Want the key to a happier, stress-free life? Get rid of the bad apples in your life before they spoil the good ones.
“Addition by subtraction” comes from professional sports and is the idea that a team’s performance can be improved, not by adding more talented players or practices, but by getting rid of existing players and practices that don’t contribute to winning.
Apply this same concept to your happiness by looking directly at the bad things in your life that cause you the most stress and finding a way to eliminate them.
Tolerating these bad things won’t make you happy. You want to live a rich life, not a tolerable life.
Think about the last time you were having a great day, when all of a sudden, some stressful emergency (it may be from work or at home) came up.
Chances are, your day was ruined, no matter how many great things also happened that day.
A Rotten Apple Spoils The Barrel
Imagine you’re a farmer and your life is a barrel of apples.
Most of the apples are shiny, crunchy, and deliciously sweet. These represent the good things in your life.
A few of the apples are bruised and rotten. These are the bad things in your life.
You can do two things:
- Fill the barrel up with more good apples
- Get rid of the rotten apples
The wrong decision that most people make is trying to add things to their lives and spend their way to happiness in order to cope with the bad things. It never works.
Your life is filled with people who seem to have a great life on the outside, but are unhappy on the inside simply because they have a few bad apples (bad job, unsatisfying relationship, spending issues, etc.) that cause a lot of stress and misery in their lives.
No amount of spending or adding more things will solve the root of their happiness problem.
Life Is Full Of Bad Apples
The better approach is to get rid of the bad things first.
Take a look at your life, I’m sure it’s filled with mostly good apples. However, there are a few rotten apples (could be physical things, commitments, people, or work) that drain your time and energy, and cast a shadow over the rest of your life.
Pretending these bad apples don’t exist will not make you happier.
Buying things and experiences to cope might make you happier in the short term, but they will eventually rot away in the presence of bad apples (this contributes to why HENRYs fall victim to living paycheck to paycheck).
Not a good strategy.
Instead, sit down and list out all the bad apples in your life and focus your energy on figuring out how to change or get rid of the biggest one first. Once you get rid of the first bad apple, you’ll realize how much brighter your life becomes.
The key is to just start. After the first one, it will become much easier to get rid of other bad apples in your life:
- If you are in a toxic work environment, time to update your resume and start looking for a new employer
- If you have unreasonable clients in your business, time to evaluate if they are worth serving
- If you are in an unfulfilling relationship, time to break it off
- If you have unsupportive friends, time to upgrade your social circle
- If you have commitments that eat up all your free time, time to block off your calendar and remove the things that don’t deserve your time
- If you have things that you bought in the past but no longer use and still require your time and energy, time for some spring cleaning
- If you have a health issue that’s lowering your quality of life, time to get it checked and figure out the solutions available to feel better
It’s way too common for people to stay in bad situations. Don’t fall victim to sunk cost fallacy.
You are causing your own misery by ignoring the bad and getting by through spending and coping habits that give you a temporary happiness boost. But that’s only slapping a bandaid on your problems. The happiness never lasts.
Don’t be afraid to take action. Do something today.
Beauty In Simplicity
You have only so much mental energy to keep track of the many things going on in your life. A simpler life is a stress-free, happier one.
The more efficient way to become happier is by getting rid of all the bad things in your life before you consider adding more good things, especially when it comes to spending.
This is hard because our entire culture focuses on the concept of more and encourages spending as a way of improving our lives. But you can’t spend your way to happiness. Money can only solve money problems.
While we should strive to have sustainable lifestyle improvements as we become richer, we should also take a step back from time to time to think about what we actually need to be happy.
Chances are, if you’re living in a developed country with peace and prosperity, you already have everything you need to be happy.
By eliminating the bad things from your life, you might even realize the good things you already have are enough. To think, this whole time you never even focused your attention on the wonderful parts of your life!
Don’t let the good things you already have in your life slip by. We often forget about our health, relationships, and good fortune until it’s gone.
There is beauty in a simple life.