Archive for December, 2009
Fire starter
I don’t remember how I found Danielle LaPorte’s website, but I’m a fan now. I adore her note cards, especially the following one. It’s sexy and bold and perfect in its simplicity.
It made me want to know more about her. She’s actually a business strategist (or a “fire starter”, to quote her), but not the boring kind. She’s a free spirit who strives for authenticity, never went to university and was nominated for the RBC Women of Influence, and Business in Vancouver’s 40 Under 40 awards. You can tell she’s very smart. Oh, and she’s hot too.
Photo: Anastasia Photography
Quoted from her website:
I’m here to evoke the truth … my version of it, and your version of it. I’m interested in raw reality, and grace. I think feminine power and conscious commerce will revolutionize how we live … that, and forgiveness. In my experience, if you steer clear of dogma and muster up more love than you thought you had to give, then your vitality increases, satisfaction sets in, sweetness surfaces. I believe in the creative power of pleasurable feelings. I’m convinced that the desire to be real is everyone’s divine imperative.
Check out her website and this video (live at Pecha Kucha). You’ll see what I mean.
Funny people
Are you bored? Check out Clients from hell (“a collection of anonymously contributed client horror stories from designers”). Some of my favorites: “Your portfolio is pink, I hope you are not homosexual” ================================================ “… and by the way, I can’t afford to pay you for this job, but you will be paid in karma — which [...]
Imagine that…
Living with less stuff
A lot of people think that minimalism equals boring (or “minimalism is a bummer”, to quote Jonathan Adler). For me, it’s the contrary : Less stuff (and less money spent on stuff) = more focus on what really matters = more life. I absolutely believe that you don’t own things, but things own you. They require a lot of attention, time, energy and money. Kind of like a demanding loved one really – except your stuff doesn’t reciprocate. It’s basically a one-way relationship.
I’m learning to eliminate the unnecessary, and when I covet something, before buying it, I make sure it won’t be just for display but will be enjoyed/used a lot and for a long time. One of the few things I really enjoy buying is greeting cards. I’m old school. I love sending “just because” letters and cards, and imagining the person’s surprise and the smile on their face when they open the envelope. The feeling you get from making someone’s day with a few hand-written words is priceless.
Anyways, I recently noticed that I had A LOT of shoes and handbags. Then I told myself, man, all that time I thought I couldn’t afford an all-inclusive luxurious vacation package in Bora Bora (aka my ultimate fantasy destination), but I could have used all the money I spent on those. That pretty much ended my toxic love affair with stuff.
Paring down my stuff has been my obsession over the last years, so the following essay by Paul Graham totally resonates with me (you can check out his website too):
I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can’t afford a front yard full of old cars.
It wasn’t always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don’t have closets. In those days people’s stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I’m surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they’d be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews’ rooms the bed is the only clear space.
Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven’t changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.
That was a big problem for me when I had no money. I felt poor, and stuff seemed valuable, so almost instinctively I accumulated it. Friends would leave something behind when they moved, or I’d see something as I was walking down the street on trash night (beware of anything you find yourself describing as “perfectly good”), or I’d find something in almost new condition for a tenth its retail price at a garage sale. And pow, more stuff.
In fact these free or nearly free things weren’t bargains, because they were worth even less than they cost. Most of the stuff I accumulated was worthless, because I didn’t need it.
What I didn’t understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn’t the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it’s “worth?” The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don’t have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.
Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless.
In fact, worse than worthless, because once you’ve accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn’t retire to the town they preferred because they couldn’t afford a place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn’t theirs; it’s their stuff’s.
And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
(This could explain why clutter doesn’t seem to bother kids as much as adults. Kids are less perceptive. They build a coarser model of their surroundings, and this consumes less energy.)
I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady’s attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn’t even remember what else I had stored in that attic.
And yet when I got back I didn’t discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.
The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn’t.
Why would I do that? Because the people whose job is to sell you stuff are really, really good at it. The average 25 year old is no match for companies that have spent years figuring out how to get you to spend money on stuff. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that “shopping” becomes a leisure activity.
How do you protect yourself from these people? It can’t be easy. I’m a fairly skeptical person, and their tricks worked on me well into my thirties. But one thing that might work is to ask yourself, before buying something, “is this going to make my life noticeably better?”
A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by asking herself before she bought anything “Am I going to wear this all the time?” If she couldn’t convince herself that something she was thinking of buying would become one of those few things she wore all the time, she wouldn’t buy it. I think that would work for any kind of purchase. Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse still, a mere bargain?
The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don’t use much because it’s too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the “good china” so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it’s fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.
Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You’re going to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
I’ve now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It’s not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you’d be a local celebrity. But except for books, I now actively avoid stuff. If I want to spend money on some kind of treat, I’ll take services over goods any day.
I’m not claiming this is because I’ve achieved some kind of zenlike detachment from material things. I’m talking about something more mundane. A historical change has taken place, and I’ve now realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it’s not.
In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they’re indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We’ve now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.
The good news is, if you’re carrying a burden without knowing it, your life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking around for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them removed.
Room service
I like surprise breakfasts in bed. Life should always be like that.
