Recently I went to the store and bought 15 pairs of the exact same brand of black nylon dress socks and 15 pairs of the same white athletic socks.

Why own a bunch of different varieties of socks when they all basically do the same thing? Now I can reach in my sock drawer and always find a matching pair of white or black socks. When I buy new socks I’m getting exactly the same type.

If I lose 1 black sock it won’t matter, the remaining 29 socks still match each other.

I know, it seems really silly to write about socks, but why not make your life super simple by having little systems set up to remove complexity?

In other areas I’m looking for simplicity as well, eating one meal each day is an easy way to lower your calories and keep your weight down. My goal is to slim down to 170 lbs.

NOT using credit cards and tracking my total debt has helped me pay off over $170,oo0 since 2014. When I pay off my home next year I’ll set up a similar system for investing the extra.

Deleting Facebook and ignoring Twitter helped me regain my time back. If you want to interact with me you actually have to write an email or pick up the phone! These posts upload to Twitter, but I never look at the feed.

EVERYTHING in Balloon Distractions is geared towards earning my family an income without having to slave away at a job 40 hours per week. Last week I spent about 15 hours running that business. There are many systems built into BD, from scheduling and billing to managing and motivating our teams.

My LIFE business is similar to BD, there are tons of systems in place to run your business, motivate your team, and increase your income.

I tend to buy used Toyotas for less than $12,000, normally with 70,000 miles or more on the odometer. My (paid off) Avalon currently has 187,000 miles on it. It runs great.

It is possible to remove all complexity and chaos from your life? Probably not.

You have to finds systems that work for you and your situation.

If you have some complexity in your life, even in your sock drawer, think about how you can do something small that removes that complexity.

Hope that helps!

Benjamin T. Alexander

January 2017

There is a sad reality show somewhere on cable that features people who hoard junk in their home. Each episode features a new hoarder, one had thousands of newspapers stacked floor to ceiling in every room of his home, another episode featured a woman whose dirty dishes sat for months in her sink, with rodents and insects running all over her home. The worst cases are the animal hoarders who keep adopting animals until the county agents come in and shut them down.

Hoarders are an extreme example of what happens when we fill our lives with useless stuff, hanging onto things we don’t need, in some cases not even realizing why we do it. People without hope sometimes try to fill that void with things they purchase, in some cases racking up needless debt buying things that only make them worse.

At one point in my journey as an entrepreneur I had a fancy office with desks and chairs and a huge conference table, along with 2 staffers, a fish tank and a storage room filled with $20,000 in balloon inventory. I also owned a rental property in Tampa with an endless revolving door of deadbeat tenants. At home I had a motorcycle in my garage and a 120 gallon fish tank in my living room.

My life was chock-full of stuff, stuff that was costing me money and time to maintain it, feed it, pay it, fix it, etc. I also carried too much debt, all that STUFF in my life was an expensive distraction from my goals and objectives.

So I got rid of it. I called my landlord and got out of my lease early. I took digital pictures of all my office furniture and sold it on Craigslist. I sold the fish tanks, the old motorcycle, even the rental property. When my two employees eventually moved on I did not replace them, I used technology to do their jobs in the most efficient way possible, instantly removing $4,000 in costs from my balance sheet each month.

I cleaned up my home office and installed a bookshelf, then went through my garage and began getting rid of all the stuff I no longer needed, either in the trash, to Goodwill or sold online. My home office today it is clean, uncluttered and organized. My bookshelf contains my personal library of books on success, faith, finances, history, and many biographies of people who have done amazing things, from Churchill to Gandhi.

The next part in my journey towards simplicity was my Facebook account. I had started it in 2006, with connections to almost 2,000 people I barely knew. Instead of working on my next book I was wasting time scrolling through a newsfeed containing information that was never going to help me reach my goals. Social networking had become social NOT working.

I hit the delete button, and suddenly I had vast blocks of time back. My smartphone once again became a simple device for calls, texts, and GPS. My phone was no longer an addictive screen that I would stare at for hours just to see pictures of an entrée that my schoolmate from college was eating for lunch somewhere in Cleveland.

Once you identify exactly WHO you want to be and WHERE you want to go it makes sense to get rid of all the things in your life that are standing in your way of reaching your goals and objectives. That old motorcycle rusting in my garage was not going to help me pay off debt, complete my next book, or grow my business. I sold it because later on I can buy a much better (and newer) motorcycle, with cash.

Writing my next book was more important to me than scrolling through a pointless newsfeed, cleaning a fish tank, or fixing my rental property every time a tenant moved out and trashed the place.

Writing a book was a part of my dreams and goals, my fish tank was not!

New technology can help you embrace simplicity, you can take a roomful of vinyl records and upload them to a tiny device, or download a book and eliminate the need to cut down trees for paper, but technology can also bring unwelcome complexity into your life.

If you spend more time on social media then you do interacting with your spouse this is a problem. Technology can serve to connect people, but this is not always a good thing for society, especially when those connections are negative, illegal or downright deviant in nature.

Look at your goals, figure out where you want to go, and chuck out anything in your life that is not helping you get there!

Benjamin T. Alexander

January 4, 2017