Could you lose a ton of weight this year? Literally, one ton: 2,000 pounds.

This is not about body weight, of course, but belongings. This year, could you sell, donate, and discard 2,000 pounds of stuff?

Automobiles don’t count. Nor does a set of weights since a collection of dumbbells, barbells, and weight plates usually run 300 to 500 pounds. (Plus, there’s nothing easier to sell used online than weights.) Major appliances don’t count either since they’re usually replaced with a newer model.

But everything else goes toward the 2,000-pound mark. Furniture (both indoor and outdoor), tools,  small kitchen appliances, toys, sporting goods, knick-knacks, canned food, blankets, old media (CDs, DVDs, tapes), and clothing counts. So do books and magazines – that’s at least 200 pounds for most households – along with excess school/office supplies, and paper of all sorts that can be scanned (if necessary) and/or shredded.

Keep a running total with each trip to the donation center, recycling bin, or landfill. Use a scale for easy-to-weigh items like books but otherwise make realistic estimates of weight. Losing a ton means dropping 167 pounds of stuff a month or between 5 and 6 pounds a day.

Here’s the catch. You also must add the amount of weight brought into the home. Trips to the grocery store do not count. Nor do home repair/maintenance items. But everything else must be added. New clothes, household decor, additional TVs, books, and paper. Think back to Christmas. How many pounds of stuff came into the house?

Possessions weigh us down and it doesn’t occur overnight. It happens daily when we bring in 5 or 10 pounds of stuff but don’t get rid of anything. Much like making an effort to lose body weight, when we become mindful of everything placed in the body, it’s necessary to keep a log of the in-flow of stuff to lose a ton of weight and make significant changes.

How much weight can you lose? I’ve thought of this recently after cleaning out a one-bedroom condo after a family member died. He was not a pack rat or hoarder, just someone with all of the typical things a household needs. In such a situation, it’s hard to find a home for an iron and ironing board, toaster, microwave, coffee maker, dishes, flatware, brooms and mops, coolers, framed wall art, and furniture of all sorts. Most of it went to donation centers. For bigger items, I found people online to take them away.

Could he have dropped a ton of weight? Probably not, though he did have a few minor collections. Like some seniors, he did not have much of his life digitized, so there were a couple of hundred pounds of paper, files, magazines, and books.

This is not about making things easier for your loved ones when you pass, though that’s a noble byproduct of this exercise. Instead, think in terms of how much lighter you’ll feel after dropping a ton of weight. Much like losing 10 or 20 pounds of fat, eliminating 2,000 pounds of household excess will be a life-changing accomplishment.

The toughest part of decluttering or living lean for some people is unloading a collection. It’s both time consuming and emotionally challenging.

I’ve sold my sports memorabilia collection in stages and recently unloaded the last third of it, keeping just a handful of baseball cards and a few pieces of memorabilia I accumulated from the age of 6 until I stopped collecting about 25 years ago.

That represents two decades of collecting, both as a kid and a young adult. Plus, as a full-time baseball writer throughout the 1990s, I accumulated lots of items such as press passes, schedules, press pins, yearbooks, and other odds and ends.

The collection didn’t generate the money I’d hoped and I could have raised more if I broke it up and listed the items myself on eBay. But I didn’t want to take the time to deal with listing items, emailing, packing, and trips to the post office. The extra time would not be worth the additional money. Instead, I found a buyer online who specializes in selling sports memorabilia on eBay and sold everything to him. The collection consisted of several thousand cards, some going back to 1949 and many from the 1960s, plus dozens of autographs and oddball items.

I spread the collection over the dining room table and the buyer spent an hour looking at it. We haggled a bit and I got him to raise his offer about 10 percent, but that was as far as he’d go before I accepted.

Sure the collection was worth something – and I received a fair price, although again less than I’d hoped. In the end, though, it was just cardboard and paper that had been sitting in my closet for 18 years. That’s how long we’ve been in our current house; the collection took up space in the closets of previous homes. I dragged it from home to home and probably could have sold it for more years ago before the sports collectibles market softened in the early ‘90s.

It was just excess baggage. Over the years I’ve interviewed pro athletes at their homes for stories. What struck me most – aside from the size and elegance of these homes – is that most of these athletes didn’t have much of their own memorabilia on display. Some had collections of memorabilia for athletes they’d played with or against – or players they admired from a previous generation. But for the most part, they didn’t bother with their own memorabilia.

 I figured if athletes didn’t want their own stuff, why should I?

Thanks to the Internet and digital media, there’s no reason to stockpile books, magazines, music, movies, or memorabilia. As a kid without cable TV in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I turned to baseball cards as a primary way to follow baseball, a notion that seems preposterous in the digital era. After all, for more than two decades, the Internet has provided all the information a sports fan could want.

Collecting, whether sports memorabilia or anything else, has a downside. It produces a mindset that everything has value and that you should continue accumulating until you have the definitive collection. It takes lots of space, time, and money.

You spend a disproportionate share of your time on collecting stuff rather than experiencing things. Eventually you lose interest or no longer have space and must dispose of the stuff. That’s when you realize how much – or rather, how little – your prized collection is worth.

People don’t collect things like stamps, coins, and Hummel figurines like they did a generation ago and that’s good. No longer do they fill their homes with collectibles and knickknacks. Our society is more fast-paced, or at least screen obsessed, and people are less likely to spend an afternoon tinkering with Lionel trains or organizing baseball cards.

It’s important to appreciate the past, cherish and learn from it, but there’s no need to hold onto boxes of trinkets. Any of the thousands of cards and memorabilia pieces I sold can be found online. There was no need to even take pictures before the sale.

Before the buyer arrived, I looked over the collection spread across the dining room table. Some of the cards I’d obtained from childhood friends, two of whom are now deceased. I thought of the countless hours I’d spent accumulating the collection by attending card shows, buying packs at the supermarket, trading with friends, and following the market.

It wasn’t wasted time, of course. I loved following sports as a kid and that obsession, which included collecting sports cards and memorabilia, prepared me more for an early career as a sportswriter than any class I took in college.

To live mindfully and free of clutter, though, it’s necessary to let go of things that no longer make a contribution to your life and your future. Perhaps you have such a stockpile, whether it’s a collectible, hobby, or entertainment interest that stopped commanding your attention long ago. It’s time to say goodbye. Thanks to eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other avenues, it’s never been easier.

I thought I’d feel sad when I boxed up the collection and helped the buyer load it into his SUV. Instead, I felt like a burden had been lifted. Plus I had a few extra bucks.

The memories, of course, I’ll have forever.

It’s just I no longer need huge boxes in my closet to remind me.

 

 

There’s a flashback in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” showing how Andy Dufresne tunneled his way out of a prison cell with a tiny rock hammer at night, covering the growing hole with a poster of Rita Hayworth and later Raquel Welch.

After each digging session, Andy collected the pieces of dirt and concrete and filled his pockets, concealing the evidence of his planned escape. The flashback shows him discretely emptying his pockets in the prison yard each day.

It took the fictitious Andy Dufresne, played by a young Tim Robbins, 19 years to tunnel his way out of prison by removing the barrier little by little.

I’ve found Andy’s process an apt metaphor for minimalism, especially my own life as I prepare to downsize from 20 years in the same home. It’s a prison of sorts, a home that’s been too big for too long for our family of four. I shudder to think how much more time and money we’d have now and over the last two decades by living smaller and investing more.

If the cost of anything is the amount of life exchanged for it, then my wife and I traded much of our thirties and forties paying for and maintaining a large home. There are perhaps three reasons for having a big home – huge family, many houseguests, lots of entertaining – and we can’t justify it on any of those grounds.

It’s not just the initial cost of the home in 1999, which was significant, but also the ongoing expense in terms of taxes and insurance, to say nothing of the time maintaining the home and a huge yard. In recent years, it seems we’ve welcomed more contractors and repairmen into the home than guests and family members.

As we prepare for the move to a smaller home in the next six to 12 months, I take an Andy Dufresne approach to each day, doing the equivalent of dumping my pockets each time I leave the house. If I’m going to make daily progress, stuff must go every day. Here are four areas where I do just that:

FREEBIES: It’s understandably difficult to unload things we paid dearly for, either emotionally because of the cost or practically in terms of finding a buyer. But why do we build our clutter prisons with freebie t-shirts and promotional items? I’ve stopped the inflow by turning down giveaways but still am amazed at how many freebies I continue to discover cluttering my home and my life. If it was free, it’s not for me.

FURNITURE: The less stuff we own, the less need for furniture. Why own massive bookshelves, entertainment centers and armoires? My next home, whether owned or (more likely) rented, will include built-in clothes drawers in closets. I no longer want or need to own a dresser. There is perhaps no other consumer category that costs so much, takes up so much space, and is so hard to sell at any price than furniture.

If sitting is the new smoking, as some suggest, why own so many chairs and couches? Prisoner Andy Dufresne couldn’t wait to get his hour of time outside each day. So why with all of our freedom are we so content to spend most of our time inside sitting?

PAPER: The two most important minimalist tools are a quality shredder and scanner (or scanning service). There are few documents that must be kept in physical form. One of the biggest challenges is “sentimental paper” such as love letters, photos from the pre-digital era, children’s artwork, report cards, and perhaps your work product – all of which can be scanned. I’ve spent much of my career writing for magazines and recently had more than 1,500 pages of articles scanned, eliminating the need for five thick binders of articles in plastic sleeves (The scanning service kept the articles and I donated the sleeves and binders to a back-to-school drive.)

ENTERTAINMENT: Like many people, I’ve stopped purchasing books, CDs, and DVDs because of digital accessibility. I prefer reading physical books, but read only what’s accessible through the library, which is most everything if you’re willing to wait, at most, a few weeks. Each trip to the library I bring a bag of books I no longer need to donate toward the library’s monthly book sale.

I’ve donated CDs after uploading the ones I want to digital files and DVDs as well. There’s no longer a need to own entertainment. Heck, Andy Dufresne entertained himself for years at Shawshank with only books from the library and a rock hammer to carve a chess set out of rocks. He made beautiful chess pieces and the project proved a good cover story for his real need for a rock hammer.

I’ve purged all physical entertainment, but kept my Shawshank Redemption DVD. There might soon come a time when a DVD player is obsolete; I already can find the film on-demand. But rather than keep it concealed in the (since discarded) entertainment armoire, I display it on my mostly empty bookshelf, a visual reminder to keep tunneling to freedom every day.

 

 

 

We didn’t evacuate for Hurricane Irma. But we had our bags packed and staged in one area of the house for either a last-minute departure or so we’d have a better chance of finding our most important belongings together amid the rubble.

When you reduce your belongings to one suitcase and two backpacks — I had a second backpack for important documents, most of which are backed up in the cloud anyway – it’s a reminder of how little you need.

Here’s what my suitcase contained: one suit, brown and black shoes, two dress shirts, two ties (probably unnecessary), black belt, six casual shirts (four short-sleeve), five T-shirts, one light jacket (I don’t own a heavy coat), one pair casual slacks, one pair of jeans (I planned to wear a second, along with sneakers and T-shirt No.6), two pairs of shorts, gym shorts, six pairs underwear, and four pairs of socks.

That capsule wardrobe covers me at least 80 percent of the time. Looking at the remainder of a closet I’ve pared down considerably in recent years, there still was a lot of clothing left.

Here’s what was in my first backpack, the one without important documents:  laptop, tablet, chargers, spare keys, safe box keys, ID cards, checkbook, back-up drive, toiletries, camera, and camera cards.

That was it. My wife and sons had similar stashes. Had we departed and a category five hurricane reduced our home to sticks, we would have had everything we needed to start over.

Which begs the question: Why do we have so much other stuff?

Not long after we moved to Florida in the late ’90s, we had three hours to evacuate for a hurricane. This was before kids and digital media, so we dedicated much car space to photo albums and CD and DVD collections, which seems downright silly now.

I grabbed a large box that contained my sports card and memorabilia collection (since sold). We also packed a small stereo system (again, the late ’90s) before driving inland for two hours to stay with relatives.

Then, as now, we needed space for a cat carrier (different cat, of course).

As we drove away in 1998, I realized I wouldn’t miss anything if our apartment building washed out to sea. Everything of importance was in that car, which surprisingly wasn’t that loaded down.

We have friends who years ago endured a middle-of-the-night electrical fire. They have four daughters, all 10 and under at the time, and thankfully everyone got out before the house burned to the ground.

A few years later, the father told me he considered it a blessing. “It was very traumatic at the time and putting our life back in order has been challenging,” he said. “But as far as the contents of the house, I don’t miss anything. We never would have gotten rid of a lot of that junk. The fire totally changed our mentality and I’m thankful for that. We don’t collect or accumulate anything and only buy what we absolutely need.”

Every summer since the fire this family of six has rented a large van and traveled the country. They typically take one or two of their nieces as well. People no doubt see their social media postings from some cool, out-of-the-way place and wonder how this big family finds the time and money to do it on two modest incomes.

When you spend only on what you need, it’s amazing the resources you have for experiences. And if disaster strikes, nobody can take those memories away.

When making a discretionary purchase – meaning something you don’t absolutely need – ask yourself if this is something you’d throw in the car during a hurricane evacuation or miss if the house burned down.

If it’s not something you’d grab with three hours to evacuate, it’s probably not worth buying.

I’ve accumulated far too much over the last twenty years. I’m reminded of that when I’m away from home for weeks with just a suitcase or backpack, free from the burden of a houseful of possessions. I was reminded of that Monday, which I spent cleaning up a large yard and literally rearranging deck chairs around a titanic (for me) home.

I’m thankful to have that home still intact, of course. Listening to Irma howl all night was a reminder that many here in Florida, like those in Houston, did not fare so well.

But Irma also was a reminder that the home need not contain nearly so much stuff.

This isn’t about wearing dirty clothes, saving water and energy, or going nudist for a few weeks, though there’s something to be said for all of that. This is about leaning out your wardrobe and discovering the clothes you truly value.

It’s been said that we wear 20 percent of our clothes 80 percent of the time. Some have suggested hanging your clothes the opposite way on hangers as you wear them. At the end of 30 or 60 days, you can look at the clothes not turned backward and tell which ones you no longer need.

The No-Laundry Challenge is a faster, more powerful way to illustrate this trend. Simply see how long you can go without doing laundry. We’ll make exceptions for underwear and socks, though if you run out of either, hopefully it’s because you still want to wear all of your inventory. If not, designate those you don’t want as rags. You know you’re done with a pair of socks or piece of underwear when you’re down to your last option and cringe at the thought of wearing it.

I’ve pared my wardrobe dramatically in recent years as I dropped 20 pounds. Much of my wardrobe was oversized to begin with and by leaning out my body, little of it fits. I figured everything remaining must be stuff I actually wear.

Not true. As a freelance writer living in Florida, I live mostly in jeans or shorts, T-shirts, and short-sleeve collared shirts. I tend to work out most every day, so I have a lot of training gear and rack up a lot of laundry. Having purged so much in recent years, I have an organized closet with gaping holes; I no longer need so much space.

So I figured the No-Laundry Challenge wouldn’t produce eye-opening results. I was wrong. After 10 days, I discovered three T-shirts that still had tags on them. I had purchased them at least six months ago. They had sunk to the bottom of a pile, which was where they remained as I wore the same shirts on top, washed them, and placed them back atop the pile. Even though I haven’t bought any other shirts in the last six months, it was startling to find I didn’t need the ones I bought six months ago – which I’ve started wearing this week with everything else in my overflowing laundry bin. I liked these three shirts when I bought them and still like them. It’s as if I just found some free new clothes.

As I made my way to the bottom of that T-shirt pile looking for something to wear, I passed a few other shirts, well-worn wardrobe veterans. It was time to thank them for their service, as Marie Kondo recommends in her terrific book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and take them either to Goodwill or the rag bin.

As I went through the sock drawer, it was surprising to see how many orphaned and worn socks there were. There were others I didn’t particularly like but kept because they were freebies from running events and triathlons. This violates the Live Lean philosophy of not accepting free items just because they are free. When I found that I would rather wear a pair of mismatched white socks to train in rather than a pair of freebies with some cheesy sponsor logo, it was time for the freebies to go.

You can do the No-Laundry Challenge several times a year because of seasonal clothing. Plus you’re always bringing in new clothes. Even if you rarely shop, you receive gifts and freebies. Ideally, we’d adopt a one-in-one-out philosophy each time we add. In reality, we usually don’t, especially with freebies. We don’t tend to get rid of something when we get a freebie since it likely isn’t better than much of what we have and, besides, it’s free. But there’s still a cost to ownership in that it needs to be maintained and produces clutter.

At the moment, nearly two weeks into the No-Laundry Challenge, I have one pair of underwear remaining and I’m down to mismatched socks. So I’ll wash socks and drawers today. But as I wear a “new” T-shirt for the second of a three-day stretch, I plan to continue the No-Laundry Challenge. I’ll no doubt find more stuff that can go and I’ll likely discover more “new” clothes to wear.

Best of all, I’ll continue to lean out my wardrobe, retaining only the clothes I love to wear – and keeping them where they can be seen.

 

 

 

As I write this, Hurricane Matthew is gaining strength in the Caribbean. Those of us who live in Florida know this drill well. We keep an eye on the news and update our hurricane plan if needed. Thankfully the storm usually weakens, moves offshore or takes a turn away from us.

That’s not always the case, however. Not long after we moved to Florida, a hurricane formed suddenly in the Gulf of Mexico and authorities issued an order for our county to evacuate – in three hours.

It’s amazing how you prioritize possessions when you have just three hours and two small cars. This was the late 1990s, before digital photography and storage, so we dedicated much car space to photo albums and CD music collections, which seems downright silly now. Valuable documents already were tucked away in a safe deposit box at the bank.

We put the cat in a pet carrier and filled two suitcases with a representative sampling of our wardrobes. I grabbed a fairly large box that contained my sports card and memorabilia collection (since sold). We also packed a small stereo system (again, the late ’90s) and a laptop computer before driving inland for two hours to stay with relatives.

As we drove away, I couldn’t help but think I wouldn’t miss anything if our apartment building washed out to sea. Everything of importance was in these two cars, which surprisingly weren’t that loaded down.

The hurricane never came and we returned home the following day. It was a valuable exercise, though, in realizing how little of what we have is important. Heck, even much of what we took at the time wouldn’t be necessary now that most everything is stored digitally.

We have friends in Boston who ten years ago endured a middle-of-the-night house fire. They have four daughters, all 10 and under at the time, and thankfully everyone got out before the house burned to the ground.

A few years later, the father told me he was glad it happened. “It was very traumatic at the time and putting our life back in order has been challenging,” he said. “But as far as the contents of the house, I don’t miss anything. We never would have gotten rid of a lot of that junk. The fire totally changed our mentality and I’m thankful for that. We don’t collect or accumulate anything and only buy what we absolutely need.”

Every summer since the fire this family of six has rented a large van and traveled the country. They typically take one or two of their nieces as well. People no doubt see their social media postings from some cool, out-of-the-way place and wonder how this big family finds the time and money to do it on two modest incomes.

When you spend only on what you need, it’s amazing the resources you have for experiences. And if disaster strikes, nobody can take those memories away.

When making a discretionary purchase – meaning something you don’t absolutely need – ask yourself if this is something you’d throw in the car during a hurricane evacuation or miss if the house burned down.

If it’s not something you’d grab with three hours to evacuate, it’s not worth buying.

Forrest Gump knew how to live lean. The guy didn’t own a car, preferring to run everywhere, and kept himself in top condition. He had a laser focus in all of his endeavors, from football to the military to Ping-Pong to entrepreneurial endeavors. Even after becoming a multimillionaire, he lived in his childhood home, wore the same clothes, and had the same small circle of friends, mostly just Jenny and Lt. Dan.

Yep, ol’ Forrest could teach us a few things about living lean. But my favorite Gump lesson comes from his suitcase, the one he held while sitting on a park bench telling his life story. The suitcase, being of the old-school, travel-light variety, could hold only a few items, but it was a sufficient sampling of things that defined Forest’s life, along with some useful stuff like socks and a toothbrush.

There was a Bubba Gump shrimp ball cap and an issue of Forbes magazine showing him and Lt. Dan on the cover, the magazine he pulled out to prove that he was, indeed, the noted co-founder of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. There was a well-worn Ping-Pong paddle, the one he actually used, not the one he endorsed for the $25,000 check he used to launch the shrimp company. There was a copy of Curious George, his favorite book. Perhaps the briefcase also contained his Congressional Medal of Honor and maybe a ring or certificate from his All-America football career at the University of Alabama.

Forrest was a man of many accomplishments and yet it all fit into one modest suitcase. Most of us haven’t achieved a high level of success in one field, let alone the military, sports, and entrepreneurial endeavors. But we hoard everything: old report cards, ID photos, childhood awards, trophies, certificates, collectibles, sports equipment, and any document or news clipping that mentions our name. Those of us who write for a living are even worse as we tend to save anything we’ve written, co-authored or been quoted in.

It’s as if we believe that one day someone will create The Museum of Us and will want this treasure trove of our stuff to display to the public. Guess what? There will be no Museum of Us.

That’s not to say, however, that we shouldn’t think like curators. The greatest museums display only a fraction of their vast holdings, the most noteworthy pieces. Sometimes artifacts are rotated in seasonally, but for the most part a museum’s holdings are warehoused and stored for research and preservation.

Which is great for items of historical significance. But few of us have such things. That’s why we need to think like Forrest Gump, keeping only what can fit in a small suitcase, as if we were traveling for a journey and preparing for the future. As I’ve purged my possessions in recent years, I’ve created my own Forrest Gump briefcase. It started with an actual briefcase I received as a college graduation gift way back in 1991. Briefcases were out of style even then and I never used it for anything other than storage. As I began the purge in 2013, I started with the contents of the briefcase and began curating.

When I sold my sports memorabilia collection – tens of thousands of baseball cards, autographs, and odds and ends – I kept a few items for the briefcase. I purged my stockpile of hundreds of press passes and media credentials, keeping only a few from the most memorable events I covered. I shredded more than a hundred IDs, frequent flyer/hotel cards (TWA, anyone?), and other cards, keeping just three or four from jobs and gigs that defined my career. I’ve written a number of books, but I placed only a copy of the first one in the briefcase, along with advertising postcards from several of the others. (The others, of course, could fit on a Kindle or other reading device.) I added a thin Sesame Street book I read to our sons hundreds of times – Don’t Forget the Oatmeal – my equivalent of Curious George. I had a collection of 125 Matchbox cars from my childhood that my guys didn’t want. So I sold the collection, keeping my favorite car for the briefcase.

I’m gradually moving all photos and keepsake papers into digital files and I’ll eventually keep a hard drive in the Forrest Gump briefcase. Some day I hope one of my sons will keep the briefcase. He won’t have to go through tons of my stuff upon my passing. I’ll have curated everything for them in one small briefcase.

I could have gone with a suitcase or a steamer trunk but that would not be living lean. Choosing a small suitcase – or briefcase – forces you to keep only what you’ll carry on the journey and nothing more. If you add to it, you must take something out. That’s why it’s best to be constantly curating.

Should the big hurricane hit Central Florida, I’ll grab the Forrest Gump briefcase first. In theory, it should be all I need. With the briefcase, I’m forced to think in terms of traveling on a journey, both a short trip and a journey through life. What do we really need to travel light, tell our story, and to live lean? We want to bring pleasant memories that are literally light, not heavy, stressful stuff that weighs us down. We want to bring only those things essential to the trip that celebrate our past and contribute to the future.

 

The USA turns 240 today and we’ll mark the occasion as we always do with food, drinks and fireworks. It’s one of the highlights of the summer calendar.

During the Revolutionary War, many colonists saw their homes ransacked, burned to the ground, or otherwise taken over by the British. Those colonists sacrificed everything for freedom, including their lives in some cases. Others were left with only the clothes on their backs.

To look today at our American consumer culture on steroids, it can seem as if we’re celebrating our independence by accumulating as much stuff as possible. To support such a lifestyle, we sacrifice that hard-fought independence by going into debt, working long hours in jobs we don’t especially enjoy, and becoming slaves to fashions, trends, and must-have possessions.

By overeating and drinking, we relinquish independence by creating fat, inefficient bodies that no longer allow us the energy and strength to accomplish our dreams.

Here are four areas where we can create more lasting independence:

DOWNSIZE: You need not wait until the kids are grown to downsize. By going with a smaller home, you can reduce waste and expense and create more time and freedom. After all, a big house sucks time and money. One of this year’s best-selling books is “The More of Less” by minimalist expert Joshua Becker, who has inspired millions to embrace the freedom of living richer lives by owning less stuff.

Boaters know that the second-happiest day of boat ownership is the day they sell the burden. Homeowners know that feeling, too. More really is less.

LEAN OUT: If you’ve done any overnight hiking, you know the relief that comes when you’re able to finally take off that heavy 30- or 40-pound backpack. But many of us willingly choose to carry the equivalent of that pack all the time in the form of extra weight. That burden robs us of energy, makes us more vulnerable to illness and injuries, and keeps us from being more productive.

There’s tremendous freedom that comes from losing the weight. You will look good in anything, especially your birthday suit. Body acceptance is a wonderful thing, of course. But why not feel the freedom that comes from having more energy? Why carry extra weight around?

UNSUBSCRIBE: This July Fourth, declare your independence from e-mail. Unsubscribe to a minimum of 25 things – retail store emails, alerts, newsletters, and groups in which you no longer participate. The latter can be awkward, so include a brief note expressing gratitude for the invites/information but explaining that you’re no longer in a position to appreciate it.

GIVE AWAY: As I’ve given away half my possessions over the last few years, I’ve felt an enormous sense of freedom each time I leave a carload of stuff at Goodwill, deliver something to a Craigslist buyer, or just give stuff away to friends or those who need it.

Less stuff = more time, freedom and money.

That’s really what our Founding Fathers were fighting for when they declared their independence: time, freedom, and money. Thankfully, we only have to fight that battle these days with ourselves.

 

I received just one A+ final grade in college, which I’ll always remember since I earned few As and only a handful of A minuses.

That A+ came in Public Speaking as a freshman in 1988, two years before Microsoft officially launched the corporate plague that is PowerPoint, now embraced by everyone from the military to businesses to academics as the training wheels of public speaking, the lazy person’s way to make a presentation, the guaranteed way to suck the energy and enthusiasm out of a room.

The problem with a PowerPoint presentation is that it has neither power nor a point. Powerpointless, it’s often dubbed. It’s no coincidence that PowerPoint presentations stink.

When you speak with nothing more than notes, if that, you’re forced to convey your message precisely and effectively. Without the crutch of PowerPoint, you’re inspired to practice your talk many times, which automatically makes you hone your message and timing, thus making your delivery tighter and more compelling.

Stand-up comedians understand this. So do actors, broadcasters, commencement speakers, preachers, motivational speakers, effective teachers, and even politicians, though admittedly most of them are the human equivalent of wind-up dolls, repeating a dozen familiar talking points.

There’s nothing lean about PowerPoint presentations. They’re bloated with stats, figures, graphs, charts, research, stock photos, and other yawn-producing clutter and filler that steal the power from your message. There’s nothing wrong with video snippets or a few photos. I once watched an executive from ESPN deliver a speech pegged to the history of the sports network by calling up familiar ESPN house ads from over the years. It was effective, funny, and memorable.

Usually PowerPoint fails. There are junior officers in the military that spend most of their time doing nothing but creating slide decks. Ditto for folks in the corporate world. We’ve trained a generation of kids in schools on PowerPoint instead of public speaking. What a waste of human capital all around.

Last week I attended a three-day conference where every speaker delivered a PowerPoint presentation, one after another. Some panels had five presenters, each droning on via PowerPoint for 20 minutes each. It was torture.

One panel consisted of five lawyers. That’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back. There’s nothing worse than listening to a group of guys conditioned to talk long – since they bill by the hour – deliver PowerPoint presentations. If there is a hell, I imagine it will consist of listening to lawyers go through slide decks.

In fairness, one lawyer didn’t use PowerPoint. He got up and spoke off the cuff for about 10 minutes. Maybe he went longer, but it didn’t seem that way. He told amusing stories and anecdotes, railed against the hypocrisy of his little corner of the legal world, and spoke with passion. A week later, I don’t recall a word he said but I do remember his delivery and enthusiasm.

There’s no more underrated skill in life than the ability to speak effectively in public. That’s why I’m so proud of that A+ in Public Speaking. It took a lot of practice that semester to tweak each one of those speeches, none of which I delivered with more than a prop or two. The routines and rituals I learned to prepare and deliver talks in that class I still turn to more than 25 years later. If you weren’t fortunate to take public speaking in school, there are plenty of opportunities. Thankfully Toastmasters still is thriving. It’s now teaching a lost art.

The next time you’re asked to present a PowerPoint presentation, ask if you can go without the slide deck. If someone insists, just go with a couple of video shorts (10-15 seconds max) or a few photos. Skip the bullet points and all of the numbers. Practice your presentation in front of the mirror with a stopwatch at least a dozen times so that you can deliver it without notes. I bring notes just in case, but I rarely use them. I end up rolling them up and using them as a prop, like a basketball coach on the sidelines.

Get the audience looking at you, not a boring slideshow. If you get uncomfortable making eye contact during a speech, glance from person to person, looking at their hairlines. They’ll still think you’re looking at them.

By speaking this way, you’ll come across as more confident, smart, powerful, and funny. The audience will listen to your message and remember it. You’ll learn that butterflies are merely a burst of adrenaline that will drive you to deliver the talk naturally, since you’ve practiced it a number of times already.

You’ll have the satisfaction that comes with commanding an audience and nailing the speech. It will advance your career and business. You’ll get lean in yet another aspect of your life, cutting the fat and excess time from presentations and developing the ability to deliver messages quickly and effectively.

And you’ll put another nail in the coffin of PowerPoint.

 

As a kid in the 1970s and ‘80s, I was a big-time collector. I went through stamp, coin, and beer can phases, but my biggest passion was sports memorabilia.

I started with baseball cards and graduated to autographs. One summer when I was 14, I wrote to every living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. This being 1984, before the autograph market exploded, most of the baseball legends sent my items back signed. (I knew to always include a self-addressed stamped envelope.)

There were many positives to plowing a good chunk of my lawn mowing money into sports memorabilia. I learned at a young age the value of my work and how that translated into consumer goods. I was forever organizing baseball cards, either alphabetically or by number, and that improved my math and reading skills. Because I looked at all those faces over and over, I’m convinced that’s why I’ve always been good at remembering names and faces.

My obsession with sports memorabilia collecting, coupled with my passion for sports, gave me a head start on my career. I knew exactly what I wanted to do on the first day of college and I graduated with a job as a baseball writer for USA Today, which was years beyond an entry-level gig. In my twenties I wrote two books on the sports memorabilia industry.

Perhaps collecting was in my blood. Dad collected Lionel trains and Hummel figurines. Mom had record albums and sheet music.

But collecting, whether sports memorabilia or anything else, has a downside. It produces a mindset that everything has value and that you should continue accumulating until you have the definitive collection. You spend a disproportionate share of your time on collecting stuff rather than doing things.

Eventually you lose interest or no longer have space and must dispose of the stuff. That’s when you realize how much – or rather, how little – your prized collection is worth.

People don’t collect like they did a generation ago and on one level that’s good. No longer do they fill their homes with collectibles and knickknacks. Our society is more fast-paced, or at least digitally obsessed, and people are less likely to spend an afternoon tinkering with Lionel trains or organizing baseball cards.

If nothing else, hopefully people have learned a lesson from the crash of the sports card industry in the 1990s and the implosion of the market for beanie babies around the turn of the century. When items are mass-produced and marketed as can’t-miss investments, they’re unlikely to have lasting value.

These days the motto for many folks is to collect experiences, not things. Experiences produce more lasting, personal memories and don’t take up space.

I sold the bulk of my sports memorabilia collection last year. Selling a collection is almost as time consuming as accumulating it and the best way to do it, if possible, is to dispose of it at once. No matter how realistic you are about its value, it’s worth less.

Dad recently asked me to help sell his Lionel trains collection. I have fond memories of our basement train layouts but have neither the space nor the time to put together a similar display in our home. Since Lionel train collectors are an aging demographic – Dad is 77 – I’m unlikely to find a buyer under 65. Unfortunately, most train collectors are downsizing themselves.

My sons already have gone through several brief collecting phases: Thomas the Tank Engine wooden trains, Legos, and Magic the Gathering cards. None have taken hold and perhaps that’s a good thing.

For unlike Dad, who played with Lionel trains as a way to de-stress from work or how my involvement with sports memorabilia served as career training, collections today don’t seem to provide much value in our digital world.

Today, for better or for worse, they’re just clutter.