Simplify Your Life: How to De-Clutter & De-Stress Your Way to Happiness

By Sam Davidson

We love the idea of living a simpler life, a life that’s more manageable, more meaningful, and more rewarding. But simplicity isn’t just about living a minimalist lifestyle or getting rid of things. In Simplify Your Life, Sam Davidson, author of 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need, offers practical tips and personal anecdotes to help you simplify your life by discovering what really matters. Using proven methods, the latest ideas, and easy-to-remember step-by-step plans, Simplify encourages you to find what brings you happiness and then helps you find ways to make room for more of it. Learn to de-clutter and prioritize your life to stay balanced and stress-free, all by discovering how to make things simpler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Jun 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781596529328

Book preview

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what is simplicity?

Down with minimalism

If you’ve picked up (or were given) this book, it’s because you’re looking for things to be a bit simpler (or the gift-giver sees you as a very stressed person). Maybe you feel like the world is moving too fast for you. You feel exhausted and tired. There’s so much to do and never enough time to do it all. In short, things are hectic. You want the world to stop spinning so you can get off and take a nap.

This past year, I flew more than I did in the previous few years combined. (You’ll find a list of all my destinations later in the book.) When I fly, I always know the what-do-you-do-for-a-living question will arise from someone sitting next to me, a common cultural exchange that must happen before we take off. Flying is weird that way. We share intimate space (yes, intimate—have you seen how closely they pack passengers on flights nowadays?) for a few hours, and then your aisle mates are gone forever. Random encounters can blossom into something bigger; corporate lore is full of tales of people meeting on planes and in trains who later went on to strike it rich together. I haven’t had such luck. I usually find myself next to the guy with too many gadgets or the woman who hates to fly.

As people file into the plane, looking for their seats while hoisting their overpacked carry-on bags into the overhead bins, my seat mate will usually strike up a conversation and ask me what I do for a living. I reply with half of a laugh and a smile and tell them that I write and speak about living a better life. I will sometimes go into detail about the companies I’ve started, the projects I’ve been working on, and what I’m writing about at the moment. This past year, every conversation included a discussion about simplicity.

When I tell people I write about simplicity—about getting rid of stuff—they think I’m a minimalist. They believe this for two reasons:

1. Where else is minimalism more prized than in air travel, where everything needs to fit into the small cavern under the seat in front of you, and where you can’t take more than three ounces of something on board with you?

2. They also think this because minimalism as a movement has grown rapidly as of late. There have been countless newspaper and magazine articles on the topic, profiling people who have sold their McMansions in the suburbs and traded them in for small lofts in the city. People are refusing to buy groceries until everything in their pantry has been cooked and everything in their fridge has been eaten. This makes sense, of course; most of us have enough food in our homes to last a month, yet we still insist on going to the grocery store every week.

Minimalism, however, is boring. You heard me. Minimalism as a lifestyle for minimalism’s sake is flat-out unexciting, uninteresting, and unbelievable.

This, of course, may be the point. When our lives are filled with stuff, they are invariably filled with entertainment, and with it, distraction. Eliminate the distraction, and you’ll eliminate the entertainment, too. Owning next to nothing can be very, very bland.

This is why I’m not a minimalist. I like things exciting. I like them busy. But even in that busy excitement, I keep things simple. Everything is manageable, even though it may seem overwhelming. The question I’m asked most often after telling someone about all the projects and companies I’m involved with is How do you keep track of it all?

It’s easy: I do the things that are worth doing. I do what I enjoy and I enjoy what I do. Not everyone is so lucky. When you take out the stuff that doesn’t matter—the stuff that truly isn’t important—it’s amazing how simple your life can get, even if it speeds up and gets