10 Things I Quit to Simplify My Life | Minimalism & Slow Living

Over the past 4 years, I've had just this amazing transformation in my life. I went from an almost constant state of adding new rituals, routines, challenges and an almost obsessive desire to be always doing something, going somewhere, to now living with this consistent underlying sense of contentment, happiness, purpose and fulfillment. And the crazy thing about it is that I got here by quitting a bunch of things rather than adding them in. So today I'm sharing the 10 biggest things I stopped doing that made life much simpler and much better. Number 1 is social media to kill boredom. Social media was so much fun in the early days of it, right? You could post pictures, look at memes and read people's dogfight arguments in the comment sections with almost no downside because your network was mostly just people you knew. But when the algorithms got more advanced and timelines became infinite and short form videos became popular, I found myself glued to my screen unintentionally and I'd always leave feeling way worse about myself and the world in general that I had to step away from my mental health. So 3 years ago, I deleted every social media application minus YouTube, WhatsApp and Line off of my phone and occasionally I'll download Instagram then delete it right after. And since doing this, life has become so much simpler. I can think way more clearly now because I'm not being triggered on a regular basis and I don't care about maintaining an online persona anymore and most importantly, I can be intentional about my time that I would've spent wasted just glued to that screen. And you still get the funny videos, the good ones anyway. And that leads exactly to the second thing I quit, giving away my mental space freely. How often do you think the average person checks their phone in a day? No, it's more than 100. The average person checks their phone 144 times in a day. I check my own stats as well and I'm not happy about it, I'll show you. It would be fine if I was choosing consciously to unlock the device but majority of the time it's a notification that pops up and drags my attention away from something else I would rather be doing. Like when I worked with clients on the other side of the world, sometimes they'd call me during my off time when I'm doing something to calm my brain down. And whether I answered the phone or not, once I saw the call coming in, my mind would now start to think about their project or what I could be doing differently in my business. Whatever it was, that mental space was now theirs. So now my phone is permanently on do not disturb. I don't hear sounds on notifications unless it's someone that's calling me off of certain applications, I don't read news to absorb that worry and I try to keep my phone away from my eyesight as often as possible. And I try not to check my phone first thing in the morning but I'll keep it real with you, it's a bit difficult to do that because I want to see how these videos are performing. So do me a favour and pound like for your boy down below so that I can have a great morning when I wake up. But on a serious note, I just check everything at a specific time of the day so I can at least be a little bit intentional about how I'm letting this mental space be taken. And since doing this, my mind feels so much clearer, I can think much more clearly, I feel as if my brain has so much more space and most importantly, I feel literally healthier from doing this. Addiction to desire. Do you know the quote, you can have it all, just not all at once? It's by Oprah and the way I've interpreted it, it means that you can have the things that are important to you if you prioritize them. And that's not how I used to live. I wanted to both have a lot of money in the bank and also have a bunch of luxury goods and experiences. But I was on an average salary at an average job. How would I get the money to have a full bank account and luxury goods at the same time? No. Stop. We're not going to be that stereotype. Well, you're broke dawg. Dodge the bullet there. But jokes aside, having multiple desires at the same time leaves your focus spread thin and leaves you spinning in the mud about next steps. And realistically, a lot of these things I didn't even want, they were just a lifestyle marketed to me by entertainment. Things got a lot easier when I decided that I would just pick one important thing to focus on from each category of my life and ignore the rest. That forced me to get clear about what I really wanted, then only take steps that aligned with that. And you know what they say, a healthy person desires a million things, but a sick person desires but one. I quit having unrealistic expectations of myself. For about five years, I unknowingly kept adding expectations to my life. I'd add a morning routine and with that came the expectation that I'd complete this routine every morning, I'd start a meditation practice and expect myself to never skip a session. And each always led to disappointment. Each new thing I added came with the baggage of expectation and felt more like constraints to my days after a couple of weeks. I've taken a huge step back from that and now I approach personal development from a much more holistic perspective. I choose one broad goal for the year and see if I'm getting directionally better. Like this year, I've chosen to get better at relationships and marketing. And you're now my best friend, so at least one of those two things I'm doing correctly right now. But on a serious note, I am still a very super-driven person, so I do set weekly goals and standards for myself. I just don't consider hitting all of them success or failure, playing small. Since I was a child, I knew that I wanted to travel and make documentaries, but I was always afraid to take that risk. So I always circled around the things that I actually wanted. I worked in insurance, I studied international relations, I learned Japanese and moved to Japan, I worked at an airline, and I was always doing something tangential to what I really wanted to do. It was genius actually, because I'd get close enough that I would be satisfied and said, ah, this is good enough. In reality, I was just really afraid. I let people tell me what was possible and what was not, and I believed them, and then I acted in a way to keep in alignment with that belief. But once I finally shook that fear, life became so much simpler, because I was now always either doing something to get the things I wanted out of life, or I wasn't. That made the steps I had to take just incredibly clear, and obviously there's still some confusion around the how, but the what and the why and my internal value system is always crystal clear, and that's a level of peace I would wish for everyone. I quit playing hot potato with responsibility. The other phrase I heard a lot growing up, God helps those who help themselves. Or a similar agnostic phrase would be, fortune favors the bold. And the way I've interpreted these, they mean that if I were to take responsibility and try to improve my life, things will change, and in my experience, they really do. Once the financial problems, relationship problems, and weight problems I had shifted from the banks, governments, toxic internet forums, and fast food restaurants to just my fault, they were solvable. I could take concrete steps to improve my situation, and even get lucky from time to time. This change for me came from a book I read by Tony Robbins called Awaken the Giant Within. It's one of my favorite books of all time. I read it again just last year. The message of this book is about questioning what can we do to change our circumstances and unleashing our personal power. It was the catalyst for me to begin to build a life that I really truly love, filled with happiness and purpose. And there's another book that's similar to it called Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willing, which talks about the same principles. But essentially, the core message of both of these books are the same. If you don't like something, change it. You're not a tree. You can move. I quit caring what others think about me. There's this quote that I absolutely love. Would you rather be at peace with the world and at war with yourself, or at war with the world and at peace with yourself? And this really resonated with me, because for a really long time, I was at war with myself to make peace with other people's thoughts, opinions, and ideas about me. And the amount of things that I didn't do that I actually wanted to, because of the fear of other people's judgments and opinions, was insane. I remember the moment I realized what it was costing me. I was sitting on my couch in my apartment in Fuji City, Japan, staring at my phone, afraid to post a photo I just took, because my old schoolmates back home on the next side of the world might have something negative to say about it. Ridiculous. I thought about how often they actually crossed my mind, and reality was, they nearly never crossed my mind. Only if I was about to post something that may get negative comments, or if I was reminiscing about times in the past. But otherwise, about 99% of the people on the planet I never thought about. Even this weird dude. And almost immediately after I saw him, I forgot he ever existed to begin with. So who am I to stop and think that if I post a pic, I'm going to be in people's mind for a long time. They really care about me. They don't. And that's when I was able to step back and really notice that no one thinks about us the amount we think about ourselves. And that's really freeing. It's allowed me to be silly, take risks, and live a lot more in the moment, rather than being constantly consumed with other people's potential thoughts and opinions about me. I quit busyness. This was probably the biggest struggle of my life in the last 4 years, and if you're watching this video, you can probably relate. I'd set out these huge task lists for a day, schedule everything in, and fill every minute of my day with busyness. And here I'd like to make a distinction between busyness and productivity. I think that productivity is getting the most results out for the least amount of effort, whereas busyness is really just about constantly doing things. I was always overthinking, late for something, and stressed. And that eventually led me to burn out for about 2 weeks because it was just impossible to keep going all day every day. I thought this is what I had to do to be successful, but what use is having success if there is no time in the day to enjoy it? Now I've simplified that quite a bit by putting a lot more intention and free time into my weeks. Even the unbalanced weeks where I'm going for 60 plus hours, I make room for at least one thing to do just for myself. I'm actually considering making a digital planner that goes through the process that I go through when planning my weeks, so if you're interested in getting that, then please sign up for the newsletter down below, because that's where I'll let people know about it. But the elevator pitch version of it is this. I choose one thing for each day to make that a priority in my life and try to get that completed and everything else just becomes, it would be nice if it were done, but it's not that important category. I quit keeping clutter in my home. I know this is the one that you're gonna leave in the comments or it's not so important, but I promise you, this is one of the most important things I did to simplify my life. I grew up in the bedroom in my home where we kept all of the extra things. So the extra towels, the computer, and I could be in a room filled floor to ceiling with clutter and I never would have felt anything differently about it. But when I moved to my own place and consciously started getting rid of things I didn't need, it's like a switch clicked in my brain and I felt peace and spaciousness and clarity of thought. And I realized that in rooms that are filled with things, there's always constant distractions or things to spark ideas depending on how you look at it. But in a room that has nothing but the essentials, it's like taking a clarity pill. Because your brain can really only focus on one of two things, on the thing that you wanted to focus on or on unresolved thoughts. And now I couldn't imagine living any other way. Now I get rid of as many things as I possibly can afford to. I don't keep just-in-case items in the event that something happens, I'm really conscious about the things I bring into my home and the purpose of it and if something has already served its purpose and I can replace it for $10 or less in 10 minutes or less, I just throw it away. I quit holding on to worry. Worrying is like feeling the pain of your baby toe hitting a chair leg before you hit it. It's taking all that pain you expect to happen in the future and giving it to yourself now. And while I'm not sure it's possible to ever stop worrying because it's a natural human emotion, I have quit holding on to it. I used to worry about how someone would respond to a text, I'd worry about results from exams or what people would think of me, and I realized that the thing I was worrying about was never as bad as my mind would make it out to be. And the worst part of it would be acting out of worry because that would just make the situation worse most of the times. So now I've adopted the 5 by 5 rule to deal with it. If it won't matter in 5 years, I won't spend more than 5 minutes worrying about it. And if you enjoyed this video, I think you'll enjoy this one here. That's about how I stop being stressed when I'm in my busyness phase. As always, thank you for watching.