Why Smaller Goals Can Lead to Bigger Changes with Eric Zimmer

24:01I've been trying for two decades to get to be the sort of person that could meditate daily and go on meditation retreats. And I was trying to do it fast, right? Every time I'd pick up the book, I'd be like 30 minutes or an hour. It didn't work. When I went slow to three minutes a day, I got where I was going far faster. I got there in a couple of years when I had been trying for decades the other way. So it's that make haste slowly really pays off in these sort of situations. So do you have any ideas for how to know if a goal is too small to fail? Like, how do we know when we're really in the little range that you're talking about?

24:39It's a trial and error calibration process. What I generally say is if you're succeeding consistently, I don't mean perfectly, but I mean consistently, then you're probably doing just fine. But if you're not, if your goal is to do five days a week and you're doing two days a week, we probably need to change the goal. and I think it's always better to start a little bit smaller than we think because it's easy to add okay great two weeks went by where I went to the gym three days a week let's add a day let's see what happens but the downside of it of going too big is that we increase our belief that there's something wrong with us when we fail we increase our belief that we can't change we don't have the discipline.

25:26We don't have the stuff. Whatever it is, we don't have it. And those stakes are really big, right? I talk about the stakes of change in my book. And one of the stakes of change is simply you don't get the benefit from the thing you're trying to change. So if you're trying to build an exercise habit and it keeps not working, you don't get the benefits of what exercise would bring you. Okay, that's important. But I think more importantly is that we erode our trust in ourselves. And we erode our belief that we have agency over our own life. And that is a very high cost. I was a behavior coach for years.

26:04I still do some of it. And the only reason somebody hires a behavior coach is when they've tried to make a change a lot and it has not worked. And so it's the same thing there. We had to try and undo the story that they had now convinced themselves of that there was something wrong with them. We had to get success going and we had to get them internalizing that success and getting back to believing that they are the kind of person who can make change, who does author their own life. So that's one way that we can get success going is we pick a goal that's little enough that we can't mess it up.

26:44Another thing we get wrong though is we pick too many goals at once. You've talked about how we go on these self-improvement binges What do you mean there? Yeah, well, coming back to the definition of little by little, I said low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction. And part of what I mean by that is, yeah, we are exposed to so many ways to change our lives. If you get on Instagram and you're sort of linked to all the self-help type accounts, you could have 30 ideas of things you need to do to improve your life in the first hour. so which of those do we do and there's a temptation to try and do all of them which doesn't work because we're trying to do too much also we try something we do it for a few days we expect change to happen we're like okay i've started meditating and i've done it for four days now and i'm not a different person right but we give up and we try something else and that That scatteredness does not help.

27:46It's been far better for me to narrow down to like, okay, what is the next most important thing that I want to change in my life? And let me really give that my attention and give it time to work. In your book, you talked about a case where you mess this up some of the first times you tried to go to treatment where it's like, I'm going to get sober, but I'm also going to do many, many things at once. Yeah. So explain what you learned from that. the first time I went to treatment longer term treatment and I came out and I was like all right I'm 30 days sober I need to stay sober but my life is way behind course right I'm 23 years old and I've never been to college I have no job I make no money I don't have a car I need to get sober but I also need to get in great shape because I've been in bad shape and I better start eating right and I need to enroll at the local community college because I've got to get my education on track.

28:40And what ended up happening for me was by doing all those different things, I missed the thing that enabled all of them, which was my recovery. My recovery needed more care and attention for a little bit longer before I was ready to diversify. It was the enabler of everything else. And that was what I did differently this time around. I made it the priority. I gave it the attention it needed for the time it needed so that it was solid. And then I was able to start building on top of it. And this idea of making sure that you give whatever your goal is the time it needs gets to another part of your little by little strategy, which is that rather than trying to cultivate some particular habit, we should instead think about cultivating momentum.

29:29Why is momentum so important but so underappreciated? Well, back to what I said earlier about habit. We want habits because we want these things to be easier. And most larger behaviors we do in life aren't going to fall into the category of what researchers would call a habit, which is something that happens automatically. And it typically happens in the same way around the same time. And one of the big problems is that most of us have lives that have constantly shifting context, meaning i might say i'm going to work on my novel right after the kids get on the school bus every day but there are plenty of days the kids don't get on the school bus or the dog is sick or something comes up which means it doesn't become automatic but we can have momentum which makes it a lot easier and we can work to keep momentum even when we can't do the thing perfectly An example I often use is my goal is to move my body every morning and usually in some way vigorously.

30:35There was a stretch of time that my mom kept ending up in the hospital. And when my mom would be in the hospital, it sort of took over everything. And I would have to get up at the crack of dawn and get into the hospital because you never know when the doctors are going to come by. It's not like they're like, well, check on your mom at 830. You just have to be there if you want to talk to a doctor. So I couldn't exercise. but what I could do is walk up and down the halls for 20 minutes. There are ways that we can do a smaller version. I often say a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.

31:06So we can do a smaller version of whatever our activity is. That helps us keep momentum. And we all know what momentum feels like. Imagine it on a bike. The first few pedal strokes are kind of hard. You're a little wobbly. You've got to put extra effort in. Once you get moving, it's easier. It's not like you don't have to pedal or steer. You do, but it's easier. And that's what we're after. Another thing we can do to keep momentum going is to celebrate the tiny accomplishments along the way. And this is something that I struggle with, especially when I'm using your little by little approach. If I go to the gym every day for a month and I can check off the perfect gold star, I'm like, you know, pat on the back.

31:45But when I just look at momentum and like, well, I'm working out a little bit more than I was last month, it's so hard to realize that as a win. So any hints for how to celebrate even when we're not perfect? There's two parts of that question that I want to address. The first is about the celebration aspect. And I think it's important. And I think the word celebrate might be overselling what we actually do. But I try anytime I do what I say I'm going to do, big or small, I try and have a moment where I inside give myself just a little good job, nice work. And I try and notice the feeling. It's subtle, but it is always there in my experience of I did what I said I was going to do.

32:29There's an internal alignment that feels good. And I try and notice that. And we can contrast it when we don't do what we say we're going to do. And we all know the mental agitation that comes along with that. So some of it is recognizing like, oh, this good feeling is subtle, but compared to that other thing, boy, this is much better. I think the perfection is a different animal because it is a real problem in my experience with people trying to change. We expect that we're going to do it perfectly. And that simply does not exist for the vast, vast, vast majority of people. I often talk about the 80 % rule, which means if I'm trying to do something daily and those two things for me are move my body for 30 minutes and meditate.

33:19if I'm doing that 80 % of the time or so, I consider myself successful. I try and give myself the gold star for it. Because if I can do that week after week, month after month, year after year, I get all the benefit there is to get. That 20 % that I missed just doesn't matter. But if I focus on that 20 % I'm not doing, I threaten to derail the entire project. And so getting away from that all or nothing thinking is critically important when it comes to making lasting change. And another thing we need to get right in terms of our thinking is that we need to understand which goals we really want to be pursuing in the first place.

34:01You argued that one reason behavior change is hard is because we often want more than one thing at once. Give me some examples of this and explain why it can be such a huge problem for behavior change. Well, I think if any of us pay attention to what shows up in our day-to-day life, we recognize we want lots of things. I very recently was just in New York City, and I wanted to enjoy New York City. I wanted to also continue to promote the book that was out. I also wanted to take a nap because I was tired, right? I mean, I've got all these things that just show up moment to moment. And the chapter in the book is called What is Worth Wanting?

34:40And there's a little snippet from a song, one of my favorite songs by artist Jimmy Dale Gilmore that says, my mind's got a mind of its own. And I think we can all relate with that. When we start getting into all the competing things inside of us, boy, there's a lot of theories on it. And I ended up really simplifying. I hope not oversimplifying, but definitely simplifying into two things, values and desires. Values are the things that the best, wisest part of us has decided are worth wanting. And desires are just the things that show up. You just want them because you want them. And so the first type of conflict we find ourselves in is the value to desire conflict, or as I like to call it, what I want most versus what I want now.

35:29And we're all familiar with this one. What I want most is to be in shape. What I want now is to continue to sit on the couch and read Substack because my goodness, there's a lot of great writers out there. That's what I want most versus what I want now. But the phrasing of that question is really valuable because it makes me realize that I do want the thing that I currently don't feel like doing. And I think that's critical. Now, there's a lot more that goes into solving that, but even phrasing the question allows us to make better choices. Then there's a second type of conflict that comes up.

36:07And these are even harder in some ways. And they're the values-to-values conflicts. Give me some examples of those harder ones. Well, I've done some exercises on my values, and I've ended up with two values in my list. One of them is adventure. I've realized that I am happiest, most fulfilled, most alive when I'm on some sort of adventure. I don't mean I have to be summoning Everest, but I'm doing something I haven't done before or I don't know how to do. So that's one value. Another value that's really important to me is to be able to be content right where I am with my life the way it is. Well, there is a nearly constant tension between those two values.

36:50And I don't know how to solve it. I actually got to the place where I finally realized it doesn't get solved. It's a constant negotiation or a dance between the two. And for me, that helps me relax. I used to ask some version of that question on the podcast all the time. Like, how much should I be ambitious versus how much should I be content? As if somebody would give me a formula and this tension would disappear. And my experience is it hasn't worked that way. But knowing it's there allows me to think about and go, oh, okay, yep, I'm feeling the call to adventure again. Well, you've been on the road for the last four weeks.

37:32Maybe it's time to spend a little bit more time on contentment. I face this with book launch, right? Book launch puts you into a future mindset of like all this energy going to this day. And I found that that has made it harder for me to be content with the moment that I'm in. So I've had to try and emphasize that a little bit more because the other one's just sort of happening. Another one that almost everybody will recognize is the tension between their family and their career. It's why we talk about work-life balance so much, because it's hard, because it's the tension that doesn't disappear in us.

38:13It's time for another break. But when we return, Eric will tell us how he figured out what his values really are. He'll also share his thoughts on how we can all spend more time pursuing what matters and less time frantically checking inane things off our to-do list. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

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42:21Before the break, Eric and I spoke about the importance of figuring out what we really value so that we can choose goals that matter. But that can be harder than it seems, because sometimes the things we think we value aren't really our own values at all. Eric had this realization a few years ago while driving through an affluent neighborhood in Atlanta. My partner's mother had Alzheimer's and she lived there. So for six years, we were kind of back and forth between Columbus and Atlanta. And her mom lived up in the northern part of Atlanta. And I would drive to a library to work and I would drive through Buckhead, Atlanta.

42:56And if you've been to Buckhead, Atlanta, one thing you will probably notice that I certainly did is it is lined street after street after street with enormous houses, with giant yards, like jaw-dropping wealth and i found myself one day driving down those roads and what was happening was what sometimes happens when i'm on those roads is i start thinking i want that you know what's wrong with me that i don't have that so i'm noticing that and at the same moment i pay attention to what's playing on my car stereo and it's a band i love called the gaslight anthem who are kind of like a punk band they're they're punk slash rock and it caused me just for a second to reflect because I was like, well, what is it about that that matters?

43:40And I realized, oh, there's an authenticity to punk music. There's a doing what really matters to you ethos to it. There's a contributing ethos to it. And I was able just to see in that second, like, here's one value being presented to me that I'm finding myself wanting, and here's another value. And what I was able to do though in that moment was see that one of those values is one that I have wanted for a long, long time. It's deeply embedded in me. It's the value of being authentic, about doing what I want to do, about doing things that matter. This other one, this wealth value, seems to only show up when I'm exposed to it.

44:25And that's a way of telling which is which for me, is which ones am I constantly kind of coming back around to that they remain there and which ones show up when I'm exposed to them or when I'm around them. I was in LA recently and one night I was in a party in the Hollywood Hills and there's a lot of money up there, gorgeous house, lots of people, lots of money. And I find myself thinking like, oh yeah, okay, maybe I want to be here. And the next night I was hanging out with a bunch of, you know, quote unquote, starving artists. And I found myself wanting to be like, oh, I really want to fit in there.

45:00And I just noticed like I'm affected by what I'm around. So being clear on who I am is really important as I move through these different places in the world. Another dichotomy between our goals that we should pay attention to is kind of how they feel to us. You've talked about this distinction between want-to goals and have-to goals and how they interact differently with this idea of resistance. Explain the difference between these goals and what they might look like? Well, if we think of saying to ourselves, I should do X, Y, or Z, and I'm not against the word should. I think it's a nice shorthand sometimes.

45:37But what is it that I'm telling myself I should do? And is it something that I have to do? Or is it something that I want to do? And when we are constantly embedded in have to goals, we become unmotivated, we become dispirited. We feel trapped. And so an example of this for me that I talk about is when the kids were younger, I was driving one to soccer practice here and I had to get another one to the other side of town for that. And then I had to get, and my brain is going, it's ridiculous. I have to drive these kids all over the place. I have to do this. Then I have to do that. And I just had the thought and I was like, no, I don't.

46:13There is no law out there that says that I have to take these kids to these traveling soccer leagues and all these different things. And so I paused and I went, well, why am I doing it then? And that allowed me to go, oh, I'm doing it because I believe it's good for them for X, Y, and Z reasons. I'm doing it because I really value my son's development. Now I'm doing the same thing, but I'm doing it in a slightly different spirit. And I think a lot of us fall into this, we're actually doing a lot of the things that are important to us, but we allow ourselves to get into, I have to do it, which becomes problematic because then we feel trapped.

46:57So step one for me is often just reconnect. Why am I doing the things I'm doing? Now, if you go through your list of that and you find that there are things that you are doing that don't actually matter to you, that you do feel like are have to's that don't matter, then that is where we want to work to change. I don't want to keep doing something that I feel like I have to if it doesn't align with what's truly important to me. Those are very difficult things. I've had to spend a lot of time as I looked at my relationship with my parents. How much of this lines up with my values of what I want to do to take care of them and how much of this lines up with some inherited sense of duty.

47:40Those are hard to tell apart often. It takes some time thinking about those things. But I do think the more time we spend thinking about, like, why am I doing the things I am doing, the far better chance we have of leading a meaningful and intentional life. And so that's thinking about all the values and the goals we have so that we can create the right kind of lasting change. But once we pick our goals, we don't just need to set our internal compass. We need to make sure that the world is not messing us up. We don't want to be sabotaged by the world around us. And in the last part of our conversation, I wanted to talk about what you've learned about behavior change in terms of setting up our external environment right.

48:20I know in your book, you've talked about different structural ways that we can go about bringing our goals to life. And you have this handy acronym that you use to do that. What's that? So we've got to get the structural right, the ways we set ourselves up for success. So I roll out a process in the book I call SPAR, which is a way of walking through all of these things. S stands for specificity. Because so much of what seems to us a failure of willpower is often failure of clarity. We're not specific enough about what we need to do. So we might have a goal, but are we really specific? If I have to figure out what to do and then do it at the same time, I'm in danger of failing.

49:06I know this one really well. I wake up, it's the weekend, and I know I'm going to exercise. And I'm like, okay, well, what am I going to do? It's kind of a nice day. Maybe I should go for a bike ride. But if I go on a bike ride, then I'm going to have to pack a lunch. You know what? I'll go to yoga instead. Well, what time are those classes? Before long, I am completely lost trying to decide what to do. So that ambiguity is a real problem. The next part of it is prompts. How do I get reminded to do the thing that I'm doing? This sounds simple, but it's actually often not. The mornings that I overcome my substack exercise challenge are the mornings that an alarm goes off and says, now it is time.

49:47Alignment is really sort of what you just mentioned, our environment, right? And our environment consists of, have we made it easy to do? The classic one people always use is like, do I set out my exercise clothes the night before? My version of this that shows me how important environment is, which every time I tell it, I feel like a flawed creature, is that I play my guitar so much more when it's on a stand versus in a case right next to it. it takes about 30, I've timed it, it takes about 30 seconds to open the guitar case and take the guitar out. The fact that I end up playing more because of some 30 second friction, again, makes me think like, what kind of weird animal am I?

50:30And yet it is undeniably true. So the more that we set up our environment, the better chance we have. We used to say in recovery all the time, if you hang around the barbershop long enough, you're going to get a haircut, right? It speaks to if I'm around people that are using, I'm going to end up using. And so who supports us and the environments we're in are all really important. And then the last part of it is R for resilience, which is planning for what am I going to do when my plan goes wrong? So when I would be coaching somebody, we'd work out a great plan. And then I would say, okay, how is this going to fail?

51:05Back to the example I gave earlier, work on my novel right after the kids get on the school bus every day, what are we going to do on days the kids don't get on the school bus? The answer might be, I go, that day is just a wash. And that's fine. It's better than feeling bad that we didn't do it that day. It's much better just to go, well, days that the kids don't get on the school bus, I just don't do it. But we might come up with an alternate plan. So those are the structural elements and the environmental alignments that are so critical. All of these things are really important to our chances of success.

51:40A final aspect of resilience that you talk about a lot in the book is the importance of other people and social support. Talk to me about the power of social support. The more people support you that are in your corner, your chances of change go up multiple times. So this can just be a friend asking you, hey, you know, how'd you do with that thing today? It can be sharing it on social media that I'm going to try and make this change. It can be asking your partner. I did it this morning. Last week was not a great week for me exercise-wise, right? It was book launch week. So I said to my partner last night, I really need to get back to exercise in the mornings this week.

52:23Could you help encourage me? She helped encourage me, right? I got back to it. And so it's that sort of thing that makes such a difference. And my experience of change in my life, some of the biggest changes, and obviously the biggest one being my sobriety came with the support of lots of other people. You know, it came through 12-step support, but we don't all have to have a support group to be getting support from people around us. And it's just important to ask because we are much more likely to achieve the goal. I've had friends who were heroin addicts and cigarette smokers tell me that quitting cigarettes was harder.

53:02Now, I think there are a few different reasons for this, so I don't want to vastly oversimplified. But I think one factor is that when they're trying to get over heroin addiction, they were surrounded by people helping and supporting them. And when they tried to quit smoking, it was just them. They just said, today's the day. I'm not going to smoke. I'm not going to smoke. I'm not going to smoke. And no help makes a big difference. So any strategies for asking for that help like you did with your wife? Because I think it can be tough to admit to other people that we want to change and that we need some help.

53:35So having the humility to be able to do it is hard. I get it. And it makes such a big difference. One way to do it is just get other people to want to do the thing with you. A number of years ago, when I worked in the software business, I worked in an office, people would always come in and be like, hey, I'm not going to eat that today. I'm on a diet this week. And this person would try it and that person would try it. None of them really ever seem to change very much. And so finally, at one point, I was like, you know what? Let's try something. Let's do a body fat challenge where we're just going to take our body fat at the beginning and the end.

54:08And whoever's body fat changes the most in that window wins a prize. But what was remarkable is that about all seven of us made significant changes in those three months. Sometimes our support was not support in the way you'd think of it. Sometimes we're teasing each other, we're playing, but we're still doing it together. There's more than just me involved in the endeavor. And so I think there's lots of ways to set it up. There are people in your life you may not feel safe asking, that you don't want to ask. Don't ask them. Your partner may not be that person. It might be random people on Facebook because you join some group where they're all trying to do it.

54:44So there's lots of ways to find it. And I think it's just a matter of finding the one that works best for you. And so we've talked about so many different ways that we can build our skills to change better. How has taking this little by little approach affected the way you achieve your own behavior change? It's essentially how I wrote the entire book. I have had the privilege of reading great authors for 12 years now for my podcast. I've read probably 500 or 600 books in this space. So I know what a really good book in this space looks like. And so I got a book deal and I started writing. And I can assure you that in the beginning, my writing did not look anything like that.

55:23I had levels of self-doubt. I hadn't faced in forever. And so when I would sit down and think about writing for a long period, I just didn't want to do it. It brought up such feelings of doubt and uncomfortableness, I would try and just turn away. So I wrote the book 30 minutes at a time. Now I might say, oh, okay, it's Monday afternoon and I have four hours available for writing. But I, every single time would sit down. I would start my 30 minute timer. I would put on my playlist. I'd set up all my distraction blockers. And my goal was not to bail out in that 30 minutes. And if I got to the end of that 30 minutes and I was rolling, I would still reset the timer and I'd do it for 30 minutes.

56:08But if I got to the end of that 30 minutes and I was really struggling and I was really miserable, I could stop and walk away. And I would do a little of the good job. You did it. You did it. You hung in for 30 minutes. In the beginning, I simply was like, if I put the time in, I get the A plus gold star. Now, over time, you start to see results from that. And the process gets a little bit easier. It never gets easy, but it gets easier. But that's kind of how I wrote the book. And so I follow that advice. And then the other one is I use that phrase, a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.

56:46I used it this morning. I meant to exercise this morning. I did not make the best choices in the world early on. You know, I'm still checking like, how are the reviews on Amazon? And is, you know, did so-and-so share it? And, and then I realized, okay, well, I don't have time to do what I plan to do. Then I hopped on the exercise bike for 15 minutes. I still was like a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. And that is valuable. So if there's been a small change you've been struggling to make, why not take Eric's advice and start small? Choose actions that feel manageable to you.

57:20Focus on consistency over perfection. And make sure the goal you're working toward is something you actually value. Because those little bits of progress, repeated over time, can ultimately change your life. If you'd like to hear more about Eric's advice on how to make lasting change, check out his book, How a Little Becomes a Lot, which is out now. Next week, we'll continue our back-to-school book series with comedian Chris Duffy. I'll ask him about some of my favorite takeaways from his new book, Humor Me. And we'll learn that embracing your inner goofball can help you become a better version of yourself.

57:53The humor that I want to celebrate is the kind where you are just laughing so hard that you're holding your sides and tears are streaming down your face. And it's really hard afterwards to even explain what was funny about that. But in that moment, you are so locked in, 100 % present. And that is, these days, very rare to have that complete 100 % presence with another person where they're not like half on their phone or half thinking about something else. That's all next week on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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