I by no means live an uncomplicated life, but there is one practice I hit on a few years ago that is as simple as it is effective.
Throw away all your socks, and replace them with 10 identical white pairs and 10 identical black pairs. You never have to sort or match socks, and when you’re getting dressed, you just open the sock drawer and grab any two socks of the same color.
Plus, they all wear more or less evenly. So after six months or a year (I haven’t measured accurately), you throw them all away and start again.
Of course this doesn’t work if you’re a sockophile and like to match your socks to your outfit. And yes, it is much more applicable to men than to women. But if you don’t care that much about your hosiery, it works beautifully.
photo by bark
Ask me what my favorite color is and I’m going to say blue. Over the last decade, I’ve bought somewhere between 10 and 137 more-or-less-identical short-sleeved blue check shirts.
Every now and then, though, I buy something orange. I have a couple of orange shirts, a pair of awesome orange Saucony sneakers and a black leather jacket with a big orange stripe across the chest. Somehow in my mind, that’s the “cool” stuff that I only get to wear sometimes. Why only sometimes? I don’t know.
When I decided to resurrect and consolidate my blogs into this one, I found this WordPress theme, which I loved immediately. It just seemed natural to use the orange that was already in the theme for the logo. That got me thinking about the blue vs. orange dichotomy. And I realized I need to be more orange.
What do I mean by that? We’ll see. It’s still a vague notion but it revolves around the idea of being more present, more engaged, more active, more excited about what I’m doing, and hopefully, ultimately, more interesting.
I was listening to C.C. Chapman’s podcast the other day and he quoted Derek Sivers on his new philosophy:
Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying:
If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then say no.
Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no.
That’s a hell of a goal to work toward.
Photo by hexodus
