My wife happened to stumble upon these two guys, on the Yahoo home page a couple of days ago. Joshua Fields Millburn(right) & Ryan Nicodemus(left) are best friends and they left their lucrative corporate careers at the age of 30 to become full-time authors and speakers. After publishing their bestselling book, Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life, they embarked on an international book tour and eventually began contributing to people through their online writing classes and private mentoring sessions covering a wide array, from simple living and pursuing your passion, to writing, publishing, entrepreneurship, health, relationships, personal growth, and etc.
My wife and I have been reading their blog and watching their presentations online and found that their minimalistic approach to life in so many ways reflects what we are striving to do. My wife and I have been thinking a lot about how we want to streamline, downsize and purge as much material possessions in our life as possible. This has been a deliberate quest for us for some time now to live more simply with just the bare necessities.
Just yesterday, we got rid of more clothes that we haven't worn in a long while and even gave away our dresser that used to take up space in our bedroom. We are also looking for solutions to downsize our library of books. We have quite a few books that are taking up a lot of space and our first option is utilizing an e-reader such as Kindle or Nook to replace the books that are available in digital format... still going over all the pros and cons. I'm echoing many of the things both Joshua and Ryan are speaking, writing and advocating about but one of the biggest challenge in downsizing is to really define our values and priorities. It forces us to become much more conscientious in evaluating things we buy, things we already own and how we choose to keep or discard each item. It makes us question, "Do these things honestly add value, meaning and usefulness to our life?" If not, then "Why do we have them around?"
We're both encourage and inspired by Joshua and Ryan and we hope to glean some new insights from them. Check out their blog: The Minimalist.
