Bookworm Transcripts

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I cleaned up my desk before we started recording, Mike.

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When I see that looks sharp, only somewhat.

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What you don't see is this other side.

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When you have a book like we're going to go through today,

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you can't show up to a Twitch stream with a completely cluttered desk.

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That is completely fair.

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So I moved everything off of the area that's on camera and threw it over on the desk.

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That's behind camera.

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A masterful cleaning job.

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Totally. Totally.

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Oh, fun times.

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But I think we'll get to that shortly.

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We do have, I think you have one item, a follow up, if my eyes can read that correctly.

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I do.

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How?

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How was your perfect day exercise?

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Did you manage to put this together?

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I did.

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I made my perfect day and the idea behind this was that from how to be everything,

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that there's a bunch of different pieces that comprise the real work you that is

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completely satisfied and fulfilled in what they're doing.

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So how can you kind of work those into your daily schedule, your daily routine?

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And I think I was able to do that.

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So my ideal perfect day looks like this.

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6 a.m. is when I get up.

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It's when I do my morning routine at 7 a.m.

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I'm writing for, I put three hours.

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I feel if I could sit down and write uninterrupted for three hours, I could crank out a lot of content.

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Sure.

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So at 10 o'clock then, take a break and get outside an exercise, go for a run or on a bike ride.

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11 30 eat lunch with my family, extended lunch hour and a half, one o'clock.

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Typically, that's when I prefer to do any sort of audio because seems like my voice isn't warmed up before before lunchtime.

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Nice.

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So I was a little bit gravelly, feels a little bit strained.

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So podcasting, screencasting, you know, one to four, four o'clock, shut down routine, five o'clock dinner with family, six o'clock games.

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So that's like shooting hoops outside or board games or something.

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9 o'clock bedtime.

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Like that would be a pretty awesome work day.

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Sure.

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Yeah.

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Nice.

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And it was cool to do that because I realized I'm actually not that far from that.

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There's some variability on the day to day, you know, not podcasting or screencasting every single day.

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But for the most part, you know, that's fairly achievable if I'm intentional with how I design things.

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Sure.

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I would be very curious.

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So I have started the book that's following the one we're going to start or talk about today, which is shorter.

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And it talks about a shorter work day.

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I think it would be interesting to see you redo this exercise after our next book.

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Yeah, that's fair.

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Just because having started that one teaser, I think it's going to force us to question a lot.

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All right.

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All right.

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So I'm curious your thoughts on that one when we get there, but that's a little ways out yet.

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We got a couple of weeks yet.

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I'm looking forward to that one for sure.

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It'll be good.

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My wife is asking me all sorts of questions about that one already.

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So I guess without further ado, let's jump into today's book, which is the minimalist home by Joshua Becker.

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This is our second Joshua Becker book.

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My rationale behind picking this is that my wife and I are in the process of prepping our home for sale and buying.

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And in that process, we've had a lot of conversations around what are we looking for in a home?

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Can we cut back on things that we have right now to make a move easier?

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Like we were having a lot of these conversations.

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And when this book arrived and that's why I chose the book,

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having a trust in Joshua Becker, knowing that he had a book about minimizing your home,

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was very curious to see his thoughts on it.

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And when it arrived, my wife took it and read the entire thing in one day, the following day after I received it.

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So she has already been through it and I have now been through it and it's led to a handful of conversations already.

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So question quick.

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Yeah.

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Because you mentioned that you were getting ready to sell your your home.

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I'm curious at the beginning here before we get into the discussion, like, what is the motivation behind selling the home?

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Because I don't think you guys were looking to downsize like we know Joshua Becker is going to recommend.

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Right. Right.

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And so like, what is your thought process on that going in if you're willing to share so we can kind of unpack how that changes?

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Yeah. So going in into that conversation and

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what our rationale is behind the move actually has more to do with location of the house than it does the house itself.

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So our house is a little cramped, but that's because we bought the house before we had kids and now we have three.

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It's a three bedroom house.

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So it's, you know, per American standards and what we'll get into, I think, here at the beginning, it's small.

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We would like to well, let me say this, the square footage of the house, I think is correct.

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Actually, what we've been looking at to move to is the same square footage.

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It's just distributed differently.

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OK.

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So that's a lot of what we're after is a redistribution of the house footage.

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It might be a little bit bigger just because we want to spread out and have more people over at a time, you know, if COVID ever goes away.

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And, you know, so we want to do some of that.

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But honestly, the bigger motivation behind that is that I

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I grew up on a 4,000 acre farm.

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When I walked out my back door, there was 200 acres at my disposal to just run and have fun.

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And my closest neighbor growing up was about a quarter mile away.

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And our second closest neighbor was about a mile and a half away.

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That's what I grew up with.

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And right now I could see one neighbor's house and I know that the other neighbors is within 50 feet of the other side of our house.

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And of course, the other side of the street and behind us, like, I don't do well with that.

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So sure, it's been a great house.

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It's been good for us, but I think we're at a point where we're ready to step out of the city and get into a country scenario.

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I know I will feel a lot more at home there.

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And I think it's having grown up in that scenario.

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I know the opportunities that come with teaching children in those scenarios.

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So it's that lifestyle that we're trying to seek.

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It doesn't have a lot like, yes, there are some changes in the house, but the driving forces, the land.

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Side of it.

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Gotcha.

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OK, because there's lots of reasons people would want to move.

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Yeah.

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And I think probably the most popular one, which Josh Becker dresses in this book is kind of like the keeping up with the Joneses and everybody else has got a big house.

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So I should get right.

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House.

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And I didn't think that was the case with you necessarily, but I am kind of curious, you know, how, what you're looking for specifically, maybe changes as we go through this book.

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Because it does it room by room.

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Right.

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And I don't think we're going to go through every single room.

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I've got a lot of them here, but I don't think we're going to touch every single one just because I think it can get a little redundant.

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Sure.

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Going through every single one.

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So let's let's just jump in here.

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And I didn't write down the stats here because there were so many.

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But Joshua Becker talks us through.

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Three different sections.

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Imagine that.

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It's actually a fourth one in there too.

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Kind of.

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Sure.

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It's even colored differently on the side of the pages.

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Yeah.

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You notice I didn't put it that way.

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But there's really three.

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There's kind of a fourth, but there's three.

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The first is you.

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The second is spaces, which is the bulk of the book.

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And then the third is the future.

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And the first of those you, it starts with basically where we're at right now.

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And your mindsets, which.

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When he starts walking you through the problem and explaining how much we own and

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purchase and how much it costs us to maintain that.

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It kind of gets staggering.

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Like just reading some of those numbers where.

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Here's how much.

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How much we spend on clothing in a year.

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I don't think he mentions that at the very beginning, but at one point he talks about

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how much we spend on clothing in a year, the average household.

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I think it was like $1,700 a year is the average.

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And my wife and I were talking about like, well, we spend.

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Around four or $500 a year on that with three kids.

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And that's like snow boots because the oldest doesn't have a pair at all.

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And we live in Minnesota and there are a number of like things like that.

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A coat goes out where I burn through a pair of jeans every year.

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So like there's things like that we're going to do.

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And it just adds up to around four or $500.

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But we're carrying that average down significantly.

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So it tells me there are definitely people who spend regularly $3,000 on clothes.

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In a year and I have a hard time imagining that currently.

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I'm sure for some people like $3,000, that's it.

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So I'm sure people are all over the spectrum.

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But that's that's his point is we have so much stuff.

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In our houses that.

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You have to clean.

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You have to maintain the more things you have, the more pins you have, Mike, the longer it

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takes you to clean them.

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This is true and keep them up.

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The more books you have, the longer it takes to organize them.

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Like there are so many things that come about because of stuff that you have a

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hard time seeing the impact that it has.

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So he does explain like here's what the problem is.

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And then he starts walking you through like, what do you do about it?

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And goes room to room to explain how it can be applied.

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Yeah, I really like the message of minimalism.

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I feel Joshua Becker's voice on this is is great.

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The room by room stuff that we're about to get into on one level, I'm kind of like,

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why does this have to exist?

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If you just understand the principle and then do the work, you don't need the step by step,

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but whatever, you know, if it's helpful for some people to have those checklists,

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then that's that's great.

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But the big idea here is that when you get rid of the stuff,

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you can see what's really there and that's when you can flow in your purpose.

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If you're talking about a person, one of the things he talks about,

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which I kind of liked was the idea of having a purpose for the different rooms

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in your house, like what is the purpose of your house, essentially?

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What are you, what's the goal that you're aiming to achieve when you have people

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over or whatever in the different, different rooms and things like that?

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And I feel like that sort of intentionality, while I wouldn't necessarily,

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I think, go all the way to identifying with a minimalist.

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I do think that that part of it, I really agree with and that really resonates with me.

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That's something my wife and I have tried to do.

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I think I shared on this podcast about how we rearranged our living room

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because this was going to be the year of rest in relationships.

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So we could have people over and facilitate conversation a lot easier,

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you know, share a meal and then it's all like one big open area.

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You've seen my house, so like you just go from the eating area to the sitting area,

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you know, and continue the conversation.

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That's the goal.

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Been a little bit, little bit tricky trying to live that out in these COVID times,

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but we'll get there.

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And I think that sort of thing, whether or not you like the idea of minimalism,

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is worthwhile thinking about as we get into each of these different rooms,

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he's got different steps for all of them.

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I like a lot of these steps and I feel like just identifying the purpose of the room

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and intentionally designing the room to to accomplish that purpose.

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That will kind of naturally bring about a little bit of the joy of minimalism

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that he's advocating for here at the beginning.

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Right.

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Let me walk you through because I think that what you're just saying

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makes a little more sense when you understand his method.

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And he calls it the Becker method.

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Part of me has an issue when people name things after themselves like that.

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Come on.

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Agreed.

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So who's it, Marie Kondo?

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Does the Condomari method?

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Yep.

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Yep.

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That's exactly what I thought of when I read this.

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I'm like, oh, you went there.

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Like in my mind, you were so much better than that.

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Yep.

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I think I've watched some videos with him in it and I'm guessing like he's not much

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for marketing.

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I don't think anyway, that's been my perception.

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I mean, he's like, he just wants to share what he knows and what he loves.

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And if people want to share that, great.

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If not, he's not going to bend over backwards to promote it.

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Like he's just not.

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And my guess is that this is a system that he goes through and someone said,

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you got to name that.

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It's like, I don't want to call it.

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And somebody named it the Becker method for him.

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That's my guess.

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Sure.

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So that's fair.

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I'm trying to give him a bit of a doubt, but I still was like, come on.

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Come on.

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Some better than that.

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Like, I don't know what you call it though.

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Yeah.

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So anyway, there are five steps to this process.

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And the first of those is what you were just talking about having goals.

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So I have goals for your home and your life in mind as you start minimizing.

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And I think that makes a lot of sense.

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Like whenever you're initiating that process, it's helpful to know why.

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For each room.

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And I remember there was one of the stories where they talked about the purpose for a room,

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the couple put together a purpose for their living space, like their main living room.

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And their goal for it was simply to enable conversations.

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And one of the things they did was set up two chairs right next to the fireplace

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to encourage like one on one conversations and not long after.

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And after they put those there, there, two of their daughters came home from school

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or some event of some sort and we're trying to work through something together.

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And they immediately went over to those two chairs and started having a conversation

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and worked it out.

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And it became known in the family that whenever someone went to those chairs on their own,

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someone else would go join them and help them through whatever situation it was that they were dealing with.

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That became a known thing in their family.

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And I remember I talked to my wife about that one.

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It's like that I want that.

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How do I do that?

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That's so cool.

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That's what he's talking about.

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That's the kind of thing to me where he describes it.

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And I'm like, oh, that's really cool.

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But there's no like my brain does not work that way.

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Yeah, I can see like putting the chairs there and facilitating the conversations.

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But I don't know, like the fact that they happen there and that becomes the place for that.

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Like, I think you're kind of setting yourself up for failure.

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Maybe if you have an idea for this, I hope this is what happens with people in my home

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when I design this room this way.

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And then if they don't do the thing that you're wanting them to do, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a a failure.

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That conversation, for example, if that doesn't take place there, you know,

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I'm playing it to my situation now.

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Let's say it's my two boys and it happens downstairs in their bedroom because they share a room at night.

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But it still is initiated just like that story where they walk in the door and they sit down

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and they start talking about those things.

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Then that's still attributed to the space, so though it's harder to connect those things.

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So every time I hear those stories about like, I design this thing and then it became this.

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And I'm like, that's ascribing an awful lot to that.

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Like you're really you're saying that you you really understand a lot about this situation that maybe you don't.

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Right. Right.

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At least I don't projecting my own insecurity, I guess.

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Like I don't feel like I know enough to make that confident a statement to be like, yes, this is the thing.

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I think for it's interesting to listen to you say that because that is not the perspective

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that my wife and I had on it at all.

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It was more of that's what I want.

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How do we start working our way towards that?

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Was the conversation that we had?

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Sure. Sure.

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Through some of that.

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Yeah. We have yet to so.

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So the goal for you is the conversation and I would agree with that.

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But I feel like the book puts the spotlight on setting up the chairs and the end of my place.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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I get that. Yeah.

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I don't think it sparked that.

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Like, OK.

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Oh, well, we need to set two chairs.

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It was more of because like in our house, our current house, we're trying to do this here before we move because it's very likely it's not until like next summer before we actually decide to put our house on the market.

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So there's a lot of things that have to happen before we get there.

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But one of the things that we were talking about is like, let's start this here so that we can learn and work our way towards it.

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And we know that in our current home, it's not possible for us to put two chairs in a certain spot in a way that would encourage that.

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Yeah. But we can try to figure out ways that would encourage that in our current home.

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Sure.

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We don't know what the answers are to that, but we want to try a few things.

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So that's again, sparking that conversation and being willing to talk through it.

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You know, there are some goals that we want to set.

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And this is one of my main action items is we want to walk through every room in our house and just talk about what's the goal of this room?

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Yep.

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And you know, some of those rooms, it's to encourage conversations.

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Some of those it is to crash after a busy day.

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Some of those rooms, it is to hide the squashmallow.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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Absolutely.

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So inside joke there, my girls.

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Are they, I think they're actually called squishmallows squash squash.

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I don't know what they're actually technically called.

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I think they're squishmallows, but they're big.

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They're like two feet across.

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They're like this big circle and they're super squishy, super soft stuffed animals.

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And our house might get to play this with my girls when it came to this.

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In our house, there's this game hide the squishmallow.

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And what you do is either you and one of the kids or you just you goes and hides it somewhere in the house.

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And there's a whole process of what level of the house is it on?

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What corner is in?

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We've gotten to where we set timers before we'll give hints.

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Well, you have to hunt for a certain amount of time before I give you a hint.

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And it's progressively shorter time.

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So anyway, it's a whole game.

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There are spaces in our house that are very good for squishmallows hiding.

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Now I have no idea what I was talking about, Mike.

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Thanks.

00:21:03

Sorry about that.

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I want to I wanted to interject anyways that I feel like the missing thing from this book and it's not the intention of the book.

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So it's not Joshua Becker's fault necessarily is that you have to, I think, have an intention and a purpose for some sort of vision.

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For the types of relationships and things that you want to happen in your home as a family before you can design your home in a way to facilitate that.

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And again, you're like, he's focusing on the home part, but I guess the part that rubbed me a little bit wrong is like, well, if you just position the chairs correctly, then the stuff's going to happen.

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No, you still have to you still have to put in the work on the family side.

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But the design of your home can help you accomplish those goals for sure.

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It can help her hinder basically.

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Sure.

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So you should take that into consideration when you're figuring out what stuff you want in your your rooms, but don't think that just because you place two chairs by the fireplace that all of your teenage problems are going to disappear.

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Right.

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Right.

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And, you know, one of the things they called out as part of that story, I'm on step one of the Becker method.

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Having the goals, like one of the things they called out is they had cleaned that area.

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I think there was a table between them and they made sure there was never anything on it.

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Like there's that aspect of it as well, where there's an environment that they set up there that was very warm and inviting.

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But I think part of that was because they didn't have a whole bunch of extra in tables with a lamp on it and an extra set up pile of books next to it.

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Like they didn't have that.

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It was very clean and very easy to just go be a part of it.

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So it's not just a matter of throw a couple chairs in a corner.

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That doesn't work.

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Yeah.

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So it's a it's a lot more than that.

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And I think you'll see that as we go through this.

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So so step one is have goals for your home and your life.

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The second step is to try to make it a family project.

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And especially if he says, if you live with family members, in our case, we would be taking our kids around the house with this.

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That way they understand it and learn it.

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Like, why are you doing this?

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Why are you throwing all this stuff out?

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Like that way they understand it as well.

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Step three, be methodical.

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And he's got a what is this, a five step process underneath of that.

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And he says to start with easier spaces and he actually wants you to pick up every single object and ask, do I need this?

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And he gets into.

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You don't kind of.

00:23:44

I know.

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I know it's very similar.

00:23:46

So you're picking up every single object and saying, do I need this?

00:23:52

And then you're going to decide if you're going to relocate it, leave it where it is or remove it.

00:23:57

Those are your three options.

00:23:59

If you're going to remove it, you need to decide if you're going to sell it, donate it or trash it.

00:24:03

Or recycle it.

00:24:05

That's what he's got here.

00:24:06

Once you're done with that space, you go on to the next space and you don't quit until the whole house is done.

00:24:11

That's all on step three.

00:24:12

Step four is as much as you can have fun with the process.

00:24:16

And when you're done, revisit and revise your goals.

00:24:20

I think this is the part where like you were talking about whenever you set those goals, trying to determine what the end result is going to be ahead of time.

00:24:29

I don't think that's 100% his intent there because he does have this revise step as part of it.

00:24:38

But that's the five steps that he has for the Becker method, which seems similar to other methods I've seen.

00:24:46

It is I do like, do I need this better than does this spark joy?

00:24:51

Yes, that's true.

00:24:53

That is very true.

00:24:54

It's picking on a book that we haven't officially read, but.

00:24:57

I'm not going to lie, whenever I was looking at picking because this is my choice, which means that at the end of the episode, I get to pick the next one, which I've done.

00:25:07

But whenever I was trying to figure it out before we started recording today, that particular book showed up towards the top of the list in number of times.

00:25:16

Because of this one.

00:25:17

I like how he defines though. Do I need this as does this help me achieve my purpose or hinder me in that pursuit?

00:25:25

I feel that is a very good description for identifying what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.

00:25:33

And I think that maybe speaks to one of the misconceptions that people have about minimalism.

00:25:40

Myself included when I first came to it is like, well, these are people who own 33 items of clothing and no more and they live in a white house and there's no decorations on the walls.

00:25:51

You know, and that's not necessarily the case.

00:25:54

There's a lot of people like Joshua Becker who you if you saw their home, you maybe wouldn't even realize that that is a minimalist home.

00:26:04

It's just carefully curated and everything in it is serving a specific purpose.

00:26:10

Which I really like that idea of everything in my home being in alignment with our family's purpose and having a reason for being there and everything that's not in alignment with that purpose is out of here.

00:26:23

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense to me.

00:26:25

That doesn't feel like full on minimalism, but in one sense, it is part of me wishes they had they had called it the intentional home.

00:26:36

I wondered about that, you know, the minimalist home coming from Joshua Becker is going to sell better.

00:26:42

You know, that's that's the game that the publishers are going to play and but I think you're spot on like his process is very much down.

00:26:54

I don't want to say the essentialism train, but you get my point. It's along those lines where you're taking every single thing in your house.

00:27:06

And saying does this help me get towards my goal? Do I need this? Does it help me get towards that?

00:27:13

End, you know, as the chat is saying, very Stephen Covey begin with the end in mind. Like that's very much what they're what he's getting at here.

00:27:22

So I like that. I like that concept. It's it's encouraging. So yes, I'm with you on that one.

00:27:28

Cool. Should we start tackling this room by room? At least some of the rooms.

00:27:35

So if you get into spaces, let me get the outline up here just so I can tell you what all of the spaces are that he goes through because we're going to come go through one, two, three, four, but he has I think seven here eight.

00:27:50

And the first of those is us rooms, the living room and family room.

00:27:55

Personal.

00:27:56

I like the name of this one.

00:27:58

The us rooms? Yeah.

00:27:59

Yeah, I think that's a good one. That's a good way to term it. We'll come back to that one.

00:28:04

Personal refuge, bedrooms and guest room.

00:28:06

Iconic. I thought this was interesting. The title there will explain that one. Close, closets and the mud room.

00:28:13

Clean, sweet bathrooms and laundry room, heart of the home, kitchen and dining room, freeing the mind, which I liked this one too, decluttering the home office.

00:28:22

I liked his take on that one.

00:28:24

Unburdening yourself of the past, decluttering the storage and hobby areas in the toy room.

00:28:29

My tendency is to want to throw everything in the toy room in the bin.

00:28:33

And then the last one, your second chance to make a first impression, decluttering the garage and yard.

00:28:40

So those are the different spaces he walks through and has tips for what specifically to look for

00:28:48

in each of those rooms, in each of those spaces.

00:28:52

And again, I picked out four here. The first of which was the us rooms that I wanted to talk about, the living room and the family room.

00:29:01

Because I think that, at least for my wife and I in the midst of this conversation around houses and what specifically is it that we're looking for

00:29:10

and what goals do we want to set. This is a very, very important one to us.

00:29:16

Because we want our house to be very inviting and to encourage deep conversations.

00:29:23

And I have to admit that my wife is way better at this than I am.

00:29:31

And when I brought this particular piece up, like our living room family room,

00:29:36

well, living room and family room are separate in our house. Our living room specifically is on the first room you come into when you walk into the house.

00:29:45

If you were to go look at it right now, it's very, very minimized already.

00:29:49

And I asked her, it's like, okay, in this room, what would you minimize? She's like,

00:29:54

Joe, I've done that already.

00:29:56

She's already been through the process and I start looking around.

00:30:02

Yep, you have, I see that now. This is why I like to spend time in this room and I didn't realize it.

00:30:08

I'm catching up. I'm, you know, the typical male and always behind.

00:30:16

Nice. I like that you are the victim, the happy victim of

00:30:24

Yes. Conditional minimalizing. Yep. Yep. So I don't think I'm touching this one as far as what we're doing in it, but, you know,

00:30:35

our house, I think is in good shape on that one. Sure.

00:30:38

He's got a couple of thoughts for like the purposes in each room, but I feel like for the

00:30:44

us rooms, it's pretty self-explanatory. This is where you connect with people. So whatever is going to be there

00:30:56

should facilitate that connection and you should get rid of the stuff that works against that.

00:31:02

We, I feel like, have kind of been working in that direction with our us room for a while. I mentioned

00:31:10

that at the beginning of the year, we bought new furniture specifically to facilitate

00:31:16

conversations. So instead of that big, ugly, brown couch that no one liked to sit in because

00:31:21

it was really uncomfortable, which is now in the basement and the kids can jump on it and stuff.

00:31:25

We got a L-shaped couch, which is a lot nicer, a couple of chairs and created like this sitting area

00:31:34

sort of thing in our, we have a ranch house where the kitchen kind of extends into the living room

00:31:41

slash family room. So the L of the couch kind of makes a natural distinction from the dining area

00:31:47

where the table is, but it's basically right there. And the intention behind that was we were going

00:31:53

to start doing the kibbutz and having people over once a month, which we've, I think we did a couple

00:32:00

of them. But I can say that setting up the room like that did facilitate better conversations

00:32:08

and it did accomplish the goal that we had of setting it up that way. So I definitely see the,

00:32:13

the power of a focused us room. I also like from this section the idea about selecting the items

00:32:21

that you're going to leave on the wall to communicate a story. Again, I feel like we're kind of doing

00:32:28

this. We've got a big Sean West print that says you'll never influence the world, but trying to be

00:32:35

like it. We've got our family core values printed and hanging in the living room wall. We've got some

00:32:40

family pictures and stuff like that. So I feel like we've sort of, I didn't know that we were doing

00:32:45

that specifically like Joshua Becker codified it for me, but we were using those to tell a story

00:32:51

when people walk into the home. So I like that. I feel like this is kind of confirmation for some

00:32:57

of the things that we've already done. But I do see opportunity to reduce some, some clutter.

00:33:02

And I have walked into our house before when like everything in that upper room is

00:33:08

spotless and put away and it just feels amazing. And it does the reading this book kind of spurs me

00:33:17

to figure out how we can make that easier to achieve. Yeah, I know in our living room

00:33:25

with it being cleaned up, like what he recommends, like it's only got the things in it that are

00:33:33

important to our family. And it's pretty easy to maintain. Like these are some things that he's

00:33:37

got a checklist at the back of each chapter that help you decide if you have cleared out enough

00:33:45

excess from those rooms. And I've noticed that our girls keep in mind they're three, five, and

00:33:55

seven are their ages. They have started building puzzles lately. And

00:34:02

both my wife and I have been attributing it to the fact that she minimized that room,

00:34:07

because it's now got a wide open floor. And it's easy for them to lay things out on the floor.

00:34:14

There's a little fold up thing they can slide it under the couch when they're done working on the

00:34:18

puzzle, but they can easily pull it out and work on it right there. That has been more fun for them

00:34:24

to just always have a puzzle going. And they pull it out all the time, and they've never done that

00:34:29

before. So it's been kind of cool to see them do that together. Again, it encourages that, but

00:34:35

you're absolutely right when a space is completely put together and everything is where it belongs.

00:34:39

And it's not overwhelming when you walk in. It's peaceful. It just is. So I want more of that.

00:34:50

And my desk is not that. We'll get there.

00:34:54

So anyway, that's the living room, the us rooms. The goal of those generally is to spark conversations

00:35:04

and to encourage communication between people, relationships and such. One thing,

00:35:12

having been in your living room, I'm curious your thoughts on this. Our living room does not have a

00:35:17

TV. It does not at all. And that's partially because we have a family room. And the TV is on the wall

00:35:26

where we have an L sectional as well. So that's where we have that. And that's not a space that we use

00:35:36

regularly when we're entertaining. And when we have other people, but it's a ritual on Sunday

00:35:43

nights for our family to come to the family room, pop popcorn and watch a TV show,

00:35:48

which lately has been the repair shop on. That's awesome. That's a really cool show.

00:35:55

So we've been watching that with the girls and it's fun. So that is where our TV is.

00:36:02

What are your thoughts on this? Because if memory serves, you have a TV right dead center in your...

00:36:08

My thoughts is Jay blades is the man. No, I agree. So I've been thinking about this. And we have

00:36:18

entertained the idea of taking the entertainment center, which is in the corner of our living room

00:36:23

with the TV and putting it in the basement. I do kind of like the idea of having the screen

00:36:31

that everybody is going to be watching though out in the open. Just no secret stuff. Nothing

00:36:40

hidden. I don't like the idea of having a TV hanging there. So I think that that TV is,

00:36:49

I don't know, it must be about 15 years old. So when we get a new one, I think what we're going to do

00:36:54

is we're going to take the Drew Kaufman approach and get one of those like Samsung frames,

00:37:00

where it looks like a piece of wall art when it's not being used. And when someone described this to

00:37:06

me, I was like, this is going to look so dumb. There's no way that's going to look good in a room.

00:37:11

And then I saw it. I'm like, whoa, actually that looks amazing. So we're not in the market for a new

00:37:18

TV yet. But I think that's the long term goal is to have something like that in the living room,

00:37:23

where we can have the screen if we need it. But otherwise you wouldn't even know it's there.

00:37:28

Sure. Sure. Yeah. Now I think that's a cool approach. We actually talked about that for our family

00:37:34

room even, because the TV sits above a fireplace currently. So if you were to have a picture of

00:37:43

some sort in that above the fireplace, it looks like a standard picture over the fireplace setup.

00:37:51

And then you flip a switch and now it's a TV. I already have it set up to where there's no cables

00:37:56

coming out of it because I'm nuts and have problems with cables. So I tend to spend a lot of time

00:38:03

drilling holes and walls and running cables through studs and trying to hide it all. So I've done a

00:38:07

lot of that. So that part I've done a lot with, but we've even talked about it in our family room,

00:38:14

which is set up to be around a TV. So yeah, I'm with you. I think what you're talking about

00:38:21

makes a lot of sense. I have not seen Druze set up in person, of course, but it's intriguing to me.

00:38:29

Anyway, so that's the living room and family room. The next one I want to talk about here is the

00:38:35

one called iconic, which is your closets and your clothes. And I have to admit that like I don't,

00:38:44

maybe admitting is the wrong term. If you know me and you've hung out with me a lot,

00:38:51

you know, I have a uniform kind of I'm either wearing a button up and jeans or I have a t-shirt

00:38:58

and jeans on even today. Like I've got a t-shirt and jeans on just with a sweatshirt over it.

00:39:03

So like that is kind of my uniform and I've just gone with that. But if you were to go look at my

00:39:10

closet, there's like half of it is stuff I haven't worn in years. And it just never occurred to me

00:39:17

that I need to get rid of those things. But his term here iconic, it kind of refers to a couple

00:39:27

different things. The immediate one that he's going to talk about here is like the Steve Jobs

00:39:33

concept. Like everybody knows the turtleneck look for Steve Jobs. Everybody knows the gray t-shirt

00:39:39

look for Mark Zuckerberg. People know these uniforms and they are iconic because of that.

00:39:45

And that's not necessarily what he's telling you you should do. Go down to where you only have one

00:39:51

outfit that you wear every single day. He's not saying that. But what he's getting at is picking

00:39:56

clothes and choosing few of them that are set up such that they don't really change over time.

00:40:06

Like more of a traditional look that is timeless and going down that iconic route. That's essentially

00:40:13

what he's encouraging here. At least that was my take on it. And I definitely resonated with that.

00:40:19

Part of that's because I've looked at doing that. Like the whole concept of a capsule wardrobe.

00:40:24

I've looked at that a number of times. I'm not far off of that as it is though.

00:40:28

I just have a lot of extras around it that I need to get rid of.

00:40:32

So I've been on both sides of this because I used to belong to a clothing club. It was 5'4

00:40:42

club now. I think it's Menlo House. And I joined it when it was super cheap,

00:40:46

quit rejoined whenever they would send out those offers that are too good to be true.

00:40:52

And so essentially I would get a couple pairs of pants, couple shirts every single month

00:40:59

through this club. And they're nice stuff. And I always hated clothes shopping. So I'm like,

00:41:08

well, this is an easy way for me to get stuff that maybe I wouldn't have picked out on my own.

00:41:14

But every time I tried it, my wife was like, oh, that looks good. So I'll try some different

00:41:19

things and I'll build up my wardrobe this way. I stayed subscribed for a year or two. And

00:41:25

end up with all of these shirts that I never wore in my closet. So last year got rid of

00:41:36

95% of them, like pretty much all of them kept the one or two that I liked and got new stuff.

00:41:45

I had always wanted to get Ministry of Supply dress clothes. And I need, I don't really,

00:41:53

I work at home. So I'm wearing t-shirts and jeans most days, but I'm also a church frequently

00:42:01

teaching at Bible college occasionally. So I have an occasion to get dressed up. And it was always

00:42:07

frustrating to me, like the night before service on Sunday, I'm getting my clothes ready. And

00:42:13

my pants aren't ready. And there are some shirts that just were like a pain to iron.

00:42:20

So I'm like, there's got to be an easier way to do this. And this Ministry of Supply stuff is

00:42:25

supposed to be no wrinkle. It's supposed to be like, I don't know what they call it. It's supposed to

00:42:31

be really cool. That's another thing is like I play on the worship team. So I'm under the lights

00:42:35

and I get pretty pretty warm up there. So I don't want something that I'm like sweating through the

00:42:40

shirt every single Sunday. You don't want to spit it out every day. Yeah, exactly. And they

00:42:45

were advertising that like no pit stains basically, like that's really super breathable. I forget all

00:42:51

like the fancy marketing terms they use for it. But sure. But I'm like, okay, well, if that works,

00:42:58

like that sounds pretty ideal. And what I ended up doing is I got a couple shirts in a couple

00:43:05

different colors and a pair of black pants and a pair of gray pants. And they were really, really

00:43:10

expensive, but they are the nicest and most comfortable dress clothes that I have ever worn.

00:43:18

And now every single time that I have to go get dressed up, I know I'm picking from two shirts

00:43:25

two pairs of pants. I know it's going to look good. I know it's going to feel awesome. I got

00:43:32

some two also pairs of nice shoes that go with it. So I got some black shoes and some brown shoes.

00:43:37

But that was an essentially, essentially, I minimized my my dress clothes because I was

00:43:45

happy. I did have a large collection. And I basically boiled it down to just a couple of things. And

00:43:51

I can't tell you like how happy that makes me now every single Saturday night when I'm pulling

00:43:56

out my clothes for the next day. It's like, there's the pants, there's a shirt boom done.

00:44:01

Yep. Yep. I'm very similar to that right now. I have a bank of white t-shirts that are my

00:44:08

undershirts for where when I wear a button up. Most nights, whenever I'm laying out my clothes

00:44:15

for the next day, which you should do, by the way, like that's like we're talking about it like

00:44:19

everybody does it, but not everybody does that. You definitely should lay out your clothes the

00:44:23

night before completely changes your morning guaranteed. Mike will back the guarantee on that

00:44:29

one. The will the thing that I do, I'm I'm totally lame. I throw my jeans, underwear, socks, a white

00:44:41

t-shirt. And the really, really hard part is picking the next button up that I'm going to wear because

00:44:46

that part is all the same every single day. But I got lazy with it. Even that I have a bank of about

00:44:53

eight, eight or nine button ups that I wear regularly. I just grabbed the next one on the

00:44:59

hanger, like the next one in line. I just pull it off. I wear it that day. And when I put it up,

00:45:04

it goes up on the on the other side of the rod and it just slides everything down. That's all I do.

00:45:09

I'm just grabbing like people like, Oh, you're wearing that one again today. It's like, am I?

00:45:12

I don't know. It's just in rotation. I just grabbed whatever's next. That's all I do. So I don't,

00:45:20

I don't think about it. Do you iron your button down shirts? I do about every two or three months.

00:45:26

Okay. That's needed that often though. That was a big thing for me with the Ministry of Supply

00:45:33

stuff is that they supposedly don't need ironing and they don't. Like I packed a dress shirt and

00:45:40

dress pants. I went to KC to film the Mastering Mind Maps course, put those in my suitcase,

00:45:46

took them out and hung them up when I got there and did not have to iron them before shooting those

00:45:52

videos. Right. Right. It's pretty amazing. And that alone is kind of life changing. Not having

00:45:58

to iron ever again. The problem I have is I kind of enjoy ironing, which is a weird thing to say.

00:46:04

Sure. Sure. I kind of like it. So part of me doesn't want to let that go. Now I get like what,

00:46:11

if we were to follow what Joshua Becker is talking about here, I should definitely do what you're

00:46:15

talking about because that eliminates some of the maintenance. Like that's some of his thing

00:46:20

here is when you buy things and you're setting this up, you want to pick quality things that

00:46:26

require less maintenance. Like that's a lot of what he's encouraging here. I will say though,

00:46:31

like my particular wardrobe is very like it's almost bland to me. I don't like how limited it is

00:46:41

as as it stands today. So I have put together before a list of like individual items and styles

00:46:49

that I would like to get to over time, but I'm not just going to go out and buy it right now

00:46:55

because it would cost too much to just go out and do that currently. So I've been slowly working

00:46:59

towards it over time. So it's kind of like a capsule wardrobe. I would actually have fewer

00:47:04

button ups and clothes in general, but it gives me more variety in the process. So kind of weird

00:47:13

the way that those whole capsule things work to work out. But that's what I'm shooting for.

00:47:16

But I've been trying to do that for years. But that's, you know, it's all preference at that point.

00:47:24

It is. But I would just challenge people that you really don't need as many clothes as you think

00:47:31

you do. Right. Right. Now I like the whole idea of the iconic wardrobe though. And I guess the

00:47:38

takeaway for me is like the Ministry of Supply stuff. I feel like that's my iconic wardrobe

00:47:45

outside of the home for any sort of professional setting. I can fit all of my nice stuff in a

00:47:55

single suitcase. Nice. And that feels, that feels pretty awesome. One thing he didn't talk about

00:48:01

learning how to fold your clothes. That is true. I'm terrible. There's, there's something about that.

00:48:07

I learned a different way of folding like t-shirts that had sets them up to where like the, the

00:48:14

chest of them is on the face, but they're really tight. And you can stack them to where you can see

00:48:20

that across all of them. I love doing that. I do have my white t-shirts too, just because it

00:48:26

makes them look clean in a nice, neat row. I don't know what it is about that, but it makes me happy.

00:48:33

I even learned how to fold my sweatshirts so that they're like tucked into the hood.

00:48:38

And you pull the strings on it and it tucks it all. I learned how to do all that. So then I can

00:48:43

take them like, you can literally throw them and they stay. It's awesome.

00:48:47

I don't know why I've decided to do this at one point, but I obsessed over it,

00:48:52

hyper focused on it as an ADD nut and went down that train.

00:48:56

Impressive. I have problems. All right, let's move on to the heart of the home.

00:49:03

The kitchen in the dining room. I feel like this is an area where I don't have much say.

00:49:10

I don't know if you're this way, Mike. I am not a cook.

00:49:14

Me either. At all. My wife runs the kitchen almost exclusively that deviates for breakfast,

00:49:23

which is always whole wheat sourdough toast. I always have eggs with it every morning for

00:49:30

everybody like this. That's what I do. It is identical. I don't think about it. It's all the same.

00:49:38

My wife has been amazing at keeping the kitchen very tight as far as like the number of things

00:49:45

that she has in it. And whenever she does have a lot of something, it's designed to be stacked.

00:49:51

She has a ton of stainless steel bowls, but they all are graduated and stack into a real nice

00:49:58

clean system. She does a lot of that, but a lot of what he's getting at is like,

00:50:06

don't do a lot of these unit taskers, as he calls them, where the tool only has one purpose.

00:50:12

I'm trying to think of things like things like an apple slicer. You see these where you push

00:50:20

them down over the top of it and it splits the core out and splits it off into nice neat slices.

00:50:25

It has one task. You can't do a whole bunch of different things with it. You can't a knife.

00:50:31

It has one goal. You don't need it. That's his point. Cut things up, work clean.

00:50:38

That whole concept from a previous book. Yes, that's a lot of what he's getting at is cut back

00:50:45

on all the things they have duplicate that don't have duplicate tasks that they can do

00:50:50

so that you can cut back on the number of things you have in the kitchen.

00:50:54

Again, this is my wife's territory. I told her, I finished this.

00:51:00

It's like, "Okay, I'm feeling really motivated. A good place for me to experiment with this would

00:51:05

be the kitchen. I'm going to run through the kitchen and minimize the kitchen as a trial run."

00:51:10

And she kind of clears at me. I don't blame her. I'm just like, "Just stay out of my kitchen."

00:51:15

It occurred to me when he was talking about eliminating all of those machines,

00:51:22

like the mandolin slicer and all that, the uni taskers. That is the exact

00:51:29

market for a lot of the late night infomercial type stuff.

00:51:33

Yes. Yes.

00:51:35

Is this thing that you have been doing by hand is such a pain. Look how easy it is with this tool.

00:51:45

Then you're like, "Oh, the one time a year I do that, I should have that tool to do that."

00:51:51

Absolutely.

00:51:53

There's probably another application of this in the garage with yard tools.

00:52:03

Oh, sure. Yeah.

00:52:05

But I am not very handy, so I don't succumb to that. I'm not sure if you do.

00:52:12

I have a ton of tools. I have an entire wood shop. So we have a three-card garage.

00:52:18

The third stall is partitioned off and it's set up with a chop saw, table saw. I've got a band saw

00:52:26

on their outfeed table, a couple work benches. There's a bunch of tools that are tucked underneath

00:52:31

of things, tons of clamps. You can never have too many clamps. If you get into woodworking,

00:52:38

all the clamps. That is just the way that stuff works. Yes.

00:52:43

I probably succumb to this a little bit. I can't say that

00:52:48

there are a lot of woodworking tools that are geared towards one very specific repetitive task.

00:52:57

I don't have many of those. There are some because I was doing a project that required

00:53:06

something that was very repetitive. It's the thing. This is part of the problem that he gets at.

00:53:13

Those things that you use once in a while, but not regularly. Those are the hard ones to decide

00:53:24

what you're going to do with. Because again, you're going through each room,

00:53:27

you're picking up everything and you're deciding, do I need this? He does go through

00:53:32

each of these rooms. If something doesn't belong in that room, put it in the spot where it belongs

00:53:36

or get it out of your house entirely. I didn't put the shops and garage and yard and stuff on this

00:53:45

because I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that yet. To me, a lot of what I need to do is just

00:53:52

put organization to it. Convincing me to get rid of those tools is going to be very difficult.

00:54:00

Just because I don't know that I have tools that I don't use.

00:54:04

No, that's fine. I just think it's worth calling out that there's a couple places where these

00:54:10

tools might collect and manifest if you're not careful. It won't be the kitchen. The other one

00:54:18

would be the shop. My shop tends to build on that stuff, but I don't know. That's just the way it goes.

00:54:28

I do like in this section it says that the focus of entertaining is impressing others.

00:54:34

The focus of hospitality is serving others. I like that a lot and I think that identifies why

00:54:42

I have never been fond of the term entertaining. People say we're going to be entertaining,

00:54:49

whatever. We'll have guests over. That's what you think of and I've always had a knee-jerk

00:54:55

reaction against that sort of thing. Hospitality is more in line with my DNA, I think,

00:55:02

where I want to have people over and I don't want to give them a good show. I want to make them feel

00:55:08

good. That's actually a lot of the conversation that my wife and I have had lately in that when

00:55:16

we're looking at a new home to move to, one of the core things that we're looking for is

00:55:24

a kitchen that can see into the dining room, but also the living room. Those great room

00:55:30

concepts, that's what we're after because then it keeps everybody connected at all times

00:55:35

and it doesn't ever have a spot where I need to do something in the kitchen. I need to stop my

00:55:40

conversation with you to go do something in the kitchen so that we're ready for dinner on time.

00:55:44

You don't want that disconnect to happen. In our current home, there's absolutely nothing we can

00:55:50

do about it. There's a great big wall there so you can't be in the living room and have a

00:55:56

conversation with somebody in the kitchen without yelling, which my wife and I have done on occasion.

00:56:00

Hey, what do you think about? That does still happen for us, but not when we have friends over

00:56:09

and we did have, so a couple nights ago, as we're recording this two nights ago, we had a really

00:56:16

close friend over for dinner and when we had them over, part of the conversations were some pretty

00:56:25

sensitive topics and although we were able to have those conversations, one thing that

00:56:31

the husband of the couple pointed out was that this is just a really good meal and this is just

00:56:38

super inviting. Now, it was Saturday night, so we were doing our Sabbath dinner, so it was very

00:56:45

unique in the way that we do a normal dinner. It's very ritualized and they mentioned a few times,

00:56:53

like just this whole process and because it's so routine for us, they felt like they could just

00:57:00

sit down and jump right into the flow of everything that's going on and they just felt very at home

00:57:05

in that process. When we were talking about it the next day, because when they left, we

00:57:11

crashed, like we're not staying at the time, like we're cleaning the kitchen tomorrow, we're going

00:57:14

to bed. So, like that, when we went to bed, the next day we were talking about it and

00:57:20

just the way that the kitchen dining living room is set up, now again, this is my wife's doing,

00:57:26

this is not mine, and just the way that she has that all configured and the way that she was able to

00:57:31

can like set all of that up, it makes things very inviting and makes it to where you can have

00:57:39

those conversations and people feel at peace there. That's, I think, a lot of what we're getting at

00:57:45

with this. There's a lot of potential to do this the wrong way, I think. If you've got a ton of

00:57:53

things on the table and you can't reach the bottle of wine, that's a problem, it's a bit any of you are.

00:58:02

No, I like that. I think your description, it sounds like you've kind of achieved the goal of the

00:58:11

kitchen being the heart of the home. So, what's your takeaway from this section? Are you like,

00:58:19

we're good or was there something that you're like, oh, we could do this better?

00:58:26

So, our, I feel like as we've talked about this, our kitchen is about as good as it's going to get

00:58:34

without changing the kitchen. Okay. The room itself. It's tight, like it's pretty small for

00:58:42

what we're doing with it. My wife is into a bunch of different things, like she's all in on cast iron,

00:58:50

I'm not sure we have anything other than cast iron for pans in our house anymore. And she's all in on

00:58:57

that, she's all in on like French cooking and stuff, she's borderline a home chef. And the kitchen is

00:59:05

very tight for her, not from a, I don't have space to store things, but from a, I don't have

00:59:12

counter space to do the things that she wants to move around. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's not, like,

00:59:19

when we've looked at different houses, we would like a much bigger kitchen. But the goal is not to

00:59:26

put more things in it. The goal is to take what we currently have and spread it out. So, that's,

00:59:32

that's kind of the goal there. Gotcha. But I think as far as our current goes, I think we're in pretty

00:59:36

good shape with it. Cool. I like our kitchen. I believe my wife does too, although you would

00:59:44

definitely not call it a minimalist kitchen. Sure. He advocates for putting the coffee machine away

00:59:52

and taking it out when you use it. I have four coffee machines sitting on my,

00:59:59

on my counter. Ours does go away. I will point this out. So, we have a toaster that we get out

01:00:09

every morning and we have a French press. But all of that gets put into a cupboard after breakfast.

01:00:15

And then it's gone all day long. And then it comes back out the next morning. But that's right,

01:00:20

being at your house, I recall you do have the coffee stuff left out all the time.

01:00:25

We, yeah, we leave out the, we've got a coffee robot for the Chemex. We got an espresso machine.

01:00:33

We've got a fancy grinder and then we've got the scale to weigh the beans. But for us,

01:00:41

I think the justification for this is that coffee is part of the practice of entertaining.

01:00:48

So that was kind of the idea behind the espresso machine is I don't drink a ton of espresso.

01:00:56

I kind of have wanted to dabble with it and figure it out. Yeah. My wife likes it. She knows

01:01:02

how to do it. So we got that as like a joint gift this summer and ends up like she's the one who

01:01:10

drinks it. I almost never drink the espresso. But when people come over like, Hey, you want me

01:01:17

to make you an espresso? Like, yeah, they love that. Yep. And it's a decent espresso machine.

01:01:22

It'll make one that's as good as the coffee shop down the road, whatever. So sure. That's kind of

01:01:29

a little thing that we can do, which people are always interested in the process. So they're always

01:01:36

asking questions like, what are you doing? And so I kind of feel like coffee in a sense in that way

01:01:41

is bringing people together. Right. Right. And then also at the end, you get to give them

01:01:47

not just a coffee, but like a cortado or a latte or something custom that you've made just for them

01:01:53

and it makes them feel really good. Yeah. We had an espresso machine for a while. We would do

01:01:58

that sort of thing. I'd make lattes for people and the concept of like they get to watch you

01:02:03

froth the milk and pour it in. Yep. They just love that. Exactly. We don't like,

01:02:08

I'm in the process of selling it because we haven't used it in years. And what we would like to do

01:02:16

is buy a nice one at some point, but to buy the nice ones that do what we wanted to do. They're

01:02:22

like a thousand bucks. So they're not cheap. Ours was not nearly that expensive. I'm gonna say

01:02:28

there's a whole spectrum. You can get them from 60 bucks. The most expensive like in-home non

01:02:33

commercial ones that I've seen are like $18,000. Yep. I was gonna say $20,000. Yeah, they're nuts.

01:02:39

So I'm not talking about going to that level though I would gladly take it. But that's a thing

01:02:45

we've talked about before because when we've had folks stay overnight with us, like friends and

01:02:50

stuff that come and spend a weekend with us or something like that just makes the whole trip.

01:02:55

Like they just love that. I would gladly take that on trips. Like if we were doing, we have a

01:03:00

tendency when we do vacations, we'll do them with another couple or another family. Like I would

01:03:05

totally bring that. It would just be a whole different experience with that. Anyway, espresso

01:03:11

machines, like those are not things that you put away though. Yep. Those are usually like

01:03:16

depending on what you get, you're like piping water into them and they have water stay in them

01:03:22

overnight sometimes. Yeah ours is just a small one with a reservoir. It's pretty basic but it

01:03:29

does the 15 bar pressure. Sure. It's the Gaja Classic Pro. Okay. Yeah. Gaja makes good stuff too.

01:03:38

How did we get on that? Okay. So kitchen. Minimize kitchens because I feel like we

01:03:45

taken the intention and this is kind of, well, does I dissect this more when we get to style and

01:03:51

rating? But I've taken the intention and the purpose behind the kitchen and applied it in my

01:03:56

own way or my wife has applied it in her own way too. And the result is maybe the same as what

01:04:05

Joshua Becker is going after but you definitely would not call our kitchen minimalist. Sure.

01:04:09

In any sense of the word. Let's go to the one that's maybe going to hurt me the most here.

01:04:17

Freeing the mind, the home office. I'm a horror in this sense. I have a peak design

01:04:27

everyday backpack. That's what I use for my daily carry backpack. And I have it segmented into three

01:04:35

different compartments because it's configurable. You can set up how you want the compartments set up.

01:04:41

The bottom compartment is nothing but cables that I use on occasion. And there are cables there. I'm

01:04:51

not sure I've ever used but I keep them and will keep them. Oh, Joe. And despite reading this,

01:05:00

I will still keep them in there because with what I do with IT support, I never know when I'm

01:05:10

going to need those things. I keep like three HDMI cables in my backpack. I've always got,

01:05:15

you know, instrument cables and I've got a zoom H4N Pro that I actually keep in that bag

01:05:22

at all times because I never know when I've got to plug something in and record it or I need an

01:05:26

interface off of something to do a meeting of some. So I never know when that stuff is going to happen.

01:05:32

So I keep that stuff around all the time and it's just with me all the time and people are always

01:05:39

why do you keep so much stuff? It's like, well, the next time you ask me for help setting up your

01:05:44

meeting and you can't get it to work and I pull my bag out and I grab that cable and plug it in for

01:05:49

you, that's why. It saves me a lot of headaches. No, I get that. There's definitely,

01:05:58

this is the one that I had the most trouble with too. I think there's lots of ways you can push back

01:06:08

on minimalism with the home office to bring up friend of the show, Drew Kaufman again,

01:06:15

while back he was posting pictures of people's messy desks on Twitter. Do you remember that?

01:06:22

Yeah, I remember seeing this. Yeah. Yeah. So I took issue with the statement he makes that you

01:06:28

can't be creative when your office is a mess because I feel like Drew proved otherwise.

01:06:36

I do think there's some truth though that people would create better perhaps with a clean office

01:06:43

setup. I know that's definitely true of myself. I enjoy being in my office a lot more when it is

01:06:51

clean and there's not junk out all over. But what does a clean office look like? I've got lots of

01:07:02

issues with his recommendations here from books to pens. You name it. So I even know where we want

01:07:12

to start. I'll start with pens. I feel like it's the easy one. Okay. Okay. So he says in the book that

01:07:21

he has three pens. He's got one in on his desk, one in his drawer and a sharpie in his bag for

01:07:29

signing books when he's out somewhere. And yeah, there's no way I'm going to do that.

01:07:37

Now I have reasons for owning the pens that I own. I mentioned that I buy a pen when I

01:07:48

ship a big project. I got another one coming because I've shipped Call-Minbox. Yeah.

01:07:54

It's like my little trophy case. And so that is not the same. I don't think it's an apples to apples

01:08:03

comparison necessarily, although strictly from the utility of you need something to write with,

01:08:09

you could make the argument that it is. However, I don't know, like the goal is not to, in my goal

01:08:19

when designing my office was not to only have the things that I absolutely needed here.

01:08:26

It was simply to create a space that I enjoyed working from that made it easy to create.

01:08:33

And I feel like I've accomplished that. I've made some very specific design choices,

01:08:39

like having lots of pens, but I walk in my office, I see that box, I open it and I pick up the one

01:08:45

like that brings me joy every single time that I do it. Mission accomplished. And so things like

01:08:52

that and the books thing which we'll talk about next, I'm sure, this is every single time I have

01:08:57

to make a decision like this, which goes directly against his advice. I feel like it's another

01:09:04

evidence that minimalism just isn't for me. Sure. And I don't like that. But I feel like I've

01:09:12

made my piece with it. Sure. No, it makes sense. You know, if you have your thing,

01:09:18

it's totally fine. I don't think he would argue with that. Now, there's a limit to that though.

01:09:28

There is. Who knows if he would say you're over that limit or not? I don't know. I know that

01:09:34

for me, there's a number of pens that I just don't use. But I have a hard time letting them go.

01:09:42

Because they were some of the first fountain pens I purchased. And frankly, they're cheap.

01:09:48

So they're easy to say, I could get rid of this. You know, if it was a $300 pen,

01:09:54

that's a different conversation. Then I'm looking at like, can I sell this? No, the conversation

01:10:00

changes. Right. My issue has a tendency to be things that I don't think about

01:10:05

with the home office. Like as I'm looking around here in spaces you can't see, like,

01:10:12

there's just a lot of like, there's a couple cables lying there. There's actually a model airplane

01:10:16

there that I have no idea where that came from. I have a couple like wind screens for microphones.

01:10:22

This is part of my thing. There's a D.I. box for instruments. There's a couple instrument cables.

01:10:26

And there's a bunch of stuff that my girls have made me that like, they just put it on my desk so

01:10:32

that they know Dad sees it. But there's so much stuff here that it's hard to get through that.

01:10:38

Who knows how many stickers are around just because you buy something and it comes with stickers.

01:10:42

So like, there's just a ton of stuff that I have captured over the years. And I've, I don't think

01:10:51

I've ever gone through it and just said, does, do I need this? Will I ever use it? I don't think

01:10:56

I've done that. So as far as like all the little trinkets and stuff, I desperately need to

01:11:02

do that. So that is an action item I have here is like, I need to go through my home office,

01:11:08

find a home for everything. And hopefully offload a ton. So I need to find a home for everything in

01:11:16

my home office. As far as pins go, I'm planning to go through them. I don't expect to have any

01:11:23

outcomes from that one. If I do anything, it may be to buy a couple of like pin rolls

01:11:31

of some sort so that I have a better way of managing them. Right now they just lay out on a

01:11:35

desk. Almost all of them. Yeah, it's no good. There's three or four of them each day that gets

01:11:42

rotated every day that are in my bag. And I use those for my bullet journal each day. But

01:11:50

I need to do something with that. And people keep giving me pins too. So I'm not buying them,

01:11:57

but I still accrue them. I actually, last weekend, I went through and basically minimized my office.

01:12:11

I took everything out of the closet behind me, put it all on the ground because it was all just

01:12:18

like in giant piles in there. And then got rid of like half of it and put the stuff that I wanted

01:12:24

back in there and organized the stuff on the shelves in a much more thoughtful way. Sure.

01:12:31

And I didn't even think about it at the time that I was minimizing my home office, but that's

01:12:35

totally what I was doing. Just because every time I went in there, I would get frustrated seeing the

01:12:42

giant mess. But I have no desire to do that with my pens. I have no desire to do that with my desk,

01:12:50

which isn't like one of those really clean bare desks. But also I feel like everything on here is

01:12:59

a tool that I use and serves a purpose. Like I really, really am happy with my desk setup at the

01:13:06

moment. So the other thing left then is the books over here. I have a giant bookcase full of books.

01:13:13

And there is no way I am getting rid of those books.

01:13:18

Yep. I think there is a kernel truth to what he's saying. Like if you've read a book,

01:13:25

you could theoretically give it away, sell it, whatever, because you have absorbed the knowledge

01:13:33

from it. I mean, it's not very often I have gone back and reread a book a second time, but it has

01:13:40

happened. More frequently though, I have gone back because I take these ridiculous notes.

01:13:46

And I go into the book itself and I find like the diagrams from the concepts that we're talking

01:13:53

about or specific quotes that I've jotted down in the my note files. And I cannot imagine not having

01:14:03

that reference, physical reference right there for me. Like I have it in a digital reference too.

01:14:09

But I love having those books on those shelves. Well, I don't have a digital reference

01:14:16

to that stuff. So I have a tendency to write in margins a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit

01:14:28

in these. I mark things up and have like my own index in the back of them, like in the physical book.

01:14:34

Now I also take some of those notes and transfer them into my bullet journal. So I'll have things

01:14:42

there, but like people who've watched me on stream enough, like I have books sitting on this desk

01:14:49

fairly regularly and they tend to rotate because I'm taking them off the shelves here above the

01:14:54

camera and looking through them. So I have a tendency to pull these things down and

01:15:01

and go through them. I also my wife has started flipping through these books. Like she's reading

01:15:08

the art of gathering right now, Pray a Parker. And it was because at one point I mentioned she

01:15:14

might be interested in reading it and she was taking what we were talking about in the minimalist home

01:15:20

and like, okay, well, I'm trying to make my home better suited for having people over.

01:15:25

Joe has this book, The Art of Gathering, which is about that. Let me read that. So like she has

01:15:32

now started using some of those from time to time. I feel like I'm justifying my hoarding of books,

01:15:40

but I do tend to reference a lot of them regularly. I don't know if that's going to wane

01:15:50

over time as a crew more, but I also know there are some that I have never picked up

01:15:57

since reading them the first year and there are some of like paid to think.

01:16:02

It's the first one I saw Goldsmith wrote it. Never once have I opened that book since we

01:16:08

wrote it for bookworm, not once. Am I ever to open it up again? Probably not. And yet it sits on the shelf.

01:16:18

[laughs]

01:16:20

And I don't want to get rid of it. So what do I do with that? I don't know. I should probably get

01:16:27

rid of it, but I don't want to. Like if I were to follow Joshua Becker's mentality, I probably

01:16:34

should get rid of that. But there's something about having them. It's almost, it's similar to

01:16:41

your pins in a trophy case. It's similar to that in that I like, now I should say this too,

01:16:50

if it's a non-bookworm book, I probably am more willing to let it go. There's something about the

01:16:56

bookworm books that I like want to keep that bank of books and just say like here's all the

01:17:03

bookworm books. That's what I should do. I should totally take this all of these and lay them out

01:17:08

somewhere. I'd have to do it in the yard and climb up on the house to take a picture of them,

01:17:12

to just get a picture of every book we've done for bookworm. To date, that would take a lot

01:17:18

of space. It'd be really cool, but it would take a long time to do that. So that's the sort of

01:17:25

thing that I have in the back of my mind. It's like I don't want to let those go. But again,

01:17:30

if it's a non-bookworm book, I think I would be more willing to do that.

01:17:34

Sure. I don't know. I just feel like with minimalism, it's easy to say, well, you can keep the stuff

01:17:42

that's important to you, but I keep finding exceptions of things that are important to me.

01:17:47

So does that make me not a minimalist? I don't know. I'm attracted to the idea. I like the

01:17:54

intentionality and the purpose behind every room. But this one specifically with the office,

01:18:01

I feel like if I'm just going to follow his checklist in the book, it's actually going to make me sad.

01:18:06

I'm going to be less productive here than I am right now.

01:18:08

Yeah. No, that's fair. Well, I don't know the answer on the books. I think for now,

01:18:13

I'm keeping them. As you should. I also, I think there are people that have significantly more than

01:18:19

I do that could probably benefit from this. I don't even have a full floor to ceiling bookcase.

01:18:27

So I'm not done. My goal one day is to have one of those libraries with the sliding ladder.

01:18:35

But every book in that library is not going to be a filler book. It's going to be a book that I

01:18:43

have bought in red. Yeah. I like it. I'm keeping my books. All right, let's look at, we have two

01:18:49

more topics here. One is a maintenance guide that he slips in here. In the physical book,

01:18:55

I love that he did this. He has the edges, a dark gray color. So they're easier to find.

01:19:03

I think that's so that you can reference them a lot easier, you know, because you're keeping these

01:19:08

books so that you can go back to them. So I'm not getting rid of this. I want to just read this,

01:19:16

these lists. There are one, two, three, four, and they're essentially triggers. And then what you do

01:19:24

during those, like after that trigger has happened. Okay, this will make sense as I get going here.

01:19:29

So one of those is a daily. So this is a daily maintenance guide. And just to run through this

01:19:35

quickly, straighten up the bedroom, put paper where it belongs, put back toys, clean up homework,

01:19:40

tidy the living room and family room, store media out of sites, check the entryway, reset the kitchen,

01:19:46

return things left out in the bathroom. Like those are things you do daily. Essentially,

01:19:51

you're picking up after yourself instead of leaving things out for the next day, like we did after

01:19:55

we had friends over on Saturday night. But again, that was an exception. We usually do that sort of

01:20:00

thing, at least my wife does. I'm terrible. That's daily. Okay, weekly. Take out the trash and

01:20:08

recycling, wash, dry fold and put away the laundry and clean the bathrooms. Now the first two I do,

01:20:15

for the most part, my wife does some laundry too. We kind of share that one. But I have it on a list

01:20:20

to make sure I do that weekly and usually do it over the weekend. So those are just kind of like

01:20:25

keep your house up to date. Then he has these yearly maintenance guides. I feel like this is

01:20:31

where it starts to get interesting. Okay. So after Christmas and birthdays, so you're revisiting

01:20:39

some of the goals to basically make sure that you're keeping your minimalism up to date.

01:20:48

So after Christmas and birthdays, after any holiday you decorate for. So some people do that for

01:20:55

Easter. Some people do it for Halloween. After filing your taxes, spring cleaning, the annual

01:21:02

neighborhood garage sale, we've never done that. I don't understand that. The start of a new school

01:21:09

year, the transition from the warm season to the cool season or vice versa, which we're kind of in

01:21:15

that one right now. So those are different periods at which you can revisit those individual areas.

01:21:21

I know like after tax season, my wife and I have a tendency to revisit our insurance plans.

01:21:26

Do we have what we need? Is it enough? Do we need to increase decrease change those outs?

01:21:32

Those are all things that we have a tendency to to to revisit. And then the last section

01:21:38

here is life season maintenance guidelines. And these are just a series of questions

01:21:45

that you can ask yourself during I guess big transitions. Okay. Are you finished with your

01:21:53

college studies and starting your career? That's a good time to revisit again the minimalism

01:22:00

goals that you have set for yourself. Are you getting married? Are you adding a child to your

01:22:04

family? Are your children going through their own transitions? Are you getting a new job

01:22:09

enduring a period of unemployment trying out a different career path or starting a business?

01:22:13

Are the kids starting their adult lives outside your home or have you lost a spouse through death

01:22:19

or divorce? Is someone moving back in? Are you retiring? And these are all like the goal of this

01:22:26

is to give you times that are triggers to revisit your minimalism practices and the things that

01:22:35

you have around in your life. That's basically what he's trying to do is just offer you those times

01:22:40

in order to keep you up to date. I agree. Not sure how useful this section really is though.

01:22:48

I like the idea of the trigger moments being like, well, this is when you should be thinking

01:22:54

about or reconsidering your approach to minimalism. But this is a lot.

01:22:59

I don't know. Do we have to go through all of the checklists and all of the books then

01:23:08

whenever one of these is triggered? Totally. That part's missing.

01:23:11

I think that it has to apply to whatever has changed.

01:23:19

So if you're going through a job change, the biggest one is probably going to be home office

01:23:27

or an office of some sort. That is going to change potentially. So you're going to have to make

01:23:34

some adjustments there or maybe your schedule changes. So the timing of when you're going to do

01:23:39

things is going to change. So you have to revisit that. If you're having another child,

01:23:46

you're going to have to revisit what you keep and what you get rid of. You're going to be adding

01:23:50

things. Especially if it's your first child. You're about to add an entire room to your house most

01:23:54

likely. That's a whole different conversation. But you're going to have that sort of thing.

01:24:00

And you need to revisit these questions whenever you get to those points. I think that's a lot of

01:24:04

what he's getting at. I don't think he's necessarily saying that you're now moving into a new job.

01:24:11

So now you need to revisit what you keep in the medicine cabinet in your bathroom.

01:24:16

Right. I don't think that applies. I think you have to focus it to whatever it is that's being

01:24:21

changed. Yeah. I guess what would have been helpful though is, and this is way beyond the scope of

01:24:27

this tiny little guide. But where does reconsidering everything in the bathroom fit? Is it when you

01:24:35

clean the bathroom? Or is it part of the spring cleaning? Or is it both? Yeah. I feel like there's

01:24:44

a danger where you could just keep going back and minimizing. Even if it's just maintaining and

01:24:52

it's easier the second time. I feel like the promise is less maintenance. But there's a potential for

01:25:00

more because you're constantly looking at it. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So maybe that's just me being

01:25:07

paranoid because I haven't done it right. I don't know. I've not gone through it. So I couldn't tell

01:25:13

you. I just know that whenever when things are adjusting in an area, I feel like it makes sense

01:25:19

to reevaluate it. Even in very first book for bookworm, getting things done, David Allen talks

01:25:26

about doing that whenever you change jobs or you are promoted or whatever it is when your day to

01:25:34

day lifestyle changes in any form, he recommends either going through the book or reevaluating your

01:25:40

systems as a whole during those times because it's going to change and the way you operate is going

01:25:47

to change. And that's a good time to reevaluate it. I kind of see this as the same advice.

01:25:52

But I don't think he calls out specifically. To your point, he's going through those questions.

01:25:58

You're sending a kid off to college. Okay. What should I do at that time? He's just saying,

01:26:06

revisit your minimalism. What does that mean? Exactly. It's going to be different in each of

01:26:10

those scenarios. So what do you want me to do with those? You kind of have to draw your own

01:26:14

conclusions with that piece, which is what I'm doing for you, kind of, but yes.

01:26:20

Yeah. This is the approach that kind of drives me nuts though. I mean, like,

01:26:26

either tell me exactly what to do or don't tell me what and when to do it. Sure.

01:26:31

Makes sense. So there's one last section here I wanted to talk about. This is the future.

01:26:38

And in the midst of all of this, probably a piece we haven't talked about a lot is

01:26:45

how people's mindset changes. Yeah. And their own views of things change over time as you're doing

01:26:54

these aspects. And one of the big ways that he encourages you to see minimalism is in downsizing

01:27:04

your house. And he shows a chart. Oh, I don't have it in front of me. He shows a chart of the

01:27:11

average number of square feet in a house per person living in that house from different countries.

01:27:21

And I remember in Japan, that number was like 100 in something. In the US, I think it's like 300

01:27:30

something square foot per person. And there was one, I thought, was like 700.

01:27:37

It's got to be more than that because I jotted down in my notes that home sizes are steadily

01:27:42

increasing. And he had some stats from 1975 to 2015. In 1975, the average home size was 1,645 square

01:27:50

feet. And the average household size was 2.94 people. But in 2015, the average home size was 2,687

01:27:59

square feet. But the average household size had gone down actually to 2.54 people.

01:28:04

Yeah. I looked it up. Okay. So I found it Hong Kong is 161. Japan is 379. The United States is 832.

01:28:16

There's only one country that beats us. Can you guess who it is? Do you remember?

01:28:20

Australia. Australia at 960. So the Australians need about 1000 square feet per person.

01:28:27

Quite a bit when you start thinking about it. That is. That's a lot. So that's a lot of square

01:28:35

footage. He tells the story of how his family downsized to, I want to say it was a 1600 square

01:28:42

foot home is what they moved to. We currently live in a house. It's about 1,800,

01:28:50

which feels tight as it is, especially from an entertaining stance to use the term you don't like.

01:28:57

So we feel like we want to spread out a bit. So when we've been looking at houses, we've been

01:29:02

looking at like 1,900 to 2,000. So it's just a hair bigger. But again, we're paying more attention

01:29:10

to how it is laid out than anything. But a lot of people, we have a lot of friends in our area

01:29:17

doing similar moves, one of which they have now granted, they have four kids, but they just moved

01:29:23

from a 2,000 square foot home to a 3,500 square foot home. And I'm like, wow, that's a lot. But

01:29:31

we also have a friend. They just built a home. And they were living in a 4,500 square foot home.

01:29:41

Built one. And the one they built is 2,300 square foot. So it's almost half the size. And

01:29:49

they love it. So they downsized significantly. So I don't know. Our house is weird because we have a

01:29:58

big ranch house, which when we bought it, everything was on the main floor. The basement was open.

01:30:06

It's a walkout basement, but it wasn't finished at all. And the way that they had

01:30:13

designed it, it was like all big and open. And it was kind of like a blank canvas we saw it as.

01:30:18

So we knew we wanted to grow into that as we, as our family grew. But it's like 1,800 square feet

01:30:27

on the top level. And essentially that below it too, which is where my office is now and the

01:30:33

kids bedroom is now and the playroom stuff like that is now. But it's now four bedrooms, two baths,

01:30:42

with five kids. Everybody's sharing a room except for Adelaide, the girl. And that just feels

01:30:50

right to me. So I have no desire to go down to a smaller house. Now am I willing to,

01:30:59

if I needed to, yes. In fact, my wife and I struggled through that a year or two ago.

01:31:03

We actually found a house which had five bedrooms, three bathrooms, but it was actually smaller,

01:31:10

quarter mile from our current home. But it was just not as nice, not as nice of a neighborhood.

01:31:17

Would have definitely met all of our needs though and would have been less of a mortgage payment.

01:31:25

And we had entertained the idea of, should we go there? That was our form of minimalizing,

01:31:30

I guess, if we would have done that. Just to pay off the mortgage as quickly as possible

01:31:34

and then figure out where we want to go from there. I feel like the place we're at now with this house

01:31:42

has the potential to be like our forever house. So I don't know what to do with that.

01:31:51

Because I think there is some different aspects to this. One, yeah, you want to,

01:31:56

the whole idea at the end of this book, when he's talking about like, you don't want money to control

01:32:03

your values, basically. He says, once money is taken out of the conversation, you can let

01:32:09

your values lead the way. Totally agree with that. So the goal is obviously, pay off the mortgage as

01:32:15

quickly as we can so that we can own our home outright. Don't know anybody, anything. Everybody

01:32:23

says, when that happens, completely changes your relationship with your home. Totally get that.

01:32:27

That is the goal. But in the meantime, I want to have a decent place for my kids to grow up.

01:32:36

And I want to have a place where we can entertain people. And I feel like where we're at now is not

01:32:43

what we have now isn't extravagant. It's not unnecessary, but it allows us to accomplish those

01:32:49

goals. Sure. Sure. And I feel like that is a really tough line to walk. It's something I've

01:32:54

struggled with a lot. Like, well, you say this is important to you. You should just go hard and

01:32:59

knock out the mortgage, whatever. And like, well, yeah, it is, but it's not the only thing that's

01:33:02

important. Right. Right. There's a lot more to it than that. Keeping your family happy is also

01:33:08

important. And Dave Ramsey would say, don't spend more than X percent of your mortgage.

01:33:17

We're not, I'm not trying to justify something that is living outside of our means either.

01:33:26

But I am intrigued and tempted by this stuff and then the fire stuff where you just get completely

01:33:34

out of debt. Right. There's an element of that that is really appealing to me.

01:33:39

But also, I don't know, I feel like I'm in a spot where I kind of have to take different elements of

01:33:46

that stuff and try to work it into my current situation because I don't feel like being married

01:33:53

and with five kids, like, I can just say, okay, everyone tomorrow, like we're starting our

01:33:58

minimalist journey. Rice and beans for dinner every night. Right. Right. That's, that's really

01:34:06

hard to reconcile those things because I don't think that those camps lend themselves very well

01:34:12

to moderate fans, I guess those tend to be the things where you have to be all in in order to

01:34:20

make it work. What, what do you think about about that? How do you balance that sort of stuff? Well,

01:34:26

we're, we're, I don't want to say we're big Dave Ramsey fans, but we follow a lot

01:34:33

of what he recommends. We're not in a spot like the only debt that we have is in the house.

01:34:41

That's it. So we're not really down the whole, you know, debt snowball and stuff that, you know,

01:34:48

he recommends, we're past that. We, when it comes to the house, we have a tendency to shoot for,

01:34:56

you know, I forget what the number is, a certain percentage of income. I can't think of what it

01:35:03

is. I'm not trying to keep it from you. I just don't remember what it is. So we're shooting for

01:35:09

that, but we also know that income can change over time. We're aware of that. We tend to not

01:35:18

count on higher incomes, but we also know that generally it goes up over time. So we know that

01:35:26

we don't, when it comes to choosing what we're going to inflict on our family.

01:35:32

That's a good way to put it. You also have to keep in mind that our, our kids are young enough

01:35:38

that they generally go with whatever we say. Yeah. They don't really have strong opinions on

01:35:44

what we do. I say that and yet, you know, our seven year old is very in tune with

01:35:50

what is changing and has opinions about it, but not it, not so much that it's a big deal to her if

01:36:00

she doesn't get that preference. So we've had the conversation about, you know, we're looking at

01:36:05

moving, you know, if we moved, would you like your own room or would you like to continue sharing a

01:36:11

room? And you would generally think that any and every kid would immediately say, I want my own

01:36:17

room. They didn't. Like the way that we posed it was, you know, would you like your own room?

01:36:23

Or would you like to share a bedroom with another room that has your clothes and your toys and your

01:36:31

stuff in it and have those two separate spaces? Sure. And all of them wanted the two rooms

01:36:38

shared collectively instead of their own room, which I was not expecting. I was expecting them to

01:36:45

have stronger opinions towards their own rooms, which is fine with me because it's the difference

01:36:50

between two bedrooms and three. So, you know, I'll take that. But I can't say that we would give

01:36:58

them all their own room, even if they had asked for it. We've never done that to do. We don't,

01:37:04

where we're at now because it's not even possible. And I think that whenever we're choosing what

01:37:10

we're going to do for our family, we have a pretty clean set of lines when it comes to finances.

01:37:18

Like we're not just going to jump off and hope. Yep. Really ever. We always know before we've made

01:37:26

a decision to and move forward with it, like the concept, you don't quit your job until you know

01:37:31

what your next one is. Like that concept is what we tend to adhere to very closely.

01:37:38

So that is much less risky. We're not necessarily risk. Well, we're fairly risk-averse, I guess,

01:37:46

is the way to say that. So, we're not going to put ourselves in a spot that we can't afford,

01:37:52

but we're also not going to make a jump without knowing at least a decent amount of what the

01:37:59

outcome is going to be. I don't know if that answers your question or not.

01:38:02

It opens up another conversation which you're probably out of time for.

01:38:08

This is a lot of the stuff that talks about in the Life and Air book, the audiobook that I went

01:38:15

through. Oh yeah. And I feel like what you're hitting on is that what is really important to

01:38:20

your family, maybe isn't what you think is important to your family. Sure. And most people

01:38:25

who are breadwinners, they can just default to, well, I got to provide nice stuff because that's

01:38:30

my role. No, what they really want is they want dad around. Yeah. Yeah. That sort of thing.

01:38:37

So I feel like there's some conversations that people need to have in terms of that, but in terms of

01:38:44

figuring out what is the right amount for minimalism that is still really hard for me.

01:38:54

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't know, we have, I shared the dimensions of our house and stuff,

01:39:03

it's still sometimes it feels like we're right on top of each other. I don't necessarily think

01:39:08

that's because of the layout of the house. Sometimes I think that's just the volume of the people in it.

01:39:14

Sure. Sure. And I'm not sure there's anything I can do about that. I'm not saying like,

01:39:20

oh, we need a bigger house so we can space out more stuff like that. But yeah, going down to a

01:39:26

smaller house, not appealing to me at all. I don't want to do that. But, you know, some of my drive

01:39:34

towards something slightly bigger is simply so that we can spread out what we currently have.

01:39:40

Like, we're not talking about adding things, we're talking about spreading out what we currently

01:39:44

have. Yep. Which maybe that's a justification. I don't know. I think the argument would be that

01:39:51

once you have the extra space, you'll fill it with extra things and then you'll find yourself

01:39:54

in the same situation. Could be. I'm not saying that about you guys specifically, but that's kind

01:39:59

of the trend, the American trend, I think. Yeah. Very fair. All right. I have three action items.

01:40:06

Do you have any? To tell you the truth, I do not because the one thing I really wanted to do

01:40:16

was to minimize my office and feel like I've done that to my satisfaction. I don't want to get

01:40:25

rid of my books or my pens. And so I'm not going to follow his checklist. I was kind of disappointed

01:40:30

that I didn't want to apply more of these these checklists. I guess if I was going to pick one,

01:40:36

this is a really an official one, but I do want to have a discussion with my wife about

01:40:41

having about deciding what's the intention for the different rooms and making sure that

01:40:46

everything that's in the rooms in our house is helping achieve the goal of that room. Sure.

01:40:53

I feel like that is going to be a valuable exercise and will reduce a bunch of stuff,

01:41:00

but it's definitely not going to get us to the point where we would define ourselves as

01:41:05

minimalist. Sure. That's valid. I have three action items. One is to walk through the house

01:41:13

with Becky, my wife, and just kind of decide what are the goals in those rooms. I think we're both

01:41:18

on board with I hesitant. I hesitate to say we're on board with becoming minimalists.

01:41:24

We've kind of been going down that train for down that that track for a while,

01:41:30

but never to the point where we would say we are minimalists partially because of me.

01:41:36

So I would like to walk through the house with her and just have some conversations about it.

01:41:42

Again, I don't know that I could say we are a thing, but potentially I want to go through my

01:41:51

closet and do some of the minimizing. It sounds like you've done this already. I haven't.

01:41:56

So I would like to do that. And then I'm going through my home office, finding homes for things.

01:42:01

That those are probably going to be done this weekend. So those are very practical for once,

01:42:07

Mike, like tactical. You can hold me to those. I'm proud of you. Oh, fun times. All right,

01:42:14

style and rating. I suppose I get to go first this time. I would say that Joshua is a good writer.

01:42:22

Like he's very good at pulling you into the book. I like that he tells a lot of stories and he has

01:42:29

a lot of these like call outs from other people, which is really cool. It's really cool to see other

01:42:36

people's written responses to what he's saying and their perspective on what he's recommending.

01:42:43

It is kind of like it reminds me of like the reviews you see on apps and services on their

01:42:48

websites kind of reminds me of that in that you're getting these reviews of what he's talking about

01:42:54

as you're reading about it. And it makes it very hard to say I'm not going to do that.

01:42:59

At least I found it that way. So sure, it was encouraging to go through it in that way. I liked

01:43:06

that he had these checklists at the end. It seems like that's a thing that's growing in these books.

01:43:13

And it's like, yeah, here's some practical things you can do a checklist to work through

01:43:18

at the end of each of these to help you in this process. So I like that he did that.

01:43:25

As far as a rating goes, there's a lot in this book that I gleaned. There's a lot that I learned

01:43:34

from it. There's a number of things that I'm like, I'm not doing that. Keeping my books.

01:43:39

Tell me to get rid of my books as many times as people have told me to get rid of my books. I'm

01:43:42

still keeping my books. Maybe that's part of who we are. We do run a podcast called Bookworm. So maybe

01:43:49

we have justification for that. But everyone listening to this, you need to get rid of your books.

01:43:53

So like from that sense, I don't agree with 100%. But I understand his points. I like his points.

01:44:05

I think it would be helpful to most people to go through this. Whether you're going to call

01:44:10

yourself a minimalist or not, whether you're going to say you have a minimalist home or not.

01:44:15

I think that's unimportant. Trying to put a term on yourself is not necessarily going to

01:44:25

change things for you. But decreasing the value you place on things, I think, is a good move.

01:44:35

I don't think this is a five-star book. I don't think 4.5 is quite where it needs to land. So I'm

01:44:41

going to put it at 4.0 as much as I love it. I love what I've gone through with it. It just doesn't

01:44:49

quite seem to fit some of the other books we've put in those categories. At some point, you start

01:44:54

to get your own ranking system just from where the others have landed. So I'm going to put it at

01:45:01

4.0. I feel like that's a happy medium for me on where it needs to land.

01:45:06

All right. I agree with most of what you said about this book. It's conflicting to me because

01:45:16

the takeaways here really are with minimalism in general and not with the blueprint for minimalizing

01:45:26

your home. But we read the Joshua Becker book already on minimalism.

01:45:32

Ooh, that's a good point. That is a good point. Yeah.

01:45:34

This one is specifically for how to minimalize your home.

01:45:38

So, on one sense, it's kind of like, why does this book have to exist?

01:45:47

And I didn't find it helpful for serving the goal that I think it was written for,

01:45:54

which was a step-by-step guide for minimalizing your home. There are some cool ideas in here.

01:46:01

I agree with you that kind of spoke to me and there's some things that probably will be

01:46:06

changed in our home after some conversations with my wife. But not exactly what I expected.

01:46:15

I'm kind of curious if this is a very prescriptive book for anybody or if everybody who reads it

01:46:24

has the same reaction we do. Like, well, there's some good stuff in here, but I'm not going to do

01:46:29

that. I wonder, you know, that's an interesting point. I wonder because when we read these,

01:46:35

we have a very critical eye on them because we know we're going to have these conversations

01:46:41

about them. So, I'm curious if that's... I need to ask my wife since she just read this.

01:46:46

I'm curious now.

01:46:47

Well, I remember you said last time that she... You checked on her halfway through it and she had

01:46:55

said, "It's okay."

01:46:56

Yeah. That's true.

01:46:58

So, I think she's another notch in the column of there's some stuff she likes, some stuff she didn't.

01:47:03

Yeah. It's very valid.

01:47:05

But then, what do you do with this book? Do you... It's not really designed in a way where you

01:47:12

pick what you want and chuck the rest, but that's what we're doing anyways.

01:47:19

I'd be curious to interview Josh Becker and ask him, like, what do you think about this?

01:47:25

Yeah.

01:47:25

What would his reaction be? Would he say, "Well, that's a good start." Would he be like,

01:47:32

"Hey, good for you. You can apply this any way you want." Or would he be like,

01:47:36

"You really just don't get it yet."

01:47:38

I kind of think it would be the last one.

01:47:42

That's the impression that I get anyways, walking away from this one.

01:47:48

Sure.

01:47:49

Sure.

01:47:49

So, I agree with you on his style. It's a very easy read. There's some cool stuff in here,

01:47:58

some cool quotes. I went back and looked at the spreadsheet, which actually somebody put this

01:48:06

together so we could share this with the listeners. So, I have a spreadsheet here by Marty with

01:48:13

all of our updated ratings even from episode 100.

01:48:21

So, the first book by Joshua Becker that we had read was the more of less, and we had each given it

01:48:31

for. Since I gave that book for, and this book ended up speaking to the exact same thing

01:48:39

in the end, I feel like I can't rate this one for also.

01:48:42

That's really hard.

01:48:45

So, I'm going to rate it 3.5 because I do think it is a good book. I'm not trying to diminish

01:48:51

it, but it's not my cup of tea, basically, is what it comes down to.

01:48:58

There's stuff in here that intrigues me.

01:49:00

I still am left questioning, can I apply pieces of this, or do I have to go all in?

01:49:08

And maybe that's a bigger question with minimalism in general, but I feel like Joshua Becker could

01:49:16

have done a little bit more to encourage me on my journey here.

01:49:20

Yeah, that's fair. So, we got a 4.0 and a 3.5, which means we can put it on the shelf now.

01:49:28

What's next, Mike?

01:49:29

The next book is shorter by Alex Su Young Kim-Pang, which you have started, I have not,

01:49:38

and it is basically going to convince us that we should work less hours, I think.

01:49:42

Makes some pretty good points at the beginning, I'll say that.

01:49:45

And has me questioning a lot, and I'm maybe 20 pages into it already.

01:49:51

So, stay tuned next time. I will say that. It'll be an interesting conversation,

01:49:58

especially given your perfect day layout. It'll be good.

01:50:02

Following that will be brainwash, brain space wash, by David and Austin Pearl Mutter.

01:50:12

It's like a 10-day program that you can work yourself through to help eliminate toxins in such

01:50:20

in your brain. I think, I didn't dig too deep.

01:50:24

That sounds pretty fascinating.

01:50:26

I didn't dig too deep, but that was my first take on what the book is about,

01:50:30

and it sounded very interesting to me.

01:50:33

And as always, I have to drag you along for the ride.

01:50:35

That's fair.

01:50:39

So, I do not have any gap books, but since I've already started the next one,

01:50:42

I'm starting to get ahead of things. So, I might be getting closer to that.

01:50:47

We'll see. We'll see. But, do you have any gap books?

01:50:51

Not this time, maybe next time.

01:50:54

Cool, cool.

01:50:55

Well, if you would like and you want more, and you just can't get enough of Bookworm,

01:51:02

go to bookworm.fm/membership. We would love to have you in the club of members to Bookworm.

01:51:11

And when you do that, it's a $5 a month. It's minor for a subscription.

01:51:21

And for that, we give you a premium wallpaper. You get access to a premium area in our Bookworm

01:51:27

Club, which is at club.bookworm.fm. And there's some gap book episodes from back in a back a

01:51:34

while that I did. And there's just a number of little perks that come with that. And it helps

01:51:39

us to keep the lights on, helps us pay for hosting and such.

01:51:45

So, if you're willing, go to bookworm.fm/membership, join the club. If that isn't something that's for

01:51:52

you, the next time you order a book, click one of the links in our show notes. They're all Amazon

01:51:59

affiliate links. So, you don't even have to foot the bill for it. And you can pay us for things.

01:52:05

So, if that's for you, click on the links. Super simple.

01:52:10

We would appreciate it. All right. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. And if you are

01:52:17

reading along, pick up shorter. And we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.