How to Rebuild Your Life, When Working Harder Stops Working | Steve Kamb

Working harder had never once failed him. Then it did, on his marriage, his company, and his health, all in the same eighteen months.

Steve Kamb founded Nerd Fitness in 2009 and grew it into a community of millions on the strength of a thousand essays and a very large amount of free Google traffic. His new book, How to Try Again, was sold as a guide to what happens after you quit the resolution or abandon the training plan, and then rewrote itself in real time when the company he founded crashed hard, his marriage ended, and his body started sending the bill. He is writing from inside the change rather than from a comfortable vantage point on the far side of it, which is what makes this useful if you are currently somewhere in the middle of a chapter you did not choose.

Here’s what you’ll explore in this conversation:

If you have built a life on being the person who figures it out, this is a conversation about what you reach for on the day that stops being enough.

You can find Steve at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

photo credit: Mackenzie LaRoe

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So it was almost like everything stopped working all at the same time. Those were the words of Steve Kamb, who went from being on top of the world to losing his business, his marriage, and along the way, his belief that working harder could actually fix anything worth fixing. For over a decade, Steve was the face of something called nerd fitness. It had a million and a half visitors a month. A great business, a global community of self-described misfits and camps that drew people from all over the world, some of them with nerd fitness, tattoos, even. And Steve and I actually first sat down for this show ten years ago to talk about it. Then the pandemic took his company apart. He burned out so badly that he fired himself from the business he built. Then came a divorce, a skin cancer scare, an AI swallowing the core driver of his entire career. And through it all, he was 100,000 words into a book about what to do when life doesn’t go according to plan. A book that, by the way, had to be completely changed and rewritten because he couldn’t write the one that he was first paid to write anymore. So today we go through the high. The collapse and into how Steve is rebuilding. We’ll talk about what he calls expectation bankruptcy. While trying to get back to normal keeps us stuck. And what a caterpillar dissolving into goo taught him about the messy middle. We also get into the email that Steve was literally terrified to send, and he didn’t check his inbox after for days. And what was waiting for him when he finally did. And at the very end, I asked him one question. If you’re in it right now, what’s the next step? Because a lot of people are. And he gave me three. The second one is to actually find the part of your life that you can. What he calls strategically half ass. The third is the one I haven’t stopped thinking about. You can hear them all in today’s conversation. So excited to share it with you. I’m Jonathan Fields And this is Good Life Project…And we’ll dive right in after this short break.

[00:02:06] You and I met over a decade ago now. Um, we were sort of running some in some interesting parallels at that point, you or the founder and sort of like the central figure in this big brand nerd fitness and a massive community you were in the process of, I believe it was happening even then, running these big events at the same time that we were running our adult summer camp, and we were sharing notes and we were kind of trading things, you were like on the top of the world. When we first sat down, we actually recorded conversation for this podcast about a decade ago. Um, and it’s been quite a journey for all of us, but for you in particular since then, but take me back to that time when you’re kind of like riding high, the world seems like it’s at your feet. What does life look like for you?

Steve Kamb: [00:02:58] So I was just relistening to our conversation from a decade ago. Oh no kidding. And I can I can place myself like physically in the studio that we used in New York City. Yeah. Um, which I had just moved to. I had a book that had just come out about Gamifying life and looking at life through the lens of the hero’s journey. We’re running these camps that have hundreds of people flying in from literally all over the world. People have nerd fitness tattoos. I am inspired and motivated to put my dent in the universe and kind of things were just working. The more I worked, the the harder I worked on certain projects, the more numbers went up and traffic went up and customers went up and the number of people we helped went up. And, you know, at that point, that had been seven, eight years of things just going really well. And instead of like, it was me kind of deciding at that point, like, what are the other opportunities? What are the other cool things that I can do if this keeps growing on this trajectory? Like what does, what does that look like after that? And it, you know, it’s a, it’s a big team serving a lot of people all over the place.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:14] So nerd fitness, what actually was this? And who were you serving at that point? Who were these people like? You got tons of people around the world, but who are they and why were they showing up? Because a lot of people try and do their version of this and it doesn’t work. So what was actually happening here that was working so well on the community side?

Steve Kamb: [00:04:33] Gosh. Well, I think there was one. I’d say yes, a lot of hard work, but two, like timing, luck serve played such a huge role in this too. So we were getting, geez, close to a million and a half hits of free Google traffic every month through the thousand essays that I had written. So people were stumbling across nerd fitness. Uh, probably because they googled how to do a push up, how to eat a vegetable. Uh, what are the basics of this diet? Or how do I run my first five k? So it was a lot of people who were brand new to health and fitness. And then they saw the Lego photos, the bad jokes, the, you know, the care and the entertainment that I tried to inject into these kind of boring, dry topics. So I think those were the people that, that stuck around and really resonated with the ideas of nerd fitness. We, we called our community the rebellion, paying homage to Star Wars and the Rebel Alliance. So it kind of became like this fun community of almost like the island of misfit toys, right? Like people who couldn’t find a home elsewhere and wanted to get in shape but still stay nerdy. And they found, I think, a voice and a community of people that welcomed them for who they are and whatever their eccentricities, could be. A great welcome to the community. We would love to have you. We’re going to get in shape, but we’re not going to lose the nerdy parts of who we are, too, because I think we can do both of them.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:11] Yeah. And I remember loving that and seeing what you’re doing. I’m like, you are. You’re not building a business in my mind. You are building a movement. I mean, you were literally saying, you know, come all. Um, if you’ve been felt like you’ve been outcast from the traditional wellness industry, traditional fitness industry, all these different things. But and you don’t want to stop being just like your own nerdy, dorky, like whatever it is, weird, strange, awesome, cool self, but you actually kind of do care about your life, your health, your future. This is your place, you know, like, and whereas pretty much everywhere else, from physical facilities to a lot of online communities, we’re kind of saying, no, no, no, no, like you’re not cool enough for us. And you’re offering sort of like this respite, say like you our like you are our people. Like, this is your place. And I always thought that that was a huge reason why what you had built just exploded because you were just saying you don’t have, you don’t have to leave a part of yourself outside of the room to do this thing you’re curious about, and you don’t have to know anything or much at all about it. We’re not going to assume that you have to be a certain level of knowledgeable about fitness, or a certain level of fit before you can show up and just say, I just want to like try this thing. And it was a really rare opportunity for so many people. Does that lend?

Steve Kamb: [00:07:31] Yeah, it makes sense. I think the other thing, and you know, we’ll get to this, but you know, you’re getting a million and a half people a month who are googling very basic fitness terms. So a lot of people probably didn’t see themselves as nerdy. So a lot of people found us just because they wanted like the how to nuts and bolts of how to do specific things. And then there was probably 5%, I don’t know, somewhere around there of the people that showed up that really resonated with our message. Those are the people coming to camp. Those are the people hanging out on the message boards. Those are the people flying to visit each other. Um, you know, that was like the really deep community. And I think there was always this, you know, dichotomy or really like a few different paths open to me because it wasn’t just that small group, but the opportunity of, you know, the million and a half people a month coming in to, which was an unbelievable opportunity, but also easy to kind of pull you down different paths and open up the door to things that, you know, in retrospect, probably maybe didn’t align with, you know, just serving that, that small group.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:41] Yeah. When you’re creating something like this because you’re essentially a founder who’s building this thing at that point. And most founders journeys have some version of being all in all the time and obsessive about it. Was that your, your orientation?

Steve Kamb: [00:08:58] 100%. Uh, I like to say I’m a recovering insecure overachiever. And I think there was certainly some aspect of me that wanted to prove either to past me or to people that didn’t think I could do it or, you know, that voice in my head, that inner critic that said that I could build something that could, that had, you know, longevity. And, um, so, so with nerd fitness that I just started dating somebody but didn’t have kids, didn’t have, uh, pets, didn’t have any responsibilities so that I could spend 60, 70, 80 hours a week, you know, rewriting essays to, to, to make sure that they were organized properly for Google or, um, hiring people and then training them and just going all in and continually telling myself like, I’m going to run myself unsustainably for a long time, but then eventually I’ll be able to slow down and I’ll magically figure out how to, how to relax after doing this for, you know, five, ten, 15 years.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:02] Yeah, that is a story so many of us like, I’m raising my hand here. I’ve repeatedly told myself that story. I’ve crashed and burned and then said, I will never tell myself this story again. I will never do that again. And six months later, I’m like doing the exact same thing. Um, apparently it takes me a long time to learn a lesson. So you’re building this thing. It’s going incredibly well. You’re years into it. Tell me what’s happening personally, relationally with you.

Steve Kamb: [00:10:29] Yeah, well, I think there’s there’s a few things here. You know, I started to kind of see some of the cracks personally and professionally with the business. I would say as early as, you know, like the very, very beginning of 2020. Mm. Or we had a few employees on the team that were also certified personal trainers, and I didn’t have a home for them with the jobs that they had been doing. So we launched this coaching program and said like, hey, we have these two coaches who, you know, from our community are looking for to see if anybody wants online coaching. And both coaches rosters filled up like pretty quickly. And I’m in New York and meet up with somebody who has helped scaled companies and we start talking and becomes an advisor to the business and realized like, hey, this is an unbelievable opportunity. So this coaching business kind of, I won’t say comes out of nowhere, but really starting around 2017, 2018 started to grow. And by early 2020, we had hundreds of clients, maybe a dozen coaches. And I am starting to burn out. I’m an anxious, generally introverted individual who likes to read and write and doesn’t love meetings. And suddenly I find myself in charge of this company that has, you know, 2025 employees and coaches spending a lot of time in meetings, not a lot of time writing.

Steve Kamb: [00:11:55] And then the pandemic happens and we happen to be the number one search term for online coaching. So every gym in America shuts down. Everybody starts looking for online coaching. And within six months, the company had grown to 40 people. I think maybe 45 people. I had just moved to Nashville and was engaged in the process of getting married. And, um, I started to burn out pretty badly. I realized like, yes, this is an amazing opportunity for this business. But I started to hide from my job, the company that I built, that I owned, that I was in charge of for my time. I felt like I had kind of bricked myself into a a prison in the very business that I had built to give myself freedom way back in the day. So I started skipping meetings. I started avoiding work. I would sit at my computer and not actually do anything and then feel guilty and miserable, miserable about it. Um, and, uh, man, it, uh, it all kind of started to fall apart there professionally for me. And I had to start asking some really uncomfortable questions of myself.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:14] Yeah. I mean, when you feel that because from the outside looking in, I would imagine anyone was looking and they’d be like, wow, this is an incredible opportunity. The business is growing and growing and growing. You know, like you, you must be on top of the world right now. And, you know, behind the scenes, you’re you literally have built something where you hate showing up to it every day. Yeah. Which is a strangely not uncommon phenomenon, whether it’s like building a company or building a business or building a private practice where you’re so often we’re led by expectations or dreams of a particular thing that we think will give us a feeling we want to have. And then when we actually get it, we realize we want nothing to do with it. But we don’t. It’s almost impossible. I’m curious what your take is. My experience has been it’s almost impossible for me to think my way to understanding that I’ve literally had to do my way there. And then once I’m there, I’m like, oh, right, this actually isn’t it.

Steve Kamb: [00:14:15] Yeah, absolutely. I think, gosh, I mean, I’m sure had you gone back and told me in 2016, like, hey, you’re going to burn yourself out and these opportunities headed your way in these large numbers and the opportunities coming to you are going to kind of drive you crazy. Like be, be, be careful, be careful. I think I would have said I’ll find my way through it and know this is actually what I want. And like you said, like I think I had to do it and to feel these things deeply and to, to kind of get to that point where I finally like, if I, I looked and said, like, if this works, the end result is more of what you currently have. And if you’re already miserable with what you have, like why are we going to continue down this path? And I also started to see the cracks form. This is even before ChatGPT, but I started to see like, hey, my efforts to rewrite all of our articles and to find new topics that is starting to have diminishing returns here. And that that path is a dead end. We have to pivot the business and myself and all of these things. And that’s when those realizations of like, okay, like, how do I actually want to spend my time? What am I really good at? I used to be excited to get up and go to work. What would I be willing to do to get back towards that? But like I said, it required some some uncomfortable conversations and really accepting to myself like, dude, you’re not helping anybody sitting in this job that you created and being really bad at it and avoidant. Like that’s, that’s not serving anybody. But that took me five years of, of like you said, five years of doing until I could finally think about it enough to realize like I was doing the wrong thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:04] Yeah. So meanwhile, as you shared, um, you end up engaged, you get married. Um, you’re building a new life with a partner in Nashville. And while the company is really having this effect on you. I have to imagine that what’s going on in your professional life is affecting you psychologically, mentally, in a way that also is going to trickle through and affect all the other parts of your life, including relationships. And, you know, because often it’s going to affect health, it’s going to affect your own mindset. But anyone who is sort of like in the blast radius of entrepreneurs, I often call it like it’s, it’s impossible to isolate those relationships from the effect of what’s happening in business. Was that your experience?

Steve Kamb: [00:16:50] I wear my emotions on my sleeve when I’m excited about something. People can. People can tell. And I think that excitement and enthusiasm really shows through. And I think it’s probably what draws some people to, to nerd fitness or to my writing or whatever it is. Like they can feel it because I can feel it when I’m writing and when I’m doing those things. But when I’m not excited about something, it’s also really obvious. And yeah, this is a, we’re getting to the the interesting part here. So like I said, I had, I kind of fired up, I realized that I was in the wrong seat in my own business. So I actually fired myself from, from nerd Fitness and took a step back and reached out to my book agent and said, hey, like, I have this idea for a book about helping people and how nerd fitness helps people. So I end up spending a year writing this book about or, you know, end up getting a book contract that I’m proud of and writing a book about what to do after failing at something or life doesn’t go according to plan. And it was after that year that I went through a, you know, amicable but heartbreaking, um, divorce. And the book ended up going in a different direction.

Steve Kamb: [00:18:04] But to bring this back around to what you said earlier, like it’s tough to turn off the entrepreneur part of my brain. And I’m certainly, I know that weighed on me through, through, you know, that that year of trying to write this book and navigating the future. And, you know, ultimately, my ex-wife and I decided that we wanted two different things out of life. Um, but it made for a hell of a year. And, you know, as somebody that planned a lot and built a lot and just things always worked out by working harder at it. This was kind of the first, brightest, most in my face realization that like just working harder on something that couldn’t be solved. Um, you know, it’s like I didn’t know how to handle that because up until that point, everything could have been solved with like, just work harder. And this was this example at the same time, nerd fitness, same thing, like just working harder at trying to do that thing. Like didn’t work either. And at this point, writing a book about what to do when life doesn’t go according to plan. I’ve already written 100,000 words. I’m supposed to be turning this into my publisher, and instead I’m saying like, hey, just a heads up. Um, I’m actually going through a divorce right now.

Steve Kamb: [00:19:25] The book is gonna be a while longer. Me. Meanwhile, this is like right around when ChatGPT is siphoning off a million visits a month from our traffic. You know, we’re down 80, 90% of our traffic. And I’m trying to write this book and like, almost like everything, like stopped working all at the same time. And I found myself, um, you know, my brother came up to me and said I was spent a weekend with him and he said, like, man, you’re normally like really full of light. Everything like feels really heavy for you right now. And like, I’m so sorry. He’s like, I can just like, feel it, you know, like you feel heavy. And I’ve known you for at that point, 39 years, uh, um, you know, let me know how I can help and what I can do. And, you know, I ended up spending six weeks staying with him and his wife and his family. But yeah, it was, it was tough. Everything felt really heavy. And like any plans I had for the future were just kind of like set aside. I was just trying to take things a day at a time. Professionally, personally, writing all the above was just like, hey, let’s just get through today and we’ll figure out tomorrow. Tomorrow.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:38] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So it becomes this perfect storm. Um, your marriage and your business thing that you have been creating and building and pouring all of your energy into for over a decade is literally crashing and burning at an astonishingly quick rate in front of you. Um, whether it’s the business that you enjoy being a part of or not to see that happen has got to be just brutal beyond the fact that, you know, like there’s, there’s revenue and income and like sustaining yourself involved in this whole thing.

Steve Kamb: [00:21:16] Um, obviously not only that, but like, oh God, I like, you know, we had to go through layoffs at the company and, um, you know, pay cuts and all of the above. And like, that’s the just like the, the worst, you know, also like I understand, you know, just because I wrote things and Google liked it didn’t mean it was always going to, but there was some part of me that was like, hey, this worked for 12 years. Um, and I got really good at the thing that was working. And then that thing stopped working. And just like, like, uh, like many content creators, uh, had the kind of the rug pulled out from under us in many ways. Um, and yeah, it resulted in just so much self-loathing and a lot of criticism, you know, inner inner criticism of, you know, I said, even though I had seen this coming in 2022 or 2021, really, even by 2023, 2024, I couldn’t, I couldn’t fix it. Um, there was no amount of working harder at the thing that I got good at was going to solve this problem. And that was, uh, devastating.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:24] So primary relationship comes to an end. Your occupation basically comes to an end. Um. Mental and physical health take a huge hit. Where do you go from there? You know, like where? Because you’re in a moment where you’re also somebody who cares deeply about other people, whether it’s your employees or just friends or community around you. You had this, you know, like still like large community of people looking to you, um, to show up in a particular way. And I would imagine that inside you’re knowing if I keep showing up in that way or trying to. It’s going to destroy me.

Steve Kamb: [00:23:07] Yeah. I mean, I’m not I’m not proud of it, but I think there’s a lot of me that just hid. I think whether it was, you know, out of self-preservation, severe burnout, trying to conserve any amount of emotional resources, I still had, But I shrunk and I hid and pulled back from a lot of life. Um, at that point, like I really circled the wagons around family and some very close friends. I carried a lot of shame about my marriage coming to an end. I like nothing, I think broke, maybe, like, broke my heart more than, you know, people emailing into nerd fitness and being like, oh, where’s Steve? Like, I don’t see him on social media or, you know, like, I was like the, the almost like the mascot of nerd fitness and, um, as somebody that is, you know, has really, really strong people pleasing tendencies, I tend to give and for the longest time gave as much of myself as I could. Um, certainly so much so that there wasn’t a lot of me left over, I think. And during this really dark period of my life, like I really pulled back from a lot of that And nerd fitness certainly I think suffered or had to evolve as a result. It it was no longer and hadn’t been for a while, but it was no longer like the Steve Show, which I always felt uncomfortable with.

Steve Kamb: [00:24:34] Again, I don’t love the spotlight and don’t want it, but accidentally found myself in charge of this movement. And I think I wanted to kind of step back from that and shine the light on the community and the company of Nerd Fitness and give that its best chance while I’m over here trying to heal and spend time with family and like, ask myself the questions of like, what do I want to do with my life and what makes me happy? Like, I hadn’t asked those questions in a really long time that it made me really uncomfortable. And geez, I’m still working through it, but like, had to go through all of this and pull back and just be okay with people being like, I’m, you know, posting on the internet, being like, I miss Steve or what happened to Steve or where’s Steve? And I just didn’t have the the bandwidth, the emotional strength, maybe even the maturity, probably all the above to, to let people know like, hey, I’m still here, but this is what’s going on. It took me a long time to finally, like, share that part of my life with my, my audience because I carried a lot of guilt and shame and fear around putting that much of me out into the internet.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:49] I mean, and meanwhile, you’re, you’ve committed to writing this book. You’re already you’re 100,000 words in. Life blows up. But effectively you’re writing about what happens when life blows up at the same time. So I mean, like, does this book essentially become you narrating your experience and trying to figure out in real time, what do I do with this? Like, how do I, how do I get back to a place of okayness almost like in real time. Like, who can I talk to? What can I think about? What can I try? All these different things.

Steve Kamb: [00:26:21] Yes. Unintentionally.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:23] Yeah.

Steve Kamb: [00:26:24] You know, the book, the book I sold was like, hey, what happens after you fail at a New Year’s resolution? Right. You can’t. You you stop. You stop running your five K or your diet or, you know, because that’s what Nerd Fitness did and has done for 17 years now. But then the book really evolved into like, what happens when life kicks your ass and your inner monologue is really negative and whether it’s through your fault or no fault of your own life doesn’t go the way that you expected. Like, how do you pick up those pieces? Um, and that’s the book I ended up writing because that’s what I started to like. Gosh, I think it probably another 18 months after I got divorced before I finally, like, told my newsletter and just said like, hey, so here’s Steve. I know you haven’t. We haven’t chatted in a while, but I just want to kind of update you on what’s going on. Nerd fitness lost 90% of its traffic. I had a skin cancer patch of basal cell carcinoma, which is the good kind, my dermatologist tells me, but had to get that removed and my head stapled shut. And oh, also I went through a divorce, so I just. I don’t know what the future holds, but I, some part of me felt like I wanted to share this and just like, let everybody know that I don’t have it all figured out.

Steve Kamb: [00:27:51] Somebody recently emailed me and said, like, I remember stumbling across that and thinking like, I’ve been reading Nerd Fitness forever. And he’s like, it was kind of like finding out that Captain America has a therapist. Um, and I’m sitting here with the Captain America shield on the wall behind me, and I hit send on that newsletter. And then I think I went for a walk or like, didn’t check my newsletter or check my email for, a day, two days, three days because I was just so afraid of the response. Um, and I came back to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of replies from people sharing their particular failures or challenges and things that they were going through and thanking me for just being like, authentic and honest with them. Um, it still took me, I think, 20 versions of the book before I finally put those failures in it. Uh, and they ended up making them way their way into, I think it’s page two of just being like, hey, I know you picked up this book. Here’s what I thought I was going to write. And then here’s all the things that went wrong while I wrote it. So this is what the book became instead.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:53] Was there any part of you that thought, you know? I just need to go away. Like, I’m actually not going to step back into the public eye that this is for me. This is for me and my closest to know and to help me navigate and to find a new way through. But the public doesn’t actually have a right to be a part of any of this.

Steve Kamb: [00:29:17] As somebody that had lived so much of my life, like observing and thinking and then trying to share what I’ve learned or those experiences, there was some aspect of me that was like, I can’t not write about this. And I, I don’t go into, you know, everything. Every relationship is different. The way businesses fall apart is unique. All of the above. But I didn’t feel like I could write this book telling people or trying to help people without also sharing with them. And I think this is how Nerd Fitness always worked too. It was like, hey, I’m your friend, Steve. I’m also not perfect. Like, I’m gonna put my arm around your shoulder and like, we’re going to get through this together. And once I started to like experiment with that concept of putting this stuff in the book a little bit more and sharing a little bit more of my many flaws. It just felt better, and I hoped it made for a, a book that is going to be more helpful to people that are also navigating challenges and beating themselves up and trying to figure out what the heck they’re going to do next as well. I’ve reached a place of, I think, being okay with not knowing what’s coming next. And that is very different for me than how I operated for the previous, whatever, 30 plus years of my life. And then the, the few years of, of real struggle, trying to put some pieces back in the right places.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:50] Isn’t that one of the things that we all struggle with so much when we’re in this moment of just profound uncertainty? We’re just we’re so untrained for it and we’re so uncomfortable with it. And every message that we’ve gotten from the time that we were young is like, that’s a signal that something is wrong, not that something’s possible, you know? So so the story we tell ourselves is it’s disaster. Like uncertainty. The unknown is doom and gloom. This is the feeling and the place we’re not supposed to inhabit for any longer than we absolutely have to. But without acknowledging this is also the seat of possibility. And it’s brutal and it’s hard. And sometimes when we can actually sit with it for a little bit longer and listen to what it’s revealing to us, um, possibilities and pathways start to emerge that we never would have seen had we just rushed to remove ourselves from it. And this is a lot of what you write and talk about also.

Steve Kamb: [00:31:49] Yeah, I, uh, I share this story in the book of, you know, Eric Carlis, um, the very Hungry Caterpillar, right? You know, oh, it’s this little cute caterpillar eats one apple and two pears, three strawberries, whatever. And, and then knits itself a little cocoon and makes itself some cute butterfly wings. And two weeks later, after its vacation, it pops out like, that’s not actually what happens when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. It eats itself. It digests itself into this caterpillar goo. It’s disgusting. It’s uncomfortable, it’s gross. And then it reforms itself completely into a butterfly. So I took a lot of solace in the fact that, like, I had to dissolve a lot of the old me, maybe even a lot of those people pleasing tendencies, the, the person that wanted to hide, the person that, um, never asked certain questions. And like that I was in that weird in-between stage because I haven’t figured out maybe that next path yet. I gave myself a lot of, um, you know, kindness or grace realizing like, oh, I’m just in like the messy middle part right now. Like I’m in the caterpillar goo stage right now. And that’s, that’s kind of okay. We now need to start building ourselves back up. And I don’t know what that looks like, but like for the first time in, like I said, in a long time, the unknowing and the lack of a plan I think is actually working in my favor because it’s allowing me to see what’s open to me and opportunities and possibilities that I probably wouldn’t have seen in the past because I was so laser focused on reaching a specific goal and building a specific type of life so that I could then slow down and, you know, sit in a hammock or whatever.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:35] Yeah. It’s like, you know, and this is, I’ll use your language here like this. There’s a value in treading water, um, for a certain amount of time in a certain way. And just allowing yourself to just kind of like be in this space. Um, as uncomfortable and brutal as it often is. Um, you also speak to this, like the concept that I thought was really kind of like the languaging you used around expectation bankruptcy. Because I feel like for so many of us, especially people pleasers or people with that tendency, we end up. You end up living so much of your life trying to live into or perform to the expectations of almost everyone but yourself, believing that it actually is your own expectations that you’re performing to. Take me into this a bit more because I feel like it’s a real. It’s one of the really big things that starts to get you on a path out.

Steve Kamb: [00:34:24] Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people are desperate for a certain outcome. I am doing this thing so that I can get this, you know, oh, I’m writing this book to become a best seller. I am working this job so that I can then become partner. I am working hard in school so that I can reach the whatever it is. When we focus so much on that outcome, and I’ll use this book as an example. Like I was so afraid and had so much imposter syndrome that like there was a few months towards the, you know, the final stages of the book writing process that I got paralyzed with fear around the book needing to be perfect, or it needed to sell a certain number of copies. Otherwise, I was not a success. Um, and randomly, I spoke with a friend of mine who, uh, is a mental golf coach, but he told me this great term about, you know, he says, like his name’s, um, Josh Nichols. He says, like, I pre accept any outcome. I’m here trying to do this thing. So much of it is out of my control. All I can focus on is like doing the the thing. So for me, as I am, as I said, you know, you said earlier, like as I’m treading water, which is like a really heroic act right now. Like, I might not be making progress in a lot of areas of life, but I’m not swimming in the wrong direction.

Steve Kamb: [00:35:51] I’m not drowning. I’m proving to myself every day that I can tread water and just stay afloat while I’m still figuring things out. And then I can remove the additional pressure of needing a specific outcome. Whenever I say expectation bankruptcy, like all I can think is Michael Scott from the office, like walking into the office and screaming, I declare bankruptcy! So in this instance, we are declaring expectation bankruptcy of the need for a certain outcome, most of which is out of our hands. And like just narrowing the focus to like, what are the things that are still within my control? And for me, that’s like putting the hours in and writing and working on this book. It’s having conversations and reaching out and trying to shine the biggest spotlight I can on the book. And then beyond that, like, there’s not much else I can do. So like, if I do those things, whatever outcome comes from there. Sure, I might be disappointed or overjoyed, but like so much of that was out of my control to begin with that I can just kind of like declare that bankruptcy of expectation, and that got me out of my way long enough so that I could just do the work and stop freaking myself out.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:07] Do you ever wonder whether it seems like the book, like the fact that you had a book that you were under contract to write that like you had started writing, that you were well into, even though it took a radically different direction after what went down. But the fact that you had this thing to wake up and put your energy into was a huge piece of you being okay. Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you hit this moment and you didn’t have that book, um, that you didn’t have this thing that was already like, look, there is one place that I can focus my energy and part of my job in this one place is figuring things out. And also, it’s pouring my passion for writing and for research into it. It’s a little bit cosmic in a weird way that this was there. Because if it wasn’t, do you ever wonder what that season would have felt like and how it would have been different?

Steve Kamb: [00:38:07] Yeah. So I tell there’s a, I have a whole chapter in the book called What to Do When Life Kicks Your Ass. In that chapter, I share the story of this obscure, uh, TV show called Chausey about amateur Canadian hockey players. It has no business being as wholesome and funny as it is, but they tell the story in that show, um, where the main character can’t play hockey anymore because he’s had too many concussions at some point, and his the owner of the team comes to him and says like, hey, when my mom passed away, my therapist told me, like, you gave her a lot of love. You have to find a new place to put your love. And for this woman, it was giving, you know, putting that love towards the hockey team. And for this hockey player, it became mentoring younger hockey players. And the show also says something like, if you don’t know where to go, go where you’re needed. So I think I can’t prove the the alternative future where I didn’t have a book in that scenario. However, I do think in this situation, like I had a I needed a place to put, you know, the love and energy that I have for a lot of life. And I was fortunate that I had this book to kind of pour it into. I think if I didn’t have the book, hopefully at that point I would. I think I’d already started watching Chausey. So I eventually would have found these quotes of, you know, find a place to put your love. And if you don’t know where to go, go where you’re needed and hoped that I would find a place to put my energy towards something beneficial or positive or helpful for others. In turn, that would kind of help pull me out of the darkness as well.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:50] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Another thing that, that, um you speak to, which I thought was really interesting is this impulse. Oftentimes when we’re in a really rough spot and we’re there for a while, the impulse is I just want to get back to normal. I mean, this was the entire world during the pandemic. You know, it’s just like, I just want to get back to feeling normal, to being normal, to like the way things quote were. You don’t see that as being super constructive.

Steve Kamb: [00:40:23] I think we all have a complicated relationship with the word normal. Uh, I can say how I used normal incorrectly for a long time. And that was the overachiever younger version of me that said, I’m going to burn myself out just for this week or this month, but then things will go back to normal next month, right? Um, you know, we saw it in all of our coaching clients would say like, hey, I’m sorry I missed my workout this week. So I don’t know why I sounded like I was Canadian there when I said sorry, probably from talking about Schwarzsee. Um, I’m sorry I missed my workout this week. But don’t worry. Next week things will get back to normal. And during the pandemic, we all remember those first two weeks. It was like, oh yeah, this will be wrapped up in two weeks. I think a lot we’re still waiting for normal to come back, and we’re not doing ourselves any favors when we expect normal to be any different than like, what our life is right now with kids that are sick. Um, you know, animals that are chewing on the furniture, uh, work that is crazy. Yet another once in a lifetime event that seems to happen, like with unbelievable frequency these days.

Steve Kamb: [00:41:31] Um, like that’s normal. So the sooner we accept like this is the normal and these, like we’re currently juggling chainsaws in our lives. Like that’s the normal we’re navigating like, okay, we can stop expecting things to be different. We can stop foisting all of our future expectations onto future versions of us. We can stop waiting for next week because something else will happen next week. And if that’s the case, then the only option is to find a way to, you know. For me, it was treading water today and to like, okay, what are what’s like, what’s the one thing I can do today to, to not win, but instead, like, what can I do today to prove to myself that I’m not losing? Like, how do I stay afloat? How do I, you know, is it going for a walk? Is it sitting at my computer and doodling and typing a few sentences? Like just something to signal to me like, hey, even amidst this chaos, which is normal because that’s every day now, I can still do something. And that proves to ourselves each day after that, like, hey, I am capable of doing something even when the normal is just absolutely crazy.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:45] Let’s talk about the Doing Something Part two, because I think that’s where a lot of us get pretty stuck. You know, let’s say we’re we’ve been brought to our knees by any number of things. Um, we have the support. We allow ourselves a certain amount of like, we forgive our humanity and we allow ourselves to be in that place to do the grieving, to do the feeling, to do the reconsidering, to talk to all the people that we have available to us to try and navigate it. We make whatever level of peace is available to us with the fact that this is real. This is our current reality. It’s brutal. It’s not what I wanted or asked for. Um, but it is what it is. And this is where I have to start now. And then you start to say, okay, so what might the future look like? What might a future that feels different look like? Um, so often when we’re in that moment, we have no idea what the first step is, what the first action is, what the first thing of going from inertia and thinking and repairing is to actually like taking the tiniest little step out of it. How do you think about that?

Steve Kamb: [00:43:55] Oof! I mean, I think there’s like the, the nuts and bolts answer. And then there’s like the deeper philosophical answer. So we’ll start with nuts and bolts and maybe go from there. Nuts and bolts. The we can’t edit a blank page. We can’t, uh, you know, improve, uh, an unspoken joke. We can’t, um, get better at running if we’ve never gone for a bad run. So the way I think about it, um, is giving ourselves permission to start ugly. I remember stumbling across a story of a young director fresh off a success, and he’s trying to write a screenplay about, uh, this magical thing called The way of the Bogan. And he sends it to his director friends, and they’re like, this makes no sense whatsoever. This is like, literally, This is nonsense. Um, but he kept working on it and, and ultimately ended up writing, you know, this story, which eventually, you know, became called The Adventures of the Starkiller. The Star Wars eventually became Star Wars. And even on set, it was a disaster. And then luckily, a lot of it saved, you know, by a second editing team that had been brought in to fix quite a bit of that movie.

Steve Kamb: [00:45:11] But George Lucas gave himself permission to start ugly and to write like the weird version that the best that he could. And like most screenplays, if you look up any of them, they all have really funny working titles like alien was Star Beast, and Pixar’s Wall-E, I think was called Trash Planet. Um, so like kind of reminding yourself that like, hey, if you’re so paralyzed to start, like giving yourself permission to start ugly might get you out of the way just enough to get started because once we get started, then we can actually take steps and get better at it and, and learn from others and so on and so forth. But we often fall back into procrastination and or rather like doing more research as a form of procrastination. Or to borrow a term from you, Jonathan, that I remember from ten years ago, like build a, build a bad guitar, right? Like give yourself permission to do the bad version of it and realize that like, the world doesn’t end when you do something poorly. That’s the first step towards eventually doing it. Maybe pretty okay.

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:15] Yeah. To start ugly. Um, I love that. I remember years ago I interviewed, um, the children’s book author Kate DiCamillo, um, who’s written some of the most astonishingly gorgeous children’s books that have been turned into shows and movies and all this stuff she donated. I don’t know if she’s done it with all of her manuscripts, but she’s donated a bunch of them to, I think it’s like the public library, um, in Minnesota where it’s all like on display with all of the drafts and like, just torn to shreds by herself, by her editors, like marked up like nobody’s business because she wants people to know, like, this starts really, really ugly, you know, like what you’re seeing. And when you read the final book and when you have it in your hand, or when you see something that’s up on a screen, it didn’t start that way. Like she wants people to know, you know, like just start where you are. Um, and it could be terrible. She’s like, even like, she’s like, like, like I’m somebody who sold a lot of books and touched a lot of lives. And every time I sit down to write, I still start this really, really terrible way. And you should know that, like, I want you to know that, like, don’t set your expectation that your first attempt is going to be anything resembling like moderately okay or anywhere close to what your expectations about what it could be. Ah, I think that forgiveness, that self-forgiveness is so important, but it’s often really hard for us to access because we keep thinking, what if somebody sees this or hears this or is exposed, and then I’m going to be judged for it.

Steve Kamb: [00:47:46] So actually, I think I submitted my first draft to my, uh, my book editor with an apology. I think, I think I, I think I sent it and I said like, I’m sorry, you know, and that’s the imposter syndrome, right?

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:58] If you want your money back, I understand.

Steve Kamb: [00:47:59] It was pretty bad. It was pretty bad. But I said like, like, you know, oh my God, somebody’s going to see this. Yeah, dude, that’s kind of the point. Like you signed a book deal to write a book so that people can see it. You need to show this to people and find out which parts work and don’t. Um, and that, that, that was so hard because it was, it was bad. Uh, but eventually I think it turned out okay.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:22] So somebody’s been joining us for this conversation. They’re nodding along. Maybe they’ve been through a really tough time and they’re just really curious about how you’ve navigated it and some of the ideas you have to share. Maybe they’re in a moment right now. Maybe they’re just stepping into it, or maybe they’re deep into it. Um, and they kind of nodding along and probably a lot of what you’re sharing is resonating. Some of the ideas, um, are resonating and I’m sure helpful. And they’re just asking themselves, okay, what is the next most accessible step that is available to me right now? Is this sort of like a universal piece of advice that you might give that person who.

Steve Kamb: [00:49:02] Um, I mean, I’m going to cheat a tiny bit, but I would say like step one, remind yourself that like, you’re not a failure because something didn’t go the way that you expected. You’re a human who failed at something. Welcome to the club. We are all here. We’re all trying to figure it out. Um, I think the next step then would be like, maybe identify like a part of your life where you can strategically half ass it right now. Like you probably have enough going on declaring expectation bankruptcy and like removing that stress and pressure from your shoulders while you are in it can be really helpful. So like, where are the parts of your life where you can like kind of let go of that additional burden and then see if you can find a way to tread water right now. Stop trying to win. Give yourself permission to not lose. And like that can actually be like a really heroic step to take because you’re proving to yourself each day like, hey, I’m still here. I’m still trying, even though everything else is crazy. Like, I still did the thing today. Cool. Like it’s not magically going to make everything better tomorrow because we can’t know that. But it does give ourselves one more data point that says like still here, still floating, hanging on, like, let’s see what tomorrow brings and we can cross that bridge or deal with that tomorrow.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:24] So as we have this conversation right now, um, what does life look like for you?

Steve Kamb: [00:50:31] Um, I’m sitting with the. Understanding that I don’t know what my future holds. Mm. The book is out in the world I’m in. I would say I’m in the process of building my butterfly wings. Maybe. I’m still not. You know, I haven’t finished my my metamorphosis inside that chrysalis. But I’m in the process of figuring it out. You know, I’ve another therapy session next week. I spent last last week hanging out with friends. I go to the coffee shop in the morning and, and write and try to work on some essays and, you know, having conversations like this instead of looking at life like I’m picking a specific point. 20 years in the future that I am working towards as if I am traveling at warp speed. Instead, I kind of see myself more like a wayfinder. I know what direction I’m trying to move, and I’m open to the possibility that, like, I don’t know, there will be more storms. I will get blown off course. Um, and there will be some things that will happen in the next handful of years that I never, ever, ever could have predicted. So I’m open to that option and that possibility. And I think maybe for the first time in a long time, like really coming to peace with accepting like, hey, like, let’s try to have a pretty good day today. And then we’ll, we’ll see what tomorrow brings and kind of take things from there.

Jonathan Fields: [00:51:56] Mhm. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Steve Kamb: [00:52:06] If I allow myself to feel it, I’m living it right now, which is so hard for me because I’m always more and more and more. So I think in this instance, it’s time with friends and family, um, finding a place to put my love and going where I’m needed going for walks, um, helping the people around me and doing work that I’m proud of.

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:30] Mhm. Thank you. Okay, so let’s talk about what I’m carrying out of this one. What got me was Steve’s line about getting really good at the thing that stopped working. That is not a failure story. That’s kind of most of us three ideas to hold on to. First, expectation bankruptcy, which is his term for formally releasing the outcome that you have been white-knuckling because most of it was never actually in your hands anyway. Second one is the idea of almost strategically treading water. Stop trying to win in moments where you can’t give yourself permission to not lose and count the day you stayed afloat as a real, legitimate day. And third, permission to start ugly. George Lucas wrote nonsense that his friends could not follow, and it eventually became Star Wars. We need to give ourselves permission to just start wherever we are. So maybe here’s something to think about doing this week. Pick one thing that you’re currently gripping for a specific result. Say it out loud and declare bankruptcy on the outcome. Then name the one small thing you can do today that proves you are still here. Not progress, not proof. Do that one and let tomorrow be tomorrow’s challenge. And hey, before you go, do me a quick favor. Think of one person in your life who maybe is in the middle of something really hard right now and send them this episode. And while you’re at it, take a couple extra seconds. Leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us get discovered and it brings more people into conversations like these. This episode of Good Life Project. was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By, Troy Young and Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven’t already, go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time. I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

The post How to Rebuild Your Life, When Working Harder Stops Working | Steve Kamb appeared first on Good Life Project.