Please enjoy this transcript of a special compilation episode on how to simplify your life. It features wisdom and advice from Chip Conley, Greg McKeown, David Allen, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Oliver Burkeman.
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How to Simplify Your Life — Tips from Oliver Burkeman, Chip Conley, Elizabeth Gilbert, and More
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CHIP CONLEY
Hi, I’m Chip Conley, the founder and executive chair of MEA, and also formerly the modern elder of Airbnb and the founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre, the second largest boutique hotel company in the US.
Tim asked me to talk about simplifying life. My God, I don’t know why he would ask me because I tend to complicate my life, but I can say that I’ve had two experiences in my life where my health forced me to simplify my life. And then I could—I learned some new tools and practices. So let me, let me give a little storytelling. When I was in my late 40s, I had this boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre, which means joy of life, that I’d started in San Francisco.
Ultimately, we had 52 hotels around California. We were the second largest boutique hotelier in the US. But in my late 40s, my life was really complicated. We were going through the dot-com bust and 9/11, and then we were going through the Great Recession, and I didn’t want to be doing this anymore. And I ended up having an NDE, a near-death experience. And NDE happened because I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic.
So I was giving a speech on stage in St. Louis and I went flatline. And I ended up in the hospital for three days because they were trying to figure out what went wrong. Yeah, why did I go flatline nine times over 90 minutes? Bottom line was that experience woke me up. The hotelier needed a wake-up call. And the wake-up call was this. I had started that company because I wanted creativity and freedom.
But with 3,500 employees and going through our second once-in-a-lifetime downturn in the same decade, I realized that the identity that I was attached to—being the founder and CEO and the VIP status I had—it was less important to me than my health. And while it wasn’t—I didn’t have a heart attack. It was an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. It might as well have been a heart attack because I was living my life that was a very complicated life.
And so I decided to do something that I call mindful decoupling. Mindful decoupling. This is not unconscious or conscious uncoupling. This is not a Gwyneth Paltrow thing. Mindful decoupling means I said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next, but I know I’m not supposed to do this anymore. I don’t know what my next identity is going to be, but I know that the identity that I have been so reliant upon, the VIP status, and now I may be a PIP, a previously important person. I know that that is what I need to move toward. I need to move toward this fertile ground, this chrysalis space.”
You know, between caterpillar and butterfly, there is a chrysalis. In the chrysalis, the transformation happens. And what I learned by selling my company at the bottom of the Great Recession, by actually changing a lot of my habits and even changing friendships and ending a romantic relationship that wasn’t working anymore, but I wasn’t willing to leave it because I felt like it was my life preserver.
I was holding on to it at a difficult time. I made space in my life. And what I wanted to say is if you are a talented person, create space in your life, especially in midlife. I have become sort of an expert on midlife. And midlife is where we actually have to let go of who we’ve been in order to allow something else to emerge. But in the meantime, in between, the decoupling that has to happen is you have to be willing to let go of the identity and the roles in order for something new to emerge.
I spent two years from age 50 to 52 in what I would call, or Mary Catherine Bateson, Margaret Mead’s daughter, would call the midlife atrium. So what we know about an atrium is that an atrium is a very simple space. An atrium has light and air and all kinds of beauty that allows you to see what’s going to actually emerge from that space. During—between age [unclear], I spent a lot of time in a hammock in my backyard.
I did a lot of reading. I got really curious. Curious—curiosity is not something you do when you’re really busy. So I got curious about hot springs. So I went around the world exploring hot springs and learning about the geothermal properties of hot springs. I got interested in emotions because when I was struggling through my emotions in my late 40s, I didn’t feel like I was emotionally fluent. And ultimately I wrote a book called Emotional Equations, which became a New York Times bestseller.
But the thing that was the most fun was I decided I wanted to go around the world and become the world’s leading expert on festivals. I was the first board member of Burning Man. Who knew Burning Man had a board? But the six founders of Burning Man came to me and said, “Chip, we’re going to take our non—our for-profit and turn it into a nonprofit. We want you to be part of the board.” So I spent two years, you know, going around the world.
I went to 36 festivals in 16 countries just in one year. I brought Tim, Tim Ferriss, to my 50th birthday party at Burning Man. And I learned an awful lot about the cultural curiosity that happens in festivals around the world. And then at age 52, in the midst of all that, I got asked by the three founders of Airbnb, a company nobody had heard of, but was also based in San Francisco like I was, to join them.
And so I created this space, I simplified my life. I went out and had fun. I got curious. And out of that fertile ground, that good soil, came this Airbnb opportunity, which was quite beautiful. I loved it. And I spent seven and a half years there helping the founders of Airbnb turn that little tech startup into the world’s most valuable hospitality company. So that’s one experience about simplifying life. And from that simplified life, something beautiful grew.
The more recent experience that I’m going to talk about, I talked with Tim about it in 2019 when I was on his show. Tim surprised me. He showed up in Austin and we were going to have lunch before we did the show. And I was talking about the fact that I had found out I had cancer, prostate cancer. At that point, it was stage one. And we talked a lot about it on the show. So over the course of the last seven years, since that time, seven and a half years, my cancer’s moved from stage one to stage two to stage three.
And I have learned that I’ve done what I’ve always done. I’ve made my life more complicated, but it’s not so much just being complicated. It’s like I have such a sense of calling in what I’m doing that I take on a lot. And when I have the sense—I’m now at stage three with my cancer—I have this thing called holy urgency.
I call it holy urgency. The sense like I have a calling and I’m supposed to pursue it because I don’t know how much time I have left. But it actually makes me a little bit manic. And the thing I’m learning right now is, how do I turn manic into magic? It’s just changing one letter to go from manic to magic. And so the kinds of things I’m doing to simplify my life, to try to actually be more magical in my approach to my calling: Number one is I do a Sunday sabbatical as much as I can.
I try to take Sundays off. And I try to do that, and I try to actually not look at my—I go offline for the day. And I do that partly because it’s great for my nervous system. It’s great for my creativity. It gives me time to meditate for an extended time. It gives me time to take long walks.
I’m also doing something this coming February that I’m really excited about. I call it the month I died. You know, I think one of the things that’s really interesting about our lives is we do a very poor job of telling people how much we love them while they’re living.
At the funeral, we do the eulogies, but we don’t do that while we’re living. And so I call this the social eulogy. So in February, I’m going to take the whole month off. Sabbatical, but I’m gonna do it in a sort of a radical kind of way. I’m gonna actually do the following. I’m gonna act—I’m gonna wake up one day, the first day of February, and say, “Who am I?” And my real name, you know, on my passport is Steve, and chip off the old block from Steve Jr. I am gonna be Steve for the month.
I have nothing on my calendar. I’m not gonna use my phone. I’m gonna have a burner phone. I am gonna simplify my life by not checking email for the whole month. I am going to just almost disappear. But what I’m going to do before I actually take this month off, that month off where no one will know where I am except for a couple of friends in case there’s an emergency—is, and I have no idea where I’m going to be, by the way. I’m going to wake up and just say, like, “Where do I want to be?” But what I’m going to do is I’m going to do these social eulogies.
I’m going to simplify my social life down to having three social eulogies. One in San Francisco, I have a lot of friends. One in Santa Fe, where MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, has a campus and I have a lot of friends. And the last one in Baja, where MEA also has another campus, where I have groups of friends. And with small groups of friends, we’re gonna actually come together, have a dinner, and we’re gonna give the eulogy for each other that we would give if we were to die tomorrow. Because when you have stage three cancer, and I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna live, I wanna hear that while I’m still living.
Because one of the things that’s beautiful about the experience I had when I was 47 years old and I had my flatline experience is what I experienced was I saw birds. During my time in that liminal space between life and death, I was in this 40-foot tall ceilinged living room and I had the capacity and ability to fly. And there were all these small birds in there and I could talk bird talk and they could talk to me.
And so they were saying to me, “Slow down. You can’t see beauty [unclear] awe unless you slow down.” So my life today in terms of simplifying my life is learning how to fuse or alchemize slowing down with holy urgency. Slowing down because often when I slow down, I have my best ideas. I have my best conversations. I feel a sense of spaciousness.
I do love my Sundays. I love my silent retreats that I do, often with MEA at one of our MEA campuses. Um, but I also have that holy urgency, that sense of purpose, that sense that what I’m supposed to do in my—with my life, I’m doing, and I feel very passionately about it. Um, so my biggest, uh, lesson in life right now is, how do you alchemize two things that sound opposites?
Slow down, holy urgency. And most importantly, I think what’s true of many people as they get closer to death—and Laura Carstensen at Stanford has proven this at the Stanford Center on Longevity—is the less perceived time you have left in your life, the more you focus on what’s important. You don’t focus on the future or the past, you focus on the present moment. And in focusing on the present moment, you often are happier. So how could you go out and focus on the present moment? How could you go out and get curious and create the space for something to emerge? I hope this was helpful.
Simplifying is something that is really bounded in wisdom. MEA is the world’s first midlife wisdom school dedicated to helping people in midlife get wiser. And the difference between knowledge and wisdom is knowledge is something you accumulate, you add. Wisdom is something you distill, you simplify. It’s like the difference between a plus sign and a division sign and the square root of something. So simplification is what wisdom is all about. Thanks so much, Tim, for letting me share this and wishing you all the best.
GREG MCKEOWN
Tim Ferriss: I write very long-winded books and I’ve done them over a long period of time. So every once in a while, I get quoted and I feel lost. So if that happens, let me know. I have everything in front of me. Could you talk about the Endowment Effect and how you turn around questions people might ask themselves about certain things, whether that is something they own or an opportunity that gets presented to them? I think this is really important.
Greg McKeown: Well, let’s use a metaphor to get to the Endowment Effect. Our closet is a pretty good metaphor for the problem and what to do about it. So for a lot of people listening, even, as you say, they don’t feel incredibly successful financially, incredibly successful in all the things in their life. Right. They probably still have more things in their closet than they actually can use usefully. It’s a bit cluttered. Maybe it’s a lot more than a bit cluttered.
I talked to somebody not too long ago and they said, “Oh, Greg, my closet – you’ve identified the pain point.” They said, “I have my closet organized by decade.” So they had organized it. I said, “You don’t have a closet, you have a museum.” They have the ‘70s and the ‘80s. She’s not using any of these things. She just has them. That’s an organized version of the problem, which is we just have so much stuff. Now that is true in the physical stuff. It’s literally true in the closet. But in the closet of our lives, it is equally true.
Now just staying with this metaphor for a moment, almost everybody has had a moment where they said, “I’ve had enough. I’m going to organize my closet.” They begin the process and they take an item off the shelf, off the floor, and they say, “It’s time to just get rid of this item.”
In the moment of picking it up and reflecting on it, as if to give it away, something mysterious, almost magical seems to happen to many of us, which is that in that moment, we think, “I’m not sure I want to get rid of it. I can use it some time in the future. So-and-so give it to me.” Something somehow in the act of giving it away, it’s harder to give it away than it was before we picked it up to give it away.
So what’s going on? It turns out there’s a heuristic, a brain heuristic pre-disposition that we have to all physical objects in our life and also all of the opportunities that we have in our life too. It is this – we value things more because we have them. That’s a good thing in certain situations. That’s why essentially owning a home is generally a good thing. People look after the home better.
It explains the phenomenon of why nobody in the history of the whole world has washed their own rental car. It’s a positive phenomenon until and unless we over-value something that we really ought not to have in the closet at all. It ought to go. It is actually not useful to us. It’s not valuable to us, but we are overvaluing it and therefore keeping it. So it’s over-valuing because we own it or it’s endowed to us.
So in our life, that is an incredibly real problem. I’ll give you an illustration. It’s not in the book but it’s something that happened to me that really hit a chord. It happened when I was staring at myself in the mirror dressed from head to toe in a stormtrooper outfit.
Tim Ferriss: Where all good epiphanies start.
Greg McKeown: And I’m looking at myself and I realize two things. I realize that I have been thinking of this moment in some small degree for 30 years. This is true. I’m standing there staring. I’m in the Halloween store. This is not a cheap suit that I’m trying on. I remember that this goes back to like when I’m 10 years old. Maybe Return of the Jedi had come out or one of the Star Wars movies.
One of my older brothers had said to me in passing but with quite a lot of enthusiasm, “Wouldn’t it be a great to own a stormtrooper outfit just like from the movies, like the real thing?” Somehow, that got lodged in me, “That’s an idea. That’s something you should pursue. That would be so cool. My older brother thinks so, so it must be so.”
Somehow in the back of my mind, there it lives unquestioned for 30 years. Finally, I’m in the store thinking about whether to buy this. In that moment, I actually did have a eureka moment, which was: “There is no part of me that wants this. It’s stayed with me, but my 40-year old self doesn’t need this. This is ridiculous. Why are you in this suit right now?” I was able to sort of separate myself from the moment. That’s exactly what I’m advocating here.
I’m saying that for a lot of us, we have a lot of – it became a shortcut phrase. My wife will say it sometimes to me now: “Is that a stormtrooper that you’re pursuing? Is that a stormtrooper opportunity?” You used to think this was the thing, but you’re pursuing it because you caught on to it. You feel a sense of this Endowment Effect, this sense of, “It’s my opportunity. It’s my thing. It’s my goal. It’s not serving me anymore.”
I think a lot of people have a lot of stormtroopers in their life. So it’s not about the closet. It’s not about the stormtrooper outfit. It’s about the stuff that really we need to get past and let go so that we can pursue the right things now, not just the things we are pursuing because at one time, we wanted to pursue them or one time, they came into our life.
Tim Ferriss: And it seems like there are a number of ways to identify these, whether they’re stormtroopers or items, opportunities that we are endowing with greater value because we have them. We either own them or are being presented with them, right? You can take let’s just say that sweater from Aunt Mildred or whatever it is. Rather than asking, “How much do I value this item?” You turn it around and ask, “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” That turnaround seems really important to me.
Or in the case of opportunities – and I’m quoting directly from you here – “How will I feel if I miss out on this opportunity?” instead of that, “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?” That strikes me as a very powerful reframe. I think it was Andy Grove at Intel who also used this. There are many other business examples, but, “If we were not already in this line of business, how much would we pay to pursue it or would we pursue it in the first place?” as a way of pruning activities and conserving resources so they could be applied to the most important things.
Greg McKeown: Yes. The idea is to trick your brain, putting it in the position where you don’t own the thing, where you don’t have the opportunity. You have to reflect on it fresh. You have to say, “Starting now, do I want this thing now? How hard would I go after this now if I didn’t own it, if I didn’t have it.” It helps us to evaluate things without this inflation of the fact that we own it, which is, of course, the Endowment Effect.
DAVID ALLEN
Tim Ferriss: What are the first questions you ask, or exercises you do, when you sit down with high-functioning but, nonetheless, overwhelmed people, to work with them? What are some of the first things that you do with them?
David Allen: Well, aside from establishing rapport.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
David Allen: Which is, “Hi,” and, “Why did you bring me in here? And what is your presenting issue, as best you can describe it?” And, “Here’s a little bit about who I am and kind of what we’re going to do.” But ideally, and over the years, I discovered the less I tell people about what we’re going to do, the better. You know, “Surprise.”
So if I just walked in cold, the tabula rasa here is, first thing I would do, Tim, with you, would be, “Let’s make sure you have an in-tray.” A physical in-tray. We need some place to throw stuff until we can make decisions about what it means and what you’re going to do about it. But we need to collect a bunch of stuff first.
So that’s what we’re going to do first is get some sort of a material version of collection, or “capturing” stuff that has people’s attention. So we just get a big stack of printer paper, a favorite pen or pencil, sit them down and say, “Okay. What’s on your mind? What has your attention?” “Oh, I need cat food. Oh, I need a life. Oh, I need a new vice president of marketing. Oh, our next vacation is coming up. Oh God, my cell phone just crapped out. The printer broke.” Yada yada.
And we literally start writing, they write, each one of those items that has their attention on a separate piece of paper, and they toss that into their in-tray. You’d be surprised by, first of all, how many people don’t have an in-tray. Or if they do have one, it’s petrified because it’s just been sitting there with crap in it for weeks.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
David Allen: We need to have some sort of clear space to just collect all that stuff to begin with. That process, Tim, takes, usually, in my experience over all these years, for the mid- to senior level professional that we actually coach with this process, it takes one to six hours, just to capture what has their attention. Not to organize it. Not to prioritize it. Not to make decisions about it. Just to identify it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s so impressive and horrifying at the same time. And I was doing prep for this conversation, I found one paragraph that struck me as important that’s related to this, I think, in some capacity. This is from an older piece in Wired, and it reads as the following.
At his seminar, Allen asks the audience to try to capture all their stuff by writing a list, and at the end of a few minutes he tells us to look at the list and think about the way it makes us feel. He guesses that our feelings include a mixture of grief and relief. The relief, he suggests, comes from the simple fact of making the list. But where does the grief come from?
And this is the quote that really caught my attention.
“These items represent agreements you haven’t kept with yourself,” Allen says. “What happens when you break an agreement with yourself is that your self-esteem plummets.”
Could you speak to this a bit? Because I would imagine a lot of folks would say, “I feel guilt, perhaps, about all of the things I haven’t done for myself or for other people.” But this grief and agreements that you haven’t kept with yourself struck me as important, and at least got my attention. Could you speak to that?
David Allen: Well, I’m going to reverse engineer a little bit and come back to the fact that your breaking of the agreement is because you’re keeping track of it in your head, and where you keep track of that has no sense of past or future. So that part of you, that little subliminal part of you, thinks you should be buying cat food 24 hours a day, or hiring a vice president 24 hours a day. That’s why it wakes you up at 3:00 in the morning. “Oh, shit, cat food. What am I going to do?” Because that thing has no sense of past or future.
So because it doesn’t, you can’t do it all. You can’t do more than one thing at a time. And so there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing all of that all the time. So talk about a ton of broken agreements. But you don’t have to finish the thing to keep your agreement. You do need to get it out of your head.
See, agreements—and this is one of the things I learned back in the old personal growth days. Agreements, there’s an automatic price you pay when you break an agreement, is you disintegrate trust, either with other people or with yourself, or both. So if you don’t want to have a broken agreement, you have three options. One is don’t make the agreement, called “No, not going to do that.” Move it to someday, maybe, or something. Keep the agreement. Go buy the cat food. Go hire the VP. Go finish the thing. Or, most importantly for most people, is renegotiate the agreement.
If I made an appointment today, for instance, Tim, as people may hear ambient noise out there. There’s construction going on. If that was too loud, I would probably have to try to renegotiate and reschedule this talk with you. And then I don’t have a broken agreement if I don’t do it, because we’ve renegotiated it.
But you can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing. So most people have just made so many more agreements than they’re aware of. So all we do in our coaching is get people aware of, “What are all the agreements you’ve made? What are all the would-, could-, should-, need-tos, ought-tos?”
And that’s one of the reasons people feel good when they make a list is they look at it and go, “Well, gee, I can’t do all this right now.” No kidding, right? And so it comes back to externalizing stuff out of your head. That’s why it’s so critical to do that. And most people, I don’t think have really understood or certainly managed themselves with an understanding of that dynamic.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Tim Ferriss: When you do say an integrity check, and I had read that when Rayya was sick, for instance, you began deleting or archiving emails without responding as a bit of a treat to yourself.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Deleting. Not archiving, deleting.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Deleting, goodbye. When you say now, check in with yourself, and decide to say no to something—let’s just, to make it easier, make it concrete, via email, you get an invitation from a friend you do actually really like with something that could plausibly advance your career or be fun, but you check in with yourself and it’s like, “Nope, this isn’t a yes.” How do you phrase your nos or declines? Do you have any particular go-to language that you’d like to use?
Elizabeth Gilbert: I just want to make sure everybody knows that this is not easy. I didn’t want to have any illusions for anybody that this is simple. And the closer the relationship, the harder it is. The closer and more intimately I’m involved with somebody, the more stakes there are for me and the harder it is for me to tell the truth. That feels like it should be—there’s a paradox, the people you love the most should be the people that you are able to be the most honest with. Well no, because they’re the people who you want to hurt the least. Right? That’s where it’s really, really hard.
There’s a couple layers of it, right? So if it’s somebody—I now treat my inbox like it’s my home because I think it’s an extension of my home. So if somebody walks into my home uninvited and announces themselves and doesn’t say how they got a key and asks for something, I delete that email. I will delete that email even if they are a producer for Good Morning America. You know, I’m just like, “I didn’t invite you in. There are proper channels, you know what they are. I don’t know how you got my personal email,” and I just, I just delete it. If I feel a sense in my sternum of offense, of feeling like this person has taken a liberty, I don’t believe that I owe them anything. I don’t believe that I owe them anything any more than if I came down to my kitchen and saw people sitting at my table who I didn’t know eating breakfast, I wouldn’t believe that I owed them to make them a cup of coffee. I’d be like, “Get out of my house. You’re not supposed to be here.” I don’t think I even owe them—I don’t even think I owe them a polite response. I owe them nothing. I didn’t ask you to come into my house, I don’t owe you anything.
That’s the easiest. Those are the ones that are easy and I now treat myself to doing that. I mean, I do that every day. I clear my inbox out very quickly that way. Then I’m entertained when they come back later and they’re like, “Just circling back,” and I’m like, “Yeah, just deleting you again.” Circle back as many times do you want, you are not coming in. So that’s simple.
Tim Ferriss: Just bumping this up because I know you—
Elizabeth Gilbert: Yeah, I’m just bumping you back—it’s like whack-a-moles. It’s like, I can do this all day. Delete, delete, delete. If it’s somebody who I care about, if it’s something that I’m interested in but I’m just not going to do it because I don’t want to, I will write back and say, “Thank you so much and I’m really honored that you invited me to this, but I’m not going to be able to do this at this time.” And I don’t feel the need to give a reason. I think a simple no is really, really good and sometimes the reason it’s good not to give an explanation is that if that person is an expert manipulator, as many of us are, that explanation will not suffice. So it won’t matter what you give as an explanation because they can come back and be like, “Well we can do it by audio,” you know? Or we can do, “Oh, well we can do it a different weekend.” Just no.
I learned a lot about this from my teacher Byron Katie, who teaches an amazing thing called The School for The Work. That’s a whole, she’s a whole ‘nother being who’s not at all living by the rules.
Tim Ferriss: She’s extraterrestrial, for sure.
Elizabeth Gilbert: She is extraterrestrial. She is the only fully enlightened human being I believe I have ever met. As such, she does not have any trouble saying an honest yes and an honest no to people.
Tim Ferriss: Just to underscore that, because I did an in-person training with her. I mean, literally no hesitation—
Elizabeth Gilbert: None.
Tim Ferriss: No struggle, no conflict.
Elizabeth Gilbert: None.
Tim Ferriss: It’s bizarre and just mesmerizing to watch.
Elizabeth Gilbert: And she loves you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.
Elizabeth Gilbert: And she loves you. There’s also no hostility.
Tim Ferriss: No offense, no hostility—
Elizabeth Gilbert: I remember seeing somebody come up to her, somebody came up to her at an event, handed her a book that they’d written, which people do to me all the time too. So I really marveled at this and they said, “I wrote this and I want to share it with you,” and she said, “Oh, sweetheart, I’m never going to read that.” True. It’s just true. “I’m never going to read that.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God, I didn’t know you could say that.” Right? It’s so—that’s amazing and she said it so lovingly like, “Oh. Oh no, I have no interest in reading that.”
She teaches—I don’t know if you did, when you took her training, did you do where she teaches a simple no and she does training on how to give a simple no?
Tim Ferriss: I don’t think we actually spent much time on that. So I would love to hear you say more. We worked on the emotional one-pages and the turnarounds.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Yeah, the turnarounds.
Tim Ferriss: We did a lot on the turnarounds, which is probably, we could do a whole episode just on that.
Elizabeth Gilbert: Everybody look up Byron Katie, she’s amazing. And if you have the means and if you have the chance to ever take her nine-day School for The Work, it’s the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself.
Tim Ferriss: Oh wow.
Elizabeth Gilbert: I say that quite simply. But she has a whole day in the nine-day School for The Work, which is about the simple no. The simple note is ways to say no. It always begins with, “Thank you,” and there’s never a “But,” because she feels that the word but is very cruel. It’s just an “And.” So it’s “Thank you” and “No.” That’s it, that’s a simple no. Then if they come back, you can say—
Tim Ferriss: Well, hold on, just to pause for a second. Is that literally the phrasing or is it just—
Elizabeth Gilbert: Yes. “Thank you” and “No.” Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. It’s a simple no. It still makes my stomach, because I’m like, “Oh, my God, you can’t just do that. You’ve got to give, you’ve got to like do the dance,” and she’s like, “You don’t have to do the dance.” And she’s the one who taught me, if the person is a good enough manipulator, it doesn’t matter what you bring, they’re going to manipulate it. Right? And the beautiful thing about a simple no is that it gives—in the jiu jitsu game, it gives somebody no weapon that they can take and bring back at you. They can say you’re being incredibly selfish and you can say, “I hear that and you might be right about that.” That’s another one. She always says, “You might be right about that. You might be right about that.” And no. And you just keep adding “and no” after the statement. So then there’s, you know, but you know, “I really—I need you to do this. I’m desperate,” and you say, “I see that, I see your desperation, and no.”
One other thing she’ll add is you can say, “If I change my mind about this, I’ll let you know. And no.” That’s been a game-changer for me. I just did one last week. Somebody who I have a professional relationship said, “I want you to do this one-hour video interview to promote this thing that I’m doing.” Old Liz would have thought, “I owe her that because she did this other thing for me that time.” I checked in with my inner compass and I was like, “Nothing in me wants to do this.” So I just wrote back to her, I said, “I’m sorry and I’m not going to be able to do this at this time,” and she wrote back and pushed in and said, “Oh, let me clarify. I wasn’t clear about why we need it. We really need it because right now, it’s really hard for us to sell things because we don’t have, because of COVID-19 and it’s just—you know, that’s why we need it.” I wrote back and said, “I hear you and I understand you and no.” And it goes away. They don’t tend to come back a third time.
It really does just stop. And let it sit at the no. The more words you add after that, more entangled you get. But again, I want to make clear, it’s hardest closest to home and it’s hardest with family and. With family, I find if I anticipate that I’m going to be asked something, I really have to practice. I really—because it’s scary and I have to really practice and be like, and just practice saying, “I’m not doing that right now. I’m not coming this year. I’m not doing it.” And I’ll say it a thousand times. I’ll just go for a long walk and I’ll just practice it and practice it and practice it. Because as I say, the closer the people are to you, the more difficult it is.
OLIVER BURKEMAN
Hello, I’m Oliver Burkeman. I’m the author of books including Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals and The Imperfectionist newsletter.
So, I have to answer this question about simplicity and simplifying my life, honestly, I think, and say that I have tried so many ways to simplify my life, only to discover that in subtle ways they’ve actually had the opposite effect. So I’m going to tell you what has truly simplified my life in a moment, but I want to get there by way of explaining what I think the downside is with quite a lot of simplification advice.
It’s just that pretty much any system, as we all know, creates overheads to maintain. So it becomes all too easy for some supposedly pro-simplicity practice to make things more complicated. One random example I like: famously, Barack Obama only wore, I think, two shades of suit in order to reduce decision fatigue. He didn’t have to worry about what range of suits he was going to choose from so that he could make more important decisions later in the day.
I always loved this example, but of course Barack Obama was the president and he had a team of people to keep his wardrobe of suits in perfect condition. Whereas for me, for most of us, you know, maintaining a wardrobe full of clean iterations of a work uniform, making sure that I always had everything I needed in order to only make a small number of choices, that’s actually going to be quite likely to add to my overheads.
It might be a good idea for other reasons, but I’m going to have to think about it, going to have to put in the upfront work to setting it up, and then a lot of maintenance work to make sure that it’s always ready. And actually, for me, it’s probably easier and simpler to just look inside my wardrobe and pick something that’s—that’s there and that’s clean and that basically works. There are some other systems I can think of that are equally kind of great in a way, but I do question if they make life simpler.
So, for example, I try to nominate specific time boxes during the week for calls and doing podcasts and things in order to safeguard time for writing. This is often described as a way of simplifying your life, a decision filter. And it’s true, it stops me having to think so much maybe about whether I can fit in another call outside of those predetermined boxes. But in fact, it actually makes for many more tough moments where I either have to tell someone no because I can’t fit them in, or alternatively have that time where I’m thinking, “Well, [unclear] an exception? This guy’s quite a big deal. I should probably alter my rules to make time for him.”
So it doesn’t actually end up simplifying my life to try to impose this alleged simplicity on it. You know, I think about the image of the obsessive minimalist in interior design who lives in a sort of perfectly simple apartment, all clean lines and stark bare surfaces. So that might be your idea of beauty and that’s fine.
I think I can really see the appeal. But it’s not actually very simple in the psychological sense of reducing the thought and cogitation and stress that has to go into keeping it that way. It’s actually pretty high maintenance, which, in the important sense here, I think is the opposite of simple.
So to stop being so negative and say something practical and positive instead, I think what all this is leading up to—and this is something that I’ve really taken from Zen Buddhism especially—is that I think true simplicity, the simplicity that actually practically helped me in life, is not a question of techniques; it is an attitude.
It’s a kind of a relationship between me and my reality. It’s the kind of relationship in which I’m just not so attached and clinging to how things are in the external world in which I can pass through my days less bothered by whether things are one way or another. So, you know, for example, it’s less about keeping a really minimalist home and more about not being made anxious because the home is a bit messy, not feeling that I can’t get down to work or to something else important until I’ve done every little bit of clearing up.
It’s less a case of rigidly time-boxing my day in order to reduce interruptions, though again I think that can have a role, and maybe more about being able more fluidly to drop back into work and to focus after an interruption has happened. I’ve seen this attitude described variously as entrusting everything to nature, entrusting everything to reality, letting go of the idea that reality needs me to help operate it, just sort of unclenching, withdrawing my claws from things and learning, as Krishnamurti put it rather wonderfully, to not mind what happens.
I don’t think that means to be a doormat or a pushover or to be passive. Far from it, the opposite. I think it is to be able to say, okay, look, well, reality is as it is, and that’s fine. I mean, it better be fine because it’s the truth of the matter. And now I can just be okay with that situation and take action, vigorous, bold action on the things I really want to do. So that is, after many learning experiences, what simplicity has come to mean for me. I hope it’s useful. Thanks.
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