Books about Simplicity from Amazon.com

Find financial freedom in the new millennium with a new edition of the life-changing national bestseller

More than three-quarters of a million people everywhere, from all walks of life, have found the keys to gaining control of their money--and their lives--in this comprehensive and revolutionary book on money management. Considered the bible of the voluntary simplicity movement, Your Money or Your Life is now updated with a new Preface, Index, and Resource list to help you put the program into practice. This simple, nine-step program shows you how to:

* get out of debt and develop savings
* slow down the work-and-spend treadmill
* make values-based decisions about your spending
* save the planet while saving money

* Over three years on the Business Week bestseller list
* Your Money or Your Life made all major bestseller lists in hardcover and paperback, including the New York Times, USA Today, Business Week, Publishers Weekly, and Washington Post.
Price: $8.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the only book that teaches all the skills needed to live independently in harmony with the land harnessing natural forms of energy, raising crops and keeping livestock, preserving foodstuffs, making beer and wine, basketry, carpentry, weaving, and much more. This new edition includes 150 new full color illustrations and a special section in which John Seymour the father of the back to basics movement explains the philosophy of self-sufficiency and its power to transform lives and create communities. More relevant than ever in our high-tech world, The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the ultimate practical guide for realists and dreamers alike. .
Price: $18.16 [Notify me when price goes down.]

When Peter Walsh, organizational guru of TLC's hit show Clean Sweep and a regular contributor to The Oprah Winfrey Show, appeared on national television shows and told people how they could reclaim their lives from the suffocating burden of their clutter, the response was overwhelming. People flooded Peter's website (www.peterwalshdesign.com) with success stories about how his book had changed their lives.

Peter's unique approach helped people everywhere learn to let go of the emotional and psychological clutter that was literally and figuratively choking the life out of their homes.

With his good humor and reassuring advice, Peter shows you how to face the really big question: What is the vision for the life you want to live? He then offers simple techniques and a step-by-step plan to assess the state of your home, prioritize your possessions, and let go of the clutter you have been holding on to that has kept you from living the life you imagine. The result is freed-up space, less stress, and more energy for living a happier, richer life every day..
Price: $7.40 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Received an Honorable Mention in the Communication and Cultural Studies category of the 2005 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.

Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.

Maeda—a professor in MIT's Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer—explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of "improved" so that it doesn't always mean something more, something added on.

Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products—how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.".
Price: $12.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The three biggest trends in weddings today are simplicity, personalization, and color. Wedding design expert Karen Bussen highlights these elements as she shows couples how to design their own weddings without going crazy or broke.

Simple Stunning Weddings is the first wedding design book to focus on the where of the wedding. Location is the first and most important decision brides and grooms must make: everything else flows from that. Bussen showcases 12 popular wedding settings, including the city loft, country inn, art gallery, botanic garden, and private club, and demonstrates how to make them extraordinary. With the site as the starting point, she creates unifying themes with color, flowers, and personal touches. She explains how to deal with vendors, how to spend the wedding budget, and when it makes sense to hire a specialist.

Sharing all her trade secrets, Bussen teaches the power of simplicity and the impact of color, which can be tailored to any budget, always to stunning effect: substituting cotton tablecloths for silk in the same eye-dazzling color combinations, for example, or creating striking flower arrangements using only one or two types of blooms. Whether for a barefoot union on a beach or a formal affair in a hotel ballroom, this fully illustrated, information-filled book is like having Bussen on hand as your personal wedding designer. AUTHOR BIO: KAREN BUSSEN is one of Manhattan's most exciting wedding designers. Her work has been featured in such magazines as Modern Bride, Martha Stewart Weddings, Home, Food & Wine, and Interior Design. In the past six years, she has designed more than 100 weddings.

ELLEN SILVERMAN's photographs have appeared in Charmed Bracelets and New Soul Cooking (both STC)..
Price: $17.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This one volume edition of Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life brings these classics on rural homesteading together. This couple abandoned the city for a rural life with minimal cash and the knowledge of self reliance and good health..
Price: $8.46 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Using real world examples, such as traffic flow, politics and baby linguistics, the author makes the theories of 'simplexity' accessible to the layperson ..Kluger makes complex science seem simple."
--Kirkus

"Kluger makes the modern world comprehensible...his astonishing discoveries require no exaggeration..[his] findings are likely to incite controversy, confirming his contention that explaining simplicity and complexity is never as straightforward as it seems."
--Publishers Weekly

"Simplexity...is a study of human behavior, and the way we perceive things and events, and how our perception frequently causes us to make wrong assumptions and to perceive simplicity (or complexity) where it does not exist, The book is sure to be a deserved hit among the ever-growing Freakonomics crowd."
-Booklist

Why are the instruction manuals for cell phones incomprehensible?
Why is a truck driver's job as hard as a CEO's?
How can 10 percent of every medical dollar cure 90 percent of the world's disease?
Why do bad teams win so many games?

Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea. Things that seem complicated can be astoundingly simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex. A houseplant may be more intricate than a manufacturing plant. A colony of garden ants may be more complicated than a community of people. A sentence may be richer than a book, a couplet more complicated than a song.

These and other paradoxes are driving a whole new science--simplexity--that is redefining how we look at the world and using that new view to improve our lives in fields as diverse as economics, biology, cosmology, chemistry, psychology, politics, child development, the arts, and more. Seen through the lens of this surprising new science, the world becomes a delicate place filled with predictable patterns--patterns we often fail to see as we're time and again fooled by our instincts, by our fear, by the size of things, and even by their beauty.

In Simplexity, Time senior writer Jeffrey Kluger shows how a drinking straw can save thousands of lives; how a million cars can be on the streets but just a few hundred of them can lead to gridlock; how investors behave like atoms; how arithmetic governs abstract art and physics drives jazz; why swatting a TV indeed makes it work better. As simplexity moves from the research lab into popular consciousness it will challenge our models for modern living. Jeffrey Kluger adeptly translates newly evolving theory into a delightful theory of everything that will have you rethinking the rules of business, family, art--your world.

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Price: $15.01 [Notify me when price goes down.]

More provocative business thinking from the bestselling author of Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars

As one of today’s most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin helps his army of fans stay focused, stay connected, and stay dissatisfied with the status quo, the ordinary, the boring. His books, blog posts, magazine articles, and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketing people, innovators, and managers around the world.

Now, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short pieces from his pioneering blog—ranked #70 by Feedster (out of millions published) in worldwide readership. This book also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine, and several of the short e-books he has written in the last few years.

A sample:
• Bon Jovi And The Pirates
• Christmas Card Spam
• Clinging To Your Job Title?
• How Much Would You Pay to Be on Oprah’s Show?
• The Persistence of Really Bad Ideas
• The Seduction of “Good Enough”
• What Happens When It's All on Tape?
• Would You Buy Life Insurance at a Rock Concert?

Small is the New Big is a huge bowl of inspiration that you can gobble in one sitting or dip into at any time. As Godin writes in his introduction: “I guarantee that you'll find some ideas that don’t work for you. But I’m certain that you're smart enough to see the stuff you’ve always wanted to do, buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I’m betting that once inspired, you’ll actually make something happen.”.
Price: $6.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $5.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]