Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (12 page)

The point is that there will always be something there to tempt you from doing the things that make your life more meaningful. The good news is that you can avoid those tempting activities by transforming the
positive experiences you dislike
into
positive experiences you enjoy
. In this way, all the positive experiences that relate to your life are made enjoyable. We have found ways to take the experiences that used to seem tedious and dull to us, and make them fun and exciting.

The Fun & Excitement of Contribution

No matter what activities the two of us do, we go out of our way to make sure we have fun with them. Whether engaging in activities related to our health, our relationships, our passions, our personal growth, or the ways in which we contribute to others, we go out of our way to make things playful, silly, fun, and exciting. 

Contributing is a serious thing, but we don’t take it too seriously. Rather, we’re playful, we have fun with what we do, we enjoy the process of contributing. We do this by asking ourselves one question:
How could I make this experience fun and exciting?
This sounds like an elementary question, but it is the foundation of turning the positive experiences we dislike into positive experiences we enjoy.

Praxis: Think of a way you could contribute beyond yourself (preferably in a way you’ve never contributed before). If you’re at a loss, use the website we gave you earlier in this chapter: volunteermatch.org. Once you have your means of contribution, ask yourself
How could I make this experience fun and exciting?
Write down all the answers you come up with.

For example, a few weeks before writing this, the two of us worked with Habitat for Humanity on a rainy Saturday afternoon. We were outside in the rain for four hours, donating our time to help build a home for a family on the east side of Dayton. We were outside, putting siding on the house as the cold rain started coming down harder, soaking our clothes and our typically chipper demeanors. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t pleasant. At least, not at first. One of us looked at the other and said “How could we make this fun?” Although it was a basic question, the answer wasn’t that easy—it’s not easy to make cold rain and construction work fun and exciting. So we started brainstorming as we continued hanging the siding:

• What if we got the kids from inside the home and asked them to help us?
  
• What if we raced to see who could put up the most siding the quickest?
  
• What if we sang aloud like a couple of idiots while we hung the siding?
  
• What if we did terrible impressions of actors like Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken hanging the siding?
  
• What if we did jumping jacks in the rain every five minutes to take a break from the construction work?
  
• What if we went inside until the rain let up, made hot chocolate for everyone, and told stories to the family who is building the home? Then we could get them to help us finish the siding when the rain stopped.
  
• What if, what if, what if?
  

Within a few minutes we had over a dozen answers. Most of which were quite silly. But we picked a few and gave them a shot, increasing the level of fun and excitement for an otherwise mundane task. We joked, we laughed, and we had a good time. We turned a dull activity into something we enjoyed, into a great day of contribution, into something we won’t forget for a long time.

Giving Is Living

Unless you contribute beyond yourself, your life will feel perpetually self-serving. It’s okay to operate in your own self-interest, but doing so exclusively creates an empty existence. A life without contribution is a life without meaning.

The truth is that giving is living. We only feel truly alive when we are growing as individuals and contributing beyond ourselves. That’s what a real life is all about. That’s what it means to live a meaningful life—a life filled with great health, great relationships, and ultimate passion.

CHAPTER 7: CONFLUENCE

The Most Important Dimension?

Throughout the five previous chapters, we explored the five dimensions of living a meaningful life. You probably noticed that we started each chapter by presenting you with reasons why that particular dimension was the most important of the five. Truth be told, all five areas are tremendously important. But which area is the most important?

This is a question we have asked ourselves plenty of times, and we tend to reach a different conclusion each time we ask this question. The honest answer is probably that all five areas are equally important. The more precise answer is that the importance of each dimension changes over time for each of us. Thus, we all experiences stages—be it brief or lengthy, a day or a month—in which the importance of a particular dimension takes priority over another.

A Person's Top Two Dimensions

We’ve noticed that over time there are often two dimensions that rise to the top of a person’s priority list. In other words, of the five dimensions, an individual tends to make two of them a priority over a long enough timeline. That is to say that even though every person will shift all five dimensions—invariably making any of the five areas a top priority at any particular time—he or she will have two areas that rise to the top considerably more often than the other three. Again, this can vary drastically depending on the individual and his or her personal values and beliefs.

Joshua's Top Two Dimensions

For Joshua, the two areas of his life that tend to receive the most focus are
health
and
passion
. He fulfills his passion by writing every morning as soon as he gets out of bed, and he focuses on his health daily by eating healthy foods and exercising. These things come almost naturally for him, but they didn’t always. Once he developed habits he enjoyed though, focusing on these two areas of his life became the easiest.

That isn’t to say that the other three areas—
relationships
,
growth
,
contribution
—are ignored. They’re not. But it’s important to know which two areas are your current default dimensions, because then you can focus on the other three that come less naturally. Joshua knows he must make a concerted effort to focus on his relationships, his personal growth, and contributing to others each day. By focusing on the dimensions that come less naturally, Joshua is able to better balance his life.

Ryan's Top Two Dimensions

For Ryan,
relationships
and
growth
reign supreme. As an extreme extrovert, Ryan loves being around people all the time. Fostering relationships comes naturally to Ryan. Similarly, Ryan’s competitive nature forces him to compete with himself, promoting rapid personal growth.

This means Ryan must make a daily effort to focus on his bottom three dimensions:
health
,
passion
, and
contribution
.

Bottom Three Dimensions

It’s important to note that just because a person has two areas on which he or she focuses more than the other three areas, that doesn’t make the bottom three areas less important. In fact, the opposite can be true. If an individual focuses too much on one or two particular areas of his or her life, then the other three areas can lack the attention they need, resulting in an unbalanced and unfulfilled life.

For example, if a man focuses all his energy on his health and pursuing his passions, and places too little emphasis on his relationships, then there’s a good chance he will feel lonely and depressed. If he avoids growing as an individual, then he will feel stuck and complacent—a spinning wheel. If he sidesteps contributing to others, then he will always feel a certain amount of discontent, for we only feel real happiness when we contribute beyond ourselves.

Balancing All Five Dimensions

Understanding your top two dimensions is important, but balance among all five is paramount. The only way to experience the long-term happiness and contentment is to focus on all five areas.

To do so, we recommend incorporating all five areas into your life each day. Making these five areas the core of your daily life is the best way to ensure you are living a meaningful life.

The best way to do this is to simply ask yourself a question:
How did I incorporate all five dimensions into my life today?

Once we are aware of how we incorporate these five areas into our daily lives, we become acutely aware of how we are spending our time. 

With every action we take, the two of us tend to ask ourselves the following question:
Which area of my life does this action improve?
If it doesn’t improve any of the five areas, then we need to ask another question:
How could this task improve one of the five important areas of my life?
If whatever you’re doing doesn’t improve at least one of the five areas of your life—directly or indirectly—then it’s important to find a way to drastically reduce or eliminate that action from your daily life.

Most people’s days are filled with tedious, banal tasks that take up much of their time. Thus, we could provide a million examples of daily tasks that do not lend themselves to intentional living. Here are a few obvious examples:

• Smoking
  . Obviously, smoking is bad for your health (so not only does it not improve that area of your life, it actually has a negative effect). Furthermore, smoking doesn’t add value to your personal relationships; it doesn’t help you pursue your passions; it certainly doesn’t help you grow as an individual; nor does it help you contribute to other people.
  
• Overeating
  . Similar to smoking, eating too much is harmful to your health, and it doesn’t contribute to any of the other areas of your life.
  
• Gossip
  . Talking negatively about others can damage your relationships. Plus, it obviously doesn’t fuel any of the other four dimensions.
  

Like we said, there are myriad examples of everyday things people do that do not positively contribute to their lives. 

Take ten minutes and write down all the things you’ve done in the last week that do not contribute to the five important areas of your life. Now write down why they don’t contribute to any of those five areas. How can you eliminate these things from your life?

The Role of Minimalism

So we finally get back to minimalism. We knew it had to be somewhere in this book other than in the opening chapters, right? So, you might be thinking, how does minimalism come to play in all this? 

We’d like to posit to you that minimalism plays a substantial role in living a meaningful life. Recall our definition from the first chapter:
Minimalism is a tool to eliminate life’s excess and focus on the essentials
. Therefore, this entire book is about minimalism, because this entire book is about focusing on the five essential areas of life. By embracing minimalism in other aspects of life (your possessions, your work, etc.) you can focus on the most important aspects of your life (viz. the five dimensions mentioned herein).

Thus, living a meaningful life and minimalism go hand in hand. Minimalism acts as a tool, allowing you to focus on what’s important much more easily; it clears away the clutter so you can focus on living more deliberately.

What excess items, tasks, and relationships can you remove from your life so you can focus more of your time and energy on all five dimensions?

A More Meaningful Life

It’s also important to ask another question about your daily tasks:
how could this task positively impact one or more of the areas of my life?
By asking better questions like this question, we get better answers.

Not everything you do is as black and white as
smoking
or
gossip
; some daily tasks can be questionable. For example, watching television. There is nothing wrong with watching TV, per se, but if it consumes a large amount of your time, then it can be detrimental to living a meaningful life. So, instead, ask yourself
How could watching television better impact one or more areas of my life?
Perhaps you could schedule your viewing time with a friend, watching your favorite show together, and then afterward the two of you could discuss what happened. The two of us do this with our favorite TV shows. This way we’re not stuck in the state of perpetual channel surfing that can consume large amounts of time without adding any value to your life. Or perhaps you can watch TV while you spend an hour on a treadmill or elliptical machine, improving your physical health. 

With many questionable items, there is often more than one way to make it positively impact at least one of the five dimensions. If you can’t think of a way to turn one of your questionable items into something that impacts one of the five dimensions, then you should most probably remove (or drastically reduce) that item from your life. It’s important to be honest with yourself when considering what things to remove from your life; doing so will provide you with the best possible outcome. Removing some things from your life can be incredibly difficult at first, but the rewards you enjoy are worth the sacrifice. 

Other examples of questionable items include things like spending time on the Internet, social media, shopping, daily drive time to and from work, sleeping in too late in the morning, and staying awake too late at night.

What other questionable items take away your time? Make a list. How can you make these tasks positively impact one or more areas of your life?