Elizabeth Gilbert
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The Tim Ferriss Show · #885: How to Simplify Your Life — Tips from Oliver Burkeman, Chip…
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Why Does Simplicity Advice Often Backfire?
Oliver Burkeman says simplicity advice often backfires because every system creates overhead. A practice sold as a way to make life simpler becomes one more thing to maintain. Barack Obama, he notes, famously wore about two shades of suit to avoid clothing decisions. Obama had a team to keep that wardrobe ready. For Burkeman, keeping a closet of clean copies of one work uniform means setup and upkeep. He thinks it is probably easier to open the wardrobe and wear something that is there, clean, and good enough.
Time boxes fall into the same trap. Blocks for calls and podcasts are meant to protect writing time, and they add hard moments: saying no because someone does not fit, or bending the
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What Does a Stormtrooper Costume Have to Do With Clutter?
Greg McKeown says a stormtrooper costume shows the clutter that is not sitting in a closet. In a Halloween store he stood in the mirror dressed head to toe in a suit that was not cheap, and he saw he had been half-planning the moment for 30 years. It went back to age 10, around Return of the Jedi, when an older brother said it would be great to own a real stormtrooper outfit from the movies. The idea sat unquestioned. He says it lived that way for 13 years. In the mirror, no part of him wanted the suit, including the child he thought he was buying it for.
His wife now uses the costume as a test. She asks whether a goal is the stormtrooper: something he keeps chasing because he caught it onc
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What Happened When Chip Conley Flatlined on Stage?
Chip Conley says a speech in St. Louis in his late 40s forced a simpler life. He was running Joie de Vivre, the boutique hotel company he started in San Francisco, through the dot-com bust, September 11, and the Great Recession, and he no longer wanted the job. An allergic reaction to an antibiotic sent him flatline on stage. He spent three days in the hospital while doctors tried to learn why he had gone flatline nine times in 90 minutes. He says it was not a heart attack, and it worked like one. The founder and CEO identity, and the VIP status on it, mattered less to him than his health.
He calls the next move mindful decoupling. He did not know the next identity. He knew he was not suppo
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Why Does Keeping a To-do List in Your Head Cost So Much?
David Allen says a to-do list kept in your head costs a stack of broken agreements with yourself. The part of the mind that holds "buy cat food" or "hire a vice president" has no sense of past or future, so it treats those jobs as due all the time. That is why the list can wake someone at 3 in the morning. A person can do only one thing at a time, and the head still acts as if every open item is happening now.
Finishing the task is not what repairs the agreement. Getting it out of the head does. He says a broken agreement, with someone else or with yourself, disintegrates trust. The way out, in his account, is one of three moves: do not make the agreement, keep it, or renegotiate it. Renego
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Why Does a Simple No Never Use the Word but?
Elizabeth Gilbert says a simple no always begins with thank you, and there is never a but, because the teacher of the nine-day school feels the word but is very cruel. The reply is thank you and no. You do not have to do the dance. If the other person is a good enough manipulator, it does not matter what you bring, because they are going to manipulate it. A simple no gives them no weapon to take and bring back.
A whole day of the nine-day school covers the simple no. When someone pushes, the reply stays short and ends with and no. One line is, I hear that, and you might be right about that, and no. Another is, I see your desperation, and no. A further line is, if I change my mind, I'll let
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Why Is It Harder to Tell the Truth to People You Love?
Elizabeth Gilbert says telling the truth is not simple, and it gets harder the closer and more intimate the relationship. The closer she is involved with somebody, the more stakes there are for her. A paradox sits in the middle of that. The people you love the most should be the people you are able to be the most honest with. They are the people you want to hurt the least, and that is where a no becomes really hard.
She now treats her inbox like her home, because she thinks the inbox is an extension of her home. There are a couple of layers to telling the truth. If somebody walks into her home uninvited, announces themselves, does not say how they got a key, and asks for something, she dele
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What Is the Endowment Effect?
Greg McKeown says the endowment effect is a brain habit that makes people value things more because they already have them. It covers physical objects and the opportunities in a life. The habit helps until someone overvalues an item that should not stay.
A closet shows how it works. Plenty of people who do not feel incredibly successful still own more clothes than they can use. One woman had hers organized by decade, the 70s and the 80s, and was not using any of the clothes. She just had them. Almost everybody eventually decides to clear a closet, picks an item up to give it away, and then finds it harder to let go than before they picked it up. They think of using it sometime in the future
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How Does Chip Conley Separate Knowledge and Wisdom?
Chip Conley draws a line between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is something you accumulate and add. Wisdom is something you distill and simplify, the difference between a plus sign, a division sign, and a square root. The Modern Elder Academy is the midlife wisdom school he built around that idea.
He also wants to hear the eulogy friends would give if he died tomorrow, while he is still living. He has stage three cancer and does not know how much longer he will live. In San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Baja, where the academy has campuses and friends, small groups share a dinner and give that eulogy for each other. At 47 he flatlined. In the space between life and death he was in a living roo