← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
The PACT Formula for Starting Over with Steve Kamb
00:53:35
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- [00:01]
Dylan
Hey, Dylan, here. You know what sucks? When your newsletter plateaus and growth completely stalls out. It happened to me last year, but instead of panicking or worrying, I hopped into Chanel's Growth Vault. The Growth Vault has over 30 tactics and lessons on getting more subscribers and keeping them subscribed and engaged. I pulled out a few new strategies and implemented them that very day. The best part is these strategies are super tactical and they even come with video walkthroughs from Chanel. Oh, and the Growth Vault is constantly growing. Whenever Chanel finds a new proven strategy, she adds it and you get instant access. And for a limited time, the Growth Vault even includes Chanel's subscriber onboarding course, 10 lessons, and a few extra tips and tricks to make sure the subscribers you work so hard to get actually stick around. Check it all out in the growth vault@growthinreverse.com vault.
- [00:50]
Steve Kam
When you have an all or nothing mindset, all or nothing becomes all, then nothing pretty quickly. Don't just ask, is the juice worth the squeeze? But, like, do you even like juice? I wrote two articles a week every week for 10 years, and that's how I built Nerd Fitness. I know so many people that don't like running, but keep trying to run and then beat themselves up when they can't stick with the running habit. We put so much pressure on ourselves to succeed and succeed quickly, and everybody wants to sell us that we can succeed very fast.
- [01:19]
Chanel
What does success for Steve in this book look like?
- [01:22]
Steve Kam
Yeah, well, I.
- [01:28]
Podcast Host
We are so excited to have Steve Kam from Nerd Fitness and from his new book, how to Try Again on the show today. Steve, welcome to the show.
- [01:36]
Steve Kam
Hi, y'. All. What's going on?
- [01:39]
Podcast Host
Nothing. We're excited to jump in. There's a lot to your story here. And so I feel like if we were recording this back in, like, 2015, everyone would know who you are, because Nerd Fitness was huge. It was a. It was a big creator business at the time, and it still is. But I feel like you have kind of changed paths a little bit. So do you want to give a little intro into how you got into Nerd Fitness and how that became to be back in the good old days.
- [02:08]
Steve Kam
Way back in the day. Yeah. I actually bought the domain for nerdfitness.com back in 2007. So almost.
- [02:17]
Chanel
Wow.
- [02:17]
Steve Kam
Almost 20 years ago. Um, I was working a pretty terrible job that I was not very good at, and I walked into a bookstore, and it was, I think, maybe the week of just very serendipitously it was the week that the four hour workweek came out. And I picked it up on the shelf and I saw the little, the, the silhouette of the guy in the hammock between the palm trees. And that was not the life I was living. So I, I read it cover to cover and they talked about pick something that you're good at in a social group that you're a part of and where is that kind of, where is that overlap? And for me it was simple. I'm a huge nerd and I like fitness. So I googled nerd and fitness and nothing popped up. And I was like, okay, well, we'll just buy that domain and see what happens. So I bought nerdfitness.com had no clue what I was going to do with it. Started training people in a gym and quickly realized that that was not my path or what I was good at. But I loved writing, so I just started writing and kind of chased my curiosity on topics and wanted to make it interesting for me to read or write myself. So I tried to put as much humor and corny jokes and, you know, nerd pop culture as I could into the essays to make it interesting enough for me to write about doing push ups or eating your vegetables or whatever. So, and it worked. I just kept writing and people started reading and then Google updated some algorithms that I was unaware of. And all of a sudden I found myself in charge of a website that was getting, you know, a million and a half hits of free traffic every month through essays I was writing. And then I started hiring people to help with that traffic. And then those people hired people. And you know, Fast forward to 2016, 2017, 2018 in there, and I found myself in charge of a like 40, 45 person SEO driven coaching company, which is not the path that I would have expected for myself. So, well, I'll leave it there. But yeah, it was that first 10 years was, was pretty interesting for sure.
- [04:27]
Podcast Host
Wow, that's a big wild ride there that you went on. It sounds like. Okay, so that was 2016, 2017, 2018, you said it's been a few years since then. What does nerd fitness look like now?
- [04:40]
Steve Kam
You know, in 2016 I put out a book called Level up youp Life. And I had always wanted, you know, a book that I stumbled across in a bookstore, changed my life. So I wanted to kind of return that favor and had this dream of putting a book out onto bookshelves. So I did that. I wrote a book in 20, came out in 2016. It did fairly well. And I was like, man, I really enjoy this, but I have this team to run and I have this company to manage, and I had just moved to New York City. So, like everybody, you know, I had this vision in my head of I'm going to put my dent in the universe and build a big team, and then I can slow down, and then I can relax, and then I can do what I actually want to do, but only after I have done all these other things. The challenge there was, I kept living until right or living for this eventual future that I assumed would have made me happy, that would have made me feel enough. I am a recovering, insecure overachiever. So I kept kind of doing more and more, and then I found myself in charge of a larger and larger team with more responsibilities and burned out pretty badly. The funny thing here is I was. I. I was pretty burned out on health and fitness. And you can only write about those things so much before you're kind of like, I want to chase some other curiosities. But when the pandemic hit, I think we were the number one search term for online coaching. Through no fault of my. I'd say through no fault of my own. You know, we didn't pay for it, or there was no marketing spend, but every gym shut down. So all of a sudden, business, like, exploded. And I. I found myself with even more responsibility and more meetings and no writing. And I was pretty miserable. And I found myself wanting to stop coming to the day job that I had built for myself in the company that I had started. And I realized that something had to change. Like, I couldn't be the guy that ran this team. I wasn't doing the one thing that I've loved, which was writing. And I was kind of chasing more and more of, like I said earlier, that thing of, like, I'll just keep doing this until some magical future with unicorns and rainbows and whatever and everything works out. And, like, just every week, something new would happen. So eventually I said, like, I have to change. I demoted myself from first from CEO of Nerd Fitness down to head of marketing. I then learned that I was not very good at being the head of marketing either. So I essentially demoted, fired myself from that, too, and said, hey, I'm burned out. I'm checked out. I'm not serving my team, this community, these people. With my efforts. Right now, I need to. Essentially, I need to try again at doing the things that I love. And for me, that was writing. So I went back to my book agent and said, I kind of have this idea. What about a book for people who like, what about a book for people after they have failed at something, which is what we do at Nerd Fitness, I think better than anybody. It's like helping people after they've tried every weight loss strategy, every. They've tried joining gyms and anyways, so that was the beginning of that idea. Many, many years ago. While I did that, other people stepped in to manage and run Nerd Fitness and I started work on this book. And then Nerd Fitness ran into the buzzsaw that I think every content creator has run into lately, which is artificial intelligence, LLMs, Google, essentially making their searches, making it infinitely more difficult for people to actually click through to your website to get information from them. So while all of this is going on and I'm writing a book about starting over and what to do when life doesn't go according to plan. And I watched as over two years or three years nerd fitness, we lost 80 plus percent of our traffic. And I mean we tried everything. We tried a lot of things and not a lot of it worked. So Nerd Fitness these days is a lot smaller. It's. I think there's a team, about 20 people. We still have an unbelievable coaching program. We have a really great community. And it's just like a smaller kind of sustainable business run by a gentleman named Matt, who has been with Team Nerd Fitness for close to a decade. I think started as a coach and has just been working his way up. The community loves him, his clients love him, I love him. And it's kind of turned into this thing where it's like Steve, the author who writes about and chases his curiosities. And then there's Nerd Fitness, like a sustainable small business that serves a community of busy people who are trying to navigate an unpredictable, kind of chaotic life.
- [09:50]
Podcast Host
Wow, that's a heck of a story. And I want to say I didn't realize that you were also in the COVID Burnout Club. I, I had the same thing happen to me. Oh yeah, Business did super well during 2020. 2021. And then I was couldn't handle it anymore and had to shut it down. And thankfully it brought me back to writing again. So yes, it's so interesting, isn't it?
- [10:10]
Steve Kam
Like there are, I think for us as entrepreneurs or creators, you see opportunities and you're like, well, somebody's gotta do it and we're perfectly positioned or I'm positioned, I see this opportunity, I have to do it. But because if I don't. Then I'm going to let it slip by. And I think my challenge is I see those opportunities and I get so excited that I will chase them and then end up down a path that isn't actually aligned with my personal strengths and things that I'm really interested in. And as a result of that, you end up going down. You end up working on things that you're not, that don't light you up at the expense of not having time to do the things that you really, really enjoy.
- [10:51]
Podcast Host
Totally. Yeah. It can be such a trap. Yeah.
- [10:55]
Steve Kam
Yep.
- [10:55]
Chanel
And there's a few things.
- [10:56]
Steve Kam
Not better.
- [10:58]
Chanel
No, it's usually worse. I have a few questions for you, Steve, because a lot of people, especially who are kind of on the beginning journey that you started on, like, geez, 15, 16 years ago, they're starting and they're creating a personal brand, maybe a business, a creator business. And one thing I noticed that you did that I think benefited you in the long run was you. You didn't position this as Steve's Nerd Fitness or Steve Fitness or anything with your name and your face necessarily. Or maybe it was at the beginning, but you had the name Nerd Fitness. And so when it got to the point where you're like, you know, 10 years down, down the road, and you're like, I don't really want to run this thing anymore, it gave you the opportunity to kind of step aside and let other people kind of run the show to some degree. So was that something conscious that you did back in the day, or was it just like, we're going to run this thing with Nerd Fitness, and yeah, I'm going to run it, but I'm not going to be the face of it or how did that work? Because I think a lot of people kind of struggle with that. Should I have this brand after myself or should I have a creator brand?
- [12:00]
Steve Kam
Sure. I mean, I think there's probably like, the romanticized story I could tell in my head, and then there's probably actually connecting the dots looking backwards. I. Early on, it was. There was a big picture of me on. On the Nerd Fitness website, and it was me with my, you know, doing like the Superman pose with the Nerd Fitness with wearing a Nerd Fitness shirt underneath.
- [12:21]
Dylan
Right.
- [12:22]
Steve Kam
And I think probably most people, for the longest time, you know, I'd meet them at a conference or whoever, and I say, hey, I'm Steve. Like, oh, great. You know, what's your. I'm like, oh, a company called Nerd Fitness, they're like, oh, yeah, I've been reading you for five years. Like, they just don't know Steve and Nerd Fitness, which is, like, perfectly fine with me. I think initially, I don't even know if I had. Back in the day when Twitter was relevant, Twitter handle of. I think I just had Nerd Fitness and I wrote through Nerd Fitness and people maybe knew Steve the Nerd Fitness guy. And eventually, only in the past handful of years have I kind of branched out Steve Kam as a separate creator. I think there's positives and negatives to both. I think maybe Nerd Fitness was really connected with me and people really enjoyed my writing, which has allowed me to then kind of pivot my own career and be Steve the creator. Where is me and it's my face. And you're reading@stevekam.com and you're getting my innermost fears and thoughts and awful, corny jokes, and, you know, it's me. It's the same writing from Nerd Fitness that people came to love. But when people found Nerd Fitness, the team members that we hired already resonated with the message or the journey that the company and the community was going on. A lot of the people we initially hired came straight out of that community because they already loved it. So I think Nerd Fitness became something bigger than me. And I'd be interested to see what Nerd Fitness looked like, had the. The. That. That craziness of LLMs and what this looks like, you know, what. What it could have been differently, but I don't know. So a lot of this has kind of been. There's been a lot of acceptance on my path of this is where you need to go, Steve, and this is where Nerd Fitness needs to go. And I honestly, for the longest time, I feared splitting them. And I think I probably did Nerd Fitness a disservice by. By doing that. I would write, like, the Monday newsletter, but then Team Nerd Fitness would write the Wednesday and Friday newsletter. So people were getting like, a little bit of both. And only maybe a year and a half ago did I finally say, hey, you're getting an email from me on Monday. And if you want to get that, great. And if you want to get an email about health and fitness, you're going to get it from Team Nerd Fitness on Thursdays. And everybody was like, oh, great, okay, cool. No problem. And I was so afraid of this for so long that I think I kind of gave half my heart to both. Or I kept writing about health and fitness because Because I thought I had to. It's been wild. But as far as I wish I could say I had the perfect plan of setting up this brand and maybe kind of, it would have been cool. I had ideas like, maybe we'll open a gym and make equipment and we'll have these other. And some of that stuff worked and some of it didn't. And then I branched me out, and now Nerd Fitness is just kind of its own thing. So I. I think there's a path to both, and you might not know which one is the right one when you start. And it's totally okay to move and change along the way.
- [15:31]
Chanel
Yeah. Did you ever think about just, like, burning the whole thing down and shutting down Nerd Fitness altogether?
- [15:36]
Steve Kam
Yes. Multiple times.
- [15:38]
Chanel
Yeah. Okay.
- [15:39]
Steve Kam
Because I. Because I like mental breakdowns. I have gone through a lot of therapy recently and learned more about myself and where my struggles are and the things that I love to do and not do. And it's really hard. It's really hard for me to accept and realize that, like, I wasn't the guy to be running this. And a team of that size scared the heck out of me. And so I knew where my path was headed. And it was like, I need to go write a book. I need to spend a few years figuring out what this next version of Steve looks like with complete acceptance of my faults and flaws and struggles and challenges and unique strengths. And I knew that was writing, and if I was going to go that path, there were essentially three options. One was sell the company. Right. I've had offers for people to buy it in the past, and I've just politely said no every time, mostly because I know when people buy health and fitness companies, they just slap a bunch of supplements on there and ads and kind of suck the soul out of it. And I didn't want that for Nerd Fitness. The other pass was just shutting it down or kind of taking it over, just saying, hey, this is Steve now. And I chose that third path, which was, we have a great team. I want to let them fly. And so I now meet with the team once a week. There's a lot of kind of synergy, actually. Matt from Nerd Fitness is now coaching me for my health and fitness through the Nerd Fitness app, which has been full circle, huh? Yeah, I love it. Full circle moment, which has been great. That's the perfect amount of coaching for me is virtually. And it's been delightful. And. Yeah. So I think this is probably the path that I was. That felt preserved the Heart and the integrity of Nerd Fitness that I had tried to build for 17 years and honored that legacy, and hopefully it's around for another 17 years would be great. But it was tough. There were definitely moments where I was like, this is too much. I can't do this. I need to go live in a cave and write and just shut everything down. Because it's. I give a lot of myself to my work, and I think I gave so much of myself to Nerd Fitness that I had kind of burned out and maybe even forgot some of who I was. So I had to go through that journey and hopefully give Nerd Fitness a chance to become what it is now, too.
- [18:14]
Podcast Host
Wow. Thanks for sharing all that. I'm sure that was not an easy process to go through.
- [18:18]
Steve Kam
Oh, no, it's terrible. It was terrible. But like I said, I learned a lot.
- [18:23]
Chanel
Do not recommend. I'm kidding.
- [18:27]
Podcast Host
Okay, so now you've pivoted. You've. You've broken out your own personal brand from Nerd Fitness. I think that goes out to about 135,000 subscribers at this point.
- [18:36]
Steve Kam
Yeah, about right. Yeah. What I did was actually, I took the Nerd Fitness newsletter and we essentially duplicated it. So the people that had already opted in and wanted to read Nerd Fitness and said, hey, you're going to get, you know, you'll still get the same email that you've been getting from me for 17 years. It's just going to come from a different email address. And you'll then still get the Nerd Fitness emails that you're expecting on Thursdays. It's just going to come from Matt at Nerd Fitness. So essentially, we allowed people to opt in, you know, to. To keep both or to get rid of one or the other. And I think everybody stayed for both. So now they're just growing on. Growing on independent paths. I haven't checked the numbers in a while. You know, it might be down to 100,000 or it's somewhere. It's somewhere in that. In that range. Like, to be honest with you, it's. I haven't checked because. Right. The focus at the moment hasn't been on growth. It's just been on getting this book done and then also trying to shine a spotlight on it, which is so deeply uncomfortable for me because I would much prefer to be hiding and writing instead of on cameras or out in front of a lot of people, which probably played into why I didn't love being in charge of a large team either.
- [19:52]
Podcast Host
Totally. I can understand that. It's not easy to talk about your stuff, even though it's incredibly good. I've already read the book. It's amazing.
- [20:00]
Steve Kam
Thank you.
- [20:01]
Podcast Host
Well done on all the dad jokes and everything, even though. Thank you. It's incredible, especially in a world of, like, with AI and LLMs, like, I can tell that every single word came from, like, right out of Steve. And I love that. So kudos.
- [20:16]
Steve Kam
Yeah. Honestly, when I've done meetups in the past or I meet people, like, there was no greater compliment than when I would meet them and they would say, you're exactly what I expected based on your writing. And that's what I've tried to come across. And, you know, we could talk about this too, but I had to go on that journey with my book too, where I tried to sound, you know, like. Tried to sound like other people to feel more impressive because, again, struggling with imposter syndrome and some insecurities and had to learn that my writing and my jokes were enough, and that's what people were going to say yes or no to. And that ended up, I think, making for a much better book.
- [20:54]
Podcast Host
Totally. Especially because the topic is not, like, warm and fuzzy all of the time. And so, you know, I feel like you have well placed. Like, just when you start feeling like, man, this is hard, it's like, there goes Steve again with one of his crazy jokes. So you, like, pull people back in. It's well done.
- [21:09]
Steve Kam
Yeah. I want an equal number of eye rolls and laughs is what I'm aiming for.
- [21:15]
Podcast Host
Oh, it was incredible. Well, okay. So writing the. Now that you've separated the two, do you feel like the topics are similar to what you were writing before? Or you feel like you have this complete freedom now to just, like, write about anything you want. What does that feel like?
- [21:33]
Steve Kam
It has been really nice to not have to tie everything back to health and fitness. I mean, this book, I talk about standup comedy, I talk about science, I talk about Polynesian wayfinders. I mean, I get real weird with it because that's where my interests lie. And there is, you know, there is still a good, you know, kind of connection back to the first 15 years of my writing. But having that freedom to explore these topics, I think has made for. Had made rather, it has improved my writing and also allowed nerd fitness to succeed in its own way because they can focus on their strengths. So for me, I think my strength is my enthusiastic curiosity and trying to find really interesting or funny ways to make challenging topics approachable and understandable. And I think by doing that it's allowed me to dive way deeper into some mental health philosophy types of things that I probably wouldn't have felt comfortable doing at Nerd Fitness. For sure.
- [22:43]
Podcast Host
Yeah, that's gotta be. Gotta feel nice. I'm sure after such a long time of probably internally struggling with, like, what are you gonna do with the company? And like, how do I go back to what I feel like I was born to do? And I think that's. It's awesome that you've gotten to that place.
- [22:58]
Steve Kam
So thank you. Yeah. It only took 17 years, so.
- [23:03]
Podcast Host
Yeah. So if you're on year two or three, just wait another 14 and you'll be good to go.
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Chanel
Yeah, yeah. You're almost there.
- [23:09]
Steve Kam
Yeah. I tell this story in the book. I've tried to meditate a thousand times and have always been like, well, you just have to do it once a day, every day for 30 days, and then you'll reach nirvana. You know, you have to be disciplined and militant about it. And I stumbled across this book, I think it was by Jon Kabat Zinn, and he's telling the story about maybe just sit with your breath, try that for a few years and see how it works. And very matter of factly, like, yeah, this could take years. And it's like, sit with it more often than not. And I kind of realized, like, that's what we do with. That's what I do with writing. That's what we do at Nerd Fitness. Doing something more often than not for a long period of time is kind of the, like, that's the goal. It's not perfection. It's not. It's not being. You have to do it every day. You keep the streak alive. It's doing it more often than not, semi regularly for a long time is generally how you're going to get those results. And that's ultimately how I started with writing. It's how. What led me to Nerd Fitness. It's what led me here and is kind of a theme throughout the book too.
- [24:15]
Chanel
Yeah, it's like, it's funny because you said, you know, I'm going to try meditation. And it's like, I feel like it's just always. We're just trying. That's all we're doing with all this stuff is we're, we're trying to write, we're trying to meditate, and we're trying it every day. And we're never like achieving necessarily that ultimate end goal because ultimately it's the journey that matters and, and where we get to, um. I'M getting a little too philosophical here, but I.
- [24:38]
Steve Kam
But don't. I will never stop you there. Just keep going. Let Dylan cook. Let's go.
- [24:43]
Chanel
Yeah, it's just that. Yeah, I guess the. The journey is the point, right? Like, we're always just going to be trying and trying and getting better and trying and improving. And so, you know, sitting with your breath for. For a few years and see how. How that works. Right? Like, that's. That's kind of like this whole creator journey, the writing journey, this newsletter thing that we've all been doing for a while. It's all trying and just doing it more often than not. So I really like that message.
- [25:05]
Steve Kam
Thank you. Yeah. And I think a big part of the book, too, is we in that trying. It's not just trying. And the reason the book is called how to Try Again, it's because how you are going to try again. I mean, for so many years, I'm sure we've all done this, right? January 1st, all right? This is the year I'm going to run that marathon. And then they get two or three weeks into their training. And the way that I put it, essentially, is like, when you have an all or nothing mindset, all or nothing becomes all, then nothing pretty quickly.
- [25:35]
Chanel
And then I just read that post of yours this morning.
- [25:37]
Steve Kam
Yeah, it's so true, right? Oh, well, I'm so good for three weeks, and then my kid got sick. Or I'm going to write every day for my newsletter. I'm going to post every day on Instagram. And then you miss a day, like, well, streak's ruined. It's over. All right, we'll try again next year.
- [25:52]
Chanel
May as well stop.
- [25:53]
Steve Kam
Yeah, might as well stop. And I think so. The way I think about this is before you just try again to run another marathon or to post again on Instagram, and that one's deeply personal to my heart because I've struggled to try to post every day on Instagram a bazillion times in the past. And I have to pause and ask myself, is this actually the thing that you want to be doing? I know so many people that don't like running, but keep trying to run and then beat themselves up when they can't stick with the running habit. Of course you don't enjoy this, but maybe you enjoy dance or trying Pilates or picking up heavy things might be great. So it's not just trying again. If you keep trying at that same thing and failing, of course it's not going to work. So what are you going to do try differently this next time. What's the different strategy? Maybe it's a different medium altogether. Instead of Instagram, maybe it's, you know, maybe it's substack or threads or whatever. Trying differently is so important because we're just going to end up right back in the same spot, except with way more guilt and shame and sadness when I couldn't follow through with it again. Yep. Not surprised you didn't like it when you started it. Of course it's not going to work.
- [27:09]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I, I've always wanted to have like a 10,000 step goal every day. And I'm just one of those people. Like, the streak ends and I'm like, well, close up shop, try again next year. And so this year I decided, what if I just average 10,000 a day? So, like, one day I might do 15, one day I might do seven. And that's okay. And it's been working incredible. I'm actually at like 12,000 average just because I'm letting myself have that flexibility of being able to, like, do it differently and not focus on the specific number every single day. And if you miss one, you're, you know, you're done, you're finished. So. Yeah, I think there's something to that too.
- [27:44]
Steve Kam
Yeah, the, the metrics that you choose to track certainly matter. I think, like, for you said, oh, if I had to do 10,000 steps a day and I missed it, then the streak is broken and everything is over. But, you know, oh, 25,000 or 12,000 steps or 10,000 steps on average. Okay, today was a little lower. I can make tomorrow a little higher. Or you go on a hiking trip. Amazing. Now all of a sudden you're ahead of the game. Fantastic. I know so many people are like, I'm going to read 100 books this year. And then they get through like one book in January and they're like, well, that's it. Years over, couldn't reach my goal. It's like, maybe, maybe a goal of 15 minutes a day would have been better. Or maybe a goal of. Yeah, you know, when you pick certain goals with certain metrics, it might send you down a path that. Or have you trying to succeed in a way that misses the whole point of why you're doing it in the first place. Oh, if your goal is to read 100 books, you might speed read a bunch of short books. And you will never tackle the Count of Monte Cristo or War and Peace, because that could take you the entire year to read. But you might get way more out of it. And the whole point is to read for enjoyment and to learn something, not to get through a certain number of books. So I think matching the metric with the goal and really pausing and thinking about what am I trying to accomplish, why am I doing it? And have I picked like a sustainable metric or path that allows me to keep doing this more often than not for a long time?
- [29:22]
Chanel
Oh, man, we could go down so many goal setting rabbit holes here.
- [29:30]
Podcast Host
The one quote that stuck out to me from this book that I can't stop thinking about is we're not doing ourselves any favors by waiting for life to be any different than it is right now. And it kind of ties into this goal setting thing is like, do we actually need to set another goal to change something in our lives? Or are we just picking something because it's January and we're like, well, I need to do something different where it's like, could you just be okay with where you are?
- [29:55]
Steve Kam
It's the hardest thing in the world. I mean, and it goes, it goes way, way, way back to like, essentially like the Protestant Reformation and then the, you know, salvation through work. And then that gets transplanted to America. It's like a whole. And then that has all been transplanted into us millennials and coming of age during certain years and, and the uncertainty in the workforce and then we have to perform on social media. All of this combines to us being never feeling enough. And we need to, well, you have to be more productive. And if you're more productive, well, then in your spare time you're not, you know, you're not doing your work. So therefore you need to be more productive with your hobbies. And you can get through more hobbies if you're more productive there and just slowing down and accepting that where you are today, like the messiness of right now is life. I think that's one of the most challenging lessons we've had to teach most of the coaching clients at Nerd Fitness. A lot of people keep apologizing to their coaches and saying like, oh, I'm sorry, this week was crazy, but next week things get back to normal. And then next week something else happens and they say, well, okay, well, I can't do it this week, but next week after that, then things will get back to normal. And we eventually get people to come around to the realization that today the messiness, the laundry still in the washing machine or the dryer that you forgot to switch over, the, you know, the fact that you're running low on certain ingredients, you can't cook certain things or you have to go pick up takeout because work ran late and the kids soccer practice ran over, like that's normal. And the sooner we can come around and accept the fact that today this messiness, this reality is normal, the sooner we can finally start to prioritize like, okay, if this is normal, how do I do the things that actually need to get done today with kindness and grace for myself and my situation? Because normal, probably whatever normal we think is, isn't coming back anytime soon.
- [32:00]
Podcast Host
So hard.
- [32:01]
Steve Kam
It's so hard. I remind myself every day, it's the most challenging thing for me is to slow down and be here and realize like, this is it, you know, this is today. I'm not reaching for something else in the future. I lived so much of my life doing that for nerd fitness and I think it did me a disservice. And this time around I'm working so hard. Like I said, I recently started up therapy again and have worked through a lot of these things of accepting that today, now this messiness, you know, this book coming out, there will always be something that I could be doing that I don't have time for. And that's okay. And it is so, so, so hard, especially for us entrepreneurs and people building businesses.
- [32:44]
Podcast Host
And so I know in the book you walk through like a four step process of like how to, you know, essentially try again and start over and do it better this time. How do you think that translates to, you know, an entrepreneur, creator? Like what are some more tactical, I don't know, ideas or examples you can think of that?
- [33:03]
Steve Kam
Sure.
- [33:03]
Podcast Host
And I, we've kind of talked, touched on a couple.
- [33:05]
Steve Kam
But yeah, I essentially wanted to create a very simple framework. Like it's not magic, it's not rocket science. It's not like top secret. It's four letters that people can remember. And when they find themselves spiraling or on the verge of burnout or beating themselves up, the four steps form the word pact. So pause, accept, change, try. So I'll just use myself as an example. I'm burned out in my own company. I keep waiting for normal. I keep trying to fix things that I'm not interested in fixing and telling myself that eventually I can slow down. And I told myself eventually for five years. So what I did was I step one was pause and I had to take a breath and step back and really evaluate and decide if I wanted to keep doing the thing that I was doing that was making me miserable. And in order for me to do that, I had to Move on to step two, which was acceptance. So accept. I had to accept that I was a writer and I loved writing and I hated managing people and my skill set and personal, you know, my personality, my quirks, my weirdness, whatever, was so much better served going down this other path than the one that I was on. So by pausing and saying, you don't have to keep doing this, and then saying, these are your strengths and weaknesses and this is the new path you want to go down, that also comes with consequences, right? The team. I wasn't there to fix some things that maybe I would have been able to fix, and that was really challenging. But what I had been doing wasn't working. So I had to accept my new situation and I had to change everything. It's been 17 years since I started the old ways of building an audience and growing and doing things that that chip doesn't. That doesn't work any anymore. So for me, as a solo creator, as a writer, I've had to change and find new strategies. I found I had a lot of success with threads, something that didn't exist many, many, many, many years ago. It's been super fun for me. I've been messing around with Substack, messing around with Kit's creator network, and various things like, oh, these are new strategies that allow me to be me, that leverage my strengths and are super fun for me. So let's change and try these things as an experiment. I talk about the change aspect of this book a lot in the context of experimentation and saying, let's try this for 30 days or a few months and zoom in and just focus on this strategy. And then we can zoom out after a few months and say, is this working? Do I like it? Am I gaining traction? Even if it's a little bit. Okay. As I know a little bit of traction and a little bit of growth can compound over time, and that's great. And then the last one is try. And for me, the biggest, most challenging lesson to this has been I tell this lesson in the book, but the eventual result of the lesson is this idea of pre accepting any outcome. And I tell it in the context of golf from my friend Josh Nichols. And he essentially helped me back off of the expectation I put on really every golf shot. But it applied even more to writing this book. I found myself paralyzed at one point from working on the book because it had to be perfect. I had a book deal. It was this new path for me. I knew there was a great book in there, but I was struggling to find it and I felt paralyzed to continue working on it because I couldn't find perfection. So I had to essentially let go of the outcome, which has been so hard, and just focus on the process of putting. I'd say put pen to paper, but really putting fingers on keyboard and typing and relinquishing control of how this book may or may not do. I worked really hard on it. I did the best I possibly could and made it the most Steve version of this book I could and hopes that it helps people. But there are so much. There are so many parts of life that are out of our control that focusing overly on that end outcome might keep us from taking action in the first place or might make us water down the product or the effort because we're trying to achieve a certain outcome. So I had to try without expectation on this book itself and give it the best possible chance to become a book that helps people first and foremost and hopefully allows me to continue writing. That's going to be my plan regardless. But it's been a new path for me, so I had to pause and step back. I had to accept my strengths and faults and accept that the old thing that I had built, I was actively holding it back and not helping myself. I had to change how I thought about myself and who I was and how I spoke with myself. And then I had to try with that expectation on this new path that I'm still on and hopefully I'm on. If nerd Fitness was 15 years of my life, hopefully this new path is Steve the writer, the weird creator who just loves putting himself out into the world. Hopefully I'm doing this for another 15 years, but there might be some pivots along the way too, and that's totally okay.
- [38:46]
Podcast Host
I love this. I think this actually ties in well with a lot of things that creators and people writing newsletters often struggle with. It's like, what. What do I write about? What am I doing? And it's one of the things I tell people often is like, pick something that you would do even if you had zero outcomes. Nobody but your mom read it. Like, that is the thing you should go do. And I think it's harder to actually do that than it is for me to say it, obviously. But it's so powerful when you do that because people feel the passion. They can feel how excited you are about the thing. And so I love that you're talking about this because I think even if you're just picking a new social platform to try out, it's like, give it 60 days, 90 days, six months. Do it for a year and see what happens. And don't expect to have like 10,000 followers at the end of it. Just try and have fun with it and do something that you enjoy.
- [39:36]
Steve Kam
Yeah, actually, I have a whole chapter in the book on success and picking the next thing to try and the traps that most of us fall into of. Okay, well, that's. I see other people succeeding in that way. I should probably do that thing because it worked for them. And especially in the. In, you know, the online creator, online business space. There's a lot of people who will tell you, I have the one secret. I have the one way. I have the productivity hack that will change your life and make you a million dollars in your business. And then when you do that thing, and shockingly, it doesn't work and you don't make a million dollars, you beat yourself up. And I think the reality is that tactic worked for them because of who they are and their strategy, if it worked at all, maybe if they're actually honest, which is a big ask. But also it's so alluring for us to think that somebody else has it figured out and we want to just do what they're doing. And, or. Or we think because we want this end goal, we're willing to do something we don't actually like for a while until we can stop doing it. And the way I think about this is, like, don't just ask, is the juice worth the squeeze? But, like, do you even like juice? Right? Like, if you don't want to drink that juice, you don't have to. It's totally acceptable to do, to find your path. And I think that's the only way you're going to have 15, 17, 20 years of a career is because you found the path that actually aligns with how you want to do it. The way that you think and talk and interact with people, the products or services, like, it has to be aligned with how you operate as a person. Otherwise it is going to. Man, it's going to feel like you're swimming, uh, I think swimming uphill, but that. That doesn't necessarily make sense. You know what I'm saying?
- [41:33]
Podcast Host
Salmon or something.
- [41:34]
Steve Kam
Yeah, right. Yeah, salmon.
- [41:35]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [41:36]
Steve Kam
Well, actually, salmon seem like they're having a pretty great time swimming. Swimming upstream. Um, we are not salmon, so swimming upstream is probably a little more challenging for us. Yeah, it's like fighting a current. Um, so it's really important to really pause and get to know yourself and not just get distracted by those really shiny Bright, beautiful lights and the allure of this. Somebody else telling you they have everything figured out. If you just do exactly what they do, it's very unlikely that's going to work.
- [42:03]
Podcast Host
Do you have any tips for trying to figure out if it's actually something you want to do versus if you're just like paying attention to what other people are doing? Like, aside from going into a cave and sitting there for 12 days and thinking, like, what are some real tips we can use?
- [42:18]
Chanel
Yeah, I mean, that's a good tip.
- [42:19]
Steve Kam
It's a good tip. I mean, the way I think about it is imagine you're on like this, you're at this, you're in this buffet, right? And you can see all these different options available to you. And you walk through and you make your plate of food and it's got a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Great. And then somebody else walks over and steals your plate and gives you a different plate of food and said, no, no, no, this is how you have to eat. And you have to eat with your left hand and you have to, you can only eat between 7 and 7:15pm like, but I don't like any of the food on this plate. That doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not going to do it. I think when you're trying to find your path, you're building your own buffet plate. It's perfectly fine to look on Instagram, to sign up for great newsletters from people that you love and then be okay taking individual tactics or strategies and treating them like a 30 day or a 60 day experiments without expectation. The experiment shouldn't only be like, do I see number go up? But did I enjoy the process or did I find fulfillment? Did I enjoy the challenge of making this number go up or do I see positive progress in a certain direction? So I think it's perfectly fine to try a few different things. I would set some parameters around those, around those things. Like, like I said, A 30 or 60 day experiment where you're zooming in and just focusing on it without the results. And then you can zoom out and take a look and see this is working. I felt good about it. I enjoyed it. Cool. Keep going. Oh, I didn't enjoy it. Great experiment. Still successfully accomplished. You learned what doesn't work for you or which path or strategy doesn't align with your goals. Great. I think also we put so much pressure on ourselves to succeed and succeed quickly and everybody wants to sell us that things take that we can succeed very Fast if we just go all in or whatever it may be. As I said earlier, this is a lot. We do live long lives. We can, it's amazing what we can accomplish if we can do these things some of the time, more often than not for a long period of time. So I think there's a lot of this that requires us to reset healthier expectations. It's to get to know ourselves. I mean, for me, therapy has been really helpful and joining groups of other entrepreneurs and writers. Some of my most powerful life experiences have come from being in small groups with other writers. So getting to know other people that are succeeding maybe in the way that you want to succeed, not just celebrities who are succeeding and following some 4am morning protocol or whatever, but like the person down the street who also has two kids and plays pickleball but has built a really cool little business. That's probably somebody you should be spending a lot more time with than trying to follow the Kardashian strategy for, you know, unbelievable billion dollar success in marketing. Like find people that are like you, who are succeeding in the way that you want to succeed and see if there's ways you can borrow from them. I think that's probably so much more valuable than chasing, chasing this amazing magic. You know, celebrities that are so far out of touch that we can't, we can't relate to what a day to
- [45:50]
Chanel
day life is like. Relatable success I think is kind of like what I'm hearing is like, yeah, find people who are living the life you want with obviously some boundaries and a level of success that seems achievable to some degree and see what they're doing and maybe pick up some notes, take notes, follow them a bit.
- [46:12]
Steve Kam
Yeah, and people that like you said, people that are, we never really know what's going on in everybody's lives. You know, I think a lot of those people that are preaching success and grinding 4am and working 80 hour weeks and who knows what they have going on. Maybe like they don't want to go home or they never get to see their kids and like you just have no idea. There's this. I tell a story of Ken Burns, the amazing documentarian who has put out some of the, the world's best documentaries and he's getting interviewed and the host say something like, ken, I love your documentaries. I know you put so much time and energy and effort into them, but it also seems like you have a really great work life balance. What is that like for you? What does work life balance mean to you? And he says, you'll have to ask my two ex wives about that. And he was just so transparent and honest and was like, yeah, this job has taken a lot out of me. And it has. There is a lot that most people don't see. And so when we romanticize the success of other people, we might not realize what they're chasing or what void they're trying to fill or what sacrifices they've made. There's a lot of that that is happening and we only get to see the bright, shiny front spot. So the more we can get to know those people, like you said, Dylan, the, you know, the relatable successes in our own town or people that we want to get to know on the Internet, I think the more likely we're going to be to find peers or a group of people that we can then spend a lot of time with over the next five, 10, 15 years. I mean, there's a lot of people that are going to help me promote my book that I met at a conference 15 years ago, because we were all doing this at the same time way back then. And we stayed in touch because I like them as people. I think that is under. That can't be replicated or replaced. And it really helps to be in this for the right reason and surrounding yourself with people that are chasing similar things or have succeeded in ways that we're excited to try to succeed, to
- [48:23]
Podcast Host
pick something, you know, you can do for a long time. I think one of the biggest things I hear from people who have made it in this creator space or in the entrepreneur space is like, just keep doing the same thing. Like, keep going, stop pivoting, stop doing all these things. Like a pivot here and there is good, but not every six months. And so what can you do for the next decade or more, and that's how you're going to win, is just like, stick with the thing.
- [48:47]
Steve Kam
Endurance. You can talk about treading water a lot in the book, but you can tread water for certain things for a long time if you need to while you're navigating a bunch of other parts of life. So being able to do something for a long time. I wrote two articles a week every week for 10 years. And that's how I built nerd fitness to what it was. And as a result of all of that work, it is still a business that gets to operate because of a lot of that legwork, because I was willing to do it for a really, really long time. The other thing too is I got better over those 10 years. My writing got better. It allowed me to become a better writer, a better researcher, a better communicator because I was willing to do it first for such a long time. There is some institutional knowledge, there is some experience that you just cannot take a shortcut on. So being willing to do something for a long time, hopefully, also means you are building a better and better body of work and a strategy that does work over time that will help you succeed. Even if you do have to pivot in the future. All of that work gets to count. None of it is wasted.
- [49:53]
Chanel
Mm. It compounds.
- [49:57]
Podcast Host
Amazing. Awesome. Steve. This was great. This is definitely a different episode from a typical one, but I think even more important than our other episodes. No, like, fantastic. The topic is something we don't talk about enough in this space. And I think just learning to be okay with knowing that you're going to have to try again someday and start over and just have a good process for doing that. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing that with the audience. Um, so the book how to Try Again. Go get it. It should be out by the time you listen to this. Any. Any other places people should check you
- [50:34]
Steve Kam
out, Steve or yeah, the book is. So if you go to howtotryagain.com it's all the details where it's available. It's available in countries all over the world and hopefully other countries too. I also recorded the audiobook, which gave me a slight panic attack the first day, but ultimately being super fun by
- [50:52]
Podcast Host
the end of the week.
- [50:54]
Steve Kam
So if you enjoyed this conversation. I read the audiobook. I had a lot of fun with it. I essentially fired myself to spend the last three years writing this book and distilling my life's work and writing into it. Hope you check it out. I'm really, really proud of how I turned out and I guarantee it will make you laugh at least three times and roll your eyes four times. So maybe, maybe even more. But yeah. Howtotryagain.com and then I'm everywhere on the Internet, just Steve Kam. Pretty easy to find the book.
- [51:24]
Podcast Host
The little subtitle on the book is one of my favorite sentences of all time. It says, some people wake up at 4am, run 15 miles barefoot and then meditate in an ice bath. This book is for the rest of us. And I'm just like, yes, well done.
- [51:36]
Steve Kam
Thank you. That was actually the first line of my book proposal at this point, three and a half years ago. And I think that was the line that got the publisher to take a closer look at the proposal. And it was their suggestion, put it on the COVID and I was like, let's do it. I love that. And it's the thing everybody has commented on.
- [51:54]
Chanel
Now that's a hook.
- [51:57]
Steve Kam
Got him.
- [51:57]
Chanel
As they say. You got them. Yeah. What I was going to ask you was what is, what is success? We've talked a lot about success in the last hour. What does success for Steve in this book look like?
- [52:07]
Steve Kam
I mean, if I'm willing to allow myself to believe it, I'm currently living it. I got paid to write a book that I got to be myself in and I get to wake up and think about writing and helping people through my writing. By that metric, I've made it. So I am trying to sit with that. And again, I have pre accepted whatever outcome happens for this book, whether it sells 5 copies or 5 million copies or somewhere in between. My guess is somewhere in between. Then I've made it and I'm living that success, which is I get to write a newsletter each week that I chase a curiosity and connect with people and I'll be able to walk into a bookstore in countries all over the world and see something that I wrote and is hopefully helping people. Like that is success to me. Future success means me being able to continue to say no to a lot of things, to keep focusing on my day to day life, which is friends, family, taking care of myself physically, some hobbies, writing, volunteering, just like doing those things. I've made it. It's just really allowing myself to accept that is really challenging. As entrepreneurs, we always just want like, what's the next thing? How do we do more? So if I can accept it, it's here, I'm doing it. And that's pretty awesome. And I think if you looked back at old Steve or brought this back to old Steve and said, look where you ended up, you'd be like, oh, he made it. You must be so happy and everything must be perfect, right? No, that's not how life works. But I'm excited to keep trying and keep writing and to keep improving that craft and, and working on it and connecting with people. So I'm here, I'm doing it, and I'm really proud of that.
- [54:01]
Podcast Host
Wow, congrats on the past 20 years or so.
- [54:05]
Chanel
Yeah, yeah. Long time. It's crazy.
- [54:09]
Podcast Host
You've made it, Steve.
- [54:10]
Chanel
Yeah.
- [54:12]
Steve Kam
Thank you.
- [54:13]
Podcast Host
Thank you. Thanks again for being on the show. We appreciate it.
- [54:25]
Dylan
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