This book changed my life. It turned me into a person who does not live on "automatic pilot". I got rid of "stuff" that I had to keep cleaning otherwise. And that's friendships too, the ones I felt I had to maintain to be a nice person, even though I felt these people were draining me of my sanity.
This is a wonderful book for simplifying everything in your life, from the inside out and I always recommend it to everyone, especially if they feel lost or overwhelmed with anything that's going on in their lives.
It settled me and made me a much more thoughtful person.
Definitely a book worth reading, Davidson makes great points and gives advice you can actually use in your own day-to-day life. Lots of simple tips and tricks that had immediate benefits for me.
This is a must-read. Seriously, there's a lot of worthy advice about a wide range of topics. In the few days since I've read it, I've already been able to use a lot of the tips and it's been quite helpful.
I found this book to be quite helpful. It's definitely worth reading and, if you're like me and have a lot of needless complexities in your life, you'll find this book to be a life changer.
Q: View your problems as challenges. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, Ph.D., would amaze his colleagues and students when he first encountered a complex physics problem. He would dive in with disarming enthusiasm, saying, "Well, what have we here?" To him, a problem was an opportunity dressed up in disguise. Complexity was a challenge to be solved. He thought it was good fun to tackle and solve what baffled others. Dr. Feynman didn't resist what he found, he used it to flourish. He recognized that by identifying and accepting the problem, he was already that much closer to resolution. Look for the answer alongside the problem. A generation before Dr. Feynman, Charles Kettering pursued problems with an equally ingenious and innovative approach. (c)
While normally I feel bad about myself for being extremely online, this book convinced me that the internet has simplified everyone鈥檚 life immensely. In an extremely 90s grimace-inducing passage, advises borrowing against your 401k at a reasonable 8% interest. Has a nice couple of pages on how to compose an efficient fax though.
This plethora of tips of supposedly simple living contains some interesting pointers on simplifying your life, but the majority of advice is simply about how to be a hood housewife. Plus some of the advice (like flushing expired medicine down the toilet, keeping a mini-fridge next to the sofa for easy snacks and airing the living room after another round of heavy smoking) is terribly dated and hopelessly stuck in the 90s. Additionally, some advice is just plain wrong, like the recommendation to eat with a companion to cut down on eating - supposedly because as you converse, you have less time to eat. Studies have shown though that each additional person at the table adds 10% to the total caloric intake of each person involved, so the more people at the table, the more everyone eats. So the real recommendation is to eat alone if you want to stay lean. You'll have complete control over your portions and will stop once your plate is empty and stomach is full (or half full, if you really want to control you weight). At a table with other people though it is hard to stop or leave when others are still eating and just sitting there is not a good option either, so what do you done once you're done? You'll help yourself to a second serving, just to blend in and to be social. All in all, I found myself cringing more often than I would have liked when I read the book.
The book generally takes the "eliminate all that you don't want" route. What i loved was the approach that we can indeed simplify our lives by reducing many excesses and cutting down on unwanted hoarding. Will certainly help a good deal when one sets out to plan and organize one's home, work and life as a whole!
The book is long and informative and is full of ideas to cut back on stress. I've learned a lot of if that I am trying to get in the habit of thinking an different ways and taking action. I was unable to read the whole book but get thro most of it. And otherwise skimmed other chapters. I do obliges myself in reading reviews, tips and paragraph. This did allow one to come to terms to how does life evils effect on our lives - both good bad.My quotation is truly know what is important. Think: what is important.
Wow, this sucked. I think it was probably aimed to a completely different demographic than me. Watching one hour less of television a week in order to give me 52 extra hours a year to do more...simple things?...didn't hit me as helpful, but rather, that was the point when I decided to put the book down. Blah.
Definitely "just okay." I already knew most of the tips in the book; the rest didn't seem like they would be worth trying. Maybe these were new ideas when the book was first published, in the 90s. Might be good for someone who has NO idea how to live more simply.
I didn't finish this book. I found the advice to be dated and somewhat passive. It wasn't so much a save money type of book as it was just making life easier. Maybe when I'm looking to destress my life this book would be useful, but for not it was not what I was looking for.