How Minimalism Will CHANGE YOUR LIFE! (Rich Life With Less Stuff) | Joshua Fields Millburn

Aspiring to be a different person based on my purchases is a recipe for discontent. Our money is one of the things that makes us most miserable. Our relationship with money.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome, Lewis Howes.

We're talking about money. This is a topic everyone seems to want more of.

A relationship with money. Yeah.

We want more money.

Yes. I listened to an interview you did with Sadhguru recently. He was asking you about money, right? And even then, we just have this sort of nebulous idea because when you and I were both broke, a million dollars was like, hey, a million dollars, right?

Life changing.

It's the ultimate. And then, you know a lot of broke people who are millionaires. Now, broke in many ways. One is they have a ton of debt. Now personally, I don't ever want debt in my life ever. So I have no car debt, no house debt, no debt period. Now I could see circumstances where it makes sense to have a mortgage and things like that, but the average American has four credit cards in his or her wallet, $16,000 in credit card debt. One in 10 Americans has 10 or more active credit cards. I was one of them in my corporate days. I had 14 credit cards in my wallet.

14.

14. Because every time you go somewhere, oh, Banana Republic, cool. Let me get the credit card. That'll save you 10%. I'd be stupid not to do it. No, I'd be stupid to do it because now I'm spending stupidly. I'm buying a bunch of things with money I don't have to impress people I don't even know and I'm buying things I don't even need. Things I don't even want. It's do I want this or does someone else want this for me? Was it the advertiser that wants it for me or is it someone on the street who was wearing it and I saw it on them and now I saw it on a mannequin and it's an aspirational purchase. Maybe I'll look as good as the guy in the Lululemon ad. Nothing wrong with Lululemon, but the thing is, aspiring to be a different person based on my purchases is a recipe for discontent. Our money is one of the things that makes us most miserable. Our relationship with money. So in the book we talk about healing that relationship with money, understanding the relationship with money.

How do we heal it?

The first thing we do is we realize that our life is out of control. We are spending money that isn't ours. It's so much easier to part with the plastic than it is to part with hard-earned cash. Paying with things with cash was one of the first things I did immediately. Second thing I did was I got a budget together and actually stuck to the budget. I realized that if I'm willing to tolerate reckless spending, the way to not tolerate it is to budget for everything. Wow. Because if every dollar has a home, in fact, our friend Dave Ramsey, they have an app called Every Dollar and it's a great, I used to just use spreadsheets back in the day but now the Every Dollar app is just a great way to free app people can download and you can have a budget right there on your phone of every single thing that you spend money on. And by the way, by tracking these things now, you add a little bit of friction to the process. People hear that word friction like it's a bad word, but think about that. If we don't have any friction, we lose traction. You're an ice rink, you're skating all over the place. And that's what we're doing with our purchases. We've removed all the friction. You hop on Amazon, same day delivery, one-click purchase, it'll be here right now. All I have to do is think about it, it's gonna show up on my doorstep. It's that easy. We removed all the friction. Well, no wonder we're broke. We're not just broke, we're broke in. We're broken by our spending habits. We're buying a bunch of things that we thought we wanted. But the things that we want aren't the things that we wanted. Everything I ever wanted, or so I thought, ended up being everything I didn't want and ended up getting rid of anyway.

What's the thing you wanted?

Yeah, the thing that I wanted was the thing that I value, which is peace. Yes. And it doesn't mean that you should value peace. Maybe you value something else. We have friends who are rock climbers and adventure, they are thrill seekers. Maybe you value that. But that's probably still not the Lexus or whatever. And again, nothing wrong with a Lexus. If you enjoy it as a purchase, wonderful. If you can afford it, wonderful.

It brings you value and peace.

That's right.

Great.

Yeah, but if it's blocking that peace.

Then- It's causing more stress than peace than what's the point.

Exactly. Why? And if I value peace, now, if you value stress, now that sounds weird, but there are some people we know who value stress. Michael Jordan was a person who I think valued stress and performed really well. He didn't perform in a peaceful state, right? And so be honest about what you perform. If you value stress, then Don't get stressed out about it.

Right, right, that's true. Enjoy the process. So how do we heal our relationship with money?

There's some questions.

Not improve or fix it, but heal it.

Yeah, it has to do with a deeper understanding of our relationship with money. So some questions we ask in the book or whenever I'm getting ready to spend some money, there's several questions we ask, but I'll give you a few of them here. One of those questions is, can I afford it? Now, there's two, this is actually two questions. One is can I afford the actual price tag? So if I want to buy this widget and it's $100 and I've got 100 bucks in my pocket, great. It means I guess I can afford it. Now if I have to put it on a credit card, I can't afford it. By definition, if you have to put something on a credit card, if you have to finance it, I don't care if it is an SUV or if it is carpeting for your home, whatever it might be.

If you have to finance it, you can't afford it. Unless you have, I mean, I have a credit card that I pay off.

Every month because I have the cash.

I use a credit card for the business. That's right. But I don't have to finance it.

Because I have the money. You don't have to, you choose to. That's the difference. If you pay it off every month, that's not having to. But if you're like, and by the way, you could pay cash for it right there at the moment. Of course. You're deciding to do it for points and business expense, all that other stuff. So that's a strategic decision, but you can still afford it. You have the actual cash for it. You've got the money. And I think that's the thing to think about. So can I afford the price, but then we never think about the actual price of our purchases, which go way beyond the price tag. What's that? So let's think about it. If you buy something and it has to sit in your home now, so there's the price of the space that it takes up. Storing it. Yeah, there's more square footage. Now buying one thing, not a big deal, but over time, having 300,000 items, it means I need to have a 4,000 square foot house in order to fit all of these things that are making me miserable. And so I'm paying more for the storage or maybe literally a storage locker these aren't storage lockers, they're mausoleums of stuff. We never go and visit those and take out the thing. We pretend they add value. We tell ourselves a story. As a minimalist, everything I own serves a purpose or it brings me joy. Everything else is out of the way. Another question I ask myself, can I afford the true cost of the thing? That's the storage space. But what about the cost of worrying about the thing? Painting the thing, charging the thing, putting gas in the thing, changing the batteries in the thing. the thing getting stolen, I have to replace the thing, insuring the thing. There are all of these other costs. We're like, oh yeah, the car payment, I guess I can afford, it's not a car payment, it's a debt payment. I guess I can afford 400 bucks a month or whatever, but really is it, no, it's the money for the insurance, all these other costs that, by the way, the thing is making you miserable and now you're paying for your own misery. Give you another question. What's the cost? What's the true cost of the thing? And then is this the best use of this money? So if I'm spending a hundred bucks towards something and I can afford it and I've decided yes, I've got the space for it, the psychological cost isn't too high, great. But money is a resource. Is this the best use of this resource? Because if not, wouldn't I rather spend this hundred dollars elsewhere, this thousand dollars elsewhere, this ten thousand dollars elsewhere? Is there a better use for this money? If not, then great. It makes sense for me to purchase this item. If this thing is going to augment my life, it's going to enhance my life, wonderful.

Right, if it serves a purpose, it brings me joy, then great. What would you say some of the best minimalist budgeting tips that you have then once you've created a budget?

Yeah. Yeah.

That people could start to implement and apply in their life where it doesn't feel so overwhelming or such like a huge, like, Or should they just cut it all off and go into like this minimalist approach or should they gradually get there?

That's great. There's a couple ways to do this. I'll break it down for you. One of the rules, we have the 16 rules for living with less in the book and one of the rules is the no junk rule. Basically, everything you own can fit in one of three piles. Say you go home, someone listening to this or watching this, they go home and they have their 300,000 items, everything in that home. can fit in one of three piles. It's either essential, it's non-essential but value adding, and it's junk. Those are the three piles. Now, everyone has basically the same essentials. Like, we all need clothing and shelter and food. Silverware. Yeah, transportation, vocation. Like, we have the same essentials, right? Yeah, silverware would go up there. I need plates and essentials are all there. But the non-essentials, this is the area where we get confused by. Non-essentials are things that we could do without. I could live without a couch, right? But it adds value to my life. Minimalism is not deprivation-ism. It's not about going without the things that add value to your life. It's about identifying the things that you need plus the things that will add value and then getting rid of everything that's in this third category, the junk. Now, junk are the things that masquerade as something that adds value. Oh, I saw someone else with that and I think I would like it. Oh, you've got that really nice air purifier over there. I should get that too. Again, there are no shoulds. I could get that. Is that the best use of my money?

Do I need it?

Does it bring me joy?

Does it serve a purpose? Maybe it does. Maybe it does. And I have to be honest with myself because we can justify just about anything. And how do we be honest about it? We temporarily deprive ourselves. If you remove something from your life for a period of time, three weeks is something that we talk about in the book. Ryan did his packing party where he boxed up everything in his house. and we had 47 different families do this as well in this case study for the book. They boxed up everything, pretended like they were moving because what? That's the one time you have to confront all your stuff. When you move, it sucks. I don't care how much stuff you own, you have to box it all up. You're dealing with everything you own. All these past indiscretions, all these decisions I wish I wouldn't have made, now I'm dealing with all these things. And so packing up everything and then slowly unpacking only the things that add value to your life, that is a great way to identify the things that we think add value versus the things we actually get value from.

Put it all in a box. Put it all in a box. and then take out the things you only really need.

That's right.

Or the only really want.

Yes, and the things that will add value to our lives, we'll keep. But the things that stay boxed up, they're boxed up for a reason. In fact, sometimes when we move, we carry one box. I didn't unpack this from the last time I moved. I guess I'll move it around and now you get these little mini storage.

Lockers all going with you.

Yeah, it's all this stuff. So, I bring that up because we can do the same thing with our budgeting. What is truly essential? What will add value to my life?

And then what is junk?

Now temporarily, if I'm in debt, when I was in debt, I was paying, and I had almost half a million dollars worth of debt. So it took a long time to pay it off. A lot of very serious focus. I even cut down on my non-essential value-adding things for a period of time. Hey, I know I get value from these things. I can't really afford them right now because I value freedom so much. I want to get out of debt. I want zero debt. I don't even want a credit score. I don't care what my credit score is. There's no such thing as a credit score. Dave Ramsey says, it's what? It's a debt score. It's how good you are at accumulating debt. I don't care what my credit score is. I don't want a bad credit score. A credit score of zero to me is the perfect credit score, by the way. It just means that you don't have any debt at all and you haven't for a very long period of time. When I look at the non-essential things, sometimes, hey, maybe I can't afford these right now. but maybe I can bring them back in when I can't afford them. And then the junk, yeah, just get rid of that altogether because it's not adding value to your life and you're spending a ton of money on it.

And why waste that money when you can pay off the debt that you're in? So what's the best budgeting strategy then? Are you talking about essential, non-essential junk.

In terms of spending or-- yeah, yeah, I would look at it that way. So I'm looking at what is truly essential. Of course I need to spend money on that, but even then I can reduce the expenses there. Like my housing. Like food. Yeah, I'll give you an example. So when I first left the corporate world, I walked away and I had this really nice house I was living in. I sold the house. I moved into an apartment. I realized, hey, I can move into a smaller apartment and pay off my debt quicker. So living in Dayton, I lived in a $500 a month apartment and it was nice in Dayton, Ohio. And it was fine for that period of time. And I used that extra money to pay off my debt. I knew it was for this period of time. And so even though it was essential, I was able to pare down even my essentials for that period of time. And then the non-essentials, okay, maybe I don't need any of these non-essentials right now while I pay off my debt. And then the junk, I don't ever need it ever. I don't care if I'm a multi-billionaire, why would I want a bunch of.

Junk in my life?

We call it a junk drawer for a reason. It has a bunch of stuff that we never use, right? Yeah, and so our houses have turned into junk drawers, giant junk drawers. Crazy, isn't it?

Yeah.

And we don't get any value. In fact, it blocks the value we do get from our things.

Yeah, intentional spending, intentional living. So what does your budget look like? Do you have like, do you track it on a weekly basis? Do you look at your finances? Do you open up your bank account? How does this work for you with your spending? Or do you kind of just have your system in place and you just know you only spend on certain things and that's it, you let it go?

Yeah, I spend very little money now, but it's just the things I do spend money on, are on experiences, but also on people. And so, you know, whether it's with the Minimalists and our team, you know, we've got eight employees with the team, but there's like 25 people in total who help us do, you know, the films and all this other stuff. And so it's really nice to be able to have a great team of people and pay them well. I think it's wonderful to be able to do that. I mean, there's only so many black t-shirts I can buy before I'm like, I don't need another line item in my budget, right? I have a paid off car. We pay rent every month. And so my budget, it used to be I would look at it every single day when I was getting out of debt. And I would catalog it on a spreadsheet or you could use an app like the one we talked about. And so looking every day, but now I look at it once a month and I just say, okay, am I spending money and is this the best use of my money? Making sure I'm staying out of debt. And from this point on, I'm spending money on the same things and I don't have to worry about it at this point. Don't have to worry about it. No, I don't have to worry. I developed the understanding which led to the habits. The other way never works. If you just get the budgeting habit, all of a sudden now, if you don't have a deep understanding, that car sure does look nice. I can afford the payment. If you have the understanding, it doesn't matter.

I want to hear about the biggest challenge you've had to overcome in the last few years. Because you write a lot about the hardships that you've gone through in your life in this book, Shame youe've Dealt With. things you're not proud of? What's the biggest obstacle or challenge you've had to overcome or thing you've had to bring to light?

What a great question. I wrote about this in the book. I've never talked about this in an interview before though. So three years ago, it would actually be three years next month, I was down in Brazil. Ryan and I, the other minimalist, were down in Brazil at a speaking gig and it was amazing.

RIO, Sao Paulo, where were you?

Sao Paulo. Yes, nice. It was great and unfortunately I drank.

The water in the hotel and it.

Was not filtered water and I got a parasite that just ravaged me. I mean it was awful and it was awful for many months after that. It destroyed my microbiome and it made me really appreciate all of the cliches, health is wealth. There's this Confucius quote that's in the book that A healthy man wants 10,000 things, a sick man wants but one. Yeah, and man, did I begin... I knew that intellectually, but I really understood it viscerally.

You experience it, nothing else matters.

Yes, because my world came crashing down. I was not able to work nearly as much. I wasn't able to contribute to my family the same way, contribute beyond myself. I just didn't feel like me. And it's been a three-year journey. I'm not even 100% out of it.

Really?

I'm about 80% out of it now. But there are still days where it is rough. And what you realize is like, oh, everything else is window dressing, man. If you have your health.

Yes.

All the other stuff, it's nice. You can enjoy it, but you can't enjoy it without your health.

That's true, man. Okay, so that was the biggest challenge.

You'Ve had to overcome. That's the biggest challenge I've had to overcome in my entire life. In 40 years on this earth. Yeah, without a doubt. So the summer of 2019, this was about a year after that happened, I went into a deep depression. Really? Yeah, I took some antibiotics to try to deal with some of these parasitic infections and it ravaged me, it destroyed me. First time in my life, I actually experienced deep depression. Not sadness, not grief.

What does deep depression feel like for you?

It feels like you're trapped in a mason jar and you can't get out of it. Like you're just in this giant mason jar and you can see freedom perfectly through the glass because I know it wasn't that long ago I was in perfect health and everything was just right or so I thought and then immediately thrust into this the depths of a depression so big, so overwhelming it blankets everything in your life. And I tend to be, you've known me for a while, I'm a pretty optimistic person. And I try to bring that into every positivity and everywhere I go, but it was, I couldn't even bring it into that mason jar that I was trapped in.

What are some things that you did to help you get out of the depression or at least open the top of the jar? I don't know what you had to do first, the first steps, but what are the things you did and what are some things people can do if someone they're close to is experiencing that.

Yeah. I experienced the healing over these last three years. I think one of the things we look at is we try to fix our problems.

Yes.

You know, how do I fix this? But it doesn't work that way. Or how do I improve my situation, right? But of course, if you break your arm, you're not talking about how do I improve my arm. I just want to heal the arm. And so, I think sometimes a lot of that has to do with what we don't Do. We're so caught up in the doing. How do I do this to improve my life, to fix my life, to solve my problem? The thing I learned deeply over the last few years is that the solution is often the problem. And what I mean by that is like, or the prescription is the problem. You can say that as a metaphor, but also literally, like in my case, a prescription sort of ravaged my gut even more. quite often we're trying to fix things through how to's and prescriptions, through more doing, doing, doing. And I found that sometimes it's about doing less. Because doing less isn't about the doing, it's about the less side of it. That's how we heal. Ryan, he broke his back, five vertebrae in his back skiing a couple years ago.

That's gotta be painful.

I mean, the biggest bruise I've ever seen in my life. And I think first inclination, because he's a very type A, I'm gonna get this done, how do I improve this? How do I fix this. And the doctor's like, you fix it by healing.

By doing nothing.

By doing nothing.

Sitting, resting.

That's how you heal. And quite often it was like, I can't do my way out of depression. I'm gonna have to sit through this. There's an old Buddhist maxim about before enlightenment, I was depressed. After enlightenment, I was still depressed. And yet how we react to that changes over time. If we see it for what it is, then it doesn't have the same power over us anymore. Yeah.

So how did you learn to heal?

I learned that the more action I did, the farther I got away from healing. Like if you break your leg and you keep running on it.

Yeah, that's gonna hurt.

Right. And so I learned that in order for me to heal, I had to set aside the programming, the preconceived notions, that I'm going to improve my way out of this.

I was already doing something.

Right, think about a newborn baby. I've got a daughter now, she's eight, but when she was a baby, they're born, they're perfect, right? We don't think about improving a baby. That sounds crazy. If you had a kid next year, hey Louis, how are you planning on improving your child? You'd be like, what are you talking about, you weirdo? And yet we do that to ourselves all the time. What are the seven ways that I can improve my depression, right? And I understand why we want that because I'm a problem solver. But quite often, the solution ends up being the problem because it's like in medicine, they call it palliative care, right? It's like just, it's putting a balm on the pain. Relieves the symptoms, but it doesn't actually cure you.

It doesn't heal the root.

Exactly. And so the solving of the problem actually has to do with identifying, understanding the root of the problem.

So, what was the root for you?

The root for me, I mean, was this terrible parasite infection that I had. So, I had to deal with that. And so, I've worked with some great infectious disease doctors to work through that. But it also made me realize that a lot of the things that were making me anxious were causing the discontent, the anxiety, the overwhelm all of these sort of negative, I say negative in quotes, negative emotions that we try to suppress, we try to avoid, we run away from those things, we run away from misery and we seek pleasure. It's even in the fiber of our country here in America, right? The pursuit of happiness. It's your right to pursue happiness. Well, what kind of nonsense is that? The pursuit of happiness is actually the problem. You can be happy, but the pursuit is making us miserable. Happiness, it's already there, you see the baby.

Just be it.

Yes, it's already there. Happiness can't be pursued, it can only be uncovered. And we cover it up. Now, with my work with the Minimalists, we talk about how we cover it up with material clutter, financial clutter, but then also all this other clutter, relationship clutter, emotional clutter, spiritual clutter. There's all this clutter in our lives. No wonder we're not happy, we've covered up. the innate happiness that already exists inside us. Yeah.

What's the difference between these clutters and the essential relationships?

So, in the book we talk about what we wanted to write a regular relationship book. Our first three books, we had this book called Minimalism, where it was about our values and focusing on living a meaningful life with less. And we wrote this memoir called Everything that Remains. We moved to this cabin in the middle of Montana, nowhere. And it was about leaving the corporate world, becoming these suit and tie corporate guys to being minimalists, walking away from that world, walking away from all the so-called success and achievement. And then our third book was an essay collection. We had written 150 essays and published that about intentional living, 12 different areas of intentional living. We said, okay, well we don't want to rewrite about the things we've already written about. What haven't we written about so far? We really hadn't written about a deep dive into relationships. And so we wanted to write a traditional relationship book. hence love people use things because the opposite never works. We're so busy using things and loving people. And so looking at it through the minimalist lens, we realize like, oh, yes, it's about our relationship with other people, but what are the things that destroy our relationship with people? It's our screwed up relationships with our stuff. So it starts there. We have a relationship with our stuff. Yep. And as a minimalist, I'm not against stuff. In fact, I want to enjoy my stuff. I want you to enjoy your stuff. The problem is it's often the opposite. The stuff, the objects of our desire have become the objects of our discontent. We get that thing we thought we wanted, but the thing we want is never the thing we want. We want the feeling that we think.

It'S gonna bring out of us, right?

It's funny, I was having a conversation with, I can't remember who it was recently, but someone older, an older mentor of mine who was like, you know, a lot of people you know, in their 20s to 50s, they want to acquire a bunch of things. But then when you're after 60 and 70, you want to, like, downgrade. You just want to have less. Yes. You've got to manage so much stuff, all your properties everywhere and manage all your expenses.

You just want to have a peaceful life, right?

You acquire, but then later, you're like.

How do I get rid of all this? And now people are recognizing this earlier and earlier because they're seeing the discontent in their parents or their grandparents or whomever. It's funny, when we do these tours, we're getting ready to go on our 10th tour in 11 years. It's called the Love People Use Things Tour to talk about the book and do live podcasts and stuff. But the thing that I notice is our older events, we had parents where they bring their kids. They drag their kids, Hey, you kids need to learn about this. And now after our films be on Netflix and stuff, Kids are bringing the parents. We have 13-year-olds who are bringing their 35-year-old or 45-year-old parents saying, Hey, Mom and Dad. I'm learning this now.

That's cool.

And so they're becoming the teachers of their parents. So the stuff is sort of the initial relationship because our material possessions are a physical manifestation of what's going on inside us. You look around your house and you have a ton of external clutter. Nothing wrong with that, nothing evil about that, no shame in it, but it's probably a sign of a lot of internal clutter. Mental clutter, psychological clutter, spiritual clutter, relationship clutter, career clutter. There's all this clutter that's going on inside us and it manifests outwardly because, well, we think we have this void, I need to fill it.

In our culture, what we try to.

Do is we fill it with stuff. So it's really about healing our relationship with stuff. And we can talk a lot more about how to do that. I've got some basic tactics to help out. We have 16 rules for living with less in the book. I'm happy to go through some of those with you, but let's talk about.

Some of the other relationships. What happens if, before we get to the next relationship, what happens if we have stuff that's around our house. What is that's not organized, that's not intentional, what is that saying? Yeah. And what happens when we start to organize every area of our living space?

Yeah.

With everything that's intentional and we declutter. What happens to us?

Yes.

On the other side.

I think organizing is actually the problem.

Oh, okay. So just throw it away.

Well, not throw it away, but just because you're not getting value from something doesn't mean someone else won't get value from it. Right? Yeah, I'm sure at some point you've had different camera equipment in this studio, right? And you upgraded your equipment at some point.

Now you throw it away, you sell it.

And someone else would... Now you could do something else. You could put it in a drawer and organize it. Right. And it would be nice and tidy. You never use it and no one else gets the benefit of using it either. But by letting go of the excess, you're able to contribute beyond yourself. Other people are able to get value from the things that are junk. to you. And so, yes, we have this relationship with our stuff and our relationship, we think the way to fix it is to organize the things. Now, in my past life when I was, when I had a lot of stuff, you know, the average American household has 300,000 items in it. Oh my gosh.

And then you have storage units for the extra items. That's right. Yeah, because it's stored in there all year.

Yeah, it won't fit in the 4,000 square foot house. And so I have to get a storage locker. Oh, and now I can't even park my car in the garage because it's You're from the Midwest. We're both from Ohio. You know what it's like, all these garages full of stuff. That'd be wonderful if all these things are making us joyous and blissful and tranquil and experiencing permanent equanimity. But the opposite is true. We're so stressed out. And so what do we try to do? We say, okay, the stuff, I bought it because I thought it was going.

To make me happy.

You know what's going to make me happy? If I just organize all of it. Well, no. Then you organize all of it and it's like, that's just well planned hoarding. Yeah. It's, you know, we see the TV show Hoarders and you see people with stuff strewn all across their living room and we recognize that is a type of mental disorder. But Ryan and I did an episode of the Minimalist Podcast recently on hoarding and we identified that there are five stages of hoarding clinically. So the ones you see on TV, the fifth stage, that's where people, yeah, it's like they're hoarding feces from pets or they have pets in the freezer.

And things like that.

That's not most of us. But most of us are stage one or stage two hoarders. A stage one hoarder just has a bunch of things they never use. Well, isn't that most people?

Right, that's stage one hoarding.

Yeah, yeah. And so most of us are stage one hoarders. I certainly have those tendencies. Even still, I want to buy things I'm never going to use because I see it in an ad and I'm enticed by it. A stage two hoarder will sometimes have things that get in the way of the things that are useful to them. And so When you think about that, it's like, oh, as a minimalist, I actually get far more value from the few items that I own because I don't have a bunch of excess that's getting in the way of that. So organizing your stuff is not the key. The best way to organize your stuff is to get rid of anything. Eliminate. Yeah. To get rid of anything that's not serving a purpose for you.

Interesting. Okay, that's stage two.

What's stage three? Yeah, so stage three hoarding, you start to block off rooms occasionally where you can't, You can't even get into a room. Stage four is where you see like paths where you can just get through the stuff. And then yeah, stage five is where.

It'S really, really, really-- you- can't sleep.

It's on your bed.

Yeah.

There's no space.

That's right. That's right. And so we have these stages of horror and we think, well, I'm not like that. It's like, well, do you think they got there overnight? I don't think everyone-- For years. Right. And by the way, if your stuff is making you happy, I'm not here to tell you to get rid of it. Quite the opposite. If you're using your things to enhance your experience of life, you have a really nice car, Louis. I've been in it before. It's great. You seem to really enjoy that car. Absolutely. You get value from it. That's awesome. Let's celebrate that. But I used to have three luxury cars. Well, why? Because of the narrative I told myself. I'll buy the Lexus. It'll make me a better version of me. It'll complete me. It'll improve me. These are all lies that we tell ourselves.

Is Lexus the pursuit of perfection or is that Mercedes? I think it is, yes.

The pursuit of perfection. Which nonsense, right? It's a nonsense statement. You can be perfect. Perfect is already there. We just mentioned the baby is perfect. We've just imperfected ourselves throughout our entire lives. Nature is perfect. And yet we've gotten so far away from our nature that we are miserable. And so the first Lexus didn't do it for me. You know what will? The second Lexus. So I got a second Lexus and then I got a Land Rover and I realized like, oh, maybe it isn't the next car, the next purchase, the next thing. Happiness is not around the bend. Right? And so I had a unfortunate relationship with stuff because I grew up really poor, a lot of abuse in the household, a lot of poverty, food stamps, government assistance. Thought the reason we were unhappy is because we didn't have a whole lot of stuff. And so of course getting all the right things will make me happy. That didn't work. Now, the problem is we think that decluttering all this stuff will also make us happy. No, no, no, no, no. Because you can get a dumpster, throw all your stuff in it, and afterward you can be like, well, wait a minute. Where's the happiness? It's because the pursuit of happiness also doesn't work. Clearing the clutter does what? It makes room to focus on what is actually meaningful to you.

So how do we find happiness? Yeah, it's already there.

It's uncovering it, right? And so recognizing, think about the last three times you were the happiest. Now, don't mistake pleasure with happiness. I'm not against pleasure. I'm all for pleasure. What's the difference? Okay, so pleasure is an ephemeral pursuit. I can have pleasure right now. I can go eat a piece of chocolate cake right now. Delicious. Pleasure. Yeah, I'm gonna get pleasure. If I do that everyday, forever meal, I'm gonna get sick. And I think that is true. There's nothing wrong with the piece of chocolate cake. When it becomes the primary calories in your diet. Yeah, that's bad. And as a metaphor, I think the same thing is true. There's nothing wrong with stuff. When we get all of our joy or pleasure from the stuff, we mistake the pleasure for joy, by the way. That's not real joy. Then we get really confused. We think those things are going to make us happy but no, they're not going to uncover the happiness that's already inside you. Yeah.

What about the relationship with truth?

Yeah, we lie to ourselves a lot, don't we? A lot. We lie to other people but I think it's mostly because we lie to ourselves.

I tell you what, man over the last few years, I just made a decision. I'm gonna fully tell myself the truth and tell other people the truth and I used to kind of like just not share certain things. I didn't feel like I was lying, but I was kind of like holding back, you know, and I would hold back with myself. But the more I do with myself, I just feel so much more at peace. I feel more at peace. It doesn't mean I'm living a perfect life every day and then like doing all the things I want to do, but I'm honest with like, okay, I didn't sleep well for the last week. I didn't eat well for the last week. I'm not lying to myself that I'm in great shape. I'm being honest with myself. Okay, I did this and I need.

To get back on track. And you don't have to react emotionally, do it? No. You don't have to beat yourself up. No, no. In fact, you can look at it and I assume there was some tipping point or somewhere where you were like, hey, I'm just gonna make this conscious decision because I'm discontented.

I'm not at peace.

Absolutely, that's where I felt. Yeah, and so there's a particular kind.

Of freedom in knowing that you're always telling the truth.

Freedom. Credible freedom.

Now, the freedom... Doesn't mean it's easy.

No.

It doesn't mean it's easy and it takes a lot of courage to be honest with yourself and other people.

We value freedom. And yet, many of us will kindly give it up in order for a temporary pleasure.

Yes.

And freedom, there's all kinds of platitudes about how freedom isn't free. The most precious kind of freedom is awareness. And what you're doing by telling the truth is you're aware of the way things are. It's not about how you wish they were. To love someone, here's a good example. We often talk about love. Most people have no idea what love is. Love is simply to see someone for who they are without trying to change them. That's all love is.

Most people aren't living in real love then. You're always trying to change other people.

It's transactional, right? I will love you. Yes, which is an oxymoron. Conditional love doesn't exist because trying to change someone is unloving. It's saying, hey, I will like you more if you do these seven things. I've come up with this list of expectations. If you want to be miserable, have high expectations of everyone around you. If you want to Be at peace, have high standards for yourself and no expectations for those people.

So, why is trying to change someone unloving? And what if someone in your life is not a good person to you or lying to you or hurting you? Do you just continue to love them unconditionally?

Yeah, so you can love someone from a distance. Our friend Rob Bell talks about this.

Absolutely.

And so, loving someone doesn't mean that you are tolerating their behavior. and just because you don't tolerate their behavior doesn't mean that you can change it. Because temporarily you can put up some conditions that will change their behavior, but you know this from all the people you've talked to about habit change and all this other stuff. Changing one's habit doesn't actually change your life. I mean, it doesn't change the person. When the person is changed, when they change on their own by their own volition, not a forcing of change, then a permanent change happens. And then the habits tend to change on their own. Absolutely. Yeah. Once you made that habit change of lying, it wasn't about, hey, I'm gonna spend the next 17 days not lying. No. It was you had an understanding.

Absolutely.

Awareness. Awareness of the freedom of the peace that brought you. And then the how takes care of itself. If you know the why, the how takes care of itself.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and so I think if you're talking about changing someone else, I get the inclination, especially you and I, we're problem solvers. I know the four things you could do in your life would be better, but that's really me putting myself on a pedestal. And we did a podcast episode about this recently called the Advice Epidemic. And it's almost as though the helpful man can't help himself. He feels compelled to sort of drag an eagle out of the sky to prevent it from falling. And it's like, well, wait a minute. That ego doesn't want to be torn out of the sky. And that's what we're doing to a lot of the people we think we love. I'm placing myself on a pedestal, which is also unlikely.

The answer is you don't, so let me tell you what you need to do.

Yeah, subordinate yourself to me and I will fix you. That's creating more problems.

What can we do to empower someone close in our life, a friend, a family member, a loved one, who is struggling? and we don't want to see them suffer anymore. What can we do to empower or support or lift up without trying to fix?

You can help them understand what is their outcome and then also there's two questions I always ask. What is the outcome or what are you hoping to gain out of whatever you're doing? If it's a behavior or whatever. Now some people, they may want to change their behaviors intellectually but they don't understand in their heart yet. They don't have it in their viscera, right? if you understand something intellectually, you might change a few things, but you're not actually making the change. And so how, the question I have here is how do we help them understand this change in their heart? And that comes through awareness. So a few questions. One is, what do you hope to gain or what is your outcome here? And then second is, what are you willing to tolerate in your life? Because whatever you're willing to tolerate, that's what you're going to get. Anything you're not willing to tolerate, You're not going to make changes. Yeah, you're not going to have that in your life anymore. On a long enough timeline, that's going to be gone from your life altogether. Imagine if you have an abusive partner who's abusing you every day, at some point, Louis, you're going to walk away from that. If it's verbal abuse, you're going to say, Hey, I'm no longer willing to tolerate this behavior. I can still love you. I can still not try to change you. I can see you for who you are, but I'm going to have to.

Do that from a distance.

Right.

It's hard to do.

Oh, yeah, yeah. But what's the alternative? Pain. Sticking around.

Suffering, pain.

Yeah, it's sticking around out of a pious sense of obligation. And if...

Trying to be a good person or trying to like, yeah, show you care.

Yeah, also, so caring is different from loving. But it is often inspired by loving someone. Because if you really, if I see you for who you are without trying to change you, that I care about you, right? Love inspires so many things, but it's not the same thing as conditions, as expectations. It's not even the same thing as hope. We have these words where we think about like, well, I can be hopeful for you or whatever, but that's also not loving. Hope in a way is also a type of expectation.

I know. I hope they change. They have potential, they could change.

Right. Yeah, but now all of a sudden I've made that a condition for Loving you.

You got to meet people where they're at and accept them where they're at. Not accept them to where you think they could be.

Right, right.

Because you know what? They may have potential for something else but right now they are where they are at.

And you got to accept them where they're at.

That's right.

Or don't be in their life or be in their life from afar or in a different relationship, you know?

Yeah, you can read in dating parlance they call this defining the relationship but maybe It makes sense to do that for all of our relationships. What are my expectations of you? What are your expectations of me? What am I willing to tolerate in this relationship? Because I tell you this, the moment you say, okay, I've been tolerating something for way too long. I'm no longer willing to tolerate this. It will change. If you are honest about that boundary, about establishing a boundary and say, anything beyond this, I can't tolerate anymore, it's going to change.

Right, how will it change? By you leaving or changing the relationship or by that person changing or what do you mean?

Either way, it is definitely going to change, right? No person has the power to upset you. Right. And it's weird to hear that because people upset me but they don't. It's how I interpreted their behavior always upsets me and I can upset myself but even then if you see that for what it is, that I'm upset by my cultural programming, by societal programming or my peers or whatever, that can drop that upset, that anxiety. It's not, it doesn't exist in the real world. It's only a story that I'm telling myself.

Absolutely. And what about the relationship with self?

Yeah, so I think a lot of that is about our own internal relationship. The person you spend the most time with is you and we have a tenuous relationship. Not only do we lie to ourselves, but there's this great Matt Nathanson line, the singer-songwriter, he said in a song, he said, I would kill anyone who treats you as poorly as I do.

Oh man.

And isn't that true? If someone self-talked, or the way I self-talk myself, someone talked to me like that, I wouldn't keep that person in my life. Right. And yet we tolerate that for so long. Maybe there's something about not being willing to tolerate the way that I've been treating myself, the way I've been acting toward me. By the way, I would never treat other people the way that I treat myself. That would seem abusive. But we're abusing ourselves every day.

When did you stop abusing yourself?

It was a gradual transition into understanding, like, oh, this is something that I'm doing to myself. Because before it was about blaming. First it was blaming other people or other circumstances, oh, this is your fault, this happened. But a true sign of maturity is what? It's not blaming anyone, including blaming yourself, and not even blaming the cultural programming, but understanding the programming you've been given since birth. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, your community had a particular way of living and they instilled that in you because they thought it was the best thing there was. They thought there were a lot of things that you should do and we end up shoulding all over ourselves, as they say, because of everyone else's expectations. You should do this, you shouldn't do that, you should eat plant-based, you should, whatever it is. Some of these things might improve your life, but there aren't any shoulds in life. There are a whole bunch of coulds, a lot of possibilities for you and your future. And understanding, the self chapter in many ways, you could even consider it a health chapter, in the sense, not just diet and exercise, though we talk about the minimalist diet in there. And so those things are important, but you've had Matthew Walker on your show recently, and so sleep, understanding how light affects us and our circadian rhythms, our entire relationship with ourselves. We have divorced ourselves from nature. One thing that we never do anymore now is grounding. We never walk on the actual ground. Have you heard of Clint Ober? I'd love for you to have a conversation with him.

Clint Ober.

Yeah, he wrote a book called Earthing that totally changed my life and my relationship to nature. Because I've always had an allergy to people walking barefoot. Look at these hippies or whatever. I just never really resonated with me. I grew up, there was a lot of concrete and not a whole lot of nature. And I looked at it like, oh, I don't kind of get this whole, people walking around barefoot. And then I realized, oh, in 1960, we developed rubber. And now we have rubber, I mean, my shoes have rubber soles on them, right? we inadvertently disconnected ourselves from the very thing that we live on, from the earth and the negative ions. Now there are so many studies, like scientific studies. This is what got me on board. In that book he talks about all of these studies that they've been doing that help us identify how disconnected we are. All of these inflammatory diseases, autoimmune diseases, a lot of them have to do because we're not grounded ever. I mean, think about it. We're many stories up in buildings all day. When are we actually touching the ground? I mean, I go to the beach all the time now. I walk barefoot through West Hollywood and people's yards just to feel the grass. Yes, yeah. And I sleep on a grounding mat at night now on top of my bed, my normal bed. I'm not doing anything insane, but it has totally changed my life. And my wife, who is a paragon of health, she is a dietician, a nutritionist, you know Vex. She's amazing. Even her sleeping on Grounding Mat at night and Grounding More has changed her sleep and everything. And so it's probably the most important discovery I've found in the last several years is reconnecting with the earth in a way that isn't woo-woo, it's not a bunch of nonsense. It can be if you want it, fine, I don't have judgment around it. But for me it took understanding the science behind it to really to really get on board.

So what is, how do we create a better relationship with values?

I think most of us don't even have a relationship with our values. We don't know what our values are. Or we have what I call lip service values. Like if I walk up to the average person on the street and I say, what do you value? And it's a person who's relatively articulate, they'll walk up to you and they'll say, well, you know, I value my health. But you look and they're like, oh, well, you're 100 pounds overweight like I used to be. You know, I used to weigh about 100 pounds more than I weigh now. And so like I could say I value my health but my actions didn't align with that. You can say you value your finances but if you have half a million dollars worth of debt like I did, did I really value financial freedom? I could say I value peace but do I really? And so what we did in the book is we identified four different types of values. So you have your foundational values, kind of look at it like a house. You're building a house, you have a foundation. Everyone has similar foundations. Every house has a similar foundation. They're not designed considerably differently. So health, relationships, contribution, personal growth, creativity, passion, peace, tranquility, all of these things can be your foundational values. On top of that, we start building a house. We have structural values. These are the things that you, they start to develop, they're going to be different for you and me because the shape of your house might be a little bit different from mine, right? And these are things that you value that I might not value and that's okay. You're not right for valuing something differently from me and vice versa. And so we have these structural values, things that sort of prop up our house. So things like freedom or autonomy, these are really strong values for me and they build the structure of my house. And then we have surface values. These are things that make life interesting or beautiful our friend Irwin McManus says that beauty is essential. And so it's not that these values are simply a facade. They create the facade and that's an important part of what we're doing as long as we're not focusing solely on the facade. If our house is rotting with termites or better analogy, say your house is on fire, you're not gonna improve the house by painting it one more time, right? You gotta put the fire out. So you gotta deal with the foundation and the structure first and then understanding like what are my interests? What are my hobbies? What are my desires? These things are what make life interesting. And you and I might have radically different surface values but that's what makes the relationship passionate even because oh wow, fascinating. You're interested in that? Here's what I'm interested in. Tell me what you're passionate about. and all of a sudden it totally changes the trajectory of our conversations. Because it used to be when you meet someone you say, what do you do? And that's one thing that we can talk about. It's a conversation starter, but isn't it so much more interesting to say, what are you passionate about? What do you enjoy doing? You see the features in their face change. There's this fourth category of values though. It's the imaginary values.

What's this?

Now, this is a giant fence that we put up around our house. and there's no door. It blocks us from all of our other values. This is how we actually spend our day. So everyone has the same 24 hours in a day and your values are actually... You show me your calendar and your bank statement.

Show me the values.

I will show you your values. And so if you're spending all day browsing email or Facebook or Instagram or whatever, nothing wrong with Instagram. It's not evil, it's not bad. But if I'm spending all day on Instagram, that is what I actually value, that sort of passivity, right?

Show me your app usage time on your iPhone.

Yeah.

And you'll see your values, yeah.

That's right. Yeah, that's so good because when you think about how you're spending your day, the discontent comes from my short-term actions are not aligned with my long-term values. No wonder we feel so much discontent. We're spending our days on our imaginary values. So in the book, I made a list of some of my imaginary values and realizing like, oh, these are some, this is how I spend my days sometimes. But I say these other things are my values. If I want more contentment in my life, all I have to do is change my actions to align with those things I actually value.

What are some of your imaginary values?

So I've had quite a few in my life, right? So social media is a big one. Twitter is my drug of choice. Interesting, yeah. And so I had to remove the Twitter app from my phone. I tell you one for me that is big is email. And we talked about this last time I was on your show and I haven't had email on my phone for about four or five years at this point.

So you just turned computer now.

Yeah, that's interesting. And sometimes it creates some extra friction because of some, hey, did you get that email I sent you? Not yet.

But overall it creates a lot of freedom.

Yes, because here's the thing. If everyone else's urgency becomes my emergency, then I'm just, I don't get to focus on what's important to me. Because it's urgent to you doesn't mean it's important to me.

I feel like if I took email off my phone, I would just never check email. I feel like I would just go months with not checking it.

Have you had Cal Newport on the show?

I have, yeah.

Okay, so he has a new book out recently called A World Without Email.

Yeah, what we do.

Yeah, how we communicate.

That's a great question. I don't know.

Documents of this would be...

I don't know, and I don't think the solution isn't to replace email with Slack.

That's the same thing.

That's even, yeah. Or replacing it all with text messages or whatever. DMs, yeah. Yeah, and so I don't know. I saw Kendrick Lamar talk about this recently.

He says, Sometimes I go months at a time without a phone. Freedom.

Yeah.

I think I told you this. It was about four years ago. I had a realization that I had been with my phone since 2000. It was either 1999 or 2000 when I got, I think it was 2000 when I got my first cell phone. And I had a realization that, wow, I think it was 17 years at the time. Every day for 17 years, I had touched my cell phone or it had been on me or been, I used it every day for 17 years. I was thinking to myself, wow, what would it be like to go a week without my phone? And so I made a decision to go to Hawaii by myself, not take any electronics on the plane with me, which was like the scariest thing. I was like, well, I'll just take it and put it in the hotel and leave it there and not use it, put it in the drawer. I was like, no, if I really want to challenge myself, I want to take it on the plane. And I went on the plane. I felt so naked. I was like, what do I do? I'm just sitting here, you know, there's nothing like play with no computer, nothing. No Wi-Fi. and I remember I was like, oh, crap, I forgot where I rented my car from. So I had to go to, like, so many different car rental places and ask if they had my reservation. I didn't have navigation on my phone, so I had to stop and ask directions at multiple gas stations to get to the hotel. Like, old school, man. It was 1997 again, right?

Yeah.

And it. The first day and a half was tough. By day two, I was laying in the ocean. I remember thinking, oh, I'm not wondering what's on my phone on the beach right now. I'm not like, do I need to go check something or scroll?

I just felt freedom.

I was like, wow. And I remember by day five, I was like, I don't want to go back. I was like, I don't want to go back. And I had a good relationship with it after I got back for like six months, but then you kind of go fall back in the pattern.

You do?

Unless you decide like, I'm not going to be using this or I'm going to create structure and order with my phone usage or laptop or whatever the thing is that you're struggling with. It's, yeah, I want to go on a month without the phone, what that'd be like.

Yeah, well, I think about like, why do we do it? Why do we fall back into the patterns?

Because it's easy, right? I know Matt did this from... Matthew Yellin. Yeah, yeah.

Well, he just had just phone calls.

And like... Yeah, he would like a dumb text. Yeah, analog text, wherever it's like, you have to push three buttons to get a letter.

Yeah.

Yeah. He was like, yeah, it was amazing.

It was interesting, but I don't know.

If it's like, in the modern world if you can really live that way?

I think a lot of people do, obviously. It's definitely possible. And maybe the question is instead of like, what is the worst thing that could happen? It's like, what is the best thing that could happen? How would my life look different? Now, it might mean you have to structure it a bit differently. You know, you meet with your team here, maybe you'd have to have just a weekly get together or three times a week get together and say, hey, here's the things we're communicating because you can't do it via email. It might slow things down for you, but is that a bad thing? I don't know. It could mean that by slowing it down, it makes it more meaningful. The things that you're creating all of a sudden, you're doing so even more intentionally.

You have email on your phone?

I don't. I don't have any email on my phone.

Social media on your phone?

No. I will download Instagram occasionally for a few days. Yeah, like if we're getting ready to promote this tour, for example. And so like I'll send some stuff and then I'll remove it from my phone.

But it's on your computer so you can go on there at certain times and tweet.

That's right. Yeah, I can do what I need to do. I can set aside time for it and then it doesn't feel like a junk activity. If I set aside, I'm going to spend the next half hour on social media. I've set up this time.

This is what I want to be.

Doing right now as opposed to, oh, I'm in line at Chipotle. I'm going to be, next time you go into Chipotle, you look down, everyone is like zombie lost in the glowing screen, these six inch glowing screens that heads tilted downward and we're all just sort of, you see it walking down the street now and people almost getting hit by buses and all of these things because we're so lost in, I mean, I get it, our technology is so tantalizing, but I think we're gonna look back 50 years from now and we're gonna see it like smoking. There's still gonna be people who smoke, They're not gonna be scrolling the same way. Yeah, I just don't I don't think we're going to I don't think it's going to last the test of time.

With all the mental health challenges that are coming out now more and more it seems like I feel like it's tied a lot of it's tied to just getting lost in some addiction, you know and so on the phone is a lot of that I think I do I feel like I do a really good job of when I'm with people, I'm present with people. I'm not on my phone. If I'm like out for dinner or something, I'm not on my phone.

Yeah.

And I don't think I was always that way, but in the last few years, I really made this conscious decision to do that and it feels just like, wow, really notice what's happening around you more.

That's right.

You can really be present with the person in front of you or the group of people. And it's a powerful practice.

Yeah.

So I recommend it for sure. Okay, so this is values. We've got creativity. What's the relationship with creativity? What is this all about?

This is a weird one to put in the book because really, I was thinking about three different things when I wrote that chapter. So, we've been told for a long time that we are consumers. In fact, I remember being in the business world, we identified our customers as consumers. And that's fine. It's partially true. You and I, we need to consume some stuff. But we've gotten so conditioned to consuming, we forgot that fundamentally as human beings we are creators. We also have this entire creative side that we've shut off.

Yes.

Another source of our discontent is the fact we're not creating anymore. It doesn't have to be creating something for a business to make money. It's just that my daughter loves to paint things or to play with clay, to mold it, to fit. It's an act of creation. We're all creators and it stimulates that part of the brain. But the reason we're not creating has partially to do with our distractions. And the sort of biggest weapon of mass distraction is our technology. And we talked about that. In fact, the chief evangelist at Google referred to our smartphones as the 79th organ. And because As you said, every day for 17 years. I mean, what else do you have on you every day for 17 years? Just your organs, basically. Yeah, yeah, everything. So it's become part of your body. Crazy. We're already cybernetic beings. We're thinking about getting things installed. We don't have it. It's already installed in our hands. It's installed in our pockets. And so we've already been upgraded, so to speak. But every upgrade is a type of downgrade. Think about that for a second. So when we upgrade one thing, if I say I'm buying the newest technology, I'm downgrading my bank account. So we don't think about that. I'm also upgrading my ability to distract myself. We've gotten really good at distracting ourselves with all the scrolling and the pings and the notifications. As you said, you found some ways that you can be present with people.

It might mean that, hey, you don't.

Put the phone on the table. That's the place to start. If you put your phone on a table, all that says is, hey, you're the most important person unless anyone else interrupts this. Yeah, of course. And so there are ways to leave it in the car. That's what I do all the time. My wife and I, we do screenless Saturdays. That's cool. And so we just take our phones, lock them in a drawer on Saturday, and I tell you, we moved to LA four or five years ago, and I learned about I didn't need GPS.

I just needed to go get lost a little bit.

You'll find your way. I know my way around Los Angeles now because of my screenless Saturdays. because remember back in the day when you didn't have GPS everywhere you went, you just had to kind of figure it out. And now if we stopped by a gas station and asked for directions, they kind of look at us like, oh, you're crazy. Yeah, what's wrong with these people, right? And yet we have some of the best days I've ever had. And so there's no correlation between smartphone usage and happiness, or if anything, there might be an inverse correlation between the two. Now, we get pleasure from the smartphone and we mistake that dopamine hit for happiness. That's not that at all.

You know that.

I think all of us know that intellectually, but if we can understand that in our hearts, how do we understand that? By setting it aside. It doesn't have to be for a month or a year or whatever, but if you can set it aside for one day a week on Saturdays, now like an addict, you're going to feel some withdrawals. I feel withdrawals every Saturday.

Really?

Every Saturday. But it's made my usage a lot more intentional and meaningful. Yeah. At home, I have something Cal Newport came up with called the four-year rule. So we don't have a real four-year, so I just have a junk drawer. Well, I call it a junk drawer. I think if you saw it, you wouldn't say they have a pair of keys in there. A set of keys.

A pad.

Yeah, literally.

And I throw the phone in there when I go home. so that it doesn't follow me around the house. Because what I found is that if I do get the desire to go check it, to send a text, I have to physically get up from wherever I am in the house, walk over to the drawer, send the text, put it back in the drawer, and I create a little bit of extra friction so I'm not distracted all day while I'm at home.

I like that. What about the relationship with people?

I mean, that's ultimately where we wanted to start, right? I forsook people for the longest time. I did the opposite of the book's title. I used people and I loved things.

Really?

And I used people to get things because I thought what? It was going to make me happy.

Or I thought it was going to.

Make me more complete. Consumerism. Consumerism is just the ideology that purchasing things will make me more whole, more complete, or happier. That's all consumerism is. Of course it doesn't work. And so we try these other sort of things that we think are going to make us happy. It's like, okay, maybe I'll trade the purchases for more clout on social media or whatever. It's all the same sort of pleasure chase. And so, using people to get those things makes us miserable. To love someone, as we talked about already, is to see them for who they are without trying to change them. So, loving people, seeing them for who they are, Respecting them, appreciating them, accepting them for who they are. That's a beautiful thing. And then we can get something out of our things. I'm not anti-thing. Yeah, I don't live like a monk. I live like a minimalist. And a minimalist really enjoys his or her things. My wife and I and our daughter, we don't want a whole lot of stuff. You come to our house though and it's not like, oh, I just walked into a monastery. No, you walk in like, it looks like they have organize their stuff. Well, no, we didn't organize it. We just got rid of the stuff that was in the way. And then it just stays organized as a result.

Yeah, it's just intentional living.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I'm much more intentional about my relationships now. How can I add value to other people's lives? How can I contribute to the greater good? How can I love people? And how can I not change them? I know one of the three truths I shared with you last time was you can't change the people around you, but you can change the people around you. And we start the last chapter off with that sentence actually. So the people chapter is really about not trying to change other people, but also you can surround yourself with people who have similar values to you, people who will empower you. And you can identify what a meaningful relationship looks like for you. You can restructure your relationships in a way that will serve you and will allow you to serve others and relationships that don't drain you but they empower you. They actually aid your freedom in some way.

What if you're in a relationship with someone that doesn't want to be a minimalist?

Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

But you love this person, you want to be with them but they don't share the same values as you wanted to transition this to your life. How do you make the relationship work?

Yeah, so I look at it as a continuum. Like my wife values different things from me, especially on the surface values, right? And so in our home, we would own far fewer things if it was just me by myself, right? And however, I also have recognized that she gets value from certain things and it's not up to me to say, hey, you shouldn't value that. Same with my daughter, right? Like, oh, what? I don't get value from toys, so you shouldn't either. Well, that's being a dictator. And so recognizing, so here's a stat for you. The average kid has about 300 toys, plays with only 12 of them. You just have 12. Right.

Or 20. Yeah, basically, yeah.

And it's like, and what she has learned, my daughter, Ella, she has learned that, oh, if I'm not playing with this anymore, some other kid might want to play with it. And so instead of holding on to it, wouldn't it be cool if I gave this to some other kid? that's an understanding about it. It's not just about me. And little kids were even able to understand that. For some reason, as adults, we've said, oh yeah, but I'm different. I can love my things. And okay, we have a language problem, right? Like we say, I tell you that I love you, Louis, but I also love my toaster. Oh yeah, it's a great toaster. I love it. Well, up in Canada and the Nunavut region, they have the Inuit dialect up there. They have 53 words to describe snow. We have one word for love. And so we apply it to I love my wife, but I also love burritos. And it's like, well wait a minute, what do I mean? One means extreme like, I really like this thing. Now the other, quite often we mean attachment. That's not love either. Being attached to someone is really, that's a nice word to say clinging, by the way. We talk about our attachments, we're really talking about the things we cling to, but clinging isn't loving someone because what if my wife tomorrow wants to say, Hey, I don't want to be in this relationship anymore. I can still love her even if she doesn't want to be in the relationship because loving someone isn't trying to change them, to hold on to them, to trap them. That's a prison.

It is a prison.

Yeah.

I've been there before.

Yeah.

It's no fun, man. That is no fun. So there sounds like you would have a lot less things in your place if it was just you.

For sure.

But you value and appreciate and love your relationships. And so you're willing to be intentional but also be flexible.

Yes.

It doesn't have to be this extreme. Way.

I'm not dogmatic.

Yeah, yeah.

Now I'll tell you this, intentionality is contagious. And so when my wife and I started spending time together, she realized the way that I question my things might benefit her as well. And so instead of telling her the things she should have or shouldn't have, a question that we start the book out with is how might your life be better with less? Now it sounds like a how question, like a how-to question, but it's really a why question. Why would your life be better with fewer things? What are the benefits of simplifying? Because the benefits are different for everyone. If you simplify, it just might be, oh, I have a tie to your house. Someone else, it's like, oh, you know what? I have a ton of debt. I need to pay off my debt. And for someone else, it's just like, you know what? I'm sick and tired of the burden of my things. Whatever the benefits are for you, you have to identify that because that why helps you identify the how. You don't need a video from me about the 67 ways to declutter your closet. Everyone knows how to declutter your closet. The problem is not a shortage of decluttering tips. Everyone knows how to declutter their home. The problem is we don't understand the benefits of simplifying. If you understand that, as my wife did when we first got together, then it happens on its own. It's a natural progression. And she'll still value things differently from me. Whether or not she's a minimalist, it doesn't really matter. I call myself a minimalist because it's a thing that helps people understand but there's no... It's the only ism I know, minimalism without any dogma behind it. I wish there was a list of here are the 100 things that you could own to make you happy but it just doesn't work that way.

Excited for this man. Love people, use things because the opposite never works. This is a powerful Pavel guide to help you really deepen your relationship with all the things in your life, the people in your life and yourself. So, I hope people get a few copies of the book. Again, love people, use things because the opposite never works. Make sure to pick up a few copies. You're going on tour. They can go to theminalist.com, your website and see the tour.

Yeah.

All the dates where you're gonna be at all over the country, right?

20 cities, yeah.

20 cities all up till what, January, February?

Yeah. Yeah.

To be on tour for many months.

Right.

Which is exciting. You're on Twitter occasionally.

Yes. You're at the Minimalists everywhere on social media.

The Minimalists everywhere. But your personal Twitter is JFM, correct?

Yeah.

So is that where you spend the most time?

If you're spending time on social media, Twitter?

If I spend any time at all, it tends to be on Twitter. Okay, so if you want to connect with Josh, make sure to go over.

To Twitter and connect with them over there.

He'll probably get back to you once a week. when he's checking it.

That's right.

You shared your previous truths in the last time we interviewed you, but I'm curious if they're the same things. So if this was your last day and all your work had to go with you to the next place or wasn't here anymore, and you had three lessons to share with the world or three truths, what would be those three truths?

Yeah, so last time I wasn't prepared for this and I gave you three that I really, really like and I think they're great. So the first one was, Let it go, it's just stuff. Then there was, you can't change the people around you, but you can change the people around you. And third was love people use things. I'll give you three more, just for fun. Okay, okay. So the first one is letting go is not something you do. Letting go is something you stop doing. You stop clinging to the excess stuff. You stop clinging to the toxic relationships. You stop clinging to busyness. thinking that busyness makes me who I am, you stop clinging to the achievements and the status and the status symbols. If you stop clinging, the letting go sort of happens on its own because you could get rid of the stuff but still hold on to the attachment and be utterly miserable. But you can let go of the.

Attachment to the stuff and still have.

Things that improve your life.

Right, okay.

Yeah. That's number one. That's number one.

Yeah, number two.

I think we kind of talked about this a bit with technology. I'll say this, scrolling is the new smoking.

Oh, man, you gotta get me now. Our addictions are showing.

So every time you go somewhere, you'll start to notice it, man. Because here's the thing, 50 years ago, you lit up a cigarette in the middle of a restaurant, no one said anything, right? Imagine going to Whole Foods right now and lighting up a cigarette. They would look at you like you're insane. Like you're an alien. Yeah, what's wrong with you? And yet, all of us are interrupting each other with our devices. You see a family of six and they're all just, they're not with each other. Oh, we're dinner, yeah. Yeah, yeah, they're not with each other, they're with their phone. They're with this glowing screen. And so, what I've learned is that we are treating our technology the same way we're treating cigarettes. And I think 50 years from now, we're gonna use it completely differently because we're going to realize the sort of, you know, cigarettes gave us lung cancer. There's a different kind of cancer we're getting, not literal, but a metaphorical cultural cancer that we're getting from constantly scrolling on these devices. So scrolling is the new smoking would be my second one. And then third, your happiness is moderated by your expectations. So, if you want to be unhappy, have more expectations. Expect more from people around you. Expect people to meet all of your demands and you'll walk around miserable all the time. But the happiness that's already inside you, it can be uncovered by having fewer expectations.

That's true. That's a good one. I just interviewed Mo Gawdat who had a book called Solve for Happy. I believe that was the name of the book. And he has an equation that's event minus expectations equals happiness. Yeah, it's just, if you can let it go both of those, I guess there's an event that's going to happen, your expectation around it, you let go of that expectation, you'll be a lot happier. So, that's beautiful. Powerful stuff, man. Before I ask the final question, Josh, I want to acknowledge you for constantly showing up, constantly showing up and living your values, living your truth, you reveal a lot of new things in here that you haven't talked about in the past that you've been afraid of talking about, a lot of shame, a lot of insecurities that you're opening up about now. So I acknowledge you for really sharing more of these things that for whatever reason, now is the time to share them. And I hope people get to learn more about them in here. And for continuing to be a guide. When the world gets sicker and sicker around devices, addictions, consumption, you continue to be a healing guide for doing less, buying less, consuming less so we can be our full selves, so we can be happy without doing to do things to be happy. So, I appreciate you being the healing guide in the world, man. We need more people like you.

Final question.

What's your definition of greatness?

I think true greatness is loving. Because greatness without love seems like a type of failure to me in a way. Because we can see someone who has achieved what is ostensible greatness. But if there's no love there. I'm not talking about romantic love. That's fine. But I'm talking about just the love of people. The love of the world.

The love that is in me.

There's this great saying, it's an old platitude, but it's I'm not in love.

Love is in me.

So, I think greatness is loving.

If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now.

I read your story about your mom going through a challenging experience and your marriage going through a challenging experience.

Sure.

Can you tell us why you got into minimalism?

I'm 35 years old now and about seven years ago. We do the math there, I was 28. I had achieved everything I ever wanted. The six-figure salary back in Dayton.

Pretty big deal in Dayton, too.

In Dayton, Ohio. I was really doing that. I know, right? And so, I had the six-figure salary. I had the big suburban house with more toilets than people. And I had the closets full of expensive clothes, the luxury cars, plural, all the stuff that was supposed to make me happy. And I didn't necessarily feel fulfilled. filled, but I just kept, I knew I was always one promotion, one paycheck, one purchase away from achieving happiness someday in some hypothetical future that was just around the corner. And if I could get this, then I would be happy. And that started well before that. I mean, I grew up really poor in Dayton on welfare and food stamps. we didn't have a lot of money and there was a lot of drugs and alcohol in the house and it was, you know, a dysfunctional household before that word dysfunctional was cool. And so.

We grew up really poor.

And I said, I don't want to live this life, right? And so by age 18, I circumvented the whole college path and just went and got a sales job. And I realized...

I didn't go to school.

No, no, yeah, I just realized, I almost dropped out of high school. And I realized that if I worked six or seven days a week, 60, 70, 80 hours a week, you can make good money. Even as a 19-year-old, right? You're in sales and I was making $50,000 a year by age 19 in Dayton, Ohio. And you're like, okay. But then I noticed that I was spending $65,000 a year. And I had my first experience with debt at age 19. And I said, okay, well, I thought $50,000 a year would make me happy.

Not student loan debt, a different type of debt.

Right, right. Yeah, it was credit card debt. It was just consumer debt, right? You know, there's $12 trillion in consumer debt in our country right now. 12 trillion.

That's not including student loans.

No, that part of that is student loans. Student loans, mortgages, cars, credit cards, the average American has four credit cards in his or her wallet. Oh my gosh. The one in ten Americans has ten or more active credit cards in his or her wallet?

One in ten Americans has ten or more.

Has ten or more. I had 14. And so I continued to climb that corporate ladder because I realized that you know what?

$50,000.

I thought it was gonna make me happy, but it's not. I'm spending 65. Maybe I need to adjust for inflation.

Right?

So, when I started making 65,000, of course I was spending 80,000. It's never enough, right? And so, by the time I was making six figures, I was spending even better than that. So, I had massive amounts of debt. I had six figures worth of debt, not counting my mortgage. If you had my mortgage in there, it was about half a million dollars in and debt. I felt overwhelmed and so I kept trying to pacify myself the same way many Americans do with stuff, the accumulation of stuff to try to fill this void that I felt inside. But of course, that didn't fill the void. It basically widened the void. I felt more discontent and stress and overwhelm and so I was working more and I forsook the things that were most important to me. I said that certain things were important to me. I said my health was important, right? But I weighed...

When did you work out?

Right.

I weigh 80 pounds more than I weigh now.

Wow.

And I said my relationships were important to me. But really, I was spending most of my time with those tertiary relationships, the networking buddies, the executives, the co-workers. And there's nothing wrong with those people. Many of them were great people, but they didn't share the same values. that I shared. And because of that, I wasn't allocating time to the people closest to me, my wife or to my family or my closest friends, because I figured, oh, they'll understand, right? I'm off being successful. By age 27, I was the youngest director in my company's 140-year history. I had 150 retail stores that I was responsible for. I know that's really ironic with the whole minimalism thing now, the 150 retail stores. But I was on this-- which company was this? It was a telecom company in the Midwest. Cool.

Yeah.

And so I was going through-- I was just going through the motions of continuing to climb the ladder. And there were these guys who I really aspired to be like. And I had this whole plan laid out for myself. I was going to be a vice president by age 32, a senior vice president by age 35, a C-level executive by age 40, and then you're set, right? But as I climbed this ladder, I got closer to these guys and realized that many of them were kind of miserable. They were on their third marriage. My boss had his second heart attack. I worked with a guy who was 30 years old. He was three years older than me, who had his first heart attack at age 30. And so, of course, what I tell myself, but I'll be different, right? I'm not going to be like those guys. But if you follow the same recipe, you're going to get the same pie that they've baked. And so I realized, you know what? I need to make some changes, but I don't know what. And then in 2009, when I was 28, my mother died and my marriage ended both in the same month.

Holy cow.

And these two events forced me to look around and start to question what had become my life's focus. And I realized I was so focused on so-called success and achievement and especially on the accumulation of stuff, the trophies of success. Like look at me, I have two Lexuses and I have this, I have that, I have the bigger house and...

The golf membership or whatever, you know.

Yeah, yeah, the Racket Club membership, actually. And so I had these things and here's the thing I want to get across. There's nothing inherently wrong with stuff. We all need some stuff. The problem isn't consumption. The problem is this compulsory consumption. Buying things because that's what we think we're supposed to do. We've been sold this meme of the American dream. If you get this, then you will be happy, as if there is a template for happiness. And in fact, I think that's one of the bigger problems is we are chasing happiness. For the longest time, that's what I did. I chased happiness. And that forced me to really forsake what was important. In fact, I was at a point in my life when I was very narrowly successful. I had the job title.

But.

I wasn't broadly successful. And it's because there wasn't a lot of meaning in what I was doing. We all have to earn a living. I understand that. But I was so focused on just accumulating more money and status and identity, my whole life was wrapped up in that identity. I mean, when you meet someone, what's one of the first questions they ask you?

Well, they ask you, what do you do? I don't ask that question.

Exactly. Right?

And so when I was, you know, and I had, the bigger problem for me is I had this impressive job title, right? Because when you think about that question, like what does it mean? It's such a broad question.

What do you do?

I drink water. I walk down the street. I go to concerts. I read books. Oh, you're asking me, where do you work? How much money do you earn? What's your job title so I can compare you to me on the socioeconomic ladder? Now we don't posit the question that way because if we did, we'd sound like a real jerk. If I said, well, how much money do you make and where do you work? you'd be like, well, wait a minute. That's a weird question. Why are you asking me? So instead we just say, what do you do? And then we're supposed to recite our job title and then spend 15 minutes talking about something we may or may not be passionate about. I did an experiment when I was back in the corporate world. And I said, okay, people keep asking me, what do you do? And I need to untether from this identity. And the only way for me to untether from this identity is to let go of that answer. And so I did this for a year. And when people said, what do you do? I'd say, I'm really passionate about writing. See, for the past decade, I had written fiction. And that was really the thing I was passionate about, I really enjoyed doing. Now, notice I didn't say I'm a writer because then you start getting the accusatory questions, right? You get the, oh really, you're a writer? Who's your publisher? Who's your agent?

Have you written anything I would have read? Or, oh so you're saying you don't have a job?

Right, right, right. And so I would just, instead of talking about the noun, I'm a writer, I would talk about the verb, what I'm actually passionate about doing, creating. And for me that was writing. And I'd flip the question around. Instead of saying, what do you do? I'd say, what are you passionate about? And that would change the whole trajectory of our conversation. Someone say, oh, I'm passionate about snowboarding. They might be an accountant, but they're passionate about snowboarding or they're passionate about.

Playing basketball or whatever it may be. The conversation is much richer at that point. Yes. Yes. You guys can connect and relate in different areas. I always ask, what are you excited about right now in your life? What are you most excited about in your life?

Yeah.

And that brings up the same thing usually about what they're passionate about. Yeah. I'm excited about this passion project of mine. something I'm working on or something that my family's going through, my kids are doing, whatever. It's something that I'm excited about. And sometimes it can be your vocation. That's okay. I just talked about an accountant earlier. Our accountant back in Missoula, Montana, he is passionate about accounting. Now, I don't know how someone could personally be passionate. I could not love it.

They love numbers. They love figuring out the solutions, solving the problems.

Now, my guess is knowing you, it'd be very difficult for you to be passionate about accounting, right?

I would not love it.

Yeah, and same for me. It'd be hard for me to be passionate about accounting. Now there are other people who are passionate about horseback riding, right? I couldn't see myself being passionate about horseback riding either and that's okay. The key is that there isn't one thing that we were born to do with our lives, right? You weren't born to be an astronaut or a yoga teacher or an accountant. The truth for me was that what I was doing as a vocation didn't necessarily align with my values, with my beliefs, with my interests, with my desires. And as I started to figure out what my values were, I realized that what I was doing with my time didn't align with the person I wanted to become, the person I aspired to be. And so after those two events happened with me, my mother died, my marriage ended, I stumbled across this thing called minimalism. And it started with a guy named Colin Wright. We were talking before, he's a guy who moves to a new country every four months. and everything he owns fits in his backpack. And I admired that, but that's not something I want to do. I don't want to be the peripatetic writer who travels everywhere. And that was really cool. But what I admired about it is he said this thing called minimalism allowed him to focus on what he was passionate about. For him, that was travel. And so he writes about his travel experiences. And that was really cool, but I didn't want to just be this Traveling guy.

Yeah.

And so maybe that's what minimalism was, I thought at first. But then I stumbled across guys like Leo Babauta and his wife Eva and their six kids and I said, oh, there's minimalist families. Wait a minute.

They live in society that aren't just like wandering around.

Yeah.

Yeah, and they're not off the grid or anything. They actually live in the city, right?

They have a laptop, they have a cell phone. Yes.

Yeah.

And although they don't have to, the question is like what actually adds value to your life and I realized that I owned a lot of stuff. Did you know the average American household has 300,000 items in it?

No way.

300,000. But I think most of us aren't hoarders. We hold on to a lot of stuff. We hold on to all these supposed memories, right? And I know that's what I was doing. That's what my mom did when I went to deal with her stuff. And I realized that you know what? Some of this stuff actually adds value to my life. but I don't know what. And so I started small because I had attachment to so many things in my life. I had given so much meaning to my stuff and I said, I need to try to get rid of some of this. Like some of it's in the way, I don't know what's actually adding value. And so over the course of 30 days, I just started, I said, I'm going to let go of one thing a day, one item a day each day for 30 days. And what would happen if I did that? Well, of course, you're not going to put a big dent in 300,000 items.

Yeah.

299. Yeah, I probably still have I had 300,000 items, but I was a very well-organized hoarder. So I wasn't a candidate for the TV show necessarily.

It was detailed in boxes and labeled.

Yeah, there was an ordinal system of bins. And so yes, there was a lot of stuff that was very well hidden, basically. It was organized hoarding. And so I said, I'm gonna get rid of an item a day for 30 days. Well, of course, once you get momentum, I got rid of way more than 30 items in the first 30 days.

I don't know if I'd do that, I just want to get rid of all of it at once. I feel like let's just purge it all. Yeah.

Go through this room, you know, right now. Well, that's actually great because so I spent about eight months getting rid of. So from that beginning, it took me about eight months to radically simplify my life. And I over those eight months, I got rid of about 90% of my possessions. Still 50,000 or whatever. Yeah, right. It's like I don't know what's left. It's certainly not like Colin who owns, you know, 52 items and they all fit in his backpack. or whatever. For me, it was like you could come to my house today and you're going to be like, oh, this guy's really tidy. You're not going to say, oh my God, this guy's a minimalist, right? And what adds value to my life today may be different five years from now or whatever. When I first embraced minimalism, I was 28 years old, seven years later, I have a three-year-old, I have a partner. Our needs are appreciably different from when I was a single guy sort of out living on my own, although it's not my values aren't different. and I think that's what's important is identifying what is important in my life and what is going to, what items, what material possessions are going to augment that experience and not get in the way. Yes. And so letting go allowed me to figure out the paradox of minimalism is I get far more value from the material items I own now than by watering them down with hundreds of thousands of items.

It's kind of like you were the original magic guide of tidying up, right? Like that book came out like a year ago, didn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

When Ryan and I were on a book tour for our second book, Everything that Remains, and I think it came out right around that same time. That thing blew up, man.

It really did.

And I think a lot of the professional organizers really get it. That scene of, I always say the easiest way to organize your stuff is to get rid of most of it.

Yes.

And I think professional organizers understand that I think the problem that we run into with us amateurs and me being an amateur organizer, what I've realized is that most people just try to cover up the problem by organizing. This is what I did. I'd go to the Container Store and buy all these containers and have this whole system for hiding stuff in my basement.

You didn't need the stuff in the first place.

Exactly, right? And so when I simplify my life, people at work started coming up to me and saying, you, know what? seem less stressed. You seem so much calmer. And I didn't jump up and say, Look at me, I'm becoming a minimalist and all of you need to too. I wasn't out proselytizing. I wasn't out trying to convert anyone to minimalism. In fact, I'm still not trying to convert anyone to minimalism. I just want to share a recipe that's worked really well for me in hopes that some people could tweeze out a few ingredients and apply it to their own life in some way. And so after I let go, my best friend of 20-something years, a guy named Ryan Nicodemus, We worked together, we climbed the corporate ladder together. We knew each other since we were fat little fifth graders. And he came to me one day and he said, why the hell are you so happy? And I said, Let me talk to you about this thing called minimalism. And I explained how I'd let go and sort of purge 90% of my possessions over the last eight months. And he was like, you. Because he was like, you, spent eight months getting rid of your stuff? Like, that sounds really awesome. I want to do it now.

Yeah, right.

And I'm like, okay. How can I become a minimalist like...

In a weekend.

Yeah.

Pretty much. And so he came up with this idea called a packing party, where the easiest way to start to deal with your stuff, and you know this, whenever you move, you realize like, oh, I've got a lot of stuff to move, right? So he boxed up everything in his 2,000 square foot condo in Dayton, Ohio, and I mean, literally everything. He had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two living rooms, a single guy with a cat and two living rooms, and he's like, why do I have all this stuff? So he boxed up everything as if he were moving, put it all in his second living room, stacked halfway to his 12 foot ceiling and said, okay, over the next three weeks, I'm going to unpack only the items I truly need. And I don't know what's in all these boxes for sure, but, you know, so that first night he's unpacking a toothbrush and some toothpaste and then clothes for work the next day, a bed and bed sheets. He even packed up his furniture, like.

Everything as if he were moving.

And over the course of about three weeks, He had unpacked about 20% of his stuff, but 80% of his stuff was still in boxes. He looked at this mountain of stuff. I remember going over to his condo and he's like, Josh, I don't even remember what's in most of these boxes. All of these things that I worked so hard for over the last decade, it's supposed to make me happy, but it's not doing its job. And so he donated or sold all of it. And about a month later he came to me and he said, I think some other people would find value in this message. Josh, you've written for a while. Do you think you could write some non-fiction stuff? And so we started a website. We didn't even know it was called a blog at the time.

This is your partner now?

Yeah.

So Ryan said, I think we could share this. And so we started theminimalists.com and that was about six years ago. I think the cool thing is people start to find value in that message. We were still working in the corporate world at the time and still letting go and realizing that you could live a regular life without being a hermit or a nomad or an ascetic or a monk or something like that. Yeah, yeah.

Why do you think humans are so wired to be dissatisfied?

I think so they did an experiment with some chimpanzees a few years ago. And it's interesting because if you look at, if you give a chimpanzee a banana, it's going to eat a banana, right? I mean it's wired to do that. We're all wired to eat, right? And if you give it enough bananas to eat and share, It will eat and share the bananas. If you give it a horde of bananas, it will try to kill other chimpanzees that try to take it. And I think we're why like a.

Chest of them like a ton of them.

Yeah, yeah, like like if you fill this room here with bananas it will try to fight off and kill other chimpanzees.

They want to take one.

Yeah, yeah, I We don't know why exactly, but but we but we know that that There's something about this overabundance of stuff that this scarcity, this idea of scarcity starts to come into play. And we literally will hoard. And I think it's the same psychology with material possessions.

People do that with money too and other things.

Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with money. I mean, I'm certainly not allergic to money. But it's no longer the primary driver for doing what I do. And I no longer worry about money the same way I used to because I'm much more intentional with the decisions that I make with my money. And I think we all have to pay the bills and so sometimes that requires a 9 to 5 or starting a business or doing something that may not be your ultimate passion project. But for me, anything I do to earn money, it has to align with my values. And if it doesn't, then I have to be willing to walk away from that and find something else. Sure, sure.

Why do you think we keep buying stuff even though we know it's not going to fill the holes?

I think advertising does a very good job of making us desire things, making.

Us feel not good enough unless we have it or not.

Hungry for a food we didn't know existed. And so the average person sees 5,000 advertisements a day. So that's about a million or so a year. And we are indoctrinated by these things. And so I don't think advertisements are inherently bad, but I think seeing that many messages, that many discrete bits of input every single day is inherently problematic. And so the question is, how can I turn the volume down on that so that I can make more deliberate decisions with my attention. Because it's not just money we're spending, it's time, it's attention. These are other resources that are even more important than money.

Right.

What about the internet? How do you think the internet's increased consumerism?

I think, well, technology, it's weird because it seems a bit quixotic to think that we can fix our problem of consumption with a different type of consumption, right? And so, a friend of mine named Cal Newport, are you familiar with Cal? Sounds familiar. He wrote a book called so Good They Can't Ignore your. I've heard of it. And he wrote a book recently called Deep Work. He just had a TEDx talk come out this past month called Quit Social Media. And he advocates for just getting off social media altogether. Now, full disclosure, I'm on social media. But he talks about how they've aggregated our attention. Social media is engineered to aggregate our attention to give us these ephemeral bursts of pleasure, these likes and retweets and shares and whatever else to keep coming back for more. It's tantamount to having a slot machine because you're constantly pulling to see if you've won. The problem is though, now we're carrying around the slot machine in our pocket all day. and constantly pulling that lever to see if I've won more attention. And so I don't think that's inherently bad either, but I think it can be problematic if that is the purpose that we use it for. I'm not as strict as someone like Cal would be. I find value in social media. I use it as a platform to disseminate information and to communicate with others, but I can see how it would be problematic for many people, including myself. I've done some pretty interesting experiments over the last six years.

Experience must be done. You've gone without a phone for a few months, right?

I did.

So when I first became a minimalist, I said, okay, I'm going to work hard on paying down my debt. So I moved to this tiny $500 a month apartment in Dayton and I just started going crazy on paying off all my debt, right? So I said, I don't want to be tied to this lifestyle anymore. In order to not be tied to this career, I need to be able to pay off this debt. And so I went on the ramen noodle diet. Not literally, but But $1,000 a month lifestyle. Yes, yeah, I spent as little as I could so that I could get out of debt and no longer be tied to the same obligations, right? And so when I moved into that apartment, I didn't hook up internet for the first few days because it was like a weekend or whatever, and I'm like, Huh, I wonder if I could go 30 days without internet at home. 30 days without internet. I said, I'm gonna try it. It'll give me something to write about, right?

Sure, sure.

That was five years ago and I have not had internet at home since. And I run an online business.

Holy cow.

And so I could tell you the reason I don't have internet?

What about your phone? You've got internet there?

Sort of.

But I found a way around that too because I wanted to be able to write about that. So it was the most productive month of my life.

Wow.

Those 30 days and I'm like, okay, I'm not going to get it back next month. And so it just continued from there. And it's not to say that I won't ever have it again someday. We have an office in Missoula, Montana, so I drive to the office and it's a place where I can schedule it. Yeah, I can work there. And I have an office at home too, but there's no internet there, but that's a place for me to create.

You're probably so focused when you're at home writing.

It's deep work.

It's full concentration.

You're in the flow.

Yeah.

Not distracted by social media likes and.

Who left a comment here. Exactly. And so, yes, I do have a phone at home, but I keep it as soon as I get home, the first thing I do is put it on this charging stand. And in fact, I go out of my way to keep it away from my person. You were asking me if I had a picture of something earlier, I had to go into my bag and dig my phone out because I try to be as present as I can and I'm constantly failing at that and that's okay. I'm not anyone's Yoda. I fail at all the time, but I learned so much from it. So when I got rid of internet, it was maybe six months earlier, I'd got rid of TV at home and realized that that wasn't adding as much value as I thought it was.

Disconnecting you from your partner or your children or whatever.

Yeah, and so I was so... I had no TV and then I did no internet. And then for two months, I got rid of my cell phone. And you learn about a special kind of loneliness. Think about this, you've removed all your pacifiers, right?

Because it was my first.

You have to be with your thoughts.

Yeah, you have to be with your thoughts, but then, and you have to be with, you know, people, and you have to make plans in a different way. And also, here's the interesting thing. You learn a lot about your friends, too, because, because if you're going to.

Meet someone for lunch and, and I'm ready.

A few minutes behind.

Yes. You text it really quick.

Yeah. Right. I couldn't do it.

You were just there and you're on time. You're waiting. Oh, yeah. And you learn how what's happening. There aren't any pay phones anymore. I mean, there was one in Dayton where I lived.

I had to, you know, walk in the rain.

Four or five blocks to get.

You don't even have quarters anymore.

She's like, how do I put, what do I do?

Yeah.

And so you're not remembering the numbers anymore. No, they're all plugged in our phone. I used to remember every number.

Yeah. Yeah.

Growing up, you know, your five friends.

Your home phone, you know? Yeah.

There's a great John Mayer lyric. He talks about the shape of calling, like, I no longer remember the shape of calling home. And, and the shape of calling home.

Yeah.

Because you got, you know, you remember, you used to remember these numbers, like.

On the keypad there or the The.

Little dial ringer, you remember those?

Oh yes, yeah, the rotary phone.

Yes. Yes.

That was me like age six or seven.

Yeah, we totally, I grew up with one of those. So, I realized that once I removed all these pacifiers that I had to fill the void with something else that was maybe more meaningful. And so I'd rediscovered these things called books. They're amazing, let me tell you.

But you're so minimalist, you didn't have books. So you just rented them from the library.

No, I wrote them. And then I read... No, I mean, so I rediscovered time to create more. I rediscovered time. And then the cool thing is, minimalism isn't about deprivation for me. Like, I'm not trying to deprive myself of these things. I'm not an ascetic. I don't want to go live in a cave somewhere. I do want to live in our society. I just want to do so deliberately. And so I decided to bring a phone back into my life. And when I did, I used it more deliberately. No longer do I have Facebook on my phone. No longer do I have email on my phone.

I.

Use the phone. Yeah, I use it to make phone calls, I send text messages, GPS, that's how I got here today, GPS, Uber, I took an Uber to get here. And so the technology is there and I allow it to add value to my life, but when it starts getting in the way, I try to check myself because the phone isn't the problem, I'm the problem. And once I realized that, I knew I could change that. by just being more deliberate with how I use it.

Yeah.

Powerful, man.

Wow.

So when did you move then? So you moved to Montana a few years ago?

Yeah.

So Ryan and I started theminimalists.com December of 2010. I left the corporate world in 2011 and at the end of that year, so a year after we started the website, we published our first book. which is called Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life. And it was sort of about the five higher order values: health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution. The ability to focus on not just our basic needs, food and shelter and all these other things, which is important, but going beyond that, minimalism wasn't just about the stuff for me. That was the initial bite at the apple that changed everything. But I think we get so caught up in just the stuff. We think decluttering is just the point. I think anyone watching or listening to this could go rent a dumpster, throw all their crap in it, and be utterly miserable. Because you've just removed the pacifiers. The point isn't just getting rid of the stuff and coming home to an empty house and sulking. No one wants that. I don't want to tell anyone to get rid of your book collection or whatever. Whatever adds value to your life, I encourage you to hold on to, but question, what adds value to your life? What is adding value? And so when I had let go of the stuff and started writing about it, people found value in it and people started asking about writing a book. And so we did and wrote that book, Minimalism. And we went out on the small book tour. Over the course of about a year, we did 33 cities. So we'd go out for a week and then we'd come back. And we were in our tour bus, which is Ryan's 2004 Toyota Corolla. Nice. And we'd hit the road and we'd go out. Was it you two or you bringing a-- yeah, it was just us two. And we'd go to these bookstores. and we had these little events. That was back in the day when we were lucky if eight people showed up. It was a big event, right? And that was so great. It was more like a listening tour. I remember our fourth tour stop. We were in Knoxville, Tennessee, and there was no one there. There was literally no one there. We're sitting there at this bookstore, and we're like, okay, I guess this is it. It was like a little coffee shop there. I'm like, all right, I'm going to get a coffee to go. We're driving back to Dayton tonight.

No way.

Yeah, and as we're leaving. this guy and his girlfriend goes, Hey, you're the Minimalists! And I'm like, Yes, we are!

We're just setting up.

He's like, Hey, we drove like three.

Hours to come see you. And it ended up being this awesome one-on-one session, this guy who had a lot of issues in his life, and it was a perfect opportunity to have this almost one-on-one coaching with this guy that we wouldn't have been able to have otherwise. dozens of people have shown up or hundreds or thousands of people have shown up. And we learned a lot from that tour and just going out on the road and listening to people and hearing their stories and telling our stories, figuring out what stories resonated, which ones didn't. And that's actually how we wrote our second book. So at the end of that tour, we finished in Vancouver, BC. We were driving back to Dayton, Ohio, and we had to drive through Missoula, Montana. Driving through the state of Montana, it's like a 10-hour drive. It's this massive state. We woke up in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. It was gorgeous and it just got more gorgeous throughout the day. Ryan looked over at me and he goes, Hey, man, we've got to come back out here to write the next book. We rented a cabin in the middle of nowhere, Montana, near Butte, and on the side of a mountain, it was like 800 bucks a month to be in the middle of this gorgeous wilderness. we wrote that second book or the first draft of it and we wake up every day and it's negative 28 degrees outside and it's a conducive environment for writing. I'll just say that. You can write ahead and write. Yeah, you can do push-ups and write and that's about it. That's super. Yeah, yeah. And so we moved out to Montana and we found ourselves sort of gravitating toward Missoula, Montana, which is the city there. And when you were writing that book, it really came from all the stories that resonated with the people from that last like, okay, this story really resonated and we're talking about the packing party or we would talk about, you know, my mom's death and me going through her material possessions and trying to let go of sentimental items. And so we learned what resonated, what didn't. The things I thought were very profound, they landed on deaf ears. The other things, the packing party was sort of an afterthought and that really resonated with people. And so what we learned was that Here are the things that people find value in. Let's share more of that. And so, yeah, we ended up in Montana about four years ago and we've been there ever since.

What do you think brings you the most fulfillment today?

I always look back to those five values. And so, if my health is lacking, then I need to repair that.

That's the first thing.

Yeah.

And I think they're all tied though. If my relationships are lacking, it means if I'm not giving to them or if I'm not getting what I need from those relationships, then I have to question why. And so if I'm not creating, if I'm not passionate about this creativity or this craft, then I'm lacking. If I feel like I'm not growing or if I'm not giving to the world in a meaningful way, then any of those areas, if any of those areas are empty, that's the weak link and I need to go back and fix that. And, you know, it's constant every day. I'm trying to look at how do I serve these values in my life? And if I'm not serving them, then I need to be honest with myself and find a way to fix that.

How does someone, is there like a minimalist assessment test that people can take where you can ask a number of questions to yourself and, you know, where your stuff is owning you as opposed to you are owning your stuff and you're in control of your life? Is there like a few questions you could ask people listening that's like, yeah.

There'S one question in particular that I would ask. How might your life be better with less? It's a counterintuitive question at first, right? Because we're always thinking about more. How do I get this? How do I bring this into my life? How do I achieve that? How do I take on this new responsibility, this new project? How do I get this promotion? But how might my life be better with less? that's a different question. For me at first it was less commitment, less financial obligation. For me I had all that debt and so the first benefit for me was regaining control of my finances and developing a plan to deal with that. And to do that I had to be less focused on the stuff. I had to sell a lot of stuff. I had to to stop accumulating and buying things because the price tag is one cost but then there's all these other costs as well. You have to have the space to store it or to clean it or to take care of it or to charge it or to whatever, put gas in it, all of these things. And so by asking that question, how might your life be better with less, you identify what the benefits are for you and they're different for everyone. I had a 93-year-old come to our last event San Diego and she came in the hug line afterward and she goes, I just want you to know that she brought three generations of daughters. So her daughter, her granddaughter and her great granddaughter with her. And she goes, I just want you to know that I'm 93 years old and I am finally simplifying my life for the first time. Wow. We had a 13 year old show up in Omaha, Nebraska and I'm like, Hey buddy, did your mom drag you out here? I see you're with your mom here. He's like, Are you kidding me? I dragged her out here because I thought maybe my parents could find some value, some benefits in this minimalist message.

That's cool.

And what I learned is the benefits are going to be different for everyone. But we're all asking the same question. It's how do I live a more meaningful life? And part of that has to do with just changing our focus to figuring out what's important.

Yeah, I would say, I mean, I bet if you came into my place right now and you looked around, you would I don't think I'm a minimalist.

But I really don't accumulate a lot.

I think you're intentional. Yeah, I'm very intentional. Like, it's all, you know, I don't have a blank room in here, so I have some stuff on the, you know, it's intentional things. Yeah, but this is, like, pretty much it. When I moved to La, I had two bags, a laptop and a guitar. Minimalist. I didn't have anything else. I, in Ohio, I got rid of all my stuff, moved to New York City, and I had two bags when I came here to La, and I really don't need much, you know, I've got an older car. It's a four thousand dollar car that I bought.

Sure.

But I'm not looking to buy new things.

Yeah.

I would say I'm looking to have impactful things and, and updated equipment that I could use to produce better quality. They're tools, though, right?

Yeah.

And I think, I think that's how.

A lot of this, this is my home and my office.

Yes. Yeah.

So it's like I'm maximizing my space for sure. And I, you'll talk to my assistant. I Purge probably every few months because I get a bunch of, like, just packages and bags constantly, like gear from people always sending me stuff. I'm just trying to purge it as often as I can to make my closet simple and clean and organized. It's minimal but not to the extreme, you know what I mean?

Yeah, for me, minimalism isn't a radical lifestyle. It's a practical lifestyle and my version of minimalism is going to look different from your version. It's going to look different from Leo's version who has six kids. his will necessarily look different. I'll tell you this, Leo is the ultimate minimalist. He washes his shirts in the sink still. He doesn't make his family do that, but he does it as a ritual to show that he can, he doesn't have to have this attachment to these things. And I find...

I like the washer and dryer.

Amen.

I like simplicity.

I have a washer and dryer. I do too, but he finds value in that ritual. And so that's different for him. And what I've realized is that As a minimalist, everything I own serves a purpose or it brings me joy. So whether it's serving a purpose like the equipment that you have here, those are all tools, or they bring you joy like aesthetic joy like you have these photos and artwork and things on the walls and hangers and things like that. That serves an aesthetic purpose as well and so it brings you joy in some way. And so I think that's great. I don't want people to deprive themselves or think that's necessary. Now you can temporarily deprive yourself. Sometimes that's helpful. If you remove something from your life for a temporary period of time, like I did with the cell phone, to figure out when I bring it back in, does this actually add value? And if so, how can it add the most value to my life?

Yeah.

What do you think people listening could do to get started? Whether they want to say, I want to get rid of some things or I want to be more minimalist or more intentional.

Sure.

Is there one post that we could refer them to? Is there? a set of three things they can start with. What's something they can start with?

So, start with that question. That one's so important because you need to identify what the benefits are for you. We all know instinctually how to declutter your closet, right? So, you're never going to see me and Ryan write about here are the.

67 ways for you to declutter your closet.

Go get the magic guide of tidying up. Right, yeah. I'm not opposed to that, but it's just not my thing. We don't write the how-to stuff, we write the why-to stuff. And so, it's important for me to understand the why to. But some tips for how to, I mean, I'll give you three things really quickly. Number one is 30-day minimalism game. You can find that at theminimalists.com/game. Here's how it works for you guys. I've got it linked up too for you guys. Yeah, great. If you want to throw it in the show notes, that'd be awesome. But basically, I think decluttering personally, just for me, is kind of boring. And so we found a way to make it a little more fun with some friendly competition. So at the beginning of a month, you partner up with someone, a friend, a family member, a co-worker, your arch nemesis, whoever it may be, and you decide to let go of some stuff over the course of the month. Now, on the first day of the month, it's really easy. You each get rid of one item. Second day of the month, two items. Third day of the month, three items. So you get that momentum you need. It starts off really easy, but by mid month, it's much more difficult. 15th day of the month, I have to get rid of 15 items. 20th day of the month, 20 items. And whoever goes the longest wins, so you can wager whatever you want. You bet a dollar, bet a lunch, or whatever you want to bet. If you both make it to the end of the month, you both won though because you've both gotten rid of 500 items and it's a really good start. And I find that we've had tens of thousands of listeners share stuff on social media now. So if you go to that post, you can find a link and see a bunch of pictures of people sharing online as well. So having that other person there to help keep you accountable and you keep them accountable makes it more enjoyable but also sustains the process a lot longer.

How does someone go through this Let's say you get rid of 100,000 things or whatever because you think it's a cool idea. But how do you do it so you don't reaccumulate those things?

Sure.

So there's a deeper why that keeps you maintaining it.

Yes. How does someone do that? Well, I did a few things. So the question that was really important to me early on was, does this add value to my life when I was letting go of stuff? But then as an experiment, beginning of 2011, so this is about a month after we had started our website, I needed something to write about. And so I decided, well, we're the minimalists. I'm going to be the authority on this, so I need something to write about. I'm not going to buy anything this year as a New Year's resolution except for food and hygiene products, right? And so I'm not going to buy any new material possessions for a year.

No clothes.

No electronics. No new tools for your business. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing for your business. Yeah, not even for the business, right?

I'm just going to do this for a year to see what happens. Food and toiletries.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Man, was that way more difficult than I thought? Oh my goodness. Especially with Amazon at your fingertips and everything else, it becomes nearly impossible. But what I did, it took about four months to really retrain myself because I'd be at a store and I'd see, I really want to buy this glass. I think it's beautiful. I'm going to buy this. Oh wait, I can't buy the glass. I'm doing this experiment. And then, be at the store a week later, getting some deodorant or whatever. And I'm, oh, I really want to, oh, that's right, I can't. And about the four month mark, I still can't get this gift for someone.

No, I can't.

I can't, yeah.

Write them a letter instead.

Yeah.

Or make them a gift. Or buy an experience, concert tickets or spend time with someone. So I still spend money on experiences but not on material possessions. And so, but by the end of four months, I would walk by this glass and say, oh, that's a really nice glass.

I really like that. And that was it.

I didn't feel the urge to continue to consume. And so when I that feeling has stuck around for the last five years, I would encourage anyone who is eager to try to limit the things they're bringing into their life to set up some sort of rule like that. Now, you don't have to be as extreme as that, but even now, for me with any big purchase, it's over $250, I have to wait at least a month in order to make that purchase.

Think about it and then a month later then you purchase if you still want it.

Yeah, if I still want it, if I still need it, if I still think I think it's going to add value to my life and that forces me to continue to contemplate that. And so I'm asking that question. I've asked that question so much. Does this add value to my life? That it's no longer an intellectual exercise, it's an emotional one. Is this going to add value to my... I'm going to know. You'll know in a moment. Yeah, you have to be honest with yourself. But also holding on to the thing.

Just because I get value from this today doesn't mean I'll get value from it six months from now.

It's like a tattoo. Maybe it's a nice idea right now, but in a year or two, are you going to be glad you had it? Who is Jenny?

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, no, it's but I think it's the same thing. Is this going to continue to add value? And if not, I have to be willing to let go.

Sure. You have a new documentary that you guys put together over the last couple of years, right? And it just came out. Can you share a little bit about it?

Yeah, it came out in theaters at the end of May and basically for the last six years it's been the Josh and Ryan Show and that's been great. We've been able to share a recipe. and millions of people have found value in that and people have liked our books and our blog posts and now the podcast. And so that's been great. And so what I've learned over the last five, six years is I started off just wanting to be an author. Initially, it was a literary fiction author and then I started writing nonfiction and really enjoyed writing a memoir and went through that whole process. I've become much more vehicle agnostic over the last six years. And I don't know if you know the stat, but 55% of adults in the United States read less than one book a year. So if you just write books, it doesn't matter how awesome your book is, half of the adult audience won't even read one book. Yeah, and your book doesn't have any chance. So the people who read 10 or more books is a very slim percentage. But many people will use other mediums to consume different bits of content. And so whether that's the, we've done two TEDx talks, we've done the blog or the books, we wanted to find ways to communicate and reach people and show people that it wasn't this radical lifestyle. So we went out and we interviewed minimalists from all walks of life, minimalists entrepreneurs and minimalist families. tiny house enthusiasts. Do you know Graham Hill? He's from New York. So he does this, he runs a website called LifeEdited, but he has this 420 square foot apartment that we have in the documentary and it sleeps seven. You can have dinner for 12.

What?

It has an office in it and it's because it's all modular. So like this table comes to the floor, these beds, I mean, and it's unbelievable and he utilizes every square inch. I mean, it's unbelievable. And so, that may not be appealing to everyone. In fact, we have one lady, Tammy Strobel, who... She's only got one bathroom.

That's a challenge.

Yes, it does. Yeah, that is definitely a challenge. Well, for one bathroom. And so, we had Tammy in there. She had her 183 square foot tiny house. I don't want to live in a tiny house, personally. But I admire people who want to live in that and then find a way to execute it. And so, we interviewed those people. I interviewed a minimalist architect in Tucson, Arizona who had this really cool plot of land with three houses on it, but they weren't tiny houses, but they were appropriate. And he kept using this word appropriate in fact. And I felt like that was the perfect word for minimalism because he said when he builds a house for someone, he doesn't just go to their, he doesn't just show them a blueprint of your typical house. He doesn't ask, do you want a living room and do you want dining room because people say yes. He asks, how are you going to live your life? And he tries to build a house around that life instead of trying to cram a life into a home. And I really admire that because he said everything I bring into my home, everything that I bring into my life is appropriate for my life. And that's what we wanted to show people. So we got that side of it, but then we also wanted to be more data driven and we wanted to show the other side of it. We didn't want it to just be like, oh look at these people and this template for living. That was interesting. So we went out and we got neuroscientists and neuropsychologists and a bunch of different economists, a former Wall Street broker, and all of these people who were using this idea of simplifying and living more intentionally, but able to quantify it in a way that really highlighted the stories of of these other people who were living this more meaningful, more deliberate life with less stuff. Sure. It's pretty cool.

So where can people watch it right now?

You can go to minimalismfilm.com and you can find it there, Vimeo and iTunes, Amazon and several other places as well. And what's the main blog, your main site?

TheMinimalists.com.

TheMinimalists.com.

Gotcha. And you can get all your books there. There's also information there for the documentary, I'm assuming.

Absolutely.

And your next tours and all those things. Yeah, everything you guys are doing. A couple final questions for you. What are you most proud of that most people don't know about?

I'm proud of my short-term actions align with my long-term values. And that wasn't always the case for me. I was always living for someday. I'll get to that someday in some non-existent hypothetical future. I'll do this passion project. I'll focus on my health. I'll focus on my relationships. Yeah, I'll give to charity someday. But of course, someday is never, never comes. And so, you know, I turned someday into today. And I'm much more deliberate with the decisions I make today because I realize that impacts not just myself and others but it impacts the future self and others as well.

That's cool, man. If you had, do you have any tattoos?

No.

If you had to get a tattoo on your forehead in reverse that only you could see in a mirror when you're looking at yourself right here, what would that be? A word or a symbol or something?

Just a minus sign.

A minus sign?

Yeah.

That's cool. I like that. Alright. What are you most grateful for in your life recently?

My partner, Becca. She's amazing. I mean, I am truly in love and man, isn't that what it's all about?

Absolutely, man. How long you guys been together?

About a year and a half.

Wow.

Yeah, she has a three-year-old so I've become a parent in the last.

In.

The last couple years and that has been the biggest challenge of my life probably.

Turning into a parent without.

Yeah. Yeah.

Learning that, it wasn't something I anticipated but it's been well worth it.

That's cool, man.

Yeah.

Congrats.

Thank you.

That's awesome. This is a question I ask everyone at the end of the podcast. It's called the Three Truths.

Okay.

So if this was your last day many, many years from now, and you've achieved everything you wanted to, you lived the minimalist lifestyle, you have the relationships you want, and you got to write down three things you know to be true about everything you've learned that you would pass on to the world. And this would be all that they would be able to remember you by are these three truths.

Yeah.

What would you say are yours?

Number one, let it go. It's just stuff. Number two, you can't change the people around you, but you can change the people around you. And number three, love people and use things, because the opposite never works.

Final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

So, I just spent the last few days at a Rob Bell event, so we have a mutual friend, Rob Bell.

And.

He said something interesting while I was there. It was one of the big takeaways. I remember writing this down. He said, Greatness isn't self-conscious. There was something that I loved about.

That.

When you are doing something that is great, when you feel the best, the most excited, the most engaged, the most focused, you're not self-conscious about it. When I'm in a flow state generally it's when I'm writing. When I feel like something is truly great, it doesn't matter what other people think about it. It doesn't even really matter what I think about it. It's just I feel that it's great. And so maybe it's just that greatness isn't self-conscious.

Get your credit right, negotiate your salary, get a good job, automate your money. You could buy 10,000 lattes. It doesn't make any difference at all. And so whether it's the debt snowball or whether it's earning more, whether it's automating your money, you want to make sure that this advice is something you're actually gonna follow. And that means you need to bake in psychology.