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Why I don’t want stuff | Derek Sivers

Why I don’t want stuff | Derek Sivers

In Your Next Letter

by Carrie Shipers

In your next letter, please describe
the weather in great detail. If possible,
enclose a fist of snow or mud,

everything you know about the soil,
how tomato leaves rub green against
your skin and make you itch, how slow

the corn is growing on the hill.
Thank you for the photographs
of where the chicken coop once stood,

clouds that did not become tornadoes.
When I try to explain where I’m from,
people imagine corn bread, cast-iron,

cows drifting across grass. I interrupt
with barbed wire, wind, harvest air
that reeks of wheat and diesel.

I hope your sleep comes easy now
that you’ve surrendered the upstairs,
hope the sun still lets you drink

one bitter cup before its rise. I don’t miss
flannel shirts, radios with only
AM stations, but there’s a certain kind

of star I can’t see from where I am-
bright, clear, unconcerned. I need
your recipes for gravy, pie crust,

canned green beans. I’m sending you
the buttons I can’t sew back on.
Please put them in the jar beside your bed.

In your next letter, please send seeds
and feathers, a piece of bone or china
you plowed up last spring. Please

promise I’m missing the right things.

I want to change your life…

…For the better. Even if it’s just for a little bit. But, my goal is to change it for the better for good. So that you are just a bit happier or a bit better.
That’s why I write. I know that if I put out enough posts, or enough books, or share the right things that one of them, eventually, will make someone’s life somewhere out there just a little better.
But why? Why do I care? Why does such hope give me such a deep amount of satisfaction? Why do I spend so much time and effort on it?
I believe the best way to make the world around me a better, friendlier, and stronger place to live in is to help others that occupy it with me be better, friendlier, and stronger. It can’t be done alone. I can’t change the world only by being better, friendlier, and stronger myself. So, I try to change others lives too.
Maybe it is egotistic and foolhardy to think I can have that sort of impact. And, maybe I can’t. But, I can try. And every victory, no matter small or large, tells me that I can. If I write enough or care enough or offer enough that, eventually, I can make someone’s life a little bit better and by doing so I can make the world incrementally better.
When I die, I want the people I’ve helped to be the largest asset I leave behind so that a happier world may be my children’s greatest inheritance. And I believe that can be done one word, one action, and one opportunity, at a time.

Our Penny Universities

Our Penny Universities

Proven

When it comes to the things I use, especially those I rely on every day, I want to use only things that have been proven as much as possible. Proven to work. Proven to last. Proven over time and use.

This is fairly easy and straight forward to find in the offline world. For instance, I gravitate towards and enjoy using pen and paper because it is proven. As a tool it works, lasts, requires nothing else, has been around for hundreds of years, and is used almost everywhere so is easy to find. Other tools are proven too. Hammers are proven, for example. Nail guns may be a quicker way to drive a nail but require power and have a hundred ways they can fail or break. A hammer always works.

In the online world, it’s a bit more difficult to find things that are proven. Things change quickly. Formats and applications come and go. What’s hot today is gone and unsupported tomorrow in too many cases. Experience has taught me not to rely on many of these things or to be too quick to jump on board new things that come along. They aren’t proven.

Yet, there are some things in the online world that are proven — at least as far as such things can be in the world of technology. Here are two examples: Plaintext and Email. Plaintext (.txt) as a format is proven. It has been around in some form or another since the dawn of modem computing. Email, the basic plaintext form of it, has been around long enough to be considered such. These are things I trust. Things I have used for a long time, work today much the same as they always have, and the chance of continuing to work far into the future is high. Plus, they’re practically universal. Practically everyone who is online has an email address. Practically every computer can open a plaintext file.

This doesn’t mean I won’t use things that aren’t proven. I will and sometimes do. But I don’t place my faith or trust in them until they are proven. I don’t pretend they will be around forever and I always have an escape plan for when they inevitably go away. I don’t go all in on a new thing, especially if it means abandoning something proven.

So, when people ask me why I love and prefer email over [Insert latest email killer here] it’s because email is proven. It’s why I don’t use the latest note taking app or word processor. It’s why you won’t find me hoping on the latest new social thingamajig or chatting whatnot or blogging whozit. And while I watch those things come and go and their users jump on and off them, I’ll still be here using the same proven tools I have for-what-might-as-well-be-ever and getting the things I want to do done.

Conklin’s Handy Manual of Useful Information. One of my most prized possessions. “Everything worth knowing” printed right at the top. So good. Published in 1891 as best as I can tell.

I often consider creating a Twitter or Tumblr around it and post random “facts” many of them outdated but many spot-on but concerning old subjects.

Important subjects concerning ocean travel? It’s in here. How to properly season and store timber? Yep. Five cent interest schedule? You betcha!

When the shit goes down, you better believe this will be in my bug-out kit. It might just be the thing that saves me.