ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Hi, I’m James Clear. I’ve been writing at jamesclear.com since 2012. I’m the author of the New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits, which has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. I’m also known for my popular 3-2-1 newsletter, which is sent out each week.

What is Minimalism?

What is Minimalism?

Let’s define minimalism.

“Minimalism is not a lack of something. It’s simply the perfect amount of something.”

-Nicholas Burroughs

Minimalism is about more than just possessions, though.  Minimalism is focusing on and committing to the fundamentals, instead of wasting time, money, or energy on details.

Committing to the basics and mastering the fundamentals can be hard, though.

In the words of my friend, Corbett Barr, people waste too much time debating edge cases. Edge cases are the what-ifs, the could-bes, the minor details — the things that might make a 2 percent difference, but mostly distract you from the real work that would make 80 percent of the difference.

When you eliminate everything that is unnecessary, there are no details to hide behind. You’re left with just the basics and whether or not you have mastered them.

As you’ll see throughout this guide, a minimalistic approach can be applied to consumption, goals, schedules, tasks, design, and much more.

Why We Want Things We Don’t Need

I want to tell you about something called The Diderot Effect to help explain why we want things we don’t need.

The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled.

The effect is named for Denis Diderot, the co-founder and writer of Encyclopédie, who experienced a large windfall of wealth after living nearly his entire life in poverty. Shortly after, Diderot acquired a new scarlet robe. That’s when everything went wrong.

Diderot’s scarlet robe was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that he immediately noticed how out of place it seemed when surrounded by the rest of his common possessions. He soon felt the urge to buy some new things to match the beauty of his robe.

He replaced his old rug with a new one from Damascus. He decorated his home with beautiful sculptures and a better kitchen table. He bought a new mirror to place above the mantle and his “straw chair was relegated to the antechamber by a leather chair.”

These reactive purchases have become known as the Diderot Effect.

You can spot similar behaviors in many other areas of life:

• You buy a new dress and now you have to get shoes and earrings to match.
• You buy a CrossFit membership and soon you’re paying for foam rollers, knee sleeves, wrist wraps, and paleo meal plans.
• You buy your kid an American Girl doll and find yourself purchasing more accessories than you ever knew existed for dolls.
• You buy a new couch and suddenly you’re questioning the layout of your entire living room. Those chairs? That coffee table? That rug? They all gotta go.

Life has a natural tendency to become filled with more. We are rarely looking to downgrade, to simplify, to eliminate, to reduce. Our natural inclination is always to accumulate, to add, to upgrade, and to build upon.

Why Minimalism?

Not only will minimalism save you time, money, and resources, it’s also an important ingredient for success. If you want to be more productive, more focused, more creative, and exercise better willpower, it’s essential that you absorb the principles of minimalism.

People often say that they want options. When it comes to getting things done, however, options aren’t always a good thing. When everything is a possibility, it actually becomes harder to make the right choice (or any choice at all). This is the paradox of choice.

Meanwhile, when we place a constraint on ourselves, it can become much easier to get something done.

How Minimalism Will Help You Do More

The simplest way to get better is to eliminate your distractions.

Want your software program to run faster? Delete every line of code that isn’t essential.

Want to get stronger arms? Stop wasting energy on unrelated exercises.

Want more people to read your blog? Stop distracting them with ads, buttons, and widgets.

These choices have nothing to do with gaining new skills. They are simply about eliminating the things that are distracting from the essential. Learning to ignore, reduce, and remove the inessential choices can be just as beneficial as teaching yourself to make better ones.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Example No. 1: George R.R. Martin’s Minimalist Writing Strategy

George R.R. Martin is the best-selling author of the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. The first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, has also been turned into a blockbuster television series on HBO. (The first season of the show was nominated for 13 Emmy awards.)  The epic 7-part series that hasn’t even been finished (Martin is currently working on the sixth book), but it has already sold more than 25 million copies.

In total, Martin has written almost 2 million words for the series thus far…

And what does Martin use to churn out such an amazing quantity of work?

He writes the novels with a program that most people have never even heard of: WordStar 4.0. To give you an idea of just how ancient this program is, here’s a picture of the typical WordStar screen…

Martin says, “I still do all my writing on an old DOS machine running WordStar 4.0, the Duesenberg of word processing software (very old, but unsurpassed).”

He goes on, “I am not on Facebook. I am not on Twitter. I will not be on the next new thing to come along, the one that makes Facebook and Twitter as obsolete as GEnie and CompuServe and The Source, those halcyon communities of yore.”

George “WordStar” Martin is selling more books than nearly anyone on the planet and his computer can’t even send an email.

Example No. 2: The Minimalist App One Man Designed to Beat Procrastination

In 2009, Fred Stutzman was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina and he was trying to grind out some important work on his thesis.

But there was a problem.

His favorite coffee shop, which had previously been a quiet sanctuary where he could escape distraction and get work done, had just added a new and very dangerous feature.

Wireless internet.

Now Stutzman found himself constantly distracted by the endless supply of entertainment and social media on the web — even if he really wanted to get something done. He tried disconnecting from the internet, but it wasn’t that simple. He was always clicking it back on to “take a break.” He was constantly fighting the urge to check his messages and updates.

Thankfully, Stutzman happened to be a programmer studying Information Science. When he went home that night, he decided to create a software program that would solve his problem.

The program was simple. You turned the application on, told it how long you wanted to focus, and it prevented your computer from going online for that amount of time. If you wanted to get back on before your time was up, you had to turn your computer completely off and reboot.

The program was called Freedom and not long after Stutzman created it, the application went viral. It was picked up by NPR, The Economist, The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Time, and nearly every major news outlet you can imagine. More than 500,000 people downloaded it.

The Freedom app that Stutzman designed is effective not only because it prevents you from reaching the web, but also because it eliminates your options and, as a result, doing the right thing becomes much easier. In other words, the application places a constraint on your behavior.

Example No 3: I Removed Every Inessential Thing From My Website

When I built my first website a little over 3 years ago, I had no idea what I was doing.

Naturally, I figured that looking at what other websites and blogs had on their pages would be a good place to start. I started seeing sites with social media buttons, email popups, advertisements, comments, and all sorts of other things. At first glance, these things seemed important. After all, every other website had them and they appeared to serve a purpose.

But as I continued tweaking my site design, I tested what would happen if I eliminated the unessential pieces. I didn’t run any advertisements. I took down all of the social media buttons. I eliminated the sidebars, the suggested content, and anything else that wasn’t absolutely essential.

As I pulled away each piece, a funny thing happened. People were less distracted. Visitors spent more time reading my articles. More people joined my email list. The simpler things became, the better the results were.

I realized the same thing George R.R. Martin and Fred Stutzman did: Less is more.

So often we think that we need more to be successful. More outside funding for our startup. More software programs or productivity tools to handle our to-do list. More business contacts, a bigger network. More clothes or cars or credit cards.

But the success of these minimalist tactics show us that maybe what we really need is less. Maybe what we really need are fewer distractions and more focus. Maybe what we really need are a few carefully chosen constraints that narrow our energy onto what really matters.

For this reason, minimalism is key to success.

Why You Should Create More and Consume Less

Minimalism is also key to happiness to longevity.

A recent article in the New York Times shared research on longevity that revealed that the people who live the longest not only live healthy lifestyles, but also tend to engage and connect with the people around them.

As a lot of people age, they tend to find themselves consuming more and creating less.

Meanwhile, the people who keep on contributing tend to be the ones who keep on living. The message was clear. People who contribute to their community live longer.

Creating and contributing to the world is not only a foundational piece of living a healthy and happy life, but also a meaningful one.

You can’t control the amount of time you spend on this planet, but you can control what you contribute while you’re here. These contributions don’t have to be major endeavors. Cook a meal instead of buying one. Play a game instead of watching one. Write a paragraph instead of reading one. You don’t have to create big contributions, you just need to live out small ones each day.

Time and energy that is wasted consuming is time and energy that can’t be spent creating.

Most of the information you come across in your daily life — the news stories, the social media updates, the television shows — isn’t going to change the choices you make. Instead of sitting around and consuming whatever is readily available, challenge yourself to make more conscious choices about what you consume and how you consume it.

Do you really need social media apps on your phone? Or will you be just fine checking Facebook and Twitter when you get home?

Is it necessary to turn on the same news program every night? Are you living a better life because of watching it?

If something isn’t benefitting you, then eliminate it.

The world doesn’t need more people who mindlessly digest whatever information is around. What the world needs are people who learn with purpose, who take action on the things that are important to them, and who seek out high quality information as a way to spark creativity — not as an excuse to consume even more.

How to be a Minimalist

Minimalistic Scheduling

Doing more things does not drive faster or better results. Doing better things drives better results. Even more accurately, doing one thing drives better results.

Mastery requires focus and consistency.

I haven’t mastered the art of focus and concentration yet, but I’m working on it. One of the major improvements I’ve made recently is to assign one (and only one) priority to each work day. Although I plan to complete other tasks during the day, my priority task is the one non-negotiable thing that must get done.

Here’s what my current weekly schedule looks like…

• Monday – Write article.
• Tuesday – Send two emails (one for networking, one for partnerships.)
• Wednesday – Write article.
• Thursday – Write article.
• Friday – Complete weekly review.
• Saturday – OFF
• Sunday – OFF

The power of choosing one priority is that it naturally guides your behavior by forcing you to organize your life around that responsibility. Your priority becomes an anchor task, the mainstay that holds the rest of your day in place. If things get crazy, there is no debate about what to do or not to do. You have already decided what is urgent and what is important.

Minimalistic Goal Setting

Your odds of success improve when you are forced to direct all of your energy and attention to fewer tasks.

If you want to master a skill—truly master it—you have to be selective with your time. You have to ruthlessly trim away good ideas to make room for great ones. You have to focus on a few essential tasks and ignore the distractions. You have to commit to working through 10 years of silence.

Here’s how Warren Buffet recommends people narrow down their goals, as told by Buffett’s longtime business partner Charlie Munger…

When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.”

He says, “Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”

Again, this is a concept that seems perfectly obvious to me. And to Warren it seems perfectly obvious. But this is one of the very few business classes in the U.S. where anybody will be saying so. It just isn’t the conventional wisdom.

To me, it’s obvious that the winner has to bet very selectively. It’s been obvious to me since very early in life. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to very many other people.

Minimalistic Consumption

Here are some tips for how to control the Diderot Effect and adopt a minimalist’s approach to buying and consuming.

Reduce exposure. Nearly every habit is initiated by a trigger or cue. One of the quickest ways to reduce the power of the Diderot Effect is to avoid the habit triggersthat cause it in the first place. Unsubscribe from commercial emails. Call the magazines that send you catalogs and opt out of their mailings. Meet friends at the park rather than the mall. Block your favorite shopping websites using tools like Freedom.

Buy items that fit your current system. You don’t have to start from scratch each time you buy something new. When you purchase new clothes, look for items that work well with your current wardrobe. When you upgrade to new electronics, get things that play nicely with your current pieces so you can avoid buying new chargers, adapters, or cables.

Set self-imposed limits. Live a carefully constrained life by creating limitations for you to operate within. Juliet Schor provides a great example with this quote…

“Imagine the following. A community group in your town organizes parents to sign a pledge agreeing to spend no more than $50 on athletic shoes for their children. The staff at your child’s day-care center requests a $75 limit on spending for birthday parties. The local school board rallies community support behind a switch to school uniforms. The PTA gets 8o percent of parents to agree to limit their children’s television watching to no more than one hour per day.

Do you wish someone in your community or at your children’s school would take the lead in these or similar efforts? I think millions of American parents do. Television, shoes, clothes, birthday parties, athletic uniforms-these are areas where many parents feel pressured into allowing their children to consume at a level beyond what they think is best, want to spend, or can comfortably afford.”

—Juliet Schor, The Overspent American

Buy One, Give One. Each time you make a new purchase, give something away. Get a new TV? Give your old one away rather than moving it to another room. The idea is to prevent your number of items from growing. Always be curating your life to include only the things that bring you joy and happiness.

Go one month without buying something new. Don’t allow yourself to buy any new items for one month. Instead of buying a new lawn mower, rent one from a neighbor. Get your new shirt from the thrift store rather than the department store. The more we restrict ourselves, the more resourceful we become.

Let go of wanting things. There will never be a level where you will be done wanting things. There is always something to upgrade to. Get a new Honda? You can upgrade to a Mercedes. Get a new Mercedes? You can upgrade to a Bentley. Get a new Bentley? You can upgrade to a Ferrari. Get a new Ferrari? Have you thought about buying a private plane? Realize that wanting is just an option your mind provides, not an order you have to follow.

Best Minimalism Books

• Essentialism by Greg McKeown
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
• The More of Less by Joshua Becker
• Also, check out Josh Becker’s great blog on minimalism.

SOURCE: https://jamesclear.com/minimalism

 

With respect.

Minimalism isn’t just “owning less stuff.” It’s a state of mind that’s to be inhabited. Here’s what it means to me.

For seven years, this was everything I owned: A MacBook Pro, an iPad, an unlocked iPhone, seven shirts, two pairs of jeans, two jackets, one coat, one sweater, two pairs of shoes, a suitcase, a backpack, some gym shorts, bathroom stuff, socks and underwear. That’s it. Everything I owned could be easily packed into a small suitcase and moved within thirty minutes.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden made the bold claim: “The things you own, end up owning you.” Although I think that’s true, I’m not going to be a zealot here and try to convince you to throw away all of your possessions and go live on a mountain or something. Obviously, you have a life and a home, perhaps a family, and needs, and a radical shift in lifestyle wouldn’t be practical for many of you. These days, it isn’t for me either. I have commitments and obligations and people who depend on me now, so I’ve had to root down.

But what I am going to try to convince you is that you probably don’t need as much of the stuff you think you do and that getting rid much of it can be surprisingly liberating as well as make you happier.

Back in 2007, I went broke after graduating from university. To deal with this, I sold most of my possessions and moved onto a friend’s couch temporarily. At the time, it was painful. I had to get rid of my bed, my desk, a lot of my books and CD’s, pictures, and who knows what else. It felt excruciating. But despite my perception of “selling everything,” I still moved into my friend’s place with two large boxes of crap, a full suitcase of clothes, desktop computer, desk chair, guitar, TV stand (don’t ask) and other odds and ends. For the six months, I lived on that couch, 75% of everything I owned sat neatly in boxes, untouched.

The next year, with a struggling online business, no money, and nowhere to go, I moved home to live with mom for a while. Since shipping a box full of stuff from Boston to Texas was expensive, and I was surviving almost solely on peanut butter, I jettisoned even more stuff. On Craigslist, everything went: goodbye bicycle, messenger bag, the high-end poker chip set I won in a tournament, framed pictures, dumbbell weights, yoga mat, basketball, Playstation 2 and games. It hurt. It’s funny now, but looking back I really felt like a failure because I was selling all of my possessions to keep my business afloat. Like it was this massive sacrifice. Aside from my clothes and suitcase, all I kept was my guitar and a small box of books.

Six months later, I began my foray into the digital nomad lifestyle. I visited Brazil and moved to Buenos Aires. I took one large suitcase with me and spent hours the days before I left deliberating over how I was going to fit everything I “needed” into one single suitcase for 3-6 months abroad. Which tools do I bring? Which raincoat should I bring? Fitness supplements, external hard drives, an extra pair of running shoes, clothes iron and cooking spices all seemed like necessities at the time.

I was an idiot.

I didn’t use half of the stuff I packed. I started a habit of unloading unnecessary junk by leaving them in apartments, hostels, and hotels I stayed in. Finished reading a book? Here you go, intrepid next traveler! Eventually, I ended up with the small suitcase of a week’s worth of clothes and a laptop and essentially lived like that for most of my 20s.

That may sound a little extreme to some of you. And it is. But… and this is a big “but,” so I’m going to bust the italics out: Every step along the way, getting rid of what I didn’t absolutely need was painful, but at no point did I ever miss anything once it was gone. Ever.

I don’t remember most of the crap I owned, much less miss it. I couldn’t tell you what hung on my wall, what the color of my couch was, where I bought my television, which video games I owned without thinking very, very hard.

In fact, not only do I not miss anything I got rid of, but the thought of spending money on more of the same possessions instead of life experiences and relationships with others sounds absolutely insane to me now.

Identity Investment and Loss Aversion

There are two psychological factors at play in owning a bunch of stuff and I think both lower the overall quality of life: identity investment and loss aversion.

Identity investment is what Fight Club ribs at when it makes fun of the need to own a bunch of nice stuff–people tend to become emotionally attached to their possessions and see their possessions as a part of themselves. This is particularly true in more materialistic cultures where people are encouraged to express their identities through consumerism. People become attached to the companies that make their car or truck, their computers, their clothing, their appliances, etc. They spent months saving up for an item, spent a lot of mental energy choosing which item “represents” them best, therefore they begin identifying themselves as a “Ford guy,” or a “Mac user,” or whatever.

This becomes part of your identity, no matter how small, that you portray to others in your life. And if you’ve learned anything from this blog, it should be that investing your identity in factors outside of yourself (sexual interactions, what people think of you, how much money you make, stuff you own) isn’t healthy and generally backfires.

The second factor, loss aversion, is a sad fact of life. Psychology has shown that humans perceive the pain of losing something to be much greater than the pleasure of having it. This is true for everything — relationships, possessions, competition — and it’s hard-wired into us. All of us. So that poker chip set I won and swore I had to keep and felt crushed when I had to get rid of it, I never actually used it once when I owned it. The guitar that I thought I loved just sat collecting dust, yet I couldn’t bear to allow myself to sell it.

Happiness studies consistently bring back a couple of findings: 1) that we derive far more happiness from experiences than we do from possessions, and 2) that we’re better off investing our energy in our relationships than the things we own.

Getting rid of unnecessary possessions can therefore indirectly improve our quality of life through the following ways:

1. Frees up more time and money to spend on experiences and with people.
2. Forces one to invest more of their identity in their behavior and attitude and less in objects around them.
3. Removes the stress of loss aversion and trying to hold on to what one already has.
4. Saves money (always a stress reducer).

Keep in mind, the goal here isn’t to get rid of everything. It’s simply to get rid of things that don’t actively make you happy or improve your life. It’s about owning as little as possible to optimize one’s well-being and happiness.

What Can You Get Rid of Today?

Now comes the fun part. Let’s talk about the useless crap you have that you can get rid of today. I’m going to start with the easiest objects to trash and move to the most difficult.

1. 90% of what’s in your storage closet, attic or garage. This is the easy part, the spring-cleaning part. Those old golf clubs you never play with, the rusty toolbox, the beaten up board games, the bicycle pump for the bike you don’t have anymore, the old pool toys, the posters from college, on and on and on. This is the stuff you would have thrown out ages ago except you told yourself, “Well, you never know,” or you stopped because they brought back a really good memory or two. Look, if you haven’t used it in the past three months and don’t think it’s likely you’ll use it in the next three months, toss it. Don’t think about it. Don’t reminisce. Just toss it. You won’t miss it. I promise.
2. Video games. About half of my readers just gasped when they saw this. Yes, video games are fun, and they’re nice to blow off some steam every now and then. But most people who play them, particularly young men, play them way too much. Not only are they a massive time sink, but they waste a lot of money and all but kill your social life. Ask yourself, if you spent half the amount of time you spend playing video games out socializing the past five years or reading books, what would your life be like? Chances are your stomach dropped as soon as you thought about that. If it did, then it’s time to put the Xbox and PS3 on Craigslist. Delete Diablo 3 off your hard drive. Get living.
3. Television. Yeah, there are some good TV shows, but you can watch them on your computer for free whenever you’d like. Forget the television. Having it around only encourages you to get sucked into pointless crap. Like sports? Go watch your favorite games at a sports bar. Watching sports with other people is ten times better, even if they’re total strangers.
4. Books. I’m a bookworm and love the good ole glue and paper as much as anybody. But buy a Kindle or iPad and start downloading your books. This one hurt me a lot and I resisted it for a long time. But I’m glad I did it.
5. Clothes. Clothes. For guys, all you need is 3-4 dress shirts, 3-4 T-Shirts, two pairs of jeans, a nice pair of pants, some shorts, exercise shoes, dress shoes, a coat, a jacket, a sweater, maybe a sweatshirt, socks and underwear.For women, I know this sounds crazy, but you don’t really need a whole lot more than most guys. Instead of dress shirts, maybe just 3-4 dresses (if you’re into that). And the great thing about dressing for women is that accessories can really change the whole look of an outfit. So, with a few scarves or pieces of jewelry or hats or whatever, you can mix and match the same few pieces and still look like you have an endless closet.
6. Furniture. Now we’re getting serious: that nice chair you never sit in, the dining room set you touch once a year, the extra table in the office, the bookshelf that held the books you just sold. When you toss your unneeded furniture, you’re likely to find that you can easily live in a house/apartment half the size of your current one. That may be a traumatic realization for some of you, but if you can handle it, then you can use the money you make now to live in a smaller place in a far better location. Remember, experiences bring happiness, not stuff. So what’s going to make you happier, the futon grandma gave you for a graduation present, or living down the street from your favorite concert venue?
7. Car. And if you live in a better location, and live in a city with good public transportation, chances are you don’t need a car anymore. I haven’t owned a car in 9 years and I think it’s very unlikely I’ll ever own one again. My friends think I’m crazy, but they’ve never lived in a city with quality mass transit. If you don’t own much stuff, you can live in the best location in the city and then use buses or metros to get where you need to go. Not only is it far cheaper, far more convenient, and far more enjoyable, but it leaves a much smaller carbon footprint. The only situation I can even fathom wanting a car again is if I one day end up with four little kids and need to shuttle them back and forth to football practice and dance recitals. But let’s cut this article off right there before I start envisioning my soccer mom future a little bit too clearly.

 

SOURCE: https://markmanson.net/minimalism

 

With respect.

 

The mantra of “less is more” still obeys a logic of accumulation—but it hints at genuinely different ways of thinking.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her first book, the essay collection “Trick Mirror,” was published last year.

The new literature of minimalism is full of stressful advice. Pack up all your possessions, unpack things only as needed, give away everything that’s still packed after a month. Or wake up early, pick up every item you own, and consider whether or not it sparks joy. See if you can wear just thirty-three items of clothing for three months. Know that it’s possible to live abundantly with only a hundred possessions. Don’t organize—purge. Digitize your photos. Get rid of the things you bought to impress people. Downsize your apartment. Think constantly about what will enable you to live the best life possible. Never buy anything on sale.

Recently, I spent a few months absorbing the new minimalist gospel, beginning with Marie Kondo, the celebrity decluttering guru, whose book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” has sold more than ten million copies, and whose stance can seem twee but is rooted in Shinto tradition: having fewer possessions allows us to care for those possessions as if they had souls. I also turned to Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, who call themselves the Minimalists and, under that name, run a blog, publish books, and host a podcast that is downloaded as many as three million times a month. I read the blog Be More with Less, which is written by Courtney Carver, who came to minimalism after being given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and views the practice as a pathway to love and self-care. Also on my syllabus were the books “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” by Greg McKeown, for whom minimalism is a habit of highly effective people; “The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own,” by Joshua Becker, a former pastor who wants his readers to free up their time and money for charitable causes; and “Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism,” by Fumio Sasaki, who writes with winning self-deprecation, admitting that his simple life style might make him seem like a loser.

As I waded through this course of study, I felt like a dirty sponge being irradiated in the microwave: I was trapped, unpleasantly, but a cleansing fire was beginning to rage within. I Kondoed my sock drawer, tenderly unravelling lumpy balls of wool and cotton and laying each pair flat. I made daily pilgrimages to Goodwill. When I went home to Texas for the holidays, I entered my parents’ apartment as a whirling dervish of minimalist self-satisfaction, hectoring them to toss out their kitchen doodads and excess Tupperware. Within hours of arrival, I had filled six large trash bags with clothes to donate. “See?!” I howled, irritating myself and everyone around me. “You get rid of the things you don’t need so that you can focus on the things you do! ”

I sounded, I imagine, like many of the converts to what might be considered the latest wave in an intermittent American impulse. In 1977, the social scientists Duane Elgin and Arnold Mitchell observed that, for several years, “the popular press has paid occasional attention to stories of people returning to the simple life.” Elgin and Mitchell believed that this smattering of articles reflected a social movement that could bring about a “major transformation of traditional American values.” They called the movement “voluntary simplicity,” and saw it as a potential solution not only to “growing social malaise” but also to ecological destruction and the “unmanageable scale and complexity of institutions.” They believed that a few million people were practicing full voluntary simplicity, and that as much as half the U.S. population was sympathetic to it. Estimating the “maximum plausible growth of VS,” they wrote that as many as a third of all Americans might be converted to the simple life by the year 2000.

That didn’t happen. But, in 2008, the housing crisis and the banking collapse exposed the fantasy of easy acquisition as humiliating and destructive; for many people, it became newly necessary and desirable to learn to rely on less. It is tempting to interpret the new minimalism as a kind of cultural aftershock of that financial disruption, and perhaps it is, in part. But, at the same time that Kondo and her cohort have popularized a form of material humility, minimalism has become an increasingly aspirational and deluxe way of life. The hashtag #minimalism pulls up more than seventeen million photos on Instagram; many of the top posts depict high-end interior spaces. Last April, Kim Kardashian West appeared in a Vogue video walking through her sixty-million-dollar California mansion, a stark, blank, monochromatic palace that she described as a “minimal monastery.” Less is more attractive when you’ve got a lot of money, and minimalism is easily transformed from a philosophy of intentional restraint into an aesthetic language through which to assert a form of walled-off luxury—a self-centered and competitive impulse that is not so different from the acquisitive attitude that minimalism purports to reject.

It is rarely acknowledged, by either the life-hack-minded authors or the proponents of minimalist design, that many people have minimalism forced upon them by circumstances that render impossible a serene, jewel-box life style. Nor do they mention that poverty and trauma can make frivolous possessions seem like a lifeline rather than a burden. Many of today’s gurus maintain that minimalism can be useful no matter one’s income, but the audience they target is implicitly affluent—the pitch is never about making do with less because you have no choice. Millburn and Nicodemus frequently describe their past lives as spiritually empty twentysomethings with six-figure incomes. McKeown pitches his insights at people who have a surplus of options as a consequence of success. Kondo recently launched an online store, suggesting that the left hand might declutter while the right hand buys a seventy-five-dollar rose-quartz tuning fork. Today’s minimalism, with its focus on self-improvement, feels oddly dominated by a logic of accumulation. Less is always more, or “more, more, more,” as Millburn and Nicodemus write: “more time, more passion, more experiences, more growth, more contribution, more contentment—and more freedom.”

“The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism,” a new book by the journalist and critic Kyle Chayka, arrives not as an addition to the minimalist canon but as a corrective to it. Chayka aims to find something deeper within the tradition than an Instagram-friendly aesthetic and the “saccharine and predigested” advice of self-help literature. Writing in search of the things that popular minimalism sweeps out of the frame—the void, transience, messiness, uncertainty—he surveys minimalist figures in art, music, and philosophy, searching for a “minimalism of ideas rather than things.”

Along the way, he offers sharp critiques of thing-oriented minimalism. The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds. Later in the book, Chayka examines Philip Johnson’s Glass House—a startling, transparent box in New Canaan, Connecticut—and concludes that its beauty manifests a “megalomaniacal possessiveness” over both the surrounding landscape and the experience of anyone who enters. This sort of aestheticized emptiness, Chayka argues, is “not particularly radical; it might even be conservative,” given its reliance on control and exclusion. Plus, the ceiling leaked when it rained.

More beguiling to Chayka are artists who have no interest in directing the lives of others. He writes about Agnes Martin—who considered herself an Abstract Expressionist but whose poised, transcendent paintings have been claimed for Minimalism—and Walter De Maria, whose installation “The New York Earth Room,” a field of dirt in a mostly empty white space, has been quietly confounding people in SoHo since 1977. He visits Donald Judd’s “100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum,” in Marfa, Texas, which defies any attempt to ascribe emotional meaning to it—the aluminum boxes are “just there,” Chayka writes, “empty of content except for the sheer fact of their physical presence, obdurate and silent, explaining nothing and with nothing to explain.” Such a sculpture might sound “deathly boring, more math problem than artwork,” but, as you walk through the exhibit, with the desert sun setting the silvery containers alight, they become a “constant affirmation of the simple possibility of sensation.” Elsewhere in the book, he writes about the philosopher Keiji Nishitani, who described ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, as a practice that links beauty to ephemerality and death.

These are the models for a deeper, more honest, less self-centered minimalism, Chayka believes: a way of living that makes “simple things more complicated, not the other way around.” Still, he is not immune to shallower forms of the aesthetic. When he flies to Tokyo, hoping to understand concepts like mono no aware—the Japanese idea of sensitivity to impermanence—the first thing he encounters is the stark, white, dehumanized Airbnb where he will be staying. Despite his intent to critique, he is being catered to, sometimes successfully. A developer puts up a condo building across the street from his Brooklyn apartment, and stages one of its units as an “Instagram-ready tableau of white bed, white nightstand, white table, white kitchen cabinets,” visible through big windows. Chayka admits, grudgingly, that the place looks stylish.

The Brooklyn apartment and the Tokyo Airbnb are examples of a style that Chayka has called AirSpace, a term he coined in 2016, in a piece for the Verge, to describe the look of cafés, co-working spaces, and short-term rental apartments all over the globe. “I can’t say no to a tasteful, clean, modern life space,” he wrote then. “But,” he added, “thinking through its roots and negative implications makes me reconsider my attachment.” Chayka’s writing tends to center on phenomena that conjure aspiration, emptiness, and emotional distance: as a journalist, he’s covered luxury cryptocurrency, the blandly appealing life-style magazine Kinfolk, and the streetwear brand Supreme. “The Longing for Less” revisits earlier essays and reporting on the Minimalists, the Japanese philosopher Shūzō Kuki, and Marie Kondo.

His dual response to the all-white apartment is one of the only moments in “The Longing for Less” when Chayka acknowledges his attraction to superficial minimalism, but that attraction pulses throughout the book. The writing has a careful tastefulness that occasionally conforms to what Chayka, in a different context, calls the “house style of the non-place and the generic city.” The table of contents is presented as four pristine boxes, with high-toned, one-word chapter titles—“Reduction,” “Emptiness,” “Silence,” “Shadow”—arranged in a perfect grid. Each chapter is subdivided into eight sections, and Chayka suggests that “The Longing for Less” might be wandered through in the manner of an art exhibit, that the blank spaces between contrasting examples will generate unexpected lessons. (Chayka’s reporting on Supreme, which was published by Racked, was also organized by a gridded table of contents, guiding readers to considerations of “Hype,” “Japan,” and “Fandom,” among other subjects.)

Nonfiction forms that rely on the generative potential of white space, like poetry and the lyric essay, require a distinct forcefulness of voice and vision to succeed; in its absence, this kind of mannered subtlety can be frustrating. Most of the sections in “The Longing for Less” end on a glancing note of epiphany, such as “Simplicity doesn’t have to be an end point—it can lead to new beginnings,” which is the last line of a paragraph two-thirds of the way through the book.

In a way, Chayka’s book replicates the conflict he’s attempting to uncover—between the security and cleanliness of a frictionless affect and the necessity of friction for uncovering truth. He does have moments of productive discomfort: outside the concert hall where John Cage débuted “4’33”,” he wanders for four and a half minutes of silence in honor of Cage’s blank composition, and finds himself disappointed by the mundane sounds of leaf blowers and airplanes, before becoming unexpectedly attuned to the gentle sound of a hidden stream. He goes to the Guggenheim to hear Erik Satie’s proto-minimalist composition “Vexations,” an experiment in extreme monotony, and it proves intolerable, creating a jarring awareness of the often inadequate here and now. But Chayka best conveys the unnerving existential confrontation that minimalism can create in his capsule biographies of figures such as Julius Eastman, the composer who used minimalist structures as a means of asserting personal dissonance. In the nineteen-eighties, Eastman began living, on and off, in Tompkins Square Park; he wrote music on the subway and gave his compositions away in bars. Explaining the titles of his pieces “Crazy Nigger” and “Evil Nigger,” Eastman said, “What I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a ‘basicness,’ a ‘fundamentalness,’ and eschews that thing which is superficial or, what can we say, elegant.”

True minimalism, Chayka insists, is “not about consuming the right things or throwing out the wrong; it’s about challenging your deepest beliefs in an attempt to engage with things as they are, to not shy away from reality or its lack of answers.” I suspect that some recent converts to minimalism have already come to this conclusion. Underneath the vision of “less” as an optimized life style lies the path to something stranger and more profound: a mode of living that strips away protective barriers and heightens the miracle of human presence, and the urgency, today, of what that miracle entails.

The self-help minimalists say that keeping expenses low and purchases to a minimum can help create a life that is clear and streamlined. This practice can also lead to the conclusion that there is not only too much stuff in your apartment but too much stuff in the world—that there is, you might say, an epidemic of overproduction. If you did say this, you would be quoting Karl Marx, who declared that this was the case in 1848, when he and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto.” Comparing a “society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” they contended that there was “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” Hence, they suggested, the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism, which brings the periodic “destruction of a mass of productive forces”—as, perhaps, we experienced in 2008, before the rise of Kondo and company.

Today’s most popular minimalists do not mention Marx. Sometimes they address the importance of freeing oneself from the dictates of the market. In “Goodbye, Things,” Sasaki writes about the importance of figuring out your minimum required monthly income, and encourages readers to consider the environmental consequences of their life styles. Millburn and Nicodemus write about the joy that comes from choosing to earn less money, even if they avoid discussing the more common situation of having your wages kept low against your will. But they also assure their audience that “capitalism is not broken”—we are. They insist that there’s “nothing wrong with earning a shedload of money—it’s just that the money doesn’t matter if you’re not happy with who you’ve become in the process.” Even these sincere prophets of anti-consumerism are hesitant to conclude that the excessive purchasing of stuff may be a symptom of larger structural problems, or that a life built around maximum accumulation may be not only insufficiently conducive to happiness but actually, morally bad.

The worst versions of life-style minimalism frame simplicity not as a worthy end in itself but as an instrument—a tool of self-improvement, or of high-end consumption, or of self-improvement through high-end consumption. It is a vision shaped by the logic of the market: the self is perpetually being improved; its environment is ready for public display and admiration; it methodically sheds all inefficiencies and flaws. This vision also forgoes any recognition that the kind of salvation so many people are seeking can happen only at the level of the system rather than at that of the individual. (As Chayka puts it, “Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad.”) The difference between profound and superficial minimalism may be a matter of conceptual inversion: the question is whether you accept diminishment in order to more efficiently assert your will or whether you assert your will in order to accept the unseen bounty of self-diminishment. This is also where the minimalism of ideas meets the minimalism of things—the latter argues that ridding yourself of possessions means ridding yourself of trouble and difficulty; the former suggests that the end point of stripping away excess is the realization that the world is more troubled, more difficult, more discomfiting, and also more wondrous and full of possibility than it seems.

The term that Elgin and Mitchell used in 1977, “voluntary simplicity,” was borrowed from Richard Gregg, a lawyer from Colorado who, after the First World War, gave up the law and took a job with a railway workers’ union. In the early twenties, hundreds of thousands of railway workers went on strike, and more than a dozen people died in clashes between strikers and armed guards. Gregg, devastated, came across a book of Gandhi’s writings in a Chicago bookstore, and travelled to India to meet Gandhi and learn about peaceful resistance. In 1934, he published “The Power of Nonviolence,” which Martin Luther King, Jr., later described as one of the books that had had the greatest influence on him. Gregg published “The Value of Voluntary Simplicity” in 1936. In it, he calls capitalism a “gravely defective” system that ought to be “reformed or ended.”

Several years ago, Duane Elgin, who has become an author and an activist focussed on sustainability, published a paper arguing that either we can “continue along our current path of denial and bargaining” until we drain our natural resources and our capacity to relate to one another as humans or we can “awaken ourselves from the dream of limitless material growth and actively invent new ways to live within the material limits of the Earth.” This is, in the end, the most convincing argument for minimalism: with less noise in our heads, we might hear the emergency sirens more clearly. If we put down some baggage, we might move more swiftly. We might address the frantic, frightening, intensifying conditions that have prompted us to think of minimalism as an attractive escape. ♦

Published in the print edition of the February 3, 2020, issue, with the headline “Simple Plans.”

SOURCE: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-pitfalls-and-the-potential-of-the-new-minimalism

With respect.

 

With respect.

 

With respect.

 

Education has evolved with time due to the advancement of technology. There are multiple new skills which teachers need to master in order to keep up with the tech-savvy students. We have listed a few essential skills a teacher needs to develop in order to become a tech-savvy.

Communicate Digitally:

Electronic communication is the most used method people use to communicate. You need to have an understanding of sending E-mails and messages. Learn to use group features on messaging apps and make a group of your students to whom you need to broadcast the same message.

Be Flexible to Change:

Technology keeps changing every day. You need to be open to these changes and adapt to them as and when they come. Embracing such changes will keep you ahead of many others.

Go Paperless:

We all know that use of more paper means deforestation. A tech-savvy teacher is the one who would be all about going paperless. Start using the cloud for assignments. Make your students save their assignments in the cloud.

Online Education and Apps:

In earlier days, we used to have a separate computer lab in schools, nowadays, every classroom looks like a computer lab where each student has a laptop for learning. Learning through apps is widely increasing hence if you wish to be tech-savvy, you need to learn to use these apps. Today’s teachers need to understand these interfaces thoroughly as students are all about e-learning. Especially when it comes to taking extra classes such as Maths, Physics or Chemistry, students prefer online learning from the comfort of their home.

Use Social Media:

Social media is another platform which any tech-savvy person needs to master. It is the future of any field. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube etc, are more than just a medium of entertainment. Making a closed group on Facebook is a great way of being in touch with your class and communicate all class-related activities. YouTube channel can be created to upload subject-related teaching videos. Students can be encouraged to share interesting articles by saving Pins on a common Board on Pinterest. Learning through social media is just endless. If you want to become a tech-savvy teacher, you need to dig deep into this.

Use Digital Assessment:

Technology has made thousands of activities easier and less time consuming than it used to be. One such example is the use of digital assessment. Multiple-choice questions can be easily assessed and marked. Most of the entrance exams use a digital assessment to evaluate thousands of papers. You can introduce this format in your classroom to save time.

Go Global:

Technology has made the entire globe accessible to you through communication. Why teach locally if you can go global. It is easy to communicate and collaborate with other teachers across and the globe and learn from others, this makes you much more knowledgeable.

Being tech-savvy is a very important skill in every job field especially in the field of education where you need to be ahead of your smartphone-addicted students. Technology helps you in using a better approach of teaching which motivates the students and elevates their learnings.

Source: https://www.mscareergirl.com/how-to-become-a-tech-savvy-teacher/

With respect.

 

If this is your first time reading this series you’ll get the most value by starting with the first article. Note for the already tech savvy, IT professionals, and our regular readers: this is designed as a resource as you help others or for those looking to become tech savvy on their own.

Background, Expectations, & Best Practices

I have yet to find any books or resources that discuss the foundation and most important factor in becoming tech savvy (or learning anything), your mindset. Research shows that people with a growth mindset are more likely to achieve success in part because they believe they can. Alternately, people with a fixed mindset, who believe they can only achieve according to ingrained talent or aptitude are more likely to give up on their goals.

The reason having the right mindset is so critical is because your state of mind controls your thoughts and your thoughts directly impact your behaviors. Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck has been researching this topic for over twenty years and is credited with popularizing the term ‘growth mindset.’

Her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, has created a highly influential movement, but a fixed mindset and a focus on the results instead of the process are still common in mainstream culture. No matter our age, experience, or in what context we’re learning this is the heart of what holds us back or moves us forward in any endeavor and we often don’t realize it.

Here’s how these two mindsets sound and feel different:

Image source: Project Happiness

Science has found the most important factor in our achievement of any endeavor is not talent, but more specifically how much we apply deliberate practice to our work. The belief that you can improve paired with deliberate practice is what creates success. This is the topic of Geof Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated and also an article he wrote for Forbes Magazine called What it takes to be great. Colvin explains how a fixed state of mind limits us:

The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up.

Just as Colvin found in his research, Dweck has also shared that having a growth mindset is not enough on its own. You need an effective strategy for your goals and deliberate practice and effort to achieve success. Here are some of her cautions:

“But the growth mindset movement has pitfalls, too. Prodding students to increase effort alone, telling them they would have done better if they had tried harder, isn’t enough,” Dweck said. Without suggesting learning strategies when students are stymied and judiciously offering help at the right time, a student may feel more incompetent if more effort doesn’t work. Telling students to “keep trying and you’ll get it” does not instill a growth mindset, Dweck said. “I call it nagging.”

This is why we’ll cover effective and efficient strategies to becoming tech savvy as we continue on in this series. It’s definitely important, but first let’s continue on with the foundation of your success.

These findings about the value of a growth mindset are most exciting because it means our behaviors (choices) are the biggest factors for success, not genetics, age, happenstance, or external circumstances. Sometimes our feelings and beliefs can seem so concrete and immutable, but they can be changed by adjusting our mindset and the stories we tell ourselves (and repeat over and over).

Here is a great visual, on the left is a popular romantic view of how success works through a fixed mindset lens and often the ‘if you have the talent’ misperception. On the right, how success really works with a growth mindset, this will work for anyone with belief and deliberate practice.

Image source: TheLeaderinMe.org

Tony Robbins talks about how our strategy for a goal rarely holds us back, but the culprits are usually our state (mindset) and our story (what ideas to we keep repeating). He illustrates the power of these factors with two perfect examples in this video. He says:

You need a different state of mind, because the state you’re in will determine your story. Did you ever notice when you’re really really angry with somebody, suddenly you can remember every story of anything they’ve done that’s upset you?

Did you ever know when you’re totally in love with somebody…when you’re in that state what’s wrong in your life? Nothing! And when you’re in that state with somebody what will you do for them? Anything!

Is it true that we get in habits of the states we’re in? You bet we do. It’s easy to get in the habit of being pissy or angry or sad or feeling depressed. And here’s the worst part, it feels terrible, but you’ve gone there so often that it feels like home for you, meaning, it’s comfortable because you know it and you’ve gotta break out of that.

So you can break out of that in the most simple ways…the fastest way to change your state is a radical change in the way you move. Because emotion is what creates motion. Fear is physical, so is courage, so is energy. And if you want to know the simple solution to fear, there is only one, massive action.

One way Robbins recommends changing our state is by doing twenty jumping jacks, pushups, or squats. This instantly changes our biochemistry and get us in a better state to create a helpful story.

Children are great models for positive states of mind as they are usually taking action and confident they can acquire new skills. Excitement, optimism and natural curiosity for growth drives their learning. They are eager to try themselves, even if they fail the first time, or many times. They are also not content to watch others do something for them or be helped for too long.

I love this video as the little guy exemplifies learning and exploring life with zest and a helpful mindset. Can you feel the momentum he created by talking about his effort, failures, and success? We won’t always feel exactly like this, but I always keep this in the back of my mind when I come up against challenges and ask myself, ‘how can I view this as a cool opportunity?’, ‘what perspective would make this seem fun?’, or ‘of course I’ll figure this out eventually!’

We can make up our minds to feel how we want, but like Tony Robbins says, we may need to recondition and put in some effort to change our ‘home’ or default state. As you become more consistent with keeping a growth mindset, remember not to be too hard on yourself, it isn’t a fixed thing for anyone. Our feelings, people around us, the weather, and all sorts of external factors have the potential to influence us.

Don’t worry if you notice yourself thinking through a fixed mindset lens. The goal is to become more aware of your mindset and choose a beneficial perspective as much as possible. This will be the cornerstone of your success. The awesome part about building your growth mindset is the more you use it, the more momentum it creates and the easier it is to keep using.

Shawn Achor describes why this happens in The Happiness Advantage:

When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. The role happiness plays should be obvious—the more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel—and we’ve already seen the advantages to performance that brings. The second mechanism at work here is gratitude, because the more opportunities for positivity we see, the more grateful we become. Psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent nearly his entire career studying gratitude, has found that few things in life are as integral to our well-being. Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely. And it’s not that people are only grateful because they are happier, either; gratitude has proven to be a significant cause of positive outcomes. When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience fewer headaches than control groups.

Next week we’ll dive specifically into creating a positive narrative about yourself as a technology user. But now that we’ve covered how important a growth mindset is to your goals and how it works, here are your next steps.

Do This

1. What children around you can be a model for choosing a growth mindset? How do they uniquely approach learning and exploring?

2. Reflect on your past growth. What new skills have you learned in last few years? How will that success transfer to your success with becoming tech savvy?

3. List three reasons why you’re able to become tech savvy.

4. Even if you didn’t realize at the time, when have you used a fixed mindset and when have you used a growth mindset? How did the two experiences feel different? What was the process like? What were the results like?

5. Spend 3-5 (or more) minutes imagining yourself using technology with ease and confidence. What are you accomplishing? What are you creating? How does it feel?

6. Watch Thumbs Up for Rock and Roll! again 🤓 If you’d like some further reading, I recommend Brain Pickings‘ article on mindsets.

 

SOURCE: https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/07/become-tech-savvy-if-you-truly-want-to-improve-youll-need-this/

 

With respect.

 

‘Become Tech Savvy’ is a series designed for anyone who wants to learn how to use technology with confidence, ease, and minimal frustration, as well as those who want to help someone else with technology. No matter your age, experience, background, or current skills, this series will provide a unique strategy for mastery.

For the already tech savvy and IT folks, this will be a valuable resource to share and reference while supporting others as it will deconstruct the barriers to becoming tech savvy. Keep reading to discover why absolutely anyone can and should become tech savvy and why this series is unique.

Introduction for the already tech savvy and regular readers

Odds are very good that like me, you’re the go-to tech support resource for your friends, family, and colleagues (maybe you even do it for a living). While it can be fun and rewarding to help out, it can also be difficult, frustrating, or overwhelming, especially depending on how many people regularly need your support. Some of the challenges include remembering what it’s like to not have the skills and knowledge you do, fitting it in your schedule, supporting remotely, and repeatedly helping with the same issues.

Over the last ten years as a teacher in public schools and also working for a major tech company, I started piecing together the distinct attributes that allow a 90-year-old (or anyone) to have fun with tech and use it confidently. I’ve discovered how and why a 50-year-old can convince themselves they’ll always be tech-illiterate or that they’re too old to learn something new. I’ve also met people in their 20’s who don’t know what a backup is and are often frustrated with technology.

The root problem for frustrated users is not a lack of information. Derek Sivers nails this, “If information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” To help others become tech savvy we need to first look at choosing the right mindset, transforming limiting beliefs, and then scaffolding their experience and exposure with an effective strategy and deliberate practice. I’m excited to share this series with you and hope it improves the lives of those around you as well as your own!

Introduction for those who want to become tech savvy

If you’ve decided to become tech savvy, cheers and welcome! Feeling confidence and ease as a technology user is a very useful goal and will positively impact your life in many ways. If you’re still unsure that you really can or even want to, read this article to learn why you absolutely can and should become tech savvy.

First things first, the most important part in considering becoming tech savvy is to focus on your own goals and progress. Don’t focus on the idea of learning it all at once or thinking about everything you cannot do (the design of this series will help you take it one step at a time). Also, try not to be distracted or frustrated by others’ abilities, comparison is often the thief of joy.

We’re all knowledgeable and ignorant, just on different subjects. The goal is sustainable, steady growth, no matter the pace or where you’re starting from (think 1% better every day).

Why You Should

Like all inventions, technology provides the potential for immense benefits as well as many opportunities or problems. These problems can make us feel frustrated, angry, disappointed, discouraged and helpless. The great news is that we can eliminate these negative feelings by learning to use technology competently.

I define being tech savvy or tech competent as being able to use technology with confidence, ease, and minimal frustration (just as someone can achieve the same with playing an instrument or driving a car). That may seem difficult right now, but this series will guide you smoothly to tech savvy mastery as we deconstruct invisible roadblocks and the best ways to approach building your experience and exposure.

The two biggest benefits to using tech confidently and easily are:

• To make creating, sharing, playing, and working efficient and fun. Every day our lives are more intertwined with technology. From ordering food to staying in touch with family to running a business or being an educator, technology is integrated into everything and will only keep increasing.
• When you become efficient and skilled with tech you can save yourself lots of time, which allows you to focus more energy on your priorities and enjoy life more.

Why You Can

“I’m technologically illiterate” and “I’m too old to learn this stuff” are shared with a somber laugh by many people I’ve met. Sadly, the false idea that these things are unchangeable have become a given for far too many people. The trick is to change these narratives with questions like, “why wouldn’t I be able to improve my skills?”, “I’ve learned lots of new things before, what would stop me now?”, or “why would I be too old to learn?”

These questions decode why such limiting ideas have become so popular, they give people an out. If you believe you can’t, it removes any reason to try. There is nothing inherently wrong with believing you can’t do something or deciding to keep on as an un-savvy tech user (or staying ignorant on any subject matter), but it is a choice, not a life sentence.

If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. -Jim Rohn

Now that we’ve deconstructed some of the limiting beliefs that hold us back, we can ask a better question, “how are our choices helping us meet our goals?” Seth Godin cuts to the chase with this quote, “Of course your behavior is justifiable. That’s not the question. The question is, “is it helping?”It’s that simple, what do you want your behaviors to help you do? If you want to learn something new, you may need to adopt a new state of mind that sets you free from past limitations. Mainstream beliefs often hold us back, but if you start looking for evidence that will support why you can be successful and learn whatever you want, you’ll find it.

It’s that simple, what do you want your behaviors to help you do? If you want to learn something new, you may need to adopt a new state of mind that sets you free from past limitations. Mainstream beliefs often hold us back, but if you start looking for evidence that will support why you can be successful and learn whatever you want, you’ll find it.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. -Henry David Thoreau

Why this series is unique

Most tech resources are dense manual style books, isolated Q&A’s, or how-to’s. These resources can help you learn how to do a specific task, but are not efficient and effective ways to master the overall skill of using tech with confidence and ease.

Having the right mindset, changing unhelpful beliefs, and having an efficient and effective strategy for your learning is what will unlock your success. Here’s the foundation of this series, which is why it’s unique and also why it can truly help you become tech savvy no matter where you’re starting from:

• Growth mindset: A productive state of mind is the greatest factor in your success. We’ve never seen any other tech resource discuss this.

• Transform unhelpful beliefs into useful ones: Learn how to start telling helpful stories about yourself, your abilities and goals instead of limiting ones.

• 80/20 Principle: Jumpstart your progress by learning what 20% of things to focus on to give you 80% of the results.

• A strategy that works: Get results as we deconstruct the why-to’s and how-to’s. We’ll show you the best ways to build your experience and exposure and implement deliberate practice.

Next Steps

Alright that’s my pitch, I won’t try to convince you any more about why tech savviness is highly valuable or completely achievable. If you’ve decided it’s not for you, that’s okay. However, if you’ve made your mind up that you can and will become tech savvy and reap the all awesome benefits, cheers, here’s what’s next!

Each week the articles in the Become Tech Savvy series will be organized into the following sections:

• Background, Expectations, & Best Practices This portion will cover the what and why with the best ways to understand and think about a given topic.

• Do This This is section will include the how-to in compressed directive form. This section will efficiently and effectively build your skills with deliberate practice. You can even have fun with this with your friends, family, kids, etc. by making a game or challenge out of it. Will anyone know if you don’t do this part? Actually, yeah they probably will 🙂

• Troubleshooting Some articles in this series will include this section to of course address common issues and provide solutions.

Alright, here is your first Do This assignment:

Open the application ‘Pages’ and choose a new blank document (or other word processor of your choice), copy and paste the questions below and fill in your answers (highlight the questions with your cursor, right-click and select copy, right-click in new doc and select paste. Or, on the keyboard use command + C for copy and command + V for paste). You can even keep the same doc as a Become Tech Savvy journal and keep adding to it as you go (yeah, paper could work too, but not encouraged).

1. What programs or applications do you use frequently and are most important to you?

2. What applications do you feel confident using now?

3. What do you enjoy doing the most with tech?

4. What would you like to learn or what do you see others doing that you’d like to do?

5. What possibility excites you most and what frustrates you most about technology?

6. Share these answers with someone and let them know why you want to become tech savvy! Make a plan to check in with this person(s) each week to keep them updated and get support and feedback.

 

SOURCE: https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/02/become-tech-savvy-how-why-unique-series/

With respect.

 

With respect.