Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (13 page)

Maximizing Results

Some of the things we do positively impact
more than one
of the five areas. Often, these are some of the best things you can do to live more meaningfully. 

For example, we often enjoy exercising together, which positively impacts our health and our relationship. We enjoy working on our website together, which positively impacts our relationship, helps us grow as individuals, allows us to contribute to other people in meaningful ways, and permits us to actively engage in our passions. In these two examples alone, we cover all five dimensions of living a meaningful life. That’s because some activities allow us to maximize our results.

What activities do you do that impact more than one of the five dimensions? What can you do to make some of your current activities impact more of the five dimensions at once?

How Do You Know?

How do you know if you’re living a meaningful life?

This is an important question. Unfortunately, there is no black and white answer. There is no checklist or set of absolute maxims by which you must gauge your life to answer this question—just like there is no way to definitively answer many questions in life.
Am I healthy? Am I happy? Am I content? Am I successful? Am I smart? Am I passionate? Am I growing as an individual? Am I contributing beyond myself? Am I a good person? 

You might be thinking,
Great, so I’m almost at the end of the book, and you’re not going to tell me if I’m living a meaningful life?

No, we’re not going to tell you. Actually, we
can’t
tell you. Only you know for sure. Just as with the aforementioned questions, there are different sets of criteria and internal rules each of us place on these questions. We might think you’re smart or good or happy, but what we think doesn’t matter. Only you know for sure.

The way we measure our success in each of the five dimensions is through a simple equation, an equation we call the simple success formula:

Success = Happiness + Constant Improvement

This equation applies to any of the five dimensions. Ultimately, you are successful in any of these five areas of life if you are happy with where you currently are and if you are constantly improving that area of your life.

For example, you may not be in the best shape in the world, but if you are happy with the progress you’ve made, and you’re happy with your daily improvements, then you are successful in that area of your life. Conversely, if you are in great shape, but you are not improving your health in tiny ways each day, then you won’t feel successful in that area in the long run. Or, if you’re not happy with your physical shape, but you are constantly improving, then you aren’t yet successful in that area of your life, but you are most likely on the road to success if you are making small daily improvements to your overall health.

Similarly, if you’re not happy with your relationships and you are not making any improvements in that area of your life, you are unsuccessful. For the two of us, this was the case for all five dimensions just a few years ago. If you go back and read the first chapter, you’ll notice that neither of us were happy with our lives, neither of us were happy with our health or our relationships or our passions or our personal growth or how we contributed beyond ourselves. What’s worse, is that we also weren’t improving these areas of our lives. In fact, if anything, these areas were further deteriorating as we journeyed down the paths we were traveling.

This is when we decided to take back control of our lives. We used the principles of minimalism to eliminate the excess stuff in our lives so we could focus on the five important aspects of our lives every day. Over the course of two years, everything changed for us. We got rid of the superfluous in favor of the essential, in favor of a more meaningful life.

None of this was easy. It takes daily focus and commitment to constant improvement in all five areas of life. And to continue living a meaningful life, we must continue to commit to constantly improving each area of our lives. We must do so every day. Small daily improvements make all the difference in the world.

What we discovered over the last two years is that we can be happy and content, we can improve our lives every day, and we can live meaningful lives—and so can you.

THE MINIMALISTS, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, write essays about living a meaningful life with less stuff for their online audience of more than 100,000 monthly readers. They have published several bestselling books about simple living and have been featured in the
Wall Street Journal
, CBS, NBC, FOX, NPR, CBC,
Zen Habits
, and numerous other outlets. Find more information at TheMinimalists.com.

BOOKS BY THE MINIMALISTS

NONFICTION

Minimalism: Essential Essays

Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life

FICTION by JOSHUA FIELDS MILLBURN

Falling While Sitting Down: Stories

Days After the Crash: A Novella

As a Decade Fades: A Novel

MORE INFO

TheMinimalists.com

JoshuaFieldsMillburn.com

TWITTER
 

@JFM & @RyanNicodemus

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SPECIAL THANKS TO all our readers. We write these words for you. We are eternally grateful for your support. Thank you for giving us a purpose. Thank you to our amazing editors and proofreaders who helped make this book appreciably better: Shawnacy Kiker, Lee Knowlton, Joshua Keel, Carla Duarte, Cynthia Schrage, Guillaume Ceccarelli, Shawn Mihalik, and Austen Nelson. Thank you to the people who inspired us to write these words: Colin Wright, Leo Babauta, Joshua Becker, Julien Smith, et al. And thank you to our wonderful friends and families—we are grateful for your love.