Life rarely unfolds according to plan. A relationship implodes. A move or job change doesn’t work out. Or you simply fail in a goal you’ve set for yourself.
My guest has spent almost two decades researching and field-testing how to get back on track when smaller slip-ups and larger upheavals knock you off course. His name is Steve Kamb, and he’s the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change THAT STICKS. Today on the show, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life’s frustrating and demoralizing setbacks. We discuss why sometimes the best move is to pause rather than push harder, how to accept reality without resigning yourself to it, why treating change as an experiment can help you beat paralysis and take action, why you should treat consistency with your goals the way you do showering, and more.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Steve’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
- Steve’s AoM guest posts:
- Nerd Fitness
- Museum of Failure
- Sunday Firesides: Good Times Are Not Around the Corner (And That’s Great News!)
- Sunday Firesides: Treat Life Like an Experiment
- “Lightning Fields” by the Killers
Connect With Steve Kamb
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Life rarely unfolds according to plan. A relationship implodes, a move or job change doesn’t work out, or you simply fail in a goal you’ve set for yourself. My guest has spent almost two decades researching and field testing how to get back on track when smaller slip-ups and larger upheavals knock you off course.
His name is Steve Kamb and he’s the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of How to Try Again: an Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks. In today’s show, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life’s frustrating and demoralizing setbacks. We discuss why sometimes the best move is to pause rather than push harder. How to accept reality without resigning yourself to it. Why treating change as an experiment can help you be paralysis and take action. Why you should treat consistency with your goals the way you do showering and more after the show is over, check out our show notes at a om is slash try again. All right, Steve Kamb, welcome back to the show.
Steve Kamb:
Gosh, Brett, it’s so good to be here. You gave me an opportunity back in, I think it was 2010, to write a guest post for Art of Manliness. And I spent months writing that guest post, and that was the biggest opportunity that had ever come my way when I started Nerd Fitness. So thank you for that opportunity. 16 years later and I’m just honored to be back on the podcast.
Brett McKay:
Well, you’re very welcome and thank you for writing that article. So yeah, Steve, you’re the founder of Nerd Fitness. It started off as a blog, started about the same time we started AoM, back in 2008. Nerd Fitness has since turned into a coaching company. You do fitness coaching and nutrition coaching for people. But yeah, that article “Don’t Be That Guy: The Taxonomy of Lousy Male Friends,” published in 2010. We still reshare that. We reshare articles, so from our archives on our X feed and on Facebook, and every time we reshare that, it still gets a ton of traffic. It’s timeless, it’s evergreen.
Steve Kamb:
That makes me so happy. And also you don’t want to be that guy.
Brett McKay:
You don’t want to be that guy. Yeah. So thank you for sharing that, allowing us to publish that article. And then we’ve had you on the podcast before. You’re one of my early podcasts. 2013 was the last time we had you on episode number 42.
Steve Kamb:
Whoa.
Brett McKay:
So it’s been a long time. 13 years ago you were on the show to talk about your book Level Up Your Life, and you got a new book out and since that time we both have gotten old. We’re in our forties now. And your new book, How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks is all about how to get back in the saddle when life derails the goals you have for yourself. And this book was born out of your own experience having to get back in the saddle big time because in 2023 you got bucked the heck out of life’s saddle. What happened in 2023?
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, well, so interestingly, I said I started Nerd Fitness at this point 17 years ago, and I had an idea in 2023 like, hey, we’re really good at helping people succeed not with more discipline when they fail or struggle but with more compassion. And we help people get back on track. We help them respond or restart on their fitness journey after a failure. And that was the premise and the idea that I thought I was going to be writing a book around said, I have all this experience. I have an amazing team at Nerd Fitness. I have almost two decades of experience helping busy people navigate a chaotic life. And that was the book I started to write. And then about a year later, my life took a few left turns. It started with a skin cancer diagnosis that kind of shook me and made me realize like, oh, I am in fact mortal…
Brett McKay:
You got the good kind of skin cancer. I mean, no, cancer is good, but it’s the one that you can just cut off at the dermatologist’s office.
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, don’t worry, it’s the good one. Which was interesting. And it was in my scalp, so they did have to scoop it out and then they had to sew my head shut and keep an eye on that wound for a few months I think. So that was step one, step two, like you Brett, we can both relate to this thanks to things like ChatGPT and the way that Google changes us. Content creators and writers kind of ran into, I guess steer to ship into an iceberg unbeknownst to us, which was people don’t click through to websites anymore. And I watched as Nerd Fitness my company, over a handful of months and years, we lost a good 80% of our traffic, not because we did anything differently, but because of just the way that society interacts with websites and large language models hoovering up all of our content and spitting out answers. So that was super fun to try to navigate.
Brett McKay:
We had that same thing happen to us. So yeah, we can commiserate.
Steve Kamb:
And then I went through an amicable but heartbreaking and life-changing divorce and all of a sudden I’m writing this book about how to navigate a chaotic life and how to pick yourself up and how to try again differently, how to try with compassion, how to try with different strategies that will actually help. And then I went through the most tumultuous years of my life and the book evolved. I had to go back to my publisher and say, Hey, kind of going through something, going to need a little bit more time, but I think it’s going to make for a better book that’s going to help more people in different ways. And fortunately, they were very supportive of this, and the book ended up becoming the book that I needed to read myself. So it started as a, Hey, we’re really good at this. We have a team. We have a system and strategies that help real regular busy people navigate chaotic lives. And then it became a much bigger idea and a lot more kind of philosophical about, hey, life is not going to go the way that you expect. Here’s how we can navigate that together.
Brett McKay:
Okay, so let’s talk about how to deal with failure. When you don’t reach a goal or when your life just goes off kilter, it feels bad because it’s a failure. We feel like a failure. But you highlight that this idea of thinking of ourselves as being a failure is relatively new. Walk us through how the meaning of failure has changed over time and how that history can change the way we look at failure.
Steve Kamb:
So very early on in the book, I have a whole chapter dedicated to failure. I thought, Hey, most people are going to pick up a book called How to Try Again after something has gone wrong or they’re not succeeding in the way they want to. And like you said, we feel bad. Failure hurts. And I’m not going to say like, oh, failure is always a blessing in disguise. Sometimes failure just sucks. And when we feel and when we have these experiences where we have failed, we decide that we and our identity, we are now failures. The good news, that’s not actually true. We are humans who failed at something. And I did some research into failure. I spoke to a professor of failure from Stevens University, her name is Dr. Theresa McPhail, which is just the perfect, perfect last name. She literally teaches a class on failure.
And then I took a trip to the Museum of Failure and I studied the origins of the definition of the word failure and something that really jumped out at me through my research way back in the 1820s, I think Noah Webster, Webster’s Dictionary, Noah defined failure as a breaking or becoming insolvent. It was something that happened 30 years later after Webster had passed away, but his dictionary endured. The new definition of failure became something like it’s a weakness in a man’s character. And all of a sudden failure went from something that happened to us to something that we were, and I posit and think we would be much better off if we returned to that original definition or that definition that Webster had in his 1820s dictionary. That failure is something that happens. It’s not the end of the world. It sucks, especially when you’re going through it.
And in those moments, and I’m not going to say like I said, oh, something great will come from this maybe, but at the same time it’s something that happened. There is a lesson that we can learn from it, and we are not failures. We are humans who failed at something. Once we can get wrapper heads around that, then we can start to kind of pick through the rubble and say, alright, that happened. Give yourself a hug and be like, I’m part of the most common club on the planet and humanity. What do we do next?
Brett McKay:
Yeah, because when you identify yourself as a failure, it just makes you feel incapacitated. You feel like why even try? But if you think, well, okay, this thing happened to me, but it’s not the entirety of who I am, then you feel like, okay, okay, there’s something I can do to fix it. You mentioned you visited the Museum of Failure. What did you learn about failure from that visit?
Steve Kamb:
Well, two things. One, it’s a traveling museum by Dr. Samuel West. And I flew up to New York City and then was supposed to go to the museum with a friend, but he bailed. So we actually failed to make it to the Museum of Failure on time. We had to go the next day. So I walked into this museum and it’s full of the best and the most interesting failures and frauds and flops in history. And what surprised me was how many of the world’s most successful companies were well represented there. I mean, Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, those were all there in addition to some failures that maybe were understandable like Hooters Airline or other inventions that were the hula chair. Okay, maybe this idea wasn’t fully baked. But the thing that really jumped out at me is the final exhibit. As you’re walking out of the Museum of Failure, there is this kaleidoscope of Post-it notes on the wall and they encourage you to write down your failures and place it up on the wall alongside everybody else’s.
And for somebody that is struggling with something, we often, maybe you’re the head of a household and you keep your failure down because you want to come across as the strong. You’re the strong foundation of your family or your business or whatever. There’s a lot of shame and guilt that we feel when we’re failures and we cram it down. And I think we’d be much better off like this wall here when write down your failures and add it to the wall and you see, oh, failed businesses or failed marriages or something deeply personal to somebody that they wrote in that wall, it makes you realize that you’re not actually that unique. And I mean that in the best way possible. Somebody has failed in the way that you have failed that before. You’re not that unique. And also failure makes you part of this never ending list of people who have failed, which has gone back since the beginning of time.
Since humans have had the opportunity to fail, we have failed. So when we add our failure to that wall or we talk about it with others, it kind of removes some of the power it has over us. It took me months, maybe over a year, I think it was at least maybe 18 months before I finally shared my personal struggles with my audience and the support I got in return was mind blowing. And that’s what gave me the confidence to tell my story on page two of my book, it took me 14 drafts I think before I finally added my story to my book because I wanted other people to feel okay sharing their failures and not beating themselves up because something didn’t go the way they expected it to.
Brett McKay:
Okay, so everyone fails. Even the big dogs fail with billions of dollars of funding. They can have big giant flops, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, what was it, Pepsi? Clear, big flop that didn’t work out. So if they can fail New Coke. Yeah, New Coke…
Steve Kamb:
Crystal Pepsi.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, crystal Pepsi. Yeah. Or the Arch Deluxe. Remember the Arch Deluxe?
Steve Kamb:
I think that was in there too. Yep.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And then the other thing too, it teaches you that with anything you decide to do, failure could be an option and just accept that and as soon as you do things get a little more copacetic. And then the other thing you talk about in reframing failure, I think another reason why people don’t like to fail, and you talk about this in the book, is when you fail, you think, well now I’m going back to square one. You argue like, no, that’s not the case. If you fail at something, you don’t automatically have to start from scratch.
Steve Kamb:
Yeah. The good news is square one doesn’t actually exist. So here’s an example. Let’s say a year ago you signed up to go to the gym and you went to the gym for two weeks and then life happened and you fell off the wagon and every month you’ve been paying your monthly gym membership and you feel like a failure and you’re like, oh gosh, I have to go all the way back to square one the next time I walk into this gym. That feels really daunting. The good news is that you’ve already accomplished so many of the steps between you and exercise. It’s not just I’m at the gym, but rather you already had to find the gym, you had to sign up for the gym, you had to figure out where to park, you had to figure out how the equipment worked, you had to figure out how to navigate the locker room.
You had to figure out which workout you were going to do. So although you might be starting over with regards to how much weight you can lift or how fast you can run, you’ve already taken care of the first 90% of those steps. So when you start over, you get to bring the knowledge of every one of those past failures with you. You get to stand on those shoulders and we actually get to be thankful for the fact that we failed in certain ways in the past. We can learn from all of that and bring it with us for our next attempt. It might allow us to succeed a little bit further or maybe have a dramatic success because we’ve already done so much of the hard work and learned some really tough lessons on what doesn’t work for us in the past.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Reminds me of a line from a song from my favorite band and everyone knows what I’m about to say because everyone knows what my favorite band is. It’s The Killers. So they got this song called Lightning Fields from their 2020 album, Imploding the Mirage, it’s their best album, my favorite album. And there’s this line that goes, don’t beat yourself up. You’ve laid good ground. I think that captures that idea perfectly.
Steve Kamb:
I love that. I love The Killers too.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, Killers are great. Alright, so let’s talk about this framework you developed that you’ve used with Nerd Fitness clients to handle setbacks and that you used and dealing with your own setbacks. It’s an acronym. It’s packed, PACT, and it stands for pause, accept, change, try. So let’s talk about pause first. Whenever we’re facing a hurdle or a setback, our first inclination is often to do more like, okay, I got to do something to get over this thing, but how can doing more actually make things worse for us?
Steve Kamb:
Y’all know the saying, if at first you don’t succeed, try again maybe. But if you’re trying to succeed at something, that’s the wrong thing. And how are you defining success? If you try again in the same way, you’ll probably just fail again in the same way. So the first step, I think so many of us kind of get on this loop or just keep running around this wheel of, all right, I failed at couch to 5K or going to the gym or journaling each morning, all right, I failed. I’ll try again next month. And then you just do the same thing again except now you are beating yourself up even more because you couldn’t follow through with it. You’re going to end up in the same spot. So the first step I want people to take on this journey is pause. We think when we’re not making progress, we’re falling further behind and that’s bad.
And we humans, we love progress. The problem is the opposite of progress is not stagnation, it’s not staying where we are. The opposite of progress is regress, it’s making things worse. So when we think about things from this perspective, having a pause and saying, wait a second, am I actually doing the right thing? Am I heading down the right path? Am I progressing or am I trying to progress in the way that I’m actually interested in progressing? The good news is there are so many different ways to change, and if you keep trying to do the one that you don’t like, you’re just kind of spinning your wheels, you’re swimming in the wrong direction, you are using so much energy to do something along the wrong path when the next step is actually, instead of just putting your head down and going further or faster in the same direction, it’s pausing, taking a breath, looking at your surroundings and saying, is this working for me? I think a lot of us kind of skip that step.
Brett McKay:
You actually use a story of this guy named Brett Archibald who literally swam in the wrong direction and it made things worse for him. Tell us about this guy.
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, this is one of the craziest stories I’ve ever stumbled across. So I fell in love with this idea of treading water being actually heroic. And again, when the alternatives are drowning or swimming in the wrong direction, treading water is actually a pretty darn good option. Second only to swimming in the right direction. So this story is about this guy. His name’s Brett on a 50th birthday celebration with all of his friends and they are on a boat sailing through the some straits, I think in the Philippines. And he got some food poisoning from eating a bad calzone the day before. So it’s two in the morning. He’s on this boat where they’re getting ready to head out to a specific island, and he’s got so much food poisoning that he runs up to the deck to throw up over the side of the boat.
And the boat was so rough that he literally falls over the side of the boat, falls, I think it’s 15, maybe 20 feet into the water, and it’s two in the morning so nobody sees him and he pops his head up and he tries to yell, but there’s nobody awake. There’s the captain who’s busy driving the boat and everybody else is asleep. So Brett does what anybody thinks they should do in this moment. He’s like, all right, well, I guess I’m going to start swimming. So he starts swimming, pole kick, breathe, pole kick, breathe, and he does this for a handful of hours until the sun comes up and he can finally take a look at his surroundings and he realizes that there’s still nothing in any direction and he takes stock of what’s on him, and he reaches in his pocket and he pulls out the little cardboard key card holder from his hotel stay the night before.
He rips off a tiny corner and he drops it on the top of the water and notices as the current sends it in the exact opposite direction. He was swimming, unbeknownst to Brett, he had been swimming against the current for hours, wasting energy, trying to make things better when the reality was he was actually making things worse. So as soon as he does this, he realizes like, okay, this is not what I need to be doing. I don’t know when I’m going to be rescued if at all. My only plan I have right now is to do the bare minimum and tread water long enough, not because I believe I’ll be rescued, but rather I’m going to tread long enough to keep going. And every hour of treading water reminds me that, Hey, I’ve already done it for this long. I can probably do it for another one. And I don’t want to spoil a story. The good news is he does eventually get rescued, but that story of him trying so hard to do one thing and realizing that he was actually making a lot of things worse has stuck with me ever since.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I mean even in wilderness survival, if you get lost in the woods, the thing they tell you is just stop and stay where you’re at because our natural inclination, I got to get out of here, I got to find my, you’re just going to get more lost that way. And I think it’s applicable to when our goals go sideways because let’s say it’s a fitness goal and it doesn’t shake out well, we think, well, I’m just going to try harder on this thing that I was doing. Instead, what would be helpful is just like pause, stop. Is this the thing I should actually be doing? Is there something else I could be doing? Maybe I hire a coach to get their input. But that pause is what allows you to make those decisions.
Steve Kamb:
Not only that, but I think if we don’t pause, there is some part of us that think there is comfort in just continuing to do the thing that we have been doing, even though we know it’s not working for us. Oh, we sign up for a dating app and we swiped right a hundred times and it didn’t work. It is trying to date with your same cheesy pickup lines. If it’s not working, that’s probably not a good strategy. Maybe having a friend look at your profile and work through like, Hey, what is working and not working here? Same thing with maybe you’re applying for a new job, just firing a hundred more resumes into the void of LinkedIn or whatever. If it’s not working before, it’s probably not going to work this time. You need to pause and take a look at the picture and say, I need to do something different, which is so hard because then we have to admit to ourselves that what we’ve been doing isn’t working.
And we spent all of that time on that when we could have been doing something else. But there’s this great quote from CS Lewis who says something like, once you realize you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing it about face and walking back towards where you came so that you can get on the right road. He says, the next correct step is backwards. I think there’s a step in between there, which is pausing, stop moving forward and turning around and accessing your situation so that you can have the bandwidth and the clarity to say, oh, what I’m doing isn’t working. I know I don’t go back to square one because I get to carry all of these past experiences with me. Cool. I can now adjust my path and try something different, and I might be able to get there slightly faster because of all the changes and challenges I went through in the past.
Brett McKay:
And you also talk about the pause can come in handy if life just throws you a curve ball. Let’s say a loved one gets sick or there’s a death in the family and it just requires you to spend time in that area of your life. Our natural inclination is like, well, I’m going to take care of my family, my sick loved one, and I’m going to keep doing all this stuff and more and more stuff when the better approach because that’s just going to burn you out. The better approach would just be pause and just tell yourself, I’m just going to tread water here for the next couple months, maybe year, and I’m going to take the foot off the gas so I can focus on this one thing. And then you tell yourself like, okay, I’m not going to be making progress I want, but I’ve got all this experience in the past and I can take that with me when I can pick things back up again. But for now, I just got to tread water.
Steve Kamb:
Like I said, treading water can be heroic. I mean, I’m a guy that owns a health and fitness company and I spent the last six years treading water with my own fitness and it was so needed. I’m trying to write this book. I’m navigating a business that is reinventing itself. My personal life has irrevocably changed. All of these things are happening at the same time, I didn’t also need to add onto this, Hey, you’re not doing your prescribed workout. You’re not doing all of the things. I think we have a tendency to beat ourselves up when we can’t juggle all of the chainsaws that we’re trying to juggle and we just keep thinking like, God, if I just had it together a little more, or if I was just more disciplined. And the reality is it’s not a motivation problem, it’s a resources problem. We’re asking so much of ourselves and sometimes strategically half-assing your goals or strategically your workout is like an amazing place to be when the alternative is to give up and drown or again, bring out energy swimming in the wrong direction.
For me it was, I’m going to go to the gym and do one exercise and while I’m traveling, I’m going to have one healthy meal a day. I wasn’t trying to win, I was just trying to not lose. And I knew if I could do that today, it gave me a chance to get to tomorrow. And if I could get to tomorrow, I don’t know how long I’m going to need to tread water, but I can do it for a really, really long time. And for me, only recently after finishing this book and finally having a little bit of a gap in my schedule, did I rejoin a commercial gym? Actually working now with a Matt from Nerd Fitness who is now coaching me to work on my fitness. And the great news is I’m not going, I don’t have to go all the way back to a start. I’m not having to start from zero, even though we know there’s no square one, I have been doing a bare minimum for long enough that I can get right into that gym and get on track moving forward with some progress pretty quickly. And that’s due to the fact that I was able to tread water for a long time.
Brett McKay:
Alright. Let’s talk about A for accept. Instead of accepting problems, you argue that we typically avoid them. What does avoidance often look like?
Steve Kamb:
I think when I see and deal with avoidance personally and when we see it with coaching clients and community members at Nerd Fitness, we do one of two things. One is we kick the can down the road and we love the word until or we kind of drown it out and let’s talk about that first one. So I’ll share an example. There is this amazing podcast called Chasing Scratch, and it’s about these two guys named Mike and Eli who are college buddies trying to get to scratch golf, which is shooting even par or better on average, which is a really challenging goal. And I’ve known them for years. They’ve been working with Matt from Nerd Fitness and Mike kept coming to Matt and saying, oh, I’m so sorry I couldn’t get to my workout today. My kid got sick or I couldn’t make it because this work meeting went long, but next week things should get back to normal and the next week something else would happen.
And he kept saying, but then I’ll get back to normal. And Matt finally had a conversation with Mike and said, Mike, I’m worried there is this normal that you think is just around the corner. That normal’s not coming back. In Mike’s mind, normal was predictable, normal was routine, and Mike’s normal was anything. But the podcast had become an unexpected success. His co-host Eli ended up having to have a hip surgery. His kid was growing up, he was taking on extra work so that he could focus on the podcast and leave his corporate job. So there was nothing normal about his life. Normal had left the building. And once he accepted this of like, Hey, I keep trying to expect something is going to be different in the future, I’m avoiding my actual reality today in all of its messiness. And the sooner I accept the fact that I can’t do it all, that my life is messy, only then could they finally start to do something about it.
Instead of a structured workout plan three days per week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, it was, Mike, what do we have time for today? Great, let’s do that first thing in the morning before your kid wakes up. It might be 15 minutes. Cool, those 15 minutes are better than the perfect workout routine that Mike was hoping to be able to do next week. So I think a lot of us avoid the reality of our current situation because this reality is kind of scary. The fact that we can’t do it all or that there is some aspect of our life that isn’t going the way that we want it to, it’s really easy to just kind of cram that down and not deal with it. And the sooner we can accept that this is actually what’s happening, this is the situation I find myself in, these are the struggles and pain points, the sooner I can have that uncomfortable conversation with my spouse or my boss about how I’m struggling, the sooner we can have those things, then we can finally start to make smarter decisions about what we’re actually going to prioritize, where we need boundaries, how to navigate whatever that next step might look like for us.
Brett McKay:
And I think the way you described acceptance there, it’s not resignation because I think a lot of guys in the here acceptance, it means, well, I just got to resign myself to this situation. There’s nothing I can do. It’s like, no, what acceptance is just looking at the bare bones reality facts. And once you see how crappy things are, then you can start doing something about it. It’s like Apollo 13, they had to accept the fact we’re in this little tin can thousands of miles from earth with these limited supplies, and we got to make a filter out of it, and they had to accept that fact and then work with those constraints.
Steve Kamb:
We’re not doing ourselves any favor when we think or feel badly that life is anything other than what it is right now. And all dog eating too much grass and throwing up in the carpet, kid getting sick, navigating fertility issues, whatever it may be, these are things that are so real and honest. And the sooner we can look at those with clear eyes, the more likely we can then say like, Hey, we’re trying, but also this is our reality. What can we do about it?
Brett McKay:
And even when people accept there are problems in their life, they sometimes just kind of do it passively instead of as a step toward action. They’re just thinking, I’m just going to hope for the best. Things will just turn out better, just magically. Well, maybe that might happen, but probably not.
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, there’s some researcher, I think her name is Dr. Keta Weingarten, who refers to this as unreasonable hope. And it’s just this concept that, oh, things should get better because I want them to get better. They should, and I’ll just wait for them to get better. And that’s not how this works. They might not get better or they might require very specific action for things to get better. So the sooner we can accept and look at the absurdity of our life and say, yep, this is happening and it’s not cool, and I’m really unhappy about this and here’s what I can do about it.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Alright, so that’s accept. Let’s move to change. So we’ve paused, taken a break from what we’re doing to assess things. We’ve accepted our situation, now we got to figure out, okay, what can we change to prevent the failure in the future or to overcome it? How do you figure out what you need to change when trying to overcome a setback?
Steve Kamb:
I think that the step one is to picture your favorite literary detective. It could be Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew. For me growing up, it was Encyclopedia Brown. Oh man.
Brett McKay:
Encyclopedia Brown. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Kamb:
He would solve mysteries in his neighborhood for I think it was like 25 cents, 25 cents a case. And then he would come home from school or on summer break and sit down at the dinner table and his dad, who was the chief police of Ida, would then spill his guts about whatever case he couldn’t solve. And by the end of dinner or later on, Encyclopedia Brown, this young kid would have solved it. So I dunno what that says about the dad that he couldn’t handle this and was just telling all of the details to his son. But I think there’s something interesting and fun about looking at life and looking at our past attempts like a curious detective, and you can picture the board game clue as well, like, oh, that’s really interesting. Oh, you think you’re a failure because you couldn’t stick with your workout.
It’s like, oh, that’s really interesting. I missed my workout this morning. Not because I’m a failure, but because I was up super late last night scrolling on my phone because I just felt like I had to disassociate from a really stressful day. Okay, why was the day stressful? Oh, I actually don’t like my job and I had to go pick up my kid from school. There was behavioral issues and then I had to forgot to take the food out of the freezer in time to defrost it, so then I couldn’t cook dinner, whatever it may be. So many times, as I said earlier, what we think is a motivation problem is often a resources problem. So if we can look with curiosity and not judgment, imagine we are detectives and we see the chalk outline of our past attempts to try to make a specific change. We can look at that and say like, oh, okay. Turns out it was for these specific reasons, actually two steps removed from I’m not motivated. It’s actually so much deeper than that. Once we can finally start to put those pieces in place and solve that crime, we can then decide, okay, now that we’ve paused and accepted our reality and we know why we failed in the past, we can change something this time and do something differently.
Brett McKay:
And when you do make a change, it doesn’t have to be a wholesale change of the whole entire thing. It could just be one small variable.
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, there’s that great quote from Charlie Munger. It’s show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. I think when we’re deciding what to change, we can think about this scientists, we’ve been running experiments with our clients for, I’d say we’ve been doing this program for eight years now, nine years. And it’s been really liberating for our clients to be able to say, Hey, I know this is not how you’ve done things in the past, but you came to us because you want things to be different. And if you want different outcomes you need, we need to try something differently. Let’s try this as an experiment. And when you look at things this way, it adds some lightness to it. It removes this pressure of, gosh, I have to do this for the rest of my life. What if it doesn’t work? Whatever. We can look at it like curious scientists, we take all of the data that we learned from our detective work and say, interesting.
Okay, I have a hypothesis that if I were to follow this new workout program or try join this hiking club, I will be more interested in exercise by the end of it. Or I’ve been trying toxic dieting, I’ve been trying to cut out carbs for the past decade off and on, and it turns out I love carbs. Maybe there is a different experiment I can conduct where I still get to eat carbs and try to have success in a different way. So as we call it, the zoom in, zoom out method. So you zoom out and set the experiment and then you zoom in and just focus on conducting the experiment. You don’t worry about the end goal, you don’t worry about whether or not it’s giving you the results you want. We are simply conducting the experiment and at the end of those 30 days or six weeks, we can then zoom out and say, one, did we get the result that we expected?
It might be what we expected or not, but neither one is good or bad. It’s an experiment. And then we can decide, did we enjoy the experiment? Would we like to keep doing it or do we need to make a change or adjust a variable and create a different experiment and make that change and kind of rerun that process. But when we think about things in this experimental mindset, it removes so much of the judgment that we put on the plate and the expectations we kind of put in our shoulders to suddenly have it all figured out.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’ve done that in my own life with my own training. One experiment I ran and I still continue today, I wanted to get more steps in because I sit down a lot for my work. And so I decided when I wake up early, I started waking up early in my forties, like five o’clock. Not on purpose, it just happened. I decided, you know what? I’m just going to take a walk around the block during that time, and I think you and I, we’ve actually had a phone call on one of my early morning walks and it started out as an experiment and I was like, I’ll just do this for a month and see how it goes. And turns out I really like it and I’ve been doing it now for years. Every morning, go for a walk at 5:30, 6 o’clock in the morning and it worked.
But there’s other things I’ve tried. I’m like, I’m not going to do that anymore. Didn’t work out for me. So yeah, I like that idea. Just any change you make, you don’t have to make a full hearted commitment. Just approach it like an experiment and see how it goes for a few weeks. And if it works, great, if it doesn’t, no harm, no foul in getting rid of it. Let’s talk about the T for try. So you’ve come up with something that you want to change in your life that you want to make an improvement on, but a lot of people still don’t actually try the thing they came up with. What’s holding people back from trying things?
Steve Kamb:
I think first of all, you’re in good company. If you’re like, I need the perfect plan. I should do some more research. I got to do more research to make sure I have the perfect plan or the most optimized diet that I have to follow, and I just need to keep working on this. I tell a few fun stories in the book. One is about George Lucas and him trying to write the screenplay for Star Wars and just how terrible early drafts of it were. And I think it was Francis Ford Coppola got a chance to read an early draft and said, I think the term he used was, this is gobbledygook. I don’t know what this is and it’s a disaster. But he needed to get something down on the page. And then I also tell the story of Winston Churchill. We know him as the Prime Minister and as a war correspondent back in the earlier days, and then as a soldier in World War I, I believe, and in between World War I and World War II, he decides he wants to become a painter.
And he tells this funny story about how he was terrified of where to put his first brushstroke on his canvas. He called it the towering canvas. And he was afraid with a silent veto because what if he put it in the wrong spot? Fortunately, his wife invited over a neighbor who was a painter, and she just walked up to him and said, give me the big brush. And she just grabbed it and just started throwing paint up on the canvas. And this is when Churchill realized like, oh, the canvas couldn’t hit back, it couldn’t fight back, and suddenly the spell had been broken. Oh, I can just do this imperfectly, and that’s okay. The term that I thought up was start ugly. I’m like, oh, this idea of starting ugly gives you permission to get out of your own way and just get started. And then I stumbled across a book called Start Ugly by David. I believe that’s his name. But we’re so afraid often that we’re going to do it incorrectly, that we never start at all. And I think we need to instead give ourselves permission or rather challenge ourselves to start incorrectly and to do things imperfectly and to start ugly because only then can we finally get good at it.
Brett McKay:
So that idea that things have to be perfect, that holds it back a lot of people, but just kind of like, you know what? The first one’s going to suck. Richard Grier, he’s one of the CEOs at Huckberry, he’s got this saying, you always throw out the first pancake whenever you’re making pancakes. It’s like the first one’s always the worst. You always throw it out. So yeah, just do something and accept that it’s probably going to be bad. And then with time as you do it more and more, you’re going to get better and better and better at it.
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, well, not just that, but there is a specific way that you can get better. And I think about this from a ready, fire, aim sequence of things. And in the book I talk about standup comedians specifically and what we see on stage or what we see on Netflix, what we see at a comedy special, we see the finished product and we think like, oh, that was really funny. What we don’t realize is the hundreds of sets that that comedian has performed slowly tinkering with that specific joke, that pause, that funny aside that they just thought up. All of that has been tested like scientists in a laboratory on Tuesday nights and small clubs around the world. The way I think of this as comedians don’t tell jokes because they’re funny, they tell a joke until it becomes funny. And writers don’t write when they have an idea. Professional writers write until they find a good idea. So much of this is, I am going to try this thing and start ugly, and then based on the feedback that the world is giving me or the audience is giving me, or my readers are giving me and how I’m feeling about this, I can make this project slightly better over time and create this pretty amazing thing at the end. But it’s going to come with a bunch of tiny adjustments along the way based on feedback that we’re getting throughout the process.
Brett McKay:
And another thing you talk about that holds people back from trying the thing that they’ve decided they’re going to do to initiate some change in their life, they might think, well, this isn’t how you’re supposed to do it, or This isn’t the most optimized way to do it, and it’s not what the guru says I should be doing. And you say, that doesn’t matter. Just do what works for you. And if it seems kind of silly or okay. And then also it’s okay to not try things that everyone’s saying you should do because you’re just like, you know what? I don’t like doing that. I’m not going to do that. So when it comes to fitness, if someone says, man, bro, you got to do CrossFit. That’s the best thing. Well, if you don’t like that, don’t do CrossFit. It’s better for you to be physically active doing something you enjoy. You’re more likely to stick with doing that thing.
Steve Kamb:
And nothing makes my heart hurt more than seeing somebody that is like, okay, I’m finally working up the courage to exercise. And they go to a bootcamp class with their super fit friends, and this class is full of really fit people and the instructor is yelling motivational platitudes, and this person finishes that class and thinks, gosh, if that’s what it takes to get healthy, man, I’m out. I do not want to do that. This is not for me. The reality is there are so many different ways to get healthy. There are so many different paths to success. The best workout is the one that you actually do the best diet is the one that you can actually follow most of the time. In the book I talk about, Neil Stevenson is the author of Snow Crash and a bunch of other unbelievable science fiction books.
And he talks about how he’s a terrible correspondent because he needs four hours of uninterrupted time to write his books. And if he had two hour blocks, it is not nearly the same as one four hour uninterrupted block. Somebody might read that and think, gosh, I don’t have, there’s no way. I have a young kid, I work from home. I’m in calls. There’s no way I could ever write or succeed the way that he is, therefore I’m just never going to be a writer. But then you hear about Agatha Christie who wrote 60 plus detective novels and has sold billions of literally over a billion copies of her books and short stories. And she tells a story in her autobiography about how her friends never knew when she wrote because she would just steal away for bits and spurts like a dog with a bone, I think she said.
And she would write for 20 minutes here or there. She didn’t have a dedicated writing room, and that’s how she wrote her books. So both of those paths worked, but they worked for the right person because they found what worked for them. And I think that’s the step that a lot of us miss. We see the celebrity, we see the Instagram influencer telling us about the perfect morning protocol, and we forget to ask the question one, do I want that two, does this fit into my reality and what am I not accepting about my current situation? And once I do those things, then you can finally decide like, Hey, this is the path that I want to try and the things I want to do for myself.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I think those influencers can be helpful if you just approach them as like a buffet. It’s like, well, that thing looks interesting. I’m going to try that. And you don’t have to do it exactly the way they do it, but you try it out and see if it works for you. But yeah, if you just decide, I got to do exactly what this person does, that’s not going to work out. Alright, so that’s packed. So pause, accept, change, try. Let’s talk about some of the things that get in the way. So if we do experience failure, some of the mental roadblocks that prevent us from getting back in the saddle and makes things harder for herself, and one of these things is the doom loop. What’s the doom loop and how does that get in the way of us trying? Again,
Steve Kamb:
The doom loop is the most common pitfall I see people falling into when they’re, they’re trying to make some sort of behavior change. It generally starts with step one is feeling less than step two is identifying, we see something on Instagram, we see, we read an inspiring biography, we watch a documentary or whatever, and we then get irrationally excited and think this is the thing that is going to solve all of my problems, and then I will finally feel enough. And then we go all in on that thing. Everybody does it on January 1st, new year, new me, I’m all in. I’m changing everything about myself, let alone set aside the fact that we’ve never been able to, as the Twitter quote, it was something like, all of my future plans require me to display a level of discipline I’ve never once exhibited in my entire life.
The challenge here is when we go all in on something, the reality is like all or nothing generally is all then nothing. You go all in, life happens and then you say, oh, that didn’t work. Okay, I have to stop because life is too busy right now. I will try again a year from now. So we go back around the loop back to the beginning where we are again, not enough, except we now heap on some more failure and struggle and guilt because we couldn’t follow through with it until we find that next thing again. That gets us irrationally excited. Maybe this will be the thing. And we either go around that loop or we just kind of give up and say like, oh, change is not for me.
Brett McKay:
So how do you escape that doom loop?
Steve Kamb:
There’s a few tactics. I think one step one is when it comes to feeling not enough, we’ve all tried tough love repeatedly. I think we have enough of that in our lives, and I spent a lot of this book and a lot of the years writing this book, diving really deeply into self-compassion. Specifically Kristen Neff’s work on self-compassion and realizing a tough love you think is what kind of got you here. That’s probably not the case. And beating yourself up is not a great strategy for getting yourself out of this loop. Let’s try self-compassion instead. And that means allowing ourselves to have the thoughts that we have and not beating ourselves because we have them. Our thoughts are thinking themselves. It’s not generally not under our control, which thoughts pop in, but we can start to put some distance between us and those thoughts. We can notice a name, those thoughts or those patterns as they’re starting to happen.
We can give a name to that voice in our heads. For those of us like myself that feel like they have that inner monologue. When you add some distance, maybe some humor to that voice and realize that you are not your thoughts, it kind of gives you some of that ability to move back through that pact loop again, which is pause maybe, is this thought helping me? Is it true? What am I not accepting about? The situation? Change would be, Hey, do I want to turn up the volume on this thought or turn the volume down on the thought? And then to try based on what is happening in these loops and these thoughts, what would I like to try to do differently moving forward? So there is, like I said, you’re going to put some distance between you and those thoughts we’re going to practice.
And then before we even get on the loop again, I like to think of that scene from the fellowship of the ring where they’re at the prancing pony and Aragorn is talking to Frodo and Aragorn says, are you frightened? And he’s asking Frodo about the ring wraiths that are chasing after them. And Frodo says, yeah, I’m frightened. And Aragorn says, not nearly enough. I know what hunts you. And I think about that line a lot. When people join our coaching program, we ask them right up front like, what are you worried about? And more often than not, they’re saying, Hey, I have a hunch that a few weeks from now when the motivation wears off, I’m going to fall back into this doom loop. I’m going to fall back into all or nothing thinking I’m going to retreat to old patterns. And when we can identify those things upfront, it might make us change the expectation we have.
It might change the type of exercise we’re interested in trying. It might change how many changes we’re willing to make, and we can start to accept and predict, Hey, we’re at that moment. We’re three weeks in. I know that voice in your head is telling you to stick your head in the sand and ghost. What if we tried something differently? What if we did the bare minimum today and we counted that as a win? What if we shifted into tread water, whatever it may be, we are just essentially looking for tiny tactics to have a better relationship and conversation with that voice in our heads or that little person that sits on our shoulder that tells us to give up or to quit or to stop doing what we’re doing.
Brett McKay:
I want to talk about in this talking about my favorite chapter in the book, and it was how to keep doing the thing. And what you do is you provide all these tried and true tactics to successfully keep plotting along with whatever thing you’re doing. So you decide to make this change in your life. How do you keep with it so you don’t … the saddle as frequently? What are some of your favorite ones? There’s like eight of them. What are some of your favorite ones from those? How to keep doing the thing? Tactics?
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, so this chapter is built around Albert Bandura’s research into self-efficacy, which is essentially just belief in yourself that you’re able to make change and do things differently. Yeah, I think it’s eight might be 10 tactics in there. There are a few that I love more than others. I think the one that honestly has changed my life more than anything is being willing to half-ass the thing. I don’t know what the thing is that you’ve picked. It might be training or trying to write your first novel or read a large novel, whatever it may be. And I think being willing to strategically half-ass, that thing is one of the greatest, most important life skills you can develop. And it can be done with a simple question change. Instead of asking, do I have time for my workout today? It’s reframing it as what workout do I have time for?
And that might be five minutes in the morning before you pick up your newborn from his or her crib. It might be going for a walk after work with your spouse and saying, that was my workout for today. I checked the box that was good enough and accepting that, yeah, it might not be the full blown, I did the full workout. I went to the gym for an hour and a half. But man, it is so much better to strategically be able to say, Hey, I did what I was capable of doing today. And that’s a huge win. The other one, this one is going to sound so simple, and yet it’s one of the best predictors we’ve seen or I’ve seen over 17 years of writing for nerd fitness, and I think I call it the shower theory or the shower principle. Let’s say you wake up in the morning and normally every day after your morning walk, Brett, you take a shower and you get ready to go to work, but this morning you woke up late because the alarm didn’t go off and your kid threw up in the middle of the night, so you have to navigate that.
Now the dog’s eating the throw up and all of a sudden your morning is just completely blown out and you splash some water on your face and you drag. You bring the kid to the doctor and based on that, you failed at taking your morning shower. Do you have to start downloading shower podcasts? Do you need to start studying the shower habits of celebrities? Do you need to write in your shower journal about how you failed? Are you going to try again showering next month? No, you just missed your shower this morning because of life. Cool. Just take your shower the next day and move on. When we find that people are willing to allow themselves to miss a day and then just do it the next day, that is one of the best predictors we’ve seen for success compared to people who miss that day of their workout or diet, and then they feel so badly that they stick their head in the sand or they go off the rails and then they don’t want to talk to their coach, or they beat themselves up so much that they then crave eating more of the thing that they’re beating themselves up for having eaten.
So much of this is essentially just negotiating with our own brains and saying, how do we do this thing slightly more often than not for a long enough time that we can see change and stick with it for a long enough period of time?
Brett McKay:
Those two are my favorites too. I use those all the time with my fitness in particular, if I’m having my day’s busy and I don’t have time for a full 45 minute workout, it’s like, what can I do to half-ass this thing and get in a 15 minute workout? And that usually means just like, I’m not going to do this accessory work and I’m just going to do one hard set of each of the main lifts, and then if I miss a day, say, I can’t even get a workout in. I remember early on in my fitness journey, if I missed a day, I was like, oh, geez, I’m a failure. Why am I even going to try? It’s like, ah, whatever. It’s okay. I’ll just get it in the next time. Nothing’s not much. Change is going to happen in a workout or even if you mess up on your nutrition, you just pick out on the weekend, you’re not going to gain any fat from a single day of bad eating. You’ll look heavier. You have a lot of water and glycogen. It’s not fat, so just like the next day it’s like, all right, I’ll just get back on the saddle. It’s going to be fine.
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, it’s never the one missed day. It’s always that missed day that turns into a week or a month of self-loathing and making more unhealthy choices that send you down the wrong path because you beat yourself up from missing that one day.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. But yeah, like you said, there’s a lot more in there. Some of them are just get a quick win is a good one. Make things fun, actually enjoy the thing you’re doing, make it necessary, and you go into detail on how to do that. My favorite chapter, I really love that a lot. I use a lot of those tactics in my own life. Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation. There’s a lot more we could talk about. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Steve Kamb:
Yeah, it’s super simple. The book is called How to Try Again, so you can go to howtotryagain.com, and then I’m on every platform, Steve Kamb, S-T-E-V-E-K-A-M-B, stevekamb.com for my newsletter. I’m on the various social platforms @SteveKamb, so pretty easy to find. I’m so proud of this book. It took a lot out of me and I lived a lifetime while writing it, so I hope you consider checking it out. It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of. It took a lot to get it across the finish line, but I’m really glad I did.
Brett McKay:
Alright. Well, Steve Kamb, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Steve Kamb:
Thanks for the opportunity.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Steve Kamb. He’s the author of the book How to Try Again. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
