Everyone develops their own creative process over time.

Some sculptors, Bernini for instance, build sculptures with clay. Others, like Michelangelo, carve from marble. Though I’m no Michelangelo, my creative process tends to mimic the latter, building way too much and then removing massive amounts of excess until I uncover the beauty beneath the banality.

I call this process Subtractive Creation. Unlike most carving sculptors, though, I also have to quarry the marble from which I pitch, chisel, and polish.

The essays on this site are published with around 400 words, even though they often start with 2,000 or more. My novel was 950 pages before it entered the world with only 283. The current book I’m editing, a memoir called Everything That Remains, is 550 pages, though I hope to whittle it down to fewer than 200.

When I edit this way, the final result is far more meaningful—to me, to the reader. The care and handcraftedness shows in the final work. I teach my writing students how to edit this way, too; that is, how to spend 1/3 of their time writing effectively and 2/3 of their time editing, shaping their work into something more concise, more powerful, more beautiful.

Subtractive Creation seems to be an appropriate synecdoche for the rest of life, as well. There will always be life’s excess, always more, always too many inputs bombarding us from every direction. But instead of abhorrent multitasking, instead of trying to get things done, we can make life more beautiful via subtraction.

We can filter out the noise. We can remove superfluous material possessions. We can let go of sentimental items. We can get rid of shitty relationships. We can avoid the UnAmerican Dream. And when everyone is looking for more, we can focus on less.

Sure there’s an infinite amount of materials with which to build our lives, but sometimes the best way to build is to subtract. The best lives are often well-edited, carefully curated lives.

Speaking of my online writing class, the summer session doesn’t start for two months, but there are fewer than 10 seats remaining if you’re interested.

(N.B. Yes, I know that Bernini also sculpted with marble.)

I don’t own many things. But everything I own adds value to my life.

Each of my belongings—my kitchenware, furniture, clothes, car—functions either as a tool or gives some sort of positive aesthetic value to my life. That is, as a minimalist, every possession serves a purpose and/or brings me joy.

Over time, though, situations’ll change. They always do. And so I’m forced to ask the same important question over and over and over again: Does this thing add value to my life?

And but it’s not just material possessions at which I posit this query. I ask it, too, in regard to relationships, social media, and any other potentially superfluous matters in life.

I constantly ask this question because circumstances constantly change. Just because something adds value to my life today, that doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily add value to my life tomorrow. So I keep asking, and I adjust accordingly.

“Does This Thingy Add Value to My Life” is a small sliver of a passage from my forthcoming memoir, Everything That Remains, for which you can find updates on Twitter: @ETRbook. Ryan and I also elaborated on this topic during our live Seattle Meetup (link takes you directly to this specific portion of the talk).

The Missoula sun is working its way through the last bits of snow on the mountains. Puffer coats are being closeted for a few months. Snow tires are being removed from Subarus trepidatiously.

It’s almost summertime in Montana, and just to the north our neighbors in Alberta, Canada are about to receive a (not-so-) surprise June visit from The Minimalists: Calgary on 6/11 and Edmonton on 6/13.

Both meetups are minimally priced (FREE!). And Colin’ll be there too. You can find all the details and RSVP on our tour page.

If you’re waiting for us to come to your city, hold tight. Make sure you subscribe via email to keep updated on future tour stops.

(Big thanks to Matt Bailey from Live Limitless for organizing both events.)

#minstour

The path I’m walking down is not the minimalist path. No, I’m not headed toward some abstract thing called minimalism—never was, in fact.

Rather, the path I’m traversing is one that leads to happiness, growth, actual freedom (not the kind of “freedom” marketed to us on our TVs).

Hence, minimalism is simply the tool I used to clear that path, to make it easier to find and then easier to travel. If you’re having trouble finding your own minimalist path, stop looking. Instead, search for contentment. Find that path—discover what will make you happy—and then allow minimalism to help you clear the clutter that’s keeping you from moving forward.

Related reading: One Thing Each Day

I don’t do things I dislike, but I do do a lot of things that force me to feel discomfort.

If I dislike an activity—if I don’t enjoy it—then I find a way to unfasten it from my daily life.

I’m serious about growth, though. So I often place myself in situations that help me grow. These little stoical experiments frequently make me uncomfortable.

The difference, then, has to do with timing. When something is new and unfamiliar, it is by definition not natural, not comfortable. In the long run, though, I don’t keep drudging through tasks I don’t enjoy. I move on to something new. Life is too short to do shit you dislike.

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Every whole person has wants, cravings, aspirations. We all desire something. We don’t, however, all have the same desires.

Some of us long to create something meaningful, to make a difference in the world, to eschew the so-called American Dream in favor of something better, something more deliberate, an experience-driven life of intentionality instead of a life pushed toward the wrong side of the consumption continuum.

On the other hand, some of us watch the luminous box flicking in our living rooms and yearn for the material things in its advertisements—the things that bring us stress and discontent and often keep us tied to a particular income, which keeps us tied to jobs we don’t love (or worse, jobs we hate), all so we can obtain the shiny objects projected on the glowing rectangle.

In truth, most of us desire both: we desire the meaningful experiences and the stuff. But usually the latter gets in the way of the former. That is, too often our material desires get in the way of a more meaningful life. After all, we are what we desire.

On a white-skyed afternoon in March, the two of us teamed up with our friends Joshua Becker and Courtney Carver to discuss “How Minimalism Is Changing Entrepreneurship” in front of a crowd of roughly 200 folks at SXSW 2013. You can listen to the 60-minute audio recording below.

Timetable

• 0:00 Joshua Becker states the case for minimalism
• 11:59 Joshua Fields Millburn discusses cultivating your passion
• 21:35 Ryan Nicodemus discusses overcoming the fear of money
• 28:35 Courtney Carver discusses practical applications of minimalism
• 40:00 Q&A with the crowd

If you’d like to discuss our panel, you can do so using the #simplework hashtag on Twitter. You can also check out Emily Lyons’s write-up at SXTX.

Every human being has the innate desire to create. We all want to add value to the world. Hence, we are all creators of some sort. Some of us are writers, painters, musicians. Some people scrapbook or take photos or make cool things with their hands. (For a long time the two of us—Joshua & Ryan—created, gulp, spreadsheets in the corporate world, although we weren’t terribly fond of those number-filled grids occupying our glowing screens.)

Every human must also consume. There’s nothing inherently wrong with consumption. It’s necessary. We must eat food, drink water. Plus, we all tend to purchase hygiene products and furniture for our homes and other material possessions that bring us joy—books, music, etc.

Shortly after the industrial revolution, though, corporations found themselves wading through too much supply and not enough demand. So, via advertisements and various talking heads, people were told they needed to consume more. Even today, we are told that in order to “keep the economy going” we have to buy more stuff. What’s worse is that we buy into this lie.

Marketers do a great job convincing us we need more. They establish a void so we will try to fill it. This is no secret. In fact, we take it for granted now; amongst the bombardment, we realize what advertisers are doing, yet we still give them carte blanche with our attention—we let them into our homes and onto our screens and into our personal lives via Facebook and other outlets—and when we do, the void gets deeper.

For most of us, however, the void has nothing to do with a need to consume more. In fact, the opposite is true: when we consume too much, we experience stress and anxiety and depression, effectively deepening the void. Our possessions possess us. They weigh us down mentally, physically, emotionally, and the void becomes cavernous.

Thus, we need to realize that the real void is on the other side of the equation. The void most of us feel is a creative void. We’ve been so caught up in our consumeristic mindset that we’ve forgotten about our inherent need to create. The solution, then, is to create more and consume less. If we spend more time creating, we will necessarily spend less time consuming. This is how we tip the scales of contentment back in our direction. This is how we solve our individual problems of compulsory consumption and mindless self-indulgence.

So let’s each of us pick one meaningful thing we’d like to create, one thing that will add value to the world, and let’s create it. Let’s fill the real void together.

It’s 8:33 A.M. and daylight is peeking through the windows. So far this morning I wrote for three hours (I’m working on a memoir-ish book called Everything That Remains), and then I read for half an hour and exercised a bit: stretches, push-ups, pull-ups, and squats—my usual exercise regime.

In other words, I’ve already done a lot today, and yet there’s still an entire day ahead of me. My secret? I don’t do much. Seriously. Sure, it seems like I do a lot of things, but I don’t.

To put is simply, people can be more productive by doing less. Rather than the normal productivity tropes of planning and scheduling, attempting to force production, we can get more things done by focusing on only the the important stuff first, working through the tasks that truly matter, embracing Real Priorities instead of engaging in fluid inactivity.

Usually that means doing things that’re more difficult than we’d like. For me, writing is difficult, exercise is hard, even reading is not passive. Virtually everything that’s meaningful—everything worth doing—requires a good amount of effort. But of course that’s where all the reward is.

Likewise, the passive tasks—Facebook, email, television, &c.—are easy. And they are fine in small doses (I’ll likely check my email for 30 minutes today or tomorrow, and I’ll certainly spend a few minutes on Twitter ). But there’s no long-term reward for passivity, just a beer gut and an empty existence.

Later today I’ll walk five or ten miles, wandering the streets of Missoula (my form of meditation); and I’ll spend time with friends, correspond with my writing students, and even squeeze in some more writing/reading time tonight—all active tasks that require more from me than the boob tube, with an exponentially higher payoff. Feel free to do likewise.

The most important skill I learned during my dozen years in the corporate world was trust.

When I started managing people in my early 20s, I tried to micromanage their work. The more I tried to be involved in every detail—i.e., the more I tried to do their work on my own—the more distrust I showed.

As the years went on, however, I managed more and more employees, hundreds of people, and I was forced to relinquish control.

Every great leader has this skill. In fact, I don’t know a single great leader who is also a great micromanager.

Trust isn’t something that just happens, though. You have to develop your trust muscle. To do so, one must relinquish control. Simply, let it go.

Sure, people will fail; they will let you down. That’s inevitable  You can let those failures disappoint you, or you can let them help you grow. One failure isn’t the end of the world. Over time, the people who repeatedly succeed will solidify the trust you’ve placed in them, and the people who consistently fail will lose your trust altogether.