How about your career or business interests – are you doing what you want to be doing?

Do you know where you’re heading? Focusing on what’s really important to you?

Do you have the time to focus on what’s really important to you?

For those of you who have read Life’s Too Good for a wee while, you’ll know that what we really believe in is enjoying life and specifically how to enjoy life more for less (and therefore getting a better return in our lives and our business), by simplifying life and making room for the things that are really important.

In our case that’s things like family, flexibility and freedom – freedom to live life on our own terms.

10 Ways to Enjoy Life More for Less

On the subject of enjoying life more for less, here are 10 ways that you can do just that:

1. Experiment

This is my absolute favorite, so it has to be #1.

Experiment.

Recently, my good friend Annie Andre invited me to try a new experiment with her: Let’s just eat raw vegan food.

This sounded easy enough to me.

I’ve recently been considering whether I could go super-simple and eat one type of food only – something similar to the kinds of complete food that dogs eat. That might be an interesting experiment because if you could just eat ‘kibble’ you would no longer need a cooker, a fridge, crockery, a kitchen… no more need to cook etc etc. I found this guy: Monkey Chow Diaries – and I have to admit that did put me off just a little.

I digress.

Back to Annie’s idea…

Raw. Vegan. Sounds easy enough, though as a meat-eater I know already that would be a big challenge for me.

We’re not sure how easily we can sync up – it’s summer after all, Annie’s off to Germany, I’m off to France… but we’ll see and I’ll keep you posted.

I suggested a more interesting challenge might be only being able to eat what we could grow (though I don’t really have a vegetable garden at the moment so may have to wait a while before starting that one) – I still think that might be an interesting challenge for the future aka become a good gardener or starve.

As you probably know with my recent slow-carb diet experiment and my interest in Annie’s 30 day water fast, I’m really enjoying not only experimenting, but learning more about my health and dieting in general which, as I said in that post, to be honest, isn’t something I’ve really spent too much time thinking about in the past.

Just goes to show – when you start to explore something new, how interesting things can become.

In fact my life these days seems to be one long series of experiments (health, exercise, business things, investments… mostly little things, nothing too extreme, but experiments all the same) – and it’s lots of fun.

2. Live Within Your Means

As I talked about in this post: It’s Not About The Money, Money, Money, I’m a great believer in living within your means, or at least as far as possible.

It’s crazy how much we spend on stuff we don’t need.

Don’t get me started…

Being wealthy is not_the_same as being rich -> in fact it’s much better.

Read that post for more details or just take it from me right here, right now – live within your means and you’re gunna start enjoying life much, much more.

3. Read All About It

For more tips (52 of them), you could always read our e-book on the subject (‘Enjoy Life More For Less’). The book is organized in a similar way to the website with four sections: Life, Health, Money and Business.

You can use the book to try and take action on every one of the tips (yes, they’re actionable) or pick and choose only the ones that really resonate with you.

We’ve had great feedback on this book – I’ve even had people on more than one occasion mail me with a blow-by-blow account telling me how they’re doing against each and every tip and how the book has changed their lives.

Dounia, who found the book to be very inspirational, took a beautiful picture of her reading the book on the beach and posted this on Facebook. I love the photo so asked her if she would mind me using it in this article (yep, that’s it above).

Oh, and did I mention that the ‘Enjoy Life More For Less’ e-book is completely free?

Join our rapidly growing community (which is also free) and you’ll get a free copy plus weekly updates and other treats reserved only for our subscribers.

We also recently published this on Kindle (search for ‘Enjoy Life More For Less’ in Amazon – I’m not putting a link here because there are different Amazon links for every country: UK, US, France, Germany… see what I mean?) – unfortunately it’s not free there as Amazon wouldn’t let us make it free but it is set at the minimum price possible.

Or you can just get it free below.

4. Go Crazy

As another friend of mine, Steve Bloom wrote in a recent article of his, which I loved, challenge yourself, challenge your perceptions and go crazy – because, as Steve puts it, “some crazy things are great opportunities in disguise”.

In fact it’s not just that post, it seems to be pretty much what Steve stands for. Check out his site (http://dosomethingcool.net), he has several posts which tell you how to enjoy life, how to get more out of life and how to, well, do something cool.

On the subject of doing crazy, fun stuff, something else that springs to mind is when another friend of mine, Allie from Ramblings of a WAHM tweeted about going to a ‘Survivor Mud Run’ that weekend. It sounded fantastic and she later told me she had a lot of fun. Now that’s what I’m talking about.

What can you do that’s crazy (whether crazy big or crazy small)?

5. Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously

Business doesn’t have to be serious and life certainly doesn’t have to be serious.

Let’s take a look at the business side of things for a moment.

OK, so there are some business people who are quite serious. But a lot of the most successful business people in the world got there by having fun, by being themselves and more importantly by not taking themselves too seriously.

One obvious example that springs to mind is Richard Branson – did you know that he has never worked a day in an office in his life? I heard that from the man himself in a recent interview.

An example a little closer to home (I wrote an article: Why You Need To Lead, for her site quite recently) is the wonderful Ana Hofman. Ana was offline for a while and rather than get all business-like about it, she came back more open than ever, she actually made fun of herself and shared that with her readers to some success (171 comments and counting).

Ana is really well respected online, she knows her stuff and is certainly what I’d consider an expert in her field, yet she still finds the time to show humility, to have fun and to be really open – which her readers love her for.

6. Live in The Present

Don’t spend your time worrying about what might never happen.

Remember the past with fond memories, but don’t spend too much time there either.

Enjoy the present.

The present is the only time we truly have and it is also the only thing we really have control over.

If you’re worried about tomorrow, realize that what you do now can change tomorrow.

If you’re worried about yesterday, realize that the only chance you have to fix yesterday is with what you do now.

We have lots of articles on this website about living in the present and if you can do this, you will find your time is much more well spent.

If you want to get started learning more about being mindful and living in the present you could start with this article (or use our search function and search for the term ‘Mindful’): How To Practice The Art Of Mindfulness

7. Collaborate

There are some great examples of collaboration online.

A couple of good examples of really impressive collaborative projects are Corbett Barr’s Million Dollar Blog Project and Danny Iny’s wildly successful collaborative e-book ‘Engagement from Scratch!‘.

Collaborating, whether in a social or business sense keeps things fresh and interesting and opens up new possibilities and opportunities as well as enabling you to enjoy life (and business) more in the process.

Spend time with people who you like to be around, who you learn from, who give you new perspectives on things other than your own and who challenge you.

Working with others (assuming they are the right others) can give us leverage and enable more to happen than working alone.

8. Move More

Move. More.

Mentally, physically and socially.

Move more.

Particularly physically – movement is really important and more of a benefit than you can possibly imagine (check out Isabelle’s superb article on Shinrin Yoku).

Get up.

Get Out.

Shake it all about.

If you’re feeling down, get out and move around. Out as in outdoors.

Fresh air + exercise is one of the best boosts you can get.

Awesome for mind, body and spirit.

9. Do Something You’re Really Passionate About

This doesn’t have to be your main business – but you may find out that it ends up being that way.

You don’t have to drop everything and follow your passion – though you may end up doing so when your passion becomes more lucrative than your day-job.

You don’t have to become a starving artist – do the thing you’re passionate about just because you’re passionate about it – it should be quality time doing something you love, not like work at all. Put pressure on that one thing you love and it becomes work – don’t ‘punish’ it in that way.

Even if it’s just for a few hours a week instead of wasting time watching crappy TV programs – choose a few programs to skip and spend time doing something you’re really passionate about instead.

Do this without putting any expectation on what you’re doing, but allow your focus to shape, refine and build that thing you’re working on to the quality and completeness that you feel is right.

Your focus and passion will be enough of a driver, you don’t need anything else.

A great example of someone who has tremendous passion is Marcus Sheridan over at The Sales Lion (http://thesaleslion.com).

Marcus was already successful with his swimming pool business and wanted to learn how to advertise through content marketing.

Through training himself to understand more about this, he started getting really interested, really passionate about it and ultimately built another business, a content marketing business (The Sales Lion) where he helps others do the same.

Now Marcus has one of the strongest communities out there online, eagerly following his every word. That would never be possible without passion. Now I have no idea if Marcus makes more money from his content marketing business than his swimming pool business, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that was the case.

10. Fail Fast

It’s OK To Fail – failure is not actually about failing.

Sound weird?

Well, go ahead and read that post if you want more details.

In short failure is more about giving up than it is about failing. Successful people fail all of the time, it’s something that is really worth doing on your way to success – well, if you want bigger success that is.

If you don’t fail a few times on your way to whatever success you’re gunning for, then you’re hardly pushing your boundaries are you?

So fail, fail fast, then get up, dust yourself down, take a look over your shoulder to see what you learned from that little stumble and move on.

Then, if you stumble again, take another look, write a few notes if you want, check your hair, then move on again.

… and keep going relentlessly and you will reach your target, precisely because you failed… but you kept going.

Don’t be afraid to fail. It will hold you back.

Try celebrating it instead.

A Starter For 10…

So there’s your ‘Starter for 10…’

I don’t know where that expression came from (perhaps I should look it up) – but I quite like it. A colleague of mine used to say it all the time.

So this is hopefully a useful list to whet your appetite.

Final Thought

The most valuable thing we have is our time.

The good news is that we all get paid the same amount.

We all get the same 24 hours every day, the question is, what are you doing with yours?

You should be able to do any of these right away. You will also find lots more examples of how to enjoy life more for less dotted all over the place on this little website, because as I said above, that’s what we’re all about.

So what are you waiting for?

Image Credit: Dounia Touil