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Clear the Clutter: Books That Need a New Home · The Daily Writer

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Rider Podcast, where we bring you tips and inspiration each day to help you build habits for writing success.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: For more resources, including your free Daily Rider Starter Kit, visit DailyRiderLife.com.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're continuing our Clear the Clutter series, and I'm going to share a tip that might be emotionally painful for you as a writer, but it's essential if you want to clear items from your life that you don't need anymore.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm talking about is getting rid of books that no longer serve you.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: In the course of my ministry, teaching, and writing career, I have moved offices several times, probably much like you.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, over the years, we work different places, we have offices different places, and that kind of thing.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And every time that I have moved my office, I realize that print books are a huge pain in the behind to move.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as a voracious reader and now as a full-time writer, I love books.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I do a membership group for writers, I do this daily podcast about writing.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've been a huge reader for a long time.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: I used to be a college professor and a pastor.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, those are two jobs where people buy a lot of books.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's pretty well established that I love writing and I love books.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, hardly a week goes by that I don't get a book or two in the mail.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I think this week I've gotten, okay, let me look at my desk.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one, two, three, four, five.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh five?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Is it five or six?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this, oh, this week I've actually gotten uh seven books in the mail this week.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: That was that's an unusually high number.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm literally looking at my desk, just counting these.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: About 90 minutes ago, the Amazon guy pulled up and delivered uh yet another book.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I got two in the mail yesterday.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I read a lot, and because it's part of my job, but I genuinely really, really love books.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But over time, the problem is that these books add up, and I've run out of shelf space more than once, and I have to go through these book purges every couple of years.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So here's how this book purge works.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I take a couple of hours and I go through all my books.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes actually it takes three or four hours and I spread it out over two or three days, just a bit here and there every few days.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I take a couple of hours at least to go through all my books and I set aside the ones that I no longer need.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I try to use a principle that I just call the moving next month principle, where I ask myself, if I were moving to a different house or to a different office next month, would I want to pack this book and take it with me?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that principle really helps me to decide whether or not I want to keep a book.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that I use that moving next month principle instead of, you know, do I like this book, do I not like this book?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: The reason why I use that moving principle is because, you know, it's great to have overflowing shelves of books right now, but the time is going to come in my life where those books are going to have to be moved, whether it's moved by me to a different house or to a different office, or whether I keep those books for a few decades, you know, and ultimately I just have a house overflowing with books.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Whether I keep those for a few decades and I die, somebody's gonna have to move those books.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those books are not gonna stay in this house for the next 250 years.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they're gonna have to be moved at some point, whether it's you or your spouse or your kids or whoever is gonna have to transfer that book to another location at some point.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, the older I get, the less sentimental that I feel toward books.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have moved anytime recently, you know how unsentimental you feel when you're lugging around boxes of books and furniture and you're taking stuff out of the moving truck and into your house, or vice versa, or whatever the process is.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can feel sentimental toward stuff when it's all set in your space, but when you've got to move that stuff, you get really, really unsentimental about it pretty fast.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of what I think about this process.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I get less sentimental, I think, about books with each passing year.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I believe in an aggressive approach to book purging.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think unless you have a particularly sentimental attachment to a book, or you think that you're going to need it in the next three or four years, you should question whether you need to keep that book.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, using this principle, I have downsized my library by a couple of thousand books over the last few years.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I've either sold the books on Amazon or more recently, I just donate the books to Goodwill.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: I tried selling books on Amazon one summer, a few years ago.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was a huge, massive pain in the neck to ship all those books and list them on Amazon, and the profit margin was really, really small.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think on if you're gonna sell books on Amazon, you've got to sell a lot of books typically to make any decent money from that, unless you're selling highly specialized books.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like actually, when I was doing that, I'm taking a little side note here on this episode.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: When I was doing that, I made far more money on Bible resource books and language resources like Greek and Hebrew tools than I did on, you know, novels and fiction and personal growth books and leadership and stuff like that.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I think if you're going to sell books on Amazon and hope to make good money from that, it needs to be either a highly specialized thing where the books have a good profit margin, or you've got to sell a really big volume of books to make that really worth its time financially.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Again, that's just based on my limited experience.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, taking one summer and selling books on Amazon for me was a huge disaster.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you can make it work, hey, more power to you.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the point with all that though is that when I get rid of my books, I don't sell them really anymore.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I give them away if I think somebody's going to enjoy a book or if it's going to be valuable to them.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: But most of the time I just box them up, I take them down to Goodwill, and I'm more than happy to do that because I've bought my fair share of books from Goodwill in library sales and things like that as well.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's what's interesting is that every time I go through this process of book purging, I come across books that at one time in my life were important to me, but they don't need to be a part of my journey going forward.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: This happens to me all the time.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, every almost every single book that I have, probably not everyone, but I would say like 98% of the books that I own, I can remember what caused me to buy that book or what I was hoping to gain from it.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, I went to a conference and there was a speaker there and I got their book or whatever the situation was.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I've changed a lot over the past five or six years.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: I've changed especially a lot over the last 10 or 15 years.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'm, you know, I'm in a whole different career.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing almost completely different things than I was doing 10 years ago.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So my needs have changed.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So books that I bought at that time in my life, whenever I was, let's say, a college professor teaching music and arts and doing much more church and ministry kinds of things, whenever I was in that phase of my life, those books were really helpful, but they're not helpful to me right now.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make them bad books, and that has nothing to say about the author or the value of those books.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not something I need in my life any longer.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: So when you look at it that way, where a book really has to earn its place on your bookshelf, and a book really needs to justify its continued existence in your life, a print book at least, I think that's a helpful principle.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of like the default way of looking at it is all books should go, but you only should keep the ones that really you need in your life.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And most of the time we approach it the opposite way.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: We approach it in the sense of, well, I'm just gonna hang on to all these books unless there's really a pressing need to get rid of it.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm proposing here that we actually take the complete opposite approach where we get rid of stuff from our life unless it really needs to have a reason to continue being in our life.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is because we just accumulate stuff that clutters up our minds and our hearts and our lives and our basements and our offices and our homes and our emotions.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we just accumulate clutter mentally and emotionally and physically over the years and decades, and we just kind of take on stuff without really thinking a lot about it.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I propose that we, you know, as we get older, I think most people take an opposite approach where you realize that you need to get rid of a lot of stuff in your life and you should only really keep the things that are essential and that really, really matter.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's something else I want to mention before I wrap up this episode.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: This has gone on a lot longer than I thought, by the way.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: This was actually going to be like a three-minute episode, but uh apparently I have a lot more to say about this topic than I wrote in my notes.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if a book is not relevant to you right now, it might be helpful to somebody else.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: So again, just because a book doesn't have a place in your life right now, that doesn't mean it's not a good book, or that doesn't mean it's not helpful.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: It just means for where you are right now, the book is not helpful to you.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I advocate, again, for liberal generosity when it comes to giving books away.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, you know, honestly, with I mean, books are are pretty cheap, especially if you buy ebooks or audiobooks.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, audiobooks aren't really that cheap most of the time.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if you have a subscription audible, they're much more affordable than if you just buy them straight up as individual audiobooks.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Much cheaper that way, typically.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: So if you get rid of a book and then you discover that you need it again, you can just buy another copy.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if you get on Amazon to buy a used copy, typically they're just two or three dollars.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, for five bucks or less, almost all the time, you can get a great used copy of a book from Amazon.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've actually done that, gosh, two or three dozen times over the years, probably, where I've gotten rid of a book and then I decided, well, I really kind of need that book again back in my life.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I just buy another copy.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's really not that big of a deal.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we stress out a bit these little decisions that you know we can rectify with two or three or five dollars.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I just say get rid of a book.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not sure if you need to keep it, get rid of it, pass it along to another person who needs it, give it a new home, release that book from your life so it can bless somebody else.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you need to get it again, just get another copy.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's really not that big of a deal.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And here's why is because sometimes we have these emotional attachments to books that don't really need to be there.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I know this sounds funny coming from a person who makes his living as a ghostwriter and as an author, but when it really comes down to it, a book is just a collection of ideas and stories that represent a particular author's viewpoint or their experience at that point in that author's life.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that book might have been important in that author's journey at that point, but maybe now they've moved on to other things.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: And a book is just something that represents that author's journey or their story at that particular moment in time.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean, you know, that every book is like this holy thing from the heavens where it drops down and and we think it's this, you know, undisputed thing that must stay in our lives.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Books are just books.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: They're just a collection of ink and paper and glue.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's all that a print book is.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: You can always get another copy of it.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I think it's helpful to take this kind of viewpoint of books because it allows us to release books back into the world and to bless others who might benefit from that book rather than hoarding books and hanging on to them when we don't actually need all those books in our life.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I know this sounds weird coming from somebody who makes his living writing books, but I'm a big fan of just letting go of stuff and passing it along to other people who can be blessed by it and who can benefit from it.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So here's today's challenge.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And sorry, this episode's gone on a little bit longer than I intended, but I guess it's okay.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Here's today's challenge to get started with this process.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to take one minute, so take 60 seconds, and look at a single shelf of books in your home or in your office.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to select at least one print book that you don't need anymore and give that book to a friend or donate it to Goodwill.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Just that one single act of taking 60 seconds and selecting one book to release from your life so it can bless somebody else.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think that single act is gonna lead you to a lot more book purging and it's gonna give you a lot more mental space.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, you're gonna have space on your shelf for books that are more relevant in your life right now.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a really, really cool thing.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, hopefully, this has been helpful to you.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to this little bit of a longer, quote unquote short episode.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: I always appreciate you listening, and I will see you tomorrow.