Power of Less
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What Matters Most Leo Babauta had a job where he worked long hours. Stressed out, he wasn’t spending enough time with his wife and six kids. He was unhealthy, smoking, eating junk food, overweight and sedentary.
Unmotivated and stuck in a rut, Leo transformed his life.
Today, Babauta’s life is very different. Happier, he embraces simplicity. He is self-employed, working at home and accomplishing more even by working less. He is healthier, losing 40 pounds after quitting smoking. Spending more time with his family, he now does the things he enjoys.
Leo’s transformation didn’t occur through a miraculous epiphany. It occurred through good old-fashioned trial and error. He explains, “It wasn’t overnight, and it wasn’t like, ‘I know how to do everything and let’s start doing it one at a time.’ It was failure that actually helped me learn and grow and improve. While I’m still going through trial and error, I’ve learned some principles that have helped me to do any kind of change that I want to do.
“This feeling of success, I just wanted to carry it on to other things. And so, I started running. I started waking up earlier. I started eating healthier. I’ve since become a vegetarian. I started doing things in my work life where I was more productive and organized. I simplified my life, started getting out of debt. I started using the same principles and just built upon my success one after the other.”
Babauta footnotes Bill Gates, “…he calls it a ’spiral of success.’ You have one success, you build upon that, and leverage it to get another success. I did the same thing in my life. Every time I had a victory. I used that feeling of positive success and I used that to carry me on and motivate me to make another change. Today, I’m still doing that same spiral of success.”
Leo blogs at ZenHabits.net where he encourages readers to celebrate their failures because there’s no learning or growth without failure. He believes if you do something without any mistakes, and you do it perfectly, that would be something you had already perfected and you wouldn’t be learning anything new. When you do something and you fail, this is an opportunity to learn and grow.
According to Leo, failure is not an obstacle, it’s a positive experience. “Take that failure and say, ‘What can I do better? How can I stop myself from failing with this same situation next time?’ Each of [my] failures was a stepping stone to my success.”
What Babauta recommends is that you look at change as an experiment, watching what works and what doesn’t work. You try out a solution and watch for results. Be open to changes and realize that the way you’re working isn’t necessarily the best way. In his own life, he constantly experiments and changes the way he works.
Power of Less
Leo is the author of The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential in Business and in Lfe. He recognizes that at home and work we are constantly dealing with technology. For many of us, our life is based around email, electronic communications, browsing the weband using web applications. He believes technology is overwhelming us.
“What happens is that it takes over your life, and technology becomes something that fills up your life and often controls us rather than us controlling it.” The Power of Less is about how to limit the intrusion of technology into our lives so you can still make the most of it, but make room for what’s important, decluttering your life so you can focus on the essentials.
What stops us from approaching life in a simple and essential fashion is a global culture bent on multi-tasking, striving to do everything, get everything done and buy everything. “We live in a culture of more. The things I’m doing might seem like common sense but they’re actually counter-intuitive when it comes to our culture.
“When you say, ‘I’m going to do less, to focus on the important things, what matters most.’ Then, you have to say, ‘No’ to people.”
Leo points out that if you look at time management books from fifty years ago, they suggest doing one thing at a time. If you look at Zen Buddhism, which is a couple thousand years old, they also say to do one thing at a time. Single-tasking is old advice but it’s completely against our culture. We’re stuck in it and it’s hard to break away.
“That’s why I teach people to create new habits because making changes like this is not something you can just, with a snap of your fingers, turn on and turn off. You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to go from working like this like I have for years, multi-tasking and doing everything, to single-tasking and limiting what I do to just the essential.’ You can’t just do that, you have to create new habits.”
Unlearning What We’ve Learned
We are unlearning what we’ve learned in order to put in their place the common sense principles that Babauta has put to use changing his life.
Leo elaborates, “It goes against the society that we’re in right now. A lot of times, it’s difficult for people because they don’t live in a vacuum where they’re by themselves and they can make these changes. Again, you have to make people around you understand. It’s hard to go against the culture like that.”
He certainly isn’t perfect but Leo is getting better at telling people ‘No.’ He says, “..it’s an ongoing practice so I’m continually reminding myself, ‘Okay, wait a minute, you’re saying ‘Yes’ to too many things. It’s a skill and it’s something you have to get good at. It’s uncomfortable for a lot of people.
“What we normally do is say, ‘Yes’ to most things and then what happens is we don’t have time for all of it. And so, when you say ‘Yes’ to too many things, you are shortchanging other people because you’re committing to too much and you’re not able to fully focus on whatever it is that you’re committing to. At the same time you’re shortchanging yourself. You’re allowing other peoples’ requests to fill up your life so you’re no longer living the life you want to live.
“It’s a matter of learning how to say ‘No’ and get comfortable with that.”
Motivation to change a habit often occurs by being passionate. “It’s a matter of wanting to do it and keeping your eyes open for things that you’re passionate about. Once you start looking, you’ll find it eventually but you have to start to search.
“Do something new. Break out of your routine. Find a way to be passionate about it. I think you owe it to yourself to give it a try and try to find that passion.”
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