Steve Kamb is the author of How to Try Again and founder of Nerd Fitness, an approachable fitness company that helps busy humans level up their lives. Since 2009, Steve has published research-backed essays and a weekly newsletter that explores failure, self-compassion, and making change that sticks, especially when life doesn’t go according to plan. He lives in Nashville, TN, where he plays golf decently and music poorly.
1) Your work has long had a humane quality to it, especially compared with more punishing corners of self-improvement culture. Did writing this book change your own relationship with ambition, discipline, or what progress should look like?
I think maybe the way I put it is, I’m a recovering insecure overachiever. For a lot of my life, I haven’t felt enough. I would always say, “Well, if I built my business, or if I got enough subscribers, then I could feel enough.” Part of that in my head was like, “Well, maybe once I get this book deal, then I can finally call myself a writer or an author.” But, sure enough, the day I got the book deal, I’ve never felt like more of an imposter than that day.
The next three years of my life have been this crazy journey of really navigating how I talk to myself and what ambition looks like. I did a lot of work on self-compassion, a lot of work in therapy. Visiting the Museum of Failure really helped me realize that we’re all kind of weird, fallible disasters, and we’re all trying to figure it out.
So, the biggest challenge when it came to actually writing this book was letting go of the result. I put so much pressure on myself to try to write the perfect book that, about halfway through, I got paralyzed from being able to work on it for a few weeks. I felt like I had something pretty special, but it was hiding inside 125,000 words of chaos.
In the book, there’s a phrase coined by a friend of mine, Josh Nichols. That phrase is, “I pre-accept any outcome.” For me, I had to pre-accept that I can’t control a lot of what this book could do, or might do, or who it will help and how it will help them. I just had to write the most Steve version of this book possible and put my best effort into it.
Letting go of that has been so hard, yet it’s also been the only way I think this book ever got done. I could finally just focus on getting over this need to be perfect, the need to create the perfect text, and instead try to write the most Steve thing that I can. Then accept that anything that could happen as a result of this is not completely out of my control, but a lot of it is.
The one thing I can control is how the book sounds. Is it me? Does it help the people I’m trying to help? I think I succeeded on that front. Now, I’m going to do my best to shine a spotlight on it and get it to people who I think it could help. Beyond that, it’s kind of out of my control.
I spent a number of years prior to writing this book focused on a specific outcome for my business. In order to reach that outcome, I had to go down a path that I wasn’t exactly thrilled with, or that aligned with my strengths.
If I wanted to build a big business and put my unique dent in the universe, then I needed to hire a COO and build out a team. Then there’s HR, and then all of a sudden there’s a whole marketing department, and I’m teaching people and sitting in meetings because the outcome was, “I need to have a big business because that’s what successful people do.”
Eventually, I realized don’t just ask yourself, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Ask if you even like juice. For me, it took years, but I realized I don’t want a big business. I don’t want to be in charge of that. It was keeping me from doing the one thing I really love doing, which is writing.
So, for this book, I did try to be very deliberate about that. I know tons of people who have set their outcome at, “I need to be a New York Times bestselling author.” And there are ways that can happen. I deliberately had to tell myself, “That is not your goal. Your goal is to help people by writing the best book possible and to set up your future so that you can write future books.” I set my expectation on wanting to write a Steve book. A book that, from the depths of my heart and soul, when people read it, they feel like they’re getting into a conversation with their best friend. Somebody who is telling them, “Hey, we’re all screwing up, and life happens, and we’re going to get through this together.”
If I allow myself to step back, I’ve already succeeded. I got paid to write a book, and I got to put as many funny dad jokes and eye-rolling puns in there as the publisher would allow. I did it. I have succeeded by that metric. Anything beyond that is not only partly out of my control, but also beyond what my wildest expectations could have been when I started my little blog 17 years ago.
2) Your PACT (Pause, Accept, Change, Try) model gives people who are looking for a fresh start a sequence to follow, but I am curious about the philosophy you’ve built underneath it. What did you want this framework to do differently from traditional habit or mindset models?
I think there are a lot of books and strategies that teach you how to be more productive, how to instill more discipline in yourself, how to have a more perfectly structured day, or a more optimized workout, or whatever. After 15 years of writing essays for Nerd Fitness and the company training 15,000 or 20,000 coaching clients, we just kept seeing the same pattern from most people who found us.
It was, “I try something, I go all in for two or three weeks, but because of this all-or-nothing mindset, it becomes all, then nothing.” And then they beat themselves up and think that they’re failures because they couldn’t follow through with some perfect protocol. So, I wanted to come up with something simple and memorable that people could use after they’ve failed at something (which will be all of us at some point). Or, before they start up their January “New Year, new me” thing again, before they just go right back around that loop again, they have a quick system or checklist that they could follow. For me, that’s the PACT framework: Pause, Accept, Change, Try.
I started with Pause because it’s the one thing most people probably need permission to give themselves. It’s the one that, instead of just, “All right, let’s try to run a 5K again. All right, let’s go back to CrossFit even though I don’t like it. All right, let’s go keto again, even though I gave up 17 times in the past.” Instead, Pause, take a breath, slow down, ask yourself, “Hey, if this didn’t work before, maybe it’s okay that it’s not going to work this time. Maybe trying to make progress again or starting a new goal again is not what you need.”
Maybe you need to strategically half-ass stuff for a long time because you’re navigating your parents getting older and having to take care of one of them. Or, there’s a new puppy in the house, or your partner is navigating fertility issues, or whatever it is … we’re all going through something.
I think many of us need permission to slow down. It’s okay not to make progress. Maintaining the status quo with the bare minimum of effort can actually be pretty heroic for a lot of people, especially people who are really overwhelmed. So, I wanted to come at this from that angle instead of like, “Hey man, you can do it. Just grind a little harder.” Instead, it’s like, “Yo, yeah, your life is crazy right now. You can stop trying to juggle chainsaws. It’s okay. You can take a break and give yourself permission to do less right now.” That’s okay. And, we can stay there for months, years, or a decade if you have to. And that’s perfectly acceptable.
3) A lot of change advice is still built around grit, building the right system, and uninterrupted consistency, but (at least, in my opinion) we undervalue flexibility and designing for reentry. Given How to Try Again takes a different slant, what were the most surprising contrarian ideas that emerged when building the material for the book?
The most important one up front was that strategic half-assing is perfectly acceptable.
I just joined a commercial gym for the first time in six years two weeks ago. For the past sixteen years, I have owned a health and fitness company. Yet, while writing this book, exercise was probably seventh on my list of priorities. Lately, I have been navigating a new personal life, a restructured business, and trying to write a book. Fitness was not a priority for me, and I had to give myself permission for that to be okay. You’re talking to somebody who probably spent the previous 15 years saying, “Fitness is the most important thing. Not missing a workout, that’s how I’m disciplined. That’s how I am who I am.”
I had to reframe it from “Do I have time for my workout today?” to “What workout do I have time for?” So many times, that has been going to the community center and doing just what I could do. Mentally, I was so checked out that I was just like, “This is enough. We’re just going to do this today, and that’s perfectly fine.”
A story that I tell in the book, it sounds so simple, but it is one of the biggest indicators that we’ve seen at Nerd Fitness over 17 years of whether or not somebody’s going to be successful is something I call the shower metaphor.
Let’s say you take a shower every day, but on this day, your kid gets sick, and your dog throws up, or whatever. You can’t take a shower today. So, you splash water on your face, you put on some deodorant, and go to work. Do you now have to buy a new shower journal and contact a shower coach? Do you need to start listening to showering podcasts, beat yourself up, and try again next month? No!
You’re just like, “Okay, life happened.” And then you just take your shower the next day and move on with your life. It doesn’t have to be more than that. We put so much pressure on discipline, perfect execution, militant adherence to whatever we are doing. When we miss something, it’s like we’re broken. We feel like we are failures and like something is wrong with us.
The thing we’ve noticed more than anything else at Nerd Fitness is not just whether someone can stick with a workout plan, but how they respond after missing a workout. How do they talk to themselves? Do they ghost us and then apologize a week later? Or do they say, “Hey, I couldn’t do my workout yesterday. I’m just going to do it today.”
I think, for most of this stuff, that’s the key to building a healthy habit or routine. It’s doing the thing more often than not, in whatever level of capacity you have for that day, with the expectation that you’re going to miss days, and there’s going to be weeks when things happen, and you will miss a day. And, that’s totally fine. You can just try again and move on.
Last one, and I realize this isn’t rocket science, but instead of, “I have to hit all my workouts this week,” it’s about adding things to a jar or keeping a tally. Every time you do the thing, put something in a jar so you have a visual record of everything you have accomplished. That way, when you start to feel like you’re behind or you haven’t done enough, you can look at your jar. At Nerd Fitness, we call it the Jar of Awesome.
4) I am interested in how you think about identity after a setback. What is the healthiest way for someone to narrate a failed attempt without either minimizing it or letting it define them?
I’m excited to answer this one. This question is honestly what I think I will be spending the next handful of years thinking through personally. For the longest time, my identity was the rebel leader of Nerd Fitness, in charge of a team and a worldwide community. I never missed my workouts because I am an inspiration to people out there, and I want to practice what I preach. Or rather, that’s what I told myself was important, and that’s why people liked my writing.
I spent a few years banging my head against the wall trying to become a better CEO. I stopped reading philosophy and interesting books that satisfied my curiosity, and instead started reading business management books. Books like The Effective Executive and all the books that everybody in charge of a company is supposed to read. As I started to climb that ladder, I came to realize, “I’m on the wrong ladder.”
I had to Pause and really think, “If this works, the result is that I have to keep doing it, and the company gets bigger, and the stakes get higher, and the pressure is larger. If I win, I don’t want that. That sounds terrible.” So then, what do I actually want? What do I love? How do I want to spend my time?
Let’s see: I love writing. I love connecting with people. I love the perfectly crafted sentence. I love reading weird books, playing weird video games, and watching strange movies. I love it when my brain connects two dots between two random things out of the blue while I’m on a walk. I love that so much, I will chase that feeling for the rest of my life.
So, when I realized my identity was out of alignment, I had to pause. Then, I had to accept that if I were going to go down this path of changing my identity, there would be consequences in both directions. I didn’t know if people would want to read the writing of real Steve, with my flaws, faults, struggles, and challenges.
This change also meant Nerd Fitness wouldn’t get as much of my attention, because I felt drawn to this new path.
Also, I had to change how I talked to myself and how I thought about myself. Before, it was Steve as the rebel leader of Nerd Fitness, who wrote a book and built this big company. Now, I was changing it to Steve, an author working on a book, as his most important thing. This meant I had to say no to so much other stuff, too, which was so hard because Nerd Fitness was going through its own turmoil. But I couldn’t do both of those things. I kept my focus on this book, trusting and hoping it would be the right path for me.
And then I had to try this without expectation, as we talked about. I told myself, “I’m going to put this out into the universe. I’m going to tell the Nerd Fitness audience: Hey, you’re going to start getting different emails from me. They’re going to be more personal. They’re going to share my flaws and faults, and they’re not going to be about health and fitness more often than not.”
My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner, because everybody came over. The replies I’ve been getting from my newsletters have been life-giving to me, and so much of that has informed the shape of this new book.
So, I’m still figuring out my new identity. Before, it was the head of a company that happened to have written a book back in 2016. This new Steve is like, “I’m a one-person creator. I handcrafted this newsletter that you’re reading. I placed every word in this book. Art and caring about the craft are most important to me.”
As for what the final outcome looks like, I’m less concerned because, as I said earlier, from a day-to-day perspective, I’ve already won. I got contracted to write a book. I get to read interesting things and hang out with interesting people. I get to write content that helps people in ways that align with who I am. Whatever the outcome is on the other side of this, my take on my identity is, “I will figure it out.”
5) If readers take only one lasting idea from How to Try Again, not a tactic but a deeper reorientation, what do you most hope changes in the way they relate to a setback and rebound from it?
I’m going to cheat and give you two. One is, we’re not failures. We’re humans who failed at something, and that’s okay. All of the failures and the struggles that we’ve had, we get to build our inevitable success on the shoulders of all of those past failures. Plus, all of that earned knowledge, we get to bring that with us, too. And that’s so amazing!
The other one is: the opposite of progress isn’t stagnation or maintaining the status quo, the opposite of progress is regression, making things worse, or giving up. So, in light of that, strategically half-assing things or just treading water, whether it’s your fitness goals or a side project or whatever, the bare minimum is to stay afloat. If that’s all you have to give, that’s perfectly acceptable. In fact, that’s preferable to burning yourself out.
We are not failures. We’re humans who failed at something. And strategically half-assing things and treading water is perfectly acceptable. Some is great. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Some is a perfect amount. You either win or you learn.