Work Lean

Beyond the Obvious: A Dive into Abstract Photography

I’ve been meaning to share more photography here. It took me a while to get around to this, because other than sharing some frugal travel tips and photographs from recent trips I hadn’t found a great way to share some of the other photographs I’ve created. I’ve created quite a few of them as part of a quest to publish over 10,000 photos from 1000 places in at least 100 different cities over 10 years. I’m halfway there after six years at it.

The idea behind this is to make an effort to master something. In my mind, this comes after many years of steadily working on it. To publish 10,000 photos I’ll probably have to take 100,000 photos because many of them are crap. Especially early on.

While working on my quest I’ve become especially interested in abstract photography. I look at it as wandering through city streets looking for found art. Fascinating combinations of peeling paint, torn posters, graffiti, and decals all converge to create something different.

The other challenge I’ve had is getting around to describing found art and abstract photography. And for that, I found one of the most interesting solutions I’ve come across in quite a while. I’ve been playing with ChatGPT the (still experimental) artificial intelligence site that you can ask to do many things.

[Read more…]

Let’s Clean This Mess Up.

05/21 by The Frug 5 Comments

What you can learn from a minimalist lifestyle even if you’re nowhere close to adopting it.

By Brad Beckstrom

Minimalism is hard. After five years of working on it, I’m not even close to my original goal of a vastly simpler lifestyle. I’ve worked on applying minimalist ideas in everything I do. I’ve slowly realized that for me there is not some ultimate minimalist goal or destination. The reason is that there’s always stuff coming into our lives. And it’s not just our stuff, it’s our family stuff, our work stuff, stuff related to our home, our hobbies, our kids. The average American home has 300,000 things in it. So, I guess my family’s making progress — we’ve gotten rid of about 50,000 of these things over the past five years.

I think part of the reason adopting a minimalist outlook is hard is that many of us have lived our lives doing the opposite. It’s only much later, after decades of accumulating stuff, that we realize it’s all really just weighing us down. Given this, it’s going to take some time to unravel all that.

One of the interesting things I’ve found is that you can apply minimalism to a lot more than just cleaning out closets and garages. Over these past five years, I’ve developed everything from minimalist investing strategies, work habits, and exercise routines.

As I’ve been working to apply minimalist principles, I look around and notice people adding more more more. Like spending 30 minutes driving to and from a CrossFit Gym to spend hard-earned dollars on increasingly complex workout routines. Constantly bringing complexity into life with high-tech toys often built into expensive new vehicles and smart appliances. Using social media, news apps, and productivity apps to create more and more urgent notifications. Complex volatile investment schemes involving everything from cryptocurrency to meme stocks. Utilizing multiple tools and technologies that were designed to lighten the load, but instead, end up adding hours to the average workday.

Let’s simplify this stuff.

I don’t think anyone will ever look at me and my home or family and say “Oh, that guy is a minimalist”. For me it’s not about that, it’s about applying minimalist principles to one part of your life at a time and making small improvements. So, in the spirit of minimalism, if we could apply just one idea across everything we do it would make a big difference. Here’s one idea I use: [Read more…] about Let’s Clean This Mess Up.

The School of Life

04/20 by The Frug Leave a Comment

How in the world do I homeschool a high school senior who is headed off to college?!

*Quarantine Global HQ and School of Life classroom.*

By Brad Beckstrom

Our youngest son is a senior in high school. On March 13, 2020, his senior year ended. Like most schools around the world, his classes ended due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. His school district is fortunate in that it’s well-funded and all the students have laptops. However, not everyone has the Wi-Fi speed needed to utilize some of the cumbersome online tools and video conferencing. The school district has decided to provide remedial material for students to improve their grades through three semesters. There will be no final semester, no finals. And seniors will have their grades locked in through the first three semesters unless they opt to improve them through remedial work.

We all know that sort of sucks, especially for a high school senior headed off to college. With no fourth-quarter grades and remedial work optional for A students, I didn’t see much being done over the next few months.

[Read more…]

How to Crush Worry and Develop Mental Toughness

03/20 by The Frug 2 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

I’ll admit it. I am a worrier. I’ve spent too much time worrying about things that never happened. It’s bad, I’ve even read book(s) about worrying and fear. I come from a whole family of worriers. When my Dad’s business was struggling, he used to take off his glasses and rub his eyebrows. I watched him rub them almost completely off! They grew back.

One thing I’ve learned is that we all have worries and fears. Think about worries and fear, I bet every person you know has at least one of these. Worries about Health, Family, Work, Finances or something silly like “the unknown”. Some folks worry about all of these to an extent, and then they listen to the news, or talk radio and worry about world events. If you worry, you’re in good company.

If everybody worries, why are some people so much better at dealing with it than others? Some are consumed by it, and others turn it into motivation. The key is developing a mental toughness allowing you to silence the worry voices, or at least put them in the back row of that noisy crowd of voices in your head. Just like the muscles in our body, the brain needs some exercise to keep it healthy. A healthy brain helps us develop mental toughness.

6 great ways to crush worry and develop mental toughness

Write your fears down and turn them into ideas.

Writing your worries down is a great way to frame up your fears and redefine them, even if it’s just a list or short paragraph. I woke up at 4:30 AM, worried about something so I thought I’d write about “worry” in a blog post. If you have this problem, keep a small notepad by the bed. If you wake up, forgot something or are worrying again, just write a quick note and go back to sleep. I like to think of this as moving the worry from my head to paper, so I can get back to sleep. It’s also helpful if you wake up with brilliant idea. I have a small moleskin notebook with the title “ideas” on the cover. When I write something in there I’m already reframing my worry as an idea. Tip: don’t use a smartphone for this. It’s fine during the day but you don’t want screen glare and notifications waking you up in the night. Avoid keeping your smartphone in the bedroom.

Put your fears in perspective.

A while back I was worried about my health, including high blood pressure and cholesterol. I remembered reading about Tabata training, a high intensity 20 minute exercise routine that I could do five days a week. I made a note about it then later researched it and wrote about it. When you frame up a fear and address it, you put it in perspective. Once I began to address my health with a short daily exercise habit, it allowed me to get that worry off the list. Many worries like money or health are repetitive, revolving around one or two things. Go after those first. [Read more…] about How to Crush Worry and Develop Mental Toughness

The Secret to Running The Business of You.

01/20 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

“Have a small nut; that’s the key to life.”

Graham Parker.

What’s an aging rock ‘n roller to do, the once big recording contracts, the limos, seven-figure tour revenue all start to trickle away? Graham Parker, a British punk rock pioneer, knows exactly what to do: enjoy life, have a great time, and keep making music. Graham’s quote “Have a small nut; that’s the key to life” sums up one of the core principles of financial independence. The small nut he’s referring to is not assets, but monthly expenses. Rock stars, athletes, entrepreneurs, everyday folks all hit the same wall. We hear these stories all the time, from the extreme, like Mike Tyson blowing through $400 million and ending up homeless, to the highflying salesperson that overextended themselves, justifying their current expenses on future income fantasies, only to be chop blocked at the knees by a corporate reorg or downsizing.

Professional athletes know this story all too well. The average career in the NFL is about four years. In major league baseball, it’s a little over five years. Knowing this, it seems crazy when you see young athletes, blowing their entire signing bonus, borrowing against it before they even get a check. The secret is to do the opposite, save the entire bonus along with any windfalls, and keep your monthly expenses to a minimum. [Read more…] about The Secret to Running The Business of You.

Work Lean

Turn off the Firehose

How in the world do I homeschool a high school senior who is headed off to college?!