Letter 5

Hi folks, today I want to talk about the wire baskets in a Kimbo and why we went with that decision. There’s a whole philosophy of thought behind it and I’ve been looking forward to sharing that. Today we’ll talk about value, transaction, and paradigm.

Before we even start, I want to just share the simple version: “You only need one pair of scissors in your life, buy a good pair and give it a home so you don’t lose them.” And “if you only use something once a year, give it away or sell it or toss it”.

So that’s the message. If you want to know more, let’s keep digging into it.

A heat map is a picture of where the most activity exists in an environment. The more activity, the “hotter” the area. When you look an overhead heat map of a house, often the most activity is in about 30 percent of the house like the kitchen, the bathroom, and the living room. When you look at other areas like a formal dining room there’s little to no activity. That area would show as blue where the kitchen would show as red.

When you think about that concept from the perspective of the things we own, there’s a heat map in that too. We use our cell phone, wallet, favorite jacket, the green backpack we got in Lake Tahoe and favorite Nike’s every day. We don’t use the jeans that still have a tag or the backpack that the green one replaced 2 years ago. Here’s what I’m saying: if you were to list all of the things you own from most to least used, there would be hot ones at the top and cold ones at the bottom. Our material life is a spectrum of reliance and neglect.

Everything that we own is a responsibility. We work hard to afford the things we own, and in that we inherit the responsibility to take care of them. A car needs to be cleaned, a house needs to be vacuumed, a tear in a jacket needs to be sewn.

Everything that we tend-to gains value because maintenance is a trade of the most important asset that we have to give: time.

But we can’t tend to everything equally; we tend to what’s valuable to us. And value is often an assignment that we make subconsciously, without knowing that we’re doing it.

So here’s the thought: When you buy something, make sure that it’s quality and that you feel a commitment to its maintenance.

And that brings this letter back to the scissors I talked about before. You only need one pair in your life. They need to be nice ones, you should have researched them and had to stretch a little to afford them. They should be something that you’re proud to use. Resharpen them once and a while and they’ll take care of all of your green-onion-chopping needs for the rest of your life.

The baskets in a Kimbo are a simple addition to a simple space, but they’re a design decision to make sure that you always know where your favorite scissors are, and that you can easily assess and get rid of the “blue” things at the bottom of your heat map, the things that you neglect.

There’s another way to think about our material life, from the perspective of transaction. This way of thinking is about buying something for its lifecycle. A cheap pair of scissors lasts a year, but you can cut wire and leave them outside and even buy a few extra pairs because you know that you’ll lose one somewhere along the way. A trade of transaction is a decision to use-up where a trade of value is a decision to up-keep.

And honestly you may need both in life. Because your Japanese $300 bonsai scissors aren’t going anywhere near your car project in the gravel outside where you just need to clip a tie town off of a brake line.

I want to tie this all together with talking about our bias of paradigm; we’ve talked about the two perspectives and their places. I want to compel you that buying something once and buying it knowing that it’s in our life to maintain is really rewarding. it’s said that “love is a verb, not a noun” because love isn’t a feeling that we get by taking, it’s something that we get by giving first. Value isn’t a feeling that we get by taking, it’s something that we get by investing first; when you tend to the things you own, they give back. Take pride in the 10 valuable things that you own instead of riding the value of 50 things that you neglect.

Because at the end of the day it isn’t about the 10 things for someone or the 50 things for someone else. It’s about reducing what we have to maintain so that we can invest a little more of our most important asset - time - into the people who matter most to us.

Thank you for reading this letter. I hope you’re healthy and feeling content and growing every day. Thank you for doing your best and for not giving up. Talk to you later,

-M