You will be less stressed and might find your business more successful if you can shed some baggage.
I’m three days into a four-day spring break camping trip with my 13-year-old daughter, Hazel, and her best friend, Lilly (they have been inseparable practically since birth). And the full recognition just hit me (not for the first time, mind you!) this morning, as I sit here at a picnic table drinking my coffee with our female Great Pyrenees, “Bella,” that we can all do with less.
On this trip, our meals have been simple and our days have been even simpler. Three of us are living comfortably in what is probably, at most, a 240-square-foot space. And while I can’t say everything happens faster (try cleaning a cast iron skillet in a motorhome sink or changing clothes in a bedroom that has about 12 inches of space surrounding the bed), it all still gets done and you have so much time for solitude and reflection.
Of course, being the compulsive cleaner and fixer that I am, the condition of our RV is making me want to take it home and rip everything out for a top to bottom cleaning, and it’s driving me a little mad that I cannot fix the leaky kitchen faucet because I somehow left my camper toolbox either at the last campground we went to or at home. But those minor irritations aside, the taste of minimalist life is quite enjoyable. Instead of working on my yard and cleaning my cars and working on a house down the street that we are redoing – as I do most every other weekend – I can pretty much do absolutely nothing if I want to for most of the day.
I think most of our readers can identify with me when I say that all of the stuff we aspire to own can become a trap. And it seems like one that so many successful people fall into. Every single thing you own has other purchases and other activities tied to it. And it takes up space.
We have some friends who owned a $1.15 million house here in Fayetteville, Arkansas. They had a house in Scottsdale, multiple vacation homes in various places in Michigan, an Airbnb in Chicago, and also rented an expensive apartment in New York that was their primary residence. After one recently retired, they just sold four or five of those properties and gave up their rental, and bought a nice house in Michigan to retire to. Can you imagine the stress of trying to keep up with all of those homes? Between the maintenance, cleaning, utilities, and furnishing/decorating – along with 60- or 70-hour a week professional jobs, there would be no time for anything else.
I have been there myself at one point when we had more than 60 highly leveraged houses and apartments and 44,000 square feet of commercial space, along with about 15 cars and 10 motorcycles. Too much to keep up with – and unnecessary. I can honestly say at this point in my life I have every single THING I could want. And probably three or four times as much as I need.
I still hate to think about the mess my kids would inherit if my wife and I both passed away or were incapacitated and had to go into a facility somewhere. We still have way, way too much stuff in our huge house with a four car garage and massive closets with 10 times the clothes anyone needs. We need to start shedding as much of it as possible. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Most of us “boomers” rationalize we need a place like ours for family gatherings; it’s nice, but our older girls each have nice homes we could go to and the country club we belong to has free rooms and great food and we could always go there. We don’t NEED what we have for such infrequent use.
The point of all this is that we all complain about not having enough time. The AEC business is client- and deadline-driven. So much is out of our control and if we want to have successful companies, we have to do what we have to do when we need to do it. Then we have families and friends who need our time and attention. So why take up what little time we have that is not consumed by the business with all of our stuff? Does that make us happier? And what about personal overhead? You think your businesses are more likely to survive and thrive if you can leave more cash in them to fund the growth and get over humps? I do. I also think we are headed for a slowdown, even if it is only temporary.
The bottom line: you will be less stressed and might find your business more successful if you can shed some of this baggage. We all would be!
Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.