Transitions and Sage advice from one far younger than I
Almost all of us are go through transitions or experience changes of one kind or another throughout our lives. Life will change whether we plan it or not and no matter if it is major or minor there is one thing that all changes have in common; there are days when we cannot seem to see the daylight at the end of the tunnel. Recently it was just such a day for me when I received an email from an amazing guy about his even more amazing adventure!
A LITTLE BACKGROUND ON JOHN
John Reese is a well known young marketing genius and an expert in internet traffic generation. After years of struggling to become a success and a large amount of accumulated debt he made quite an impact on the internet marketing community when he made over a million dollars in a single day! I know…it got my attention too and I had been a subscriber to his list for quite some time until last summer when he announced that he had made a drastic decision:
JOHN’S MINIMALIST ADVENTURE
He abruptly announced he had decided to get rid of all his ‘stuff’ with the exception of his laptop and a few days worth of clothes and travel indefinitely. Now that’s a TRANSITION! The email also spoke of how he had been reading about minimalism and how eliminating all distractions and ‘things’ could really free up your mind and unlock creativity to its maximum potential.
And I said…Wow!
Now I don’t know Mr. Reese personally but I have admired his work and certainly appreciated his story of how he struggled for a long time to make a success online. Through tenacity and never allowing discouragement to damper his quest he ultimately achieved his dream. When I received his email last summer I was very intrigued because although I was not contemplating anything quite so drastic I also had been reading and thinking a lot about what I now call my ‘fresh start transformation.’ As the months passed I forgot about John’s email so imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to receive another email with a long awaited update; given the fact Mr. Reese is not yet ‘of a certain age’ I was even further surprised at some of the thoughts he shared about his “minimalism” experiment.
HIS PLAN
In summary his plan was to travel the world and run his business from his laptop for at least a year but that did not happen. (Not all bad, life and our goals are usually a work in progress) After 3 months he grew tired, lonely and a little road weary so he adjusted his plan, returned to the USA and rented a ‘home base’ to allow a more leisurely pace for his continued minimalist adventure. He shared a lot about what he had learned about himself and life so far but what follows are a few excerpts from the email that struck a chord in me despite the difference in our age and path.
“Ultimately, I have learned a lot about myself, about being an entrepreneur, and about tapping into my own creativity from this experiment. Let me share some of those insights…
AS LIFE GOES ON, OVERWHELM INCREASES
I found that the older I got, as more time passed, the more life itself became overwhelming. I accumulated more stuff, more relationships, more memories, and often more obligations.”
He spoke of how we tend to be mental and actual pack rats; almost unconsciously accumulating and collecting. As he says;
“If the brain is like a computer, it only has so much RAM capacity. The more memories we accumulate and the more things we surround ourselves with that have to be managed, the less RAM is free to use for thinking. Sad but true. No wonder most people are going through life completely stressed out. There’s just TOO MUCH CRAP GOING ON in your life to give you a chance to relax your mind.
I, obviously, went to extremes with my Minimalism Challenge to myself. But I wanted to (and probably needed to) so I could really feel the difference and see what that was. And let me tell you, it’s AMAZING.
Do you know why so many of us think of CHILDHOOD as the best time in our lives? It’s because that’s the time when we had very little to WORRY about or STRESS over. We used our minds creatively and were only focused on a very small number of things:
- - What can I do to entertain myself today?
- - I wonder if he/she likes me.
- - I’m really enjoying learning this new stuff in my class.
- - I don’t feel like doing this homework.
- - Gee, I’m hungry, what’s to eat?
Okay, that was obviously over-simplified, but the point is, back then we had very little to truly stress about (at least most of the time) and our minds weren’t CLOGGED managing all sorts of material stuff we owned or worried about tons of obligations we had to manage.
Yet as adults we can have just as much fun as we had when we were kids. In fact, we can participate in certain activities (if we choose to) that we couldn’t as kids. So it’s definitely not about that that makes the difference.
More than anything it’s about TIME and having the freedom to enjoy ourselves more — and that comes down to many things like how we produce our incomes to live off of but also how we manage the rest of our time as well.
Of course, making more money will provide more freedom for you, but I truly believe you can gain a lot more freedom by FREEING UP YOUR LIFE from a lot of unnecessary things, and that’s one key point of this email.”
John shared how he felt his experiment had positively affected his outlook on business but at this point in my life I was more interested in his thoughts on how this experiment had changed his feelings on life. Interestingly the two seemed surprisingly intertwined which he summed up this way:
“YOUR SUCCESS (AND HAPPINESS) LIES WITHIN REDUCING YOUR LIFE, NOT ADDING TO IT”
“In summary, the key point I want to get across is that LESS IS MORE. Yes, that seems like an overused statement but it’s true.
If you minimize your life, you will maximize your Freedom Of Thought (as I like to call it), which will reduce your stress, and allow you to focus only on the most important things in your life – whether that’s your family, your business, or any other interest you have.
YOU are the architect of your life. If you want to ADD more of one area of your life then it’s 99.9% certain that you must TAKE AWAY from somewhere else. You must REDUCE something else in order to add more of what you want more of. It’s a simple and true equation.
Time is limited and so is our Mental Capacity. You have to learn to manage BOTH.
I challenge you to take some time to really write out where you spend all of your time, the things in your life that stress you out and overwhelm you, what consumes much of your thoughts, and see if you can’t REDUCE things from here and there or find ways to manage them better.
If you want MORE of anything in your life, it all starts with LESS of the other stuff.”
Sage advice from one so young! Having just reduced a lifetime of physical belongings by about 90% I could certainly relate to this. As it turns out that was the easy part but while considering the mental ‘stuff’ it occurred to me this is proving to be a bit harder to reduce. Family, pets, habits and patterns of thought, fear of the unknown and well meaning advice from those who do and do not care about you can be very difficult to sort out when you are making any kind of change in your life let alone a major one.
This very well may relate to being an entrepreneur but I think John may have discovered an even more valuable pearl of wisdom about life! I hope you find this as thought provoking as I have. Thanks John, I hope you don’t mind my sharing your valuable food for thought.
So how are you managing your time? Click this link, take this thought provoking quiz and find out! Were you as surprised as I was? I’d love to hear…
Deborah Hayes, CTA Life Coach
Empowering women to live a life of consequence, a life without regrets that is your own unique version of the life you love. About Deborah
deborah@womenintransitiononline.com
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