The Simple Life: Less Is More
We have all heard the saying that less is more. This phrase can be applied to essentially any and all aspects of a person’s life. Very little is needed to make a person truly happy. There lies true beauty in simplicity; less is usually more effective.
We engage in an immense amount of activities on a daily basis, making our attention constantly jump around. Simplifying these activities will yield greater results. When you eliminate certain things that are not as important to you, you make room for other things that are of greater importance. This allows you to immerse yourself more deeply and thoroughly in the things you truly enjoy.
You need to carefully analyze the different things in your life and decide what is adding to it and what is taking away from it. Taking the time to assess your life situation is a great way to ensure that you will live a less cluttered life in the future.
"Emptying your mind helps develop clarity, common sense and insight."
Less is more because it gives us more time to work on things that are important to us. It lets all the distractions fall into the background, allowing us greater freedom. Life can be much more simple than we construe it to be. Life is ultimately what we make of it. We have the ability to change our perceptions and procedures at any given moment. We have the ability to get rid of things that just fill our days, but don’t help us achieve happiness.
We need to advocate an unadorned, clutter-free lifestyle, one where the focus is not on mindless material consumption, but rather on inner peace, connection with others, meaningful involvement in the community and, most importantly, the act of making conscious decisions about how we lead our lives.
“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” -Socrates
We need to strategically filter out things in our lives that are not aligned ultimately with where we are trying to go and are taking away from our ability to focus on what we truly desire. The reality is that we really only have so much attention and focus we can direct. In order to move in the direction we should, we have to ensure that we are directing as much of this energy and attention to our top priorities and eliminating those other things that we can.
In the dating world, when trying to get a girl interested in you, many people believe that the best way of going about this is to give her all sorts of attention. The truth of the matter is if you are trying to pursue a hot girl, the less you do will be more. Good-looking girls are used to receiving attention from men, so when you don’t give the girl the attention she’s used to, she becomes intrigued.
“Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated.”-Confucius
The more you talk, the less people will listen to you. If you really want the things you say to make an impression, do not cloud them with other incessant nonsense. Speak only about things that carry true value, so that your points can be heard clearly.
Think about when you go in for a job interview. The person interviewing you does not want to hear about the ten different clubs or jobs you have had in your lifetime. They want you to focus on your most important and impressive occupations. That way, you can highlight that your attention has been focused on only a few different jobs.
The belief is that by focusing all of your attention on fewer things, the more devoted you are to them. When they ask what your biggest strengths are, they do not want to hear a laundry list of your skill set, they want to hear about your two or three most remarkable talents.
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