Getting rid of stuff and decluttering you life is an awesome thing to do.
You immediately start to feel less stress and more inner peace. It’s a very freeing thing once you declutter.
There’s a deep connection between our living space/work space and our state of mind. That’s why it’s nice to clear your work area every so often.
Have you ever cleaned up your work area, gotten rid of junk and organized your papers and everything and just felt better about it?
Part of it might simply be the act of cleaning, but I also think that organizing and having things clean has a big deal to do with how we think.
Maybe it’s something along the lines of “cleanliness is Godliness”, but I feel it’s more of a zen thing. It’s that Buddhist minimalism.
After all, if we have tons of stuff around us, that’s much more to think about, more to organize, more to dwell on. If we have a very spartan and sparse living area, our minds are allowed to expand and think about more grandiose ideas. Or at least we can think more creatively about the things we want to do.
Steve Jobs was known to live (and sit) like this.
Steve Jobs, despite being rich beyond belief, believed in living such an austere, minimalist lifestyle. He believed in focus and simplicity. Many of Apple’s products derive from those Buddhist concepts, and yet while being simple, can help us accomplish amazing things.
For Jobs and Apple it’s about the removing of features that allows a product to be amazing. And sometimes it takes more time to develop a simple product than a complex one.
Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Think about that… it takes much more time to distill something down into a simpler form. But once it’s in that simpler form it’s much more powerful.
So too are our lives. We can accomplish a great deal more once we’ve managed to simplify things. When you don’t have things pulling you 50 different ways, you’re able to focus better and work towards your dreams with much more intensity.
