Jasper Johns and Karen Kingston -- Clearing Out the Clutter

A recent issue of Investors Business Daily featured painter Jasper Johns in their "Leaders and Success" column. It starts with: "At 24, Jasper Johns destroyed all his previous artworks. It was the only way, he knew, that he'd achieve his life's goal"--pretty dramatic eh?

This reminded me of Karen Kingston, the clutter-clearing and feng shui expert who divides her time between the UK and Bali, Indonesia. Sometimes, the physical things we hold onto keep us from getting where we want to go. Kingston says this is because there is no space for the new to come into our life.

I doubt Jasper Johns knew of Karen Kingston, as she has become famous more recently, and he has had renown for quite some time. It's amazing they may have jumped onto the same ideas on their own.

As I clear out things in my room and at my Grandmother's, I try to think: "Why am I keeping this? Is it relevant to what I want to do now--acquire true assets and develop positive cashflow so I can get out of the rat race? Does it represent what I want to be?" More often than not, the answer is no. I try to remember the reasons I initially held onto it, and the reasons sometimes give insight into my personality--for example, holding onto a section of an old Financial Times because I loved the writing quality, had a crush on the author, hadn't been to the place that was written about so interestingly etc.--in other words, the article represented something I aspired to be, see, experience, or participate in. I try to have compassion for myself and my original reasons for keeping the item, remind myself that my security and life do not depend on keeping the object around, and physically hug and kiss the item into a donation box for the cat sanctuary white elephant fundraisers, or to the trash.

If any of these items are holding me back from getting out of the rat race and getting assets with passive income, then I'd much rather get rid of them, because they are liabilities of the mind, even if their cost in money has been paid off long ago. For the Financial Times example, I no longer put out for it at the newsstands, but read it in the library and take mindmap notes. This way I avoid holding onto them forever and avoid them as a Robert Kiyosaki doodad.

Wouldn't it be awful if Jasper Johns never achieved all that he did just because he "held on" to those early paintings? What a tragedy that would be!