#843: Tactics and Strategies for a 2026 Reboot — Essentialism and Greg McKeown (Repost)

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Happy New Year, happy New Year.
Happy New Year. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. To kick things off in this 2026, I am re-releasing my most recent conversation with Greg McKeown. I'll explain who that is, which was recorded right at the end of 2024 I found it super helpful. I've revisited this episode myself. And if you want to get grounded, centered for the new year, focused, we cover a lot of practical stuff. How to get centered when life feels destabilizing, using journaling to move from confusion to clarity, personal quarterly off-sites, pre-mortem systems thinking, converting one-time fixes into repeatable rules, defining done so your work doesn't expand indefinitely, the one-two-three method for having a successful day, and it goes on and on. There's a lot to it. Greg, who is Greg? Greg McKeown, M-C-K-E-O-W-N. You can find him on X at Gregory McKeown, is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. I have highlighted this book in hundreds of places, and that is what led me to ultimately connect with him. And his second book, Effortless, Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most, and these two pair very well together, and we certainly dip in and out of a lot of the key concepts in our conversation. He's also a speaker, host of the Greg McKeown podcast, founder of the Essentialism Academy with students from close to 100 countries, and 200,000 people receive his weekly One Minute Wednesday newsletter, and he is also the creator of the Essentialism Planner. So he's done a lot. This conversation gives you plenty to chew on and to take away and apply. So happy new year, everyone. I hope 2026 brings you and yours many pleasant surprises, and now let's get to the episode. Enjoy.

**Greg McKeown** (1:53)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:58)
Can I ask you a personal question?
When something hits, it could be a calamity, it could just be something destabilizing, it could be anything. How do you center yourself so that you don't just end up feeling like you're in the washing machine? Because I am very good at getting things done even when I'm internally suffering a lot of turmoil, but the last handful of days have been very, very challenging. We don't have to go into specifics, but this is a close loved one and a lot of the responsibilities are going to fall on me to figure things out. It's also the holidays, right? So the people I want to get a hold of, I cannot get a hold of. And I recognize that fretting over it does not fix anything. And it makes my day less peaceful and enjoyable. And I'll make a reference to one of our earlier conversations, which may have been on the record, or may have been behind the scenes. But there's, I'm pretty sure that you mentioned a piece of artwork called The Listener, I want to say.

**Greg McKeown** (3:14)
Yes, that's right.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:15)
Which is this sort of centered, calm person. And I have it up on my wall at home with all of this shouting, commotion and chaos around him. And in the center, he's just perfectly centered and thinking clearly. So I suppose my question is, how do you help get yourself closer to that depiction of The Listener when you realize, wow, there may be a lot of chaos around me. There may be a lot of chaos in my head. And look, I'm meditating like meditating like twice a day. It's helpful. It doesn't seem to be quite enough. And maybe the answer is, look, you sit with it. This is just something you're going to have to weather. So don't make a problem out of a problem in a sense. But I'm curious what you found helpful in those circumstances.

**Greg McKeown** (4:08)
I think I can respond that I don't think it's just sitting with it. And I'm pro meditation and I'm certainly pro prayer. But the thing I want to say is sort of distinguishing the noise outside of us and the noise inside of us, because they are two different things. And I want to sort of share a story and then illustrate the action that comes back from it. But this last summer, I was back in England. I'm doing this doctorate at the University of Cambridge. And so part of the requirement of that is to have residency every year there. And this summer, I felt really destabilized while I was there. And it wasn't the doctorate that I don't think was particularly major part of why.