A new life, minimalism and beyond

| February 8th, 2010

Last Wednesday was a incredible day!

I started by quitting my job. After 6 years of solid denial and choosing for the “job security”, “certainty of income” etc. I wrote myself a letter. Read it day after day, and made a decision to liberate myself from these delusions and start to take control of my own life.

“From this day forward I will start living my dream. Realize my full potential, cut the fat and become more effective in everything I do.”

“It feels great, I feel liberated”, I tell a colleague in the hallway. Suddenly I get a phone call from my brother in law. “You just became uncle!” My eyes filled with tears of joy. Wednesday was all about being born again and I feel like a million dollar!

In November I started working less with the idea to setup my own company PLANETZER0 (more about that another time). Not for gain but because it is nice to see if a good idea can really work, one big experiment. I’m an idealist, dreamer and hyper-creative dude but I suck at being focussed which renders your creativity pretty useless. Two days ago I picked up a book on my Kindle titled “The 4-Hour Workweek”. I never heard of it, yes I know it is an amazingly well known book and New York Times best-seller, I live in a cave, shoot me. I’m generally very skeptic about all these self help books or people telling me I can become rich in two days, however this book is very different.

The book is about giving you insight into your own life, the decisions you make and offers you a total new way of looking at it and actually taking action to change it. The book is build up around DEAL (Definition, Eliminate, Automate, Liberate). It provides endless amounts of tips, resources, super direct questions, exercises and actions all to unclutter your life. Take back control, be effective, automate income and do the things you want to do in this life. Practice things like getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, or “eyegazing”, calling celebrities.

I’m now halfway through the book. I already meausure my productivity using RescueTime, scan all my paper, audio recs, notes webclippings, pictures of notes in Evernote (which allows me to search through all notes), have a day schedule, Actionlist I’ve created, inspired by the 4 hour work week book which actually works, a low information diet and I’m prepping my first outsourced adventure in India where I will outsource some heavy research work for my startup.

There was no better time than now for me to have found it now. I will post a dedicated review here as soon as finish it. Along the way I will post some nice lifehacking experiences a long the way. My room will become empty, no TV, no PS3, no districations, a super low information diet. It will be a difficult venture to downsize my life and become a true minimalist. However having just a nice sofa with a nice lamp to read and listen to music or dream sounds zen to me.

So my new life starts and now I go to bed, read, sleep, dream.

Sleep tight little “Darius Felix” until we meet in real life. Can’t wait!

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
– Mahatma Gandhi