521 | One Day Less

music music every little thing you think that you need every little thing you think that you need every little thing that you're feeding your greed or I bet that you'll be fine without it yes welcome to the Minimalist Podcast we'll be discussing what it means to live a meaningful life with the less my name is Joshua Fields Milburn and joining me here at our beautiful studio and beautiful West Hollywood, California is my good friend T.K. Coleman oh that's a wonderful day to be alive we'll be new year to you T.K. it's our first episode of 2026 we got some of our favorite people in the studio with us today Professor Sean's here he has a monocle on right now and a tweed jacket with a leather elbow patches because how to write better our writing class and I teach together is it's opening for 72 hours we'll talk about that in a bit but that's why he's dressed to the 9s like the professor that he is Savvy D is on the board he's taking notes over there maybe he's just drawing in a notebook I'm not sure what he's doing skateboard is taped to his feet right now and T.K. brand new year any resolution for you this year? oh man to take one day at a time with all things the breaking of old habits the building of new ones the appreciating gratitude the appreciation and gratitude for the relationships we have investing in the things that matter it's all about taking one day at a time yeah you know the episode we put out during the week of Christmas was called Begin Again and it was a re-earing of one of our live events because we took we closed the studio down for Christmas and we had this great event in Orange County and we were talking about beginning again although that event happened in the summer you don't need the new year to begin again to have a resolution it's a great reminder to maybe begin again to take it one day at a time for me I've been thinking a lot about reacting versus responding and especially in a heavily mediated world social media world youtube online content content content it's so easy to react to have an opinion about everything but I love this idea that you talk about sometimes with having an opinion fast and sometimes you can do intermittent opinion fast and that means I don't need to react to what is in front of me right now I could take my time and respond if it requires a response one of our recent fans calls we do this Friday afternoon Minimal Zoom the first Friday of each month and one of the most recent ones someone was asking about best practices in your email inbox and what are some things I can do to sort through this because this barrage is weighing me down it's overloading me I don't know what to do and one of the things that I do is I respond only when an email requires a response and at first that's difficult I'm so used to responding with okay thanks all right then let me take a look whatever it is and most emails don't require a immediate response and many of them don't require a response at all I can express my gratitude next time I see you in person but one of the reasons that were so overwhelmed are the number of reactions and responses that we constantly have and I realize that most of my email responses weren't responses they were reactions I need to send something back immediately and so I'm constantly reacting and the people are reacting to my reaction and it's this cacophony of noise and the first step in quieting that noise is just taking a pause and saying I'm gonna have, I'm gonna fast do an intermittent fast on my opinion on my reaction in this moment and if it requires response later that's fine but this isn't an emergency it reminds me of the rule that we followed when we were servers at restaurants you know you get really busy you feel like you're in the weeds and you got to rush everything but my manager would always say just take the minute to review the order that you typed in and make sure it's good because I know all these other servers are waiting behind you use the computer and you look at the restaurant and everybody's waving their hand for your attention but if you get it wrong here that's gonna cost you 15 to 30 minutes and a couple of free meals elsewhere but if you get it right here over the long haul it's gonna save you so much time so embrace the pause do what Jason Fried calls give it five minutes even when something does warrant a response if you just take a moment and breathe and give a response that is intentional it might save you so much back and forth sometimes I see people in tech six changes and email exchanges and they say well I had to respond but the response is so low quality and so reactive that they end up having a 10-15 minute conversation about something that could have been settled in a 30-second phone call or a 30-second intentional text message so even when you have to respond give it a few minutes respond with intentionality and that can resolve it and often we respond out of emotion I feel overwhelmed so now I'm going to overwhelm you I don't even realize what I'm doing I'm just going on in the background and if I don't take that moment to pause then it continues to escalate and all of a sudden we're having an emotional exchange over something that is perfunctory at best we're coming up on this episode we're talking about consumerism's role and workplace overload what a good time to talk about that TK also what it takes to work fewer hours the hidden reason grocery prices have increased and much much more plus on page three we'll talk about why certain buy one get one free deals have been outlawed buy one get one free outlawed let's start with our callers we have a question or comment for our show we'd love to hear from you to join the program it's 406-219-7839 give us a call or email a voice recording from your phone to podcast at theminilists.com let us know if you're a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message by the way if you're a Patreon your support keeps our podcast 100% advertise but free because sing along at home advertise but suck our first question today is from Autumn hi my name is Autumn I'm from South Carolina and I've been watching you since night grade I'm currently 24 now I wanted to know your thoughts on this consumerism society and how it is we have to work all the time unfortunately I am fine working a very minimal amount because I'm satisfied with this and there's a statement now that we have to work work work so what are your thoughts on that? do we have to work work work work work tk I'm interested in this Sadly you have been listed to the minimalist for a while before I don't think ninth grade, I got into minimalism from the documentary when I was like, I think in tenth grade. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So you and Adam have a lot in common here and lean on some of your insights here too, Savidee, because you talked about how this is like the first job where there's this amount of flexibility that's going on here. And we try to create that. Obviously we need to be here in the studio on days of record or if we have something going on here, but we try to be pretty flexible. I think that's not always the case. Sometimes it can't be. I think about my brother who builds cabinets at a factory. He has to be there when other people are building the cabinets with him. And so they adhere to a particular schedule. And for them, it's not about work more hustle culture. It seems to me that that hustle culture mindset, TK, and you have a lot of experience with this. It's more in the knowledge work, what we used to call white color jobs. There's the mindset, the grind set as they call it. And a lot of people are overwhelmed by it. That's right. Well, I will say too that my father's generation and my grandfather's generation, men who grew up on the farm and worked very hard, not necessarily doing things that they love, but doing work to provide for their families. They would look like the ultimate hustlers to today's generation, including those who advertise hustle culture. They would outwork those guys any day of the week. I think hustle culture has become a kind of disparaging term that we use, you know, to talk about a certain segment of thought leaders and podcasters, many of whom to be fair are misunderstood because everybody that gets lumped under that name, hustle culture is not preaching a philosophy of unhealthy culture. This is something that Gary Vee, for instance, gets attacked with a lot. If you ask Gary Vee, do you think everyone, regardless of what they want to do and how healthy they are and what they can tolerate, needs to be working 60, 70 hours a week, he would not say yes. I've heard him talk about these kinds of things. So I think there's room for a nuanced discussion on hustle culture. I think it's, I think it gets lots of clicks to make oneself an enemy of it in an unqualified way and just lump everybody that's in self-help in it. But anyway, with that being said, there is such a thing as toxic hustle. There is such a thing as being a workaholic and using work to compensate for what you really want, for what you really need, for the time that it might take to be intentional. It's like that old quote that you often say, where forgive me for writing something so long, I did not have the time to make it brief. Sometimes when we don't step back and ask ourselves, what do I really want to say here? What am I really trying to achieve here? We compensate for that by overdoing it, whether it's with talking, making effort, working things along those lines. I think the toxic element of hustle culture is a work version of that. Yeah. I just call it busyness because for me, whenever I say I'm busy, that has been a status symbol for a long time. What do you have to? I've just been so busy, right? But now when I say I'm busy, I say, what am I really saying? My life is out of control. Everyone else's decisions has become my urgency or maybe even my emergency. And then of course, I'm putting out fires of my own, the fires that I started, now I have to put them out. It's what we talked about at the top of the episode with constantly responding. Am I adding to the blaze right now? This weekend I was driving with my wife and we were listening to Donovan Woods. He has a song called Man Made Lake. And there's this great line and he talks about how his boat is taking on water and a man made lake. Woo, it isn't that what we're doing. We're drowning, but we created the lake in which we are drowning in. And whether you call it hustle culture or you call it busyness, you call it distraction, you call it overwhelm, ultimately it's a status symbol. Look at me. Look at who I am. It's all part of my identity. I'm the type of person who has all of this going on in my life. I'm the type of person who wants to be successful and to be successful. I see other people doing these successful things for me in the corporate world. And this is why I identify with Autumn. When I was 24, I'd be the first person in and I'd be the last person gone. Ironically, that's often the case now that I run a small business, right? Because I need to do a lot of the things that other people don't do. But it's me being considerate of the other people that I'm working with. And it's not a mandatory for me. But also I enjoy working. And so it depends on the type of work, right? If it's work I have to do, then it feels almost punitive. If it is work that I get to do, or if it's something that supports the work that I get to do, then it doesn't feel like grinding. In fact, that word, like we associate with other things like grinding my teeth. Right? I'm so tense. I'm so anxious that I'm grinding my teeth. Why would I want to be on the grind? And so yes, whenever I say I'm busy, I recognize I'm using one of those four letter words I don't want to use. And maybe I need to step back and say, okay, this is Henry David Thoreau. He said it's not enough to be busy. I'm paraphrasing, obviously. It's not enough to be busy. The question is, what are you busy about? Because ants are really busy, right? They're super industrious, right? But what are you busy in service of? And maybe I would set that down and say, I don't need to be busy in order to be in service of something that's meaningful to me. That's exactly right. The tricky part of what we're dealing with today, when we analyze the effects of consumerism on our approach to work, is that there are so many social constructs around what we need to live a life. And previous generations have proven that it's possible to create a happy life without many of these social constructs. But you can't solve the problem simply by saying, well, that's a social construct. You can just opt out of it because social constructs are realities to be contended with. They are at a second order of reality compared to like a tree or the air that we breathe, but they are realities, even if only social realities. And you can't just pull one thread without making other things move. And so we can say, well, hey, you don't need a cell phone today. You can opt out, okay? You can, but communicating with your friends, getting to work, paying for parking, all of those things are going to be a lot more difficult. And you're going to have to get creative in about 10 to 15 other areas of your life that you used to didn't have to think about. That is possible. But how much time do you have? How confident are you in your ability to make those adjustments? And so we can say things like, well, I don't need a car. I can just do the bike thing while I don't need a cell phone while I don't need those luxury goods, but life isn't that simple. There are things that we don't need biologically, but we're hooked into a system. And many of these systems are propped up by very powerful forces that incentivize to stay in the machine. And so it's a really difficult thing to sort out. And it's possible to unhook from the system, to get out of the machine, as you're saying. But often the costs are pretty high. You know, Derek Sivers, he wrote, you know, that great book, Hell Yeah, or no, he's written a bunch of things that I really enjoy. But he and his son moved into a cabin in the middle of nowhere. And there's no cell phone reception. There's no internet. And he's opted out of the system. But the cost of that, you have to be willing to pay. And sometimes you might withdraw yourself from society for a while and whatever respect you're withdrawing, whether it's from work or email or social media. And you say, okay, but now I'd like to go back and use that thing intentionally. What we left social media for a year and the question is, can we go back and use that intentionally? And same with Ryan and I moved to a cabin in the middle of Montana for, you know, back in 2012 to write a book. It wasn't the intention for us to go live there forever. I was open to that. But what do I miss about the quote unquote, real world? Because you're right. Ultimately, a lot of these things are constructs. Even when you talk about the tree or the air, those are constructs as well. What constitutes a tree even, right? It's a collection of branches and a trunk and leaves. Okay, well, are those individual parts also? And so everything is a construct. It doesn't mean that it's less real, especially to the observer who's overwhelmed by these constructs. And so to address the question specifically that Autumn is asking, she's basically asking, how is consumerism forced us to work more hours? And what can we do about it? For me, consumerism is an ideology that externalities will complete you. Usually that's through our acquisition of material things. And the way that manifested in my own life and the corporate days was I want all of the trophies that symbolize success. I want to prove to other people that I'm worthy, that I'm valid. You know, when you go to valet parking and they get a valedate your ticket for you and then you're validated, I kind of wanted that. I wanted the Lexus or the Big House or the manicured lawn or the walk and closet or the designer belt. So the people would validate me. What did I really want? I want people to see me to know I'm worthy of their love. Okay, well then I can bypass. It's not a shortcut. Actually, you learn that consumerism is the long route to the thing you really want. Because you could buy all the things and now people what like you, maybe, or maybe they just like your things. They like the idea of you. They like the construct that you have put together, the identity that you have formed. They like your ego in a way, the false self, not the arrogant self, but they like your identity that you've created that you've built and you've adorned it with all of these things. And so what can we do to opt out of that? For me, TK, it seems that we realize what we really want when we want those things. Because it's true. Consumers have kept me tethered to a lifestyle where I was working 80 hours a week, many weeks. I worked 362 days a year. And no, I wasn't doing the farm labor that you were mentioning earlier, but it was a lot of work. It was early mornings and late nights. It was managing large groups of people and lots of meetings and spreadsheets and interacting with customers and getting yelled at and having cell phones thrown at me. It was intense. It was a lot. And it was non-stop. And in fact, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. It just kept going and going and going. And eventually I get to a point where I'm like, when is this ever going to end? When's it going to ease up? Maybe it's when I get the next promotion. I've already had several promotions and every promotion, the work doesn't get easier. It becomes more challenging and there's more demand on what I'm supposed to be doing here. The expectations increase as your salary increases, as your status increases. And so in a way, I was tethered to everyone else's expectations. And so I did have to opt out of that system in somewhere, at least put a plan together to stopping tethered to that lifestyle, which for me meant paying off debt so that I was financially free. That took me about four years of really difficult work paying down hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. But then it also meant that I was no longer relying on my self-image to be propped up by the trophies and the accoutrement of yesterday. Yeah. I like to think of consumerism as a drug because I think it highlights two very important things. Number one, consumerism, like drugs, have the power to drive our behavior in ways that are unnatural. It has the power to make us do things that we, in a sober mindset, would not even want to do or ever think to do. But the second thing is it illustrates the relationship that we have to the will. If you present to me a hard drug, like a scheduled one drug, I've never taken it before, I have a choice. I can say no. And it's pretty cut and dry. And this is the peak of my willpower. But if I say yes, even just this one time, my will begins to diminish. And it may very well be the case that after I say yes one or two times, I no longer have the capacity to say no at the same level I had before I never engaged a drug. Now my willpower has been surrendered to this. Now my nature has been distorted in a way or damaged in a way to where if I want to say no in the future, I'm going to need to think creatively, I'm going to need to think as a community, I'm going to need to approach this differently. And I think that's how we should approach consumerism. It's not as simple for us anymore to just say, hey, I'm going to opt out of the consumerist of games. Oh no, we're all hooked into this system in various ways. Even if we didn't know any better, we've all made so many choices that have gotten us addicted to and attached to so many things. And how do you deal with that? You abandon all or nothing thinking. You don't pressure yourself to say, I'm going to go completely off the grid and never do anything. It's sort of like this Instagram reel where this guy sits down and eat a bowl of noodles and a voice says, hey, that plastic fork, it has these toxins in it. And he puts it down and he gets a regular like silver fork and it says, hey, you put that in the dishwasher and it had all these toxins in it. And he's like, oh, and he puts that down. And then he tries to eat with his hands and the voice says, hey, you didn't wash your hands. And he goes to wash his hands, put some soap on there and the voice says, hey, that soap has these toxins in it. And so he picks up a towel to dry his hands. He says, hey, that towel has all this toxic logic detergent on it. And he's like, what the heck? And so he just looks at the bowl and he just pours the noodles into his mouth. And then it says, hey, those noodles have arsenic in them. The realists over. But the guy can't do anything because everything's toxic. So what do you do when you find yourself in that situation? You try to find one small little way in which you can unplug from the unintentional autopilot way of doing things. What's one area of my life where I can introduce a small dose of intentionality so that I can begin to unplug bit by bit such that even if on the day I die, I'm still hooked into this system in 45 different ways, I've taken that number down from 48. I've taken that number down from 88. Whatever it may be, you want to just reduce the number of ways in which you are hooked into systems that are not soliciting your participation cautiously. I think that's spot on. And what I do there is try to detangle consumption from consumerism. We all need to consume some things. It doesn't make me a better person because of the car that I own or the clothes that I wear. And the same is true with the work that we do. I'm not better because my job title improved. It doesn't improve me as a human being. That's one of the great lies of the corporate world is your status equals who you are, your net worth equals your personal worth. Back to the toxic thinking. I think there's an 80 20 rule with that as well. And you illustrated it perfectly with that video is ultimately the noodles were poisonous. I mean, there's arsenic in the noodles. And so even if you change all of the other things around the edges, you're still eating the arsenic. And so the question is, what's the arsenic part of the hustle culture that you're embedded in right now in addressing that? And then recognizing that you can do the small things around the edges, but there's 20% of the thing that's leading to 80% of the discontent in your workplace. What is that? And if you address that, everything else sort of becomes a side dish to that, that main meal that they were completely swapping out. And I'd love to send you a copy of everything that remains. That's Ryan Nicodemus's and my story. It's that five year transition period of leaving the corporate world, simplifying our lives, walking away, no longer being tethered to that lifestyle and no longer being tethered to all of the bills and consumerism as a result. One of the beautiful benefits about simplifying my life is I stopped spending as much money, but strangely, I became more financially free because I was no longer dependent on those outside things to make me me. And that book is really about the first line is our identities are shaped by the costumes we wear. This costume we wear every day is like, what am I wearing into work? And that could be if you are, you know, if you're in sales and you have to wear a suit grave or if you work at a restaurant and you're wearing the apron, maybe that's your uniform, those are fine as uniforms, but as soon as they become my identity, I'm a yoga instructor. Therefore, I'm the type of person who has to dress like a yoga instructor. I have to wear these types of beads. Nothing wrong with the accessories. The problem is when that is me and I am not me without them. So that's what everything that remains is about. If you want the book book or the ebook, we'll send those to you or the audiobook version as well. TK before we get back to our colors and we got some good ones here. It is time for the lightning round where we answer the Patreon community chats question of the week. And this will re attempt to answer questions with a short shareable minimal maximum. You could find this episode's maximums in the show notes at theminimostest.com slash podcast and every minimal maximum ever at minimal maxims.com. We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox, including seven new maximums, a bunch of new maximums every Monday for free. If you sign up for our email newsletter at theminimostest.email, whenever you spam or junk or advertisements, we'll start your week off with a dose of simplicity. All right, the question of the week this week. This is a good one to pair with Autumn's question. What would it take for you to work one less day per week? What would it take for you to work one less day per week? Now before we get to our pithy answers, TK, and you have a couple really good ones here. Let's see what some of our listeners had to say. Alexa says, for me to work one less day per week, it would take an actual livable wage, not to mention the cost of living to stop drastically increasing every month. Now TK, I think you have your doctorate in economics. Street economics. I always think of TK as our resident economist. He always like, stop, stop, stop saying that about me. But to me, you are so wise when it comes to economics. I appreciate the fact that it never feels stuffy. It feels real world and practical. And you go talk to real schools with real people. You can talk to kids about economics in a way that doesn't seem like I'm opening up an economics textbook and looking at graphs. So as my personal resident economist, when you think about a livable wage and you think about cost of living increases, what do you think about? Man, I think about a lot of things. I think about all of the land in this country and all of the buildings that are completely empty. That would be so useful to so many people. But we've got everything from all types of zoning laws and regulations that just place these artificial restrictions on human creativity so that we can't do anything with a lot of the land and the property that's out there. Like you'd be amazed at just how much of a problem that is, right? And you contrast that with homelessness in this country. It's a very unfortunate thing. I think most of what gets talked about when we talk about economics and livable wage are talking points that can be reduced to something that is anti-left or something that's anti-right. And that's a tempting direction to go in because you know that half the country will love you when you do that. Isn't that that absolute thinking you were talking about earlier too? Well, it's part of that, but it's also political and economic opinions come with a social cost. The moment you articulate where you stand on some matter of politics and economics, at least half the country is going to be mad at you. And so it's good to know that you got another half that's going to have your back, right? And so the safest path to take is to say something against the left or say something against the right to sort of identify what tribe you're going to attack, blame them in their policies. And then you know that somebody's got your back for the attack that's coming at your way. What I think about is something that neither side of the political spectrum seems to be too interested in because it's just not politically profitable to talk about. There are people that are interested in it, but they don't really say anything about it because it doesn't make them more electable and it's not a sexy issue like so many other things are. And that's the topic of sound money and the way that sound money imposes all sorts of constraints that nature does not give us on our capacity to create wealth. We have very little transparency and accountability when it comes to the very means by which we measure our capacity to create value. What you hold in your hand, the product of your hard work, the product of your labor, the product of the problems that you've solved for people, you don't know what that's going to be worth because there are no objective rules that determine that. No, there's no accountability for how much more of that can be printed, for how that can be devalued. There's no sense of what that's based on. It's just sort of like a naive faith that we don't question because we happen to feel stable right now, but the moment that we don't, that's when everything changes. And so I think about sound money and that's something that I would like to see more discussion on from both ends of the political spectrum. What would it take for us to get to a place as a country where there's some serious accountability and transparency with the increasing of the money supply and what does it look like to adopt a develop a currency that is deflationary or a currency that is anti-inflationary and you know what direction that's going to push me in but I'll control myself and stop there. You know what's fascinating to me is all the knock on effects of what happens with society, inflation is a byproduct of a lot of things that happen in our society. For its printing money, there are shortages, there are tariffs. A lot of things will add to our everyday cost of living. There are taxes, there are embedded fees or hidden fees that we don't know about. When you go to the gas pump even, that's a tax, we don't even realize that we're paying. You can look at it, you can see how much of this is tax but also quite often that is an inelastic good. If I need to drive here, I have to buy gas and even if it says it's $10 a gallon, well now I'm like, okay, I guess I can't eat lunch today because I still need to be able to go into work. And so there's a whole lot that goes into that. And I agree, it won't say a broader discussion. Maybe we get Steve Patterson on the show, we can really hash it out, although you can't talk about the Trinity when he's here. All right, back to the question of the week. What would it take for you to work one last day per week? Chris says, for me, it would take a mindset shift. This is a different answer. My income wouldn't be impacted. It's more of the feeling of, quote, needing to work Monday through Friday. For a while, I took one week day as a me day to do whatever I wanted. I need to re-empliment this. You know, TK for millennia, humans have observed a Sabbath day. I'm going to take one day to do nothing to not work. Yeah, and there's a lot of research to support this. There's a very excellent book. I believe it's called Rest that talks about the way in which slowing down actually increases our creativity and our overall wellness. We had Cal Newport talking about the concept of slow productivity. It's an idea that's been around for a very long time. And even at an anecdotal level, we all understand that experience of wrestling with the problem. We just can't quite crack the riddle that's got us hung up. But then you go for a walk, you take a shower, you do something like let it go, you sleep on it, and then it comes to you when you're in that state of rest. Rest doesn't necessarily mean sleep, but rest means a cessation of busyness, right? Taking a break and getting rooted in the deep self. And that's what the concept of the Sabbath is all about stepping back, saying, I'm not going to focus on doing today, but I'm going to focus on being and I'm going to ask myself, what is the basis for all of my doing? Oh, yeah, they're doing versus being. That's some of that's so difficult for me. And in fact, I really enjoy the work that we do. Like, I love doing this. Coming in here on Tuesdays with you getting to have these conversations. How amazing, what a privilege that is. And yet I force myself, you know, this I do every other Friday, I take off with my wife and I put it on the calendar. And so everyone knows, like, hand, not going to be available that day. I force myself to be because I really like the doing. And so sometimes you might really enjoy something the same way you enjoy dessert. But if you don't take a pause on the dessert, it's all just gustatory, imbibing all of the time. And it loses, it loses the joy after a while. And so sometimes setting it down, setting down the doing and picking up the being. Just because you're always being anyway, but actually noticing it, like I can be here, I can be present is practicing a type of presence. And without the distractions, and I'll tell you, man, that's difficult for me. It's difficult for me because my default back in the corporate days was myself worth is been tied up. So the pattern I I developed is myself worth is part of the work that I do. But you've got more than that going on too. I think you deserve more credit than that. There may be some of that and only you can speak to that. But there's also a part of you. I wish I had the words that someone used to describe you in our FAMS call where it's your your sense of of what could go wrong drives you to action. It was something like that. We're talking about OCD there. Yeah. And like the things I've become obsessed by. That's right. Or are often the things that I want to I want to kill Godzilla when Godzilla is a baby, not when Godzilla is taking over the city. Hey man, how about not killing Godzilla at all, man? I give what you say, though. You would see your house on fire and then you tell me how that's going. But you know, I think there's this there's also this version of you where you work hard in a way that people have to find out about by almost like catching you doing it. But you wouldn't advertise it. You wouldn't say anything. And it's because you can see that something needs to be done. No one is going to do it. And you can see the way that will negatively impact others and you'll sacrifice yourself without even advertising it because you believe advertising sucks to make things happen. So I would give you more credit than that. But you know, to your point, get back to your point. You know, we can easily prove the idea that overdoing it can compromise what we even love doing. Imagine if we said, hey, this is so fun that we're going to record this. We're going to take a 15 minute break. And when we're done, we're going to do another one. And we're going to start doing three to four episodes a day. You and I will be so exhausted. If you think this podcast is bad now, man, wait till we get to the fourth one. It's going to be horrible, right? And we would have to scale back and say, hey, what's the amount of this to do that's sustainable. And so we say, all right, one a day, one every few days, one every week. And so the question to ask yourself is given the fact that you know there's such a thing as doing it too much, do you have a good reason for believing you found the right amount now? Or can you scale back even more? Right. And sometimes that's through some experimentation. It's okay to scale back too much for a period of time. Or it's okay to scale up. If you know there's a light at the end of the tunnel, I remember we were working on everything that remains. I had some 14 hour days working on that book. And that's not sustainable long term. But when you see the finish line there in front of you, you recognize what you're working toward. The difference between that and my corporate days is there was no finish line. The finish line was just a new starting point. And you're like, uh-oh, I've made it here. And now this new race is even longer and faster and more overwhelming. And it's uphill. And it's like, what am I doing? And so recognizing that, yes, sometimes it'll be cycles where I ramp up. And that's okay. But I want to make sure that I know where the finish line is. Otherwise, I'm going to get that sense of burnout. Let's do one more. This one's from Tara. She said, we own a small business and working one less day per week is our goal. Once we feel like we have financial legs and the business is stable enough, we would like to take this step to have a little more time to live and enjoy our hard work. TK instead of waiting until she feels like they have enough stability, it might make sense that they figure out what enough is. Get concrete. What is enough for you? Yeah. Two questions actually. What is there a way I can give myself permission to have some of what I love before I even have enough? So even when I define what enough is, is there a way for me to enjoy something? You know, I get the whole idea of, hey, we're sports team, man, and we're going through the regular season and we win a game. All right, that's great. But it's not the championship, right? Let's stay focused on the, you know, big picture. But do you really want to live your life in a way where you never get to say, yay, at all? You never get to take anybody out for a celebratory dinner at all until and unless you win the Super Bowl or you win the championship, that's a really long season. How about stepping back and saying, all right, where are some markers I can give myself permission to celebrate without having to treat my celebration as if it's tantamount to ultimate success. If we make the playoffs, we're all going out for dinner, right? If we beat our rival, we're all going to have a good time. You want to do that with your life. That's exactly why I celebrate because I'm bad at it. And it's not my default. But it's a nice time to step back, reflect on what have I done? What have I done? Oh, yeah, that is great. Now's a good time to reflect on that. And that's not to be the beginning of the year. It can be a middle of the year. It could be a middle of a month. It could be the middle of a drive into work. I'm going to celebrate where where I am right now. And it's just a recognition is what it really is. Let me recognize. And it's a way to step into the present moment. How about you, Lester? What would it take for you to work one less day per week? Let us know your thoughts in the Patreon community chat. Okay, give me something pithy, TK. I know you had a couple of them here. What would it take for you to work one less day per week? Only work less win less works better. Oh, come on. First, work is not just what you do as a job. Work is the expenditure of energy towards a goal or a value of some kind. And so just because it does it feel really difficult, just because you're not sweating, just because you're not getting paid for it, just because you don't have external accountability doesn't mean that it's not work. When you say I'm going to go get a glass of water, that's work. When you say I'm going to go home tonight and play a video game, that's work, because you are investing your energy towards something that is important to you. And so when you realize that the goal isn't to eliminate the work, the goal is to eliminate the waste. What are those aspects of your work that are not actually creating value for you? That's the kind of stuff that you want to minimize. And that's when you say, Hey, I'm going to do less work here because that's just busy work that's not really doing anything for my life. And now I'm going to free that up to do more work here, doing the things that even if they don't pay me, they nourish my soul. I really like that. Eliminate the waste, not the work. And the way that I often do that is by setting appropriate boundaries. And so my pithy answer is a good boundary highlights the unacceptable. I'm not the type of person who just sets up boundaries for the sake of putting it. In fact, I think that's really harmful. The all the talk of boundaries these days, I think it's useful until it's not. And a bad boundary is one that gets in your way. There's a lot of boundary clutter out there because we say I'm not willing to accept any of this other stuff. And it tunes us out of the possibilities. I'll give you a good example in the, we just had our 15th anniversary celebration for the minimalist. And we hit up the Joy Committee group chats. We call our team of people work go the Joy Committee. And Jeff, our very talented branch strategist and web developer, he and Dave, we've worked with them since the Minimals were two weeks old. And it's because we went to this meet up in Chicago randomly. And I used to have a mindset, I'm not going to any events. I'm not going to any gatherings. I don't want to be around people. And yes, that may be a proclivity of mine. But if I set up the boundary that says, no, I'm not going to do that. That's an unnecessary boundary. That's a bad boundary for me. I would have never met Jeff or Dave. I don't think we'd have the beautiful cover art for our books or movies or podcasts without them. And so what if I said, I really hate touring. I would have never met Professor Sean. I would have met podcast Sean. I would have never met Professor Sean. We met him in Pittsburgh. However many years or 2011. And as a result of doing something that I refused to put up a bad boundary on just because I'm a little bit uncomfortable. Oh no, that discomfort is a sign that I might be able to grow in that direction. Yeah, I don't like travel and I don't like crowds of people and I don't like public speaking. It's not that I don't like them though. It's they make me uncomfortable. And so I give myself permission to not have a boundary around those things that is going to get in my way. That's almost the end of page one. We still have an entire switchboard of colors to talk to. Savidee over there is on the board. But first real quick for right here right now here are two things that are going on in the life of the minimalist. You probably heard at the top of the show. I didn't say coming to you live from Earthing studios, right? We had a grant from them for a year and a half our good friends over at Earthing, Olivia and Clint. And they've been really good to us over the last year and a half. And they came to us and they thanked us for the work we were doing. They're helping us with our live events as well. So they're buying all the tickets so people could get in and we could pay for the venue. We could pay for math and other people on the team to contribute. And so they gave us a grant for a year and a half. A studio grant. They knew the whole time that we weren't going to do advertisements for them. But we would do a naming grant similar to if you go to UCLA and you see the Jim Johnson building. It was the same sort of thing that we did here with the studio. And so you've heard that for the last year and a half, Earthing studios. And that grant is coming to a close as we transition on. But I'm still the biggest fan of the Earthing folks. And so I got both of their books here. If you want to check them out, we'll put links to them in the show notes. Clint wrote this book that changed my life. It's called Earthing. It's hard. I heard about Earthing. So many scientific studies in here. And when I started grounding a couple of years into my autoimmune conditions, I realized that it was the main ingredient that was missing. There are other things we talked about it recently with changing some dietary things, reduce inflammation with cold thermogenesis. And recently I've been doing hyperbaric oxygen as well. But the number one thing that has affected my health has been Earthing. I wrote a whole essay about it called I shouldn't have to deal with this. And you can find that we'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. It's at the minimalist.com slash Earthing. But it's my whole healing story of being in the worst pain in my life. And just I shouldn't have to deal with this. Also, if you want to check out a bunch of really great testimonials, the mother Earth effect by our friend Olivia Smith. She wrote this book with a bunch of women who had these amazing testimonials when they started Earthing. And so this is not an ad for them. They're not paying me to say this. I just wanted to take a moment and say thanks to them for that time that we had with them. We brought them out to several of our Sunday symposiums. We had a great time bringing them on the stage. And they've added a lot to this community. And they've it's because of Earthing that I'm still here right now. And that's why I've become an evangelist for it. So I think Clint, I think Olivia, I think the folks at Earthing for all of their contributions. One more thing for you. How to write better my writing course, which I offer a couple times a year, Professor Sean and I, it's four weeks. It's developing a writing habits for distinct weeks as well. We work with you on the writing habit because for the longest time I was an aspiring writer, which means I didn't have a writing habit. I didn't write every day. I didn't write regularly. I wanted to improve my writing. Second week, we talk about composition and really getting the words onto the page. And the third week, we talk about editing. And the fourth week, we talk about publishing. What are the different ways to publish now? Do you want to go with a traditional publisher? Do you want to publish yourself? Do you want to start a blog? And I speak from a perspective of someone who has published five books, four of which have been bestsellers. And I've learned so much about writing over the years, but the old adage ends up being true. The teacher learns more than the students. I remember the first three years that I taught this writing course. Paradoxically, am I writing improved so much as I'm stopping? I'm pausing. I'm figuring out all of the ingredients and the sequence of my own writing. And so the course opens up today for 72 hours only. We only accept a hundred students. If you're interested, how to write better.org. You can find all the details. You can find the testimonials over there. If you want to join that cohort, join a hundred other students. We have forums over there. You can do it at your own pace. We do it over four weeks, but I have some people who take it over 16 weeks. You can do it at your own pace. What feels reasonable for you. Everyone from high school students to medical doctors have taken this course. And the testimonials are overwhelming. You can find those at howltowritebetter.org. Much more coming up TK, but first here's a quick insight from one of our listeners. Hello, Susan Colling from Portland, Oregon, Patreon subscriber. And I'm just calling to give a shout out testimonial to Mr. TK Coleman and his clutter counseling. First off, I just wanted to a hundred percent agree with the other caller who referred to TK as her personal Oprah. This is correct, especially if you've been listening to the podcast for some time. You'll find that you have kind of a common knowledge base ideology framework from which to jump in. And it's um you kind of hit the ground running addressing your issue. TK has what I would call is a transformational presence, meaning just the act of scheduling an appointment with him, being with him, engaging with his curiosity, his intelligence, his courage. It changes your perspective on your issue, the way you see possible courses of action or solutions, your whole stance. And the last thing I would say is you'll have a lot of fun. TK has a great sense of humor and brings a lot of levity to different situations which I found to be kind of a critical piece of the transformational element. So that's my tip and everyone take care and have fun. Bye. Oh, Susan, what a sweet comment. TK is also my personal Oprah TK win for you over here. Wow, that was very heartfelt. I really appreciate that. And I don't know, thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for that. Yeah. Well, anyone else who's listening who might want a clutter counseling session with the transformational and fun TK Coleman, you can book a session anywhere in the world over at the minimalist.com. Just click counseling at the top for anyone else as a list or tip or inside about this episode or any other episode. You can send a voice memo just like Susan did over to podcast at the minimalist.com. So we can feature your voice on the show. Up next page two and page three, but first let's take a quick pendigulation break. We'll be right back. All right, so that is the first 36% of episode 521. We'll see you on Patreon for the full two-hour maximal edition, which includes answers to a bunch more questions, questions like what is the purpose of everything you own? How do I better manage anxiety, avoid resentment and process past grief when interacting with my relatives? How does one deal with the emotional clutter of feeling overwhelmed? Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast on Patreon. The link is in the description. When you subscribe, you can listen to our private podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Plus, you'll gain access to all of our podcast archives all the way back to the very first episode from 2015. It's more than a decade of archives, TK. And that is our minimal episode for today. On the behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, TK Coleman, post-production Peter, Spire Jeff, and Spire Dave, Jordan Noemore, Tom Kat, Professor Sean, Savvy D, and the rest of our team. My name is Joshua Fields-Milburn. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this. Love people, and use things. Because the opposite never works. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time. Peace.