How to Try Again
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
2
sentences flagged
Toxicity
2
sentences flagged
Hate speech
2
sentences flagged
Summary
Steve Kam is 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 this episode, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life s frustrating and demoralizing setbacks.
Transcript
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One of the things I've learned after running AOM for nearly two decades is that the fun part is
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creating, writing articles, recording podcasts, designing products, things like that. The less
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fun part is all the operational stuff that comes with selling those products online.
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And that's one reason we've used Shopify for the AOM store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind
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millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US. It handles all the
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stuff you don't want to spend your day worrying about, inventory, payments, analytics, shipping,
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returns all in one place. What I like is that it scales with you. Whether you're selling your first
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product or managing an established store, Shopify gives you the tools to keep things running
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smoothly. They've even built in AI tools that can help with product descriptions, page headlines,
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and product photography. Plus, as a customer, you've probably seen that purple shop pay button.
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There's a reason why it's everywhere. It makes checkout incredibly easy, which means fewer
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abandoned carts and more completed sales. It's time to turn those what ifs into reality with
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Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash manliness.
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That's shopify.com slash manliness. That's shopify.com slash manliness. If you've been
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following AOM for a while, you know that I love the book Lonesome Dove by Larry McBertry. It's
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one of my favorite novels of all time. It's sprawling, funny, and heartbreaking. Basically,
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it's the American Odyssey set in the Old West. And by the end of it, the characters feel less
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like fictional people and more like old friends you've lived alongside with for a few weeks.
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So this summer, over at our Substack newsletter, Dying Breed,
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we're doing an eight-week Lonesome Dove book club for paid subscribers.
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When you sign up, you'll get a reading schedule.
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plus weekly reflections and discussion prompts from me and Jeremy Anderberg.
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and a Q&A with Larry McMurtry scholar Stephen Fry about Lonesome Dove.
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If you always meant to read Lonesome Dove, this is your excuse.
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this is a great reason to saddle up and experience it again.
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The first reading assignment drops Saturday, May 30th.
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast,
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which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders
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that glean their edifying, life-improving insights without the fluff and filler.
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The AOM Podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word, and deed.
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Also, be sure to explore our articles in ArtOfManliness.com, read the deeper dives we do in our sub-stack newsletter at DyingBreed.net, and turn our content into real-world action by joining the Strenuous Life program at StrenuousLife.com.
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A relationship implodes, a move or job change doesn't work out, or you simply fail in a goal you've set for yourself.
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My guest has spent almost two decades researching and field testing how to get back on track
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when smaller slip-ups and larger upheavals knock you off course.
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His name is Steve Kam, and he's the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of How to Try Again,
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an approachable guide to navigating chaos and making change that sticks.
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Today in the show, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life's frustrating
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We discuss why sometimes the best move is to pause rather than push harder,
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how to accept reality without resigning yourself to it,
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why treating change as an experiment can help you beat paralysis and take action,
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why you should treat consistency with your goals the way you do showering, and more.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash tryagain.
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All right, Steve Kam, welcome back to the show.
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you gave me an opportunity back in I think it was 2010 to write a guest post for art of manliness
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yes and I like I spent months writing that guest post and that was like the biggest opportunity
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that had ever come my way when I started nerd fitness so thank you for that opportunity
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16 years later and I'm just honored to be back on the podcast well no you're you're very welcome
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and thank you for writing that article so yeah Steve you're the founder of nerd fitness it
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started off as a blog. Started about at the same time we started AOM back in 2008. Nerd Fitness has
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since turned into a coaching company. You do fitness coaching and nutrition coaching for
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people. But yeah, that article, Don't Be That Guy, The Taxotomy of Lousy Male Friends,
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published in 2010. We still reshare that. We reshare articles from our archives on our X feed
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and on Facebook. And every time we reshare that, it still gets a ton of traffic. It's timeless.
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it's evergreen. That makes me so, that makes me so happy. And also like, you don't want to be
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that guy. You don't want to be that guy. Yeah. So thank you for, uh, for sharing that, allowing
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us to publish that article. And then we've had you on the podcast before you're one of my early
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podcasts. 2013 was the last time we had you on episode number 42. So it's been a long time,
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13 years. You were on the show to talk about your book, level up your life, and you got a new book
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out and since that time we both have gotten old we're in our 40s now and your new book how to try
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again an approachable guide to navigating chaos and making change that sticks is all about how
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to get back in the saddle when life derails the goals you have for yourself and this book was
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born out of your own experience having to get back in the saddle big time because in 2023
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you got bucked the heck out of life saddle what happened in 2023 yeah well so interestingly i
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said i started nerd fitness at this point 17 years ago and i had an idea in 2023 like hey
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we're really good at helping people not succeed with more discipline but like fail or struggle
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through with more compassion and we help people kind of get back on track we help them respawn
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or restart on their fitness journey after a failure.
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that I thought I was going to be writing a book around.
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like, Oh, I am in fact mortal. And you, you got, you got the good kind of skin cancer. I mean,
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no cancer is good, but it's the one that you can just cut off at the dermatologist's office.
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Yeah. That was, that was what the dermat, don't worry. It's the good one, which was interesting.
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And I did have, it was, it was in my scalp. So they did have to, you know, they like scooped
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it out and then they had to sew my head shut and keep an eye on that wound for a few months,
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I think. So, so that was step one, step two, like you, Brett, we can both relate to this.
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thanks to things like ChatGPT and the way that Google changes, us content creators and writers
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kind of ran into, you know, I guess, steered a ship into an iceberg unbeknownst to us, which was
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people don't click through to websites anymore. And I watched as Nerd Fitness, my company,
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over a handful of months and years, you know, we lost a good 80% of our traffic, not because we did
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anything differently, but because of just the way that society interacts with websites and
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large language models, hoovering up all of our content and spitting out answers.
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So that was super fun to try to navigate. Yeah. We had that same thing happen to us.
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So yeah, we can commiserate. Yeah. And then I went through an amicable,
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but heartbreaking and life-changing divorce. And all of a sudden, I'm writing this book about
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how to navigate a chaotic life and how to pick yourself up and how to try again differently,
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how to try with compassion, how to try with different strategies that will actually help.
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And then I went through the most tumultuous years of my life and the book evolved. I had to go back
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to my publisher and say, hey, kind of going through something, going to need a little bit
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more time, but I think it's going to make for a better book that's going to help more people in
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different ways. And fortunately, they were very supportive of this. And the book ended up becoming
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the book that I needed to read myself. So it started as a, hey, we're really good at this.
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We have a team, we have a system and strategies that help real, regular, busy people navigate
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chaotic lives. And then it became a much bigger idea and a lot more kind of philosophical about,
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hey, life is not going to go the way that you expect. Here's how we can navigate that together.
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Okay. So let's talk about how to deal with failure. When you don't reach a goal or when
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your life just goes off kilter, it feels bad because it's a failure. We feel like a failure.
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But you highlight that this idea of thinking of ourselves as being a failure is relatively new.
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Walk us through how the meaning of failure has changed over time and how that history
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can change the way we look at failure. Yeah. So very early on in the book,
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i have a whole chapter dedicated to failure you know i thought hey like most people are going to
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pick up a book called how to try again after something has gone wrong or they're not succeeding
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in the way they want to and like you said we feel bad failure hurts and you know i'm not going to
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say like oh failure is always a blessing in disguise like sometimes failure just sucks and
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when we feel and when we have these experiences where we have failed, we decide that we and our
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identity, like we are now failures. The good news is like, that's not actually true. We are humans
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who failed at something. And I did some research into failure. I spoke to a professor of failure
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from Stevens University. Her name is Dr. Teresa McPhail, which is just the perfect, perfect last
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name. She literally teaches a class on failure. And then I took a trip to the Museum of Failure
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and I studied the origins of the definition of the word failure. And something that really jumped
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out at me through my research way back in the 1820s, I think, Noah Webster, Webster's Dictionary,
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Noah defined failure as like a breaking or becoming insolvent. It was something that
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happened. 30 years later, after Webster had passed away, but his dictionary endured,
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the new definition of failure became something like, you know, it's a weakness in a man's
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character. And all of a sudden, failure went from something that happened to us to something that
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we were. And I posit and think we would be much better off if we returned to that original
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definition or that definition that Webster had in his, you know, 1820s dictionary, that failure
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is something that happens it's not the end of the world yeah it sucks especially when you're going
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through it and in those moments and i'm not going to say like i said oh the you know something great
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will come from this maybe but at the same time it's something that happened there is a lesson
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that we can learn from it and we are not failures we are humans who failed at something once we can
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get wrap our heads around that then we can start to kind of pick through the rubble and say like
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all right, that happened. Give yourself a hug and be like, I'm part of the most common club
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on the planet, humanity. What do we do next? Yeah. Because when you identify yourself as a
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failure, it just makes you feel incapacitated. You feel like, why even try? But if you think,
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well, okay, this thing happened to me, but it's not the entirety of who I am, then you feel like,
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okay, there's something I can do to fix it. You mentioned you visited the Museum of Failure.
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What did you learn about failure from that visit?
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One, so this is a traveling museum by Dr. Samuel West.
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And I flew up to New York City and then was supposed to go to the museum with a friend,
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So we actually failed to make it to the museum of failure on time.
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So I walked into this museum and it's full of the best and the most interesting failures
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And what surprised me was how many of like the world's most successful companies were
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I mean, you know, Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, those were all there in addition to some failures
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that maybe were, you know, understandable, like Hooters Airline or other inventions
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that were like, you know, the hula chair, like, okay, maybe this idea wasn't fully baked.
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But the thing that really jumped out at me is the final exhibit.
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as you're walking out of the museum of failure, there is this kaleidoscope of post-it notes on
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the wall. And they encourage you to write down your failures and place it up on the wall alongside
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everybody else's. And for somebody that is struggling with something, we often, you know,
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maybe you're the head of a household and you keep your failure down because you want to come across
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as the strong, you know, you're the strong foundation of your family or your business
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or whatever, there's a lot of shame and guilt that we feel when we're failures and we cram it down.
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And I think we'd be much better off like this wall here when you write down your failures and
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add it to the wall and you see, oh, failed businesses or failed marriages or something
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deeply personal to somebody that they wrote in that wall. It makes you realize that you're not
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actually that unique. And I mean that in the best way possible. Like somebody has failed in the way
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that you have failed that before, like, welcome, you're not it's not that unique. And also failure
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makes you part of, you know, this never ending list of people who have failed, which has gone
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back since the beginning of time, since humans have had the opportunity to fail, we have failed.
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So when we add our failure to that wall, or we talk about it with others, it kind of removes
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some of the power it has over us. It took me months, maybe over a year, I think it was at
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least maybe 18 months before I finally shared my personal struggles with my audience. And the
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support I got in return was mind blowing. And that's what gave me the confidence to tell my
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story. You know, on page two of my book, it took me 14 drafts, I think, before I finally added my
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story to my book, because I wanted other people to feel okay sharing their failures and not beating
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themselves up because something didn't go the way they expected it to. Right. Okay. So everyone
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fails. Even the big dogs fail with billions of dollars of funding. They can have big, giant
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flops, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. Was it Pepsi clear? Big flop. That didn't work out. So if they
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can fail. Yeah. New Coke. Pepsi Crystal, right? Crystal Pepsi? Yeah. Crystal Pepsi. Yeah. Or the
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Arch Deluxe. I think that was in there too. Yep. Yeah. And then the other thing too,
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It teaches you that with anything you decide to do, failure could be an option.
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And as soon as you do, things get a little more copacetic.
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And then the other thing you talk about in reframing failure, I think another reason
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why people don't like to fail, and you talk about this in the book, is when you fail,
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you think, well, now I'm going back to square one.
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If you fail at something, you don't automatically have to start from scratch.
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So the good news is square one doesn't actually exist.
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So, you know, here's an example. Let's say you 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 your monthly gym membership and you feel like a failure. 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.
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The good news is that you've already accomplished so many of the steps between you and exercise.
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It's not just I'm at the gym, but rather you already had to find the gym.
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You had to figure out how the equipment worked.
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You had to figure out how to navigate the locker room.
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You had to figure out which workout you were going to do.
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So although you might be starting over with regards to how much weight you can lift or
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how fast you can run. You've already taken care of the first 90% of those steps. So when you start
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over, you get to bring the knowledge of every one of those past failures with you. You get to stand
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on those shoulders. And we actually get to be thankful for the fact that we failed in certain
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ways in the past. We can learn from all of that and bring it with us for our next attempt. It
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might allow us to succeed a little bit further or maybe have a dramatic success because we've
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already done so much of the hard work and learned some really tough lessons on what doesn't work for
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us in the past. Yeah. Reminds me of a line from a song from my favorite band. And everyone knows
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what I'm about to say because everyone knows what my favorite band is. It's the Killers. So they got
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this song called Lightning Fields from their 2020 album, Imploding the Mirage. It's their best album,
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my favorite album. And there's this line that goes, don't beat yourself up. You've laid good
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ground. I think that captures that idea perfectly. I love that. I love the killers too. Yeah. Killers
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are great. All right. So let's talk about this framework you developed that you've used with
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nerd fitness clients to handle setbacks and that you used in dealing with your own setbacks.
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It's an acronym. It's PACT, P-A-C-T, and it stands for PAWS, Accept, Change, Try. So let's talk about
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pause first. Whenever we're facing a hurdle or a setback, our first inclination is often to do
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more. Like, okay, I got to do something to get over this thing. But how can doing more actually
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make things worse for us? Y'all know the saying, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
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Maybe. But if you're trying to succeed at something, that's the wrong thing.
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you'll probably just fail again in the same way.
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kind of get on this loop or just keep running around
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this wheel of, all right, I failed at couch to 5K
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or going to the gym or journaling each morning.
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All right, I failed, I'll try again next month.
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except now you are beating yourself up even more
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So the first step I want people to take on this journey
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is not stagnation, it's not staying where we are.
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So when we think about things from this perspective,
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having a pause and saying, wait a second, am I actually doing the right thing? Am I heading down
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the right path? Am I progressing or am I trying to progress in the way that I'm actually interested
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in progressing? The good news is there are so many different ways to change. And if you keep trying
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to do the one that you don't like, you're just kind of spinning your wheels, you're swimming in
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the wrong direction, you're using so much energy to do something along the wrong path, when the
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next step is actually like, instead of just putting your head down and going further or faster in the
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same direction, it's pausing, taking a breath, looking at your surroundings and saying like,
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is this working for me? I think a lot of us kind of skip that step.
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Yeah. Speaking of being a swimming in the wrong direction, you actually use a story of this guy
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named Brett Archibald, who literally swam in the wrong direction. And it made things worse for him.
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Yeah, this is one of the craziest stories I've ever stumbled across.
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So I fell in love with this idea of treading water being actually heroic.
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And, you know, again, when the alternatives are drowning or swimming in the wrong direction,
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treading water is actually like a pretty darn good option, you know, second only to swimming
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his name's Brett, on a 50th birthday celebration with all of his friends. And they are on a boat
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sailing through the Mentawai Straits, I think, in the Philippines. And he got some food poisoning
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from eating a bad calzone the day before. So it's two in the morning. He's on this boat where
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they're getting ready to head out to a specific island. And he's got so much food poisoning that
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he runs up to the deck to throw up over the side of the boat. And the boat was so rough that he
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literally falls over the side of of the boat falls i think it's 15 maybe 20 feet into the water
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and it's two in the morning so nobody sees him and he pops his head up and he tries to yell but
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there's nobody awake there's the captain who's busy driving the boat and everybody else is asleep
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so brett does what anybody thinks they should do in this moment he's like all right well
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i guess i'm going to start swimming so he starts swimming you know pull kick breathe pull kick
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breathe and he does this for a handful of hours until the sun comes up and he can finally take
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a look at his surroundings and he realizes that there's still nothing in any direction and he
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takes stock of what's on him and he reaches in his pocket and he pulls out the little key card
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you know the cardboard key card holder from his hotel stay the night before he rips off a tiny
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corner and he drops it on the top of the water and notices as the current sends it in the exact
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opposite direction, he was swimming. Unbeknownst to Brett, he had been swimming against the current
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for hours, wasting energy, trying to make things better when the reality was he was actually making
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things worse. So as soon as he does this, he realizes like, okay, this is not what I need to
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be doing. I don't know when I'm going to be rescued, if at all. My only plan I have right now
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is to do the bare minimum and tread water long enough, not because I believe I will be rescued,
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but rather I'm going to tread long enough to keep going. And every hour of treading water
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reminds me that, Hey, I've already done it for this long. I can probably do it for another one.
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And I don't want to spoil the story. The good news is he does eventually get rescued,
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but that story of him trying so hard to do one thing and realizing that he was actually making
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a lot of things worse has stuck with me ever since. Yeah. I mean, even in wilderness survival,
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if you get lost in the woods, the thing they tell you is like, just stop and stay where you're at.
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because our natural inclination is like, I got to get out of here. I got to find my,
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you're just going to get more lost that way. Yeah. And I think it's applicable to like when
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our goals go sideways, because let's say it's a fitness goal and it doesn't shake out what we
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think. Well, I'm just going to try harder on this thing that I was doing. Instead, what would be
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helpful is just like pause, stop. Like, is this the thing I should actually be doing? Is there
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something else I could be doing? Maybe I hire a coach to get their input, but that pause is what
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allows you to make those decisions yeah not only that but i think if we don't pause there is some
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part of us that there is comfort in just continuing to do the thing that we have been doing even though
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we know it's not working for us oh we sign up for a dating app and we swiped right a hundred times
00:23:17.100
and it didn't work you know it's like trying to date with your same same you know cheesy pickup
00:23:21.980
lines if it's not working that's probably not a good strategy maybe having a friend like look at
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your profile and work through like, hey, what is working and not working here? Same thing with
00:23:32.420
maybe you're applying for a new job, just firing 100 more resumes into the void of LinkedIn or
00:23:37.920
whatever. If it's not working before, it's probably not going to work this time. You need to pause
00:23:43.020
and take a look at the picture and say like, I need to do something different, which is so hard
00:23:49.300
because then we have to admit to ourselves that what we've been doing isn't working. And we spent
00:23:54.360
all of that time on that when we could have been doing something else. But there's this great quote
00:23:58.660
from C.S. Lewis who says something like, you know, once you realize you're on the wrong road,
00:24:03.320
progress means doing an about face and walking back towards where you came so that you can get
00:24:08.120
on the right road. You know, he says the next correct step is backwards. I think there's a
00:24:12.080
step in between there, which is like pausing, stop moving forward and turning around and
00:24:17.260
assessing your situation so that you can have the bandwidth and the clarity to say, oh, what I'm
00:24:22.580
doing isn't working. I know I don't go back to square one because I get to carry all of these
00:24:26.960
past experiences with me. Cool. I can now adjust my path and try something different. And I might
00:24:33.360
be able to get there slightly faster because of all the changes and challenges I went through in
00:24:37.600
the past. And you also talk about the pause can come in handy if life just throws you a curveball,
00:24:44.220
like let's say a loved one gets sick or there's a death in the family. And it just requires you
00:24:49.520
to spend time in that area of your life our natural inclination is like well i'm going to
00:24:54.980
take care of my family my sick loved one and i'm going to keep doing all this stuff and more and
00:24:59.840
more stuff when the better approach because that's just going to burn you out the better approach
00:25:03.860
would just be pause and just tell yourself i'm just going to tread water here for the next couple
00:25:08.440
months maybe year and i'm going to take the foot off the gas so i can focus on this one thing and
00:25:15.040
then you tell yourself like, okay, I'm not going to be making progress like I want, but I've got
00:25:20.240
all this experience in the past and I can take that with me when I can pick things back up again.
00:25:25.340
But I, for now I just got to tread water. Yeah. Like I said, treading water can be heroic. I mean,
00:25:30.380
I'm a guy that owns a health and fitness company and I spent the last six years treading water with
00:25:35.200
my own fitness and it was so needed. You know, I'm trying to write this book. I'm navigating
00:25:40.120
a business that is reinventing itself. My personal life has irrevocably changed. All of these things
00:25:45.560
are happening at the same time. I didn't also need to add on to this, hey, you're not doing
00:25:50.700
your prescribed workout. You're not doing all of the things. I think we have a tendency to beat
00:25:56.240
ourselves up when we can't juggle all of the chainsaws that we're trying to juggle. And we
00:26:00.680
just keep thinking like, God, if I just had it together a little more, or if I was just more
00:26:04.700
disciplined. And the reality is, it's not a motivation problem. It's a resources problem.
00:26:09.460
we're asking so much of ourselves and sometimes strategically half-assing your goals or
00:26:16.540
strategically half-assing your workout is like an amazing place to be when the alternative is to
00:26:22.880
give up and drown or again bring out energy swimming in the wrong direction like for me it
00:26:28.200
was i can do i'm gonna go to the gym and do one exercise and while i'm traveling i'm gonna have
00:26:33.560
one healthy meal a day. I wasn't trying to win. I was just trying to not lose. And I knew if I
00:26:40.060
could do that today, it gave me a chance to get to tomorrow. And if I can get to tomorrow,
00:26:45.220
I don't know how long I'm going to need to tread water, but I can do it for a really,
00:26:49.240
really long time. And for me, only recently, after finishing this book, and finally having
00:26:54.640
a little bit of a gap in my schedule, did I rejoin a commercial gym, actually working now with Matt
00:27:02.920
from Nerd Fitness, who is now coaching me to work on my fitness. And the great news is I'm not going,
00:27:08.900
I don't have to go all the way back to a start. I'm not having to start from zero, even though we
00:27:13.620
know there's no square one. I have been doing a bare minimum for long enough that I can get right
00:27:19.260
into that gym and get on track moving forward with some progress pretty quickly. And that's
00:27:25.040
due to the fact that I was able to tread water for a long time. We're going to take a quick break
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00:32:22.700
And now back to the show. All right, let's pause. Let's talk about A for accept. Instead of accepting problems, you argue that we typically avoid them. What does avoidance often look like?
00:32:34.340
I think when I see and deal with avoidance personally, and when we see it with coaching
00:32:39.840
clients and community members at Nerd Fitness, we do one of two things. One is we kick the can down
00:32:45.700
the road, and we love the word until, or we kind of drown it out. And let's talk about that first
00:32:52.320
one. So I'll share an example. There is this amazing podcast called Chasing Scratch. And it's
00:32:57.540
about these two guys named Mike and Eli, who are college buddies trying to get to scratch golf,
00:33:01.980
which is, you know, shooting even par or better on average, which is a really challenging goal.
00:33:07.640
And I've known them for years. They've been working with Matt from Nerd Fitness. And Mike
00:33:12.320
kept coming to Matt and saying, oh, I'm so sorry. I couldn't get to my workout today. You know,
00:33:17.780
my kid got sick or I couldn't make it because this work meeting went long. But next week,
00:33:22.600
things should get back to normal. And the next week, something else would happen. And he kept
00:33:27.280
saying, but then I'll get back to normal. And Matt finally had a conversation with Mike and said,
00:33:33.080
Mike, I'm worried. There is this normal that you think is just around the corner.
00:33:37.620
That normal is not coming back. In Mike's mind, normal was predictable. Normal was routine.
00:33:43.700
And Mike's normal was anything but the podcast had become an unexpected success. His co-host Eli
00:33:50.660
ended up having to have a hip surgery. His kid was growing up. He was taking on extra work so
00:33:57.060
that he could focus on the podcast and leave his corporate job. So there was nothing normal
00:34:01.500
about his life. Normal had left the building. And once he accepted this of like, hey, I keep trying
00:34:08.040
to expect something is going to be different in the future. Like I'm avoiding my actual reality
00:34:14.380
today in all of its messiness. And the sooner I accept the fact that I can't do it all, that my
00:34:20.480
life is messy, only then could they finally start to do something about it. You know, instead of a
00:34:25.840
structured workout plan three days per week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It was, Mike, what do
00:34:31.240
we have time for today? Great. Let's do that first thing in the morning before your kid wakes up.
00:34:36.560
It might be 15 minutes. Cool. Those 15 minutes are better than the perfect workout routine that
00:34:42.840
Mike was hoping to be able to do next week. So I think a lot of us avoid the reality of our
00:34:49.980
current situation because this reality is kind of scary, right? Like the fact that we can't do it all
00:34:59.580
it's really easy to just kind of cram that down
00:35:11.820
the sooner I can have that uncomfortable conversation
00:35:14.080
with my spouse or my boss about how I'm struggling,
00:35:19.780
like then we can finally start to make smarter decisions
00:35:24.980
where we need boundaries, how to navigate whatever that next step might look like for us.
00:35:30.640
Yeah. And I think the way you described acceptance there, it's not resignation. So I think a lot of
00:35:35.360
guys when they hear acceptance, it means, well, I just got to resign myself to this situation.
00:35:40.020
There's nothing I can do. It's like, no, what acceptance is just like looking at the bare
00:35:44.300
bones reality facts. And once you see how crappy things are, then you can start doing something
00:35:49.920
about it. It's like Apollo 13, right? They had to accept the fact like we're in this little tin can
00:35:54.300
thousands of miles from earth with these limited supplies we got to make a filter out of it
00:36:00.840
and they had to accept that fact and then work with those constraints yeah we're not doing
00:36:06.280
ourselves any favor when we think or feel badly that life is anything other than what it is right
00:36:13.160
now warts and all you know dog eating too much grass and throwing up on the carpet kid getting
00:36:18.760
sick, navigating fertility issues, like whatever it may be, like, these are things that are so
00:36:25.780
real and honest. And the sooner we can look at those with clear eyes, the more likely we can
00:36:30.600
then say like, Hey, we're trying, but also this is our reality. What can we do about it?
00:36:36.120
Yeah. And even when people accept there are problems in their life,
00:36:38.820
they sometimes just kind of do it passively instead of as a step toward action. Like they're
00:36:43.020
just thinking, I'm just going to got to hope for the best, you know, things will just turn out
00:36:47.020
better just magically. Well, maybe that might happen, but probably not.
00:36:52.960
Yeah. There's some research, or your name is Dr. Keta Weingarten, who refers to this as like
00:36:57.960
unreasonable hope. And it's just this concept that like, oh, things should get better because
00:37:04.080
I want them to get better. And they should, and I'll just wait for them to get better. And like,
00:37:09.200
that's not how this works. They might not get better or they might require very specific action
00:37:14.480
for things to get better. So the sooner we can accept and look at the absurdity of our life and
00:37:21.380
say like, yep, this is happening and it's not cool. And I'm really unhappy about this. And
00:37:28.260
here's what I can do about it. Yeah. All right. So that's accept. Let's move to change. So we've
00:37:33.620
paused, taken a break from what we're doing to kind of assess things. We've accepted our situation.
00:37:38.380
Now we got to figure out, okay, what can we change to prevent the failure in the future to overcome
00:37:43.700
it. How do you figure out what you need to change when trying to overcome a setback?
00:37:49.200
I mean, I think that the step one is to picture your favorite literary detective.
00:37:53.280
It could be Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew. For me growing up, it was Encyclopedia Brown.
00:38:00.380
Yeah. He would solve, you know, mysteries in his neighborhood for, I think it was like 25 cents,
00:38:05.060
25 cents a case. And then he would come home from school or, or, you know, on summer break and sit
00:38:10.240
down at the dinner table and his dad who was the chief police of idaville would then spill his guts
00:38:15.920
about whatever case he couldn't solve and by the end of dinner or later on you know encyclopedia
00:38:20.580
brown this young kid would have solved it so i don't know what that says about the dad that he
00:38:24.800
couldn't handle this and was just you know telling all the details to his son but i think there's
00:38:29.880
something interesting and fun about looking at life and looking at our past attempts like a
00:38:35.360
curious detective. And you can picture the board game Clue as well. Like, oh, that's really
00:38:41.140
interesting. You know, oh, I'm you think you're a failure because you couldn't stick with your
00:38:46.100
workout. It's like, oh, that's really interesting. I missed my workout this morning, not because I'm
00:38:50.600
a failure, but because I was up super late last night scrolling on my phone because I just felt
00:38:56.920
like I had to disassociate from a really stressful day. OK, why was the day stressful? Oh, because
00:39:03.160
I actually don't like my job. And I, you know, I had to go pick up my kid from school because
00:39:08.360
there was behavioral issues. And then I had to, oh, forgot to take the food out of the freezer
00:39:13.100
in time to defrost it. So then I couldn't cook dinner, like whatever it may be. So many times,
00:39:17.440
as I said earlier, what we think is a motivation problem is often a resources problem. So if we
00:39:23.140
can look with curiosity and not judgment, like imagine we are detectives and we see
00:39:28.040
the chalk outline of our past attempts to try to make a specific change.
00:39:33.160
We can look at that and say like, oh, OK, turns out it was, you know, for these these specific reasons, actually two steps removed from I'm not motivated.
00:39:42.800
It's actually so much deeper than that. Once we can finally start to kind of put those pieces in place and and solve that crime, we can then decide, OK, 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.
00:40:01.520
And when you do make a change, it doesn't have to be a wholesale change of the whole
00:40:08.620
Yeah, there's that great quote from Charlie Munger.
00:40:10.300
It's, you know, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
00:40:12.520
I think when we're deciding what to change, we can think about this like scientists.
00:40:19.380
You know, we've been running experiments with our clients for, I'd say, we've been doing
00:40:26.280
and it's been really liberating for our clients to be able to say hey i know this is not how you've
00:40:33.900
done things in the past but you came to us because you want things to be different and if you want
00:40:38.460
different outcomes you need we need to try something differently let's try this as an
00:40:43.020
experiment and when you when you look at things this way it adds some lightness to it it removes
00:40:49.940
this pressure of gosh i have to do this for the rest of my life what if it doesn't work whatever
00:40:55.380
we can look at it like curious scientists. We take all of the data that we learned from our
00:40:59.560
detective work and say, interesting, okay, I have a hypothesis that if I were to follow this new
00:41:05.980
workout program or try join this hiking club, I will be more interested in exercise by the end
00:41:13.020
of it. Or, hmm, I've been trying toxic, you know, dieting. I've been trying to cut out carbs for the
00:41:19.520
past decade off and on. And it turns out I love carbs. Maybe there is a different experiment I
00:41:24.660
can conduct where I still get to eat carbs, you know, and try to have success in a different way.
00:41:31.620
So in NerdFitness, we call it the zoom in, zoom out method. So you zoom out and set the experiment,
00:41:36.860
and then you zoom in and just focus on conducting the experiment. You don't worry about the end
00:41:44.240
goal. You don't worry about whether or not it's giving you the results you want. We are simply
00:41:50.100
conducting the experiment. And at the end of those 30 days or six weeks, we can then zoom out and
00:41:56.400
say, one, did we get the result that we expected? It might be what we expected or not, but neither
00:42:01.760
one is good or bad. It's an experiment. And then we can decide, did we enjoy the experiment? Would
00:42:07.840
we like to keep doing it? Or do we need to make a change or adjust a variable and create a different
00:42:13.520
experiment and make that change and kind of rerun that process? But when we think about things in
00:42:19.000
this experimental mindset, it removes so much of the judgment that we put on the plate and the
00:42:23.980
expectations we kind of put in our shoulders to suddenly have it all figured out. Yeah. I've done
00:42:28.280
that in my own life with my own training. I mean, one experiment I ran, I still continue today.
00:42:32.880
I wanted to get more steps in because I sit down a lot for my work. And so I decided, you know,
00:42:39.140
when I wake up early, I started waking up early in my forties, like five o'clock, just not,
00:42:44.600
not on purpose. It just happened. So I decided, you know what, I'm just going to take a walk
00:42:48.020
around the block during that time i think what you and i we've actually had a phone call on one
00:42:53.040
of my early morning walks i just started it started out as an experiment and i was like i'll just do
00:42:57.960
this for a month and see how it goes and turns out i really like it and i've been doing it now for
00:43:01.800
years every morning go for a walk at 5 30 6 o'clock in the morning and it worked but there's other
00:43:07.200
things i've tried i'm like i'm not going to do that anymore it didn't work out for me so yeah
00:43:10.360
i like that idea just with any change you make you don't have to make a full-hearted commitment
00:43:14.460
just approach it like an experiment and see how it goes for a few weeks and if it works great if
00:43:19.360
it doesn't no harm no foul and getting rid of it let's talk about the the t for try so you've come
00:43:25.480
up with something that you want to change in your life that you want to make an improvement on but a
00:43:31.740
lot of people still don't actually try the thing they came up with what's holding people back from
00:43:37.740
trying things? I think, first of all, you're in good company. If you're like, I need the perfect
00:43:45.100
plan, I should do some more research. You know, I got to do more research to make sure I have the
00:43:49.440
perfect plan or the most optimized diet that I have to follow. And I just need to keep working
00:43:55.640
on this. I tell a few fun stories in the book. One is about George Lucas and him trying to write
00:44:00.760
the screenplay for Star Wars and just how terrible early drafts of it were. And, you know, I think
00:44:07.460
it was Francis Ford Coppola got a chance to read an early draft and said, like, I think the term
00:44:12.300
he used was this is gobbledygook. Like, I don't know what this is. And it's a disaster. But he
00:44:18.020
was just he needed to get something down on the page. And then I also tell the story of Winston
00:44:23.040
Churchill. You know, we know him as the prime minister and as a war correspondent back in
00:44:29.160
the earlier days, and then as a soldier in World War One, I believe. And in between World War One
00:44:35.280
in World War II, he decides he wants to become a painter. And he tells this funny story about how
00:44:40.500
he was terrified of where to put his first brushstroke on his canvas. He called it like the
00:44:46.180
towering canvas. And he was afraid, arrested with a silent veto, because what if he put it in the
00:44:51.840
wrong spot? Fortunately, his wife invited over a neighbor who was a painter. And she just walked
00:44:57.240
up to him and said, give me the big brush. And she just grabbed it and just started throwing
1.00
00:45:00.820
paint up on the canvas. And this is when Churchill realized like, oh, the canvas couldn't
00:45:05.100
hit back. It couldn't fight back. And suddenly the spell had been broken. Oh, I can just do this
00:45:11.040
imperfectly. And that's okay. You know, the term that I thought of was start ugly. You know, I'm
00:45:15.940
like, oh, this idea of starting ugly gives you permission to get out of your own way and just
00:45:19.840
get started. And then I stumbled across a book called Start Ugly by David Duchemin, I believe
00:45:24.500
that's his name. But we're so afraid often that we're going to do it incorrectly, that we never
00:45:30.440
start at all. And I think we need to instead give ourselves permission or rather challenge ourselves
00:45:34.860
to start incorrectly and to do things imperfectly and to start ugly because only then can we finally
00:45:41.720
get good at it yeah so that idea that things have to be perfect that holds back a lot of people but
0.76
00:45:48.660
just kind of like you know what the first one's gonna suck richard grenier he's one of the ceos
00:45:53.680
at huckberry he's got this saying you always throw out the first pancake whenever you're making
00:45:58.760
pancakes it's like the first one's always the worst you always throw it out so yeah just just
00:46:02.740
do something and accept that it's probably going to be bad. And then with time, as you do it more
00:46:08.300
and more, you're going to get better and better and better at it. Yeah. Well, not just that,
00:46:12.900
but there is a specific way that you can get better. And I think about this from like a ready
00:46:17.040
fire aim sequence of things. And in the book, I talk about standup comedians specifically and how
00:46:24.400
what we see on stage or what we see on Netflix, what we see at a comedy special, we see the
00:46:31.060
finished product and we think like oh that was really funny what we don't realize is the hundreds
00:46:36.080
of sets that that comedian has performed slowly tinkering with that specific joke that pause
00:46:43.120
that funny aside that they just quote unquote thought up you know like all of that has been
00:46:47.380
tested like scientists in a laboratory on tuesday nights and small clubs around the world the way
00:46:53.280
i think of this is like comedians don't tell jokes because they're funny they tell a joke
00:46:58.060
until it becomes funny and writers don't write when they have an idea you know professional
00:47:04.540
writers write until they find a good idea so much of this is i'm going to try this thing and start
00:47:11.860
ugly and then based on the feedback that the world is giving me or the audience is giving me
00:47:18.780
or my readers are giving me and how i'm feeling about this i can make this project slightly better
00:47:26.120
over time and create this pretty amazing thing at the end, but it's going to come with a bunch
00:47:31.620
of tiny adjustments along the way based on feedback that we're getting throughout the
00:47:35.360
process. And another thing you talk about holds people back from trying the thing that they've
00:47:39.220
decided they're going to do to initiate some change in their life. They might think, well,
00:47:43.260
this isn't how you're supposed to do it, or this isn't the most optimized way to do it.
00:47:48.240
It's not what the guru says I should be doing. And you say like, that doesn't matter. Just do
00:47:54.120
it works for you. And if it seems kind of silly or non-optimal, like that's okay. And then also,
00:48:00.980
you know, it's okay to not try things that everyone's saying you should do because you're
00:48:05.340
just like, you know what? I don't like doing that. I'm not going to do that. So like when it comes to
00:48:09.180
fitness, if someone says, man, bro, you got to do CrossFit, that's like the best thing. Well,
00:48:13.220
if you don't like that, don't do CrossFit. It's better for you to be physically active
00:48:16.560
doing something you enjoy because you're more likely to stick with doing that thing.
00:48:20.900
yeah and nothing makes my heart hurt more than seeing somebody that is like okay i'm finally
00:48:26.960
working up the courage to exercise and they go to like a boot camp class with their super fit
00:48:32.580
friends and this class is full of really fit people and the instructor is yelling motivational
00:48:38.360
platitudes and and this person finishes that class and thinks gosh like if that's what it takes to
00:48:44.820
get healthy like man i'm out i do not want to do that this is not for me the reality is like there
00:48:50.440
are so many different ways to get healthy. There are so many different paths to success. The best
00:48:56.300
workout is the one that you actually do. The best diet is the one that you can actually follow most
00:49:01.780
of the time. In the book, I talk about Neil Stevenson is the author of Snow Crash and a bunch
00:49:07.180
of other unbelievable science fiction books. And he talks about how he is a terrible correspondent
00:49:12.000
because he needs four hours of uninterrupted time to write his books. And if he had two two-hour
00:49:19.780
blocks, it is not nearly the same as one four-hour uninterrupted block. Somebody might read that and
00:49:25.500
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
00:49:31.260
no way I could ever write or succeed the way that he is. Therefore, I'm just never going to be a
00:49:36.460
writer. But then you hear about Agatha Christie, who wrote 60 plus detective novels and has sold
00:49:43.060
billions of, like literally over a billion copies of her books and short stories. And she tells a
00:49:48.500
story in her autobiography about how her friends never knew when she wrote because she would just
00:49:53.400
you know steal away for bits and spurts like a dog with a bone I think she said and she would
00:49:58.660
write for 20 minutes here or there she didn't have a dedicated writing room and that's how she wrote
00:50:04.180
her books so both of those paths worked but they worked for the right person because they found
00:50:09.800
what worked for them and I think that's the step that a lot of us miss we see the celebrity we see
00:50:15.620
the Instagram influencer telling us about the perfect morning protocol. And we forget to ask
00:50:21.520
the question, like, one, do I want that? Two, does this fit into my reality? And what am I not
00:50:28.280
accepting about my current situation? And once I do those things, then you can finally decide like,
00:50:32.860
hey, this is the path that I want to try and the things I want to do for myself.
00:50:36.780
Yeah. I think those influencers can be helpful if you just approach them as like a buffet.
00:50:41.320
okay it's like well you know that thing looks interesting i'm gonna try that and you don't
00:50:45.820
have to do it exactly the way they do it but like you try it out and see if it works for you
00:50:49.660
but yeah if you just decide i gotta do exactly what this person does like it's not gonna work
00:50:53.520
out all right so that's packed so pause accept change try let's talk about some of the things
00:50:59.760
that get in the way so if we do experience failure some of the mental roadblocks that
00:51:05.200
prevent us from getting back in the saddle and makes things harder for yourself and one of these
00:51:09.400
things is the doom loop. What's the doom loop? And how does that get in the way of us trying
00:51:13.460
again? The doom loop is the most common pitfall I see people falling into when they're trying to
00:51:19.120
make some sort of behavior change. It generally starts with step one is feeling less than. Step
00:51:25.560
two is identifying, you know, we see something on Instagram, we see, we read an inspiring biography,
00:51:32.280
we watch a documentary or whatever and we then get irrationally excited and think like this is
00:51:39.960
the thing that is going to solve all of my problems and then I will finally feel enough
00:51:44.440
and then we go all in on that thing everybody does it on January 1st new year new me I'm all
00:51:51.500
in on changing everything about myself like let alone set aside the fact that we've never been
00:51:56.660
able to, as the Twitter quote, it was something like, all of my future plans require me to display
00:52:04.060
a level of discipline I've never once exhibited in my entire life. The challenge here is when we
00:52:09.120
go all in on something, the reality is like all or nothing generally is all then nothing. You go
00:52:16.960
all in, life happens. And then you say, oh, that didn't work. Okay, I have to stop because life is
00:52:23.140
too busy right now. I will try again a year from now. So we go back around the loop, back to the
00:52:28.420
beginning where we are again, not enough, except we now heap on some more failure and struggle
00:52:33.240
and guilt because we couldn't follow through with it until we find that next thing again,
00:52:37.700
that gets us irrationally excited. Maybe this will be the thing. And we either go around that loop
00:52:42.320
or we just kind of give up and say like, oh, change is not for me.
00:52:48.460
Yeah, there's a few tactics. I think one, step one is when it comes to feeling not enough.
00:52:54.600
We've all tried tough love repeatedly. I think we have enough of that in our lives.
00:52:59.780
And I spent a lot of this book and a lot of the years writing this book,
00:53:03.720
diving really deeply into self-compassion, specifically Kristen Neff's work on self-compassion
00:53:09.820
and realizing like, hey, tough love you think is what kind of got you here. That's probably not
00:53:15.900
the case and beating yourself up is not a great strategy for getting yourself out of this loop,
00:53:21.260
let's try self-compassion instead. And that means allowing ourselves to have the thoughts that we
00:53:27.240
have and not beating ourselves because we have them. Our thoughts are thinking themselves. It's
00:53:32.080
generally not under our control which thoughts pop in, but we can start to put some distance
00:53:37.600
between us and those thoughts. We can notice and name those thoughts or those patterns as
00:53:43.220
they're starting to happen, we can give a name to that voice in our heads for those of us like
00:53:49.140
myself that feel like they have that inner monologue. When you add some distance, maybe
00:53:53.640
some humor to that voice and realize that you are not your thoughts, it kind of gives you some
00:53:59.560
of that ability to move back through that packed loop again, which is pause. Maybe,
00:54:04.720
is this thought helping me? Is it true? What am I not accepting about the situation?
00:54:09.280
change would be, hey, do I want to turn up the volume on this thought or turn the volume down
00:54:13.780
on the thought? And then T, try, based on what is happening in these loops and these thoughts,
00:54:19.300
what would I like to try to do differently moving forward? So there is, like I said,
00:54:23.880
you're going to put some distance between you and those thoughts. We're going to practice
00:54:27.500
self-compassion. And then before we even get on the loop again, I like to think of that scene from
00:54:33.420
the Fellowship of the Ring where they're at the Prancing Pony and Aragorn is talking to Frodo
00:54:58.640
we ask them right up front, like, what are you worried about?
00:55:08.500
i'm going to fall back into this doom loop i'm going to fall back into all or nothing thinking
00:55:14.380
i'm going to retreat to old patterns and when we can identify those things up front it might make
00:55:22.400
us change the expectation we have it might change the type of exercise we're interested in trying
00:55:28.440
it might change how many changes we're willing to make and we can start to accept and you know
00:55:35.080
predict, hey, we're at that moment. We're three weeks in. I know that voice in your head is
00:55:40.100
telling you to stick your head in the sand and ghost. What if we tried something differently?
00:55:44.140
What if we did the bare minimum today and we counted that as a win? What if we shifted into
00:55:49.960
tread water? Whatever it may be, we are just essentially looking for tiny tactics to have
00:55:56.200
a better relationship and conversation with that voice in our heads or that little person that
00:56:01.220
sits on our shoulder that tells us to give up or to quit or to stop doing what we're doing.
00:56:06.480
I want to talk about, and just talking about my favorite chapter in the book, and it was
00:56:10.200
how to keep doing the thing. And what you do is you provide all these tried and true tactics to
00:56:15.580
successfully keep plodding along with whatever thing you're doing. So you decide to make this
00:56:20.660
change in your life. How do you keep with it so you don't fall off the saddle as frequently?
00:56:26.480
What are some of your favorite ones? There's like eight of them. What are some of your favorite
00:56:30.280
ones from those how to keep doing the thing tactics yeah so this chapter is built around
00:56:35.160
albert bandura's research into self-efficacy which is essentially just like belief in yourself that
00:56:40.500
you're able to make change and do things differently yeah i think it's a might be 10
00:56:45.960
tactics in there yeah there are a few that i love more than others i think the one that honestly
00:56:52.260
like has changed my life more than anything is being willing to half-ass the thing i don't know
00:56:58.500
what the thing is that you've picked. It might be training or, you know, trying to write your
00:57:03.760
first novel or read a large novel, whatever it may be. And I think being willing to strategically
00:57:11.420
half-ass that thing is one of the greatest, most important life skills you can develop.
00:57:17.920
And it can be done with a simple question change. Instead of asking, do I have time for my workout
00:57:22.980
today, it's reframing it as what workout do I have time for? And that might be five minutes
00:57:29.820
in the morning before you pick up your newborn from his or her crib. It might be going for a walk
00:57:35.760
after work with your spouse and saying, that was my workout for today. I checked the box,
00:57:41.940
that was good enough. And accepting that, yeah, it might not be the full blown, I did the full
00:57:48.560
workout i went to the gym for an hour and a half but man it is so much better to strategically be
00:57:53.640
able to say like hey i did what i was capable of doing today and like that's a huge win the other
00:57:59.360
one this one is going to sound so simple and yet it's like one of the best predictors we've seen
00:58:04.080
or i've seen over 17 years of writing for nerd fitness and i think i call it like the shower
00:58:09.320
theory or the shower principle let's say you wake up in the morning and normally every day after
00:58:14.180
your morning walk, you take a shower and you get ready to go to work. But this morning you woke up
00:58:20.960
late because the alarm didn't go off and your kid threw up in the middle of the night. So you have
00:58:26.060
to navigate that. Now the dog's eating the throw up. And all of a sudden, like your morning is
00:58:30.180
just completely blown out. And you splash some water on your face and you drag that you bring
00:58:35.880
the kid to the doctor. And based on that, like you quote unquote failed at taking your morning
00:58:41.500
shower? Do you have to start downloading shower podcasts? Do you need to start studying the
00:58:47.120
shower habits of celebrities? Do you need to write in your shower journal about how you failed?
00:58:53.020
Are you going to try again showering next month? No, like you just missed your shower this morning
00:58:58.360
because of life. Cool. Like just take your shower the next day and move on. When we find that people
00:59:06.240
are willing to allow themselves to miss a day and then just do it the next day, like
00:59:11.020
that is one of the best predictors we've seen for success compared to people who miss that
00:59:17.500
And then they feel so badly that they stick their head in the sand or they go off the
00:59:22.180
rails and then they don't want to talk to their coach or they beat themselves up so
00:59:26.540
much that they then crave eating more of the thing that they're beating themselves up for
00:59:31.660
Like 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?
00:59:46.800
Those two are my favorites too. I use those all the time with my fitness in particular. If I'm having my days busy, 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 set, one hard set of each of the main lifts.
01:00:07.520
And then if I miss a day, say I can't even get a workout in, I remember early on in my fitness
01:00:12.980
journey, if I miss a day, I was like, oh, geez, I'm a failure. Why am I even going to try? It's
01:00:17.420
like, ah, whatever. It's okay. I'll just get it in the next time. Not much change is going to
01:00:22.600
happen in a workout. Or even if you mess up on your nutrition, you just pig out on the weekend,
01:00:28.120
you're not going to gain any fat from a single day of bad eating. You'll look heavier because
01:00:33.200
you have a lot of water and glycogen it's not fat so just like the next day it's like all right
01:00:38.280
i'll just get back on the saddle it's going to be fine yeah it's never the one missed day it's
01:00:42.700
always that missed day that turns into a week or a month of you know self-loathing and and making
01:00:48.180
more unhealthy choices that send you down the wrong path because you beat yourself up from
01:00:52.980
missing that one day yeah but yeah like you said there's a lot more in there some of them are just
01:00:56.780
get a quick win is a good one make things fun like actually enjoy the thing you're doing make
01:01:01.480
it necessary. And you go into detail on how to do that. My favorite chapter. I really love that a
01:01:04.860
lot because I use a lot of those tactics in my own life. Well, Steve, this has been a great
01:01:08.660
conversation. There's a lot more we could talk about. Where can people go to learn more about
01:01:12.220
the book and your work? Yeah, it's super simple. The book is called How to Try Again. So you can
01:01:17.200
go to howtotryagain.com. And then I'm on every platform, SteveKam, S-T-E-V-E-K-A-M-B,
01:01:25.140
SteveKam.com for my newsletter. I'm on the various social platforms at SteveKam. So
01:01:30.320
pretty easy to find. I'm so proud of this book. It took a lot out of me and I lived a lifetime
01:01:36.020
while writing it. So I hope you consider checking it out. It's probably the thing I'm most proud of.
01:01:40.840
It took a lot to get it across the finish line, but I'm really glad I did.
01:01:43.700
All right. Well, Steve Cam, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
01:01:48.060
My guest today was Steve Cam. He's the author of the book, How to Try Again. It's available
01:01:51.380
on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at
01:01:54.880
his website, stevecam.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash try again.
01:02:10.120
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
01:02:23.540
As always, thank you for the continued support.