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

“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”

“mall 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 your, you know, Oceanside suite where you've been, you know, a handler brings you to stage to give this one hour talk, just paint. 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 in academia 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”

“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 your, you know, Oceanside suite where you've been, you know, a handler brings you to stage to give this one hour talk, just paint. 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 in academia my entire life and I love writing. I just love thinking. Like, what was I going to do”

“xplain 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”

“tributive 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”

“tionship 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”