#4 on minimalism & why it leads to success in every area of your life
By: Berenice De La Lanne
Tags: Successful Entrepreneurs, Life Hacking, Mindfulness, Minimalism, Biohacking

One color — one rubik’s cube showcase minimalism so perfectly: simple yet so fulfilling. Picture by Daniele Franchi.

A lot of people have been using minimalism lately to describe their way of being. Like a lot of trending words its become a buzz word. But what exactly is minimalism?

The Minimalists jokingly describe minimalism as such: “to be a minimalist you must live with less than 100 things, you can’t own a car or a home or a television, you can’t have a career, you must live in exotic hard-to-pronounce places all over the world, you must start a blog and you can’t have children.”

Owning less than 100 things is the typical misconecption we have about minimalists.

The first time I got in contact with the concept of minimalism was through my partner, Tilman Walch, CEO of an AI company. Working on a project, bringing my visions to life, immersing myself in my creation I was completely all over the place. I just had and have so many creative ideas and yet didn’t know how to channel them all and bring them to life. Where should I even start? Tilman told me to focus. Simple as that.

When do we even focus? Focus seems so crazy when our phones buzz every now and then, when people call us, when there is so many amazing things going on in the world wide web.

Focus /ˈfəʊkəs/ noun

the centre of interest or activity: “this generation has made the environment a focus of attention” the state or quality of having or producing clear visual definition: “his face is rather out of focus”

Focus /ˈfəʊkəs/ verb

adapt to the prevailing level of light and become able to see clearly: “try to focus on a stationary object” pay particular attention to: “the study will focus on a number of areas in Berlin”

I didn’t want to bore you with definitions but sometimes definitions are truly golden to grasp the understanding of a word. Words bring so much clarity when we truly understand them and not use them as something we have been programmed to use our entire life.

So we know that focus is the centre of interest or activity and brining us particular attention to something.

Here is where the juicy part begins. When do we know that something is in the centre of our interest or activity? We feel it. It is something that our friends from the biohacking community call the Flow State, the magic time when time feels like time doesn’t exist anymore, when hours seem to pass by and projects and ideas are brought with so much energy, devotion, desire and passion into life. When you’ve once experienced the Flow State you will understand that only by bringing your entire awareness & attention to the things you are creating you will gain deeper clarity and understanding of everything that is immersed in that moment of creation. And with creation I mean everything that you are doing, art, business contracts, innovating, legal things — whatever you are doing, you are creating it.

If you would describe the feeling of water running it would be as easy as the Flow State. Picture by Benjamin Voros.

The Flow State brings so much power and clarity in whatever we are creating simply because it is placing your attention on one thing, one idea you are creating and removing everything that is not part of the process and here you are completely minimalistic because it is one thing you are doing not 100 things parallel at the same time.

Simple as that you have become a minimalist. A minimalist with using your time, energy, attention and focus directed to one thing, one idea you are creating.

Being minimalistic is about being very selective with who and what you spend your time with. We only have 24h in a day and we definitly only have a certain energy during the day. We all know that no one, not even Elon Musk, is 24h a day super energetic — everyone sleeps at least 4–8h, maybe less if you struggle with severe insomnia but in the normal case we all sleep and we all eat to some point. These are nurturing times where we recharge our batteries. So in the other lets say 18h a day we need to get dressed, shower, doing our morning rituals — whatever we are doing we have limited time for really getting into that magical Flow State. In case you don’t take mind altering supplements the Flow State is something that wont happen as long 18h. It will cost you a lot of energy and that is just simple biology.

When we are selective with our time and where we focus our energy and attention we become immediately minimalistic because we are cutting out all the BS (please check urban dictionary if you don’t know this beautiful abbreviation, since I do not like to swear).

When we approach every area of our life life becomes so easy and so easy for great opportunities to be attracted by us because we can easily allow them in because there is no mental clutter, but rather a lot of place for clarity and vision to bring ideas and opportunities to life.

You don’t need to have less than 100 things to gain clarity. Minimalism is not so much about the things we own but the way we think, the way we declutter our minds so we have focus and total clarity for our ideas and projects.

Everything we do is diminishing the total energy we have in a day, the things we do, the people we meet, the foods we eat, etc. Everyone knows someone (I hope not a friend of yours, but most of the times thats the best example) that completely diminishes our energy with their negative vibes, e.g. complaining about life, their relationships, their this and their that. When we cut off things that diminish our energy and being really minimalistic about where we place our energy and focus and attention then life gets first of all a lot easier, a lot freer and more spacious to being successful and everything you are doing.

Everyone has their own definition of success but using my beloved dictionary explanations here is what success means in the English language:

Success /səkˈses/ noun: result, successful outcome

Yet again so simple, being minimalistic means being successful in every area of your life because focussing your energy and attention on the one creation you are trying to bring into life will make the result, the outcome extremely successful for you — in every way you define it.

How to start being a minimalist?

Start by asking yourself this simple question: where do you place all your energy, focus and attention during the day? Are your push up notifications overwhelming you? Turn them off. Are phone calls annoying you and steal your time? Go into flight mode or use the “do not disturb” button. My iPhone is mostly all day on the little “moon” symbol because my ideas are litterally mooning and I do not have the time for anything that is disturbing my Flow State.

Also another great tip: not only de-clutter your mind (meditation works very well, too) but also read the book by the cleaning queen herself, Marie Kondo: “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: The Japanese Art” and start de-cluttering your home. No, you don’t need to reduce the things you own to 100 but you need to clean up to give yourself and your space freedom and openness. You will know when you’ve de-cluttered your mind and space about how free you will feel.

All the best to you,

Berenice

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Click on the “play” button below to listen to the entire Podcast Session on minimalism w/ Tilman Walch: