31 Personal (Banal) Things About Me

31 Personal (Banal) Things About Me Each year time betrays me, and I get older one more year. This year is no exception. Last year, as the sun set on my roller-coaster twenties, I turned 30 and shared 30 life lessons. Its been a year, and today (June 29, 2012) I turned 31. Dont worry, you neednt buy a gift for me. I am inherently suspicious of lists  because  theyre often vapid, overdone, and, honestly, not very well written (e.g., Six Ways to Get Six-Pack Abs in Six Days!, Eleven Bloggers Reveal Eleven Sure-fire Hacks to Create a Successful Life-Hacking Blog, etc.). Furthermore, I dont enjoy wedging trivial details about my personal life into essays unless those details serve the greater good. But alas, a handful of people are curious, so heres my attempt at a list. Perhaps theres beauty beneath the banality. Perhaps not. 1. I believe the meaning of life is growth and contribution. If whatever Im doing doesnt serve oneâ€"or bothâ€"of these things, then its a waste of time. Each year I grow; the more I grow, the more I have to give. 2. Yes, Joshua Fields Millburn is my real name, not a pen name. Fields  is a family name. I generally introduce myself as Joshua, but a bunch of people call me Josh. Fine by me. Seriously, I want you to feel comfortable, so call me whatever you wantâ€"Joshua, Josh, Millie, JFMâ€"just dont call me collect. 3. I was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1981. 4. Im 62, 165-ish lbs. (though I used to weigh 230â€"240 lbs. at my corpulent zenith). 5. Ive never lived anywhere but Ohio. (Update: That is, until I moved to Montana in the fall of 2012.) 6. I dont desire to be a nomad or a peripatetic writer, but Ive traveled more in the last year than all 30 previous years combined, embarking on several international tours  and speaking  at all kinds of universities, conferences, and organizations. 7. I grew up in a fairly dysfunctional household (before it was cool to be dysfunctional). 8. The chapter  Falling While Sitting Down  in my novel,  As a Decade Fades, is  based on my tumultuous childhood and is about 90% autobiographical. 9. I graduated high school half a year early to attend audio engineering school (way back in the 90s when we still recorded on reel-to-reel tape). I learned to record everything from bluegrass and jazz to death metal and hip-hop. 10. I moved out on my own on my eighteenth birthday and got a sales job once I discovered I couldnt make much money as a recording studio engineer. 11. Although I grew up Catholic, Im not particularly religious. If anything, Id say Im open to religion. One of my closest friendsâ€"Adam, the guy who takes most of the photos for this siteâ€"is a Harvard-educated pastor. Other friends are atheists. For me, religion is abstract and abstruse. All I know is that I dont know it all. 12. I dont have a college degree. 13. When I was 22,  I started taking a few college classes at night in hopes of one dayâ€"sometime in the distant futureâ€"becoming an English teacher. But then the corporate ladder got in the way. 14. Now it is the distant future, and with my online writing class, Im the only teacher I know without a college degree. 15. I wasted my twenties climbing the corporate ladder, working 70â€"80 hours a week, 362 days per year, attaining impressive titles like Store Manager and Regional Manager and Director of Operations, none of which made me feel fulfilled. 16. Instead of fully pursuing my dream at 22, I bought a too-big house and a luxury car and started racking up debt. 17. It took getting everything I ever wanted to realize I didnt want everything I ever wanted. 18. I eventually led a large group of peopleâ€"as many as 100 employees in sixteen locationsâ€"where I learned that I enjoy helping people grow. 19. Over the years, Ive interviewed well over 1,000 people, hired over 200, and fired/laid-off nearly 100â€"the latter of which never gets easier with time. Im glad I dont have to do that anymore. 20. I was married to a wonderful woman for more than six years, though we grew in different directions and eventually parted ways shortly after my mother died in 2009. Were still close: relationships can change over time. 21. I didnt start reading books until I was 21. Once I discovered literary fiction, I was hooked. I didnt know how, but I knew I wanted to be a part of it. 22. I didnt start writing until I was 22. 23. I wasnt serious about writing until I was 28. Sure, I had a few failed attempts at writing a novel, but I didnt seriously pursue writing until a few years ago. 24. I have an inch-thick stack of discouraging rejection letters from agents and publishers from my twenties. 25. Since receiving those letters, Ive published four bestselling books. Hell, I might collect all those letters one day and publish them as a book. I could call it Dear Author: Rejection Letters to a Bestselling Writer. 26. I left my corporate job a few months before I turned 30 so I could pursue my dream. When I left the corporate world, I didnt expect our audience to grow as much as it did. But Im incredibly thankful it did, and Im thankful you read our words. Your support means the world to me. Thank you for giving me a purpose. 27. When I started this site eighteen months ago, I didnt know what a blog was. (Seriously!) But I needed an outlet to share my writing and my experiences with other people. So I asked Ryan if hed be willing to share his experiencesâ€"and my experiencesâ€"with the world. He said yes, we created The Minimalists, and then started publishing essaysâ€"which we soon realized were called blog posts. We stuck with calling them essays, though, because we believed it better categorized what we were writing. The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, to try or to attempt, and we were writing about the changes we were attempting to make in our lives. 28. Ive known Ryan over 20 yearsâ€"since we were fat little fifth graders. 29. I currently own one pair of blue jeans, and I wear them (almost) every day. 30. I learned how utterly uninteresting I am while writing this list. 31. I dont dance: I just pull up my pants and lean back. Subscribe to The Minimalists via email.