How To Design Your Life For Flow States Through Minimalism And Simplicity: With Jiro Taylor

In this 10 minute “Flow Nugget,” Jiro discusses how minimalism relates to lifestyle design, why it benefits us to bring simplicity and remove (some) choice from our lives, and how we can do this to achieve more states of flow. If everyday you stripped down your life so that it contained: Something for survival, something that drives your purpose, and something that is fun. What would happen? Let Jiro tell you a story about 2 crazy, but awesome Norwegian adventurers and how they stripped down life to the bare essentials, and in doing so found profound joy and purpose. He also give you 4 simple ways to add more minimalism and flow to your daily life.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci

Transcript

Welcome to the FlowState Performance Podcast.

Created for those committed to mastery and success.

Coming to you from Manly Australia,

We break down the science and philosophy of optimal performance.

So you can unleash your potential.

Hello everyone,

Happy Friday.

Welcome to Flow Nuggets.

I'm Jero Taylor,

The founder of FlowState Collective.

And today I wanted to talk about designing your life at flow.

The art of minimalistic lifestyle design.

So I just wanted to talk about an aspect of lifestyle design that can have a massive effect on your ability to live and flow.

When you look at the word minimalism up in the dictionary,

It says use of the fewest and barest essentials or elements.

As in the arts,

Literature or design.

And I feel like lifestyle design can very much fall within that definition.

So what's the whole point of this?

Well,

In my observation,

The people who experience most flow in their lives have in common the deliberate removal of choice from their daily lives.

For example,

I just did a training with a guy called Taki Moore who's a very talented coach.

And he said he has 15 identical black t-shirts in his closet.

Why?

To remove that choice of what to wear.

So when he wakes up in the morning,

He has one less thing to think about so he can focus on the important things.

I also know people who eat the same two meals every day of every week,

Or they strip down their training routine so that it's so minimalistic that they always know exactly what they have to do at any given time.

So I call this sort of lifestyle design micro minimalism.

So removing choice in very niche areas of your life.

And this can definitely save you a lot of unnecessary thought.

There's less leakage of mental or psychic energy.

From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep,

We're faced with hundreds,

Maybe thousands of choices and decisions.

White t-shirt,

Red t-shirt,

Fried eggs,

Scrambled eggs,

Run,

Swim,

Flat white latte,

Which is actually the same thing,

I think.

But here's the paradox.

In our society,

We see choice as a luxury,

As an indicator of our level of freedom.

So we think that the more choice we have,

The better our life is.

But the paradox of choice is that when we have too much of it,

We become entangled in this net of decision making.

And it kind of stops us from flowing through life smoothly.

So I think we can all help ourselves out by looking for ways that we can add micro minimalism to our lives.

For example,

Choosing one website where we buy flights,

Choosing one expert on nutrition whose email we receive,

Choosing five meals that we rotate when we cook,

Having three surfboards instead of 12 surfboards.

I need to learn that one.

But I also think there's a way to have a far wider impact on our flow.

And let's call this macro minimalism.

Principles that can affect our whole life.

So in Flow,

The Psychology of Optimal Experience,

Which is the epic seminal book on flow states by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

He wrote,

The psychic entropy,

Which is mental leakage in normal talk.

So the psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.

So in other words,

We have mental leakage because we see more than we can actually accomplish and we feel like we can do more than we actually can.

So this basically creates what he calls psychic entropy or mental leakage or what I see as obstacles to flow states.

So how do we set up our lives for minimalism flow?

How do we do this macro minimalism?

Well,

Let me tell you a story about two crazy Norwegian dudes.

I'm going to say their names wrong,

But it's Inge Verge and Jørn Ranum.

And these two Norwegians created this amazing documentary,

Which I watched at the Banff Film Festival last year,

And it's called North of the Sun.

And I'll create a link for this in the show notes.

So these two crazy dudes,

They decided that they wanted to spend their entire winter.

And this is Norway,

So the winter is nine months long and it's really,

Really cold.

And they decided they wanted to spend this entire winter living in a bay in the far north of Norway that faces the Atlantic Ocean.

It's basically in the Arctic Circle.

So these dudes,

They hardly had any money,

So they went shopping for all their supplies and they basically bought expired food.

They basically just bought the expired food that shops were giving away.

When they got there to the Arctic Circle,

They built this simple cabin out of driftwood.

They had their surfboards and they had a whole bunch of good humor.

So basically they toiled every day to build a shelter and they relaxed by surfing in this frigid water.

And their life just took on this new level of simplicity.

So basically their daily life became focused around three goals.

One,

Collecting materials,

Building shelter,

Chopping wood to survive.

Two,

Cleaning up rubbish and debris that was washed up on the beach,

Something that was worthwhile and purposeful.

Three,

Surfing and playing,

Having fun.

So in this simplified existence,

Away from all their gadgets,

Computers,

Society and everything,

These two guys,

They found profound freedom.

Their life flowed from one activity to the next.

The activities they chose to channel their energy into were rewarding.

So they wasted hardly any mental energy choosing what to eat,

What to do.

Their attention became laser focused on their three main goals.

The end result,

Positive emotions,

Positive productivity.

The shelter that they built was awesome.

When you watch this video,

You're going to be in awe of the shelter that they built.

They collected and removed three tons of rubbish from the beach,

Giving meaning to their existence.

And they had so much fun and laughter.

These guys are hilarious.

They just laughed all the time and they just had so much fun surfing in this frigid water.

Another side effect,

By doing the same things over and over again,

These guys became expert in the few things that they were doing.

So I think there's a few lessons to learn from these guys.

I think it's just epic what they achieved.

And I think that's a really powerful one,

That last one,

How they just became an expert at very few things.

So they went deep rather than broad.

So what lessons can we take in terms of our life?

How can we learn from these crazy Norwegians about paring down our life to limited choices?

Well,

These are the things that we could do right now to take on this process of macro minimalism.

The first one is obvious,

Create habits and routines.

I think that morning routines and evening routines are super powerful.

There's so much you can do first thing in the morning.

And if you just do the same thing every morning,

It's going to become a routine.

You're going to get good at it and you're going to really set up your day in a powerful way.

An eating routine or a meal plan is a good thing.

I'm not sure about eating one meal for the rest of my life,

But maybe I just haven't discovered that perfect meal.

Secondly,

Know your priorities.

Become a planner and a list writer.

I've noticed that those people that write plans,

They're basically that write lists.

They're basically just creating themselves more mental bandwidth to focus on the really important things by offloading the little things onto a piece of paper or onto an app.

So I really recommend there's an app called Wunderlist,

Which I have on all my devices,

And it helps me keep track of all the things that I've got to do.

Number three,

Create digital boundaries.

Nothing drives mental leakage more than technology.

We're bombarded by choice and stimulus in a way that our pre-digital ancestors probably would have found unbearable.

So the internet has created a new dimension of information and choice,

So it's really up to us to create the boundaries on that.

So there's a list on lifehacker.

Com.

I'll put it up on the show notes.

Finally,

This is a really big one to create more minimalism and more flow in your life.

Choose your core activities,

And don't just commit to them.

Build your life around them.

So for example,

Surfing is one of my core activities.

There's loads of stuff that I love to do,

Like climbing,

Rock climbing,

Mountain biking.

I love to do more of these things,

But I just don't have the time.

But surfing is a core activity.

It's one of the things in my life that I just want to get better and better and better and better at.

So if you just decide on this,

If it's just your go-to activity,

You don't have to waste so much mental energy just choosing what you're going to do with the free hour that you have,

And you probably have more chance of becoming an expert if you just focus on one of these core activities.

So that's it.

I hope you enjoyed that.

I guess I'll leave you with a quote by Leonardo da Vinci.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

And I think much like minimalistic architecture or sculpture,

Simplifying our lives can become an art form.

So just ask yourself,

What can be stripped away to add more beauty to my life?

I hope you enjoyed that.

If you appreciate this podcast,

If you enjoyed it,

Please go to the iTunes page for the FlowState Performance Podcast and click Subscribe and then go to the Rating and Review bit and just put whatever you want for that.

And yeah,

Tune in next time.

So Monday we'll have a longer form show and every Friday you can tune into these Flow nuggets.

Okay guys,

Take care.

Enjoy your weekend.

Bye bye.

Reviews

Excellent. Really good tips on the thought process for leaning towards becoming a minimalist.

Simple and concise advice, good food for thought, practical and easily applicable.

Could of listened in more and enclosed the link. 🙏Metta 🙏working on simplicity and purging house to start.

Thank you! I used to employ all the tips you mentioned but let societal pressure get the best of me and gradually began cutting each one out of my life, leaving me quite depressed. After listening to your talk, I’m inspired to incorporate them back in starting right now!

Love the concept of reducing mental leakage, and the tips provided.

Loved this perspective, Tks! I’m a surfer too so totally resonate 🏄🏻‍♀️

Great concept!
I like it! Thank you!

Wow - thank you! I hope I can download your podcast to my Android phone.

Amaaaazing thank you so so much

Very interesting talk. Thank you

Excellent tips! Thank you!🌝

Interesting. Thank you

Love how applicable, creative, practical, relevant and sensible this gift of the spirit is = deLIGHTful combo!

I am so happy I ran into this talk! I love learning about flow :)

We could all use a more simplistic life.

Excellent! Inspiring! Clarifying and great activators to live a focussed, enjoyable life, amidst massive choices and distractions! Thank you so much Jiro!!

Thank you Jiro, a very important aspect, and a process I am in the middle of right now in my life after a good month living a very simple life in India 🤩🧘🏼‍♀️🙏

Nicely said and simply put ;)

Really great insight well presented and fun and easy to listen to! Really helpful thank you! Just what I am working with right now!

Very thought provoking. Really enjoyed. Makes so much sense. Thanks.