Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (10 page)

Then, over time, we gradually got rid of nearly all our bills. Joshua got rid of the internet at home. Instead of surf the ’net, he now finds more productive things to do with his time, focusing on health and relationships and the more important things in life. When he needs to use the internet, he visits the library or a coffee shop and uses it deliberately, no longer wasting hours of his life “surfing the web.” Living his dream doesn’t allow time for such pillory.

We both jettisoned TV. Instead of stare at the glowing idiot box, we read or write or go to a concert or a movie with a friend, creating meaningful, lasting experiences instead of channel surfing our lives away. Living our dreams doesn’t allow time for such passive nonsense.

We killed our expensive gym memberships. Now, we walk more than ever, and, of course, exercise 18 minutes a day at home or in the park. 

We got rid of our extra bills. No new, expensive cars. No more satellite radio. No more Netflix. No more magazine subscriptions. Hell, Joshua even stopped buying material possessions for a year, which he wrote about on our website. Living our dreams makes our old ephemeral pleasures pale in comparison.

And now our only bills at this point are rent, utilities, and insurance. Everything else had to go. We decided that pursuing our dreams was worth it.

We now make less money than when when we were 20. But we’ve never been happier.

That happiness didn’t come without a price, though. It meant getting uncomfortable, questioning our stuff, and getting rid of the excess. It meant refocusing our finances and re-prioritizing our lives. It meant living more deliberately and intentionally. It meant we had to stop living the lie and start living the dream, moving forward with a new life of focus and passion and purpose—and far less stuff.

How about you: is your dream worth the sacrifices you need to make?

Finding Your Passion

Once you’ve removed the above mentioned anchors from your life, the horizon becomes vividly clear and you can focus on finding your passion.

The first question we typically ask people is a fairly standard question:
What would you do with your life if money wasn’t an object?
Most people who are searching for their passions are still deeply anchored to some (if not all) of the four anchors mentioned above, which causes them to articulate a fairly common response:
I don’t know.
 

If you don’t know, it’s likely because you’re still anchored. Perhaps you’re afraid of what people will say if you tell them you want to be a rodeo clown (for years Joshua never told people he wanted to be a writer, for fear of what they might think). Perhaps you’re uncertain about the stability you’ll have as a mascot for a professional baseball team. Perhaps you’re worried you won’t make enough money to feel significant. Whatever your anchors are, you must get rid of them to find your passion.

Once you’ve truly shed your anchors, you’ll be able to answer the above question. Sometimes it’s easier to answer that question if it’s asked in a different way. Write down your answers to the following:

• When was the last time you felt overwhelmed with excitement?
  
• What were five other (different) experiences like this?
  
• Why were you excited each of those times?
  
• Which experiences were you excited about for the longest period of time?
  
• Was there a common thread among the things that excited you?
  
• What did excitement look like? (How did your physiology change in these situations? How was your posture? Your facial expressions? Your breathing? Your heart rate? What else was happening with you body?)
  

Once you know what excitement looks and feels like, and you’re able to relate it to specific experiences that excited you, it’s easier to answer the question
What would you do with your life if money wasn’t an object?
Answer:
I’d do things that excited me every day.
So, what excites you the most for the longest period of time? That is likely your passion. 

Said another way, passion is one half love, one half obsession. So what would you love to do each day? What would you be obsessed by? Where those intersect, that is your passion.

Now slap on that rodeo clown outfit and let’s figure out how to turn it into your mission.

Turning Your Passion into Your Mission

We know what you’re thinking: That’s great, but no one is going to pay me to be a rodeo clown/hula dancer/[insert real passion here]. Oh, really? Maybe not with that attitude. The truth is that someone is earning a living by doing the thing you’re passionate about, by doing the thing you obsessively love. 

But they just got lucky!
Well, maybe some of them got lucky, and maybe they were at the right place at the right time, but even luck has a recipe for continued success. Plus, there are hundreds of people who are pursuing
your
passion (and making a good living from it) who didn’t get lucky, who didn’t achieve stardom or get everything they wanted overnight. They put in a lot of work, experienced many debilitating failures and losses, and obsessively followed that beacon of passion until they were able to call it their full-time mission. Why not learn from those people?

If you want to learn how to turn your specific passion into your mission, the fastest, most efficient way to do so is to emulate someone who is already doing it.  It’s called
modeling
and that’s exactly what we did. We saw the likes of Colin Wright, Leo Babauta, Joshua Becker, Julien Smith, and Chris Guillebeau—people who were doing what we wanted to do: writing and contributing to people in meaningful ways—and we knew they already had a recipe for success, we knew they had learned through trial and error, and thus we knew we could learn from their successes and failures. Over the course of a year we met with each of these individuals face to face—all five of whom lived thousands of miles away—and learned from their experiences. We bought them coffee or lunch and offered to add value in any way we could. We took copious notes and thanked them for adding value to our lives. We stayed in contact with these guys via email, phone, Skype, social media, etc., establishing a stronger bond over time. After meeting them and learning from their experiences, it was clear to us what we needed to do to successfully turn our passions into our mission. That’s when we took action; that’s when we created our website and worked incredibly hard on adding value to other people’s lives through our writing and various other content.

Your assignment is to do the same: find at least three people who are making a living doing what you’re passionate about. It doesn’t have to be anything similar to what we did. Your passion doesn’t need to include a website or writing or online commerce. The specific nature of your passion is irrelevant. What’s important is that you find some people who are doing what you want to do and you learn from them, soaking up their knowledge and then taking massive action.

It Ain't that Easy

You might be thinking:
But, guys, this is all easier said than done!
 

Hell yeah it’s easier said than done—we know because we’ve done these things ourselves during the last two years. We went from being anchored by debt and status and careers we weren’t passionate about to pursuing our passions and living our mission. We now make less money and we sometimes put more hours into the work week than we did at our original corporate jobs, but we now love what we do, and we obsessive over it, so it certainly doesn’t feel like a job. 

Of course it wasn’t easy, it took a lot of action to remove those anchors, it took a lot of courage to reject certain social imperatives so we could live meaningful lives. But it was worth it, and it’s worth it for you too—you deserve to pursue your passions, you deserve to live your mission, you deserve to live a meaningful life.

CHAPTER 5: GROWTH

The Meaning of Life

We saved the most important two chapters for last: Growth and Contribution. These two dimensions work hand-in-hand to form the meaning of our lives. That is to say that
the meaning of our lives is to grow as individuals and contribute to other people in meaningful ways.

The Importance of Personal Growth

Your growth as an individual is the most important of the five dimensions of living a meaningful life. Don’t believe us? Let us prove it.

Imagine winning the lottery, getting into the best shape of your life, finding your soulmate, establishing the most meaningful relationships possible, paying off all your debt, moving into your dream home (on the beach, of course), finding the thing that makes you the most passionate, and discovering your mission in life.

Now what? Sit back and fish at the lake every day? Eat Cheetos and bask in the blueish glow of your television? Of course not. You want to continue to enjoy your newfound life—the one with the improved health, improved relationships, and newly discovered passions. Thus, you must continue to improve, you must continue to grow. If you’re not growing, you’re dying; and if you’re dying, then, by definition, you’re not
living
a meaningful life.

Incremental Changes

Once you make a change in your life, the journey isn’t over—you need to continue  making changes if you want to be happy long-term. Think about all the changes you’ve already made—many of which might have seemed impossible five or ten years ago. How were you able to make those changes? Chances are you made the change one of two ways: giant leaps or baby steps.

Giant Leaps

There are some changes you can make that are huge and immediate. Take, for example, ending a relationship, quitting your job on the spot, picking up and moving to a new city, making a large purchase (a home or a car), and the like. We won’t be focusing on these types of
giant leap
changes in this chapter. While sometimes these changes are absolutely necessary, there is generally only one way the
giant leaps
approach is successful: wait until the time is right and make the leap. Thus, we will focus on the most important changes in your life: the baby steps—because it’s the baby steps that allow you to take the giant leaps.

Daily Incremental Changes

Most change happens gradually, wherein you don’t take a one-time giant leap, but you make small, gradual changes in your everyday life, which, over time, amount to massive changes in your life.

For example, no one goes to the gym, exercises really hard for one session, and expects to be fit for the rest of his or her life. It doesn’t work that way. Similarly, most changes you make are about improving upon past changes in small ways every day.

The vast majority of the changes we’ve made in our lives—from our health to our jobs and our relationships—have involved these daily incremental changes. As you make these changes, your day-by-day life doesn’t change, but when you look back through life’s rearview mirror, everything is completely different.

Finding Leverage

The first step in any change, big or small, is making the decision to change. We’re talking about making a real decision—one in which you make the change a
must
in your life—not something you
should
change someday when it becomes convenient for you. 

Making these decisions can be easy or difficult, depending on one major factor:
leverage
. 

Leverage is your ability to associate enough satisfaction with the change that you have no choice but to make the change a
must
in your life (e.g., “I
must
exercise” is appreciably different than “I
should
exercise”). The more leverage you have, the easier the decision is to make and follow through with—because the satisfaction you’ll experience on the other side of the change is so high that you
must
make the change a reality.

Whenever a change doesn’t last, it’s always because the person doesn’t see enough long-term benefit from the change (i.e., he or she doesn’t associate enough satisfaction with the change
or
he or she associates too much dissatisfaction with making the change). 

But once you can associate an immense amount of satisfaction with the change, it becomes a
must
for you. For example, the satisfaction of living a healthy lifestyle was enough for us to make some dietary and exercise changes in our lives. To get this leverage, we started to associate dissatisfaction with our current states (i.e., the way we looked in the mirror, the way we felt after a big meal, and all the other things that generally made us feel terrible). Then we began to associate immense amounts of satisfaction with the daily changes we had made (e.g., we enjoyed experiencing food as nourishment, rather than entertainment; we enjoyed our daily exercises, finding satisfaction in the small changes we were making in our bodies each day).

Taking Action

Once you decide to make a change in your life—once you have enough leverage—it’s important to take immediate action towards making the change. This doesn’t mean you have to go out and run ten miles to improve your health or quit your job today to pursue your passions. Rather, you should take one small baby step in the right direction. You must build some momentum first. Otherwise, you will experience large amounts of dissatisfaction and your change won’t last.

These first few steps are of paramount importance. Once you get enough momentum behind you, the change becomes fun and exciting and you want to continue to improve and grow. Thus, you want to find little ways to make improvements in each area of your life, be it exercising daily, strengthening your relationships via one meaningful conversation per day, spending one hour on whatever you’re most passionate about, etc. These small changes add up quickly, and they compound on top of each other. And, pretty soon, you’ll glance in the rearview mirror and be stunned by how much progress you’ve made.