“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Leonardo da Vinci

“Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify.”
Henry Thoreau

One of the most important things I have done to improve my life over the last year or two is to focus on letting go of many things and to simplify.

Doing this of course nothing new, these concepts have probably been with us for many, many thousands of years. So today I’d like to share a few of my own favourite thoughts about simplifying your life from the last 2500 years.

1. Focus on what is most important for you. Let go of the rest.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
Hans Hofmann

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”
Lin Yutang

“The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed – it is a process of elimination.”
Elbert Hubbard

There are many things you can let go of. Both on the inside and the outside. I have for example let go of some busy work on the outside. I have greatly decreased the number of times I check email etc. each day and I have learned to use very short to-do lists with only 2-3 of the most important items instead of a dozen items or more.

On the inside I do my best to let go of trivial and petty stuff. I let go of negative stuff. I let go of trying to control the results of my actions. I let go of information and old self-images that don’t serve me anymore. I always remember – or remind myself via the white board on my wall – to keep things extremely simple.

You can read quite a bit more about letting go in the last chapter of my free ebook, The 7 Timeless Habits of Happiness. But I’ll mention a small and effective tip for letting go right here. First accept that you are for example stuck in focusing on something trivial. Then let it go. Don’t try to just reject what you are thinking or feeling because that will only make it harder to let it go.

By doing all this elimination on the inside and outside there is more room, time and energy for me to use for the most important things. And that makes life so much more interesting and fun.

2. Express yourself in a simple way.

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
Ernest Hemingway

One of the trickier things about social skills is to get your message across. One reason why people have difficulty with this is because they use more words than needed.

Now, sometimes that can be a good and enjoyable thing. Sometimes it’s just a way to feed your own ego and keep the spotlight on yourself for as long as possible. A lot of the time I think it can be useful to simplify and try to use fewer words.

Why? Well, it makes your message clearer and makes it more powerful emotionally because it’s focused. Keeping it shorter and more focused also makes it less likely that people will simply become bored with what you are saying.

So, how do you keep your word count down?
Be aware and alert. Just being aware of your problem can help you to stop the talking before it becomes excessive rambling.
Focus outward. Babbling on too much is also, at least in my opinion, something that often comes from being too focused inward and on yourself in a conversation. If you instead focus more outward you’ll be less self-conscious. This reduces nervous and slightly nonsensical babbling. And if you focus more outward, on the people you are talking to and less on your own glorious voice and golden words you’ll be more aware of what you are saying and how the conversation is going. If you focus on the other people you’ll be more focused on getting through and more attentive to the reactions you bring out.

3. A simpler life is one way to a happier life.

“Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.”
Edwin Way Teale

Society is to a large degree built on getting more.

To a degree this can be useful. But it may not be the thing that will solve all your problems.

You may not find your answer or happiness in more. It may just alter your troubles and problems. And/or give you more of them. What is already there inside of you perhaps gets highlighted and magnified when you get more. Instead of getting whatever you want when finally making all that money your wanted you may find that greed, jealousy and selfishness within you and in your world increases.

You may have thought that when you finally arrived at that place your problems would just disappear. But the ego wants more and is never satisfied.

So trying to fill your life and yourself up with more – money, stuff, power, smartness, prettiness, a feeling of being more enlightened than others – and then finally becoming happy may become like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

By simplifying and letting of a craving for more you can make your life happier and easier.

4. Get a life to create a simpler life.

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Confucius

“Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.”
Katherine F. Gerould

Why do people make life more complicated than it is? Well, one answer may be old habits that you need to let go of and replace.

Another answer is that your life isn’t really that exciting. So you add drama and complications to make it more interesting and stimulating. That’s at least what I used to do in the past.

But instead of doing that you can take the more difficult path and actually get a life.

If you find yourself sitting around too much and not having enough to do then it’s very easy to get stuck in thought loops and go into a downward spiral. Simply by filling your life with more fun activities and people you become a lot more relaxed and have little time or patience for complications or drama from yourself or others.

So spend less time analyzing life and more time living and exploring it in whatever way you’d like. By doing so you are also often confronted with having to expand your comfort zones and perhaps face a fear. This leads to better self confidence and less fretting about if you can handle things that may come up.

Positivity Blog

See Things as They Are—Then Change Them

Don’t read this post while eating.

In college I spent part of a summer at John Denver’s Windstar program in Colorado. We ate macrobiotic food, slept in teepees, practiced Aikido, and were treated to lectures by Buckminster Fuller — inside the teepees. Windstar had a pithy water-conservation saying for the toilets: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” Which is certainly one way of handling it.

I was recently in Amsterdam, and the Dutch have a more ingenious way of handling “it.” Instead of one flush lever, there are two — one large and one small — for two different volumes of water, depending on what the job calls for. When I figured out why there were two levers, I had one of those confusingly satisfying “Why didn’t someone think of that before?” moments.

A few of my other favorites: 
Countdown clocks on pedestrian “walk” signs. How stupid was it for us all to bet our lives on when the sign was going to change?
The 60-mile long Breast Cancer 3-Day walks. Why were charity walkathons always 10 kilometers long? Who made up that rule? Why not create a really long walk and ask for larger donations?
The escalators in London that only turn on only when they detect someone entering, instead of running constantly, even when empty. Genius!
Kiva. Why not ask people to loan money instead of donate it? Who says that the donation has to be the only financial instrument for the expression of compassion?
Wheels on suitcases. For decades we struggled through airports, sweating and exhausted, lugging our luggage around (that’s why it’s called luggage) before it dawned on anyone that we could put wheels on the suitcases.

What each of these innovations has in common is that none of them required a new technology. Just add a second valve to the toilet, a sensor to the escalator, some numbers to the digital pedestrian display that’s already there, a some distance to a walkathon. Add the oldest tool in the universe to the suitcases.

This is the power of asking why. Why does this thing work this way? Why not turn it upside down? Why not put it in water?

It’s not as easy as it sounds. To ask “why” is to ponder the is-ness of something, and to do that one has to be fully present in the moment. But human beings are addicted to living in the past or in the future or in our anxiety — anywhere other than the here and now. Business leaders are the worst offenders. Rarely are we truly present, seeing things for what they are and what they are not.

We don’t notice the escalator running nonstop because we’re too busy worrying about whether we’ll make our flight. We don’t realize we’re betting out lives in the crosswalk because we’re mentally rehashing the meeting we just came from. More often than not we see life through a barely translucent movie screen in our minds that is running nine shows at once. These inputs deafen and blind us to reality. It is a testament to our capacity for unconsciousness that we hefted luggage around airports for decades before anyone thought to put wheels on the suitcases. We literally couldn’t see that they didn’t have them.

You have to ponder the reality of a thing before you can ponder a new vision for that thing. Before it can occur to you that there could be two different flush volumes for a toilet it has to occur to you that there is presently only one. That requires zen-master presence.

It is the power of now, to borrow Eckhart Tolle’s phrase, that gives us access to the power of why. No presence in the moment, no innovation. No now, no new. This is not taught in B-school. In fact, the B-school culture encourages the opposite of it. The hectic pace of our information overload existence makes us think that there’s no time to be present. The truth is, our time is too valuable not to be present. The opportunity cost of worry, anxiety, stress, and incessant activity in terms of unmanifested innovation alone is inestimable.

Presence is a muscle that has to be developed. The more we develop it, the more we will see its rewards, and the more we will be incentivized to exercise it.

If we take the time to be quiet, be still, and be present, we may start to see things we haven’t seen before — things that have been right in front of our eyes. And those are the things that change the world.

Don Pallotta

If I could share only one inspirational quote of wisdom with you – this would be it!