Simple Frugality Blog

The 11 Life Lessons It Turns Out I’ve Taught My Six Kids

By Leo Babauta On my 46th birthday recently, my (mostly adult) kids wrote out a list of lessons I’d taught each of them in their lives so far. Each wrote their own list, and my wife Eva sweetly put them together in a notebook. As I read through them, I felt like crying. It’s so […]

Deep Focus: Training to Open in the Middle of Shakiness

By Leo Babauta When we set out to work on a meaningful, important task, something interesting happens. We feel quite a bit shaky. It’s the feeling you get when you step into uncertain ground, where you don’t know exactly what you’re doing or whether you can do it, where you feel a bit lost or […]

Simplify Your Day to Have a Greater Impact

By Leo Babauta Our society is obsessed with productivity and optimizing our lives — having the perfect routine, perfect diet, perfect productivity system, perfect todo app, and more. It’s an ideal that not only doesn’t exist, it’s harmful to our health and happiness. And what’s more, it’s completely misguided — what many of us really […]

The Dive Into Important Tasks Challenge

By Leo Babauta There’s nothing we can do more to further our meaningful work and make the impact that we want to make in the world than to: Pick our most important, meaningful tasks And dive into them with full focus And yet, it seems to be a challenge for almost every person on this […]

Becoming More Deeply Committed to My Commitments

By Leo Babauta How often have you half-assedly committed to something, but didn’t really put your entire being into following through on that commitment? How often have you said you were going to do something, and then just dropped it because you were too busy or didn’t have the energy? How often have you said […]

The Universal Narrative: When You Feel Unworthy

By Leo Babauta A little boy was told by his father, from a young age, that he wasn’t good enough. Not in so many words, but through his actions — by criticizing him, yelling at him, hitting him, leaving him. The boy grew up into a man, knowing that he was unworthy of praise, of […]

A Guide to Letting Go of Stress

By Leo Babauta We all deal with stress on a daily basis — whether it’s the stress of being busy and overwhelmed at work, having to deal with personal crises, traffic, relationships, health, finances … stress can be a big part of our lives. And stress has some strong effects: it makes us less happy, […]

Focus as an Antidote for Wanting to Do Everything

By Leo Babauta I have a problem, and I think most people do as well: I want to do everything. OK, not actually every single thing, but I want to do more than I possibly can: I want to do everything on my long to-do list, today I want to take on every interesting project […]