Transcripts
1. introduction : In minimalism is really
about simplifying your life so that you can
have more time, money, and energy to spend on the things that
matter most I've been on kind of like my minimalist journey for about
the past three years now. And I've used these principles
and ideas of minimalism, not only in my personal life, but also in my professional life as a YouTuber and a creator, it's really about
less but better. What are the 10% of
things that are going to lead to 90% of the results. What are the 10% of things that lead to 90%
of the problems? And then focusing on
those very few things, making one decision
that will make a 1000 decisions for your
future, simplifying your life. In this course, I'm gonna
be sharing the ten steps, if you will, towards
becoming a minimalist. How to say no, to think, how to start changing your life, not only your physical clutter, but also your mental clutter. How to start spending money intentionally so that
you can have more money, which in turn will give
you more freedom to spend on the things
that matter most. And I am so excited for you guys to be joining me
on this journey.
2. Finding Your Why: Much like with
anything in your life, if you don't have a strong
reasoning behind it, you're most likely
going to fail. You see people all
the time who go to the gym on New Year's
and they stay for a month where they started
diet on New Year's and they keep that going for a couple of weeks
or maybe a month. But eventually because
they didn't have a mindset shift and are really strong reason behind
it, they inevitably fail. I don't want that to
happen with you guys. You're here because you
want to simplify your life. You want to have some changes in reduced stress and
have more freedom. So the first step really
is to find your why. When I was just starting, my house was constantly a wreck. I would be worried when people would come
over because there just be crap everywhere. I shopped kind of like impulsively and just went
I was bored and just having like a stuffed
closet that I couldn't fit anymore
hangers into and clothes strewn all over the
place and just junk and knick-knacks around my house
was really stressful for me. I was also working a full-time job and
2.5 part-time jobs. So I just had a
ton of stuff going on in my life and I realized
that I cannot sustain this. It's continually stressing
me out more and more. And I'm sure a lot of you
guys relate with this, but if I don't do anything, nothing's going to change. And if anything, it's probably
going to get more busy. So I started with
taking some time and asking myself a
couple of questions. And it wasn't like
specific questions, it's gonna be different
for everybody. For me, it was like literally going out for long walks and thinking about my
life and what I wanted it to look like
in a couple of years. And I realized that I didn't
want to be working days, nights, weekends, just constantly
doing a bunch of stuff. I didn't want my
house to be a wreck. I didn't want my
stuff to start owning me instead of the other way
around and be a burden. And after a couple of days or a week of thinking about this, I really started to
understand my y, which was reduced stress because I was
stressed constantly. It was eventually
when I have a family, I want to have time to
spend with my family and not constantly
be working to an, a ton of different things. For me remembering how
easily stress turns into depression or anxiety and really wanting to
avoid that has been a great motivator for me when things get tough because
they're going to get tough, you're going to want to quit. You're gonna do it for
maybe a week or two. And then you will realize that this is actually not
a onetime thing. It's a bit of a journey and it'll probably be discouraging. People might not
understand what you're doing if you don't
have that reason of I'm doing what is right for me and I don't care
what my friends and family think this
is what's right for me in my life and my family. So before we get into
the nitty-gritty, It's really important to
have an overarching y and kind of like a direction that
you want your life to go.
3. Consuming Less: Consuming less. This might seem obvious or it might seem backwards
to some people. But before we get
into decluttering, both mentally, financially and just with our physical junk, it's important to
stop the floodgates of junk coming into
our live for me, I realized that I
could survive quite awhile with just the
stuff that I had. So I did a bit of a one-month
shopping bandwidth. I'd highly recommend
30 days, 90 days, six months, whatever
you want to do, and just stop buying
things uninstalled, Amazon off your phone, maybe even block it
on your computer, stopped going to the mall
and try to limit even go to the grocery
store to once a week. We're all kind of ingrained with this upgrade culture
that we have to have the newest thing and
instant gratification, we can click a button and
food shows up at our door or anything we want within a couple hours or
a couple of days. But this can be not only
stressful financially, but actually take some of
the happiness out of us because we don't really
enjoy things that we have. It's always chasing the
next one and the next one. Even like when you
buy a new car, you're going to have a
lot of excitement and joy about that car
for maybe a day, maybe a week if you're lucky and then it will return to baseline. Your happiness will return to what it would be if
you had any other car. We need to get out of this
mindset that watch that phone, that car, those shirts
will make me happy. They won't at least
not for very long. It's just stuff like you
don't need it. Move on. So we need to take some
aggressive steps to get out of this consumer mindset. And I would recommend
just starting with a 30 day ban of buying anything but like food
and see what happens. See if you actually enjoy that month more than
the monk before.
4. Saying NO : Say no. I think it was also known
as decluttering near life. When I first started on
YouTube a couple of years ago, I was trying to do three
videos a week because I saw other people doing
that and it just seemed like what I should do. But as I started getting into minimalism in this idea
of less but better, I decided to take
all of that energy that I was trying to pour into three videos a week
and pour it all into one video a week. And literally within
the first month I had my first video
that went well, partially viral for just
being a random video. Since then I was hooked. I applied minimalism to
everything I do with my work. And I tried to say no to as
many things as possible, which sounds kind of counterproductive
when you're trying to grow in your career. But you have to realize when
you say yes to one thing, you're saying no
to something else. If I say yes to doing three
videos every single week, then I can't spend
a lot of time on those videos that I can't say
yes to other opportunities. When someone asks you
to go to an event, when someone asks you
to go out late When you say yes to a part-time job, every decision that you make, every time you say yes, you're saying no
to something else. So I've tried to adapt this
mindset of if it's not in 90% or above something that I'm super excited about like
a Heck yes type of thing, then I'm gonna say no to that thing so that
everything that I do, everything that I buy, everything that I spend my
time on as much as possible. Obviously, we all gotta do
self, we don't want to do. But for the most part, if
it's not that exciting, happy to do it thing, then I'm going to say no, if it's not something
that's going to make a huge impact getting
towards my goals, then I'm going to try to say no. And there's so much freedom in that you can even look at
your clothes this way. What are the 10% of clothes that you love to where everybody has their favorite outfit. For me, I wear pretty
much the same thing every single day and I love
wearing it every single day, But before I had a ton of different shirts and I
didn't like any of them. I had the same five that
I wore all the time. What if I can just get
rid of all that stuff? That's not a heck
yes, a 90 or above. What if I never buy
anything that I'm not excited about and know I'm
going to wear all the time. What if, for the most part, everything that I owned
is my favorite thing. I get to use my favorite
stuff all the time. It's actually kind
of exciting and you realize you have so
much power over your life, over your time, over your money. When you start to say no.
5. Decluttering: Decluttering, this was honestly the most therapeutic
and addicting part of this process for me, once you start getting rid of random junk that you don't
even care about at all, but that you're hanging
onto because you have this need inside of
you to have more. You have just in case stuff, you have all this random stuff. When you start to get rid of it, you realize that each
thing that you own has a tiny bit of space in your mind that it
owns as you free your house in your life
of more and more stuff, you start to have
more mental clarity. Your stress levels start
to go down a little bit. You start to get excited
about being able to see your kitchen countertop
and they don't have stuff on them all
the time always. In fact, I recommend starting
with either a living room or your kitchen before you just dive into
your whole house, pick one room that you
spend a lot of time in that you can really focus on. You can bang out in a day or on a weekend going through
things and maybe if you haven't used it
in the last 90 days and you don't expect to use
it in the next 90 days. Just getting rid of it,
really simplifying and decluttering just
one room and letting nappy motivation and
then really building habits and focusing
on keeping that room clean for at least
a week and then trying to keep it
clean for a month. And really building
habits around it in that room will be Motivation. You'll realize you're
less stressed in the living room because
it doesn't have a bunch of crap all
over the place. Then you are in other
rooms and you'll start to want that for
the rest of your house. Something that I
like to do and I've had for the past
couple of years is just a box next to my front
door that is for donations. And as I'm going
through my house, as I see stuff that
I don't use anymore, I can take it and put it that box and then once
a week or once a day, depending on how
much stuff you have, you can take it to be donated. This makes decluttering
and getting rid of things that you
don't actually need a habit because you're
reminded of that every time you walk past that box, obviously when you're
getting started, it's probably going to
actually take awhile. You might want to enlist a friend to help you
that it doesn't have the same sentimental
attachments that you have, but especially after
just the first day and you realize that all that stuff that you owned and you've been hanging onto for so long, makes 0 impact in
your happiness. You'll start to get excited
about getting rid of more and more stuffs so that you can have a
less stressful cleaner, more enjoyable for the class
project for this course, I would love if
you guys a before and after picture of
one room in your house, the first room that
you're gonna do and do a before and after
picture and then do another picture in a week and another picture in a
month because I've done a onetime declutter
and then within a month it was right
back to where I started. This is a process and this is a long-term habit,
a lifestyle change. You can't do it once and expect it to stay perfect forever. This is a journey I can't
wait to see your before and afters down in the
class projects section. Well, this is a high-level
view of decluttering. I think it's a really
good place to start.
6. Finding A Home: As your decluttering,
find a home for everything as you're going through and decluttering things, it's super important
to start to find a home for everything
that you own. This will make keeping
your house clutter-free and organized and
stressful, effortless, or at least simpler if
you're anything like me, your countertops and tables, regular tables all
collect random junk. And why is that? When you
ask yourself, why is that? Why is my house always messy? It's because your stuff
doesn't have a home. If you pick and
think about a place that your keys in
your wallet belongs, you're much less
likely to lose them. You're much less likely to
just throw them on the table. If you have a designated place for your coat in your shoes, you're not just
going to chuck them once you walk in the front door as your decluttering
and you don't want to sell or
donate this item, ask if it has a home and if you can't find a
home for this thing, maybe you should reconsider if it's something that you need, but try to find a home
for everything in your house and it'll
probably take awhile, but it also makes
cleaning up a lot easier when you
actually know where things belong and you don't just shove them under your
bed or in a closet for on a shelf or move over the pile of
junk on your table, find everything at home.
7. Decluttering Your Finances: Decluttering your finances. For most people, finances are something that is stressful, something that they avoid. But actually one of my
favorite benefits of minimalism is the
financial aspects. So not only do we start
to save money as we cut out a lot of unnecessary
stuff in our lives. But we can also simplify
our finances and make them as streamlined and
simple as possible. So how do we do that? I would recommend starting with the most simple thing
you can possibly do. And that is to take an app like true bill or mentor NerdWallet. There's a ton of different
free apps out there. And you put in your
credit cards and bank accounts and everything into these apps and then
you start to simply track, you don't start budgeting, you start simply
tracking and observing where your money is going,
how much is coming in, how much is going out, and
where is it going to take five minutes at the end of each month and look
through all of your bills. As you do this, you start
to realize how much of the stuff went to
wants and needs. And if you didn't
spend that money on a bunch of different
things in the past month, it would have 0
impact in your life. But if you had all
that extra money, that would give you
some freedom that would allow you to
start traveling, that would allow you to
maybe leave your job sooner? When I started to
really cut down everything is that I spent
in my monthly expenses got a lot lower if that
was what let me save up enough money to start investing and eventually leave my day
job when I was 24 and just do YouTube full-time
even though I was making like $500 a
month, that's that time. But because my
expenses were so low, I was able to save up a lot of money without really
all that much effort. One of the simplest things
you can start decluttering in your finances are going
through your subscriptions. We live in a subscription world where everybody is
trying to get us to pay monthly for things and some things
like Skillshare, I think, are totally worth it. I've had that
subscription myself for a while because it
actually makes me money. It better is me as a person. But having Netflix,
Hulu, peacock, Disney Plus cable, plus the random mystery
boxes that I get, whatever it is for you. You probably don't need most of those things if you want
to have more time in your life and you want to
watch less TV as well. It might help do
that if you cancel four of the subscriptions
that you have, you don't have the option
of watching those. It's kind of like the idea
of you lose weight while you're at the grocery
store because if you don't have ice
cream in your house, you're not going to have ice cream at 11
o'clock at night. You're also not going to binge
watch something on Netflix if you don't have Netflix
now, don't get me wrong. Some of those streaming
services are good, but I personally have just
picked one or two that I use. And I don't have cable and I
don't have the other ones. I've tried to just keep
the amount of those that I have as low as
possible so that I don't have too many options to watch TV and really waste time. There's also all the other things that
aren't subscriptions, like maybe your daily coffee or your daily lunch or drinks are going out to
dinner five nights a week. All those things that when
you add them all together, add up to extra thousands or tens of
thousands of dollars at the end of the year. And the difference between having that in an emergency fund and living paycheck to paycheck with all this stuff mentally, it is an insane difference. It's simplifies
everything in your life. It gives you so
many more options when your expenses are lower.
8. Digital Minimalism: Digital minimalism. The average person spends between 56 hours a
day on our phones. That's life-changing
time right there. Most people, when you
ask them how they're doing, they're gonna say, I'm busy, works good, but it's busy, man, it's
been crazy recently. It's been it's
been a rough week, It's been a rough month,
It's been a crazy year. So much stuff going on. I don't have time
to play sports, to hang out with my
family, to go to the gym, to start a side hustle to start my passion project and finally do that thing that
I've always wanted to do. I just don't have time for it. And yet we have time to
spend a quarter of our days. The phone. Here's a couple of
things that I've done to really try to
limit my screen time, which has given me
a lot of freedom to do other stuff that I otherwise probably wouldn't have thought I had
time for first. And this might be a big step, but you might need to detox from social media
maybe for a month, maybe for a week,
maybe for a day. But going through and
deleting Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok,
maybe even YouTube. And then just observing
how many times you take your phone out of
your pocket when you're bored, when
you're in line, when you're in the
bathroom and seeing that it's a mindless reaction, you know, consciously that you don't have Instagram
on your phone yet. You might pull out
your phone 25 times in a day to just check
Instagram when you're bored, you'll notice probably
after a couple of days, maybe a week, how much differently
your mind acts when you have social media
on your phone and when you don't realize how much more time you have in the
day if you cut out TV and being on your phone
at night, what do you do? Well, maybe, maybe
you start reading, maybe start painting, maybe
you start playing guitar. Maybe start doing all
those things that you wanted to do someday. But you never seem
to have time for. This can be a bit extreme. And you don't need
to do that forever, but doing it for
a week or a month will make a huge
mental impact on you. You will have a lot
more mental clarity. I also put my phone on
grayscale mode or I download a couple minimalist apps and it takes away all the
icons on my phone. So it makes my phone
a lot more boring. It's black and white. I don't get notifications. It really cuts down on that
desire to just whip out my phone constantly when it's a lot more boring, honestly.
9. Enjoying Life: Learn to enjoy what you have. Most people upgrade their
phone every year or two. They buy new clothes, new shoes, and new car all before they're
old ones are worn out. In fact, it's extremely
uncommon for us to wear clothes until they
get holes in them. Do you use any electronic until it actually stops working? Instead, we always get caught up into the grass is greener. On the other side, that new
thing will make me happy. But as you've started
to get rid of more and more stuff
in your life, in your home, you
start to realize the value of the things
that you do have. I think this is the mindset
shift that has brought a lot of happiness into my life and can
bring it into yours. It's this idea of
being grateful for everything that you do have as Americans or wherever
you're from. But you have at least a computer or a phone where you can watch. You probably have clothes
on right now that you actually bought and you've got them because you liked them, not just because they kept
you safe from the elements. You probably own a couple
of pairs of shoes. You probably have a
roof over your head and aren't starving right now. Like, we don't take time to be grateful for all the
things that we do have. Instead, we're always
chasing more stuff. We're always looking
to the future, but the future never comes. Life is always. Now. If you look at right now in the
things that you have, you realize you don't need
anything else to be happy. Everything we have
right now is enough. Happiness is a choice. You can have two people in the same exact situation with the same stuff
and one of them is miserable and the
other person has a grateful mindset for
all of that stuff, that exact same things but
totally different mindset. One can be happy,
one can be not. It is completely your choice.
10. Simplify Your Goals: Simplify your goals. There is power in
narrowness of focus, while most people either have no goals or just a ton of goals, I have found that narrowing
down and simplifying my goals has made achieving them actually happen for
the first time ever. And then sticking with
them happen as well. So here is how I approach
this as minimalists. First of all, I set
123 short-term goal. Well, I might have
longer-term goals. I tried to break those down into 90 day segments and then only focus on that short-term
90 day segment and not the big long-term one. Because if I have a goal to do something within the next year, it's most likely that I won't get started and I
definitely won't finish before 11 months and 29 days maybe you're
not like that and you just get it done right at
the beginning of the year. But for me, that doesn't really
happen with 90 day goals. I don't really have that same
option. I have to do it. I can't kick the can that
far down the road because it needs to happen in
the next three months. This is short enough that
I can't procrastinate and long enough
that I can actually make some significant progress. And then I really
tried to break these down into what is the
one thing I can do today that will get me
closer to my goal and only focusing on one thing
for that goal each day, not ten, not 20, not sprinting and trying to
get it all done at once. But what one thing can
I do every day for the next 90 days for the next year that will get
me closer to that goal. For me, reading is something that has really
improved my life. So that's something that I
want to do every single day. So instead of having
this big lofty goal of 52 books or even a book a month. I've committed to
one page every day. This is attainable. It
can take thirty-seconds. I can keep making progress. Most likely I'll get past
it and read ten pages. But it ensures that I make progress towards my
goal every single day. And I do the same
thing with YouTube and my investments and other
goals that I have, where I make one
step closer to it. Every day, most people would try to sprint and they burn out and they lose focus
and they forget what goals they even set. So write down, make them
specific, makes him attainable, make them short-term,
and see what happens. Simplify it from ten
down to the 12 or three that will make the
most impact in your life.
Gabe Bult, Do Less
