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

0:00Jonathan Fields: 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, 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 10 years ago to talk about it.

0:35Jonathan Fields: 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.

1:13Jonathan Fields: Why 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.

1:52Jonathan Fields: 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.

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5:20Jonathan Fields: 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 a conversation for this podcast about a decade ago. 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? So I was just re-listening to our conversation from a decade ago.

5:58No, no kidding. And I can place myself like physically in the studio that we used in New York City, 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 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.

6:47and 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

7:10Jonathan Fields: people all over the place so nerd fitness what actually was this and who were you serving at that point like who are 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 gosh well i i think there was one i'd say yes a lot of hard work but two like timing luck served 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.

7:48So people were stumbling across Nerd Fitness, probably because they Googled, you know, how to do a pushup, how to eat a vegetable, what are the basics of this diet, or how do I run my first 5k? 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 care, and the entertainment that I tried to inject into these kind of boring, dry topics. So I think those are the people that stuck around and really resonated with the ideas of Nerd Fitness. We called our community the rebellion of paying homage to Star Wars and the Rebel Alliance.

8:30So it kind of became like this fun community of almost like the island to 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. 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.

9:07Jonathan Fields: Yeah. And I remember loving that and seeing what you're doing. And I'm like, you are, you're not building a business in my mind, you were 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 yeah. 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. Whereas pretty much everywhere else from physical facilities to a lot of online communities, we're kind of saying, no, no, no, no.

9:46Jonathan Fields: You're not cool enough for us. And you're offering sort of like this respite, say 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 are just saying 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 try this thing. And it was a really rare opportunity for so many people.

10:26Jonathan Fields: Does that lend? yeah it makes sense i think the other thing and you know we'll get to this but you know we're getting a million and a half people a month who were 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 their message. Those are the people coming to camp. Those are the people hanging out on the message boards.

11:02Those are the people flying to visit each other. 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 too, 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 small group. Yeah.

11:39Jonathan Fields: 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? A hundred percent. 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.

12:50But 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, 510, 15 years.

12:59Jonathan Fields: 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. 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. Yeah, well, I think 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 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 uh looking for to see if anybody wants online coaching and both coaches' rosters filled up like pretty quickly.

14:03And I'm in New York and meet up with somebody who has helped scale 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 don't want to 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, 20, 25 employees and coaches, spending a lot of time in meetings, not a lot of time writing 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 um i just moved to nashville and was engaged in the process of getting married and um I started to burn out pretty badly.

15:24I realized like, yes, this is an amazing opportunity for this business, but I like 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 prison in the very business that I had built to give myself, you know, freedom way back in the day. so I started skipping meetings 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 man it uh it all kind of started to fall apart there professionally for me and I had to start asking some really

16:08Jonathan Fields: uncomfortable questions of myself yeah I mean when you feel that because from the outside looking in I'd imagine anyone would look and they'd be like, wow, this is an incredible opportunity. The business is growing and growing and growing. You must be on top of the world right now. And behind the scenes, 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 wanna have.

16:52Jonathan Fields: 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. 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 careful be careful I think I would have said I'll find my way through it and no this is actually what I want and like you said I think I had to do it and to feel these things deeply and to kind of get to that point where I finally, like, if I looked and said, like, if this works, the end result is more of what you currently have.

17:56And 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 for me this is even before chat GPT 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 is 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?

18:37But like I said, it required 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 not serving anybody but uh 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 yeah so meanwhile as you

19:03Jonathan Fields: shared um you end up engaged you get married um you're building a new life um 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 impossible to isolate those relationships from the effect of what's happening in business.

19:45Jonathan Fields: Was that your experience? I wear my emotions on my sleeve. When I'm excited about something, people can tell. And I think that excitement and enthusiasm really shows through. And I think it's probably would draw some people 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 uh we're getting to the the interesting part here so like i said i had i kind of fired uh or 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 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.

20:49And it was after that year that I went through a, you know, amicable, but heartbreaking divorce. And the book ended up going in a different direction. 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, you know, that year of trying to write this book and navigating the future. And, you know, ultimately, my ex-wife and I decided that, like, we wanted two different things out of life. 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.

21:38This 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 i'm 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.

22:19I'm actually going through a divorce right now. The book is going to be a while longer. 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 he said like man you're normally like really full of light everything like feels really heavy for you right now I'm 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 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.

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26:38Jonathan Fields: Sign up today and get 50 % off your first wholesale order up to$100 at FAIRE.com slash goodlife. That's FAIRE.com slash goodlife. Terms may apply. So it becomes this perfect storm. 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. 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 um i'll say 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 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 had like like uh like many content creators uh had the kind of the rug pulled out from under us in 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 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?

28:50Jonathan Fields: 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 still large community of people looking to you 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. 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 be like oh where's Steve like I don't see him on social media or you know like I was like the almost like the mascot of nerd fitness and um as somebody that is you know has really really strong people pleasing tendencies.

30:12I tend to give and for the longest time gave as much of myself as I could. 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 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. 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?

31:10and 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 posting on the internet, being like, I miss Steve or what happened to Steve or where is Steve? And I just didn't have the bandwidth, the emotional strength, maybe even the maturity, probably all the above. 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 audience.

31:51Because I carried a lot of guilt and shame and fear around putting that much of me out into the internet. I mean, and meanwhile, you've committed to writing this book.

32:04Jonathan Fields: 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? Yes. Unintentionally. The book I sold was like, hey, what happens after you fail at a New Year's resolution? You stop running your 5K or your diet. Because that's what Nerd Fitness did and has done for 17 years now.

32:48but 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 faults 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 was 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 a patch of basal cell carcinoma which is the 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 somebody recently emailed me and said like i remember stumbling across that and thinking like i had 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 shields on the wall behind me and i've 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 i don't know 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 end up making them 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.

35:01So this is what the book became instead.

35:03Jonathan Fields: 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. 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 don't go into, you know, everything, every relationship is different.

35:50The 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 going to 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 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.

36:41I'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 few years of real struggle trying to put some pieces back in the right places.

37:00Jonathan Fields: 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 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. 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.

37:35Jonathan Fields: 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, 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. Yeah, I share the story in the book of Eric Carley's Very Hungry Caterpillar, right? Oh, it's this little cute caterpillar, eats one apple and two pears, three strawberries, whatever, and then knits itself a little cocoon and makes itself some cute butterfly wings. And two weeks later, after its vacation, it pops out.

38:21Like, 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's 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 no 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 sit in a hammock or whatever.

39:45Jonathan Fields: Yeah, it's like, and I'll use your language here, there's a value in treading water for a certain amount of time in a certain way and just allowing yourself to just kind of like be in this space as uncomfortable and brutal as it often is. 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, 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.

40:28Jonathan Fields: 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. 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 bestseller. 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.

41:20otherwise 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 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. I'm not drowning.

42:02I'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.

42:44It'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.

43:17Jonathan Fields: 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, that you didn't have this thing that was already like, look, there's one place that I can focus my energy and part of my job in this one place is figuring things out.

43:57Jonathan Fields: 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? Yeah. So 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 shorzy 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 I didn't have a book in that scenario.

45:21However, 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 Chorzi. 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.

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49:18Jonathan Fields: 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 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 gonna 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 and all of our coaching clients would say like hey i'm sorry i missed my workout this week I don't know why I sounded like I was Canadian there when I said sorry probably from talking about Shorzy 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 right 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 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 it's like okay what are What's the one thing I can do today to not win, but instead, what can I do today to prove to myself that I'm not losing?

51:38How do I stay afloat? How do I, 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 let's talk about the doing something part too because i

52:10Jonathan Fields: 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 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. But it is what it is. And this is where I have to start now.

52:51Jonathan Fields: And then you start to say, okay, so what might the future look like? What might a future that feels different look like? 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? 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.

53:48I remember stumbling across a story of a young director, fresh off a success, and he's trying to write a screenplay about this magical thing called the way of the Bogon. And he sends it to his director friends. And they're like, this makes no sense whatsoever. This is like, literally, this is nonsense. 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 star killer 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 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 And they all have really funny working titles.

54:46Like Alien was Star Beast. And Pixar's WALL-E, I think was called Trash Planet. 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 learn from others and so on and so forth. But we often fall back into procrastination or rather like doing more research as a form of procrastination. Or to borrow a term from you, Jonathan, that I remember from 10 years ago, like build a bad guitar, right?

55:27Like 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 may be pretty okay.

55:39Jonathan Fields: Yeah, to start ugly. I love that. I remember years ago I interviewed the children's book author, Kate DiCamillo, 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 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.

56:18Jonathan Fields: 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, and she wants people to know, you know, like just start where you are. And it could be terrible. She's 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. I want you to know that. Don't set your expectation that your first attempt is going to be anything resembling moderately okay or anywhere close to what your expectations about what it could be are.

56:56Jonathan Fields: 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. So actually, I think I submitted my first draft to my book editor with an apology. I think I sent it and I said, like, I'm sorry. And that's the imposter syndrome. If you want your money back, I understand. It was pretty bad. It was pretty bad. But I said, 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.

57:33You need to show this to people and find out which parts work and don't. And that was so hard because it was bad. But eventually I think it turned out okay.

57:46Jonathan Fields: 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 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. And they're kind of nodding along and probably a lot of what you're sharing is resonating. Some of the ideas 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 it sort of like a universal piece of advice that you might give that person?

58:23who um i mean i'm gonna 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 like 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 i think 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 so as we have this conversation right now um what does life look like for you um i'm sitting with the understanding that i don't know what my future holds 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 uh finished my my metamorphosis inside that chrysalis but i'm in the process of figuring it out you know i have uh 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 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 like 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.

1:01:15And then we'll see what tomorrow brings and kind of take things from there.

1:01:20Jonathan Fields: 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? 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. finding a place to put my love and going where I'm needed, going for walks, helping the people around me, and doing work that I'm proud of. 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.

1:02:04Jonathan Fields: 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.

1:02:43Jonathan Fields: 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.

1:03:22Jonathan Fields: 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, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young and Alejandro Ramirez, Chris Carter, grafted 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.

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1:04:59Jonathan Fields: Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's G-O-O dot G-L-E slash workspace with Gemini.

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