Rebranding, Decluttering, and the Art of Seiri Part 2

In the first part of this two part series on Seiri in one’s personal life, I talked about finding your “why” in life. I asked you to answer a few questions so you could try to figure out what makes life worth living for you. Hopefully you guys have some sense of what your ideal life is all about because today, we are going to be stripping everything else away!

Seiri Revisited

Seiri, for those of you who still do not know, is the art of simplifying your life. OK, so that is the nice way of saying it. A lot of people hate it because it means throwing things out of their life. Many people horde material possessions  and overbook their schedules. When is the last time you heard someone say “Man, I have way too much time on my hands? EXACTLY! It is time for us to better ourselves by liberating our life from the things that are weighing us down.

Let’s Talk Trashy

Here is the big moment! Don’t worry though, I will be walking through everything holding your hand so you have nothing to fear if you just follow the steps.

1) Re-Define – You should have already done this from my last post. If not, ask yourself what truly matters to you. This is an important step so please be honest with yourself and take a few good minutes doing some soul searching

2) Focus - Now that you have a decent idea on what your ideal life is all about, go ahead and pick no more than 6-8 things that will be the primary focuses in your life. Jay Block’s recent post got it right when talking about different ways we victimize ourselves. Jay says:

The key to success is to understand that about 6-8 things make most of the difference.  The problem is that most people are not disciplined to invest 90% of their time, energy, and finances on the 6-8 things.  Underachievers spend too much time on things that don’t matter and way too little time on things that do matter.  High achievers, on the other hand, have the ratios right.

3) Planning – Now that we have identified the framework of “why” we live our life and found 6-8 things we want to be spending most of our time on, we need to do some planning to get things standardized. This may be a little tedious, but it is very important. You can create a basic schedule on a plain piece of paper or you can use some really cool online software like TeuxDeux. Write out a basic daily schedule for each standard day of the week and make sure that 80%+ of your focus is on one of the 6-8 things you identified in the previous step.

4) Liberation – You are done! Just follow your basic outline and constantly remind yourself not to get involved with things in your life that will overburden you. You should start to notice that your life seems more stress free and the majority of your life is spent doing things you are passionate about (or things that enable you to do things you are passionate about).

Now I really challenge you to hold yourself up to your own standards that you wrote down. It may seem kind of hard at first, but you will start seeing how much simpler your life is after just a day or two of throwing away unimportant things in your life.

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Rebranding, Decluttering, and the Art of Seiri Part 1

Hi, my name is Patrick, and I’m a victim of self-sabotage. There I said it out in the open. I sabotage myself constantly and I don’t even realize it. I’m also willing to bet that most people in the world do the same thing to themselves too. Let me explain.

I am a part of Gen-Y (those born between the mid 1970′s to the early 2000′s). The main characteristics of us Gen-Y’ers is that we have had everything provided for us. We believe the world revolves around us, that we can be/do anything we want to be/do, everything will be provided for us, and that hard work is a thing of the past. This grand delusion is problematic and causes lots of discomfort when we are presented with hurdles in life. We think we can take on tons of stuff in this multitasking world and that we can just somehow get to our goals without hard work. Sounds familiar, huh?

The Art of Seiri

I am about to introduce Seiri into my life and create the bare necessities in life for what makes me happy. The key to this is to discover what I am passionate about and remove everything left over. If I’m not passionate about something, it just builds up and becomes clutter (aka: stress).

 

Amber Rae Lambke, from Student Branding TV, sums it up best by saying:

Once you determine what your “why” is, the process of getting there will become very easy. Your “why” is your purpose — it’s the things that excite you and motivate you. It’s those things you are passionate about.

I think that we love to add things that sound interesting to our lives, but the processes build up in our life as burdens. We tell people we will help them with stuff, we sign up for stuff we never use, we set tons of goals for ourselves that we don’t achieve, etc. All these things add up and create this mentality of failure around us which depresses us and demotivates us. All these things prevent us from achieving what we really want. Once we find our “why” in life, we can discover our process of getting there.

If we look at Kaizen, we can see this point emphasized even more. Seiri is defined as the following:

Seiri states that companies must sort through their workplace and only keep tools and equipment that is absolutely necessary. Anything else should be sorted out and considered to be thrown away. It is used to free up the workspace from stuff that is kept “just in case.”

Finding the “Why” In Our Life

Finding the “why” in our life is very hard and takes a lot of soul searching. There are some things we can do to understand what we are passionate about. These things only take a few seconds, but they are very important ind discovering ourselves. Here are some questions to help us discover ourselves:

  1. Imagine you are in your house and a fire breaks out. You realize you only have enough time to carry out 3 things. What would you save and why?
  2. If money were not a factor, what would you do for the rest of your life and why?
  3. If you could have lunch with anyone in history for an hour, who would you take and why?

Amber Rae Lambke also had some great soul searching questions which I feel help to discover our personality:

  1. If I were a dog, what dog would I be and why?
  2. If I were a hotel, what hotel would I be and why?
  3. If I were a car, what car would I be and why?

These questions may seem stupid and trivial, but seriously, take 2 minutes and just answer them honestly. Who knows, you might learn something interesting about yourself.

Here are my answers to these questions:

Imagine you are in your house and a fire breaks out. You realize you only have enough time to carry out 3 things. What would you save and why? The first thing would have to be my family. I love my family a lot and obviously would want to make sure they were OK first and foremost. The second thing I would grab would be my laptop. It is probably one of the most valuable things I own in terms of both price and value. I use it every day for work and play. The third thing I would grab would be some of my nicer clothes. I think image is important. Not on a shallow superficial level, but in terms of giving off a good impression to people.
If money were not a factor, what would you do for the rest of your life and why? That is a tough question for me. I love to constantly be challenged so I would probably play poker for fun to constantly try and improve and become the best. I would also try to spend a lot of time trying to get into influential groups and meeting influential people. I find those people fascinating and I feel that with them, you could change the world for the better. Finally, I would want to do something more spiritual. I realize that life is short and would want to spend a lot of time figuring out the beauty of this world and what is to come after we die.
If you could have lunch with anyone in history for an hour, who would you take and why? It would probably have to be Jesus. He did amazing things during his life and changed the world forever. Everything in our modern age is based on him or his teachings. We are in the year 2011. What does 2011 mean? 2,011 years after his birth. This is why I find him so fascinating. He would have so much insight into life, this world, and I could get a glimpse of the man who impacted modern western culture.

If I were a dog, what dog would I be and why? I would have to be a Labrador. They are very calm, loving, and loyal animals and I think it would be awesome to be as curious as they are.
If I were a hotel, what hotel would I be and why? I would be the Trump hotel in Las Vegas. The name Trump is prestigious, well known, and comes with an aura of luxury and giving value to their customers.
If I were a car, what car would I be and why? I would be a Cadillac CTS because they are fast, stylish, powerful, and like Trump, Cadillac has a name that implies luxury and lots of value offered

Final Thoughts

I have personally completed the first half of Seiri. I have defined my “why” and am now ready to strip everything else away. In the second part of this post, I will go over how to remove these burdens and focus on doing more things in our lives that promote the “why.”

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