I was waiting at a small airport many years ago, when I struck up a conversation with one of the airport workers, a young man of about twenty. During our talk he found out I had a private pilot’s license, and he said that he would love to get his pilot’s license. I asked him why he was waiting.

“It’s too expensive,” he said. “As soon as I found out how much the lessons cost, I gave up the idea.”
“There’s opportunity all around you,” I responded energetically. “You work at an airport! Talk to the owners of the planes, talk to the pilots, talk to the crew members, find out if there’s something you can do in exchange for lessons. When you decide you can’t do it, it’s over. You can just as easily decide to do it and, in time, you’ll have your pilot’s license!”

“The mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.” – Confucius

With any undertaking, it’s important to have the right tools. The same is true when you simplify, scale back, live more frugally and sustainably, and make room in your life for things you love.

We’ve already discussed several key tools. The Short List:

1. Determining your essentials and eliminating the rest.
2. A “thriving” mindset where you focus on what you love, not what you don’t have.
3. An “enough” mindset, where you realize you already have enough, and stop wanting more.
4. A plan to reduce expenses, both small and large.
5. Sound financial habits.
6. Debt-elimination strategies.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

While you can cut costs here and there, the real, lasting changes won’t come until you change your habits. If you currently give in to impulse purchases on a regular basis, for example, you’ll still spend a lot of money despite making numerous cuts in other areas.

An important long-term strategy is to create new, sound financial habits, one at a time. See The Power of Less for more on creating new habits. Use the effective habit-change techniques in the book to change one habit at a time. Here are some important habits to form:

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I was on planet earth thousands of years ago when language was somewhat non-existent, extremely elementary at best. Although our lives would have been much simpler, I am certain people were greatly challenged with their ability to effectively communicate their feelings and the beauty they witnessed in the marvelous world around them.

Fast forwarding thousands of year later, language today is quite comprehensive. Maybe it is a little bit too complex at times. The more complex language a person uses, the smaller their audience.

Anyhow, one absolutely amazing aspect of language is the ability to take a complex concept and put it into simple words which can be easily understood by the masses. For example, a metaphor can shortcut our understanding of concepts which may have taken years to understand otherwise.