This 3-step method to simplify your life starts with your obituary View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed This 3-step method to simplify your life starts with your obituary Axios CEO Jim VandeHei joins us to discuss why living a more meaningful life requires confronting what matters and removing what doesn’t. elga Pettersen / Unsplash / Big Think Get curious, find purpose, and become more resilient at work Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz want you to think deeply about death. Not in a morbid sense, mind you. Rather, imagine you’re writing your own obituary.
What do you want it to say? VandeHei would like his obituary to say that he was a great father, son, sibling, and husband who was passionate about the work that he did and generous in the workplace. The task before him now is to make all those descriptors ring true by the end.
He thinks the best way for each of us to be remembered fondly in death is to first _simplify_ our lives. Cut out the extraneous to maximize the meaningful. He, Allen, and Schwartz wrote a pithy manual, appropriately titled _Simplify_, to help readers do just that.
It’s about spending your finite days on Earth doing things that matter, with people you love, in ways that feel true to who you are.” VandeHei, Allen, and Schwartz — hardened journalists with noses for sniffing out BS and a penchant for digging up the real story — cofounded Axios, from the Greek word for “worthy,” a decade ago and, in a brutal, bleak media environment, turned it into a resounding success. If you’re unfamiliar with the website, _Axios_ delivers information on the news that matters, from politics to business, in a concise, to-the-point writing style that informs readers quickly. Get the fall print issue, shipping in October, to members only.
The success of _Axios_’ journalism set the stage for Axios HQ, a software company that helps businesses streamline their internal communications, and the best-selling book _Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less_. It was a book that VandeHei was initially hesitant to write when he was propositioned to do so. And yet, with _Simplify_, he’s proven himself a hypocrite once again!
Cheeky chiding aside, VandeHei said he is “not anti-book.” Moreover, _Simplify_ actually isn’t much longer than a feature you might read in _The New Yorker_, amounting to just 200 or so pages of writing in a big, eye-friendly font with short chapters and ample spacing. VandeHei and his co-authors didn’t want to waste their readers’ precious time. As they summarized in the book: Confronting can be as basic as taking 20 minutes to assess the things that you do on a daily basis and truly interrogating whether they are necessary or make you happy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
