How to Create the Basis for Minimalist Business Success
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
I’ve spoken before about the idea of creating a minimalist business — a zero-overhead location-independent business that practically runs itself.
Over the last year I’ve been able to successfully create my own minimalist business. During this year I’ve learned a good deal about how to create one successfully.
I’ve made some mistakes. I’ve also made some huge breakthroughs.
I conducted a lot of research, reading over 40 business books this year. Some of these business books were terrible, others like Timothy Ferriss’s 4 Hour Workweek and Seth Godin’s Tribes have set the foundation for what was to come.
The fundamentals of a minimalist business.
I’ve been thinking about the fundamentals that make a minimalist business successful, and I believe I’ve narrowed them down to just 7 decisive elements.
Not every minimalist business will need to use them all to be successful. However, I truly believe that if you ignore these 7 decisive elements, you’re going to have a more difficult time creating a minimalist business that works.
Why design a minimalist business?
We live in the age of day-job wage slavery. People go to work in the morning, do some stuff that they’re told to do, and then go home at night with a paycheck in hand. Somehow this feels empty, but we’re not sure exactly why.
The reality is that it doesn’t have to be this way anymore. The Internet has given every single individual with a dream the ability to make work online that will support them.
The idea of a minimalist business takes the location-independent business idea a little further. I want to give people the tools to create a business that allows them to work less and live anywhere in the world.
Obviously when you’re in the initial stages of creating a minimalist business, the work times will be quite longer than 10 hours, but eventually — if you follow the 7 decisive elements that I’ve laid out below — you will have designed a minimalist business that requires very little input.
Once you get to that point, you can sit back, relax, and watch the profits come in.
Designing a minimalist business isn’t for everyone.
Not everyone wants to be location independent or create a business that provides passive income while they live and work from anywhere. That’s okay! Creating a minimalist business isn’t easy, and I’d personally rather invite only the people who truly are interested in pursuing this path to freedom.
Whether you’re interested in creating a minimalist business, or simply want to apply these ideas to your work life or your not-minimalist business. Go for it! I hope I can be of help.
Here are the 7 Decisive Elements of Minimalist Business Design
1. No-overhead.
A minimalist business must have no (or very low) overhead.
This means that you don’t spend any money until you are making money. Many business owners insist on buying expensive hosting packages, costly equipment, or intensive consulting programs, before their business idea is even conceptualized. Don’t spend a dime, until you’ve got an idea that you’re ready to put into play. Even then, it’s more than possible to get your message to the world without having major costs.
Some businesses will need to spend a little bit for supplies, but a good rule is to keep start up costs under $100.
We think we need to spend money to make money, because we’ve been brought up in a culture where brick and mortar was the norm. Now the web is the norm, and in most cases you don’t need to spend much money at all to operate on the web.
If you think your business will cost a lot of money to run, think about what you can eliminate to make the costs vanish. Obviously there are businesses that do require start-ups costs –and these are totally legit businesses, but these aren’t what we’re going for.
A minimalist business has no-overhead. If your business design has massive overhead, it isn’t a minimalist business plan.
The best part about having no-overhead is that the cost of failure is small. If your business doesn’t take off, no harm done. All you have to do is start over again with a new idea.
2. Location independence.
One of the big advantages of starting a minimalist business is that it allows you to live and work from anywhere. On May 15th I’m going to move to San Francisco Bay, and my business simply comes with me. Last year I spent many months traveling from Portland Or through Chicago to New York.
If my business was rooted in one spot, I wouldn’t be able to move as often as I do.
A minimalist business is hosted in The Cloud. For those who are still living back in 1995, The Cloud is the networking infrastructure that has been created by large web companies to support networked computing. Almost every computing task, transaction, etc can now be completed online.
This means you don’t need an extensive amount of equipment to run your business. I like to keep it as simple as possible: just use a small Laptop. I have a MacBook Pro, but maybe you want a PC. It doesn’t matter, as long as the machine is portable.
This means that a minimalist business owner can tend to their business from anywhere in the world using WIFI, which is very easy to obtain is most places in the world at coffee shops and internet cafes.
This means you also don’t need an office, or even a permanent home, which eliminates many unnecessary costs.
3. Use existing infrastructure.
So many newbie entrepreneurs insist on constantly reinventing the wheel, especially when the wheel already exists. The tools you need to create your minimalist business already exist, do not try to invent new ones. Let other people in established businesses invest in infrastructure.
Infrastructure varies for every endeavor, but here are a few simple examples: Instead of coding a blog from scratch, use a nice free template and host on a well regarded blogging software. Believe it or not, I’ve been approached by start-ups who insisted the only way to get started was to start creating a blogging platform from scratch (ahem, WordPress exists.) Don’t be this business, you’ll waste literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, when you could have started for free.
The same path goes for communications infrastructure. Use established networks such as Twitter, and Facebook to reach out to clients. These services are popular for a reason, use them to reach potential customers instead of going the door-to-door route that so many people choose.
4. Automation.
A minimalist business needs to run itself. The foundation of passive income is that it comes in without you having to go looking for it.
Completely passive income is very hard to find, but that’s the ultimate goal. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to end up having a completely passive income stream, but just the possibility that it could go passive eventually.
Money coming in while you sleep is passive enough for most people. In order to do this, you need to automate everything. You can’t be accepting transactions by hand. You cannot be shipping and labeling individual orders as they come in. A minimalist business uses e-junkie, or another similar platform to handle all payments, transactions, and affiliate sales.
Once you automate all tasks that computers can do, this frees you up to do work that matters. And also allows you to travel and have massive amounts of free time to do what you want with your life. The ultimate goal in any minimalist business is freedom, and you need to automate in order to get to that point.
5. Isolation.
We’re constantly plugged into The Matrix: The Real World, that constantly on stream of information coming into your brain from social media, your cell phone, and any other stimuli that you allow into your space.
You have to turn it all off to create a minimalist business. Constant access to information leads to reactionary workflow — the most common symptom of this is sitting and refreshing your Gmail over and over every 35.5 seconds. Do you know what happens when you send and reply to email all day? You get email all day. This leads to nothing important getting done.
You aren’t creating the work which will be the foundation of your minimalist business if you’re just sitting around waiting for an email to come to your inbox so that you can reply to it.
Stop. Unplug. Sit in silence until you have regained the ability to have your own thoughts.
I recommend checking your email once per day if you’re trying to establish a successful minimalist business. I know this isn’t always possible, but it’s the end goal.
By decisively moving toward conscious isolation, you’ll be able to test if the automation systems are working, and also you’ll begin to create work that matters. Which brings us to…
6. Creating a movement.
Creating a movement the most important element. Your minimalist business needs to be about making the world better in some very specific way.
I’ve written about creating a movement before, and that’s because I believe it’s so incredibly important in any business model.
There are a number of different elements that come into play in any minimalist business movement. First, you need leaders. People who are willing to fight for the change that you believe in. When you have leaders, you will inevitably have followers. Followers are the people who support your minimalist business.
Second, a movement isn’t for everyone. Some people must be left out — the more the better (but not so many as to leave no one.) The reason for this is because if you create a minimalist business for everyone, you’ll end up helping no one. There are so many people in the world, they all need different things, they all have different beliefs.
Most businesses seek to create a product that suits everyone. Do the smart thing and create a niche business that you’re passionate about.
This is why I said above that creating a minimalist business isn’t for everyone, because it isn’t. Not everyone will have the skill or ambition to make location independent passive income a reality. Most people will just want to stay at their day jobs and go shopping on weekends.
7. Quality.
A minimalist business has to focus on creating a quality product. This is the making or breaking point for any business, and it must be the ultimate focus of minimalist business design.
Create a product that helps people, which harnesses your strengths to make change in the world.
The simple fact is that the world doesn’t have any more room for crappy stuff. We can’t be creating minimalist businesses that give people something they don’t need.
The single most important factor in minimalist business success is creating work that matters. Every minimalist business I’ve come across that has failed because they created a lame product that people didn’t need. There are enough of bad products in the world, what we need now is work that matters.
The thing is, I can’t tell you where your quality work comes from, this work is different for everyone. For me it was writing The Art of Being Minimalist in order to encourage people to stop consuming and start living their lives — this has been a huge success and now enables my location independent life.
For your minimalist business, the change you create will be different. You have to look deep inside yourself and honestly ask yourself what you’re passionate about creating. This passion is the foundation of your minimalist business.
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I hope this helps those of you who are thinking about starting a minimalist business. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments, I’ll do my best to answer the ones that I can.
If this helped you, consider hitting the retweet button.
Thank you,
Everett Bogue
Challenge yourself to find balance and still reach for The Edge
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
I practice yoga regularly. On most days you’ll find me either on my mat at home, or at Yoga to the People — a donation-based yoga studio in Manhattan.
There is a place in Yoga that I call The Edge.
The Edge is a very special place, because it’s the balance between trying too hard in a pose, and not trying enough (checking out.) You’re challenging yourself to go deep enough into the position, but not striving so hard that you’ve gone too far.
You can hurt yourself if you go past The Edge before you’re ready.
If you hurt yourself, there’s a large possibility that you will undo all of the work that you’ve done so far.
The Edge is different for everyone. The Edge changes day to day. You’re constantly striving to find your Edge in any Yoga position.
I imagine The Edge exists in minimalism as well.
Before I practiced Yoga, I spent a number of years striving to be a professional dancer.
Dance is very different from Yoga. While they are both physical activities, the concept of watching The Edge isn’t quite as prevalent. In Yoga the aim is to do the work, it doesn’t matter if you can grab your foot and bend it back over your head. Some people can do this, some cannot, no one will hit you with a stick if you can’t touch your toes in Yoga.
Dance is the opposite. If you can’t bend your leg back over your head, you’re a failure.
The reason for this is quite simple: only the top 1% of dancers get paid. Dance is a performance-based medium, so your singular aim in life is to make it to the stage. If you don’t make it to the stage, you’re just an amateur.
In many cases, this means that dancers don’t watch The Edge as they move toward their end goal of being on the stage.
This leads to injuries, eating disorders, and a lot of pain and frustration.
A dancer wakes up every morning, looks into the mirror, and says themselves “damn, I’m getting older and fatter, and I’ll never be Baryshnikov.”
You have to watch your Edge, even as a dancer (and even if very few dance teachers are aware that The Edge exists.)
It’s easy to look at the fact that I’m living with 50-Things and assume that I just dropped everything all at once. This isn’t true at all.
I slowly worked towards The Edge of minimalist existence.
- In 2003 I moved in a Truck.
- In 2007 I moved in a Honda Civic.
- In 2009 I moved with three bags.
- In 2010 I will move with one bag.
I slowly reduced my possessions. I created boxes of stuff that I thought I didn’t need and put them in the corner for weeks until I was sure it was time for them to go.
I’ve structured my life so that my work is done in either the virtual realm, or I’m working with only my body.
My point is this: I’ve been pushing my minimalist Edge for my entire life. I’ve been working, and reworking the practice until I’m comfortable with living with less.
I’m sure some people have gone from McMansion to backpack in one day, but I certainly didn’t do that. I fear if a person changed their life that drastically, they’d be going past The Edge.
If you go past The Edge in minimalism, there’s a good chance you’ll hurt yourself.
That being said, you need to be conscious of the end goal.
Minimalism isn’t minimalism if you aren’t actually practicing. There’s such a thing as not reaching your Edge. If you don’t reach your Edge, you aren’t reaching your full potential.
Minimalism is such an abstract concept. It can really apply to any number of things. You can get lost activities such as clearing off you desk, or re-organizing your bookshelf, and then smiling to yourself and calling yourself a rockstar minimalist. You are a minimalist! But you’re missing the point.
There’s a point when you aren’t pushing the edge.
Sometimes you aren’t making the effort. You’re just settled down, and waiting for something to happen. This, in my opinion, is most of society.
These people are constantly consuming endless amounts of junk, putting it in their houses, wondering why they aren’t happy. It’s sad, really.
I know, I’ve been there. I spent an entire year completely checked out at my day job. I drank too much and gained twenty pounds of belly fat. I had days during that time where my minimalist ambitions included gathering up six-packs of empty beer bottles and multiple take-out packages from the floor of my room in Brooklyn.
We’ve all been down that road, but there’s a point where you have to take a look what you’re aiming for. To set a goal and push your Edge consciously until you actually reach it.
At some point you have to set goals for yourself.
One day I simply set a goal: I was going to move across the country and start working for myself, or I’d die trying.
To do that I knew that I needed to reduce my possessions to less than 100 things. I didn’t do this because I thought I’d one-up all of the other minimalists –I obviously didn’t anyway. I didn’t do this to make a statement about society –though apparently people have told me that I have.
I made the decision to have less than 100 things and fit everything in the bag, because it was the only possible way that I could see for me to succeed. I wouldn’t have been able to start my own business, and be an average American consumer at the same time. Maybe you can! Good.
Last year I had a difficult choice to make: life-time servitude to the system that wants me to be in debt and buy buy buy until I die, or minimalist freedom. I opted for freedom.
I couldn’t have done this without taking minimalism to the top 1%.
I’m not saying that to gloat, I’m not saying that because I have less stuff than you. Who cares how much stuff I have, I’m not trying to one-up any of you.
The thing is, I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what I did, without going all the way to The Edge. I need to go to this place of less at this moment in time.
Yes, this means that:
I probably won’t live with 50-things forever.
I probably won’t live and work from anywhere forever.
Sooner or later I might find a new challenge to pursue. (But it won’t be learning how to buy stupid stuff.)
[UPDATED: Actually, screw the people who criticize counting things.
We need to stand up for what we believe in: living with less is better.
There is nothing obsessive about having less (and making a point of showing people.) What is unhealthy: having tons of stuff. Stuff holds you down, it keeps you from being free and pursuing your dreams.
Living with 50 things and being location independent is pretty damn awesome. I wouldn't be able to do this and have buckets of junk.
In response to Charley Forness's thoughtful rant.]
I do enjoy living with less at the moment.
Part of me knows, that you can’t really know a thing until you’ve gone all the way with it.
- You haven’t known dance until you’ve pushed yourself to The Edge on a stage in front of a full house.
- You haven’t known Yoga until you’ve pushed yourself to The Edge through an entire sequence, collapsed into Savasana and passed out from blissfulness.
- You haven’t known minimalism until all of your possessions fit into a backpack (my Edge) and hopped on a plane to a place you’ve never been before.
Maybe your Edge right now is cleaning off your desk and donating a few books. Donate those books, but make sure you’re pushing your Edge when you do it. If the junk just comes back you’re not making progress.
Maybe your Edge is simplifying your time in order to work for yourself by generating passive income.
The point is, The Edge is different for everyone.
Maybe your Edge will never get to the point where you’re hopping on planes. That’s okay! But you have to push yourself to The Edge (but not too far.) or you’ll never see progress.
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I’d love for you to retweet this post if it helped you — this is the best way to help people find my writing. Thank you.
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If you’re interested, I have a guest post over at The Art of Great Things about pursing quality in life.
And Bud Hennekes wrote a reviewed The Art of Being Minimalist and interviewed me at PluginID.
The world needs to change, if we’re going to survive.
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
This entire post is based off of Leo Babauta’s “Society, Reimagined” on Mnmlist. You should read Leo’s post before this, or you’ll be a little lost.
[UPDATE:] Leo posted a follow up to his original post on Mnmlist: society, reimagined: how to make it a reality.
Why I’m writing this.
“Sometimes I wonder if society could be vastly different, redesigned almost from scratch.” – Leo Babauta
The reason that I wrote this post is not because I’m an idealist dreamer, I really believe that we’re on the verge of being able to reimagine society in the way that Leo’s dreaming of.
I believe this because I’m already doing much of what Leo describes in his post.
This society is actually coming about in a much more natural way than we think.
The developments in localized Internet make many of these sharing opportunities more of a matter of implementation than chasing idle dreams.
The biggest point that I want to make here is that Leo’s reimagined society doesn’t involve as many sacrifices as you might think that it does. This entirely minimalist neighborhood, with the community building the houses and shared food, with a willing community to implement the ideas, would in fact allow people to live a much more free existence.
I know this because I’ve been implementing most of these ideas for almost a year now, and I’ve found that my time has been freed up considerably.
I used to work 40+ hours a week, and I still spent more than I earned. Now I work much less, and on projects which I am willing to pursue (such as this blog post, and art directing a magazine to help a friend.)
We’re already seeing big business being taken down in arenas such as information production (newspapers, magazines, publishing industry.) This is why I’m able to make my entire living off of this blog, as I’m supported by a group of enthusiastic readers who’ve decided they want to opt-into this movement.
It’s not hard to imagine the same developments, spurred by the technologies we’ve developed on the Internet, to soon carry over to other industries such as localized food production and independent entertainment.
Looking forward and looking backward.
It’s easy to compare Leo’s imagined society to how our societies used to live. Localized economies which were defined by their geography. This is definitely true, but the difference between then and now is the Internet.
The internet transcends the inefficiencies that existed in the society we used to have, previous to the explosion of industrialized big business that we saw around 150 years ago. I’ll go deeper into detail on this further down in this post.
This society reimagined isn’t stepping back to a simpler time, it’s applying simplicity to a better future.
The car, junked, in practice.
“I’d start by banishing the car. It’s supposed to give us freedom, but we’re chained to it and its expensive payments, maintenance, repairs, fuel, parking, pollution, and so on.” – Leo Babuta
Cars are on their way out in a couple of places in the United States.
I wouldn’t dream of owning my own car at this moment in time. It’s just too expensive, too impractical, and too much of a headache.
This year I’ve needed a car a total of one time. I rented a Zip Car for a few hours within moments of figuring out that I needed a car. It cost me $55.
Last year I rented a Zip Car to get from Portland, OR to Seattle, WA. It cost around $135 to rent it for a two-day trip.
Zip Car provides insurance, gas, maintenance, and parking/storage for their vehicles. That’s the four headaches of car ownership completely eliminated from your life.
Think about it:
- How much of your life have to spent working to pay off your car?
- How much have you had to spend working to pay for your car’s insurance?
- How much time have you spent while your car was in the shop?
All of this is eliminated when take cars out of the picture.
We simply don’t need to dedicate the mental and monetary resources to car ownership anymore. Having a car is one of the many things that’s keeping you in the modern day rat race. If you opt-out of car ownership, you open a world of resources to dedicate to pursuing goals that you’re passionate about.
If the town you live in is too car centric, the answer is simple: move to a place where walking is possible.
It’s not impossible to re-think cities and towns across America as being walkable. You vote by where you live, if you choose to live in Portland over a sprawling metropolis like Los Angeles, these cities will be forced to reimagine their poorly designed sprawl when people declare that they want to live in cities and towns that are walkable.
This is totally doable, and many cities in America this is already happening.
Schools, erased, in practice.
“I’d also banish the school, at least as we know it: institutions that force learning, that homogenize children, that teach them to be robotic workers instead of thinkers, creators, independent learners.” – Leo Babauta
I have a secret to tell you, for most of my life I didn’t go to school.
“WHAT?!” You say.
It’s true. I’ve spent 5 of my years on this planet enrolled in school. Kindergarten, then I dropped out. Freshmen year of high school, then I dropped out. Then I went to New York University and graduated in three years with 2 majors. I went on to work at one of the leading magazines in the country for three years. This year I created my own location independent business in less than 6 months.
I was unschooled.
Unschooling is just as Leo describes it in his article. My parents pulled me out of school for 1st grade and just let me figure out what I wanted to learn. They never sat me down at a table and forced me to learn math.
We got one of the early Macintoshes when I was around 11, and I started to learn web publishing skills immediately. I had small websites on Geocities by the time I was 12. By 15 I was blogging regularly and gaining a following on Livejournal. By the end of college I was blogging professionally with Gawker Media and then was hired on by New York Magazine’s blogging team.
I credit Unschooling as teaching me the most valuable skill that anyone can ever have: the ability to learn to do things by myself. This is intrinsic motivation to pursue a skill that I need to obtain as quickly as possible with the resources that I have at my fingertips.
- I wanted to learn how to write, so I did.
- I wanted to learn how to program HTML so I could publish on the Internet, so I did.
- I wanted to learn how to be a professional photographer, so I did.
- I wanted to learn how to dance professionally, so I did.
- I wanted to learn how to do journalism, so I did.
- I wanted to learn to practice yoga in order have better health, so I did.
I wanted to learn how to create my own business online which will support my location independent existence, so I created a business on this blog in only 6 months. Now I can live and work from anywhere, and write crazy blog posts like this one.
I probably spent two hours a day learning the skills that I needed to survive in the modern world, when I was unschooling — most kids spend 6-8 hours in school a day. This translates into my spending probably two hours a day working on my business — most rat racers spend 8-12 hours a day in an office. The rest of my time I spend doing what I want, reading, practicing yoga, and relaxing.
The disaster that is modern schooling.
Modern schooling pushes out cookie cutter individuals who are forced to learn things that they aren’t interested in. If they don’t learn, they get hit with a stick.
When someone hits me with a stick, I hit them back.
Schooling creates legions of extrinsically motivated individuals who are created for the sole purpose of working in factories (factories being any job where you do what you’re told.) These kids do what they’re told, and don’t understand what’s wrong.
- They buy things because people told them to.
- They enter the rat race because they were told to.
- They know the basics to get by.
- They have been discouraged from specializing in any one subject that they’re passionate about.
Of course there are exceptions to this rule, there are brilliant kids out there who are rockstars at school and life. But for every rockstar, you have legions of kids who are forced to learn things they don’t want to know. These kids have their creativity killed by the time they graduate.
Seth Godin probably said this one best:
“The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out. The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.” – Linchpin.
Genius comes from learning how to teach yourself the skills you need to succeed.
Why we don’t need school anymore.
The internet has changed everything in regards to how information is delivered. You can have almost any answer to any question with a simple google search.
When you’re in school, you’re sitting at a desk without a connection to the Internet. No offense to teachers, but humans have limited knowledge. Teachers went to school themselves years ago, and they only know what they know.
Teachers are doing their best, but the Internet is doing far better.
The internet, when you’re given access to it, has far more knowledge than a teacher directing a classroom to learn specified approved knowledge that everyone is forced to learn.
What this world needs is not more factory workers. All of the factories are in China now. This world needs free thinking individuals who know how to obtain information on their own. We need people who aren’t going to accept the status-quo as the one and only option. We need people who will develop their own ideas and implement them.
The openness of the knowledge of the Internet has made this possible. Given the right tools, kids don’t need school anymore. I certainly didn’t, and still don’t.
Consumerism reimagined, in practice.
“It stems from my belief that somewhere along the line, we allowed ourselves to be sidetracked from what’s important — people — and instead have put profits, corporations, productivity, and consuming at the forefront of everything we do.” – Leo Babauta
If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about buying things.
We simply don’t need to consume and destroy at the rate which currently do.
The reason that we buy so much is quite simple:
In the early 1900s we all started working in factories. The problem with factories is that it’s incredibly easy to pump out more product than people will ever possibly want. The factory owners had a problem, what do we do with all of this junk? They had to sell as much as they were making.
So, they created a little tool called marketing. Marketing took the products that the factories were churning out and taught you to that you needed them.
Then the TV came around and we had a perfect situation for marketers: dumb people sitting in front of the tube every night! So someone somewhere came to the brilliant conclusion that they could run a commercial for a product and people who were watching on the other end would want to buy it.
Fast-forward to 2010, and we have an entire society who thinks because celebrities told them to buy millions of products that they don’t actually need, that they should.
The schools are setup to pump out factory workers who think buying things will make them happy.
The reality of the situation is the purpose of this blog: stop buying things and you can be so much more free than the rest of society. If you stop consumerism, you stop having to work 60 hours a week to support your over-extended lifestyle.
Once you stop buying, you can begin to support yourself doing what you’re passionate about.
What do we put in the place of consumerism?
The answer is coming about quite naturally. The internet has enabled people to make a living doing what they want. In Leo’s society reimagined, we are all connected through the Internet to people in our neighborhood who create clothes.
When we need a pair of jeans, twice a year — this is honestly how often I buy quality jeans. If you don’t buy crap, your jeans last longer — We will contact our local jean maker who will make a stunning pair of jeans by hand which will last for the next six months. We can make almost all of our products this way.
Yes, this means that products will cost more, because it will be essential to support the local industry — the jean maker guy is also your friend! You won’t be able to get 14 pairs of jeans for $35 each. Instead you will pay more for one or two pairs of jeans for more which will be locally design, made to fit, and by a person with a face.
How do you put this into practice?
- Start seeking out local artisans who create the goods you need. Support local independent industry.
- Buy used stuff. There is so much out there already, use Craigslist and visit flea markets to find stuff that you need, when you actually need it.
We obviously need to design Internet communications systems like Craigslist/Facebook/Etsy which allow us to locate local products and services in our neighborhoods. With enough searching you should be able to buy locally made products.
That and stop buying stuff you don’t need from big business.
Health Care, reimagined, in practice.
I’m a huge fan of Jay Parkinson’s Hello Health. Using the tools of the Internet, Jay Parkinson is busy reimagining health care as a system that supports the health of it’s neighborhood.
This health system would fit perfectly in support of Leo’s reimagined society.
In Jay’s reimagined health system you can video chat, text message, and occasionally have in-person visits when they are necessary. Doctor’s are compensated for their time, instead of being compensated for fixing you when you’re deathly ill. Imagine that?
I can’t discuss this further, because I just don’t know enough about health to detail everything. Jay explains it better in his recent interview with Big Think.
Agriculture, reimagined, in practice.
“I’d get rid of supermarkets and huge agribusinesses and food flown and shipped from thousands of miles away. Instead, we’d grow our own food, right in our backyards, or in community gardens.” – Leo Babauta
The final piece of this reimagined society is that we need to stop eating food that’s grown thousands of miles away on monoculture farms that are coating all of their products in pesticides.
Leo suggests the best way to do this: grow your own food. Rooftop gardens, and backyard farms are going to need to become a reality.
We are so disconnected from our food in modern society, we don’t even know where it comes from.
Have you seen Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, or his Ted Talk? Many kids in this country don’t even know what a potato is anymore. This goes back to the failure of schools, above. How can we teach math, and not teach our kids to identify vegetables?
Growing food solves that knowledge gap. So does pulling kids out of school.
Health is one of the primary responsibilities of any individual, and the easiest way to be healthy is to learn how to eat food that is good for you.
Another option is shopping at local farmers markets. In many cities you can walk to your local farmer’s market and obtain locally grown vegetables from permaculture farms. For more on this see my True Food diet, and read Michael Pollan’s An Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Yes, shopping locally for food costs more. Pollan states evidence such as locally grown Apples have 4-times as much nutrients as a monoculture pesticide-produced shipped-across-the-country Apple. There are nutrients in permaculture soil that has been wiped out by big business.
Spending more money and time on food will make you healthier.
In addition to growing your own food and shopping at local farmers markets, we will need to use the Internet to establish vegetable trading systems for local economies.
I want to be able to know that my neighbor has a sack full of onions that he’s trying to trade or sell, so I can go knock on his door and buy a onion when I want to. The internet makes this an easy reality, we just need someone to develop a Facebook/Craigslist like system for local food trading.
To wrap this all up.
I don’t have all of the answers, and I certainly don’t know how to code a local food trading web 2.0 application. I think it’s only a matter of having the need for this system for it to come into being.
I’m just doing my best to live this life as best I can, and to the best of my beliefs.
I’m sure some of you will disagree with me. Some of you had school kick the imagination out of you long ago.
I just hope this will help you recognize that this life is possible.
- You don’t need to own a car anymore.
- You don’t need to go to school anymore.
- You don’t need to buy stuff anymore.
- You don’t need a big house anymore
- You don’t need to buy crap food from supermarkets anymore.
There are alternatives to all of this, as I discussed above and Leo discusses in society, reimagined.
This reimagined society is cheaper, more efficient, and in a lot of ways has much less impact on the planet than the current situation. Yes, it will reshape this country if more of us start to implement it.
Best of all, we can make it happen now. We have many of the tools that enable it to happen.
I know there will be challenges, but I also know that it’s easier than you think it is to make this a reality.
This is a conscious choice that we can make, and it’s possible. I know this because I feel that I’m already implementing it to the best of my ability.
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How minimalism can help you focus on networking
Interview by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
Colin Wright is one of my favorite minimalists. He’s built a sustainable design studio with a 6-figure income, while moving to a new continent every 4 months. He blogs at Exile Lifestyle about lifestyle design, minimalism, and working from anywhere.
Since leaving the United States last year, he’s been through dozens of countries: Buenos Aires, Peru, Australia and now New Zealand. Meanwhile, he reduced his physical possessions to just 51 things.
I interviewed Colin for the first time last year, when he was still in South America.
An interview on minimalism, networking, and building awesome relationships.
When you’re building a location independent business, it’s incredibly important to develop good networking skills.
Colin is one of the networking masters — using his skills to get himself onto TV in New Zealand, build strong relationships with clients, and build network of remarkable bloggers to support his business.
Today, Colin released his first premium e-book, Networking Awesomely. This is a follow up to his two other two free e-books available on his site.
While Colin’s e-book isn’t exactly minimalist focused, I can’t stress how important it is to build strong relationships when building your location independent business. I learned a number of important networking strategies while reading my preview copy of Networking Awesomely.
I imagine that this e-book isn’t for everyone! That’s okay. I enjoyed learning how to network better, and if you’re into making human business connections, this can teach you more than you need to know.
Included in the e-book is 26 short essays by other rockstar networkers, including myself! I’m so thankful to have the opportunity to contribute to this project.
How to Network Awesomely with Colin Wright.
Anyway, here’s the interview. We spoke about building relationships in unexpected places, helping people, and how minimalism can lead you to focus on making strong connections.
Everett Bogue: You relocate to a new continent every few months. What is one strategy that you have for meeting people in new places?
Colin Wright: A big part of meeting people in a completely unfamiliar place where you don’t know anyone is to figure out a way to get yourself on the right people’s radar and position yourself from the get-go as someone worth knowing.
This can mean many things, but for me this usually means getting in contact with people of influence who live where I’ve moved and then meeting more people through that group.
In Argentina I made a lot of fantastic connections through a social network called A Small World, and in particular through one connector named Justo, who was also a member. Justo and his wife love to introduce people around and have visitors over for tea and conversation, and they are also entrepreneurs, so they run with the kind of people I want to meet.
In New Zealand I made an appearance on a widely-watched morning TV show, which led to hundreds of emails, invitations and new opportunities. Being on TV gave me an immediate advantage in networking in that people knew something about me and what I did, and could even recognize me in public. Boom, instant network.
Doing a quick search on Twitter to see who is active in your area is a great way to meet people, too, as generally folks who are active on social networks are more likely to want to make new connections.
Everett: What is one way our readers can break the ice with a new contact in a
strange place?
Colin: Do something nice for them.
Invite them out to an event you’re going to, share a meal, offer your services, whatever. If you pay it forward a bit, the other person will know right away that you aren’t a threat, and in fact can be an asset to them. This gives them incentive to help you out where they can, as well.
Everett: Can being minimalist help you focus on meeting people and developing quality relationships?
Colin: Absolutely. If you are focused on accumulating possessions, generally you spend more time trying to earn earn earn and the dollar becomes the main priority.
If you are focused on meeting new people and having novel experiences, on the other hand, money ceases to be quite so important, making it easier not to be such a penny-pincher and to take opportunities as they come along.
As a minimalist, I find I’m also a lot less stressed out, which is great for my mood when dealing with other people.
Everett: Are there any common networking practices that you’ve learned to avoid?
Colin: Yes! The hard sell drives me crazy.
You’ve seen this before, I’m sure; somebody with a big personality comes on very strong, hamfistedly dominates the conversation and then immediately focuses on making a sale, be it a product, service or idea.
What’s worse, you’re at a wedding. Or a funeral. Or the aquarium. You couldn’t care less about what he’s talking about, but he’s been told to be persistent and to guide the conversation and to use certain marketing tactics that more or less guilt or shame you into buying.
Does this seem like a good way to build a network? Even if this guy sells you something, you won’t want to ever hang out with him again, much less be a long-term customer.
Screw that.
Everett: The Internet has changed how we network on a fundamental level. In
your view, how has networking changed since the good old days?
Colin: I think we have a much wider array of tools to choose from, and therefore a wider array of tools that can be abused and used incorrectly.
That’s not to say that social media and new technologies shouldn’t be used for networking – on the contrary, they are amazingly powerful and I make use of them every day! – but to focus completely on metrics and numbers and ‘Followers’ over valuable connections and real, legitimate relationships is a BIG mistake that far too many people make.
Like the Buddhists say, everything in moderation.
Everett: What’s the one most effective way that you apply your energy to build relationships online?
Colin: I create content that people get value from.
Blog posts, videos, ebooks, Tweets about interesting things that I read…all of these things allow me to show my expertise on various subjects while at the same time helping other people gain more expertise in those fields. To put this kind of information out into the ether really builds up one’s visibility and networking prestige.
Everett: Ultimately, what do you think is the most awesome way to spend your energy when networking?
Colin: Out having fun, of course! At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about, anyway.
If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.
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Thanks so much for the interview Colin.
If you’re interested in the cutting edge of networking from anywhere in the world, you can learn more about Networking Awesomely at Exile Lifestyle.
At some point you have to give up the map.
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Yesterday I took Yoga from a teacher who was simply reading the manual.
She said all of the stuff you’re supposed to say in a yoga class, but there was no feeling, no connection, no emotion. She was just doing what she was told.
There’s a huge difference between intellectualizing a process and creating an experience worth living. I suppose that’s what I try to do with this blog. I want to create an experience that makes you think about the implications of your actions.
I could just read the blog manual and create a successful blog. Something would be missing though. The heart, the soul, the quality of the work.
Yes, that means that occasionally I tell you things that challenge your perception of reality. Sometimes I tell you things that a generation ago would have been so completely untrue that they’re accepted as false by most people still.
Yes, you can work from anywhere.
Yes, you do not need many things.
Yes, advertising has enslaved you.
That doesn’t mean the things on fringes of reality are false. Conventional wisdom is often very wrong, because it’s conventional.
Life is a balance between reading the manual — the public record, the modern mythos of what is acceptable and what is not — and pushing the boundaries of what the rest of everyone thinks is acceptable.
I understand that it’s scary to wakeup from the American dream and realize there is another reality which might just be better. You could aspire to owning a McMansion and filling all the closets. You could find your freedom in French Fries.
Or, maybe you’d rather go vagabonding. You’ll find the secret of life on the road, in the hills and valleys, in the trees and the swamps. Silence in the newness of everything is beautiful.
Or you could read the established manual. Do what they told you to do in school. Get the house, the career in a dying industry, the aspirations of generations past. That life might be possible too, I admit that. But honestly, is it really what you want? Especially if this is the blog you’re reading.
I think not.
This minimalist life has no manual — though I’m did my best to write a small guidebook. Leo’s simple guide is brilliant too, but a guide can’t explain every nuance of every situation. You have to make your own decisions eventually, you have to pick a point where you decide to go where the map hasn’t been written.
There is no right way that’s been tread before on this path. Yes, it’s terrifying to open yourself to infinite possibilities. Yes, maybe something will go wrong. Yes, it’s you’ll make mistakes and take the wrong road once in awhile.
But isn’t that better than taking the same road, day after day, that millions of others have already tread?
I think it is.
Here are a few links that I hope will help you:
Your Backup Plan is Your Plan by Chris Guillebeau
$0-$5000 How to Make Money With Blogs by Glen Allsopp
Email and the Art of Short Replies by Jonathan Fields
Incoming! by Seth Godin
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