Activate Accelerate Session 1
This is our first TKS Accelerate session, where we reviewed the content for Accelerate and had some group discussions revolving around the readings. Accelerate is mainly about changing your mindset and empowering you with different tools, mindsets, and ideas that can help you in your everyday life. We always have a MotW and a Person of the Week (PotW). We will go through the material on our own, share our takeaways in our threads and reflections, and then have discussions in these sessions about them to hear others’ opinions and reflect.
The MotW was decluttering, both physically and mentally. Physical decluttering is about actually getting rid of the clutter and physical “junk” in your space that doesn’t help you or adds weight to your surroundings. Physical decluttering is so important because it helps clear your area and gives you an opportunity to reset yourself. We also discussed mental decluttering, which includes things like the mindsets you hold, the habits you keep, the content you consume, and the people you surround yourself with. It’s also important to consider mental decluttering when you discuss this mindset because those things I listed also have such a big impact on your performance in your day-to-day and can actually shape the way you behave and the expectations you set for yourself. Clearing the mental clutter allows you to bring in new components for yourself, like letting go of old habits and replacing them with new and better ones, or dropping an activity to make time to work on what’s really important to you.
We discussed how we tend to overlook decluttering in our daily lives, and how we only declutter when things get too much for us. But if you normalize decluttering in your life, then you are constantly making room to update yourself and frequently motivating yourself to reflect on everything in your life right now and remove the stuff that is only slowing you down or adding more negativity.
We then discussed the PotW, Epicurus, who was a philosopher who focused his work on how to live a good life and how to achieve pleasure in life. He reflected on how a lot of the necessities we need in life are found in nature, and how those necessities are realistically all you need to achieve pleasure. You need nutritious food, water, shelter, and companionship, which can all be found in nature. Without any of those, then you wouldn’t be able to achieve basic pleasure. Those are necessities. But, beyond them just being necessities, they are also the basics of what you need to live a good life, is what Epicurus believed. He believed you should only strive to achieve those necessities and the quantities you need them in. If you don’t have enough, then obviously you aren’t going to achieve pleasure. But it’s also really hard to get more of the necessities you need if you rely on nature alone. He noted that if you can have more of something (like junk food, money, material things, etc.), then you probably don’t need it because the amount that you can have is never-ending, and that means it can never be enough.
Epicurus states that we shouldn’t worry about all those other things that aren’t necessities, but reflect on how important it is to have the necessities and have enough, and focus your efforts on achieving that for a good life. I think this philosophy is beneficial in the sense that it takes some pressure off of trying to always get more and more, but allows you to think about how it’s ok to just have enough, even if it’s only the simple things.
This is the format you are going to see for the Accelerate blog posts, since these sessions are focused mainly on discussing the content we reviewed and hearing everyone’s opinions on it. So these blog posts are going to give you a glimpse of the stuff we reviewed and my takeaways from it. I really enjoyed having group discussions about the stuff we reviewed this week, and I liked having the opportunity to share my thoughts and opinions about the stuff I learned. I’m excited for more of these sessions and to get more content for Accelerate!
