What I wanted to bring up was something that I found to be very, very true in my life and want to pass it on to you.
It’s interesting ‘cause it came up out of the story the other day where I was looking for some documents and I found a little notebook that had written in it all of the ideas that I had for changing Lifestyles Unlimited on the second rewrite, the second version of the company.
But what went on later during this whole traumatic thing is that I had this really interesting sort of—I don’t want to call it traumatic, but definitely a little out of the usual upheavaling-type of moments going on in my house the last couple days because my daughter had gotten some new bedroom furniture which moved her into a different one of the bedrooms, and so we had to clean out her old bedroom which was just completely filled with garbage and crap
—and you know, she wouldn’t want me to say this about her or about the stuff, but you know my job here is to be honest—and by God I don’t know how people accumulate all the stuff that they do, just an enormous amount of stuff, just stuff, just whatever you want to call it.
The Definition of “Crap”
My term “crap” comes out of a long, longstanding seminar belief that I’ve been teaching for 20 years, and that is just like Janis Joplin says “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” And when you have crap—and to me crap is defined—the word crap—as anything that you have that you don’t use on a regular recurring basis.
So that goes back to Grandma’s china that’s been sitting in the china cabinet for ages and ages and ages; it’s all that crap out in your garage that for some reason you won’t get rid of; it’s all that crap you have in the attic that for some reason you won’t get rid of; it’s all that crap that you have in the storage bin somewhere that, you know—and you think about it, we’re a society just inundated with crap.
You Don’t Own Crap, Crap Owns You
And the point I’m bringing—the reason I’m bringing this up is because you can’t move forward if you are attached to your crap. You don’t own crap; crap owns you. You are paying for storage of this crap; you are paying for the time it takes and wastes for you to organize your life around this crap.
It’s just amazing how much easier it is to live if you just lived very, very light and don’t carry with you this enormous burden of trying to remember the past, trying to live in the past, trying to hold onto things that are old and useless and outdated.
Streamline
I mean, I make it a point every single year to go through my closet and pull out 10 or 20 percent of everything in there and just give it to charity because I don’t wear it. I mean, you only wear like the last five, ten things you’ve ever bought, then you’ve got a suit—I’ve got a tuxedo—you wear it once, twice, three times a year, whatever blah, blah, blah. But just the rest of the crap, the accumulation of stuff that just seems to accumulate everywhere.
And when we were cleaning out my daughter’s room, I mean it just became very apparent to me how much of this stuff she was carrying around with her. And she had tried to make it fit into her new furniture set. And I told her she couldn’t move into the room unless she cleans the room and keeps it clean from that point on, otherwise she doesn’t get the new furniture, otherwise she doesn’t get the new room, larger room, turn the smaller room into the guest room.
Well, this prompted then me looking for the document not being able to find it, realizing that I had boxes and boxes of stuff that I had accumulated and just you know amazing amounts of crap that even I, which pride myself on not having crap, realizing that because I had such a large home and since I’d moved without really taking time to unload the stuff and go through it and clean it all out,
I had boxes of stuff sitting like in the maid’s quarters. I have maid’s quarters. I don’t have a full-time maid; I have a maid who comes. And so you know, you take that room and it becomes boxes room. We closed our office and moved it, so it was all paperwork, so I just take it over there and stick it in the maid’s quarters until I can go through it and see what’s there, blah, blah, blah.
You could just see that it was rubbing off on everybody in the house and for like two days I lost her. I couldn’t find her anywhere. I didn’t know what she was doing. Past 7 or 8:00 o’clock at night she’d pop out and there she’d be and we’d eat dinner and have our laugh, but for hours and hours a day I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. What she was doing was she was cleaning out her closet.
Now granted her closet is probably the same size as some of your homes, I understand that, but she was in there diligently for two days—I mean diligently two long days cleaning out all of her paperwork and documents and her clothes and her shoes and man, you know—then what’s cool is she went back in and rearranged it all in the neatest way I’ve ever seen to where everything is organized, everything is in the right place, everything’s in the right you know color-coded.
Levels of Coordination
And like in my closet everything is not only color-coded, it’s type-coded, it’s color-coded and then it’s also size-coded because my body fluctuates from 200 to 240 up and down all over the place. So I have different sizes—like I have my 34-inch sizes, my 36-inch sizes and my 38-inch sizes and that’s how much my waist fluctuates. So all of this stuff is nice and organized and life is easy then when you get it all cleaned out. But if you don’t clean out all of this stuff, you can’t move forward.
Let me give you an example. You ever drive down the freeway and you look out and you see a little farmhouse area, and you see they’ve got four, five, six, eight rusted-out vehicles; they’ve got a rusted-out boat; they’ve got an old rusted-out motor home, I mean, crap all over the yard. And you ask yourself how could anybody live like that?
Varying Degrees of That Level of Insanity
Well, my friends, there are varying degrees of that level of insanity, varying degrees of that level of holding onto the past. The world decays, the world changes, standards change, qualities change, just everything changes. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t change is the reality of change. There will always be change. And as long as you continue to try to hold onto the past and accumulate this crap, it is going to slow you down.
I believe in looking forward, not looking back. Do I have some picture albums? Yeah, I have got picture albums of my youth and whatever, a few of them. But the truth of the matter is I never look at them. And they really don’t mean anything, because I’m not that person. I’ll never be that person again. That person is gone forever.
And if you continue to live your life in the past, you’re never going to live your life in the current. And if you try to live your life in the future, you find you can’t do that either so you fall back into the current. So really the only thing you can really do is live each day, each moment at the fullest and make the decisions as to what will be the big rocks in your life, and take the actions every day towards those big rocks. And as all the minutia of life surrounds you and fills you in and holds you up and slows you down, you need to be constantly fighting to eliminate the minutia out of the jar so you can get more big rocks in the jar.
