#837: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck

0:00Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss. show. This time around, we have a different format from my normal long-form interviews. You can find 800 plus of those at tim.blog slash podcast. But this time around, I thought I would do something very self-serving. There's something on my mind. As we head into the new year, many of us, me too, feel like we're drowning in invisible complexity, or perhaps we simplified and simplified, but lo and behold, without fail, complexity starts to creep back in. This happens, right? It's like going to the gym.

0:36You can't just go once. You need to constantly refine and revert to simplify, simplify, simplify. So I wanted to hit pause on long form interviews. We'll have more coming, but ask a simple question. What are the one to three decisions that I could make that would dramatically simplify my life in 2026, this upcoming year, right? In January, hopefully. To explore that, I invited three close friends and longtime listener favorites, Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, and Martha Beck to share what they have done in their lives that has worked already. So from Derek Sivers, you'll learn how Derek uses a radical approach to living from first principles instead of default settings.

1:17From Seth Godin, how a handful of hard rules can turn a messy professional life into something simple and focused on your best work. And from Martha Beck, how making one radical commitment forced her through growing pains, but led to a vastly simpler life built around peace and meaning. And if you like this episode, I'll do more of these because certainly I want to beg, borrow, and steal from people like Derek, Seth, and Martha. And I've applied this a lot in my own life. In 2020, I used a guiding tenet that I learned really polished, I would say, from two other podcast guests, Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, and Jim Collins, author of many, many mega bestsellers.

1:58And here it is. Look for single decisions that remove hundreds or thousands of other decisions. This was one of the most important lessons that Jim, Jim Collins, learned from legendary management theorist, Peter Drucker, also an amazing author in his own right, the effective executive, I still recommend to anyone and everyone. As Jim recounted on our first podcast, and I'll quote here, don't make a hundred decisions when one will do. Peter believed that you tend to think that you're making a lot of different decisions. But then, actually, if you kind of strip it away, you begin to realize that a whole lot of decisions that look like different decisions are really part of the same category of decision.

2:41And I've applied this in my own life in a lot of different places. So my startup vacation slash retirement that I took from 2015 to 2018, I asked myself across the board, yet again, what can I categorically and completely remove, even temporarily, to create space for seeing the bigger picture, exploring, finding gems. I've applied that to doing no public speaking for years at a time. In 2020, for instance, I committed to not reading any new books whatsoever, which I extended indefinitely. And you can read about that decision, which talks about some of the principles involved also at tim.blog slash new books.

3:20That single decision solved what seemed like maybe a dozen disparate, time-consuming problems. And I'm looking for more of those. So without further ado, please enjoy now tips and stories from Derek, Seth, and Martha.

3:53The Tim Ferriss Show.

4:01Hi, I'm Derek Sivers, and I'm fascinated with the implications of simplicity. Most people don't want a simple life. They want an easy life. But a simple life can be hard. My life changed when I learned what simple really means. Simple comes from simplex, the opposite of complex. Complex comes from complex, the verb that means to intertwine. This is important. Remember this, dear listener. Your life is complex when it is intertwined with dependencies. You are depending on things and things are depending on you. Your life is simple when it is not complex. It's not intertwined with other things. But that means depending on less.

4:57Notice how easy it was to make your life complex. Just say, sign me up. Just click, buy now. Just say, you're hired. Congratulations, you just made your life easier. But now, it's objectively more complex. sex. Untangling that means quitting, firing, unsubscribing, uninstalling, disconnecting, breaking ties, breaking commitments, and getting rid of a lot of the things you own. But that makes life harder. And hardest of all, it means letting go of big parts of your identity. No more Superman self-image. It's admitting you can't do it all. You'll disappoint people that depend on you. You'll say no to almost everything.

5:51It's kind of a sad mantra. No, no, no, no, sorry, no, no. But maybe you don't really want a simple life. Maybe your deepest joy comes from all your entanglements. Friends who depend on you. Services and subscriptions and assistants and pets and tools of titans that make your life easier. You probably have a career and a spouse and a child and a hobby and a pet and a home. And I doubt you want to get rid of all but one of those. So you have different aspects, and that's that. But you can still simplify your life within each identity. Instead of intertwining them, untangle them and keep them separate.

6:44When focused on one, give it your full attention and make the rest disappear. Like in my case, when I'm with my boy, my phone is off, I'm unreachable, and if I think of anything else, then like meditation, I let it go, and I bring my full attention back to him. Within each of your aspects, you can be temporarily simple. Your phone is the enemy of this since it intertwines everything. Anyway, enough preface. Tim, you asked for my three major simplifications. Number one, no subscriptions. No Spotify, no Netflix, no memberships, no monthly obligations. No mortgage, no employees, no team, no publisher, no contracts.

7:33Nobody depending on me except my boy. We all draw the line somewhere. Number two, programming. For me, this was huge, but most of your audience can't relate, so I'll make this quick for my fellow programmers. I simplified my computer programming code so it has no dependencies, no external libraries. If something really matters to me, I code it myself. If I don't want to code it myself, then it must not be that important, and I do without it. It's harder up front to make what I need, but long-term it makes everything objectively simpler, easier to understand, maintain, and change. Long-term, it feels better, and feelings matter.

8:22To my fellow programmers listening, go find my code on GitHub and email me if you want. I love talking tech. Number three, building a house from scratch. I mentioned this briefly on our last podcast and I got so many emails about it. I didn't like living in existing houses full of shit I don't need. So I bought a piece of off-grid land in the forest in New Zealand. Then my son and I started living full-time in a tiny cabin there to see what we really need. Starting from scratch makes you question the necessity of everything. Do I really need lights? Do I really need curtains? Do I really need a kitchen?

9:06Do I really need an indoor bathroom? Instead of assuming I do, I try living without it in practice, instead of just in theory. It's no by default, and a very reluctant yes only when proven to be necessary. In all three of my examples here, life would be easier up front if I said yes instead of no. But long term, my life is objectively simpler without them. Less comforts, but less complexity Less dependencies, less obligations Less to maintain Easier to change Like a hermit crab The less you're bound to, the easier it is to grow It's thinking long-term versus short-term Deep-happy versus shallow-happy It makes me deeply happy to shed some comforts in return for a simple life, simple code, simple home.

10:10It's easy at first to make your life complex, but it's a long-term trap. It's hard at first to make your life simple, but it's a deeper long-term benefit for the peace of mind, self-reliance, control, and freedom to change. Hey, it's Seth Godin. I'm an author of 21 bestsellers, a daily blogger, an entrepreneur, and a teacher. And I'm thrilled to be with you today talking about the hard work of simplifying. I start with the idea that it's hard work because if it was easy, you would have done it already. We are surrounded by systems, invisible systems, persistent systems, systems that push us to be stuck where we are.

11:04And if we're going to leverage our agency, take advantage of our freedom, and change the systems around us, it helps to begin by acknowledging it's not easy. So there are a few things that I would like to share. Simple ways to simplify, but they weren't easy. The first one is this. real clarity about what it's for and who it's for, particularly the who. Start with who. This work you are doing, who is it trying to please? If you're trying to make the stock price go up, make the stock price go up. But don't be surprised that the kid down the street isn't impressed with what you do for a living. If you are writing something for people who speak English, Don't be upset if someone who speaks Italian can't read what you wrote.

12:00Make hard decisions, difficult choices about who it's for, and then ignore everyone else. So if you write a book and someone gives you a one-star review on Amazon, they are telling you nothing about how good the book is. All they're telling you is that it wasn't for them. No reason to read that. they weren't on your list of who it's for. Again and again, when I come back to the discipline of being clear about who I am here to serve, I can then highlight whether I've made a good decision or not about that who, and then I can go back to work. Number two, finding clarity about the gray areas. Because it's when there are gray areas, when we have to constantly analyze left or right, up or down, a little bit more, or a little bit less, things get complicated.

13:02I begin with this. Budgets and deadlines. Choose to be a professional. Never go over budget. Never miss a deadline. That's simple. When you run out of money or you run out of time, you're done. You don't have to wheedle or plead or negotiate or rob Peter to pay Paul. When you run out of money or you run out of time, you're done. This makes you much more focused when you accept a budget, when you accept a deadline, because you have a code. You're not going to miss either one. second yeses and nos make your yes mean yes make your no mean no say your no quite clearly without offending people but with clarity get it over with no i won't be able to do that yes i can take this on when we are clear about what's a yes and what's a no life gets much simpler.

14:10It doesn't get easier. It's easier to just sort of waffle your way through and see what happens. But with the simplicity comes leverage, comes clarity, and then we can get to work. The third one, a tiny one. Don't go to a meeting if a memo will suffice. In big organizations, this can save you 30 hours a week. But even as a soloist, as a freelancer, it forces us into clarity. Say what you need to say and move on. Conversations are great. I'm in favor of conversations. But meetings? Meetings almost always make things complicated. And the last one I'll share with you is personal time boundaries, which is a version of budgets and deadlines.

15:00We make a promise to ourselves. When are we on the hook for work and when are we not? You can't shortcut your way to success by spending more time than everyone else. You're going to run out of time anyway. So when I add all this up, it means no social media unless it serves the project. No reading of reviews unless you're doing it in a way that's going to make your work actually better. Don't take a gig where you can't do a good job and be happy about doing it. And tell the same story to everyone. It makes it much easier to keep your life organized, and that makes it simple. We have plenty of horsepower, plenty of ideas, plenty of energy to do extraordinary work.

15:53But then, the systems make things complicated. Resist the easy path of making it more complicated. When you make it simple, you put yourself on the hook. On the hook to show up, to do what you said you were going to do, and to do it with grace and care. Work that matters for people who care. Here's the thing. Nobody signs up for a complicated life. Nobody signs up to find themselves wasting a lot of time in a swamp of complications. We get there drip by drip, bit by bit, compromise by compromise. We get there trying to play it safe, spreading things out instead of being specific. So, a few really specific examples from me, so you can think about the ramifications and repercussions of deciding to play it simple.

16:48For example, I don't go to meetings. I don't watch television on my own. I don't look at Facebook or Twitter. If you get rid of these four things, how many hours a day would be freed up? It would make your life simpler. Also, the stakes would be much higher because you'd have to put yourself on the hook for specific things, things you got great at because of the things you just gave up. or figuring out what you stand for. When I got to business school, I looked at the cases that they were giving people. There were about eight pages of prose and eight pages of spreadsheets. And I realized professors needed to have students who, when they called on them to analyze the case, would give them the kind of feedback that they needed to keep the discussion going.

17:44So I decided on that first day to simplify my life and never do a spreadsheet. That if a professor called on me and asked me for a numerical analysis, I would simply say, I didn't have one. It wouldn't take long for professors to realize that they could embarrass me if they wanted to, but then the class wouldn't flow. But in exchange for that simplification, I had to be really ready and really good at coming up with something useful for the prose section, something that would be referred to at least twice through the rest of the discussion. By focusing on that, by simplifying, I put myself on the hook and it ended up becoming part of what I stood for.

18:27Same thing with building a reputation for doing offbeat sort of book projects, at the same time saying I will never miss a deadline and I will never go over budget. Made my life simpler, but it also made it a bit scarier. One more example, also very prosaic, makes things simpler and makes things harder. When I give presentations, and I've given more than a thousand of them around the world, I have a very specific rider about how I do it. I don't change the rules. I don't have a discussion with the client saying, do you want me to do it this way or do you want me to do it that way? My friend Simon Sinek, he shows up, he wants a flip pad.

19:10Me, I show up and I say, I will not work in the round because no audience member has ever said, oh, it was great that way. I got to see their back half the time. And I always use the same tech setup. Why? It's not because I don't like exploring new ideas. It's because by simplifying the way I do one thing, I open the door to make other things richer, deeper, and more complicated.

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22:22Hi, I'm Martha Beck. I'm an author, a coach, podcaster, mom. and I'm here to tell you about one decision that radically simplified my entire life. It also helped me create this deep sense of meaning and purpose and peace that I can always access now, so I highly recommend it. It started when I was 29 years old. I made a decision to follow the experience of joy above all other factors or considerations. I don't just mean any positive feeling. Like we can feel happy, we can feel up when we're manic, when we're on drugs, when we buy something that we don't need and get a dopamine hit. In fact, almost all the things that we turn to to feel better create that jolt of dopamine and other hormones in the brain that we come to crave.

23:17And then we have to do more and more and more to feel as happy as we did the first time we did that. So that's not really functional. What I'm talking about is a sort of quiet release that resonates through every aspect of our nervous systems. When we connect with it, all our muscles relax, and you can't fake that. When you think of somebody you love and you hold their image in your mind, your muscles will relax as long as there's no argument going on. And we may breathe more deeply, especially exhaling, like that sigh of relief. We may smile spontaneously, even if there's nobody there to see it.

24:05And we feel a sense of lifting or opening. It is a physical and emotional sense of freedom. So, once I'd made this decision to follow only that sensation, my way of charting a course through life became really radically simplified. It wasn't always easy, but it was very simple. So the only rule was, if it feels like true joy, go toward it. If it feels like misery and pain, go away from it. And here's the kicker, no matter what. So I began following this credo, and it was like playing a game of, you're getting warmer, you're getting cooler. If it's more like joy, I'm getting warmer. If it's less like joy, if it's more tense, I'm getting cooler.

24:55And I found that even when something felt daunting or frightening, it was clear and simple. You need a bit of practice to access the sensations. But once you get there, if you can feel any trace of joy in the body, heart, mind, soul, it becomes really distinct. You can use it as your getting warmer, getting colder measurement. So I started doing this no matter what. That included breaking the rules of a lot of relationships I'd had. I was because they didn't feel like joy or the way they were being played out didn't feel like joy to me. So I would either back off or I'd really change the behavior of my own behavior in that situation until I felt joy.

25:47So some people dropped away from my life. Actually, a lot of people did. I'll get to that in a minute. It won't happen to you. But after I'd been living this way for a while, even though it did create some short-term chaos in my life, I began to feel stronger and clearer than I ever had and more at peace. I had a little cluster, a large cluster actually, of autoimmune illnesses for which there was no cure, they all went into remission. People started asking me why this was happening and why I always seemed to have amazing luck. I was always in a situation that was sort of benevolent or beneficent to me.

26:31So I began talking to people and it turned into coaching people. I would say, okay, here we go. this is the instruction. Pay close attention. If something feels really great to you, if you can feel it feeding your soul and your body and your heart, maybe do a little more of that. But if something always drains you and leaves you feeling miserable, maybe do less of that. Like, this is not rocket science here. But I'm going to repeat it to make it crystal clear, because weirdly, people have trouble wrapping their minds around it. So, I'm going to say to whoever's listening, if you want to try this, if a person, a place, a task, even a thought, in fact, especially a thought, if that specific thing feels peaceful and joyful and makes your muscles relax and your face smile spontaneously, do more of it.

27:35Go toward that. And if something makes you feel crunched up and miserable, and again, this can be anything from a significant relationship or a career or anything in your life, all the way down to the most fleeting thought, if it makes you feel miserable, do less of it. So, always amazed me that people are amazed by this. It's so simple, right? But we can get caught in culture and pressured to do things that don't bring us joy. So, to my own astonishment, I made an entire career out of teaching people to adopt this one incredibly simple but radically honest approach to life. So, what prompted this?

28:22When I was 29, I had surgery, and while I was in surgery, I had a near-death-like experience, and there was a bright light that appeared. Maybe it was my brain. Maybe it was, I don't know, some mystical being. I don't know. But its presence filled me with a level of joy that I'd never remembered experiencing before, and it seemed to communicate with me. Again, could be my subconscious. And it said, your entire task in life is to live in a way that feels like you're feeling now. So I very suddenly made a total commitment to joy, and I never went back on it. And some chaos did result. Everything that wasn't working in my life left me, or I left it.

29:10And in my case, that meant my entire culture, because I'd grown up in a very, very, very deeply dogmatic religion. I left that. That meant that I left my family of origin. They stopped talking to me. I eventually left my marriage, my job, my career, my house that I was living in at the time, pretty much everything that gave me my identity but also created harm or exhaustion. All those things left with astonishing speed. I felt grief and fear while this was happening, but those emotions were now overlaid on a sort of bedrock of peace. something I think came from the deepest part of me beginning to trust that I would actually take care of it.

29:56What was hard? What was easy? It was very hard to keep my promise when in relationship with others who didn't approve. It was hard to face the judgment of people who didn't go along with my new credo. But my life as a whole became so much easier. It was so easy to tell only the truth. Lies and secrets are very hard on the emotions. What has been the payoff? Every single moment of pure delight or deep meaning I've experienced since, and there have been so, so, so, so many. The payoff was finding my way to wonderful relationships. The payoff was doing only the work I love in this world. So the sense of purpose, the sense of being on purpose, never leaves me.