Why Less Is More

I’ve been playing a lot lately with these concepts: less, more and the thing in between (usually called balance). Why do we need more? And more of what? Why sometimes we tend to value balance, while otherwise we tend to lean towards one of the ends? And, most of all, why sometimes less is good?

The following list is my answer to the last question. And, being a list about less, I will skip every unneeded clutter and just start it away (it won’t take you more than 10 minutes to read the whole article):

1. Less Money in Your Life Will Push You To Value More Everything Else

The money rat race is a never ending game. The more money you get the more money you want. It’s a thrill in many ways similar to the one you get by putting your fingers in a power outlet. You get an amazing experience but at the same time you slowly decrease your overall resistance and health. Next time you’ll need more because you created a little bit of tolerance to it. And then a little bit more. And so on.

Money is just raw energy. Without a goal to direct it, without a plan to make it something material, it will remain in its raw form. And every form of raw energy is a dangerous thing to play with.

Now, imagine you won’t aim for this raw energy all the time. Imagine you aim for something simpler. Climbing on top of the world for instance. Or having a balanced family and raising kids. Or writing a fantastic story, painting or sculpting. All in all, just getting out your creative potential. The less money you’ll aim for, the more you’ll want to put your creative potential to work.

Less is more: less money is more creativity.

2. Less Negative Thoughts Will Make Room For More Positive Thoughts

Now that’s an easy one. It works out of the box and everybody could understand it at the first glance. Just eliminate the negative thoughts and you’ll make room for some more positive thoughts. Alas, it’s not always like this. The problem is we’re having different understanding of the concept “negative thoughts”. What I perceive as a negative thought may be something natural for somebody else. Negative thoughts are highly personal. They are shaped by our life experience, upbringing, current environment and more.

So, how can you identify those negative thoughts in the first place? My number one trick in doing that is: are they making me feel angry? Am I experiencing feelings of fear and abandonment? If yes, that’s a negative thought. No matter how “right” that thought may look like in my own internal values system, if it triggers feelings of anger, revenge or fear, it’s a negative thought.

Less is more: less fear, anger and revenge will definitely make room for something else. And that something else has no chance left but being something good. We already got rid of the bad stuff, right?

3. Less Fights Means More Time for Understanding Yourself

Fighting is a constant activity in our modern society. We’re doing it almost on autopilot. Every time we’re not heard, every time something is not working according to our own expectations, every time somebody is making us feeling bad, we’re starting to fight. Most of the time, we’re doing it on the inside. We’re arguing, we’re playing our case, even if we don’t say it out loud.

We’re getting better and better at that. I know I won thousands of fights on the inside: I knew I was right. But in the end, it doesn’t really matters who is winning a fight. All that matters is that you’re using your resources in something useless. You’re spending time and energy on something irrelevant. Ok, it’s in the past now. Move on.

Fighting is such a waste of time. Just make this simple exercise of writing down every argument you had in your mind (or out loud, if you’re more extrovert) and be amazed about how much time you’re spending on this. Now imagine how it would be to make this time available for something really important, like understanding yourself.

4. Less Compromise Means More Power for Your Own Decisions

Compromise is a good social tool. It was invented to keep some sort of a balance between different opinions and create a middle path, allegedly a safer one. As such, compromise is a useful tool for survival. But as with any other good thing in our lives, overusing compromise made it toxic. We compromise on almost everything.

When was the last time you gave full power to your decisions? When was the last time you took into account your own desires and goals, without getting infected by external intentions? If you live in a modern society, you did this last time when you were a kid. And I bet it wasn’t very well received, either.

Less compromise will bring back color and shape into your life. It may not be the color and shape you would expect, but it would be your color and your shape. You can start modifying that world, once you get a hook on it. But without shrinking compromise to the size it deserves (a last minute survival resort) you won’t be able to get a grasp on the correct world. You’ll work on an infected vision of it.

5. Less Procrastination Will Push You To Get More Done

I bet you didn’t know that, by even procrastination can be done in a productive way. Joke aside, spending time without doing what you are committed to do is such a waste. Procrastination is the bigger client of our modern time expenditures. We spend more time procrastinating than maybe sleeping.

Imagine how it would be to have less of procrastination in your life. Less time spent on nothing. Naturally, you’ll start doing things. You’ll start making the world spin again. Staring at something (a project, a task, a client) without acting on it will make it stop. It won’t move, it will be dead. Procrastination is just a softer way to slowly kill your time (in both senses).

6 Less Something Is Always More of The Opposite

And with that, we’re getting to the core of it. Less something is always more of the opposite. That’s the fundamental principle of quantity and it’s a basic rule of our perceived Universe. Some of you may think that’s just a normal fact and I emphasis a normal fact too much. It’s simple, everybody knows that less of something is more of the opposite. Well, for those of you who are really getting this, I apologize. You’re not into the target of this article.

But if there are some readers who think that less of something could really trigger more of the opposite, and that is an incredible powerful tool for switching our world, our life, our universe upside down the way we need it, the last item on the list is for you.

7. Less of This Article Means More Time for Your Brain To Ponder Things By Itself

That’s right, I could go like this forever. But I won’t. I think it’s far more better for you (and, to some extent, for me too) to let you think things by yourself now. If you mentally allocated 10 minutes to this blog post, be happy: you only spent 5 so far, so the remaining 5 are going to be used for somebody really special: you.
Just leave this blog post behind and start thinking: do you have too much of something?

How less of that can give you more? And more of what?

As I’m sitting here, enjoying a coffee and taking it easy, I’m thinking about stress. We all have stress; there’s no way to avoid it. In fact, some degree of stress is a good thing. Just as the stress of weights during exercise can help build muscle, so life stress can build emotional, psychological or mental “muscle”.

Stress becomes a problem when it controls us. If you want to remain balanced, you need to manage the stress in your life.

How do you do that? Here are six secrets of stress management:

Know yourself: If you don’t have a clear sense of who you are and what you stand for, people and circumstances will try to shape you. Trying to be someone or something you’re not is stressful.

Set clear goals: Define what you want or need to do. If there’s a big, undefined task looming in your subconscious, you’re going to be stressed about not getting it accomplished. Setting clear goals allows you to see the end and set the steps toward reaching the goal. Just meeting each of the milestones leading to a completed task can go a long way to reducing stress.

Set your priorities: You can’t do everything all at once. You can set you goals and know the steps to reach those goals, but if you don’t know where to begin, you’re going to build stress. Figure out the priorities and you’ll know where to begin.

Set your focus: Once you know where to begin, focus on that task. If you try and focus on more than one thing at a time, all things will suffer.

Delegate: You can’t do it all yourself. You can plan a major project, set all the steps, plan dates for the deliverables and then stress over all that needs doing. Get the team involved. Even Jesus enlisted 12 disciples.

Relax: Take a break. Successful weight-trainers know, constant stress on the muscles will soon become counter-productive and even damaging. They know their muscles need to have periods of relaxation to get the best benefit from training. Stress can compound. You need to take breaks to relax and refresh, thereby coming back stronger.

Stress is never eliminated, but it can be managed and controlled. A few simple steps and you can make stress work to your advantage.

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