#857: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. I'm recording this intro on the road. I have a bunch of very unusual stops around the world that I'll fill you in on another time. But right now, let's get down to brass tacks. We have a different format from my long form interviews. Many of us, and this includes me sometimes, feel like we're drowning in complexity, whether that's inboxes, oh my God, another app, another this, another that, or decisions, decision fatigue. Perhaps you're even slipping in and out of overwhelm. It happens. Maybe you're overcommitted, you need to renegotiate. I have been there yet again. So I wanted to hit pause and ask a question. This was for me, but I thought it might also be helpful for many of you listening. What are one to three decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026? How can I simplify, simplify, simplify? And to explore that, I invited five listener favorites, Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman to chime in and to describe how they have simplified their lives. And you can find previous editions of this series, people sharing their simplification strategies. For instance, Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, Martha Beck, that's 837 And if you like this, we'll keep doing it. I am using a lot of what has been shared and I'll continue to do that. So without further ado, please enjoy a few steps towards simplification.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:26)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Maria Popova** (1:31)
Can I ask you a personal question?

**Craig Mod** (1:37)
I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.

**Maria Popova** (1:49)
My name is Maria Popova and I am a writer. Here are two things I have done to anneal my life. Simple, practical, behavioral changes that have had profound existential benefits.
The first is that at some point, I realized I was giving my time to people I perfectly like, respect, can spend a passable hour with, conversing about things of some interest, but it was always leaving me malnourished, wishing I had spent that hour writing or down a rabbit hole about the anatomy of the eye of the scallop or talking with one of my closest friends about her work on exoplanets. And so I adopted a kind of, I guess you could call it, the cherished quotient. I decided to stop giving my time to people whose company and conversation I don't absolutely cherish, not just like or appreciate or admire or feel kinship with, but cherish. Because as Annie Dillard so memorably wrote, how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives, and so every middling hour is a step toward a middling life. Life is wasted on the lukewarm. Anything you give your time and attention to should royal with the magma of yes. The second thing is very kindred to the first. Some years ago, I emailed a poet I know, who's also an ordained Buddhist, and got an auto response detailing her overcommitment. And, as I was reading it, I got a text from a physicist friend with an elaborate breakdown of his travels and his relationship troubles to explain why it had taken him three days to get back to me. And I thought, holy stardust, here are people of extraordinary intelligence, creativity, accomplishment, and work ethic who think they are accountable to others for how they spend their time, which is the fulcrum of their life. And I thought, how sad, how necessary, that we train each other in a kind of basic faith that everyone is doing the best with the equation between the resources they have, which we tend to overestimate, and that demands their life places upon them, which we tend to underestimate because most of them are invisible to us. And so I stopped using autoresponders or apologizing for how long it takes me to return a text because the moment you begin apologizing for how you manage your time, you are essentially apologizing for your priorities, which means apologizing for your life.

**Morgan Housel** (4:41)
Hey, Tim Ferris listeners, thanks for having me. My name is Morgan Housel. I'm the author of three books, The Psychology of Money, Same As Ever, and The Art of Spending Money. And I want to share with you a couple of things that I've done in the last 10 or 20 years that I think had a big positive impact on my life, that were both just around the philosophy of making everything as simple as I possibly could. And the first is how I invest and manage my own money. My entire net worth is a house, cash, Vanguard index funds, and shares of Markel where I'm on the board of directors. It is hard to imagine a more simple investing asset allocation philosophy. And I've done it for a few reasons. I think there are smart investors out there who have and will continue to outperform the market. And I know some of them and could invest with them. I'll tell you why I don't do it, though. I think there is so much evidence throughout history that the fewer decisions you have to make as an investor, the better you're going to do over the course of your life. And so there may be given years, maybe even given decades, when smart people ride a trend, spot an opportunity. Of course, that exists. But the fewer chances and opportunities and decisions that I have to make of what are the trends going to be, who are the investors that I need to go with, when have they lost their touch and get out, the fewer of those decisions I have to make, the better. So much of the decisions that we make and the forecasts that we make in the economy and with investments are less about, you know, truly objective views of trends and where we think the world is going and more to do with what we want to happen in the future. When you make a prediction about where the US economy is going, where AI is going, whatever it might be, it's less about what you truly think is going to happen given the evidence and more about what you want to happen given the biases and the lens of your own history and your own life and your own incentives, that kind of thing. And nobody is immune to that. Everybody has that. The fewer decisions that I have to make and anyone can make, the better we're going to do as investors. I think that is true for 99.9% of people.