• Lose 15 pounds (I’d like to go for 20, but 15 would be a good start) How? well, still working on that. I know I need to do 2 things for starters: cut waay back on cheap, processed foods increasingly eating more fresh foods. And exercising a heck of a lot more than I do. I don’t like working out, but I do love riding my bike and there’s a nice bike trail 1/4 mile from my door that I need to be more regular about hitting. UPDATE: Well, this didn’t go that well. Not well at all. I think I gained some weight instead. I did, though, cut waaay back on the amount of fast food I was eating. As a family we were more conscious of what we ate. Still need to cut back more on the processed foods. And the weight? well, I’ll still be striving for this one in 2012.

• Complete my Wood Badge training. This is a big one and very important to me. UPDATE: Ugh. If it was that important to me I’d have completed my projects to finish this up by now. Instead I slacked. There’s now only 3 months left to get this done. I do have faith that I’ll complete it in time.

• Continue to purge possessions, getting closer to owning what I really want and use. I’ve been doing the work and getting rid of stuff during the last year or two but now it’s time to kick the whole thing into high gear. One way for me to be accountable to this goal is through weekly blog posts reporting what I’ve purged. UPDATE: Finally, something I actually accomplished. I did a thorough purge of my stuff. I’d say that a true 99% of what’s left are really the things I want to own. I’m still finding things here and there that I can get rid of and there’s some clothing that I think I want to ditch. But that sort of simplifying will never stop. The less you own the more it seems you can continue to live without.

• Drive my 2000 Ford Explorer for at least 9,000 more miles. At that point the vehicle will have 200,ooo miles on it. If it’s still performing well at that point my wife and I will decide whether I keep driving it or whether it’s time to look for a replacement. UPDATE: I did do this one. My Explorer now has 201,ooo+ miles. We’ll be looking to replace my vehicle sometime this year…I hope.

• Cut non-mortgage debt in half, now that’s an ambitious goal. Not impossible by any means, but a challenge. UPDATE: Well, we made very small strides in this. It took my wife longer than anticipated to find a job after graduating in May so money was still a little tight until late summer. We’ll try for this one in 2012 with continued earnest.

• Understand what I have for investments. My portfolio is diversified, but so diversified I’ve lost track of what each fund is doing. I’m going to become reacquainted with what I have, what they represent and what else I need to do to properly prepare for retirement. UPDATE: Umm, nope. It’s still on the list.

I really don’t know if I’m going to add any goals for 2012. This is going to be a transitional year in some respects and I think I’d rather go with the flow as well as continue to finish up the old 2011 goals. Have a great year everyone!

Today is my 40th birthday and I’m officially wrapping up this year-long project. Like most projects I start, finishing it came down to the eleventh hour. The last stage of the project was the file cabinet and there was just more stuff of mine in there I remembered. It took quite a while longer than I planned to sort through. During free time in the last couple weeks I’ve been cleaning out files and cleaning out papers that I’ve kept forever and scanning some of the things I only want to remember in a .pdf or .gif kind of way.

I also made some donations to Goodwill this week. I gave away a 300+ card Ozzie Smith baseball card collection along with some other assorted Ozzie memorabilia. I thought about trying the sell the collection on eBay but decided I didn’t care enough about the items and didn’t want to devote the time it would take to sell them. I also donated a collection of about 50 Brett Favre football cards. I’ve been a Green Bay Packers fan for over 20 years and was a huge Favre fan until he pissed me off by leaving Green Bay. It didn’t make me mad that he left the Packers and went to the Jets but when he left the Jets to play for Green Bay’s hated rivals, the Minnesota Vikings, I lost pretty much all respect for the guy. That town in Wisconsin LOVED him and I feel like he just gave them the middle finger. Anyway, to get back on topic, just like the Ozzie Smith stuff I just didn’t care enough to try to sell them. Also, I gave Goodwill about a dozen autographs from various baseball players, football players, astronauts and politicians. All is not lost though, some good will come from these donations. These cards and autographs will make their way to a division of Goodwill that sells items on eBay.

I also cleaned out some of my old Boy Scout memorabilia from my youth…I’m a Scout leader now but haven’t been an actual Boy Scout for over 20 years. It was time to clean some of that stuff out. I had a ton of patches from various camps and events that I attended as a kid. Scanners are awesome. Using my scanner means I’m still able to keep a memory evoking image of the patch instead of the actual patch. I spent quite a few hours scanning stuff the last couple days because I really wanted my meet my birthday goal. I’m now donating a whole shoebox full of stuff to the local Scouting museum. There are patches, pins, neckerchiefs, postage stamps and other memorabilia. They’ll use what they can and hopefully find homes for the rest of the stuff.

I also donated to Goodwill:

• An antique camera
• An antique thermometer
• VW Bus owners manual (for a 1974 Camper that my dad had several years ago)
• 21 books
• 11 DVDs
• 22 CDs

And that’s that! There are a couple things left to finish up but 99.5 % of the job is all done and I’m down to simply owning the things I want, that are important to me and add value to my life. My next fun project will be to make a list of all the stuff I still have. But, that’s just for fun, I want to see what I own in black and white.

Have a fantastic and simple Christmas everyone!

“For all intents and purposes, this is a book of advice. The thoughts, experiments, strategies and recommendations herein are our advice to you. Whatever stage of life you’re in right now, this book can help improve the most important things in your life…”

Joshua Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of The Minimalists sent me an advance copy of Minimalism: Live A Meaningful Life to review. The book is being released today.

I can’t help but mention that the first thing that struck me about this book is that the cover is in COLOR! If you’re familiar with Joshua and Ryan’s work you know that black and white photos are prevalent on their website. Seeming to pick on them about the use of color isn’t intended for you to view as criticism but instead to make it intentionally clear to you that this is no ordinary product from the curators of theminimalists.com. They are breaking new ground here.

If -like me- you’ve followed along on Ryan and Joshua’s personal journey on their blog for the last year you will have gleaned a few details about their personal lives along the way. But the first chapter of this book lays bare all the personal details you could wish to know about these two men. You will read about their pasts in unflinching descriptions that certainly solidify the notion that they are walking the walk, not just talking the talk. The opening chapter had me saying “Wow” out loud a couple times as well as internally a few more than that.

This is not a book that will teach you how to be a minimalist. There’s no advice here on how to consolidate your DVD collection or how many pairs of black socks you need to own. There are plenty of step-by-step books on the market that will get you from cluttered to clean. Rather, this book seems to me like it’s an advanced class in living as a minimalist, instead of being one. If you’ve already passed Minimalism 101 and have successfully detached yourself from your extraneous stuff this is your graduate course in how to live your life meaningfully and pursue the life you truly want to have.

The book’s chapters are set up in a manner where you can treat each section as a lesson of it’s own. As Joshua and Ryan state in the text, you could certainly read through this book in a couple days but it’s recommended to read a chapter a day for a week in order to help you better absorb and reflect on the subject matter.

Subjects covered in the book are Health, Relationships, Passions, Growth and Contribution. Inside each chapter is advice about how to improve your life in that particular area. The advice is gentle but firm and personal stories from the two authors are interspersed with soul searching questions all geared toward helping you improve your life. The book is not meant to be a one time read, the resources within will be great to revisit on occasion to keep yourself on track towards a meaningful life.

This new book is not the same as their previously published book Minimalism: Essential Essays. There’s a bit of overlap in subject matter between the 2 titles, but both stand on their own as separate books. I would consider them companion volumes, each helpful and insightful.

The only real criticism I have about the book is the title. Calling the book Minimalism: Living a Meaningful Life isn’t as accurate a title as something like “Living a Meaningful Life.” There are a few elements of minimalist living within the book, but it’s just not a major part of the book’s broader mission for the reader.

My personal recommendation is to buy this book to help you make the most of your life, but keep this book to use as reference material as you reflect on growth and changes you make in your life.

I’ve been doing quite well with decluttering my “stuff stuff” but had somehow declined to remember that in our 2 drawer file cabinet I had quite a bit of “paper stuff.” I waded into that mess today and have compiled a sizeable pile of personal papers that I need to go through this next week.

The point of this blog entry, though, is to share a de-cluttering tidbit that I just discovered today. I had saved in the file cabinet about a half dozen articles from magazines. They contained information, stories or interviews that I wanted to be able to reference. In fact, while looking at them today I still wanted to keep them for reference.

I initially sat down on the couch to read them all again and reassess whether they were worth scanning into my computer. Then, on a lark, I decided to google the articles. That turned out to be a great idea. Not only was I able to find the online versions of articles from 2007 but I was able to find online versions of articles from 1999!

I compiled the web addresses and info into an email, emailed it to myself for archival storage in a Gmail folder and I also stored the info in a Simplenote on my iPod Touch for reference whenever I wanted.

So, I saved time from having to re-read them, saved time from having to scan them and am now able to recycle the physical paper articles and get rid of more clutter from the files.  Win, win, win!

Why run an ad in The New York Times on Black Friday telling people, “Don’t Buy This Jacket”? It’s time for us as a company to address the issue of consumerism and do it head on.

Read more about Patagonia’s reasons at their blog entry on The Cleanest Line.

Around that same time I  heard of another clothing project called Six Items or Less. Now, to a guy that was making an adjustment to wearing only 33 items of clothing the thought of just 6 items was truly crazy. Granted, there are some differences in how the 2 projects determine item counts. P333 counts coats, shoes and accessories while 6IOL does not, but still, you’re moving from a couple dozen options to just six pieces of clothing.

I stumbled back onto the 6IOL website a couple weeks ago, just as a new challenge was ramping up to start the next day.  I decided to jump in and see what this experiment would be like. I hurriedly -and slightly randomly- picked 6 items from my closet, snapped a picture of them and added a post to their website thereby solidifying my participation.

I’m now 2 weeks into the month long project and it’s going pretty good. It helps that I have a job where the clothes I wear to work are what I would wear any other time of the day, whether I was hanging out at home or going to the movies. No professional attire needed in my workplace. I also decided to conduct a separate experiment while wearing just the 6 items: I opted to not tell my wife or kids that I was participating in 6IOL.

So far no one in my family has noticed…I’ll keep you posted if that changes, I doubt it will.

In my experience, the more people have, the less likely they are to be contented. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that depression is a “disease of affluence,” a disorder of modern life in the industrialized world. People who live in poorer countries have a lower risk of depression than those in industrialized nations. In general, countries with lifestyles that are furthest removed from modern standards have the lowest rates of depression.

I find this intriguing. It has elements that make total sense. If you don’t have a lot of stuff, you don’t worry much about losing something, you don’t have attachments to items, you’ve learned to be content with less and you may have extra money to cover expenses that others wouldn’t who spent all of their extra money on “stuff.”

Check out the article. Dr. Weil presents some interesting, thought provoking points about how modern life interferes with how humans were intended to live.

Simple Black Coffee has been near the forefront of my mind over the last few months but I’ve just never made the effort to hop on here and actually write something.

Not an excuse but I’m chalking it up to human nature and nothing more.

So here we are. I’ve gotten down to just a few things left to get rid of (it’s amazing to look back and see how far I’ve come) and there’s not much decluttering left to do. There are some tasks like scanning papers, cleaning out files, looking through home videos to determine what to burn to DVD and some collections to sell that are a little challenging to list on eBay. That kinda stuff is there but that’s about it.

I’m almost 40, I’m verrrry close to my goal of being a minimalist and owning what I truly want by that age and the type of personal decluttering writing I was doing on here just isn’t applicable anymore.

People are still visiting the site for which I’m grateful and I know I can still be relevant but the site needs to grow in a new direction.

A direction I’m not sure of.

What I’m going to do is simply start writing more. Articles may or may not be about decluttering, simple living or minimalism at all but I need to blog freely to help determine where Simple Black Coffee’s future lies.

Thanks for your support and patience with me and have a great day!

USA Today has a recurring feature focusing on touring music artists and yesterday they had a short article on the band Incubus.

Lead singer Brandon Boyd leads a minimalist lifestyle…on the road at least.

Pack light: Boyd sticks to a minimalist rule. “I try to bring as little as possible because you can always find things on the road, and that’s part of the fun. You bring your absolute essentials.” His three necessities? “My leather jacket, my camera and my sketchbook.”

It’s nice to know that, although he can probably afford to buy whatever he wants, he tries to get by with what he needs.

Occasionally I’ll pop over to read what’s new at The Path Less Pedaled. Russ and Laura tour around the country on Brompton folding bicycles and Amtrak trains (and that’s cool all by itself). I was excited to see that they stopped by Joseph, Oregon and visited with Dan Price for a bit. I’ve been a fan of Dan’s for a long time now and love his book Radical Simplicity – I keep a copy on my desk as a visual reminder that life is what you decide to make it. His book and story were one of the earliest motivators that set me on the path to simple living and inspiring me to do more with less. If you’ve not checked out his book I hope you will consider reading it. He also regularly publishes small zines full of stories and his ingenious art. He offers them to the public in volumes called Moonlight Chronicles.

So Laura and Russ made a short video with Dan and it’s really cool to not only hear Dan talking about his life but to see the areas where he lives. Russ and Laura did a great job in the video in offering glimpses of where Dan does his thing. We get to see his workshop, a little bit of the hobbit hole and various other parts of his meadow. It’s just enough to whet your appetite and make you want to go visit Dan yourself someday.

If you’ve not opened yourself up to the world of Dan Price I hope you’ll do so now. Here’s another video interview from 2003 made by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The picture above is from Russ of The Path Less Pedaled.