Episode 227: Minimalism but Make it Maximal

 

You’re listening to episode number 227 Minimalism but Make it Maximal. I know it’s a cute title. I can’t take credit for it. I did an Instagram poll last week, curious about what types of topics around minimalism people may be interested in.

This was one of the many great answers. I thought I should dive right into this because it seems so paradoxical that these two things, living a life that’s minimal and maximal are like opposites and they can’t coexist. In this episode, I want to share with you why I see minimalism as the road to maximal benefit, joy, and satisfaction in my life.

Segment: Life Lately

Speaking at NAPO

One of my favorite things that happened recently, last week, I was invited to speak on a panel on minimalism for a professional development day. The group that I was speaking to be the Association of Organizing Professionals of New England, the New England chapter. This was their (I don’t know if annual or biannual) professional development day, and I attended for the whole day.

It was fun. There was a great class about marketing. There was a fun workshop about how to better provide services, organizing services for neurodivergent people with ADHD or on the autism spectrum. It was interesting.

The final conversation of the day was this panel on the benefits of minimalism. For a group of organizers who are in people’s homes, trying to help them with systems and decluttering and organizing, this is a topic that probably comes up from time to time. People may be nervous about their organizer wanting to make them minimal. When they don’t feel that way, they may not know what it exactly means or where to start, or maybe it sounds like something that they would be attracted to this idea of living with less, and yet they just don’t have the tools or perceived skillset or confidence to get started.

It was a fun conversation and reminded me of all the benefits and beauty of living a life on purpose. I have been on my own personal minimalism pathway since about 2013, so about 10 years now, starting with lots of different experiments, like my minimal meal plan that has been fantastic for years.

Decluttering. And then of course, moving, downsizing, renovating, readjusting, resizing. Right sizing. I’ve taught half a dozen group workshops over the last four years on the idea of decluttering and minimalizing and aligning better, aligning your actual decisions with your values, and that’s what minimalism feels like to me.

This conversation, this panel, gave me an opportunity to bring it all to the forefront again, I think. The choices that we make regarding what we buy, how we choose to bring things into our home, what matters most to us have become what we do, like our mode of operation. And I sometimes forget that many of the ways that I think about bringing things into my life are different than the public or then the more pervasive consumer capital mindset that is out there just in the air that we breathe.

Because I decided to pause my decluttered program for this semester of school, I normally would have hosted group in January and would be still in the middle… I guess we’d be finishing up about now. I have been a little bit further removed from teaching about practical minimalism than I normally am.

All that to say it was a really great opportunity to reacquaint myself with the values that feel so inherent to me and to remember that there’s such benefit in the continual practice and keeping these things front of mind and sharing them. So, I’m excited to share more about minimalism, but make it maximal today.

Time to Sow Winter Garden Seeds

A couple other quick life lately, things one., it’s the end of February. I maybe am a little bit late on the uptake, but I’m going to plant my seeds for my garden. I’ve decided that I’m going to try to winter sow even though I’m a little bit late. The year that I was successful with winter sewing, I planted seeds outside in about mid-January, so I’m about a month later than that.

Hopefully it’ll still go well. The idea with winter sewing is that you can plant your seeds into containers and leave them outside. If they’re taped up and they’re translucent so that the sun can get in, you only water them the first time. Like the soil is moist when you start, and then they stay as like a mini greenhouse, and you leave them outside with the sun and the rain.

The year that I did it, it snowed, and they are hardy. It’s like a more natural environment. The idea is that these plants have a little bit more strength in their roots because their initial stages outside with the fluctuations in weather, so hopefully it goes well again. I was delighted a couple years ago when I was able to winter sow my seeds and it went well.

Last year I didn’t because we moved, and I just wasn’t quite set up yet. I didn’t have garden beds built until the end of March. This year, now that the garden’s like pretty much ready to go, the garden raised beds are set up, my drip watering system is all installed that I finished that the end of last year. I’m ready to plant some seeds and see what grows. Those things are my update on life lately.

Minimal but Maximal

I just must give full credit for this idea, this podcast topic and title to my friend Cara, who lives in Austin, Texas. She was my neighbor for years, one of my best friends, and I laughed out loud when I saw her response to my question on Instagram.

What minimalism topics are you interested hearing more about? Cara responded, “minimalism, but make it maximal.”

I wonder how many of you feel that way? Minimalism feels like a big, scary, unfortunate thing that you’re not very interested in because you like your things, you like your collections, you like beautiful clothes. You’re interested in filling your home to cozy and layering things together to feel like you’re surrounded by what you love? I am with you. I feel the same way. The most interesting part of becoming practically minimal for me is how when I whittle down to what I truly love and desire to spend my time and energy surrounded by and working with, I have never felt like my life has been more maximized.

How does Minimalism LOOK?

So as a starting point, it’s interesting. We got a question on this panel that I was telling you about that I spoke on last week. The question was, what is it about your house or where you live that would feel different to someone if they came in knowing that you’re a minimalist? If someone who didn’t know you came into your house, what would they notice?

That’s different. And I thought, huh, I am so curious. What the answer might be because my house doesn’t look minimal. In fact, especially in this new house, the way that I’m choosing to design and decorate it, it feels maximal. There’s a lot of color, there’s a lot of patterns. There are some fun vignettes of beautiful things. There’s art on every single wall.

The house does not feel like a stark empty concrete box like you may have in mind when you think of minimalism or even like a super chic Brooklyn studio apartment, or a Scandinavian home with big windows and natural light and light wood furniture and the occasional potted plant.

My home feels a little bit like an old British cottage inside right now. With colorful wallpaper and colorful trim and interesting tile and different types of rugs and vintage furniture. Wood stacked near the wood burning fireplace and art hanging on the walls. Especially when my kids are home, there’s usually socks, and coats and backpacks flung through the main floor.

Bowls of snacks and trays of cookies on the table and on the island in the kitchen. Usually there is one or three or five candles lit for ambiance, coziness, and that gentle scent floating through the air. Of course, we are not even minimal right now in terms of creatures living on our home. We have three children, two adults, two dogs, two cats, and a coop full of chickens in the backyard. Not to mention the dozens and dozens of backyard local birds that come visit my bird feeder.

My front porch is usually cluttered with a combination of roller blades, roller skates, penny boards, skateboards, scooters, and bicycle helmets. The bicycles themselves go around the side in the bike shed. All this to say that my answer to that question on the panel was I’m not sure that someone coming into our home for the first time and not knowing our family would think of us as minimalists.

Probably wouldn’t consider that we had decluttered and downsized for a decade to be at the place that we are now, because exactly as Cara said, our minimalist life is hugely maximal through the choices we make. What I would call practical minimalism.

The way we live minimalism is to maximize our capacity for owning things that we love, that bring us joy, that are useful for the stage and season of life that we are in right now.

Why do people choose Minimalism?

I am always curious when people join my decluttered course, why they join minimalism and decluttering and organizing your space and your belongings usually isn’t something that you come to if you feel content with the way that your life is going.

If you feel a little bit of friction or overwhelm or stress or frustration around the amount of time that you spend cleaning and organizing around the way that you open any cupboard or drawer, and you just don’t really know what’s in there, and it’s hard to find things that you use, maybe you’re feeling a little tight on the financial side and you want to curb some of the mindless shopping and spending that you do, bringing home things that you don’t need or want in the first place.

In other words, people come to the idea of organizing and minimizing their belongings because the way that they’re doing it currently doesn’t feel satisfying, fulfilling, or contented. If it did, then great if you’re feeling good, then I think that it’s great to continue living as you are.

However, when you feel like your values or desires or goals for your lifestyle are not in alignment with your current situation or with the choices that you’re making, the habits that you’ve formed, or even as in our case, the space that we had bought ourselves that was probably twice as big as we needed.

And so, we right sized for our family and the stage of life that we were in that process of allowing ourselves to make decisions in alignment with our current needs. Some might not consider minimalism; they might just consider it choices.

In my book, More Than Enough, I share this definition of practical minimalism. Minimalism is recognizing what matters most to you and your family, and then consciously disregarding the rest.

And then I also share: What defines this type of minimalism is not how many things you can eliminate, but how intentional you are about the things you eliminate and what you choose to keep around.

Minimalism isn’t simply getting rid of things. It isn’t paring everything down or stripping away the joy and beauty and collections in life. In fact, there are some myths around minimalism that I thought I would take a little bit of time to clear up.

Minimalism Myths

1. Minimalism equals deprivation.

That when you are choosing less, that means you’re starving yourself of something that you need or want. That’s not the case. Minimalism is about choosing what you love and elevating those things and then choosing that the things that you don’t love or that don’t matter to you can resume their place outside of your mind, outside of your budget, outside of your conscious, because you don’t need or desire them.

2. There is one standard of minimalism.

Some people think that there’s one right way to do it, and that, of course, is not true. Even the definition of minimalism is vague and determined in part by the individual who’s choosing to embark on this sort of a mindset. Minimalism for me, like I mentioned, is elevating the things that we love and disregarding the rest. For someone else, it may mean something different.

I also like to apply the idea of practical minimalism to all the areas of my life. Not only what I own, like my belongings, but also how I’m spending my time, my schedule, what activities I’m embarking on. Even my thoughts, beliefs, and relationships are things that I evaluate for priority and then align and adjust as needed, as the stages of my life go.

3. Minimalists don’t go shopping.

I admit this is a myth that I perpetuated by embarking on a minimalism challenge where I didn’t buy anything for 12 months. That is out of the ordinary. However, and in the last six years since we completed our year-long shopping pause, I have bought things all the time.

What I buy and why I buy it is different than it was a decade ago, and that feels good. The things that I’m choosing are with intention and purpose and value in mind, and I leave far more things on the shelves than I would have before. In addition to that, I have some personal minimalism guidelines, some practical intentional living guidelines that help me eliminate the unnecessary decisions that are handed to us by living in a consumer driven world.

Every time I get an email with a sale, I don’t ask myself whether I should buy something because it’s less expensive than it was last week. Having my own personal set of guidelines helps me maintain in focus what matters most to me.

4. You can’t be minimalist with a family.

Another myth, and this is probably the question that I got the most often when we started talking about minimalism and sharing about it more, this was that you can’t be minimalist with a family.

When we did our initial minimalism challenge, our kids were so young that they really weren’t impacted a whole lot. I’ve had people ask wasn’t that hard with kids? In truth, it wasn’t very hard with kids because they were five years old and three years old, and there just wasn’t a whole lot of input that they had into the rhythms of our everyday life.

They never wanted for anything. That was part of why it felt so comfortable for us to embark on a No-Buy challenge because we had plenty of toys and clothes and activities, and our house was full of furniture and decorations, and we just had everything that we needed, and it seemed ridiculous to continue to add more.

Now, I will 100% acknowledge that as my kids have gotten older, they have their own priorities. They have their own perspectives, and so I did a reel on Instagram about this time last year that is funny, where I acknowledge that, yeah, I am still very much minimal in my mindset and the way that I operate in the world, and some of my kids are not very minimal, and that’s okay.

I maintain some sort of pragmatic guidelines in our family by allotting a certain amount of space for their different collections, so things don’t just overflow and get out of control. However, I don’t expect that my kids are going to have the same perspective and priorities as I do so when they want to spend their babysitting money on, yet another Lego set, that’s fine by me.

They get to choose what matters to them in their developmental stages and ages as is appropriate. Things that affect the whole family, for example, we most of the time spend our Christmas budget on traveling as a family rather than a lot of physical gifts. My kids have adapted to that as part of our overall family culture, and they like it.

Choosing adventure and experiences over stuff is part of the foundation of our family, and so our kids are used to it in that way, where I understand that it may be a little more challenging with kids who are older to begin an adjustment period. I think that they can adapt though, and I think that when you are looking at minimalism as maximizing your life, as making space for the things that you want to do as a family for the time you want to spend together for the actual physical belongings that you don’t get sick of picking up day after day, that’s when your life feels maximized because of the choices that you’ve been making.

5. Minimalists aren’t sentimental.

Another myth about minimalism is that you can’t be sentimental. that you must not care about things at all if you’re willing to get rid of so much. This I have an interesting perspective on, and every time that I’ve hosted my decluttered workshop, I’ve asked the participants where they keep their sentimental items, those things that they inherited or that they’re saving for their children. Where are they? How are they being honored? And often, the answer is that the sentimental things are in a box in the attic or in the garage.

What I’ve chosen to do and the way that I honor how sentimental I am and those things that I really love, the heirloom type things that I want to elevate, I want those memories of those relationships and people to be top of mind. I choose my very favorites and I put them on display.

For example, I have a painting that my grandfather did in the seventies hanging in my living room. And I have a ring. That was my great grandmother’s. That my mom gave me a couple years ago, and I put it on my finger, and I wear it every single day. Rather than keeping it in the jewelry box for a special occasion, I put it on, and I think of her, and I use it.

I do have small bins for each of my kids that I a lot of the amount of space for the things that I wanted to keep throughout their childhood years, and every time it gets full, I go through and do a little edit and you’ll be surprised how something that feels so meaningful when they’re five years old and they just brought it home from kindergarten starts to seem a little bit less important when they come home from eighth grade and they have a certificate that they want to save, or an amazing paper that they wrote.

The process of editing the things that we keep allows us to truly only keep the things that stand the test of time, and that is what the process is of having a system of decluttering and organizing in your life.

Maintaining at the forefront that what you own is what you love and use, and that once something has outlived that promise that you’re able to let it flow out of your life.

One way that minimalism is so maximal is that it allows you to maximize your choices so that the things that you’re surrounding yourself with, what you honor and elevate in your home and in your schedule, and in your belief system, and in your relationships are the things that bring the most joy, the most benefit, and the most value into your life every day.

The Paradox of Choice

I want to finish up today’s episode by sharing some nuggets of wisdom from the book, the Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

I had the huge honor of being able to listen to Barry Schwartz give a lecture to my program. And was just blown away by his wisdom, his years of research and how well aligned all the things that he’s researched and taught are with the idea of practical minimalism. Again, his book is called The Paradox of Choice, why More Is Less, and I will link it in the show notes.

And I also want to counter that is more. Also, less can be, more minimalisms can be maximal because when you elevate the things that you love the most and create space for them, you feel more satisfied and fulfilled with your everyday life. I want to start by sharing Barry Schwartz idea of how to make good choices.

How to Make Good Choices, from Barry Schwartz:

1. Figure out your goal or goals
2. Evaluate the importance of each goal
3. Identify and array the options
4. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to help you meet your goal
5. Pick the best possible choice
6. Stay aware of the consequences of this choice so that you can evaluate them and modify future choices based on the results

Most of us get caught up on, number one, establish your goals. This, in essence, begins with asking the question, What do I want from my life? From this year? from this week or today?

If we don’t have some clarity around what we want in our lives, it’s hard to pin the tail on that donkey.

So, start there. And if you have an idea of what you want or you’ve had experiences that have informed you what you don’t want, then start trying to evaluate and keep track of those things so that you can come up with some sort of a vision of what it is you’re trying to accomplish here.

What feels meaningful? What do you enjoy? The episode I shared last week about lifting with your strengths includes recommendation for. A strength survey that can help you not know what you want, but maybe know a little bit better what you’re good at and what you’re predisposed toward. When you answer the question what you want, it becomes easier to identify what contributes to you getting it and what doesn’t.

When I was a young mom of three with a newborn baby in a brand new big giant house that we could barely afford, trying to figure out how to move forward, I recognized that what I wanted was time and space and financial freedom and peace.

I had been living somewhat on a hamster wheel of feeling like the happiness and peace and joy and satisfaction in life that I desired was just beyond the next thing, the next accomplishment, the next achievement, the next piece of beautiful furniture to put in my Pinterest worthy home, the next pair of designer shoes or beautiful outfit.

All the things that I wanted were contingent upon the next thing that I didn’t yet have. Coming to understand that everything that I want to feel is available to me right now, because emotions are generated inside my body, was the most profound aha moment understanding or piece of wisdom that I came to because of experimenting with minimalism.

Understanding that what I want isn’t in the stuff or the schedule. That what I want is the feeling that lives inside me when I choose to believe things that aid and support in that vision. I’m not great at it. I’m not perfect at it by any stretch of the imagination, and there is a lot of beauty to surrounding ourselves by things that we want and love.

Even experimenting with that by not buying anything for even a week—In my decluttered course, we do it for six weeks—a shopping pause for six weeks.

But imagine even a week or two of just saying: I’m not going to buy anything. I’m not going to add anything to my shopping cart or to Amazon, or I’m not going to go to Target. I’m just going to exist in my life as it is right now for a little while. Maybe reacquaint me with what exists here. What are the things that are around me all the time? What do I have?

Knowing where we are can help us in determining where we’d like to go.

And sometimes we want to go forward and sometimes, like I found in 2017, we want to go seemingly backward. I wanted a smaller house with less stuff rather than a bigger house with more stuff. Both of those things are progress because they’re heading me in the direction of my own personal goals and aligning my decisions with my own personal values.

Your life is maximized by you minimizing the things that you don’t care about.

Diminishing Marginal Utility

Next, I want to tell you about the law of diminishing marginal utility.

I know that’s a mouthful. This is a law that says that the more you have of something, the less each unit has value. For example, 10 blocks, one 10th of each of those blocks is a lot bigger than 100th of a hundred. And less than 1000th of a thousand blocks. In other words, the more you add, the less each individual unit matters.

Think about that in terms of physical belongings, just because we’re talking about minimalism, which is often, most often associated with things. The more you add into your closet, into your home, into your cupboards, into your pantry, into your kids’ toy bins, the less value each one of those things has.

The law of diminishing marginal utility is an economic and psychological principle, so you may contest it and say, no, I think that even if I have a hundred pairs of shoes, I love them all the same. Like they’re, they all are equally valuable to me. Unfortunately, that’s not the way that your brain works. Having 10 things means that you can love all 10 more than spreading all that value or consciousness or care over a hundred things.

On a graph, this looks like a curved line, that as the line goes up, it also starts to plateau. It’s not like a straight directional line that more is always systemically, equally better. In this case, more is can be a little bit better, and as you add more and more, it starts to even out. And at some point, it becomes what’s called an upside-down U or an inverted U, where the more actually becomes worse. And as you add and add an ad, you get less and less satisfaction out of everything.

One way that minimalism is maximal is that by choosing and elevating the things that matter most and using your consciousness to make choices, rather than feeling like everything matters the same, you can prioritize, elevate, and appreciate things that otherwise would just become part of the background noise of your home and your life.

Add to this something called the hedonic treadmill, which is the natural adaptation that happens when something becomes part of our regular everyday circumstance. Our brain cannot process everything happening at once, and so things that are familiar to us fade into the background and those things that you thought were so important in the target aisle, come home and just become part of the blur of all the other things that you own.

One way to combat that is by changing things fairly frequently. Another way to combat that is to be intentionally conscious about what already exists in your environment. Being aware, taking time to be present in your environment, to pay attention to things, to be continually, intentionally grateful for what already exists.

I share in my book, how during our shopping pause, our yearlong shopping pause, and every shopping pause that I’ve done in the six years since every time I say a conscious no to something that I otherwise want or think would be fun, it feels like a little gratitude practice. By saying, no, I’m acknowledging that I have abundance in my life as it is right now.

Rather than saying no out of deprivation or scarcity, I’m saying no because what I have is enough. Is more than enough because my closet is already full because my bookshelf is overflowing. Because as beautiful as that cake plate is, I have five at home that are equally as beautiful that I’ve just forgotten how much I cared about them when I first brought them into my home.

So, there are two ways to sort of battle and buffer against this hedonic adaptation. One is to continually be changing things, and that’s what GK Chesterton might call having enough by desiring more and more.

His whole quote is: “There are two ways to have enough. One is to acquire more and more, and the other is to desire less.”

One way to battle this feeling of enoughness is to continually change and go through things and continually buy things and stretch for the next coolest, shiniest, beautiful thing. And the other is to desire less, not out of scarcity, but out of gratitude, and to live in continual acknowledgement and awareness and celebration of the gifts and beauty and belongings that surround us right now.

Endowment Effect

One challenge that we might all face in this process is something called the Endowment Effect. The Endowment Effect says that once you own something, getting rid of it feels like a loss. Even if you don’t really like it that much or you didn’t choose it, someone gives you a gift, for example, that you don’t think you’re ever really going to use, but now that you have it, giving it away or donating, it may feel like a huge loss.

As an example of endowment effect, Barry Schwartz cites a study that was done at Duke University. It concerns some tickets to see the Duke University men’s basketball team play in the national championships, and the tickets were super high demand, and they were expensive. There were people camping out in line for a week to get into the lottery that would determine whether they even got the chance to purchase a ticket.

(Kind of reminds me of the recent Taylor Swift debacle that I did not get tickets to, and I’m still a little bit sad about.) All the lottery winners were random. And so, the researchers presumed that those who won the right to buy tickets and those who didn’t were equally interested in getting tickets.

They asked the losers, people who hadn’t gotten the chance to buy a ticket, how much they would pay for one, and the average answer was $175. So, these are people who don’t have the chance to buy a ticket. They want one. They’d pay $175 for it Now. The lucky winners who did have a chance to buy tickets, which they had bought for less than $175 mind you, they were asked how much they would have to be paid to give up their ticket or how much they would sell their ticket for.

So, $175 if they didn’t have a ticket, the people who did have a ticket said they would sell a ticket for $2,400. For the winners giving up the ticket that they had won the right to purchase was a loss of the endowment. The endowment had inflated the value of this ticket by over 15 times! Equal desire, but when someone already had the ticket, the way that they valued that opportunity was inflated by 15 times.

I’ve experienced this in my own life as I’ve sold things on Facebook marketplace, a chair that I may have had for five years that I feel like is in pretty good condition, and I originally paid $500 for, I might be tempted to list for $400.

Someone who could buy a brand-new chair at the store for $500 is probably not going to want my five-year-old used chair for just a 20% discount. In fact, people looking at that would probably think that I’m a little bit out of it, that I think that what I have is worth more than it is. The truth is that I do think the things that I have are worth more than they’re worth because of this phenomenon of endowment effect.

This phenomenon means it is hard for people to get rid of things that they already own, which I consider to be a huge benefit of thinking hard about the decision on the front end or setting yourself up for success by having some intentional purchasing guidelines in place. Because once you buy it, you’re going to think that it’s worth more than it is for a little while.

And then you’re not going to care about it at all or acknowledge it because of your hedonic adaptation for a while. And then when it comes time to declutter that closet where those things have been sitting, even though you haven’t thought about them in two years, when you pull them out, suddenly, you’re going to think that you should sell them rather than donate them because of what you initially paid for them, plus the fact that you already own them.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? You start decluttering and it just sends you into a whirlwind of maybe I want this thing that I haven’t seen for five years because it was stuffed in the back of the cabinet. No, you probably don’t want that thing. It’s just your endowment effect telling you that because you already have it, it’s worth more than you’ve been using it.

So, another way that minimalism can be maximal. Is that it helps you make decisions on the front end about what matters most, and it also helps you keep in mind the perspective of your end goal as you’re getting rid of things that space. In your closet and in your cupboards and in your home and in your schedule is just as valuable as belongings that the peace and satisfaction and contentment that you hope for is not just beyond another trip to target or earning a little bit more and being in a little bit bigger house and renovating.

(This one’s for me.) Renovating everything that you have on your list to finish renovating in your current house. No friends, minimalism is maximal because it helps you maintain the mindset of what matters most to you, and you create space for those things and then you consciously eliminate and disregard anything else.

Minimalism at my house looks maximal. It’s got a lot of color and a lot of art and a lot of animals. And yes, a collection of cake plates. It has fun decorations for the holidays that we choose to celebrate and enough clothes for everyone to feel comfortable in what they wear every day. What it doesn’t have is pretty much anything extra that doesn’t fit inside the bounds of what we’re currently using, loving, that’s adding value to our lives in this season.

Right now, we think intentionally about the things that we allow into our home, and we’re loose about what we let go of. Recognizing that if it doesn’t add value right now, that just because we own it doesn’t mean we have to keep it.

I’m curious what a maximal minimalism would look like in your life. How can you be thoughtful about elevating and celebrating the things that you love most about your home and your life and your schedule and your relationships, and consciously, intentionally eliminate the unnecessary, uninteresting, or unimportant?

How can you live better by living with less?

That is the question. I want to leave with you this week, my friends.