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

Hello, 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/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.

You 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 long-time 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.

From 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.

And 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." And I've applied this in my own life in a lot of different places.

So my startup vacation/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/newbooks.

That 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.