Bradfjord

Dinner with @sherreejane. (at Cafe 501)

3 Lessons from a Guy with 39 Possessions

1. Fewer choices are freeing.
Asked which shirt Hyde picks in the morning, he replies, “The clean one.” How much time and mental effort do you spend choosing what shoes to wear, what movie to watch, what dish to cook? Choice is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is often overvalued, especially related to things that aren’t aligned with what’s really important in our lives–things like relationships, health and recreation.

2. If you have fewer things, make them good.
As Sarah Laskow wrote in Grist, living light doesn’t mean living cheap. Hyde’s possessions are all very high quality. Paring down means choosing stuff that holds up and looks good. If you have 3 shirts, you can’t afford to have that one shirt that doesn’t fit right.

3. Sometimes you will not be prepared…and it’s okay.
You likely won’t trim your possessions to Hyde-ian proportions, but that doesn’t mean you have to everything for every occasion. Americans in particular like to be prepared for the worst-case-scenario, having separate cookie cutters for Christmas and Halloween. We seldom consider how negligible the consequences are when we run out of something or are unprepared. Nor do we consider how high the consequences are for being over-prepared: creating more money, space, upkeep and mental clutter.

Ryan E.C. Hamm: Plainspoken Silliness

ryanechamm:

I don’t see cable news very often. That’s both because it’s generally shrill and I hate it, and also because I don’t have cable—which is a blessing in disguise, since I would probably watch it even when I publicly decry it.

I happened to see a few minutes of a report on one of the…

Field Study: Build Brands, Not Apps : SXSW Interactive / '13

fieldstudy:

The medium is disappearing.

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I wasn’t around for the invention of the book, the newspaper, radio, television, or film, but grew up watching the internet take shape. The story of a new medium starts with the technology, and moves to the content. We no longer talk about what is inside…