“Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.”

  - Coco Chanel

This summer, I discovered that I have way too much stuff (yes, just as Delbert McClinton sings in his song, “I GOT TOO MUCH STUFF!”).

I first found this out after we sold our house; seventeen years of accumulated junk—er…stuff—gone. 
It felt almost as if my stuff was like rabbits—it all just kept multiplying.  

I again realized the extent of this problem when I moved out of my house into an Airbnb, with the intention that it’d only be three weeks until my new house was ready. 

Accordingly, I packed ever-so-lightly. (Just as I’m sure the passengers aboard the SS Minnow from Gilligan’s Island did for their “three-hour cruise.” Sing it with me now, “A threeeee Oww-errr Cruiiissssee.”)

Just like Gilligan’s Island, my short stay has become a neverending stay. Two months later, and I am still without our new house, living in an Airbnb with a dramatically reduced load of stuff. 

To Live in Lack

In the book Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger, he takes us through the building of the first SpaceX rocket, the “Falcon.”

In the past, rockets (and the very large, very traditional companies who built them) were designed and constructed with increasingly more complex principles. Thus, many of our most powerful rockets were the result of a Rube Goldberg-esque process: solve problems by addition. Below, you can see the highly-detailed interior workings of the Saturn V rocket—the very same one that took the Apollo astronauts to the Moon all those years ago. 

The Saturn V rocket is a wonderful example of rocket scientists thinking, “big and complicated is better.” The Saturn V designers’ idea of a good time was to just keep adding more stuff. After all, the 1960s were all about BIG; big hair, big wars, and big social changes. So, big stuff accumulated on these rockets as the favored solution.

However, big—especially when launching things into Earth’s orbit—has its drawbacks. Even though lives and millions—nay—billions of dollars were at stake, big was still incredibly expensive. 

So how does this relate to my move? 

Well, similarly to the Saturn V launches, my knee-jerk reaction to my newfound situation was that I needed to be surrounded by all of my stuff—it worried me to have so much less. But now that many months have passed, I am finding myself happily living without. Turns out, less is more.  

How Less Became More at SpaceX

It’s difficult to imagine now, but in the early part of the 21st century, SpaceX, was just one of many small, struggling competitors trying to get something off the ground without blowing themselves up, and/or going broke in the process. So they needed a million dollar idea—reinventing launch vehicles by designing and building them completely from scratch. 

Its founder, Elon Musk, had a different vision. Instead of paying SpaceX engineers more to add more stuff, Musk developed a bonus system to pay engineers more to get rid of more stuff. 

After all, why not reward the art of undoing?

This attention to doing more with less meant that the Falcon rocket would become the most efficient, least expensive, and highest profit rocket launch system the world had ever seen.

It would seem that attention to reduction can be beneficial. There is an art to “undoing.” It only took me 17 years of accumulation of crap in my own house to figure out that discarding can be as dynamic as accumulation.  

Discarding is Like Pruning

What happens when you prune a plant? It grows back, often healthier than before. Pruning is another form of undoing. Or perhaps better put, out with the old, in with the new. 

The point here being that whether you’re pruning a vine, designing a rocket, or packing for your three-hour cruise, you’re creating space for essence to emerge. This unencumbering for the emergence of essence is the art of undoing.

Coco Channel and Elon Musk both understood that inspiration can be the result of a reductive process. The art of reduction—the art of undoing—allows an artist, engineer, or even just a human being to move out of their house and into a new one—having unlocked a new ability to recreate space. 

What if we thought a bit more about doing less? Or getting rid of stuff, rather than renting a bigger storage unit? I believe it really is possible to harvest more, create space, launch damn near anything, all by cultivating the art of undoing.