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Home » The Minimalists: The Art of Letting Go at TEDxFargo 2016 (Full Transcript)

The Minimalists: The Art of Letting Go at TEDxFargo 2016 (Full Transcript)

Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus

Full text of The Minimalists’ (Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus) TEDx Talk: The Art of Letting Go at TEDxFargo 2016 Conference. This event occurred on July 21, 2016 at Fargo Civic Center Fargo, United States of America.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: the-art-of-letting-go-by-the-minimalists-at-tedxfargo

TRANSCRIPT: 

Joshua Fields Millburn: My name is Joshua Fields Milburn and this is Ryan Nicodemus. Together we run a website called the minimalists.com and we promised the folks we’d kick things off this afternoon with something inspirational, something to get you all excited. So I’d like to talk about something uplifting. Let’s talk about death.

Now if any of you are uncomfortable talking about death, now might be a good time for you to leave. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing him again in a minute.

Anyway, yeah, we can talk about death. Let’s see, seven years ago, I was 28 years old, and up until that point in my life, I had achieved everything I ever wanted: the six-figure salary, the luxury cars, the closets full of expensive clothes, a big suburban house with more toilets than people, and all of the stuff to fill every corner of my consumer-driven lifestyle. Man, I was living the American dream.

And then my mom died. And my marriage ended — both in the same month. And these two events forced me to look around and start to question what had become my life’s focus. You know what I realized? I realized I was so focused on so-called success and achievement and especially on the accumulation of stuff. Yeah, I was living the American dream. But it wasn’t my dream.

And it took getting everything I thought I wanted to realize that everything I ever wanted wasn’t actually what I wanted at all.