First, care. Care intensely. Care about doing a good job. Care about not doing a bad job. Care about going the extra mile. Care even when nobody else seems to care. Care even when nobody else will notice. Care even when you don’t feel like caring. Care because you want to. Care because you need to. Care because you can’t not care. Care about making a dent in the universe. Care about making something new and exciting. Care about making something fun. Care about making something that scares you. Care about saying something. Care about making a difference. Care about seeing something no one else can see unless you show them. Care about making someone else care.
How to make something you can be proud of? Just care.
If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that a movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.
But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to feel meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.
From A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller. Re-reading it now and still loving it. My review here.
My girlfriend was looking for a new place to stay, but instead of having her rent a room, I convinced her to come stay with me (yeah I know, big life change right?). It meant I had to completely re-design my room, which was really set up for just one to stay and work, not two.
I had two main goals for the re-design, which informed everything:
1. It had to comfortably accommodate the living and working spaces for two.
2. It had to be as simple as possible, in form and function.
The Old Room
This is what my room looked like prior to the re-design.
The wardrobe and single bed were really set up for only one.
The main anchor of the room was this bookshelf which took up the most space and attention. Unfortunately, I realized from the beginning that it had to go, it was taking up way too much room and I couldn’t maneuver anything new around it.
I also realized that no matter how much I tried, the new room wasn’t going to fit everything I already had and still have space left for hers. That meant I had to go through a heavy, nuclear-level de-clutter.
De-cluttering my books took the longest time. I pared down my collection to the ones I absolutely wanted to keep, and these were transferred to a temporary shelf in the living room (it was interesting how few books were really essential and how obvious which ones they were).