Just Start: Kondo Everything

EVERYTHING

Some books, I think, are the closest thing you can find to actual magic, in that they might have a sentence or two in them that, if you read them at the right time, can make a huge change to your life.

For me, a lot of these books are about the process of talking to people, or relating to them in some other way: Never Split The Difference has sentences like that, but so do Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read and Rory Miller’s Conflict Communication. You can also get it from fiction, or science: I’ve read lines in David Deutsch and Liu Cixin that have made me sit back in my seat for a second, as something inside my head shifted like a slab of ice tumbling off a glacier. One of the most spell-binding books I’ve ever read, though, actually has the promise in the title: Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Not convinced? That’s fine. Kondo’s reputation has been less spotless ever since the book came out, partly because she’s publicly acknowledged that motherhood has shifted her perspective on keeping a perfectly tidy house. Also, though, most of the book is unnecessary: you don’t need to ask yourself whether every single one of your possessions sparks joy or fold your t-shirts like you’re shelving books. You only really need one insight from the entire book, but unfortunately nobody’s allowed to write three sentences in a book and charge ten pounds for it (even though this one’s probably provided far more value to my life than that). Ready? Here’s my version of it:

1. Put stuff where it goes

2. If you don’t have a place for it, decide on a place for it.

3. If this feels pointless to do, get rid of the stuff.

   Maybe this feels obvious to you. That’s fine! It didn’t to me: when I was in my early thirties, my life was still a whirlwind of mess and chaos, and I couldn’t quite understand why. When I started actually following the Kondo method with my t-shirts and USB cables, everything improved immediately. Like magic.

Here’s the thing, though: you can also do this with everything else.

By way of an example, I quite often find myself with forty tabs open on my computer. This used to be stressful — my solution in the old days was to simply wait for my laptop to crash and then consider all of those links gone, like tears in rain — but now. when things get overwhelming, I just run through those tabs and put them where they go: specific to-read list for an article or project, general to-read list for downtime, or the virtual bin. Or, when my desktop gets cluttered, I run through everything on it and put stuff where it goes: the B-roll folder, the assets folder, the nice/mean comments folders. Twitter Bookmarks, actual books, the endless random trinkets and craft projects that my 8-year-old produces: you put them where they go, or you create a place where they can go. Again, maybe this is incredibly obvious to you, but it felt like magic to me.

In Fooled by Randomness and elsewhere, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that even if 90% of a self‑help (or pop‑psych) book is nonsense, it’s worth reading if it contains one tiny insight that transforms a part of your life (conversely, he also says that if a technical, or philosophical work has just one flawed argument or error, it can invalidate everything else). I’d go a bit further: I think reading good self-help books (the sort that productivity types love to bullet-point and summarise) forces you to sit with their ideas and let them marinate, letting the best ones emerge on their own.

Have a great week!

Joel x

Stuff I’ve done

📝 Article - I ditched the gym: here’s what I’m doing instead
My gym recently started putting on terrible fitness classes that took up half of the floor at the only time I could train (6-8am), so I cancelled my membership: and I’m currently feeling fitter than I have in about five years. Here’s how! (and a quick reminder that if you want to read my occasional musings on individual workouts, I post those here).

Stuff I like

📝 Article - Dance Lessons for Writers by Zadie Smith
This is absolutely brilliant: it’s a sort of meditation on the ways dance and choreography intertwine with the art of writing, featuring a huge amount of dance history and jumping off points, ranging from Fred Astaire and Rudolph Nureyev to the Nicholas Brothers and Prince.

Why Big Companies Squander Brilliant Ideas
https://timharford.com/2018/10/why-big-companies-squander-brilliant-ideas/

🎶 Hype Music - Skinbag by VERA

YouTube Music (which seems much better at recommendations than other platforms) autoplayed me this while I was running, and it’s an insta-classic: a high-energy rock-bop that feels a bit like the best stuff by the Dresden Dolls.

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