Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (11 page)

That’s what happened to us. Over the course of two years, everything changed. We left our big corporate jobs, changed our diets, started exercising regularly, got healthy, strengthened our core relationships, made great new relationships, started pursuing our passions, and contributed to more people than we ever had before. We didn’t know that making this many changes was possible in such a short period of time, but when we look back at it, we’re thankful we decided to take gradual daily actions that changed everything for us in just a couple of years.

Raise Your Standards

What seemed impossible yesterday, will often seem easy tomorrow. So if you want to continue to grow, you must continue to raise your standards. Otherwise, you’ll plateau. Or worse, if you ever lower your standards, you’ll begin to atrophy.

While you’re taking your daily incremental actions, it’s important to raise the bar just a little each day, especially when it’s uncomfortable. Getting outside your comfort zone is an important part of growth. You needn’t raise the bar too high, but just high enough to make your change a little challenging and a little more difficult each day. Over time, your gradually raised standards will add up to changes larger than you could have imagined.

For the two of us, the most glaring example of raising our standards was with respect to our health. Once we made the decision to change our diet and exercise, and we started taking daily actions to improve both of these areas, we would also raise the bar just a little each day, especially with exercise. There was a point when neither of us exercised at all. In Joshua’s case he couldn’t do a single push-up or a single pull-up. At the beginning, he learned some techniques that allowed him to do modified versions of both exercises until one day he was able to do one of each. One push-up turned into two, which turned into 10, which eventually turned into over 100 in a row. The same was true for other exercises as well. If he would have attempted to do 100 when he started, he would have failed. That failure would have presented with it a considerable amount of dissatisfaction, discouraging him from continuing his growth. He likely would have given up. Instead he gradually raised the bar each day, building more and more on the days prior.

Consistent Actions

While you continue to raise your standards, it’s important to focus on consistent action. Said another way, it’s easier to raise the bar a little each day than raise it seven times as much each week or 30 times as much each month. 

For example, it’s important to strengthen your relationships each day. You will get a lot more benefit from being nice to your lover today
and
tomorrow than you will from yelling at them today and buying them flowers tomorrow.

The same holds true for all areas of your life. The key to real growth is consistency. Consistent gradual action taken every day is the way we changed our lives. It feels like a slow climb at first, but once you build enough momentum you won’t want to stop growing. It’s the growth that makes you feel alive.

CHAPTER 6: CONTRIBUTION

The Importance of Contribution

Contributing to other people in meaningful ways is the most important of the five dimensions of living a meaningful life. Don’t believe us? Let us prove it.

Imagine winning the lottery, getting into the best shape of your life, finding your soulmate, establishing the most meaningful relationships possible, paying off all your debt, moving into your dream home (on the beach, of course), finding the thing that makes you the most passionate, discovering your mission in life, and finding new ways to grow every day.

Now what? Bask in your wealth, fortune, and fame at the top of your mound of money, swimming through your cash and coins like Scrooge McDuck? Not hardly.

Growth Leads to Contribution

As you grow, an something amazing tends to happen: you have more of yourself to give. It’s an incredible cycle: the more you grow, the more you can help others grow; and the more you help others grow, the more you grow in return.

Beyond Yourself

Growth feels great, but contribution can feel even better. That’s because you’ll often do more for the people you love than you will do for yourself. The reason you’re willing to do more for the people you love is that humans have an intrinsic need to contribute beyond themselves. It’s one of the most basic instincts that humans possess.

Ways to Contribute

A nice thing about contributing to other people is that there are countless ways to do so. And there isn’t a right or wrong way to contribute. All contribution is positive contribution. Thus, it is important to learn how to
best
contribute to the people around you.

Later in this chapter, we’ll discuss how the two of us contribute charitably to local organizations as well as through the free content on our website, but it’s important to note that donating your time to these types of activities is not the only way to contribute to other people. Instead, you can find tiny ways to contribute to people in many of your current activities.

In our past corporate lives, we both led large groups of people for a major corporation. In doing so, we both discovered that the most rewarding part of our workday always revolved around these times of coaching and mentoring. In other words, we felt the most fulfilled whenever we were adding value to other people’s lives. Thus, whether you’re donating your time to a charity or you’re finding new ways to contribute to the
primary
relationships in your life, you are doing one thing: adding value.

Adding Value

How does this task add value?
This is a question we used to ask ourselves every day in our corporate jobs. More than anything else, this one question helped us succeed. We also asked our employees the same question:
How did you add value today?
And now we still ask this question of ourselves each day.

At its core, this question allows you to identify how you’re contributing. If you don’t have a good answer, then another question is appropriate:
How could I add value to this situation?
or
How could I better add value?
By asking these questions you begin to understand how to use your limited time to better contribute to the people around you.

For example, have you ever witnessed an inspiring short speech or monologue that made you want to take immediate action? Similarly, have you gone through a semester-long college or high school class that added the same amount of value to your life? If you’re like most people, the answer is
yes
to both of these questions. But if you had the opportunity to add immense value to someone’s life in one hour, doesn’t that make more sense than stretching it out over weeks or months? Of course it does.

While this might seem like a drastic example, the point is to make the most of your interactions. If you’re constantly asking yourself
How am I adding value?
you’ll start getting some great answers. When you think in terms of adding value, you’ll start to notice that everything you do starts adding value in various ways. That’s because over time you’ll begin to weed out anything that doesn’t add value to your own life or to other people’s lives.

How We Contribute

We’ve found plenty of ways to contribute to people in our local community (in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio), as well as to people in 151 countries all over the world (via our website). 

For example, locally, we’ve donated our time to Habitat for Humanity, local soup kitchens, and various other charitable organizations. We’ve helped paint schools, raise money, clean up the streets, paint fire hydrants and parks, and helped the community in various other ways. 

Furthermore, we’ve been fortunate enough to attract over 100,000 monthly readers from 151 countries to our website, where our desire is to help people live more meaningful lives with less stuff.

Thus, there are at least two ways you can contribute to others:

1. Local Organizations
   : You can contribute to local organizations who come together to contribute to the local community (e.g., the aforementioned Habitat for Humanity, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, various other non-profit organizations, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and the like). For a list of great places to start, visit volunteermatch.org or check out the classifieds in your local free community paper.
   
2. Start Your Own Thing
   : Many people discover so much satisfaction from contributing to others that it becomes important to them to create their own means by which to contribute. For us, this meant starting a website where we documented our journey and helped other people by sharing advice based on our experiences. For other people this could mean any number of things: from starting a community garden to providing work training to inner-city children. Typically, if you’re going to start your own thing, you get there by contributing to local organizations first, determining how you can best add value in the process.
   

We tend to subscribe to a combination of the two, because they fulfill us in different ways. Donating our time to local non-profit organizations allows us to connect with people face to face, as well as connect with the community as a whole. Our website, on the other hand, allows us to contribute intellectually to a much larger group of people in ways that would not be possible without the Internet.

Wherever you start, you’ll likely need to start somewhere that’s a little out of your comfort zone if you’re not used to contributing in these ways. That’s completely understandable. You’ll want to check out different organizations, different locations with different people, until you find what’s right for you. It also helps to have some variety in the ways in which you help so that your contribution efforts continue to feel fresh and exciting.

Big or Small Equals Satisfaction

The good news about contribution is that no matter how you contribute, you get to feel an immense satisfaction from your contributions—a satisfaction like no other. We started contributing on a small scale, well before we had our website, by seeking out local charity events in which we could participate. We would tag along with whatever group was donating their time and we’d help however we could. After our first couple of events we discovered something unexpected: we felt really, really good about our contribution; contributing beyond ourselves gave us a deep sense of satisfaction we didn’t experience from other aspects of our lives.

Writing Checks Is Not the Answer

We’ve heard some people say things like
I don’t have the time to donate my time to charity; I’ll just write a check instead.
While donating money to charitable organizations is great (and we certainly encourage you to do so if you can afford it), the satisfaction you get from such donations pales in comparison to actual engaged contribution. The face-to-face interactions, the physical exertion, and the mental activity of being completely immersed in contribution is far more rewarding than writing a check.

Two Types of Positive Experiences

There are two types of positive experiences in life: 

1. Positive experiences you enjoy
   . For some people this category includes activities like exercising by playing a sport, teaching a child how to ride a bike, snowboarding, going to a friend’s house to watch a football game, and the like. These are often the best and most effortless experiences in your life. They are easy to do because they are exciting, rewarding, and fulfilling. Unfortunately, these types of experiences are rare compared to the second type of positive experiences.
   
2. Positive experiences you dislike
   . For some people this category includes most of the activities that are good for them, activities like eating vegetables, exercising daily, sitting down and doing the hard work, conversing with loved ones each night, growing by taking on new challenges.
   

Why People Don't Contribute

The reason people don’t contribute as much as they should (or as much as they want) is because they often identify contributive experiences as
positive experiences they dislike
. And of course, humans have a natural tendency to avoid doing what they dislike. This must change if you are truly committed to experiencing lasting satisfaction and fulfillment.

The Key to Living Meaningfully

The second type of positive experiences—the positive experiences you dislike—are the key to living a meaningful life. That is, finding ways to transform the
positive experiences you dislike
into
positive experiences you enjoy
is the ticket to changing your life long-term. This one strategy is the ticket to long-term happiness, fulfillment, and a life with meaning. 

This strategy doesn't only enable you to change your relationship to contribution; it can be effective in every area of your life. We've waited until now to share this key strategy in order to discuss ways it might be applied to all five dimensions.

• Health example
  : It’s not easy to exercise each morning before preparing for an arduous workday. It’s easier to get an extra 30 minutes of sleep. But you know without a doubt which experience is better for you. That morning exercise will start your day the right way, give you great momentum and energy for the day ahead, and will certainly serve you more good than half-an-hour of sleep.
  
• Relationship example
  : It’s not easy to come home after a long day of work and engage in an hour of meaningful conversation with the people you love; it’s far easier to get lost in the television’s hypnotic luminescence. But, again, that evening conversation with your partner or close friends will strengthen your relationships and add far more value to your own life (not to mention their life) in ways that TV never could.
  
• Passion example
  : It’s not easy to stay at home at night, obsessively working on your passion, when all your friends and co-workers (i.e., your
  secondary
  and
  periphery
  relationships) are grabbing drinks at the local bar; it’s easier to go out and have a few beers, eat a few nachos, and have ephemeral exchanges with these people.
  
• Growth example
  : It’s not easy to embrace new experiences like finding new ways to exercise or starting a new business or meeting new people; it’s easier to keep doing what you’re doing, it’s easier to stay in your comfort zone, it’s easier to not attempt new things because they might fail.
  
• Contribution example
  : Similarly, with respect to contribution, it’s not easy to get up on a Saturday morning and go work at a community event, it’s easier to do a few chores around the house or turn on this season’s sporting event or sit on the couch and do nothing at all.