What’s in Your Backpack?

Achieving Creative Focus Through Minimalism

Hojung
7 min readNov 25, 2018
Photos shot by Homecooked Creative Director, Gabriel Oviawe.

Last year, I came across a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. In it, she espouses a personal organizational framework for cleaning up that translates to a powerful improvement of overall life. Apparently, a large subsection of Americans struggle through messy and unfocused lives — Kondo’s guide became a runaway bestseller, hitting #1 on the New York Times’ coveted list.

The book contains a treasure trove of tips on organizing our physical surroundings. Sorting by category rather than room by room, respecting our belongings, and even a detailed process for folding clothes. But within its covers, it packages a lifestyle change rooted in a very important American counterculture.

Minimalism.

Source: Salmon are known for going against the current.

Countercultural movements exist because certain elements of the mainstream culture repulse a critical mass of people. Often, the counterculture champions values in direct opposition to the mainstream. In some cases, counterculture can evolve into a dynamic force that transforms the mainstream. Romanticism sweeping across 18th and 19th Century Europe and North America brought literature, art, and music to the forefront. Although recent years have seen academia shift closer toward fields like finance and tech, the humanities still maintain Romanticism’s legacy.

Counterculture can change society for the better.

American culture today is marked by excess and material wealth. Our society signals value through physical belongings, communicates status by title. The result is a bloated machine which has wreaked havoc on everything from our personal relationships to our global environment.

How did we get here?

Writers like Karl Marx warned us of the dangers inherent in capitalism. He theorized that capitalism’s emphasis on output would turn us into shallow materialists. And it would alienate the worker by forcing them into repetitive tasks until they were reduced from a thinking human being into an automaton. As we optimized the means of production for maximum output, we would begin to value quantity above all else.

Minimalism is a direct, opposing response to materialist capitalism. And its adoption not only benefits the world, it refocuses personal attention on the parts of life that truly matter.

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash.

Look around your home, workplace, or wherever else you might be at the moment. How much of what you own is actually necessary? How much of it is just junk from the past? How much of it could you part with right now, without losing any quality of life?

You may find that it’s as high as 80%. It falls in line with a widely applicable framework called the 80–20 Rule. About 80% of value ends up coming from 20% of the available resources, while the other 80% of resources only creates 20% of the value. A couple of years ago, I found that I was wearing 20% of my clothes 80% of the time — so I donated the other 80% to Goodwill.

There’s a misconception that minimalism means living with as little as humanly possible.

In reality, it means the ability to let go.

The Problem with Nostalgia

There is something to be said for sentimental value. The photos and postcards that we hang up on our walls harken back cherished memories. A gift from a childhood friend might still adorn our bedside table. I am not pushing for people to cast these away. It only becomes problematic when we cling to objects and equate them with our own identity.

American materialistic culture encourages us to tie our own self-worth into possessions. It’s how corporations make us buy their products. Advertising communicates the insidious notion that we are somehow less whole without the latest fashion brand or hip new device. And as we change and mature with age and experience, they manipulate us into buying more to externally represent our personal growth. But as the objects from our past become superfluous, nostalgia is an emotional chain tugging us back to them. The cycle repeats, leaving us with a physical trail of our pasts that instead of shedding, we haul around with us.

Eventually, the clutter becomes too much to bear. The cramping of physical space begins to manifest itself in our mental sphere, and we lose our potential for creative focus.

As a traveling professional squash player and startup CEO, my day-to-day necessitates both this intense focus and extreme mobility. But an overflow of possessions denies both. I used to travel with two carry-ons full of clothes, books, and what I considered to be travel essentials. They would literally weigh me down as I tried to move fluidly through bus and train stations, winding airport terminals, and navigate the ways of a new city and culture.

So I started cutting down. I applied the 80–20 Rule judiciously, eliminating baggage by focusing on only the absolutely necessary. Now I cut past check-in counters and luggage claim lines. The minute I touch down in a city, I’m free to head straight to the conference center, investor meeting, or tournament venue.

It feels liberating. It’s just me and my backpack.

What’s In Your Backpack?

Whether you’re traveling or not, I believe this is an essential exercise for removing nostalgic dependency and achieving a minimalist mindset. I want you to imagine that you’re taking a trip someplace far away. Food, water, and shelter will be provided. But you can only bring one backpack.

What’s in your backpack?

Shot by Homecooked Creative Director, Gabriel Oviawe.

You might start out by trying to cram as much as possible in between the seams so the zippers barely close. After a couple minutes of this struggle to have more, I want you to just walk away. Breathe.

Now what if you just took a little less?

First you remove the woodneck coffee drip pot — it’s beautiful, but why did you even have that in the first place? They’ll have good coffee wherever you’re going.

Next you take out one of the sweatshirts. You don’t need both.

Bit by bit, this exercise forces you to refocus on what is truly essential. And by doing so, you will build an understanding of what you really value.

Shot by Homecooked Creative Director, Gabriel Oviawe.

For myself, it’s just a few essential articles of clothing, my laptop, phone, chargers, passport, contacts & glasses, and business cards.

The backpack happens to even have a handy little pocket for business cards.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for the philosophy put forth by George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air (from which the tagline “What’s in Your Backpack” takes its name). Clooney’s character takes minimalism to an extreme, cutting out not just his belongings but personal relationships. His philosophy paints the ideal person as some kind of individualistic folk hero who undertakes grand enterprises without any reliance on others.

This is not what minimalism is actually about.

Minimalism at its core is more akin to Kondo’s philosophy. By promoting respect for the belongings we do have, a soft attention to detail, and retaining the things that make us truly happy, owning less just follows in suit. By exercising our full capacity for love and care for our spaces and belongings, we naturally incline toward focusing it on a small subset of things.

Applying these same values to our relationships communicates that same care toward the people we cherish. In the world of Facebook friend lists and Instagram follower counts, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in quantity rather than quality. We all have a subset of our personal network who deserve more attention than the rest, but our lack of focus prevents us from relaying this love.

Minimalism isn’t about getting rid of things that don’t matter, it’s about realignment. It allows us to refocus our attention on the things and relationships that truly matter. Beyond its obvious benefit, this unlocks something crucial in our own creative pursuits.

Every aspect of minimalism is crucial for refining creative focus.

Whether you’re an artist, writer, or entrepreneur — imagine what your life would be like with a minimalist framework applied. You begin to focus more intensely on the belongings and relationships you cherish. You become aware enough to let go of the ones on the periphery. Imagine the creative potential of just having a little bit more space.

The constant upkeep of possessions that we no longer need is an exhausting mental trip. And clinging to an idea of ownership over everything, even the things we no longer need, is detrimental to the very advance of creative progress.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Creativity is not only about the output of ideas, it is also about understanding which ones to pursue and which to let go. If we are accustomed to keeping our identity tied up in past belongings, we will also tie ourselves to past creation, directly opposing future innovation. We cannot participate in the continuous refinement and improvement of our best ideas if we are spreading our attention across all of them.

Minimalism is an exercise that allows us to return to solving problems that matter. It refines focus on the things and relationships that are truly important in our lives, preparing us well for the creative process.

Because true innovation necessitates minimalist focus.

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Hojung

I’m trying to de-stigmatize mental health. Chief Gathring Officer @ gathr, a magical.app