How Minimizing Decisions Can Improve Your Life with Cedric Waldburger
Yuli Azarch | August 12, 2019 | No Comments on How Minimizing Decisions Can Improve Your Life with Cedric Waldburger
“What I think is important for all of us is to think about what is clutter and what is essential in life, be that, decisions, people, relationships, or things in your life”— Cedric Waldburger.
Cedric Waldburger is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and minimalist. He has been involved in many business areas, from Blockchain, fin-tech, eCommerce, to SaaS. Cedric has co-founded and worked for a variety of business around the world where he was in charge of technology and management.
Cedric is a minimalist. He only owns 64 things and all of them in the color black. His essentialism improves his decision-making, his life, and opens up his mind to a wide range of ideas. He has been traveling around the world with all his belongings in a backpack while working on his online business and trying to improve his relationships.
What We Discussed On the Show?
- Cedric Waldburger’s Background [00:35]
- Why Cedric Only Owns 64 Things and All In Black? [7:00]
- Improving Health Through Minimal Decisions. [12:05]
- Adapting to Flights. [19:34]
- Hiring The Right People. [20:40]
- Become more audio-visual. [33:50]
- Decision-making on investments. [40:00]
- The 90-day Process To Find Happiness. [43:00]
- The 12 most important areas of life. [46:30]
- Show Notes.
Cedric Waldburger’s Background.
Cedric started his first company when he was 15 years old. His friend was a graphic designer and Cedric was a developer. He started to create websites and sell them. He was quickly fascinated by building something out of nothing and make it sustainable in the long run.
Cedric has always been interested in building robots and giving life to machines. So he was able to combine his early knowledge on entrepreneurship and love for science and continue creating businesses.
He started by asking himself what made him happy. He started to observe himself for long periods of time and see what really made him happy, whether it was going out with friends, having a beer, etc. According to Cedric, the happiness that really stuck with him was learning.
He started to expose himself to as many learning opportunities as possible which sat him on a path of decluttering his material possessions. Soon, he realized that to learn about new things and being able to travel, he needed to have the flexibility and reduce his material possessions. He even decided to not have a home, travel constantly, and own only a couple of things.
“It is really easy, I have never missed anything material so far”
Why Cedric Only Owns 64 Things and All In Black?
When Cedric Waldburger still had a home, he was still trying to reduce the number of things he possessed. At one point, he was able to collect everything in one place and reduce it to about 650 items. Then he started to consolidate and get rid of the unnecessary items. He got down to 120 items, including household, clothes, tools, electronics, etc.
When he had the revelation, that he didn’t need a home anymore, he was able to drop down the number to 72 items. When he hit that number, he decided to travel the world with everything he owned right in his backpack.
According to Cedric, 64 is a beautiful number. It is 8 times 8, the number of chess pieces on a board, you can use a number of bits to map it. Although he does not stick by 64 items all the times, he tries to have an average of 64 things.
Why everything in black?
There are many reasons, first of all, with black everything fits together and it is appropriate for most locations. Second, Cedric is also trying to not only declutter material stuff but also unnecessary decisions. When he is going to wear or buy something new, he doesn’t have to go through the time-wasting decision-making process. He knows that black is the default color.
But by going all-black, he is also having fun in the process, experimenting, and even painting stuff to make it black.
“The idea is to be very efficient and pragmatic about what matters and what doesn’t.”
Improving Health Through Minimal Decisions.
Cedric Waldburger doesn’t drink alcohol, coffee, juices, etc — he only drinks distilled water. Wherever country he is at, there is water anywhere, so his decisions are simple and easy. He also only takes cool showers, which makes him less dependable to warm shower, and also improves his health with a good energy boost.
Cedric eats the Keto diet, where he eats really low carbs and sugars and increases the intake of fats and proteins. Following this diet also helps him improve his decision-making when he is shopping for groceries or ordering at a restaurant.
Because Cedric is constantly traveling on the plane and changing time zones, he is also breaking his morning routines. He came out with a method to break all the excuses about not having regular access to a gym. He started doing calisthenics, where he uses his own body as weight and doesn’t need much equipment. The idea of calisthenics is that instead of working for about 1 or 2 hours ever 3-4 days, he trains 20-30 minutes every single day. One thing he always does is that he tries to push himself a bit more every day.
The way Cedric works out gives him a sense of accomplishment every day because he is having the discipline to wake up and do the exercise. Another advantage of this is that he is able to keep fit and save tons of time and money. He doesn’t need to commute to a gym or pay for any subscription.
Adapting to Flights.
According to Cedric Waldburger, when you are flying West, that is when you get the worst jetlag. To adapt quickly to the new timezone, Cedric does a fastening trick. He doesn’t eat all day, he just tries to make it through 24 hours without eating, which helps him sleep better. The next day, he starts with a light breakfast or brunch in the new time zone.
He also tries to be early at the airport and work from there for a couple of hours. He doesn’t like to be running and stressing out about missing flights.
Hiring The Right People.
Cedric Waldburger believes that a good team is key. According to Cedric, the team is the secret to the success of any company. He thinks that it is not necessarily about the quality of the product or service but about the quality of the team. According to Cedric, the number one job of a founder or CEO is to hire the right people or hire the right HR people to hire more people as a company grows.
When Cedric realized that he could hire employees from all over the world, he started getting lots of resumes worldwide, so he started creating a strategy to optimize his hiring process. He asked for a brief with bold letters and added small tripwires to filter people out.
The second thing that he does when hiring is that he tries to find people that are culturally similar in terms of what they are building, for example, which tools do they use, what they know in terms of skills, etc
“I think it is the hardest but the most essential of any entrepreneur. Building the company comes down to whether you can put the right people on the right spot and give them the right tools to work together.”
Cedric also believes that clear and open communication is a clear sign of someone being a good leader over time. Someone who is capable of expressing his/her vision extremely clear. Cedric thinks that communication is very important in remote set-ups.
His hiring process?
- Asks for a brief.
- Filters people with a small tripwire.
- Looks for culturally similar people.
- Assesses their communication.
- Has a call with them.
Becoming More Audio-Visual.
Although Cedric Waldburger reads a book every month, he prefers to avoid reading it, if he can get the information any other way. He thinks that there is this wrong perception that the longer the book the better. Cedric believes that many interesting books are way longer than they should be, so he prefers reading books that are no more than 200 pages.
Cedric is looking for the 80/20 principle when he is getting information, so he can cover a surface and only go very deep if he really loves the topic or idea.
He learned that if a book doesn’t capture his interest within the first 20-30 minutes, he just skips it. And he doesn’t have to go through the whole book. He also hears a lot of audiobooks and puts them on 2.0x speed to get the information in faster and keep him more focused. According to Cedric, hearing an audiobook faster takes less time and makes it more challenging for the brain to capture it.
“I am able to train my brain to listen quicker and at a higher frequency.”
Decision-Making On Investments.
Cedric is interested in the Venture Capitalist investment. He and his team are currently focusing mostly on B2B SaaS companies. He is also interested in traditional companies, either buying them or investing in them and helping them become more digital. An example would be buying a traditional bakery and putting in technology such as 3D printing, AI, computer vision.
Cedric would love to improve traditional business models through the lens of the new technological times.
According to Cedric is about investing time in friendships as well as the business. Investments and projects are a big part of Cedric’s life, but in the end, it all falls down to personal relationships.
The 90-Day Process To Find Happiness.
Cedric Waldburger has learned that it is not about measuring happiness but more about learning about what triggers it, and how he could get more of it.
The most important thing for Cedric and what he is trying to optimize every day is being happy. Even on the surface, finding the small things that make him happy every single day is his most important mission. He is always looking to be happy and feel accomplishment in his life.
“For me is about being a wholesome person and having a positive impact on the environment around me”
Cedric also asks himself, “what does not make me happy?”… He tries to find the patterns where he does not feel happy. One of those patterns he was able to recognize was that he sat way too many goals on new year’s resolutions.
He felt really sorry for himself because he didn’t realize his goals. Cedric believes that 12 months is way too long and that he does not have an emotional perception of what that amount of time means. He couldn’t plan for such an uncertain scenario.
He came out with a 90-day process. Instead of looking at his year in 365 days he prefers to break it down in 90 days or quarters. According to Cedric, a quarter is enough time to really have an impact. For example, he would definitely see the impact after working out, dieting, or learning something after 90 days. But at the same time, it is not too long. He can have a concrete idea of what his life would look like in 90 days from now.
The 12 Most Important Areas Of Life.
According to Cedric Waldburger , the twelve most important areas of life are:
- Friends
- Family
- Relationship
- Money
- Business
- Emotion
- Fitness
- Health
- Nutrition
- Experiences
- Personal Growth
- Passion
Every 90 days, Cedric blocks his morning or evening to sit down and write a review for each of these areas. He tries to determine how he feels for each of the 12 areas. Although he is a really rational man, he has learned that the most important decisions can only be made with this gut feeling.
He writes about how does he feel in each area, in order to become very aware of his current state of where he is is right now and where he wants to go. After he goes through the 12 areas, he picks one thing where he wants to have an impact.
According to Cedric, that one thing is very important. He starts to plan in advance and block time in his calendar for that one important thing. Then, he visualizes the investments and actions that he is going to take in order to get there. And finally, Cedric writes the actions down, puts it on an automatic email, and sends it to him 90 days later.
“I learned that if I want to make an impact I can only do one thing at a time.”
Show Notes.
- Cedric practices the Keto Diet, to stay healthy and minimize his decisions.
- He practices calisthenics. Something he can do anywhere.
- More information on his hiring process.
- Cedric’s 90-day process to set goals and find happiness.
- The twelve most important areas of life.
Thanks, Cedric Waldburger.
To find more information about Cedric Waldburger , check his Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or Youtube accounts. You can also find more about Cedric, by visiting his site.
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