Back in 2009, Steve Kamb Googled “nerd fitness,” found nothing, bought the domain, and started writing — and accidentally built Nerd Fitness, one of the internet’s most beloved fitness communities. Seventeen years and tens of millions of readers later, his new book, How to Try Again, is out in the world: a funny, honest, deeply human guide to failing better, forgiving yourself, and starting over.
Steve and I go back to the same era of the internet — both of us started businesses in the blogging days, before AI (or really — social media!) was a thing. So this one is part reunion, part real talk about what happens when a clear passion cools: when the world changes under you, the traffic vanishes, your company has to reinvent itself, and life takes a few hard left turns. We get into the Museum of Failure, why “all or nothing becomes all then nothing,” the permission to strategically tread water, and what it means to navigate life like a wayfinder instead of a rocket locked onto a single coordinate.
Watch the full conversation above, or read the lightly edited transcript below.
Krista: My guest today is Steve Kamb. Back in — it was 2009? Is that true?
Steve: Yeah, way back in the day.
Krista: Steve Googled “Nerd Fitness,” found nothing, bought the domain, started writing, and somehow accidentally built one of the internet’s most beloved fitness communities — Nerd Fitness. And honestly, I remember looking at your stuff back then thinking you were just the coolest, most passionate person on the internet.
Steve: I’ll take passionate. I don’t know about cool. I did start a company called Nerd Fitness, so maybe we’ll go with the opposite of cool.
Krista: Well, in my mind, nerds are the coolest.
Steve: Also true.
Krista: So Steve has a new book out today, and it’s called How to Try Again. You should definitely get it — it’s a super funny, honest, really human guide to failing better, forgiving yourself, and starting over. Highly recommend it. And yes, Steve and I go way back to the same era of the internet — way before AI, way before… Do you remember influencers weren’t even a thing? That word wasn’t even a thing. I remember people going, “Is social media going to be a thing?” This whole time. So anyway, I’m super excited to talk to you today. Welcome, Steve.
Steve: Thanks, Krista. We’ve known each other since before my beard started going gray and my hair started going gray. It’s been 17 years since I started Nerd Fitness, which kind of breaks my brain a little bit. I feel like I’ve lived 10 lifetimes in those 17 years — with my business, personally, professionally. And the fact that we’re getting to chat feels like a very fun full-circle moment, on the day that my new book is hitting bookshelves around the world. So it’s just so fun to talk to you.
Krista: Congratulations!
Steve: Thank you.
Krista: I can’t totally remember — did we first meet at WDS?
Steve: It has to be. I just got back from another conference, and I feel like everybody there was like, “Oh, Steve, we definitely met at WDS, right?” So this is World Domination Summit. Shout out to Chris Guillebeau, the OG influencer — the person that inspired me to write and publish free content on the internet, and then hope one day we could convince some people to support our art somehow, through some means. And somehow it worked. And that, in a bunch of weird ways, eventually led me here.
Krista: Same — did you ever read his book, The $100 Startup?
Steve: Of course. Game changer.
Krista: That’s the book that — I built my whole fitness business, 12 Minute Athlete, from that book. I followed everything. So yeah, Chris is amazing.
Steve: I love that.
Krista: So, I don’t know how much you know about this, but I love to focus on people’s passions — and I’m also really curious how they change and grow over the years. Like I said, when I first heard about you and saw your stuff, I always loved the visual design of it too. It always stood out to me. And the nerd part, because — like I said — I think nerds are cool. But what were you super passionate about when you started it, if anything?
Steve: Two things. One, I was certainly passionate about nerd culture. I grew up with a Nintendo Entertainment System and two loving parents, spent my childhood playing Zelda and then going out into the woods and imagining I was Link exploring Hyrule. So nerd culture has always been part of me. And then, honestly — the obvious thing everybody wants me to say here is, “And fitness! I like fitness.” But I’m not a fitness fanatic. I am a nerd that got fit and then fell in love with writing and helping people. Those are the passions that carried me through all of this. I don’t nerd out about the specific muscles and specific exercises. I was much more interested in the philosophy, and the behavioral psychology of getting people to do the things that we all want to do and just can’t get ourselves to do. So I’m really passionate about nerd culture, and really passionate about helping people — making people feel seen, and part of something that didn’t exist before. That was the community that popped up around Nerd Fitness. So in a roundabout way, I accidentally backed my way into running a fitness company. I didn’t plan it that way. It just kind of worked out.
Krista: I can actually relate to a lot of that. I also don’t nerd out about specific muscles, but behavior change — that’s fun. It’s so interesting, right? Because we all know what we want to do, we all tell ourselves what we should do, and then we beat ourselves up when we can’t do it. There’s so much happening in our heads and with our environment that’s keeping us from doing the things we tell ourselves we want to do. And that will be endlessly fascinating to me for the rest of my life.
Steve: Yeah, that’s awesome.
Krista: Okay, so with that — how has that shifted? Because the world has shifted so much. The way you were able to do that with blogging, and this whole amazing company you built — that has changed, I’m guessing. And from what I read in your book, a lot. I’m just so curious how you’ve navigated that, and where you’re at now.
Steve: It’s a good question. The internet — you can’t even recognize it anymore. Back then, you could just focus on writing, and if you wrote well enough, Google would send you traffic. A lot of traffic. I remember when Nerd Fitness was just a small blog where I published two articles a week, Mondays and Thursdays — because that’s when Chris Guillebeau published, Mondays and Thursdays. I was at a conference this past week and James Clear was there, and he said he published on Mondays and Thursdays for a decade. I was like, “I know why.”
Krista: So funny, right?
Steve: So I was just writing. And then one day I looked at my Google Analytics and I thought I’d gotten hacked, because there was so much traffic coming in — like a hundred times what I normally got. It was something ridiculous. I was like, “Oh no, the Russian bots have arrived.” And I asked on Twitter — remember when Twitter was a thing that was fun to go on? I literally just typed, “I think I’m being attacked, what do I do?” And somebody replied — I think it was Glen Allsopp — “No, there was a Google update.” I said, “What the hell does that mean?” He said, “There was a Google update. You’re now the number one search term for a bunch of articles.” And overnight, the website exploded. Then anytime I wrote anything new — because we were seen as a source of truth, well-researched articles that were fun to read — Google just kept sending more people to Nerd Fitness. And for 13 years, that worked amazingly.
Krista: Yeah.
Steve: I said 13 — I’ve been doing this for 17. So the last handful of years, that is no longer the case. I guess what Google gives, Google can take away, right? I built this business — Nerd Fitness would be getting somewhere between a million-and-a-half and two million hits a month of free traffic, just from my writing. But now I had this big business. I had to hire people to help with what we were doing. And ultimately I realized, this is not what I want to do. I love writing. And at that time, my writing had shifted to be like, “This is what gets people in the door, I have to write in this direction.” And all of a sudden there’s this big team. So I tell the team, “Hey, I need to step back. I want to go write a book where I deeply research and dive way deeper into this behavioral psychology stuff.” And the team said, “Great, no problem, let’s do that.”
And then Google starts stuffing way more blue links — and ads above every search term. They start scraping our content and putting the answers right on Google. And then ChatGPT shows up. And I got to watch as somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of our traffic just slowly eroded, every month. And there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t fix it. It wasn’t going to come back. It wasn’t like we were losing out to other people writing better articles — it was that all of our content essentially became the fuel for the answers that were now just being given to people, who weren’t clicking through to websites. So that sucked. Really, really, really badly. Meanwhile, I’m writing a book about what to do when life doesn’t go according to plan. So I was like, “All right, this is good material, I suppose.”
It’s been really challenging. We had to shrink the team, which was devastating. I had to reevaluate the business and my life. And I’m also aware — Google provided traffic and an avenue and a career for me, for free, for years. They weren’t obligated to continue sending that traffic. It just kind of stinks, after however many years, that you then have to reinvent yourself. So Nerd Fitness is still going through that reinvention. And then I had to reinvent myself. And I’m now in this weird spot where — what is this new internet? How do people find us? The cost of information is now zero, so how do you stand out? How do you connect with people? Where do they find you? All of those are unanswered questions that I’m still working through. And honestly, Substack has been a really bright, fun spot for me the last handful of months since jumping on it.
Krista: Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of that early blog culture. Like the Blogspot days.
Steve: Yeah, it feels like old internet in a really cool way.
Krista: Right. Even how everything is a little janky — like these videos are a little janky, nothing is super polished. It’s great.
Steve: It does feel fun, right? Between the notes, and the fact that you can write things and people read it, and then if they like it they can tell other people — and that doesn’t get nerfed or blocked, because it’s part of the ecosystem to get people to click through and read more things. That is so different from every other social platform, where you can’t even reach the people who are already following you anymore. It’s pretty interesting. We’ll call it interesting. Interesting is the word I’ll use, and we’ll leave it at that.
Krista: Okay, so when you set out to write this book — did the topic shift as your life kind of exploded? Or was this the original topic?
Steve: So this is funny. I reached out to my book agent in 2022, I think, and said, “Hey, I want to write another book.” He said, “Great, what’s your idea?” And I spent maybe four or five months working on a book proposal. At the time, I figured the only deal I could get would be something about Nerd Fitness, because it had been so long since I’d written a book. So I sent that to him — it was the book I thought I could get a deal for. Maybe not the one I was really excited to write. And maybe that showed through in my writing, because he said, “Nope, this isn’t it.” I said, “Oh, shit.”
Krista: Uh oh.
Steve: He said, “Books with fitness in the title are a really tough sell. Is there a different angle we can maybe capture?” So then I woke up on New Year’s Eve — sorry, New Year’s Day — and I had this idea. I said, “Okay, here it is: what about a book for after people give up on their New Year’s resolution?” Everybody’s always like, “New you, new me!” And then that falls off three weeks later. I want to write a book for that exact moment three weeks later. And he said, “Love it. I don’t know any books like that. That’s the book.” I said, “Great.” So the working title was Restart. I knew that wasn’t going to be the final title. But the first line of that book proposal ended up being the line that’s on the front of my book cover: “Some people wake up at 4am, run 15 miles barefoot, and meditate in an ice bath. This book is for the rest of us.” And I was like, this is who we help at Nerd Fitness, this is how we help them — but it’s a bigger idea book. So that was the contract I ended up signing. The publishers were in love with it — they loved the concepts, the direction, they were really fired up about it. So that was the book I started to write.
And then the thing with Nerd Fitness happened. And then my personal life took a few left turns. And all of a sudden I’m like, “Okay.” To give you a picture: this book was supposed to be turned in, I think, January of 2024, and was supposed to hit bookshelves in January of 2025. So we’re about 18 months past that. And the book took on a much bigger perspective. It was more like — not just what happens if you miss your workout, but what happens when life doesn’t go the way you thought? How do you navigate that? When you feel like a failure, when you’re carrying shame and guilt because things didn’t go the way you expected — what do you do there? And that’s the book I ended up writing. It wasn’t what I expected when I started. But it ended up making for a book that’s hopefully going to help a lot more people feel way less alone when life doesn’t go the way they thought it was going to.
Krista: Yeah, it’s very relatable. We’re in the same age range-ish — I’m almost 40 somehow — and I know a lot of people where it’s like, we’ve gone through so many ups and downs, there’s so much excitement, and then there are some failures, and it’s just like, this is real life. And you get to this point where you wonder — I love identity stuff too — so you wonder, “Am I just a failure?” And I love all your stuff that talks about how that’s not a thing.
Steve: Yeah, it’s so interesting. I spent a whole chapter specifically talking about failure, and it’s the first chapter — because I think it’s why most people will pick up this book. “Something didn’t go right, I feel like a failure, what do we do with that?” So I researched the origins of the word “failure” and how it evolved over the years. I spoke with a professor of failure. I went to a Museum of Failure, which was so fun. And it fundamentally changed my perspective on failure. The thing that really changed for me was realizing that we are not failures. We’re humans. Fallible, weird, funky humans who fail at things. And it happens to all of us — separately. And we all think we’re the only one dealing with this specific thing. And we don’t want to burden our friends with it, so we just cram it down and tell everybody, “We’re just fine, thanks.” And the reality is, we’re all dealing with something. Somebody’s got a parent with dementia. Somebody just went through a breakup. Somebody just got a medical diagnosis they weren’t expecting. We’re all held together with duct tape, white-knuckling our way through the week, and we think we’re the only one. So going through that Museum of Failure made me realize — not only is failure not evil, not something to be avoided, it’s the cost of doing business. And we’re all doing it. So we might as well talk about it. That was my favorite part of this whole thing, for sure.
Krista: So you made a really cool website about it, where people can post about their failures. I love that.
Steve: Yeah — if you go to howtotryagain.com/fail. In the Museum of Failure, there was this giant wall with a bunch of Post-it notes on it, and everybody wrote their favorite failures and stuck them up. I found that tremendously uplifting — not in a schadenfreude way of “Oh, at least I didn’t go through that,” but rather, “Oh, my failures aren’t that unique. And they’re not unsolvable. And I feel strangely connected now to everybody else, because we’re all doing this.” So we literally built a website where you can go and add your own failure to the wall. It’s anonymous — we don’t capture any info. You put in your failure, we do a manual review to make sure there’s no spam or swears or URLs, and then we just publish it. There are already a few hundred up there, I think. Some are hilarious. Some are devastating. Some are unbelievably relatable. And some are quite unique. I hope it continues to fill up — one, because it means people are reading the book and falling in love with this idea, but two, because I want people to realize they’re not alone. We’re all going through it, and we can all help each other out. But we can’t help each other until we talk about it. And when we talk about it, it takes some of that power away, because we’re no longer just cloaked in shame and guilt, no longer hiding — instead we’re telling everybody, “This is what I’m going through, and it’s not great.” It might give other people permission to help you. It might give other people permission to share what they’re struggling with, and you can help them. But it all requires us to talk. I wanted this site to be something that makes people feel a little bit less alone when they’re struggling.
Krista: Do you remember any of the specific ones?
Steve: Oh — from the museum, there are two that are my favorite. There were the obvious ones, like “Went through three divorces,” “Two failed businesses.” And then the two that jumped out at me — one was, “I cut my own bangs,” which I thought was pretty funny. I’ve never heard that going well for most people. And then the one I ended up putting in the book, because it had me laughing so much, was, “I farted in yoga.” So I feel bad for that person, and I hope they’ve forgiven themselves for farting in yoga — and hopefully the class wasn’t too full. But I salute you, yoga farter, wherever you are in this world. I hope you’re doing okay.
Krista: I don’t know if you noticed, but I train jiu-jitsu — and everyone… well, someone farts at jiu-jitsu.
Steve: That’s so funny. I mean, let’s be honest, farts are also funny. So it’s just like, yep, that happened. You just own it at that point.
Krista: Yeah, exactly. So one of the things I love about the whole premise of the book — trying again — is that I love passions. I love when people become passionate about something and stick with it. And that “stick with it” part is so hard, because it’s so easy to give up. Like you said: three weeks later, life happens, whatever it is. And what I’ve seen in all my research — I’ve also been writing a book for four years, so I think you might have beat me—
Steve: Let’s go! When can I read it? I’ll be an early reader for you.
Krista: Thank you. I’m in. So I’ve been studying people who stick with passions, and it’s so much about commitment. And you’ve studied this stuff, you’ve worked with people for so long now — can you give us some of your strategies for trying again, when you think, “Well, this isn’t for me,” or “I’m just not good at this,” or whatever the excuse is? What would you recommend people do?
Steve: Okay. The way I think about this — I see three steps. We’re going to do these three live, and then figure out if those are the… it’s only three, maybe four. So the first step is making sure you’re chasing the right thing. I think a lot of people confuse the outcome with feeling enough, or happiness, or “this will solve all of my problems.” So they chase something they’re not actually… Passion is an interesting word, right? People will chase the wrong thing, because they tell themselves, “Well, I’m just doing this until I can get that thing, and then I can be done.” The problem is, if it works, the reward is that you have to keep doing it. And if you don’t like it — what are we doing here? I’m speaking from experience. I love writing. And then I saw opportunities thrown my way — like, “Hey, I have an opportunity to build a cool business.” And then you hire people because you need help. And then all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh crap, I have a team of 40 people. Where did you all come from?” And they’re all looking at me for leadership, and I’m sitting in meetings teaching people, and I’m not writing — which is the thing I’d fallen in love with. So I just kept telling myself, “Well, I’m going to keep doing this until I’m enough. Until the company’s bigger. Until something. And then I can slow down.” And I did that for five years. Every six months, something new would pop up, because that’s what happens when you have a business, and I would just restart the clock. “Okay, I just have to keep going, and then I’ll be happy, then I’ll have done enough, then I’ll have enough.” And eventually I came to the realization that I’m never going to get there. And if that’s the case, spending all this time doing this thing I don’t actually love, at the expense of the thing I’m actually passionate about, is kind of nuts. So that’s when I decided to fire myself from Nerd Fitness to write this book. Of course, timing is always funny — which is when the iceberg of ChatGPT and Google changes all happened simultaneously.
So for some people who are like, “I can’t get myself to run a marathon” — it’s like, okay, do you enjoy running?
Krista: Exactly.
Steve: No? Cool, me neither. Here’s your permission: you can remove the guilt of not running a marathon. We don’t need to do that. But maybe you like Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Maybe you like ballroom dancing. Maybe you don’t know if you like ballroom dancing — cool, let’s try it. But we need to try it. So that’s step one: really do some thinking before you continue to throw yourself at the brick wall and say, “Why don’t I care? Why don’t I have the passion to run at this brick wall?” Maybe you don’t like running into brick walls, and that’s totally okay. We can find another passion, another area you’re excited about. That’s one.
Two — a lot of us neglect to realize how difficult it is to get good at something. We see other people who are really good at something, and then we beat ourselves up that we’re not magically that good in two weeks. There’s this amazing quote from Mike Birbiglia, the comedian, that I put in the book. He says something like: the magic of stand-up is making it look like this thing you just thought up is brand new, and you’re kind of surprised by it, and you try to make it look as effortless as possible — meanwhile, you’ve spent the previous year, every single day, testing and improving those tiny details to make it look effortless. That’s the magic trick of it. So when somebody’s like, “I’m not as funny as that person,” it’s like, okay, how long have you been doing it? “Well, about three weeks.” Okay, cool. Birbiglia’s been doing it for 30 years. You have to really love comedy to do that. I also talked to a friend of mine who’s a professional musician, and he said something like: amateurs practice a song until they get it right; professional musicians practice until they can’t get it wrong. They fall in love with the practice. So you have to love the thing, because it’s going to suck. There are going to be weeks and months where you feel like you’re not making progress, but you have to believe in the thing — and that’s so much easier when it’s something you’re actually passionate about.
And then the third one — we’ll address those first two, and then the third is: there’s a series of tactics and hacks and strategies for when it’s like, “Okay, I have the thing, I’m okay starting ugly with it — now how do I get myself to keep doing it?” I have a series of strategies in the book: “Hey, you have your thing, here’s how we’re going to keep going.” But that gets a lot easier if you can get through the first two parts. I think a lot of us choose the wrong thing, and then set way too high of an expectation before we’ve even started, and then wonder why we’re not magically really good at it.
Krista: I agree with all that so much. There’s a cool quote — do you know Ira Glass?
Steve: Mm-hmm.
Krista: He has a quote — I can’t remember it exactly, but it’s basically that there’s a taste gap. When we start out at something, we have better taste than we have skill. I just started learning piano — this one right behind me—
Steve: Oh, really?
Krista: Yeah. I know good piano music, and I cannot play the piano well. So it’s so painful. But at least since I know that, it allows me to push through it better. Whereas when I was younger, if I wasn’t good at something immediately, I’d be like, “Well, I’m just bad at this,” and I would give up. It was crazy.
Steve: It’s so hard. I tell another fun story in the book about Winston Churchill — who everybody obviously knows as the man who stood up to Hitler. In between World War I and World War II, he’s essentially in exile. This is a man who was a POW in South Africa and then went to the front lines of World War I. And he was terrified of painting. He couldn’t get himself to put the paintbrush on the canvas, even though it was something he wanted to learn, because he said, “What if I put it in the wrong spot? What if I paint and it’s not a good painting?” Fortunately, his wife had a friend who was a painter, and she made sure the friend came over at the exact moment Winston was trying to start painting. And she just walked right up to him and said, “Give me the big brush, get out of the way,” and started violently throwing paint at the canvas. And Churchill was like — oh. The spell was broken. The canvas couldn’t hit back. It’s just art, I can get started, and it’s totally okay. And he went on to be an unbelievable painter. But that initial moment was so paralyzing for him, despite the fact that he’d lived through actual life-or-death situations. Art had become life-or-death for him in that moment. And it’s not to make fun of Churchill, but rather to point out: we all have challenges, and our brains are really weird when it comes to trying new things. Being seen failing can be really, really challenging. So you have to work up some courage to try this stuff. I give credit to anybody willing to look foolish to try something. Most people never take that step, because it’s too scary.
Krista: That’s so true. What are a few things you’ve tried in recent years that have been scary to start?
Steve: I’ll say, sharing more personally about my life. That was not how I used to write. Before, it was, “How to do push-ups. How to eat vegetables. How to do a squat.” And now I’m like, “Let me tell you all of my deepest insecurities and the challenges I’m facing and all the things that went wrong for me over the past year.” I think it took me 15 versions of my book before I finally put that story in there. It was in the epilogue, and then I moved it to the intro — just to be like, “Hey, let’s put our cards on the table right now. I do not have it all figured out. I’m kind of a mess. I don’t have a final solution. I don’t have a master strategy. I’m going to tell you some things that might work, some things that could help. I don’t know what you’re going through, but here’s all the stuff I’m going through, and we can get through this together — with kindness for ourselves and grace for our situation. We can lean on each other, we can be supportive, and we can tackle this together and see what tomorrow brings.” So that’s something I tried that was new.
Let’s see — I’ve been going to yoga class, which took me like a year to work up the courage to go to. A guy that owns a fitness company, struggling to go to yoga. But then I saw there was puppy yoga at the animal shelter near me, and I was like, “That sounds amazing, I am definitely going to do that.” So I went to puppy yoga, and now there’s a studio I go to on Fridays, and it’s amazing. But it took me a year. I bought the yoga mat like a year and a half ago, and I was like, “Oh, I’m not ready yet.” And then I was like, “Dude, you’re never going to be ready, you just have to go.” You’re not going to get fit and then go to yoga, or get bendy and then go to yoga — go to yoga to do the thing, and then we’ll deal with it after that. And it’s been great. But I had to work up the courage.
Krista: I get that. On your writing — I just want to acknowledge that I’ve seen your writing grow, and you’ve become one of the funniest writers. I laugh out loud at so many things you write. So it’s working. Keep going.
Steve: Thank you. It’s like in Deadpool, or a comic, when they break the fourth wall and talk directly to the camera — I try to do that with my writing too. A little wink-wink, nudge-nudge, like, “Hey, yeah, I see this too,” or “Yeah, I realize I just used a cliché, and here’s why.”
Krista: It’s very human and relatable, and also funny, which is nice.
Steve: Thank you.
Krista: You talk about thinking about our future selves, and different directions we could take. How do you think about that — in terms of dreaming of different selves? I always love that concept.
Steve: I can tell you how I used to think about it, and then how I think about it after this book. I used to think about it in terms of: I had the capability of traveling at light speed. If you’re traveling at light speed, you have to pick very specific coordinates — because if your ship is off by one degree, or half a degree, when you’re traveling light years, you could be way off. You could run into a planet or a sun. So you have to be very specific. Alternatively, we have Polynesian wayfinders — just like Moana. That was actually the impetus for this analogy, because my niece — I’ve watched Moana like a hundred times with her. In Polynesian wayfinding, they don’t have a specific end goal. They have a general direction. But these wayfinders are like scientists. They take off in their catamarans, which they’ve built without modern tools — they don’t have compasses, they don’t have maps. Instead, they learn to navigate by the currents in the water, the location of the stars in the sky. They know which birds live within 50 miles of specific islands, so if they’re out in the middle of the ocean and they see a certain bird, they know they can follow that bird back to the next island. So I tell this unbelievable story about Polynesian wayfinders, and how everybody thought they populated the South Pacific, and how they actually did — it’s pretty awesome. I just love that analogy. The other term here is, I think, “dead reckoning” — where if you know where you came from and you know where you are, you can use those two points to decide where to go next.
So I used to think in terms of light speed: “I’m going to plan my future 30 years from now, exactly how I want it to look, and then every day I’m just going to march toward that goal.” And then life didn’t go that way. So now I have very few plans for the future. I don’t have those expectations. I don’t have a very specific future, a concrete plan, a goal I’m working toward — because I never could have predicted how my last 10 years went. Hell, I couldn’t have predicted how the last month went. There are so many opportunities that come available. So instead, I’m much more like, “I’m a wayfinder right now, in this season. I’m figuring out who I am, what this new version of Steve the author looks like, and what Nerd Fitness the business looks like. We’re going to assess the land and see which paths are open to us. We’ll take a look at the stars. We’ll figure out which opportunities come our way.” I can then decide, “Hey, this feels good,” or “This doesn’t,” and move in that direction. Any one of these paths could be really interesting — you just have to be open to it, and your eyes have to be open to it. So I’ve relinquished control. In the book, I call it: I’ve declared expectation bankruptcy. I don’t know what the future holds, and I’m okay with that. We’ll deal with that when we get there.
Krista: That’s very wise. You also talk a lot about running experiments in the book. That seems to go along with that. Can you talk about your thoughts on that, and how people can actually think about it? It feels like a lower-pressure way to start something, without feeling like it has to be the right thing.
Steve: Right — the myth is you have to start perfectly, and you have to do it right. The way I think about change is from two different occupations. Occupation one is a detective — whether it’s Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, or Sherlock Holmes. We’re looking at our past attempts to change, or start a new skill, or follow a new passion, and we’re looking at what didn’t work for us. Cool. We can take that information, take off our detective clothes, and put on our lab coat — and now we’re scientists. We’re guinea-pig scientists. We’re going to take all that information from our past attempts and hypothesize: which version, which path is open to us, which strategy might work, which passion or new skill or activity we want to try. And we’re going to treat it like a science experiment. We can set a 30- or 60-day window and say, “Great, I’m going to zoom in, I’m going to do this activity for these 30 days.” With no judgment. You know, we both love Ted Lasso — “There’s no judgment.” We’re going to chase this with curiosity, not judgment, as he says in that amazing episode from season one. We’re giving ourselves permission to just do the action as often as we can, and then collect the data and see if it works — and not only if it works, but if it works for us. For somebody who can’t wait to stop doing an activity: congratulations, you found the one that’s not for you. That’s amazing. You can now stop beating yourself up that you don’t want to go to an actual gym. Great — you can get in shape any other way. Or maybe, “You know what, I actually don’t like playing the piano, but it turns out I really like the guitar.” Okay, that’s interesting. Maybe you can borrow a guitar from a friend and try an experiment. Or let’s try pottery. Or trying to paint. Whatever it is, we’re just treating it like an experiment, and then building from there to see, one, if we like it, and two, if we want to keep going. And then if we do — great, we can pivot, take the life lessons that everything around us is teaching us, make an adjustment, and start the next experiment. And we can just keep doing this repeatedly.
Krista: I love that. And I think people really underestimate the value of ruling something out. People think, “Oh, I didn’t like this thing — that’s a failure.” But that’s such valuable information. Data, like you’re saying.
Steve: We’re so good at planting more stuff on our shoulders — what we should do, what we should get excited about — because we see people on social media, or we get ads telling us there are things we must do in order to be successful like them. “That’s how they did it.” That doesn’t have to be how we do it. Especially if you have ADHD, or your body works differently, or you’re of a different size — whatever it is. Cool, this is your situation. Amazing. We can accept those parameters, and then decide, based on these things, what we’re going to do differently moving forward. I think we skip that step, because we just love knowing that somebody else has the answer. “Oh, we just have to do what they’ve done, and we’ll get as in shape, or as happy and healthy, as they are.” And it’s like — maybe. But maybe not. We don’t know.
Krista: What if people get too overwhelmed because they want to try all the things at once, and then they have FOMO?
Steve: Well, there’s an experiment. You tried it. The way I put it in the book is: all or nothing becomes all then nothing. In this instance, it would be, “I’m going to do all of the things.” Okay — you’ve tried that before in the past. Put that detective hat back on. Did it work? No. Cool. That’s a strategy that does not work for literally anybody. Pick one. When you conduct an experiment, you can’t have one with 47 variables, because you won’t know which variable is creating the results. So we’re going to pick one thing we’re working on. And then we need to give ourselves permission to strategically half-ass other parts of our life during those moments, while we’re trying to learn a new difficult skill, passion, hobby, whatever. We can give ourselves permission to tread water on other parts of life while that’s happening, and be okay with that. We can stop beating ourselves up for not being perfect across all the things all of the time.
Krista: I think that’s one of many very important points in your book — the treading-water concept. Because I’m sure you remember, especially when we were starting on the internet, it was very hustle culture. There was a quote — “The way you do anything is the way you do…” what is the quote?
Steve: “The way that you do anything is how you do everything.”
Krista: Thank you. And I took that to heart. I was like, “Well, if I’m not all in on everything in my life, then I guess I’m just — I don’t know — a terrible human.” It was just bad. But you give people permission, and it’s — I just kind of had a sigh of relief when I read it. Because I really pour my heart into certain things, and then there are certain things I don’t care about that much, I don’t have the time or energy for, and I’m not going to do those really well. So I love that part of your book.
Steve: Thank you. It’s the concept I think I’m most proud of, and the one that’s resonated with the most people. We all love progress, right? We want to get better at things, we want to move forward — I think it’s wired into our DNA as humans. And when we’re not making progress on things, it feels like we’re falling behind, or we’re failing, or we are failures. And we’re neglecting the fact that there are two other paths we’re not considering. One is making things worse. And the other is just giving up completely — which a lot of people do. So compared to those two alternatives, treading water — staying where we are on aspects of life — is actually incredible. Half-assing a workout, or eating one healthy meal while we’re dealing with a young kid at home, or the in-laws coming to stay, or whatever it may be — you have to give yourself permission to stop trying to be the best at everything. You will burn yourself out. Instead of trying to win all the time at everything, you can just focus on not losing on a few things. Not only is that okay — it’s probably life-preserving, especially in really busy seasons of life. I own a health and fitness company, and I half-assed my workouts for the last three years, because I had a lot going on. It was really hard. I had a lot to navigate personally, professionally, I’m scrambling, I’m trying to write this book — all of this stuff. Working out is just not a priority for me right now. And that’s okay. But that’s such a departure from how I used to operate. For the first 10 years of Nerd Fitness, it was, “I’m the guy that looks like Captain America, because people won’t take me seriously, and I need to be an inspiration, and I never miss workouts.” And now I’m like — you know what, dude, I got invited to play golf, and it was during the workout, so I skipped the workout. Yep. Friends invited me for pizza and beer, and I really needed it, and I said, “That sounds great.” It wasn’t in my macros. Totally fine. Life is lived outside of the gym. Life is lived outside of the spreadsheets. It took me, I’d say, too long to learn that — but I think I actually learned the lesson at the exact pace and time I needed to hear it. So we can all give ourselves a little bit of grace when we wish we’d learned lessons earlier. We’re learning it when life is ready for us to actually learn it.
Krista: That is very wise. Well, with that — thank you so much for all this. One last question: what’s a small way that people can think about trying again today?
Steve: I would say, give yourself permission to strategically tread water in some aspect of your life. Whether it’s a workout, or maybe the house doesn’t need to be as clean, or whatever it is — especially if you’re trying to build a passion, or work on a passion or an activity or something new. Change is so hard, and getting ourselves to do something new within the confines of a really busy life is really, really challenging. So maybe look at parts of your life where you can stop holding all that guilt and struggle that you’re not being perfect with it, and give yourself permission to half-ass it for a while, and let yourself tread water and just not lose. And hopefully that frees up a little bit of space for you to get yourself — I think, as they say at Pixar — “from suck to not suck” on whichever activity, passion, goal, strategy, dream, or experiment you’re working on.
Krista: I love it. That’s very wise advice. Thank you for the conversation, and the book. I think it’s going to help so many people, and it’s really great to catch up.
Steve: Great to speak with you. You can go to howtotryagain.com — I’m so proud of it. Like I said, I fired myself from my own company to write it, and then went through interesting years while that happened. So I hope people check it out. Hopefully this conversation helps them feel a little less alone. And I’d love to hear from you.
Links!
Cool failure page on the How to Try Again website!
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