Focused - 265: How to Try Again, with Steve Kamb

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast, but more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hello, Mr. Schmits. How are you feeling? I'm getting over a nasty cold, but I'm doing better. Yeah, I was teasing you at the beginning that you sound like Chaudet,

and then I realize you're young enough. You don't even know who that is. So probably most of our audience doesn't know who that is, but I like your voice, Mike. You should have a cold more often. I disagree, but that's okay. it'll last because we have an awesome guest for this episode. Welcome to the Focus Podcast, Steve Cam. Hi, guys. So excited to be here. Yeah, we're excited to have you. So Steve, I've known of you for a very

long time because you were a guest on a podcast that I edited back in the day called The Productivity Show. And at the time you were, I think maybe just starting with something called Nerd Fitness. And you were talking about something called an epic quest of awesome, which I thought was great and I adopted for myself. But I formally met you just this last year when we were at Craft and Commerce, and you came out with a great book called How to Try Again. And I have to talk about your brilliant marketing, because not only did he have the books that he was signing, books were included for every person that attended Craft and Commerce. So everyone got the hardcover book with the beautiful cover, and Steve's walking around with a shirt that has the cover on it and words that say,

I wrote this and an arrow pointing towards it. Best viral marketing I've ever seen. It's just like the app developers at Apple Events who wear their app icon on their shirt. That's me. It's smart. Yeah. I wish I could take total credit for it. But a friend of mine named Tim Graal, who Mike, maybe you're familiar with or have met.

But Tim said, hey, everybody's getting a copy of your book at this conference. but they have no idea what you look like. And it's your job to meet as many people as you can while you're there. And timing-wise, it couldn't have been more serendipitous. This was the week before my book was coming out. So he said, like, if you wanted something a little crazy, get these shirts made in the same style as your book cover and walk around with it, you're going to feel a little silly.

But I did. People kind of, like, looked at my face and then looked at the shirt. and then like you could see the lightball moment in their head like oh wait a second this is the book I got in my welcome kit you're the guy all right cool um so uh mission mission success uh it was it was pretty fun i bet you made some friends because of it though right people's strangers can feel comfortable walking up to you and talking about your book oh for sure and i'm pretty introverted so it was like the perfect in for people to come up to me and and say like oh hey i just read the first few pages or oh, I actually know of you from Nerd Fitness, but I didn't realize you were the guy.

So it made it a lot easier for me than just walking up to random people and saying, hi, I wrote a book. It's coming out next week. Please like me. This was a little bit, this felt a little better. I never would have guessed that you would be introverted based on my interactions with you at Craft and Commerce. I'm a, I guess you could say an ambivort, right? Like at the end of that week meeting hundreds of people and then the following week, my book coming out, I don't think I talked to, like the week after that, I don't know if I talked to anybody for like a good six days. I was like, I just need to sit quietly and read a book and not use my voice anywhere. What do you call a person who can talk to a thousand people with no problem, but put him with one person and he's super awkward? That's what I am. That's every stand of comedian, right?

What? I feel like that's every stand-up comedian who is like loves being on stage and then like the individual back and forth is like, oh, geez, this is more challenging because they can perform on stage and like create almost like a caricature of themselves. But then one-on-one, it's really challenging. Yeah, that's me, sadly. Hey, gang, Mike here. And before we get into this episode that was recorded a few weeks ago with author Steve Cam, wanted to take just a moment to mention the Relay for St. Jude campaign for 2026. This is now the. the eighth time, the Relay community has come together in September to support St. Jude for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and it's amazing because now we have passed over $5 million raised as a community since 2019. And honestly, this is one of my favorite things that we get to do, because the mission is just so important. Did you know that an estimated 400,000

children worldwide get cancer each year? And when St. Jude opened in 1962, childhood cancer was largely considered incurable. But since then, St. Jude has helped push the overall survival rate in the U.S. from 20% to more than 80% and they're not going to stop until no child dies from cancer. Curing childhood cancer is a tremendous undertaking and St. Jude needs our help. The generosity of donors everywhere supports cutting-edge research that saves lives and ensures that families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, or food. Every child deserves a chance to live their best life and celebrate every moment. But when you support St. Jude, you can help make cures possible for kids with cancer. That's a cause we can all get behind.

Together, we can save more lives. And it only takes one minute to help give a childhood cancer hope for a lifetime. We are inviting the Relay community to help us reach our goal of $700,000 this September for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And as always, there are multiple ways to support this campaign. Please go to St. Jude.org slash Relay to make a donation today. You can also set up a fun of your own and see the awesome incentives available to donors this year. Plus, check to see if your employer will match your online donation. And remember to mark your calendars because the 2026 podcastathon is right around the corner on Friday, October 2nd. It's going to be the grand finale of the campaign and we'll be running from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m. Eastern Time on Relay's YouTube channel.

More cures, more hope, more tomorrows. Go to St.jude.org slash relay to donate or start a fundraiser of your own today. If you haven't donated it yet, stop the podcast right now. Go do it. Then come back and we'll pick up with the rest of the show. Steve, you didn't just write this new book. Tell us a little bit about your journey. Well, I started a company called Nerd Fitness way back in 2009. And I essentially just wanted to help people like me, people that were nerdy, that didn't. resonate with, you know, like the gym bro culture and weren't really inspired by the fitness influencers and supplement pushers on social media. And people that were just like, man, I got a lot

going on in life. I have a lot of other hobbies and things. And I'm just trying to get fit so I can feel a little bit better about myself. And I started that as a side hustle slash hobby blog and accidentally turned it into this big company with a lot of employees. in, you know, a large audience. And, you know, so fast forward to 2021, 2021, I had this idea and came to the realization personally that, like, hey, I accidentally built this business, but I'm a writer. I love writing the idea of crafting the perfect sentence or finding a really clever way to help people live a little bit better is what I want to do.

So I reached out to my book agent and said, like, hey, everybody writes about how to succeed with more discipline. But nerd fitness, we're really, really good at helping people fail with more compassion. Like, we help them pick themselves up after something has gone wrong. Or we help them find a way to fit more, fit exercise into their busy lives without beating themselves up when they miss a day. So that was the premise that I sold to my book publisher. and the contract that I signed to write. And I said, great, I'm going to write this book about what happens after life doesn't go according to plan.

And then my life didn't really go according to plan. There was a skin cancer diagnosis. I went through a heartbreaking but amicable divorce. And then I also got to watch as Nerd Fitness, which I had been running for 15 years at that point, lost 80 to 90, of our traffic just due to, you know, changes in, you know, how Google changes their algorithms, LLMs and chat GPT, hoovering up all of our content and just giving it out without needing to click through to nerd fitness. So I essentially failed in like always, in all parts of my life, all at the same time. And I had to go back to my publisher and say, hey, I know I was going to

write a book about what to do after you fail at a New Year's resolution. I need you to give me another year. Here's what I'm going through. And I think we're going to end up with a much better book on the other side of it. Hopefully I can get to the other side of this and then can put together a book that's much bigger and is more of a hug from your friend, Steve, saying like, hey, whatever you failed at or whatever you're going through, I'm also still going through it. And let's go through this together.

Which I think is a great message. the one line you mentioned it earlier, but I really love is rather than help people succeed with more discipline, help them fail with more compassion. And the book that you wrote and your message, I feel, just further validates that. You know, it's one thing to hear that from somebody who thinks they've gone through, you know, some hard stuff and is giving good advice. but it's another when someone has been in the depths of it. And really, like, the thing I got from reading that book was kind of like, I see you. And that's, I think, a really valuable thing that is really missing in the productivity space.

So I think this message is a breath of fresh air. And I'm curious, you know, do you feel like you're through it now? Or do you feel like you just passed one thing and now there's a new heart in front of you? I've come to this other realization. So I have always been some, you know, I was born, I feel like I was born on third base, just unbelievably lucky in so many parts of my life. I also have like extreme workaholic tendencies. I'm a recovering people pleaser.

You know, all of these things, essentially like my goal through most of life was, hey, if I just work really, really, really, really hard on this thing, then it will solve all of my problems. and then I can slow down, and then I will feel enough, and then, and then, and then. And when all of these things happened to me, especially there are things that you can't just work harder at. You know, like, when these things kind of fell apart in many ways, harder work was not going to not only solve the problem, but it kind of made me realize that, like, living with

this mentality of, hey, I just need to work even harder until. was like a losing proposition to begin with. So this whole book is kind of, like, the book I needed to read myself, why I wrote it, was helping people understand if you don't feel enough, which is easy these days,

because everything on social media and the news and media has no problem telling you why you're not enough. And then they have the magic solution. Instead, this book is like, I have amazing news. We're all broken. there is no magic solution.

We're going to get through whatever challenge you're facing right now and things might not get easier, but you will get better at navigating it, especially if you can find ways to lean on the people in your life that you need. So a lot of it really came back around to like acceptance of the fact that we will never be,

we never get there or there's no magic solution that will solve those problems. And if that's the case, then it's like, okay, we can now operate from a position of like compassionate reality. This is where we are right now. This is what we're working through. Let's take today and then we'll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow. It's like, find someone you're alive who you think's arrived and ask them if they've

arrived. Uh-huh. Nobody ever arrives. You never get there. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Keeper Security. One week password is like an open door to all the stuff that you wouldn't want anyone else getting access to. Keeper slams that door shut on every account that you have with a strong unique password for each one, so nothing is left exposed. Keeper is a password manager that creates

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check out Keeper's business plans. Just make sure you use our link so they know that we sent you. Once again, that is Keeperssecurity.com slash focused. Our thanks to Keeper Security for their support of this show and all of Relay. Yeah, and that's the focus angle, I think, to this, is that focus is one of those things where, oh, I'll be able to focus once I publish the book, or once I cross whatever finish line is in front of me. And that is never the case.

So the mindset shift that needs to happen for focus listeners and us on the call is that we really need to stop, like procrastinating our focus and just do the best we can with what we've got to work with. Yeah. And let that be okay. And I really, I really like that. It also kind of reframes the whole idea of failure. So failure, if you're trying to achieve focus someday when things settle down, failure is an obstacle. But if failure is part of the, failure is actually just part of the process. You want to talk to us a little bit about some of the benefits of failure? Yeah, failure is so interesting to me as somebody that failed in certain ways. And I'm very deliberate in mentioning this in the book saying, like, hey, there's no hierarchy of failure. And my failures are not more important or less important than somebody else is. I just wanted to share like, hey, these are the things that didn't go the way that I had expected in my life. So I wanted to reframe failure because I think it's something so many of us deal with. The most important thing I think that is the most important thing I think that is.

that jumped out at me in my research of failure, which included speaking with a professor of failure, going to visit the museum of failure, and you're really diving into like the, you know, kind of the origins of the word. Is that failure over time shifted from something that happened? Like, oh, a project failed or some aspect of life didn't go, you know, it broke or something failed.

So it's something that happened. And over time, this is back in the 1800s here in America, as like the self-made man became more important, failure became a character flaw. And failure became like this moral problem. People had, you know, were failures morally, it became part of their identity. And I think to this day, that's the definition that has kind of stuck. We feel like failures when we can't follow through on finishing a project or, We fall off our 5K training or can't stick with a restrictive diet. We feel like failures.

And we carry that shame and guilt. We carry it as a burden. And what I wanted with the very beginning of the book is to let people know, like, hey, we are not failures. We're humans who failed at something. Like, welcome to the club. We literally all do it. We just all hide it because we don't want other people to know.

know that we're struggling until we talk about it. And suddenly we realize that everybody else is also struggling. They also feel like failures. David, you were just saying, like, somebody that has made it, you know, they don't feel like they've made it. I think a lot of people will look at others and say, they have it all together. I wish I had it together. And then you talk to them and find out that they are like white knuckling their way through life. Or they are so successful because they're deeply insecure in another way. You know, there's so many things that are happening that we don't get to see. So I wanted people to shift their definition of failure from that second definition,

which was, you know, a moral failing back to the first one, which was, hey, this is a thing that happened. We failed. Okay. What do we do now? And, you know, that's the type of stuff that I think has resonated the most of people is, you know, I talk about failing compassionately. the being able to fail at something and then have compassion for yourself gives you the best chance

to then figure out how to accurately take the next step after that. I think it's worth considering for anybody listening to the show, do you stigmatize failure? I mean, do you look at it as some kind of moral failing? Because it's so inherent in the culture. And I think we could get into a long discussion probably why that is. But it is a thing that underlies everything. We get emails from people about our show complaining like, well, why do you guys talk about the stuff that you fail at?

And I'm like, because I want you to know that we don't have it together either. I mean, and if somebody tells you they knew, they probably don't. But I think an underlying, something you say that really resonates with me is this underlying negative association with a failure that we carry inside of us. And until you acknowledge that, I think it really is going to hold you back. Yeah, I mean, it's called the negativity bias, right? And it goes way back in the day. If you failed back in the day to wake up for the morning hunt or you failed to be an active member of your society that literally might have met death, right?

You might have been kicked out of the tribe or ostracized from society. So failing and failing publicly was like a huge no-no back way back in the day. That's no longer the case, hopefully no longer the case in many ways. But that part of our brain I think still exists. It's like, oh, we must avoid failure at all times. And also, if we do fail, we need to hide it. We need to cram it down and talking about it will make other people think less of us. You know, it actually took me like 15 versions of my book before I finally put, you know, those failures that I talked about on page one and page two.

Like, they weren't in the book at all. And eventually worked up the courage to send an email to my list. and say, hey, just a heads up, here's what I'm going through. I think I wrote that draft and sat on it for, I don't know, weeks and finally sent it. And I got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of replies for people saying, thank you for saying this. I'm sorry you're going through it. Here's what I'm going through.

So then adding that to the book, I think, has given a lot of people permission to, like, de-stigmatize failure for themselves as well and stop beating themselves up for something that has already happened that they can't change, they can now, like, move past it and say, like, okay, what do we do next? And that's it, right? The irony is, until you acknowledge it, you can't fix it. So the whole self-defense mechanism actually almost guarantees future failure. Yeah, and not the good kind of future failure, but probably failing in the same way repeatedly. You know, it's like the, oh, if first you don't succeed, try, try again. I don't know, maybe, but if you keep trying to fail in the same way, or you can't.

keep trying the same way. You'll probably fail the same way. We need to do things differently next time. And that requires us to acknowledge why we failed previously, but do so compassionately. Yeah. And that is the second theme of your book that I really, that really resonates with me is the continuous reference to being forgiving to yourself. And I really think that is part of this journey for people who are trying to be more focused, more productive, is you beat yourself up in the process so much, of course, you're not going to be any good at it because you have these negative associations with it. And man, people, man, people are really hard on themselves. Maybe more now than ever. Yeah, I think if tough love worked, like it would have worked already for us. Yeah. And we've all tried it.

And I'm speaking from from experience here as well. I have no problem extending kindness, compassion, and grace to other people. And then I hold myself to an impossible standard. This is this funny quote that said somebody something like, I will be kind to myself, unless I make a mistake, in which case I will not be kind to myself. It's like, oh, I can relate to that so much. You know, that is the truth of it.

It's like, man, if we've tried beating ourselves up and it's not working, what if we tried to treat ourselves like the way that we treat our friends who was going through something tough, we would never speak to them the way that we speak to ourselves. So it's adjusting that inner monologue and learning to turn up the volume on certain things and turn down the volume on other ones,

which requires us again to accept the fact that we're not choosing all of those thoughts that are coming in. We have to decide which ones we want to pay attention to and which ones we can politely acknowledge and then move on from. So much easier said than done. Of course. Oh, God. It's so hard.

Yeah, as you guys were talking, talking, I'm thinking, you know, I know all this stuff, but I still slip into it. I mean, this is, this is real for me. Two weeks ago, my wife broke her leg, then I got super sick. So all the things that I should have gotten done, didn't get done. And the inner monologue is, well, I'm failing at all of these things. And I'm going to let all these people down. I had a cohort going at the same time. So the story I was telling myself is everybody's going to immediately ask for a refund because I'm not able to show up in the best way that I can. And I wrote the message because I had a session the day she was going into surgery. And I hesitated sending it, but I knew I needed to be

there. I needed to postpone that session. And I still found myself hesitating to send it, finally sent it and got nothing but overwhelmingly positive response and encouragement from people. All the stories I was telling myself were wrong. And it's exactly what you're describing. You know, I'm not treating myself the way that I would treat somebody else and I'm projecting that they're going to have that same thought back towards me. And it's often not true. So is there anything we can do in the moment other than just like every once in a while you listen to a podcast like this? Oh yeah, I should really be easier to myself. Like what tactically can people do when they find themselves slipping into those negative thoughts?

Gosh, it's so hard. And like this is where I, this is the loop that I find myself in is I have a negative thought. And then I am like, yeah, you should have been better. and then I feel guilty that I'm not being kinder to myself. And then I'm like, you should be better about that. So it's such a slippery slope. Here's the thing that helped the most for me was recognizing that we are not our thoughts. You know, like, I imagine like go back to the, I can't remember what year is, the mid-80s,

you know, the Ghostbusters movie. And they say, like, don't have a single thought in your head. Choose the, choose the design of your destroy. or whatever. And Ray, just the stay puffed marshmallow man pops into his head. And everybody else is like, I didn't think of anything. And Ray says, just popped in there. And then all of a sudden, this giant stay puffed marshmallow man shows up and starts terrorizing Manhattan. He didn't choose the thought. It just popped into his head. And like, realizing that, like, oh, okay, that's kind of how all thoughts work. Like, we're not actively choosing to have those thoughts. And

more importantly, like, we are not those thoughts. Like, our brains are like a satellite dish, and it's just like trying to absorb thoughts coming in from the universe. So when the thoughts come in, it's acknowledging that, like, okay, that is a thought, but it is not me. So I can then choose whether or not that thought gets more attention or less attention. Again, so hard in the moment because that thought is so judgmental and negative, oftentimes. times, but it's the shorter we can make that distance, I think, between, okay, we have the thought,

we are now thinking and judging the thought, and then like remembering, reminding ourselves, like, oh, wait a second, okay, I didn't come up with that. It's in my brain. Do I turn up the volume on it? Do I turn down the volume on it? And what would I like to do again differently? So, Mike, like in your instance, you know, it's it's not only acknowledging that the thought is there. It's distancing yourself from you, like being your identity tied up with that thought. And then also deciding like, hey, I don't need to turn the volume up on that thought. Like, I'm going to move in this other direction. Yeah, the Alan Watts called the brain, the rebellious organ.

And this is the part where I always tell people, mindfulness meditation, if this is a challenge for you, if you find that your inner voice is controlling you, a meditation practice, you should investigate because I've been doing it for 30 plus years, and I'm very familiar with the voice now. And I very much understand that it is not me, but it's only through countless hours on the cushion. Yeah, and to help with, you know, I have also off and on meditated now for, I guess, a decade.

and I remember stumbling across a book from John Cabot-Zinn, and he said, try sitting with your thoughts or your breath for, you know. And he said something like, just sit quietly and with your thoughts for, you know, a little while. Try it for a few years and see how it works. And like, in my head, I'm so used to, you know, pop psychology and social media telling me like, oh, within 30 days of meditating, you'll reach Nirvana. And it was a realization that like, oh, I was trying to win at meditating. Like I was trying to win at overcoming my thoughts.

I was trying to win quickly. And instead it's like, ah, crap, more acceptance. This is a practice. I am not my thoughts. This is going to take a while. I will never get there. And like it's both depressing immediately. And then it's like unbelievably freeing when you stop beating yourself that you're not

already there and you're not getting there any faster. Like, oh, okay, if that's the case, what can we do moving forward from here? And that can be really liberating. My friends used to tease me like, are you enlightened yet? You know, because it was like they thought it was such a weirdo doing this, but it's not about that. It is just about getting that space between action and reaction and just understanding like how much nonsense your inner voice spews at you. And boy, if you can disarm that, suddenly you get wings. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Saly.

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How do we try again, Steve? Well, as I said earlier, if you just try, try again, while beating yourself up, you'll probably fail in the same way, except with additional levels of guilt and shame and frustration that you just can't get it together. So the book I talk about a framework, which I tried to make as simple and memorable as possible, talk about making a pact. Pause, accept, change, try. And I'll give you like one sentence on each of those steps, and then we'll dive deeper, I think,

and probably to the first step, which is the most important. So pause means like before you try again, make sure you're like give yourself a minute to breathe and see, are you trying again at the right thing? Are you trying again at the thing that you want to be trying at? Or maybe that was a goal that you don't even want anymore, but you have been beating yourself up on repeatedly. Then you have accept, which we have talked about, this is acceptance of the fact that your life is messy. Maybe you have sick kids at home or, you know, an ailing parent that you're also taking care of. So it's taking like an active look at your life right now and giving yourself permission to do what you're capable of within those confines.

So then with C, we have change. What are we doing differently this time? We have all the experience of our past attempts. That's amazing. But what sort of things are we going to try differently? Like what experiment are we going to conduct for this next attempt? And then finally, T is for try, which is like give ourselves permission without expectation to just try doing the different thing. And that's without judgment. It's without the extra pressure that we always put on ourselves. And then see where we, you know, and then find out where we end up after that loop. And then we can, you know, kind of repeat that ad nauseum.

So, Mike, earlier you were talking about beating yourself up because, you know, your wife broke her leg and you were sick and there was surgery. And all of these things, this is the part of, you know, let's go back to that P step for pause. Right in that moment, you were beating yourself up because you couldn't make progress on these other parts of your life. You're like, and I get it. We all want to make progress. We all feel good when we're moving forward on our goals.

I think there are so many of us in our life that, like, especially right now when things are crazy, instead of trying to win or continually beating ourselves up because we are not making progress. We can acknowledge that like, hey, actually, based on all the craziness that's happening right now, like, treading water and staying afloat where I am in this exact moment, like, is not only like a worthwhile, like, alternative to making progress, but it might be like the most optimal, heroic, best thing we can possibly do in our lives right now. Like, instead of winning, we can just try to not lose. And like, we all kind of know what that is, right? It's like, man, going for one walk. It's eating one healthy meal, even in a week of fast food. It's,

for you, it was sending that email and saying, like, hey, look, here's what's going on. Life is crazy. And, like, I'm sorry, I can't be here fully, but I'm navigating these other challenges. Like, that treading water moment is unbelievable. especially when the alternatives are swimming in the wrong direction, drowning and giving up, or just like, you know, throwing our hands in the air and saying, like, I don't know, I'm out and just going off the rails completely. Yeah, that's, the hard part about that for me was the commitments I made to other people.

And I want to unpack this a little bit because there's a phrase in that in your book, you say, instead of trying and failing to get better at juggling chainsaws, we can decide that maybe putting down the chainsaws is okay for now. And I feel like there's maybe a little bit of a nuance here between juggling chainsaws and my situation where these were commitments that I would have been able to follow through on, but because stuff happened, I've got to reevaluate. You know, how, I guess for clarification, you know, we've worked through it. I'm good, which is why I'm okay talking about it.

so I don't want anybody to worry. I do want to be real about the thoughts that pop up there because I know that they're going to pop up for other people too. So in that sort of situation, you know,

how do you decide which chainsaws are actually okay to stop juggling? Yeah. Well, I think you, instinctively, you figured it out, right?

It was like, look, I made these, I made these commitment to other people who have paid me, or I'm in a contracted, contracted situation with them. However, I need to also accept the reality that my wife has a broken leg and my, and I'm sick as a dog, and also she's having surgery, like, something has to give here. And you acknowledge to yourself, like, hey, you know, the, you know, that whole analogy was like, hey, some parts of

life, you know, if you're juggling, like, some, they're rubber balls and glass balls and it's okay to drop the rubber ones, but not the glass ones. Like, sometimes you also have too many glass balls and one of them is going to drop and you have to tell people, like, hey, I screwed up. Or in your situation, hey, life is kind of kicking my ass right now. Here's the reality of the situation. I apologize that I can't keep my commitment for XYZ reason. I think, if, you know, again, treating yourself like you would treat a friend, if you got that email from somebody else who you had paid and said, hey, here's the reality of the situation. And also, I don't know when this is going to get better, but when it does get better, I will find a way to either make this right or make you hold or whatever. I think 99.9% of people on this planet, their first thought would be, oh my gosh, Mike, I hope you're okay. How can I help? And like, do this doesn't matter. Like taking care of your wife and yourself matters so much more.

So giving yourself that permission to realize like, hey, I have to do what's right for me and my family right now. And these other things need to be set aside. Those chainsaws need to be put down. And I can just tell people the truth. I think so many of us are afraid to do that. And instead we pick the worst path, which is either not mentioning it at all. Or we kind of like not do it well and kind of do all parts of life poorly.

And in this instance, it's like, what am I choosing to strategically half-ass or strategically put down so that I can give the limited energy and attention I have to the things that really matter in this specific moment? And then once I've conserved enough energy and treaded water long enough, let's see what tomorrow brings, and when I start to feel better, after the surgery, I can then give more of myself back to these other people, and they will be better off for it. And you will have been really proud of how you navigated those challenges in your life, too. And that is exactly what happened and is happening. I say is happening because we're still still fighting this cold. Still treading water. Yeah.

Yeah. But actually, I wrote about it in my newsletter this week, though, I dug into the history of triage, and I found the general, you know, that from the Napoleonic War is where that came from. And essentially, all the patients are coming in. And it was sort of revolutionary at the time because they used to treat patients based on their rank. And so if you were a high-ranking official, you got first care. And that kind of went out the window, and they started triaging. So people who were going to be fine without medical care, immediate medical care, they got put aside, the ones who were going to die. Even if they got immediate medical care, they got put aside. the ones for which the intervention made the difference, that's where they focused their efforts.

And that's been going through my mind with everything the last couple of weeks. Yeah. I think, Steve, one of the parts of your book that I really liked was this whole focus on pause, because I haven't seen that much in productivity literature. I think it's kind of nice to have someone focus on it. And I do think that, you know, as humans were fight or flight machines, right? That getting back, you talked about our caveman ancestors. They didn't think about the word pause, but in the modern society, it actually is something that is

very helpful and maybe the best way through stuff, but we are not wired for pause. I mean, how do we wire ourselves up for this new idea? The way I think about this and the way that we've helped, geez, this plan, I don't know, 15, 20,000 coaching clients at nerd fitness is letting them know that all or nothing thinking, creates all then nothing results. Like when we go all in, it works amazingly well for like two weeks. And then something in life happens.

And then we beat ourselves up. And six months later, we're like, all right, time to do it again. And we go all in. And eventually life happens. So this pause step is like I want to give people permission before they just try again. Doing something is better than nothing,

then oftentimes doing something, like just treading water, is probably better than doing everything too because it's going to result in us falling back to that same spot. So for the pause, it's like really taking the time after we have failed or given up on something or life happens.

Or we're just, like you, Mike, like all of a sudden you're caught in this hurricane, that pause can maybe be the difference maker for us from just either giving up completely or futile, you know, treading water. I'm sorry, futilely like swimming against a current when like beating ourselves up that we're not doing more and more and more and more

and more. That pause is to give ourselves permission to say like, okay, before I try again to run a 5K, which I've been trying to do every January for the last decade, ask the question, like, do I even want to actually run a 5K? Like, maybe that was a goal from a decade ago because we were trying to do it for a charitable cause, and it just, we, it's no longer, we have a much, we have different goals now. Or we've always wanted to write a book and we keep getting started. But now we have kids and, oh, actually, like, I don't want to write a book anymore.

Kind of like giving yourself permission to shed some of those old expectations and those things that keep weighing us down. So the pause is like that specific moment slowing down and then asking like before I try again, am I trying again at the thing I actually want? Before I continue to judge myself for not making further progress on this thing, do I need to acknowledge that what's actually happening in my life right now? I can't win. I can't make progress. The only thing I'm currently capable of is just staying afloat. Like, that's where that fail compassionately, you know, thing comes in. It's like, hey, instead of beating ourselves up that we're not doing more and more and more, what would it look like if we found that minimum amount of activity or energy

or that minimum amount of something to remind ourselves like, hey, I'm still here, I'm still trying, and I'm just trying to tread water long enough. Not because. as I imagine tomorrow, everything will magically get better, but because I can then prove to myself, like, hey, I made it through another day, and then let's see what tomorrow might bring. The clouds might part. The seas might get a little, you know, less rough. And we can stay afloat and tread water for like a really, really long time. I even like looked into the research of that in this book and tell some pretty crazy stories about treading water because I want people to like think of that as a heroic act when life is kicking their butt. Another way I think about personally is, like,

Like, as a human being, I have the ability to reason. That is what has allowed our species to thrive. You know, we're not fast. We don't have sharp teeth. We don't have a lot of advantages that other species do, but we have our brains. And we were arguing that the brain is the rebellious organ, but it's also the way out. And the only way that you can reason through something is if you stop, you know. And when we get into fight or flight, we're giving up our biggest weapon against

these problems. I don't know. I love that. It's just like, it's like acknowledge it. Give yourself time to think it through, to reflect. It's hard. It's so hard. It's so hard because we just want to, like, we love action, right? And it's just like we just want to go, go, go. Yeah. Because I think there's, there is like a quiet comfort in doing the same thing, even though we know it doesn't work or hasn't worked yet. we just tell ourselves or dilute ourselves to saying like it wasn't because it was just because

I didn't try hard enough at it. That is almost easier for us to do than it is to pause and stop and acknowledge that we've been trying at the wrong thing for a long time or we've been trying to make a thing work that is no longer capable of working or, you know, what we're trying on is something that is never going to work unless we make some big changes to it. But that's so painful because it requires us to recognize, like, I've been doing the wrong thing. And I've been trying that the wrong thing. And that hurts a lot. You know, you get back to your earlier point, when you just jump into action, it allows you to not think about failure because you haven't failed yet.

You're still trying, even though you're not giving any thought and you're doing the, making the same mistakes over and over again. Right. It's all kind of ties together. Yeah, it actually leads into the second step, which is the, part of Pact. And we don't have to go through all of us in depth, but there's one thing in here that I think fits with the discussion that we're having. I'd love to get your perspective on this, Steve. You bring up dialectical behavior therapy, which I'd never heard of before, which is really

just recognizing that things are hopeless and being determined to make them otherwise. How does that work? Yeah. So the way I talk about this, I call it the back-to-normal fallacy. I can't tell you, how many people in our lives. I certainly do it myself. We'll tell somebody like, hey, I'm really sorry this week got busy, but don't worry because next week things will get back to normal. Oh, I don't have time to do this thing. Or I'm going to run myself crazy this week

because don't worry next week, things will get back to normal. Of course, next week, something else happens. Somebody else gets sick. There's a new, you know, emergency at work. there was some once-in-a-lifetime thing that seems to be happening with frightening regularity these days. It's no longer once-in-a-lifetime, but seemingly once a week, some world-changing event takes place. So we have to stop treating normal, like predictable, and we need to start acknowledging that, like, today, you know, for you, Mike, it's you're sick, your wife has a broken leg, you know, our head coach at Nerd Fitness, his, his, wife has a like a torn Achilles and has been off her feet for the last six weeks in the

middle of summer and they have two young kids. Like that is his normal. Warts and all, the chaos, the unpredictability. Like that is the normal in which he resides. And waiting for next week, for some, like the clouds to magically part next week is not doing ourselves any favors. Like expecting life to be any different than it is today is a. Is it. helping us. So this is where dialectical behavioral therapy comes in. It's kind of like in, you know, improv comedy. It's the yes and rule. Like, yes, this is the reality of my situation. Yes, this is the normal that I am currently living in with the in-laws coming to visit or the scary diagnosis from the, from the doctor, the lower amount of money in our bank account than we

expected. Like, it's, yes, it's finding the courage to acknowledge with completely open eyes what our normal actually is this week. And then it's yes, and. The and is acknowledging that there are still things that can be done within the confines of this chaos. So the dialectical behavioral therapy encourages you to keep like two opposing thoughts at the same time. And you know, and that's best referenced by that quote that you mentioned, which is like, things can be really challenging and life is hard and things can feel hopeless. And yet I can still be determined to make changes or take action within the confines of that because that's who I am as a human and I can prove to myself that I can continue to tread water

or this messiness will create some sort of lesson or rather like it will bring us closer together as a family as we're navigating all of this, it is the acknowledgement of both of these things being true at the same time. Again, much easier said than done and requires practice for sure. Steve, tell us about the doom loop. Yeah, so the doom loop is this term that I came up with for the challenge that I often found myself in. And it's like the most recurring challenge that most of the clients and readers and, you know,

people I've worked with over 15, 17 years at this point have found themselves in. And it's, here's how it works. So the top of the doom loop, you have feeling less than. It is, oh, I'm not enough. I wish I was skinnier. I wish I had more money. I wish I was happier. Whatever it is, whatever it is, we don't have it and we feel less than.

Next step of the doom loop is like, but wait a second. there is the thing. Like, I don't know what the thing is, but we're all aware of it. It might be the, the productivity hack that we need to change our lives. Or the perfect optimized human diet. Or the, whatever it is, there's probably something to be bought. Some class, there's something that is being sold to us or projected to us from media, social media, you know, advertisement, whatever it is,

it's the thing that will solve all of our problems. And then we get to the third step of the loop, which is the one that I've already talked about a bit, but that is the, like, we're going all in. This thing is going to change my life. Time to make the grand declaration. I'm going to tell all my friends. I'm going to post about it on social media.

I'm going to change my entire personality to be about this thing. And I'm going all in. and this works, like I said, for two weeks, three weeks, and we feel so good. And then life happens. And we miss one day, often through no fault of our own. The dog threw up on the carpet over the middle of the night and you can't get your kids ready in the morning and time and some part of life blows up and we miss the workout. We can't show up to the thing. We eat fast food or whatever it may. We do something that that breaks the loop for us.

And then we fall all the way back to the beginning of feeling less than. Except now with extra levels of judgment. Oh my goodness, I couldn't follow through on this thing. That's why I'm a failure. We, again, we over-identify with the thing that we just failed at. And we beat ourselves up because we couldn't be perfect at this thing that up until a few weeks prior, we didn't even know existed. And not only that, but like we have never shown the ability to be militant,

perfect at anything in our past, and yet we hold ourselves to this completely unrealistic standard. And then when things don't go perfectly, we beat ourselves up and go right back to the top of the Doom Loop until the next, you know, the next big thing shows up that is going to change everything again. And we just go around, then around, down, down, generally every January. You've got some, some, a nice framing for breaking free from the Doom Loop. So like, I've heard these frameworks, before, these loops breaking free, right? We want to break the cycle. But you have these escape pods, you call them, mental escape pods. And that analogy really, really, I enjoyed that in the book. You mind talking to us about some of the things that we can do to break free from

that doom loop? Yeah. I mean, some of these are, so some of them are internal. And those are, you know, this is the mental work that we had already been talking about. That is the distancing ourselves from our thoughts. It's pausing, you know, before we go back around the loop, it's acknowledging, like, is this the thing I want to try again at? It's, you know, being aware of how we tend to fail. And this is, you know, bringing it very quickly back to like the C and the T in impact. The C is like, what do we do differently? And that means looking back at our past failures. And it can be looking at our past trips around the doom loop and realizing like, oh, that's so interesting. I failed at running my 5K when I tried being a morning person,

even though I don't like getting up early in the morning. And after a few days, I gave up. Cool. Let's not do that doom loop again. So like, what are we going to do differently this next time? This is the other mental aspect of like treating ourselves with kindness and compassion. Life is going to get in the way. And instead of going all or nothing, again, which becomes all than nothing, What would some look like? And here's the one that sounds like the craziest and the most simple, but it's the one that I think has resonated the most with people. And I call it like the shower analogy.

Every day we take a shower. You wake up, you take a shower, you go to work, like clockwork. Except one day, like I said, let's say your wife breaks her leg. And that morning, you have to, she falls down the stairs or whatever, and you have to take her to the hospital. and you don't get a chance to shower, understandably, that day. Like, the next day, technically, you are a failure at showering. Do you suddenly download shower podcasts of successful people and buy a new shower journal

and hire a shower coach and hang up a shower chart on your wall? Or do you just take a shower the next day and not think twice about it and, like, move on with your life? I think especially when it comes to fitness and working out and dietary changes, like, our brains and our bodies don't know what a streak is. Like, it's not, we're not trying to, you know, this is not rocket science here. We're trying to eat slightly healthier. We're trying to get ourselves to move a little bit more. We're trying to write a book or whatever it is.

Like, if we miss a day, that one day is not the problem. It's when we let all of this shame and guilt and judgment. derail us completely and let that one missed day become a week or a month or a year. So like before that doom loop can even kick in and before that all or nothing mindset can crush us, like maybe it's okay that when you miss the day, you can just do it the day after that and move on with your life before before like the judgment even has a chance to set in. That's why I'm so weary of these habit tracking apps because they all are about the streaks, right? And they reward you in all sorts of ways for never missing, but they don't really give you a way to

recover if you do. Yeah, I remember I used a meditating app once for six months and then I missed a day and then I don't think I meditated for like a year after that. Yeah. Because I was like, oh, if I have to, I have to now meditate for 181 days to get my streak back to what it used to be like better than what it was. Oh, that sounds impossible now. When like the reality was if I meditate 181 days out of 180, like, still pretty good. And like the point was not the streak. The point was to sit with my breath and to slow down and to pause. It wasn't the streak.

And I think we often confuse the streak for like why we started doing it in the first place. Absolutely. I loved your shower analogy. We don't need. It's so far. We love to overcomplicate it because we don't want it to. be simple. Yes. Yes. Oh, my gosh, so much. That is literally what happened. It happened while I was at soccer practice, so I didn't get to shower. But it was okay. And that's the main thing I think from this

is you can just pick it up and do it again. It's not that everything you did previously was lost. You're not starting over from zero. Yeah, like I talk about this as well, but there's no there's no such thing as square one, right? We often think, oh, the streak is broken. I go back to square one. Or I give up on my workout routine, oh gosh, I have to go join the gym again and I'm back at square one. Like, that's not actually true. We get to stand on the shoulders of every one of our past attempts. We get to take all of that knowledge about what worked and what didn't work. And let's just use that gym for an example. You know, it's not just going to the gym, but it's like, finding the gym, joining the gym, driving to the gym, walking through the front door,

finding the courage to get changed in the locker room, finding the courage to work out in public, and maybe to do exercises that you've never done before. There are so many steps between you and exercise. So sure, you might be starting over with how much you lift or how fast you can run or walk, but you've already done so many of the other steps that you've already learned how to do. So like past you actually did amazingly and you get to bring all of that forward and stand on the shoulders of those past attempts to give yourself a different chance to try something and see what happens this next time. And like that's actually an amazing spot to be if we can get our brains out of the way long enough to let ourselves just try again. So much of Steve your stuff is just like,

it's going to be okay. Yeah. I probably should have called the book that. It's just, going to be okay. That's funny, right? I tell the story event in the epilogue. Yeah. But I have a coffee mug that said it's all for fun and it will be okay. And it broke in half on like one of my funniest, like worst days of my life. And I still, you know, and then I glued the mug back together with, you know,

using like the technique of Kinsugi, which is like highlighting the cracks in the mug. And I have this little tree planted in it in the other room. And so far it's been a year and I've kept the plants alive. So pretty proud of that. I had a meditation teacher once telling me it was a Zen monk and she said, you know, half of her job is just to tell people it's going to be okay. You know, and I thought, you know what, that's true for all of us. I was a lawyer for 30 years.

It was the same thing. Everybody is giving themselves such a hard time and I wish they wouldn't. Yeah, gosh. And it's so, again, easier said than done. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Daylight. If you run a business on a Mac, you know the chance. client emails are in one place, notes are somewhere else, projects live in another app. Getting all that stuff together so that people could make good decisions was a constant

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Sure. So my shiny new object is actually something that I've owned for a little bit, but I don't think I've talked about on this podcast. And has come in clutch this week. And that is my Anchor Soundcore Sleep A30 Sleep headphones. They're tiny little Bluetooth buds that the batteries last eight to 10 hours and they play white noise. I'm a side side. sleeper, so they're small enough that it doesn't hurt your ears when you're sleeping. And with everything that's been going on, we've had to change quite a bit around our house. My wife has one of those big recliners that like stands up to help you, you know, you get up and she has to walk around with a walker currently. And yeah, the white noise just was not cutting it. So I, I, a I busted these out and they've, they've been clutch. I like them because they,

well, number one, they're, they're perfect for what I, what I want. But also, as with most anchor stuff, they're quality,

but less expensive than the other ones that are out there. Like if you go find, you know, search for best sleep headphones, you'll find ones are like $400. And that's, you know, that's kind of ridiculous to me.

But these, uh, these have been great. I got one. this time. I'm always trying to organize and I have found a wonderful website called Toyo Steel.j P-T-O-Y-O. They make toolboxes, toyo toolboxes. And I found they have this one, this is the perfect size. If you watch the YouTube video, I'll hold it up, we'll put a picture or send a link in the notes. But these little tiny boxes made of steel with a hinged lid on

it. And you know what? Whatever buttons I have, it's pushing them. Because I bought a bunch of these boxes and I've got a bunch of stuff organized now, nicely labeled. It's a kind of thing that makes my little brain happy. And yeah, these are nice. I have the big one of those. Yeah, they have, they have a bunch of them. They have one that's like multi-layer and you open the lid and it telescopes off like an old-time fishing box. And I mean, I could I could spend money at this website, Mike, but I started with the small ones. Nice. Steve, you got a shiny new object? Yeah. So I don't have it in front of me, but also there's two things here. But a company, UG, Monk, makes these amazing little, you know, to do.

The analog cards. The analog cards. I have tried every productivity system, you know, like building out the, you know, project management software on websites and creating all these giant lists and have recently made the switch over to just like bringing these little cards with me. to the coffee shop where I write from and having an Ugmunk journal. And then I have this really fancy pen

that, like, I never thought I would be a fancy pen guy. I think it's a barren fig squire. And it's got like the little tiny, it's got like a little sword on it. And somebody gave it to me as a gift. And then I'm like, oh no, I'm ruined. I love the way that this pen writes. I can't write with anything else.

So now I have like these fancy to- do cards and this fancy pen. And it just makes me happy every time I write in my journal each morning, every time I put my to-do list on this little thing and fill in those little circles and write with this pen, like it just makes me happy. And it makes me feel like I'm getting more done than if I'm just, you know, moving cards in a project management software on my computer. I think you are on to something. Jeff Shelton's been a past guest on the show and the guy who makes Eggman. And I use the cards daily too. I just think they're such a great hack. Even if you have a huge digital system, taking two minutes to, in my case, I use pencils. So like press graphite into paper. It feels like

it gets real at that point. I love that it's limited to 10 so you don't over commit. I mean, there's just so much to like about these cards. I see you've got the ones with the punch on them. So you've got them in a binder or something, right? Yeah, they have these little metal rings at the top so you can slide them out and pop them back in, which is so novel. So yeah, it's great. Yeah, that's the travel one. He's got a travel analog that he came out with. And that is a really cool system.

Great cards. Great cards. All right, Mike, when are you reading? I just finished a book called Uncommon Sense by William Brody, which was interesting. he's a medical academic person, president of John Hopkins University, stuff like that. So lots of productivity advice, but tied to crazy medical stories.

And the uncommon sense part is basically he was frustrated with the things that people don't teach in universities and schools. So it's sort of like the things that you're not going to get taught in college that are really going to set you up for success. A little bit different, but I enjoyed it. There's some really crazy stuff in there. If you have any interest in the medical or any experience in the medical industry, the stories I'm sure will hit much differently because he talks about, you know, the people that he met when they were

developing the technology for MRI and stuff like that. And like, that's just over my head. I get the point that he's making. But if you understood that world, it probably hits a little bit different. But yeah, good book. The one on my desk is Steve's. How to Try Again. Steve, I really enjoyed it. And I'm not quite done with it yet. I guess I shouldn't admit that as we're interviewing you.

But it's really good. And I think what Steve does is he brings, his language is so good. Your wordsmithing is excellent. And I think you make a lot of complex ideas accessible to a lot of people. So I'd recommend anybody that's listening to go check this book out. Thank you. As I said, it took a little bit long. longer, well, a lot longer than expected. But I wrote the crap out of this thing as I've been

trying to say. It's like I worked really hard and went through so many iterations to make it feel like your friend, Steve, is there giving you a hug saying, hey, it's going to be okay and we're going to get through this together. So I'm glad to hear that it's, it's, that is coming through to you at David. So thank you. The best art comes from the most arduous journey. I hope that's the case for me. And I'm glad to hear that it's at least coming through a little bit. So what's your book, Steve? So I'm currently rereading Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. I think I read it first maybe a decade ago and then had some friends.

I feel like I don't know what it is, but this year specifically, like I probably knew 10 different people that were all independently rereading or reading Lonesome Dove. It's just this great historic, you know, Western epic. And I'm just going through that again. And then I'm reading Neil Schusterman's that's called Seith. it's like this dystopian, utopian book series, what happens when humans essentially conquer mortality

and what does that do to society? I ripped through the first book and now I'm just like immediately onto the next one and excited to see where the series goes. That sounds good. I might have to put that on my list. I'm guessing that it doesn't go all rosy when we get rid of mortality.

Well, it's so interesting. So they're called Scyth, because not to get too far into it, but there is a selected group of humans who's, because of the planet can only hold so many people. There is a selected group of people whose job it is to essentially call the population and they're called Sides and they have positions of honor and it's deeply philosophical as to who is called and why. And it's like fascinating. And it's, you know, it's written for, I think like a, I would say like maybe I'm, high school audience. So it's, you can, it's, it's easy to, it's easy to read. And I think within two pages, I was like, oh crap, I'm all the way in. I got to know what happens. Okay, let's go. So that's why I'm like going back and forth between that and lonesome dove.

For fiction, I just recently restarted, because I read like 20 years ago, the Neil Stevenson Quicksilver series, you know, the Baroque cycle. I don't know if you guys are Neil Stevenson fans, but man, he writes so well that those books. It's been a long time. since I read them and I think I'm going to really enjoy it the second run. Yeah, he's prolific. I've read, I've read Snow Crash. I haven't read the ones you just mentioned, but I feel like I have to get through the rest of his books because I've loved, loved, loved Snow Crash. Yeah, the Baroque cycle is the one I would recommend because it's set, it's a historical fiction. Like you, you know, you're like Loneson Dove, but it's set like 17th, 18th century. It's a lot of

science. You meet, you know, a bunch of historical figures, but he just, he makes it so entertaining. And anyway. Okay, I'm in. I don't think I'll get Mike on that one. Maybe I'll get you on that. Mike's tough. He's a tough sell on fiction.

It's true. It's true. Steve, thanks so much for coming on the show. We are the Focus Podcast. Steve, where should people go to find your book and all your stuff? Easy. The book is at How to Try Again.com. And, you know, I talked about the Museum of Failure.

Actually, I tell some, you can, if you sign it for my newsletter, you can get the first chapter about failure. And that's easy too. It's at stevecam.com. That's K-A-M-B. Excellent. We'll put that in the show notes. Like I said, where the focus podcast find is where relay.com slash focused and gang. If you haven't, you should check out DeepFocus. That's the ad for extended version of the show. You can find that as well at relay.com slash focused. Today we're going to be digging in on movie culture with Steve. Can't wait to get started. We'll see you next time.