The Yankee Way to Simplify Your Life: Old-Fashioned Wisdom for a New-Fangled World Book

Thanksgiving is about more than a two-day vacation, about more than the food, football games and colorful parades that over-saturate us each year. At its core, it is a time for reflection, a pause in our busy schedule to see the way things could be if only we had the time to relax. In The Yankee Way to Simplify Your Life, Jay Heinrichs and the editors of Yankee magazine show us precisely how we can begin to pare down our lives and practice a little old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity to manage our time and lead a simpler, more productive life.

The early New Englanders knew how and when to be satisfied. Rarely feeling sorry for themselves, they had a clear sense of place and how they fit into it. As Heinrichs, notes, we can benefit from their sensible attitudes, practicing a little "Yankeefication," which we can accomplish without actually moving to rural New England.

In The Yankee Way to Simplify Your Life, Heinrichs offers a variety of practical and unusual ways to begin practicing Yankee ingenuity. He shows us how we can:

-convert desires into goals and transform negative experiences into the seeds of personal success (much like Daniel Webster, whose childhood rickets made his forehead protrude, giving him a prominent brow that many found godlike later in his life).
-improve our weaknesses and develop strengths systematically (much like Benjamin Franklin, who decided elaborate charts would lead to moral perfection; of the thirteen virtues he charted, he only failed with "Chastity," though he ended "a better and a happier man" than he would have otherwise).