Simplicity Can Be Complicated & Tackling Piles of Files with Smiles
Be sure to subscribe in iTunes and leave a review in the iTunes store! It helps others find the show!  Thanks!

Dan's Topic: Sometimes Simplicity Can Be Pretty Complicated
One of the major topics people talk to us about is how it seems that a good portion of society has given up or lost their way when it comes to choices they make and and even seems like they’ve given up on taking responsibility for shaping their lives.

On last week's show I mentioned Stephen Covey's classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Covey addresses at the beginning of his book that responsibility is our "ability to respond."
When it comes to living out our decision to pursue a more simple life, we exercise our ability to respond in the choices we make.

Choices on what to let into our lives, and choices on what to let go of.
In doing that, we exercise that responsibility at many levels..first in our choice to live simply and then with each decision we make to support that choice.



Simplicity is a completely personal choice. No one, including us, has all the right answers on how to make your life simple. Like most things in life that are truly important, there is no:

magic pill
definitive blueprint
roadmap
or treasure map to find the simple life that perfectly suits you.

The answer can only be found by truly contemplating your desires, formulating your life plan and tweaking it along the way as you get wiser. Matter of fact, listening to gurus and experts will often run contrary to your goals because it limits your ability to respond…to be response-able.

Responsibility is a like a muscle, if you don't exercise it, it will atrophy over time and you won't be able to use it.

That is the path a huge part of society has chosen to follow these days and their decision muscles become more and more atrophied every single day.

 So how did this happen? Well, I’ve thought a lot about it and wanted to share some things with you.

So, as you've heard me mention before, many sources tell us that the average adult is exposed to as many as 5000 advertisements per day.
Now, I think this number might be a little high, but who knows.
I've done some research on it and to me there's definitely a ballpark figure range from 1800 to 5000.
Still, the crux of the matter is that we're inundated with advertisements, and heck, traditional media for that matter, that are designed at their best to influence our decisions, and at worst, to replace our decision making process all together!
Advertising tells us what we’re supposed to drive, what we’re supossed to look like, wear, live, what medicines we need to take if we want to be 70 and hold hands with our significant other as we sit in separate bathtubs after a long day’s motorcycle ride.

If you're new to simplifying your life, I just want to reinforce the decision you've made to give this a shot. I wanted to start out by just going over what decision making was like back in the day and what it's like now. I'm not going to get into what's better and what's not…just sort of present some realities and how our options have changed. Like "stuff" in our lives, more options isn't always better. So let's compare some available options of a few things between an era we'll call "back in the day" to now:

First off, television.

Back in the day we had about 3-4 TV channels to choose from.

If you’re like me and lived near Canada, maybe you were able to pull in 2 more, and maybe your town had a VHF channel to watch reruns of shows that were off the Big 3 here in the States of ABC, CBS, and NBC.
If you lived outside the States, then maybe you have even fewer options.
If you wanted some advice about what to watch, you asked your friends. The sample was small and just by asking a handful of friends would give you all the info you needed.
The advertising model was a holdover from the radio days.