Simplify Ninja

Throw Out Your Clothes

It’s time. Time to talk about that room you call, loosely, a wardrobe. That collection of jerseys (official), polo’s, button downs, sweaters, various types of jeans, khakis, slacks, and maybe even corduroys. That rack of many colors that you stare at, confusedly, in the mornings, trying to decide which one is ok to and what to wear it with. Just when you decide on the shirt and pants, your realize that the loafers you want to wear look bad with the pants you picked, and the matching socks are dirty.  

So you compromise, keep the loafers, grab the other pants, find the brown belt that goes with the brown shoes and then notice you are wearing the black polo. Fail. Now, you can wear a brown belt with a black polo if you work alone in a darkroom, but around the office or other places where you have to dress up a bit for your job, black and brown together is a fashion statement the French call “Burnt Taco.” And they hold their noses when they see it. I swear this is true. 

What’s the problem here, man? Your wardrobe needs simplified. It’s a mess. 

You got a dozen different colors, styles, materials and locked-in-a box fashion statement items (Ed Hardy button downs?!) and you have created a dilemma that needs not be. With this wardrobe you have 2 options: Look bad on a regular basis, or waste a lot of time every morning figuring out a way to pair stuff that wont look bad. 

You’re overthinking all this, you say. No man should think that much about his clothes and what he wears. I tend to agree. So, lets consider how to resolve all this.

If you could get dressed in the dark in under 5 minutes, would that be awesome? Would it give you some of your life back? As the guy on the suit commercial says, “I guarantee it.” 

Well lets get some tips up and start fixing that for you. 

Update! with 2 Critical Moves!

An update at last! Where’ve we been? 

Moving, and simplifying more and learning more lessons and tips in the process.  

Moving is one of life’s big interrupters and thankfully we’ve come to see big interrupters as amazing opportunities to learn and grow.  I’ll post more on this later but for now I can tell you 2 Critical Simplify Ninja moves we’ve learned/confirmed in the last 3 weeks:

1. No more than 25% of your monthly cash for housing is the best thing you can do for your budget, your future, your sanity. Dont compromise on this.  Seriously, don’t. 
2. Downsize: your housing. You can live smaller if you dont have so much stuff. Shop creative! See if you can find a smaller, less expensive place with a creative floorplan that you can mess with.

10 Things You Need to Assess This Week

1) Next Week

2) Your inbox

3) Your money

4) Your activities

5) Your closet

6) Your bathroom

7) Your career

8) Your retirement

9) Your Exit Strategy

10) Your Legacy

I’ll write more about these in the coming weeks but the idea here is to assess what your present use of time, energy and resources is being used on, and how it is impacting the uncertain future that you’re traveling toward.  

Reward the Simplifiers

Chris Zook at HBR writes: 

Is it time to raise the pursuit of simplification to a higher level of importance in most companies? 

Letting go takes courage and is not a natural act for most humans, or management teams. But, given the trends of speed and complexity, maybe ask yourself: is this the year for more companies to take the chance of “zero basing” what they do? Will the ability to keep it simple (think of the fact that Apple has only about 60 products still!) be a mantra for competitive durability in the world of the future?

Yes! Please! A complex, multi-layered organization is far less agile and adaptable to quick changes in the market or the world. If we keep our orgs simple, we can rethink and retool much faster, we’ll be more focused on only what works, and able to drop it fast when it stops working. In this case, simplified haste eliminates waste. It’s important! Reward it!

I think companies would do well to reward their people who rethink everything and are able to simplify everywhere, especially processes. 

I don’t know how practical it is to zero-base everything your company does, but it’s the start of a great conversation I think an org should have with itself. 

Read the rest of “Desperately Seeking Simplicity” here.

A simple “Thank You” can be huge. Especially when it is unexpected.

Savings and The Unexpected

Savings makes unexpected opportunities viable.

This was painfully impressed on me when a home came on the market in exactly the neighborhood I had always wanted, where market forces had pushed the home price down into our price range and the house itself was 95% exactly what we wanted. But our savings was not where it needed to be to make the move on it. We could have made some highly risky and stupid credit adjustments to get the down payment together and make the mortgage numbers work, but we would have paid far more for everything in the long run.

Moving into your dream home financially behind the 8 ball means, at worst, you may not be able to keep that home or, best case, you’ll spend years playing catch-up in ways that will keep you from actually living your life. You’ll spend the next however many years being more vulnerable to financial disaster. Job loss, major medical expense, car repairs, home repairs, vacations, orthodontics, college, who knows what- the cash in that financial overage you’ve committed to has to come from somewhere. Your dream home can become a prison if you were not really, really able to afford it. And all that financial pressure will manifest in your personal life too. Marriages and families break apart most often for financial reasons.  Is the home you can’t afford worth that?

This is a general principle for anything: If it is too expensive for you and you go for it anyway (because a loan officer or credit card said you could)- you are guaranteed to pay for it somewhere down the line. 

I know you know that. But do you live it? Living it means saying NO to stuff you may desperately want. And that takes tremendous strength, discipline, wisdom and will-power Sound familiar? Successful people typically have these qualities- at least in their relationship with money. Your grandparents probably had these traits. Mine did.

My grandparents always told me to save, save, save. And I didn’t listen, listen, listen.

So opportunities got away from me, and disasters took a bigger toll. 

Stashing away what you can every paycheck makes unexpected opportunities viable. I love the neighborhood that house is in and I never expected that we’d be able to get a home in it. It’s a beautiful historic neighborhood with brick streets, large 100 year old homes, surrounding a small park; one of these homes just doesn’t come on the market very often.  If I had started stashing cash earlier, and more of it, we could have made a move on that house. 

I was disappointed, but had learned a valuable lesson: Be financially ready for both for disasters and opportunities.

Because both are sure to come.