Lesson Learned: Less Is Often More

When it comes to life, we often want to overcomplicate things. It turns out that less is often more. Kids tend to be happier with fewer things, adults tend to enjoy having fewer things to do, and you set yourself up for success when you remember to simplify. In fact, this year’s theme has been “simplify.”

The Mistake of Thinking More Is More

I’ve been reading Finish by Jon Acoff, and one of the big points he drives home is that we often bite off way more than we can chew. This definitely resonates with me. It is so tempting to keep aiming for more – more projects, more streams of revenue, more volunteer projects. The problem is that I did this, and the plate got so full I couldn’t even pick it up when the pandemic hit – much less keep things from sliding off of it. More is much more often less. Much less.

Paring Things Down

In order to combat my natural inclination to (literally) pile things on, I needed to start focusing on a word – simplify. I’ve been slowly simplifying our home (very slowly) and decluttering all of the things we’ve collected over the years that aren’t serving us well. Right now, I’m looking at a bunch of candle holders that, you know what, I’m not sure I like. I think I’m going to publish this post and put them in the donation box.

I’ve not just been paring down physical things, though. As I mentioned before, I’ve been letting go of projects that no longer serve me – or that I haven’t been able to make progress on and likely won’t make progress on while I have small children learning at home. I would still love to launch a magazine, but doing so while juggling other things was just not happening, so that’s been put into the someday-maybe category. I dropped three volunteer projects, a blog, and my handmade business. All because they weren’t serving my ultimate goals.

Not Everything Has to Make Money

This is a hard lesson to learn. It’s natural to feel like “I love to sew, and I’m good at it, maybe I should sell what I make.” But as tempting as it is, it’s important to keep some things that are enjoyable as just enjoyable things. While it’s fine to make money doing what you love, perhaps making money with everything you love to do is a bit extra.

2020 and 2021 taught me some hard lessons with taking on too much. It wound up not being the amount of stuff I had to do but the amount of mental load that caused me to have to let things go and simplify.

What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently?