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

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Many of us feel like we’re drowning in invisible complexity. So I wanted to hit pause and ask a simple question: What are 1-3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026? To explore that, I invited five long-time listener favorites: Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman.This episode is brought to you by:Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: Shopify.com/timHelix Sleep premium mattresses: HelixSleep.com/TimTimestamps:Intro: [00:00:00]Maria Popova [00:01:49]Morgan Housel [00:04:40]Cal Newport [00:12:20]Craig Mod [00:24:04]Debbie Millman [00:33:08] More about today's guests:Maria Popova (@mariapopova) thinks and writes about our search for meaning, lensed sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. Her books and projects include Traversal, The Universe in Verse, Figuring, The Coziest Place on the Moon, and An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. His book The Psychology of Money has sold more than three million copies and has been translated into 53 languages. Morgan is also the author of Same As Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes and The Art of Spending Money.Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. His latest book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.Craig Mod (@craigmod) is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He also writes the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more. Debbie Millman (@debbiemillman) has been named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and one of the most influential designers working today by Graphic Design USA. She is the host of Design Matters—a great show and one of the world’s longest-running podcasts. She is also chair of the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, editorial director of Print magazine, a Harvard Business School Case Study, and a member of the board of directors at the Joyful Heart Foundation.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss 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 overwhelmed. 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 26? 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 Siverr, 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. few steps towards simplification. Optimal, minimal.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now I've received an appropriate time. What if I get the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endosclerity. Me, Tim Ferriss show. 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 cherish quotients. 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 roil with the magma of yes. And the second thing is very kindred to the first. Some years ago,

I emailed a poet I know, who is 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. Hey, Tim Ferriss listeners, thanks for having me. My name is Morgan Howzel. 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 Markell, where I'm on the board of jobs. 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 are 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 U.S. 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. The other reason I do it, and I think this gets lost, is there's a lot of evidence that how well you do over your lifetime as an investor has less to do with the returns that you earn in any given year or any given decade and more just how long can you do it for. If your goal is to not outperform your peers this quarter or this year, if your goal is, to maximize wealth over the course of your life, pretty much the variable that matters more than anything is just how long you do it for. And I know that if I can be an average investor for an above average period of time,

I'm going to outperform the huge, huge majority of investors. If I can be a passive investor for 50 years, you will probably, after taxes and fees, end up in the top, I don't know, two or three percent of investors, maybe the top 1% of investors just by doing nothing. And maybe that last point is the most important. You're getting all this for doing nothing, for just sitting back and passively owning a slice of capitalism. How do you factor in that ease?

And so if like let's take an active investor who is working 40, 50, 80 hours a week tracking markets. And maybe they love it and they enjoy it. It's their hobby. But let's say they do that and they outperform me by, you know, 50 basis points per year, whatever it might be. How do you factor in the fact that I got my return for doing nothing? and somebody else got it for lots and lots of work and stress and whatever it might be. And so I think when you put all that together, I want to minimize the biases that I and everybody has in the world. I think if I can do that, I'll actually end up in the top 1% of investors over the course of my life,

and I'll do it for virtually no effort. There's a psychological cost of putting up with the volatility, but I can spend the time that I would have spent trying to track the global economy and trends and use that time in my career, if that's outside of investment. my family, my health, my hobbies, those kind of things. The second thing I've done has to do with my relationship with the news. And I would sum it up like this. I think a really good heuristic for your relationship with information is read more history and fewer forecasts.

As simple as it gets. Now, if you are to scroll most people's social media timeline, if they're interested in the news, whether that is business news, economic news, political news, science news, whatever might be, the vast majority of it is forward-looking predictions. It's maybe here's what happened today, and here's what that means is going to happen tomorrow. It's very predictive. And of course, if you're even a loose amateur student of history, you know how difficult the history of predictions are. It's just a very difficult thing to do. The world is so much more complex than we want to make it out to be. And so when we're trying to predict what's going to happen next, it's very, very

difficult. A little side note, because I just watched it and just finished it this week. If you watch or read the book. It's called 112263. It's a book written by Stephen King, unbelievable book about a guy who basically finds a time machine and goes back in time to prevent JFK from being assassinated. And he does this. He goes back in time. He prevents it. He thinks he saved the world and there's going to be no Vietnam War and whatever. And then he comes back to the present day and realizes that because he screwed with a little bit of history in 1963, the present world completely fell to pieces. And so when he comes back in time,

it's like a mad max scenario. And I think that general idea that trends are very, very difficult to extrapolate and to figure out what's going to happen in the future, particularly if we're talking about long periods of time,

is very difficult. And so I don't spend a lot of time doing it or reading it. What I do want to spend a lot of time doing in my life is reading history. And I think if you immerse yourself in history, any kind of history,

business history, political history, military history, whatever it might be, even if you're looking at just the last hundred years, just in your own country, you become familiar with a lot of the psychological trends that repeat, and you see over and over and over again. And so if you spend time doing that, you understand how people are influenced by incentives, how whole cultures fall into traps of greed and fear and blindness to the problems that they're causing themselves and the problems that are causing in the world, you become very familiar with big, broad trends. And once you become familiar with those and spend most of your time studying that stuff,

your ability to filter the news, the current news, is much stronger. And you can read the news in a much more simplified manner. You can run through the headlines and very quickly tell. That headline's not important. I'm not going to care about that six months from now or a year from now. It's not important the slightest. This thing about this new technology or whatever this might be or this example in the news of people falling for the traps of green and fear, that's pretty interesting.

Let me read that and wrap my head around it. Contextualize within the big models that you've learned from history. I think it's made my relationship with the news simpler and healthier. And I think if you don't have those big trends of human behavior in your head that you learn from history, it's very easy to get stuck in these wormholes of reading the news of every headline seems like it's a disaster. And every headline seems like it's something you need to pay attention to that's going to change the rest of your life. And there's a great quote that I love from an author named Kelly Hayes. And she says, when you haven't engaged with history, everything feels unprecedented.

I think that's a great way to summarize that. That's what I got for you. Thanks so much for listening. And thank you for Tim and the rest of his team for doing this. Hi, I'm Cal Newport. I'm a computer science professor and a technology theorist. I write and podcast about seeking depth and an increasingly distract. acted world. What I want to talk about here is simplifying. Now, I want to establish something

right off the bat. The entire reason why I'm a professor and a writer for my job and not say like a technology executive or a startup founder who's made a bunch of money is that my body cannot handle busyness. When I have too many things to do and my calendar is filled with appointment after appointment, this does not energize me. This does not excite me. I get anxious. I get stressed out. What I need in my life is autonomy and space to work on my own terms to produce cool things over a long amount of times, not to do a lot of stuff in the short term. This has caused me to have to continually readjust what's going on in my life to make sure that this busyness does not get out of control. I have to continually simplify to keep my lifestyle something that I can actually tolerate. So I want to give you two examples about this from my actual life. the first has to do with the opportunities that I get offered because as a writer and a podcaster,

I'm relatively successful at what I do. That's the years have gone on when I've gotten better. So have the opportunities and offers that come my way. I'm talking about like traveling to really cool places, chances to hang out with famous, really interesting people, stupid amounts of money being thrown my way. I mean, I'm talking about like a two-day trip that they're offering you healthily more than my annual professor salary. What I've learned over the years is that I basically have to make no my default answer.

Here's the problem. If you try to put in a triage rule, here is how I evaluate if something is good enough for me to actually spend time doing it. I found that whatever rule I came up with, too many things actually satisfied that rule. There are too many good enough offers coming my way that I would end up becoming busy anyways. And I would go into a cycle where I'd be completely overloaded. I'd get anxious and resentful. And then in reaction, I'd angrily say no to everything else. And I would tell people, they don't care, but I would tell them, I am so busy. I can't possibly do this.

Like they care. Like they need to know why you can't do something. And then I would cycle down to doing nothing. Then I would cycle up to being too busy, getting anxious and upset. And this was not healthy. So I realized no just has to be more or less my default answer to keep my life. at the level of simplicity that I personally need to thrive. So now I basically, when it comes to these type of offers, I'm really only agreeing if it's something I can bring my family to and it's basically funding a vacation that we want to do otherwise or if it's something that's cool and super convenient.

Now here's the thing. In addition to like, you know, missing out on money and contacts and book sales or whatever, I'm also clearly missing out on cool experiences by doing this. Like I'll give you an example. For over a year, master class was asking me like, hey, will you do a master class? We think your topic is well matched to our audience. And my default answer was no.

Like that sounds like a hassle. And it would be cool, but I don't want hassle. So no, no, no, no. But eventually we found a way to make it work. I mean, they were really accommodating like, look, we can just do this in D.C. It's not going to be a big deal. I talked to some other people who have done master classes. I was like, you know what?

Maybe I'll do this. This is convenient enough. And I did. And you know what? It was really cool. They rented a house. They had a crew of 20 people. It was like a movie.

set were the only talent, and I'm putting ferocious air quotes around this was me. So you got to meet interesting people. The director had worked on a bunch of television shows I know. The makeup artists had just been working on Ryan Cougler's sinners. The class, which actually just came out is like really good. I was like, you know, I probably should have just done this originally. And who knows how many other things like this that are pretty cool that I'm missing out on. But here's the thing.

I realized over time, that's okay. The goal with me simplifying the things I say yes to is not. not to try to avoid bad things, not like I need to get rid of these bad things out of my life so I can focus more on the things I really like. It's instead trying to hit an ideal lifestyle. And for me, my ideal lifestyle isn't too busy. All right, let me give you another example. This has to do with my academic life. This was a complicated one for me. I'm a computer scientist by training. I got my doctorate at MIT. I worked under Nancy Lynch in a Theory of Distributive Systems Group. I specialize in distributed algorithm theory with a focus on shared channels and really my sub-specialty, because you all care about this is lower bounds for randomized algorithms. And that's what I do. And I was pretty good at

that. And, you know, I became a professor at Georgetown to work on doing distributed algorithm theory, supervising grad students, getting grants, writing papers, trying to win awards, etc. So this is what I did. I also was always a writer. I wrote my first book where I was an undergraduate. And so I sort of had writing going on, but it was on the side. And these weren't at the time major books. And it was just something I started as an undergraduate as a grad student to make some extra money. And I kept going. These two worlds collided in 2016. This is right around the time I was about to go up for 10 years as a professor. And I published my book Deep Work, which was actually my fifth book, because I started early. I published this book Deep Work, and it did really well. I mean,

it wasn't meant to be some major launch or whatever. It wasn't meant to be the big book of the year, but it's something about it hit a chord. And that book started to do really well. like 2 million copies, 45 languages type of well. That began to change things for me, especially as I kept writing books and I started podcasting. That part of my life shifted from being almost like a hobby to something that I was really well known for. And now I had two major lives going on at the same time,

wrangling my career as a writer, while also wrangling my career as a professor and a theoretician. And it was a lot to try to do both of these things. Because there's a lot of logistics and overhead involved with both of those worlds. There's a lot of work involved with both of those worlds. A lot of thinking goes into proving theorems and a lot of thinking goes into trying to write a book. You have to do these things at the same time. It also created like really sort of schizophrenic experiences where you would go from a small computer science conference,

you know, where you're essentially taking the super shuttle over to like present the paper. And there's like 20 people there. And then you would fly to Malibu and a driver is taking you to YouTube. your, you know, Oceanside suite where you've been, you know, a handler brings you to stage to give this one hour talk, just pain, you know, it really became this weird mixed world. And it was too complicated. But I didn't know what to do. I love being a professor, right?

I've been an academia in my entire life and I love writing. I just love thinking, like, what was I going to do here? And the key was simplify what's going on with unification. So the discovery I had is like, well, wait a second. This book I wrote Deep Work, which is that. It's 10th year anniversary. That book was about technology disrupting our ability to work well and what you should do about it. My next book was called Digital Minimalism.

That was about technology. My next book after that was called A World Without Email. That book was about technology. A lot of what I was doing on my podcast was technology. I started writing for The New Yorker. A lot of what I was covering for the New Yorker was technology. And then around this time, as if the point wasn't being made clear enough to me, the university where I worked started a focus on digital ethics and they created the Center for Digital Ethics and asked me to be involved.

And I realize, wait a second, these aren't two different worlds. I'm a computer scientist and I'm writing about the impacts of the type of technologies that computer scientists create and what we should do about it. Oh, this is the same world. I could be an academic that focuses on technology and its impacts, the ethics of technology. And this is a more recent change I've made and is brand new and I'm still trying to adjust to it. But at least for now, I have put a pause on doing distributed algorithm theory and supervising doctoral students working on distributed algorithm theory and going to distribute algorithm theory and going to distribute algorithm. and getting grants to fund students to work on the street of diagram theory. I put a pause on that to say all of my effort is aimed at the same thing, thinking and writing

about technology and its impacts on humans flourishing and depth and what we can do about it. And that simplified everything. That's a completely reasonable thing. I'm now a full professor, so I'm at a stage of my career where I have flexibility and I should be exploring other intellectual avenues. Now, my writing, my podcasting, my article writing, all of this is now unified towards a common topic. I simplified what was going on in my career. Now again, this involves cutting off options. It involves cutting off opportunities. It also means, you know, I could be doing one thing

maybe even better. To me, the right way to think about simplifying is lifestyle design. I'm going to use Tim's word here, lifestyle design. You know what conditions of your day-to-day existence are best for you, the conditions in which you, you as an individual, are going to thrive. And the whole game is designing a lifestyle that matches that. And for me, that required a high level of simplicity. I needed autonomy and I needed a lack of busyness. And so I don't think about any of this in terms of what's being left on the table. I think about it in terms of like how much I get to enjoy my day-to-day life when I'm successful with these efforts. So I still struggle with this. I constantly have to cycle and resimplify.

Sometimes I go too far. But it's something I think about a lot. It's probably something you should think about a lot as well. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a midnight lux mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something they comment on without any prompting for me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots.

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ready for Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash Tim. One more time, that's Shopify.com slash Tim. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Hi, I'm Craig Mod, writer, photographer, and Long Hall Walker, who has lived most of his adult life in Japan, actually pretty much all of it. My most recent book is called Things Become other things. It was published by Random House last year. I did a book before that called Kitsa by Kisa. These are both books about huge walks across Japan. I've walked from Tokyo to Kyoto three times. I've walked the Key Peninsula bunch, the Hagiaokan, the Rukuju, Rikai, all sorts of different routes all over Japan and actually all over the world at large. But in Japan, I'm mostly looking at how

the country is changing and, you know, just trying to understand things. So three decisions I've made to simplify my life. Number one, cutting out alcohol, easily the lowest energy in, biggest impact out. Simplification of my life has been to drop alcohol by the side of the road like a sack of dead cats. Stinky dead cats, I struggled mightily with alcohol abuse in my 20s and looking back, nothing made things more complicated than this very stupid, very destructive relationship between me and drinking everything I perceived as complex in my life, trying to figure out who I was, believing in that person, that that person could even exist, wanting to find a strong, meaningful partnership was made exponentially more complex by the presence of alcohol.

If I could just go back and whisper in my 19-year-old ears, hey, dude, just don't drink. And if I could have followed that, a lot of things would have been simpler. almost nothing in my 20s was made better by alcohol. And now the big question is, of course, if you're struggling with alcohol, is how do you cut the cord? That's the big conundrum with a habit and addiction like that. And for me, it was finding deep meaning in my work. It was also sort of about hitting rock bottom. That was definitely a catalyst waking up one night and just being like, really feeling

like I was at the bottom of a terrible well. But just being at the bottom of that well, I don't think is enough to motivate you to really kick the habit. You need some kind of almost like spiritual, like quote unquote higher power experience, I think to really get over an abusive relationship. Because I mean, alcohol or otherwise. For me, that was my work. I was really lucky in the sense that I had this internal compass that I've felt for my entire life that was drawing me towards a certain kind of of work, the writing, the walking I started doing. And I could see, once I acknowledged that kind of higher power in the work, every drink I took I saw and I felt in my bones as taking away from

that work. And that alone was enough for me to be able to say no, easily, consistently. And ultimately, over the long haul, that was about 18 years ago that I really decided to, okay, let's cut this out. if you don't have that purpose, it's almost impossible to cut the habit. The second big decision I made or tiny decision or whatever to simplify my life is therapy at the risk of sounding like a cliche starting therapy in earnest almost nine years ago now. It was funny. It was about nine years after I quit drinking was one of the simplest decisions I've made that's probably had one of the biggest impacts on my life and in simplifying my life through clarification. I believe that's very difficult to achieve simplicity in life and to feel purpose strongly and clearly with a muddled mind.

Kind of makes sense. And, you know, the man who doesn't know who they are can't be expected to perform at the best or to simplify their life or to make the right decisions if purpose itself feels mystical and forever off on some impossibly elusive horizon. I find that therapy when it's done really well, it cuts to the bone in a really clarifying, interesting. way. It just calls out all the bullshit-aidled voices that you carry around in your head, that you've probably been carrying around your whole life. And it just kind of calls bullshit on this. Hey, okay, let's really figure out what this voice is saying. And most of the time you realize that voice is responding to something that either hasn't been a part of your life ever or hasn't been a part of your life in, say, 30 years. In demystifying yourself and then thereby

clarifying who it is you really are and why you are the way you are, you are, you are, paradoxically, I find more freer, less limited than ever. To use a dope metaphor, we're all swimming. Some of us are swimming in clear waters than others. Fundamentally, you're not going to change the creature that you are in the water, but I do find that therapy cleans the waters quite a bit. And in those muddy waters, you just find yourself swimming in circles like an idiot. And I certainly found that to be the catalyst for reaching out nine years ago and wanting to begin therapy in earnest was even though I had achieved a certain amount of clarity and I felt a certain kind of purpose, I was still doing some dumb things in my life that felt just irreconcilable based on the

purpose that I also felt. And so these sort of circles that I found myself moving in for certain aspects of my life in order to demystify, to clarify them, I thought, okay, third party help is probably required. I don't think we can carry this weight on our own. And I did. And actually immediately I found within the first couple of weeks of therapy this incredible sense of clarity and also this vision of a better version of myself, an even better version of myself that I felt like I could become. And every week in therapy, I find myself stepping up and becoming that person. And over time, it's not just been an hour of therapy a week that becoming that person leaks out onto the sides of it. And I find that I'm more able to readily inhabit that

version of myself that I want to be. So therapy just cleans the waters, clarifies things, simplifies all of that, the act of living, and it allows you to move forward in ways that I think would be impossible on your own. And those paths that you can move forward on are much simpler than the ones I found I was moving on without therapy. And then the third decision I've made to simplify my life has been to commit to craft. Almost nothing in my life has paid bigger dividends than stopping my waffling around trying to figure out if I was an artist or a musician or a technologist or a writer or a programmer or a publisher, a photographer. No, I'm a writer. The end. And the more I've doubled down on that choice, that commitment to the craft of writing, the simpler my life

has become and the more vast my connections to beautiful, inspiring people. Everyone that I have in my life that I love and respect can be traced back almost one to one to the commitment to the craft of writing and the act of writing itself and publishing, getting things out there in the world. The more I write and the more people I reach, I find the bigger, the impact of not only my present writing, but also stuff I've written in the past. It sort of pays compounding dividends. And the more all of that is happening, the more inspiring people enter my orbit. And when I say craft, committing to that craft of writing is not just dashing things off here and there. It is a full sort of almost maniacal, pathological commitment where you'll spend weeks and months and years

working on certain texts. And it involves a lot of reading, editing, conversations, engagement with the world of literature as a whole. That's what it means in my mind to commit to craft is you're not just committing to hiding in a cave, typing. You're engaging in the case of writing, in the case of writing that I like to do, a case of writing that moves me that I feel most drawn to. It's literary, nonfiction, literary fiction, universe of writing. In my mind, look, I'm still a photographer and I love technology and following how it's changing the world and thinking about its impact on society. But these interests and identities that I've carried all throughout my life to a certain degree or another, are all mediated now through writing.

And instead of trying to be a jack of 50 trades, especially as I was in my teens and 20s, which I kind of had to be to a certain degree. I chose one trade to commit to, which is the craft of writing. That's it. I mean, of course, friends and family are omnipresent, big part of things. But the foundations that allow me to be present for them and to be the best version of myself for them and for everyone else out there lies in the three decisions that I've outlined here. They've made things simpler and, God damn, they've made things better.

The four-month decision by Debbie Millman. In 2016, I turned down a job offer to become the CEO of the company where I had been working for over 20 years. At the time, I was president of the firm. My partners and I had sold the company to Omnicom in 2008. I had a five-year earnout, which meant I was obligated to stay there through 2012. After that, I was free to leave. And that is exactly what I was planning to do. For years, I'd been fantasizing about a different life,

a life with more writing and creativity, more teaching, more experiments, a life that felt simpler and less operational. less quarterly. But when the earnout ended, I didn't leave. I told myself at the time there were many reasons, money, security, status, fear, power, identity. I acknowledged it was hard for me to walk away from something I had helped build. It was scary to leave a place where I could see the evidence of the biggest successes of my life all around me. And it was difficult to disentangle what I was running day to day from what I wanted to run towards. So I stayed.

Three years went by, but by 2015, I finally mustered up the courage to make my move. It wasn't particularly dramatic. It really was just time. And then, I was offered an even bigger job.

My existing CEO, a man I worked with for the entirety of my 20 years at the firm, was looking to transition to chairman. And then he offered me his job, CEO, the chief executive officer. On paper, it was extraordinary. I would be one of a small number of female CEOs within Omnacom. I would be one of the few openly LGBTQ leaders helming a branding consultancy. I would have full authority to shape

the future of the agency I loved. It felt like an honor. It felt historic and power. It felt powerful. But it also felt heavy. I told myself I should want it. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I told myself that declining it might mean I lacked ambition or courage or vision. As I considered what to do, I wondered if I turned it down, I would regret it forever, if I would disappoint people, if I would disappoint myself. And then I couldn't decide. For four months, I vacillated. I made spreadsheets and pro-conn lists. I sought advice. I talked to friends. I consulted with my mentors. And every time I tried to land on a yes, something in me resisted. And I continued to vacillate. One afternoon, after yet another conversation about my indecision, my very patient CEO said something to me

that changed everything. He said, Debbie, anything that takes you for me. months to decide might mean you really don't want to do it. And suddenly, it was as if someone had opened a window in a sealed room. I had been framing my decision as bravery versus fear, as ambition versus retreat, and as success versus surrender. What if the four months weren't indecision, but rather clarity trying to surface? His sentence gave me the permission to admit what I didn't want and permission to prioritize alignment over advancement. And so, I turned the CEO job down. I remember the moment distinctly, but it wasn't cinematic.

There was no swelling music. There was no dramatic speech. But there was immediate, unmistakable relief. And yes, it was also bittersweet as I went through the realization that when you close one door, you're closing a version of yourself, but I have never once regretted it. Not once in the 10 years since I made the decision to step into the life I now lead. Turning down that job simplified my life in ways I couldn't have predicted. Instead of scaling an organization, I began expanding my ideas.

I continued my writing and my podcast, taught more intentionally, and began taking my illustration work more seriously. And I invested in doing projects that felt like extensions of my values rather than my title or my portfolio. Something else happened to. My ambition changed shape. For much of my career, ambition looked like assent, more responsibility, more authority, more achievement, more recognition. Becoming CEO would have been impressive to who I was, but it would not have been aligned with who I wanted to be. There's a particular kind of simplicity that comes not from doing less, but from doing what feels really true. Simplicity isn't only about minimalism. I think it's also about coherence. I often think about how seductive power can be,

especially for women, especially for queer people, especially for anyone who has had to fight for legitimacy. When an institution offers you the top seat at the table, it's heady. Feels like validation. But validation is not the same thing as fulfillment, and power is not the same thing as purpose. Simplifying my life didn't mean shrinking it. What I wanted, though I didn't fully have the language for it at the time, was not more control. I wanted more freedom.

That freedom has allowed me to build a very different kind of life. This meant removing the parts that no longer fit, so that the parts that did could expand. And to me, that has been the greatest simplification of all. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every single. Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short,

a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Not to be a salty old dog, but in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e-commerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried it hard, but man was it bad.

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