My book Fear of Nothing has had its best week of sales yet as readers take on the new year’s resolution of “no clutter.” It is an objective that has extra significance this year. People are hoping to cut their ties to the past decade of economic doldrums, and nothing says pessimism and economic decline more emphatically than clutter. It is a hopeful sign for the larger economy that people are undertaking personal change. The current economic problems might be global in scope, but the solutions start on an individual level.
This also means that personal change ultimately has to look beyond the pre-packaged “change” of the same old commercial products. This year more than last, we can expect to see change of a more spontaneous nature, as people respond to external changes with ideas too new to have been vetted by the two-year book publishing process or the decades of development that have created the familiar cliches of change. It is those cliches we tend to reach for first after we realize that things could be better. This year I believe we will find that we can reach beyond them.
