#864: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. This time around, we have a different format from my usual long-form interviews. This is bite-sized tips from people I love who've been on the podcast, and here's the theme. Many of us feel like we're drowning in complexity. I think day on day, the world just seems insane, whether that is with respect to inboxes or decisions or otherwise. Perhaps you're even slipping in and out of overwhelm. I've been there, so I wanted to hit pause myself, figured some of you might want to do the same thing and ask a question. What are a few decisions, say one to three, that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026?
To explore that, I invited four listener favorites to chime in with their personal stories and what they have done themselves. David Yarrow, who is one of the world's best-selling fine art photographers, his story is crazy. Listen to his episode on the podcast if you want more.
He has sold more than $125 million worth of photographs. There's a lot more to his career. So there's David Yarrow, Claire Hughes Johnson, one of my favorites also, former Stripe Chief Operations Officer, that's Yo-Oh, who helped scale Stripe from under 200 employees to more than 7,000 employees. Diana Chapman, co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, and Anne Lamott, New York Times best-selling author of Bird by Bird, one of my absolute favorite books. She's written much more, of course, but Bird by Bird is not only my favorite, but a favorite of many, many people who are simply trying to simplify and do one thing well, one step at a time. Past episodes of this Simplify series feature lessons from Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, Martha Beck, Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, and many others. So be sure to check those out. But in the meantime, please enjoy this wide-ranging, but intensely practical episode on how to simplify your life.

**Diana Chapman** (2:08)
I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over metal and those...

**David Yarrow** (2:20)
My name is David Yarrow. I'm a British photographer that works principally in America. We sell our art through the fine art market around the world, but principally in America. I think the number one thing that I did to simplify my life was not to get remarried after I got divorced at a very young age of maybe 40 years old. My wife had given me the two most important things in my life, my two children. And it would have been easy at that stage of enormous self-doubt to jump into a new life with someone else. And that could only have made life more complicated. I've got massive respect for people to choose to take that path. But for me, I had my family, and I didn't want to get it more complicated. I just hoped that the reasons why we'd separated would over time heal as we matured as individuals.
And that luckily is exactly what happened, and we're far better friends. We spend a lot of our lives together now. And we often think about how different it would have been if we'd both gone and remarried and started new families. As it is, the four of us now spend an awful lot of time together as a unit. It's abnormal probably for outsiders. But I think because we've been through pain and seen from the outside the issues that perhaps others can have when stepchildren are introduced into things, we recognize that it was right for us. Not right for everyone, but it certainly allowed us both to focus on our jobs and the other parts of our lives without the stress and complications of complicated families. I think complicated families can lead to complicated lives.
I think if you're single, but you have the mother of your children as close to you as you possibly can, it does allow you to be not selfish, but self-indulgent in pursuit of your goals. I think it's led to a far stronger relationship with my children and otherwise would be the case. If you have a strong relationship with your children, I think it makes it much easier to be productive in other parts of your life. That is not to preach to anyone else. I've made more mistakes than most people, but I do know that the simplification of my life born out of the decision not to seek comfort in a second marriage was key to the happiness in my life. I think another tenet of the simplification of my life, which has been very, very necessary, is to have a perpetual filter in my address book. And specifically in terms of the number of close friends that someone in the late summer of their life can have.