Transcript

Have you ever considered that you're carrying an awful lot in this life? Your briefcase is getting heavier all the time. Your drawers are getting crammed. Your closets at home are getting crammed. When you go on a trip it seems like there's more and more to pack. Would you like to travel a little lighter this life? Well as I speak to groups around the country, I find increasingly that people almost have a mission to travel at least a little lighter. Here are some ideas as to how you can get back to that hallowed state.

First off, remember when you first moved into your house and the closets looked so big? Well they're the same size. You jam them with things now and they tend to look a bit smaller. Near your birthday or near New Years Eve or when spring cleaning rolls around why not go through your closets and go through the clothes you haven't worn in the last year or two, bring them to the Salvation Army or Good Will or some other charitable institution and help other less fortunate than you? At the same time you'll be helping yourself because you'll be freeing up space and psychologically you'll have the feeling of abundance, of prosperity. You'll literally be lighter in terms of what you're carrying in your closet. The same technique applies to you filing cabinets at work, your desk drawer, the glove compartment of your car, the trunk of your car and so forth.

If you went to college, think of your college days when you barely had anything by comparison of today. You had some college dormitory furniture, a few books, a few tapes, well maybe you had more than a few tapes or CDs. The point is when you were younger, you had less and you felt freer. So it is today as well. When you're carrying an excess of stuff in your life, you don't quite feel as free. I can't explain why but people have told me repeatedly that this is so.

Henry David Thoreau once said, "The key to life is to simplify, simplify, simplify." All of us have the opportunity all day long to travel lighter. We can do this by casting off files that no longer serve us, creating dossiers of information that's only a quarter inch thick rather than 3"-4" thick that represent the essence of what we need to know, casting off excess information that might help junior people on your staff or new with the organization, but information that represents the tried and true, old hat dust that we really don't need t hang on to anymore.

We can do the same with our cars, our possessions; anywhere we turn we can get rid of the multiples. We can get rid of the excess. We can agree that less, indeed, can turn out to be more.