The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 102: Steve Kamb - How To Level Up Your Life

Episode Date: February 29, 2016

Episode 102: Steve Kamb - How To Level Up Your Life Steve Kamb is a giving leader who has experienced immense success building his company.  On this episode, I was inspired to hear how Steve has progressed in multiple life categories.  I particularly enjoyed the part of our conversation where we discussed the specific ways all of us can “level up our lives.” Embracing gamification to unlock your happiness and exceed your goals was also a unique tactic that I personally will be employing. Steve Kamb is the rebel leader at NerdFitness.com.  He helps desk jockeys, nerd, and average Joes level up their lives.  And occasionally he travels the world on an “Epic Quest of Awesome.”  His goal is to inspire people to make positive changes which will help you live a better life.  He’ll educate you on how to work out properly, cook a decent meal, and consistently improve your health and well-being. He just released an incredible book titled, “Level Up Your Life:  How To Unlock Adventure and Happiness By Becoming The Hero Of Your Own Story.” Episode 102: Steve Kamb - How To Level Up Your Life Subscribe on iTunes  or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show “It Was Like Neo Finding The Matrix For The First Time…” In This Episode, You Will Learn: Taking care of yourself physically and having a voracious appetite for reading leads to sustained excellence The impact that Richard Branson has had on Steve’s life Leveling up your life… Surrounding yourself with people a level above you Embracing gamification and how it will help your life Execution ideas – How to be specific around achieving small goals Learning a new skill like playing a musical instrument The Compound Effect Making sacrifices in order to achieve what really matters – Getting rid of cable TV, Facebook, etc… World Domination Summit – Why it’s a great conference Why Scrivener is a great tool to use when writing a book Being a learning leader means being humble enough to know that you don’t know everyting  “You Must Sacrifice To Empower Your Cause Like Katniss Everdeen.” Continue Learning: Go To: NerdFitness.com   Follow Steve on Twitter: @SteveKamb Read: Level Up Your Life To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 001: How To Become A Master Connector W/ Jayson Gaignard From MasterMind Talks Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 082: Dan Pink – The Science of Motivation, Legendary Writer & Ted Talk Episode 086: Seth Godin – How To Become Indispensable & Build Your Tribe Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing Steve Kamb on the show, please don’t hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell Bio From NerdFitness.com Steve Kamb is the rebel leader at NerdFitness.com.  He helps desk jockeys, nerd, and average Joes level up their lives.  And occasionally he travels the world on an “Epic Quest of Awesome.”  His goal is to inspire people to make positive changes which will help you live a better life.  He’ll educate you on how to work out properly, cook a decent meal, and consistently improve your health and well-being. He just released an incredible book titled, “Level Up Your Life:  How To Unlock Adventure and Happiness By Becoming The Hero Of Your Own Story.”

I felt like, often describe it as Neo finding the Matrix for the first time and being like, oh, that's what this is all about. So I read the book cover to cover in a few days and started to think about what my life was and what was important to me. And up to that point, I never traveled. I was pretty risk-averse shy, again, in a job that I hated far away from my friends and completely rethought everything that I was doing and how I was doing it. And a part of the book, Tim mentions, you know, if you're going to build a business,

creating, you know, building a business around something that you're good at and a community that you're a part of. And where those two things overlap, you can kind of carve out your own little piece of the internet. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk.

Hey guys, before we get to this great conversation, I want to let you know that this episode was brought to you by Mizan and Maine. You'll probably remember from episode 64, I spoke with a CEO of Mizan-Mazen-A-Main, Kevin Lavelle, and we promised to continue that dialogue as we both progressed on our journeys. We certainly have, and we formed a partnership. And Kevin and his great companies and support and people that he works with have agreed to sponsor my podcast. But for me, I'm very picky when it comes to this.

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Hey, and welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk thrilled with tonight's featured leader. It's with the great Steve Cam. Steve is the rebel leader over at nerd fitness.com. He helps desk jockeys, nerds, and average Joe's level up their lives. He also travels the world on what he calls the epic quest of awesome. He's the author of the bestselling book called Level Up Your Life, How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story.

I found Steve to be a very thoughtful and intelligent leader. I really enjoyed this conversation. A few of the things we got into. The moment that was like Neo finding the Matrix for the first time. I think a lot of us are able to identify with this story and it's very relatable to all of our lives. And the specific steps to implement gamification to our lives to help us achieve each and every goal that we've set. And then I really dug into the book writing and publishing process that Steve went through. I thought it was fascinating to hear these stories, how long it took his specific word count per day that he,

put himself under and how he actually gamified that process as well. Really interesting. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it's Steve Cam. Steve, so excited to have you here on the Learning Leader show. So first, thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man. Absolutely. I got a quick question to get us going, and that's around sustained excellence. And you are someone who has sustained excellence over an extended period of time, and you're also, you've surrounded yourself by those types of people, which I've found as a common characteristic of people who are high achievers. And so I'm curious, when you think of those people and you think of some of the

characteristics of yourself, what are the few common characteristics that those people all seem to share? Yeah, I've noticed two in particular. One, I think, is that the highest or the most successful people that I know and that I try to emulate take care of themselves physically. And by that, I mean, they take care of their health and fitness. They eat well. They have some sort of physical goal they're working towards outside of just, you know,

their regular business. And then in addition to that, everybody I know that is really successful reads voraciously. They go through a book or two a week. They're always looking for new ideas. They're always shifting, not necessarily their opinions, but learning more about something that makes them think differently, sparks a new idea in them to try a new venture or launch a new product or make a decision they probably otherwise wouldn't have made had they not read the book that they just went through. Are there a few people specifically that come to mind when you think of sustained excellence initially? Yeah, the number one overall, I would say, for me, would be Richard Branson.

I think actually it was his quote when somebody asked him, you know, you started hundreds of companies and been really successful and so on and so forth. And what's one piece of advice you have for everybody else and who people are trying to kind of emulate or be like you? And he said, work out. And I thought that was just so poignant and interesting to me as a guy that runs a health and fitness company. I've really noticed some parallels in the past two and a half years really where I put a tremendous

focus on my personal health and wellness and unsurprisingly, that's kind of overlapped with, I think, a much faster growth or a much accelerated curve or growth curve for my business as well. I think those two things are certainly related. Richard Branson, I love just his message and the things that he talks about, his books, as well as following what he regularly updates writing. and I love that he's pretty transparent too with everything that's going on and sharing. I think a lot of people could learn from the way he approaches his life in general.

So that's a great one to bring up. Yeah, his book, Losing My Virginity, like was a complete paradigm shift for me in what I wanted to build and the impact I wanted to make. So I had done the whole solopreneur thing where like I traveled around the world and worked from my laptop and tried to minimize the amount of work I was doing and maximize the amount of fun and adventures I was having.

And then I read Branson's, book and it completely changed, I think, the path of myself and the path of my company to an extent that, you know, I'm now, I live here in New York City. I have nine employees in nine different states and really trying to turn it into something world changing because I saw Branson as a guy that could build a bunch of companies that impacted a lot of lives and had a net positive effect on the planet, but he also still managed to do a lot of really fun stuff and challenge himself physically and from an adventurous standpoint. He's a guy that seems to have both things and a really level head on his shoulders. And I thought, man, if he can do it, then maybe I can too. So it's been a

fun and challenging and interesting few years going from solopreneur to now, I guess, business owner, leader, CEO. I hate using the term CEO because I still feel like a nerd that sits around in my underwear writing articles. But it's kind of fun, too, to work with other people that are as excited about the business that we're trying to build as I am. So speaking of that, you're the rebel leader at nerd fitness and you help a varying degree of people all over the world. And sometimes you do some crazy things that you deem the epic quest of awesome. Talk me more about your story and how you briefly mentioned it there about doing this

solopreneur thing, working from your laptop, traveling the world to now as you've it seems to have scaled a little bit and of trying to grow something bigger that potentially could even outlast you. So I'd love to hear your origin story when it comes to what it was like at the beginnings to what it's like up to this day. Sure. I just love the term origin story, by the way. Also, as a nerd that loves comic books and video games and movies and books and things

like that, just the best stories are always the origin stories. So for me, it started in, let's say this was. 2006 or 2007, I graduated college with a degree in economics, and my favorite classes in college were entrepreneurship. But when I thought of entrepreneurs back then, it was come up with an idea and go raise a bunch of money from venture capitalists, give away most of the company, and then hope the company takes off and does well. So that wasn't even a thought in my mind. I got a job instead in sales and worked for a construction equipment. company selling and renting equipment. And very quickly learned that, one, I was terrible at sales

and two, I was horribly mismatched, and horribly mismatched both for the job and the industry that I was in. And it was miserable. I spent a good year and a half working for them, counting down the minutes every day until the day was over so I could go home and play more video games, or counting down the days until I can get to a weekend and hang out with my brother and have enough beers to forget the terrible week I just had or not be too anxious about the week I was about to have. And it got to a point, it was like, man, there's no way I'm going to do this for another 40 years. This is, this is terrible. And on a particularly miserable day, I walked into a bookstore and on my lunch break, and it was right around the time, I think that Tim Ferriss's for our work week came

out. And I'm sure like many listeners here picked it up, read the first few pages and was instantly hooked and said, man, there's, I didn't realize there was this other world out there. I felt like, I often describe it as Neo finding the Matrix for the first time and being like, oh, that's what this is all about. So I read the book cover to cover in a few days and started to think about what my life was and what was important to me. And up to that point, I never traveled. I was pretty risk-averse shy, again, in a job that I hated far away from my friends and completely, completely. completely rethought everything that I was doing and how I was doing it. And a part of the book, Tim mentions, you know, if you're going to build a business,

creating, you know, building a business around something that you're good at and a community that you're a part of. And where those two things overlap, you can kind of carve out your own little piece of the internet. And for me, somebody that played a lot of video games, had built my own computer, was reading Harry Potter in between job site trips. I consider myself proudly to be a nerd. and I also really enjoyed being healthy and fit on the side and helping others do the same thing.

So I figured like, why don't I, maybe I can help people like me that are brand new to health and fitness and looking to get kind of no BS information. Maybe I can build something around that. So I Googled nerd and fitness and nothing popped up. So I purchased nerdfitness.com and after another year and a half or so of, actually, I'm quitting the, that, quitting the construction equipment job, again, which made me really miserable. I moved to Atlanta, got a much better job doing some marketing for a company that promoted floating music festivals, which was pretty cool. And while working for them, after getting a personal trainer certification, I finally

started, you know, had the confidence built up to start writing articles at nerdfitness.com about the nerdy things that I loved and health and fitness advice and things like that. And by day, I was marketing assistant for a company that created literally floating music festivals, cruise ships with 2,000 people, 30 bands, five stages, and one hell of a party. And by night, I was writing articles, connecting with readers all over the world, and just doing everything I could to help more people like me live a healthier, happier, more adventurous life. And that was really kind of the birth of the origin of nerd fitness, which now it's been, geez, seven years.

seven and a half years almost, pretty crazy. That is pretty crazy. Seven and a half years from where you've come from to where you are now, which then ultimately has led up to most recently a book titled, to Level Up Your Life. And I like that term as well, mentioning terms that we like. I've spoken with a number of different, well, over a hundred of them now, great leaders and a lot of them, another one of the common characteristics I've found

in these great leaders who I've had in my podcast is they're always seeking that next level, whether it's the people they surround themselves with or the challenge that they're working towards accomplishing is they're seeking out ways to level up. Jason Gaynor had a great entrepreneur, head of Mastermind Talks. I'm excited to go to his event this year in Ohio, and he always talks about not being the smartest person in the room, about finding and getting into rooms that people are above your level, smarter than you, better than you, maybe more accomplished so that you can help. level up your life.

And this is what your book is titled. It's what you're all about. So talk to me about, let's hear things why you decided the guy who runs nerdfitness.com writes a book that is not called nerd fitness, but called Level Up Your Life and the fact that how they go hand-at-hand as well. Sure. Everybody told me I was crazy when I told them I was going to write a book and it wasn't going to be called Nerd Fitness.

I'm like, what is wrong with you? Just write a book called Nerd Fitness and put workouts and diet in it. And it writes itself. and then you'll be a published author. And I was like, that don't, that doesn't sound exciting to me. I've published 750 articles at Nerd Fitness about pushups and eating healthier and living better and so on and so forth. And I wanted to write something that challenged me that excited me that was different. And the tagline since day one of Nerd Fitness has been Level Up Your Life.

So I thought that was a more applicable book title and a more exciting book that I wanted to write. You mentioned a few things there, specifically one surrounding yourself. with people that make you better and not being the smartest person in the room. Six months ago, actually maybe not six, yeah, really, I guess at this point it was six months ago, I decided to relocate to New York City specifically for that reason because I wanted to surround myself with other people doing big things and just be in closer proximity to them, just understanding kind of the serendipity that comes with choice or chance meetings with people that happen to be passing through New York City or hear researching their own book deals

and so on and so forth. So I recently moved to New York City. I'm currently sitting here at my dining room table, looking at the Empire State building out my window, to remind me, I guess, from an environmental standpoint as well, to think bigger and remind myself why I'm here and why I'm doing the things that I'm doing. So anyways, this book is called Level Up Your Life,

and very much like Nerd Fitness is a health and fitness site for people that probably weren't out looking for health and fitness. this book, I think, is a personal development book for people that probably are not looking for personal development or don't know that they could use some personal development. It's ultimately a book that helps you prioritize the things that are important to you, how to live a more adventurous life, do the things that you've always wanted to do, but said you didn't have time for. But it's all done through the lens of looking at life like an adventure or looking at life

like you're the character in a game or a movie, and applying behavioral psychology and game mechanics to get you to do those things, be it travel, learning language, learning a musical instrument, running your first 5K or marathon, becoming a chef, taking dance classes, whatever it may be.

I'm hoping, and as I was writing this book, I'm hoping it's the book that somebody stumbles into a bookstore, very similar like I did eight years ago and found Tim Ferriss's Four Our Work Week, I hope they stumble across this on Amazon.com or walk into a Barnes & Noble and see it, pick it up, and it helps them kind of rethink and reframe what's important to them, and then they can apply the things throughout the book to get themselves to actually do those things. You mentioned gamifying your life in Chapter 7 of the book, Embrace Gameification to Unlock Happiness.

I'd love to hear, let's dive into that specific part of the book a little deeper. Sure. Well, as somebody that was raised on a Nintendo and then Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and spent far too many... Like Duck Hunt and Mario Brothers, Zelda, right? Yep. Duck Hunt, Mario Brothers. We're like the same age, so I think we did the same thing. Yeah, oh, yeah, Final Fantasy, and that eventually was Golden Eye and, you know, Super Mario 64, Legend of Zelda, Occurine of Time.

All these fantastic games, I escaped pretty consistently more and more into them as life became more and more dull. and when I had this kind of lifestyle change, I thought, like, man, if I'm getting hooked in these games, like, what is it about them? You know, and I really wanted to dig in from that kind of psychology perspective or from my brain's perspective, what is it that keeps me addicted to these games? And how can I get myself addicted to improving myself as a person? And I think that the most important lesson I stumbled across, and the thing that resonated the most of me is this concept of the progress principle. It's this idea that we as humans love to see tiny winds and small incremental improvements and it releases this chemical called dopamine in our brains, which makes us happy. And as a result of that, we then chase this happiness.

In a video game, it's simple. It's like, oh, if you're level one and you kill enough spiders, then you get to level two. And at level two, you get a new sword. And the sword lets you kill rats. And then you get to go to level three. And eventually, you slowly but surely work your way up, level by level, bad guy by bad guy, until you're slaying dragons. It's like, man, your brain is just going haywire

throughout this whole experience saying more, more, more, which is why people spend and ruin their lives playing things like World of Warcraft or Fallout or Skyrim or whatever it may be. So I thought, why don't we apply this progress principle to our lives? Literally turned my life into a video game. I thought of things I wanted to do, challenges I had, experiences I wanted to have,

places I wanted to go, and assigned experience point values to them. And when I started crossing those smaller goals off of my list, my experience bar filled up and I leveled myself up as a person. So I really dug into what makes a game great and why we love to play them and reverse-engineered my life using those same mechanics to get me addicted to and releasing dopamine in a similar way to improving myself as a person from pretty much every aspect. Wow.

So talk from a practicality standpoint of implementing this right now because I've mentioned this before, but I think as humans, as great learners, as people who take time to read books and listen to great podcasts like this one, I think people are, successful people are good at that, but even some of the successful ones struggle within the implementation of the ideas and the things that they read. It's great to learn, but it's even better to implement and execute. So what are some practical tips for people to use to actually execute on some of the ideas that they learn from your book or from anything that you've written? Yeah, I think the most important thing that I found for me was be specific. Everybody on January 1st wakes up, they're like, I'm going to exercise more and I'd love to travel and I'd love to do this and that. And everything they come up with is very vague and there's no way to quantify it or come up with, ways to be very specific, AKA, were you able to do this in this amount of time or not? So, you know, I've broken, found ways to break down my goals into as small of an increment

as possible in order to get me to take action. There's a whole chapter in the book called Tale of the Underpants Gnomes, which sounds absurd. And as I start to explain it to you, you will definitely agree with me that it's absurd, but I promise it makes sense. So from the show South Park, there's these small characters called Underpants Gnomes that sneak into their characters in the show sneak into their rooms and steal their underwear every night

so these kids stay awake and they catch these underpants gnomes stealing their underwear and they go down into the underpants gnomes layer and they say to these guys like what are you doing why are you stealing everybody's underwear

in this town this is ridiculous and the gnomes say like it's all part of our business plan this is just phase one phase one is collect underpants and they're like okay well like how is that a business

that doesn't make any sense They're like, well, phase three is profit, but nobody, none of them have any idea what phase two is, so they consult their business plan. And it's literally a three-step process. Step one is collect underpants. Step two is a giant question mark, and step three is profit. Because nobody has any idea what phase two is they just continue to collect more and more underpants. So I've equated this to what most people do. They read another book.

They watch another YouTube video. They listen to another podcast. They watch a TED talk. They're essentially collecting more and more underpants. And at the end of the day, all you do is sit around gathering and collecting more information, but you don't move on to step two, which is action, actually applying those things in learning and failing and trying and doing and adapting and so on and so forth. You're never actually going to get to that phase three, aka profit, aka the life that you're

trying to live. So I really encourage a lot of people, and especially in, I think, the nerd community, we're far more likely to just sit around and say, oh, that must be nice or, ooh, that's a good idea. and, ooh, I should try to do that. But without taking action, you're just collecting a giant pile of underpants. So to get people to take action, what I do is encourage people to pick a goal. It can be a place you want to go, a skill you want to learn, but get very specific with it. So instead of travel more, it's in February of 2017, I will go to Machu Picchu.

or by the end of December, I will play this particular song on this particular instrument that I'm trying to learn. And once you pick whatever that particular goal is, you can kind of reverse engineer what that looks like on a day-to-day basis. So, for example, while writing this book, I wanted to prove the concept worked. So I actually learned to play the fiddle while writing the book by breaking that down into bite-size goals. So it was I had to practice for 10 minutes per day.

and I had very specific songs that I was working on and learning. I'm still not very good at it, but because I gave myself this task, I was like, okay, you need to play violin 10 minutes per day. That's a manageable amount of time. Yes, you can check a box at the end of the day or show that complete the quest or mission that you've tasked yourself with at the end of the day

and put enough days like that together and it will allow you to complete this quest and actually level yourself up. So it's taking a goal, getting very specific with it, breaking it down into incremental levels, very much like a video game, and then tasking yourself on a daily basis to actually start taking steps and making that thing a true priority, hopefully the first thing that you do every day. Makes me think of Darren Hardy's compound effect.

Brick by brick, every single day, your actions will compound upon one another by focusing on the little specific measurable steps that you take. Absolutely. And I think most of people don't really, you know, they set these. grandiose goals and they're like, well, there's no way I could pull that off. So I think instead, for many, I have honestly found a lot more success in micromanaging my day-to-day basis. So it's like, I don't worry about how much, you know, if I'm trying to get healthier and stronger, I don't worry about what that looks like three years from now. I just know if I go to the gym today and lift

a little bit more than I did last time and then eat to fuel the workout that I just did. if I do that consistently, I'll be better. And for the violin, you know, screeching out my first few notes in that first day compared to where I wanted to be seemed like the width of the Grand Canyon. So I just told myself, just play for 10 minutes a day. And that's all you have to do. And don't worry about where else you need to go. Just worry about the things that you have to do today. And as you said, you know, there is a compound effect if you get, you know, 1% better every day or every few days, whatever it may be.

over time, that 1% on a regular basis certainly compounds and can create massive changes over, if you can do it consistently over a certain amount of time. It also, not to just keep, but it does remind me of the conversation I had with a great Allison Levine, Allison's climbed Mount Everest, and when it got really tough, she kept saying that her only focus was taking the next step, take the next step. Take one more step. Take one more step. And every time she's able to take one step,

she just told herself to take one more and one more and one more. And think about how tough it is to climb something like Mount Everest and the danger there. And that was her, if you want to simplify things, that was her focus to go further and further and further was to not focus on climbing the mountain. It was the focus on literally taking one step at a time. And I think a lot of what you're talking about applies to, to what she did and why you guys have both been able to have a lot of success is having that type of sole focus.

Yeah, in nerd terms, it's that one does not simply walk into Mordor from Lord of the Rings. That's exactly how Frodo got there. It was one more step, one more step. And eventually he ended up getting where he needed to go and save the world. But had he initially thought, God, I have to do all these other things. It's really overwhelming. So one more step, and that's exactly how you get there.

And then there are sacrifices you need to make. So you talk about making sacrifices that empower your cause like Katness Everdeen, a character a lot of us are probably big fans of. What about that aspect of this journey is the sacrifices that will empower your cause? Yeah, I love that. I wanted to, you know, I'm a big fan of Susan Collins in the Hugging Games and Katniss as a character. and a big part of why Katniss was so, I think, powerful and so inspiring for many people is that she volunteered as tribute to, you know, she kind of sacrificed herself or sacrificed her

present self to save her sister. And it put and caused this, you know, very dramatic, eventual overthrow of a regime that all started simply because she set out to do something great for somebody else. And I think for anybody that is looking to build a business or do the things that are important to them, you're not going to be able to live the life that you're currently living. You know, I guess what's the phrase? It's something like, if what you're doing was working, you'd already be where you always

wanted to go. Or however, that's, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. There you go. Boom. So I think for somebody that's like, oh, I'd love to build a business and I got to do this and that and blah, blah, blah. But I can't for this reason, this reason.

And this reason, it's like, well, I have a mortgage. and I have this car payment, I have this so-and-so, and I have this other obligations. I think you have to look and truly dig into what's important to you. And if this cause that you're working towards is truly important, you'll find a way to sacrifice those seemingly unsacrificeable things to get it done. For example, I love to play music and I spend a lot of time doing it. I had a book to write, and I found myself watching more and more television and playing more and more video games.

So I unplugged the PlayStation, canceled my cable, and literally didn't turn my TV on for about six months. And I think so many people kind of accept as gospel, or except as just a universal truth, like, of course I have a TV, and of course I watch blah, blah, blah, and there's no way I could go without missing this show,

or I need to be up to date on the news, or I couldn't possibly get out of this relationship, even though it's not great for me, or, yes, I love my house and this car and whatever. But if there's something you're truly fired up about and something that you know it's going to be the work that you're looking to spend the rest of your life on, you might need to reevaluate a lot of those things. I lived very cheaply. I crashed on couches. I picked up odd jobs. I pretty much stopped going out and stopped spending money on anything outside the most important for me. I wore the same clothes for a few years while traveling just because that wasn't important to me. What was important is spending money on experiences and building a business and so on and so forth.

So I think for anybody that is trying to accomplish something, they have to sacrifice those, I guess, sacred cows for them. It might be, again, a friendship that has long gone beyond its importance and is no longer making you happy and is now just an obligation. It might be a relationship you're in where somebody doesn't support your goal to become healthier and happier. You might need to sacrifice that. You might be in a crappy job that you just go to and you live in this big house that you don't need. And you have to, you might have to downsize your apartment and sell your car or move to a much cheaper location so that you can become cash flow positive on this new business or move to a job that you're actually happy with. I think sacrifices, you know, I saw it personally. like if I have to sacrifice these things that I enjoy for the next five years,

but it allows me to build a life that I'm really excited about, I still have the rest of my life to enjoy them. So fortunately, nerd fitness and this life I wanted to build came together faster than five years, but I was prepared to 5, 10, whatever it took in the grand scheme of things, it's a drop in the bucket compared to waking up everyday happy. I think on Nerd Fitness we say, you want to wake up excited about what you're about to do

and go to bed proud about what you've done. and if you have to sacrifice certain things to pull that off, then that's what needs to happen. What was it like not having the cable? The only reason I bring this up, and this is a selfish question, is I've considered testing it out like a month without ever turning on a TV in my house. And I, prior to starting this podcast, I actually watched quite a bit of TV too much. And since doing it, I spend more time preparing and doing it. But I still watch TV. And our daughters, my wife and I and our daughters watch TV at night before bed, things like that.

what is that like? And what do you think it would be like to test it out? Because I almost, if I do this, I want to do it with maybe a little bit of a community to say, we're going to test it out for, I don't know, a month or something like that, that we literally aren't even going to turn the TV on. How do you think that affects your life? Because I was just listening to Seth Godin talk about the fact that he doesn't watch TV. And that's probably why he's able to write so much.

So I'm curious from your perspective, a guy who made some sacrifices in order to get this important work done. What do you think of that? Yeah, so I haven't had cable for, I don't know, three years now, I guess, maybe. I do still play the occasional video game and I do have a TV. I have Netflix that, you know, I'll once every three months or so pick a show and just, you know, gorge myself on it for a weekend and hate myself afterwards and get it out of my system. Very recently, you know, making a murderer. I think I did it in about two days. And I was afterwards, I was like, I got to get out of here. But I got it out of my system in those two days and then quickly went back to living

the rest of my life. What's funny is I was so hooked on a game called EverQuest, actually. I had purchased nerdfitness.com and had consistently told myself I didn't have time to work on it when in reality I was spending 30 hours a week in addition to the day job playing EverQuest. And it wasn't until my computer literally exploded on me. Like the motherboard fried and the fans burned out and I couldn't afford to fix it that I told myself, I had to use the cheap work laptop I had to build nerd fitness into a business before I could play another video game. And yeah, for about two to three days, I was like, what am I

missing? And what's happening in EverQuest and what are my friends doing and blah, blah, blah. And then as soon as like the, kind of like that sirens call wore off on me, it's like, oh, I'm totally fine. And like, canceling cable's like, oh, what about this show and this show and how will I watch sports and so on and forth. And then I realized, like, after a few days, like, oh, I don't really miss it. And I can still go to a bar and watch football on Sundays if I so choose, but I don't miss it. And other video games, same thing. I thought I would miss it so much so. And then I realized after a few days that, like, life goes on. And I'm now less angry because I'm spending less time watching my favorite teams lose in sports and, you know, whatever it may be.

It's like, oh, this is just, this is way better. Now I'm now reading more and doing more of the things that I've always wanted to do. So I totally think, I love the idea of trying it for a month and being creative with it. But I don't know. I literally haven't had cable for three years. So like people look at me strange when they ask about a show. I'm like, I don't have, I don't have. They're like, what is wrong with you?

You know, it's like they look at you with like you have seven heads. Like you just told them that, you know, you wear shoes on your hands and you do something crazy. And they're like, it's just so ingrained in our society that when you do things slightly differently, people call you crazy and understand like that's probably why I'm, potentially a part of the reason why where I am and why they are where they are. Yeah. I think it's a little bit scary for me and it's certainly out of my comfort zone and that's why I'm...

That's why you got to do it. That's why I want to do it. And that's why I think it would be good for my family as well. And I'm just got to pick the right time and then do it. And I think it could have lasting effects to maybe potentially be just the way it is. And even implementing little things like we just have like family reading night where you actually get a hardbound book. Don't read on a Kindle or an iPad, even though I'm a big Kindle reader. and get a book and a highlighter and all of us sit down and read together,

even if it's just 15 or 20 minutes a night. My wife came up with that and we implemented that and it's made a big difference and you go around the room and each person talks about, you know, what do they learn in that 15, 20 minutes worth of reading something they picked up. So when you know that you're going to have to do this little mini presentation, even if it's just for your family, you pay better attention to what you're reading and you really focus because I'm thinking the entire time, okay, I want to present something good.

I was just reading good to great. You know, my Jim Collins, a classic rereading that one the other night. And I'm thinking, okay, what part of this am I going to present even to my family? And it actually develops more skills than you would think. I mean, one, it's great to sit down and read with your family, even if you're just sitting in a room quietly. And two, it makes you think as far as from a presentation perspective, because I'm sure you're in the same boat where people are asking you to give talks and you want to go around and do that. These little things can help, you know, they compound on one another. that can help you become better in the public speaking arena too.

Is that something that you're really getting into now as well as is going around and giving talks? You know, I'd consider it. I wanted to quickly, I had two other thoughts that you, as you popped up, but I don't check Facebook. Really? I have a program. Well, you know, I have to go on Facebook occasionally for work, for Nerd Fitness to check in on the Nerd Fitness community page or different groups that we have for different products and things. But I've installed plugins on every browser that I have that disables the Facebook wall, the news feed on Facebook. So I sign into Facebook and all I see is a blank page.

So I have no idea how my friends' kids are doing or how their dogs are doing or what they're sharing from BuzzFeed. And my life is still okay. I don't have Facebook on my phone. I have every notification turned off. And it's funny how addicted we've all come to our phones. I think next time you're standing in line at Chipotle or a restaurant to get your food, just look at everybody in front of you. And I guarantee 95% of them will have their heads buried in their phones, mindlessly scrolling

through Instagram, cat photos, stupid motivational quotes that don't actually help anyone. It's like brain junk food. And I've tried to eliminate most of that stuff for my life as much as possible. So people are like, oh, did you see this? I was like, no, I don't know what's happening in my random high school friends. that I haven't seen in a decade's life. And sure enough, the rest of my life goes on and things are okay. So I think it's another one that people should consider is get rid of Facebook.

I don't even delete your account, but stop, you know, you sign into Facebook to check one thing. And you realize you spent half an hour scrolling through your news feed and your life is no different as a result of that. Or now you're lost in BuzzFeed, YouTube hell, and you can't get out of it. Well, it's worse. Yeah, it's worse. It's amazing. It's amazing how much we spend time on that useless crap. and then we say, I don't have time for anything. So I've eliminated all of that stuff from my life, from my phone, no notifications, no push

notifications, anything that I don't need is uninstalled. I've other programs installed to block certain websites from me, so I don't have to use my own willpower to make it happen because if it was up to me, I would spend all day checking that stuff. Like I don't have that gene that says, no, you can stop. So I just don't give myself the opportunity. Interesting. I think that's definitely helpful.

I read a great piece on Thought Catalog, Ryan Holiday talked about some of those things he does as well. And he's a previous guest on the show. And so actually the guy who introduced us. So I'm very appreciative of Ryan. But I wanted to transition a little bit here for a few minutes talking around the book publishing aspect of it. I know Rodale published your book, Level Up Your Life. And I've also emailed with Lewis Howles, and he's publicly spoken about that that's who published his book. and I'm curious about just the process it was from you creating whether you had a proposal

or just what it was like from the beginning of, okay, I think I'm going to write a book to then saying, how do I pick an agent or a publisher and then how it actually gets published as well as your launch strategy? I know that's kind of a long-winded question, but I'm fascinated by this aspect of it, maybe because, you know, I'm going to probably be in that world here at some point in the near future. and so I love to learn about that from people who have done, especially you who've, who's, you know, you're in the midst of, you know, post-launch, but you're still in the midst of it happening. Sure.

The journey really started for me, I want to say probably four and a half years ago. I attended a conference by a gentleman named Chris Gillibow, who was a mentor and kind of hero of mine. He's awesome, yeah. He runs a website, chrisgillabot.com, has written a handful of New York Times bestselling books, and he runs a conference called the World Domination Summit that takes place every summer. And I had just finished traveling around the world

and was building Nerd Fitness, and he and I had a conversation. I said, hey, I'm interested in sharing this and this and this. And he said, you need to have a conversation with this guy. And he introduced me to his book agent. And the guy's like, oh, tell me your story and what are you working on and so on and so forth. And I told him the idea for or told him about Nerd Fitness.

And he's like, hey, man, like, you know, if you're ever interested in writing a book, like, let's have a conversation. And again, at that time, I wasn't interested in writing a nerd fitness book. I didn't know what my angle was, so I wasn't ready for it. And every year I'd return to that conference, and every year I'd have a new conversation with David, and he'd say, how are things going? And I'd say, good, man.

Still not ready to write it. He's like, right, well, I'm, let me know how else I can help, but I'm here for you when you are ready. You know, I talk to Chris, and he was Chris's agent, and Chris is a guy I respected in Meyer, and therefore, by proxy, David was a guy that I knew I could trust and respect And now at this point, probably three years ago, or maybe two and a half years ago, I attended this conference and I finally said, David, I know what the book is, I want to write. And it's going to be this book called Level Up Your Life where I kind of study the hero's journey

and apply behavioral psychology and game mechanics to helping people live a better life. And he's like, that sounds like a great idea. So he and I went back and forth together on crafting a proposal. He actually has a, I think him and Chris have a course together at Chris Gillibow.com. or unconventional guides.com called like the guide to publishing a book. And it's co-written by David and Chris. And it kind of teaches you how to write a book proposal and what's important to publishers and so on and so forth. So I worked with David for four to five months or so, emailing back and forth, crafting this proposal,

really honing in what the message was for the book and getting specific with it. And then he started shopping it around to publishers. And a majority of them said pass. But there were two or three of, I think it was three of them. that were very interested in the idea. So it actually ended up going to what they call an auction. This is kind of cool. I was volunteering.

When I lived in Nashville, again, just moved here to New York City. But when I lived in Nashville, I volunteered at the local children's hospital down there every Thursday. And it was kind of a cool moment for me to be volunteering at the hospital and consistently receiving text messages from David. That was the day that the book went to auction, where all three publishers had an opportunity to make a bid. and then he would go back to the lowest bid and say, here's the new offer, what do you say? And the three publishers kind of jockeyed for a position. And then it got to the point where it was down to two publishers. And then Rodale ended up coming in with an offer that I was really excited about.

And they seemed like a company that was really eager to work with me. And even though it wasn't a health and fitness book, I know their kind of strength in the health and fitness industry just made a lot of sense for me. So I ended up signing a book deal with Rodale. and it's kind of like I imagine, like signing a record deal where you receive a book advance that is broken into a few different payments and they give you a certain amount of time to write the book. And I think I signed the deal in June, maybe May of 2014. Yeah, May of 2014.

So they gave me eight or nine months to write the book and then it was another eight or nine months back and forth at them to get everything worked out. And then the book came out this past January, so January 2016. And it was funny. When I wrote it, I think two months after I had signed the deal, I don't think I had written a single word in the book. I was so afraid to start and so overwhelmed with the idea of having to write something that I was really proud of.

And as a result of that, I consistently told myself, I'll wait until I get other things lined up and I'm still behind on the rest of my work and so on and so forth. So very much like learning to play the violin 10 minutes a day, I had to change. my environment and change my kind of day-to-day philosophy. So I started getting up early. I had every website blocked on my computer, and I used a program called Scrivener that allows you to have a word count. It's like a word counter.

So in the gamer in me saw this and like a light bulb went off. I'm like, oh, man, this is great. So it was like, okay, well, if the book needs to be between 60 and 70,000 words, I'm going to shoot to write 80,000 because then it's a lot easier to edit and trim than it is to have to write more. So it's like, okay, if I'm going to write 80,000 words and it's due on February, whatever eight months or six months from now, that means I need to write 467 words per day, four days a week or five days a week. So every morning I woke up and even when I didn't want to write, even when I was tired, even if I was hungover, even if I was busy, even if I had something

else to do, the first thing I did every morning was work on my book. And as I wrote words, even if my words were like, I don't want to write today and this is stupid and whatever, I had to write that number of words. And as I wrote them, the little experience bar fills up through Scrivener. And when you write your 467th word or whatever your target date or target goal is for the day, it gives you this really satisfying ding noise through your computer. And like I became addicted, almost like Pavlov's dog, to waiting and wanting to hear that noise every morning because I knew that I hit.

my goal. And nearly every morning, I'd wake up and not want to write and I'd sit down and start writing. And about 100 words in, I'd find my groove, some new idea would jump in and spark it. And sure enough, after not writing anything in two months, four months later, I had like 105,000 words written or something, almost enough for two books. Wow. And then from there, actually enlisted the help of a friend of mine who was a book editor outside of the editor that Rodale was going to give me and I said, hey, I have 105,000 words. I need 60,000 of the best ones out of this. Can you help me? And his name's Matt Gartland. He runs a website called Winning Edits. He does a lot of work with Pat Flynn, a friend of mine, and author of the recently released book, Let It Fly, or Will It Fly,

excuse me, just a great guy, but I worked with Matt, and he really helped me kind of carve the statue out of the 105,000 words of marble that I had written. And the book ultimately remained largely unchanged after working with Matt and then it went to Rodale and they published and they had an editor my editor Mark Weinstein who was just awesome really great guy and and really understood my voice and language and made me a better writer and over the next few months I just consistently crafted and worked on it and improved it and so on and so forth and then it came out in like I said January so it came out just a you know six weeks ago or whatever it is now five weeks ago and I couldn't have been more happy with how the book itself turned out.

I did a handful of as many podcasts similar to this one. You know, podcasts and guest posts, and we did an adventurous book tour. You know, the whole book's about adventure. So we did parkour in L.A. and swing dancing in Chicago and rock climbing with a rock band playing in Atlanta and Ninja Warrior training in New York. The publisher said, we don't necessarily believe in book tours anymore. So I said, that's fine. I'll do it myself.

And then they said, okay, do you want to sign? books in bookstores. And I said, not particularly. We're going to do this instead. And I'm like, oh, that sounds even better. So let's do that. So ultimately, I took it into my own hands and have been to do everything I can to promote it and share it and spread the word and then do some really fun events that allowed me to connect with readers throughout the nation. It's been really fun. Cool picture on the cover and well, as well as the way that's formatted and like the illustrations. Was that your idea? Was that the publishers? How did that come about? Yeah. So the publisher actually had a book cover that they were relatively satisfied with, and I let them know that I was like,

man, I just, I'm so proud of everything in this book, and I want the outside of the cover to reflect that as well. So, fortunately, they were very receptive and said, we want you to be proud of it too. So I reached out to, I bet you it was Ryan Holiday and said, hey, I'm, I'm interested in getting a third party to create this book cover, and he introduced me to the person that did his covers, and it's Aaron Tyler. And she presented. presented, fortunately Rodale was very receptive to it and said, hey, we're interested. And Aaron put together four to six kind of quick mock-ups of different covers. And the cover that looks, that the book looks like now is very similar to this, except it just had the nerd fitness logo on. It's,

the cover is of a guy kind of doing the Superman pose, spreading his shirt open and under that, on his shirt, it says, level up your life. So I said, hey, I love the idea of the Superman doing that pose. It's a big part of what I do at Nerd Fitness. And, you know, have had many photos taken like that with a nerd fitness shirt on. Can we put the name of the book there? And when she did that and shared the cover with us, I was like, this is it. And what's funny is I looked at this cover for a good four months and never once did it occur to me to hold it up in front of me as if it was the book.

And it wasn't until Pat Flynn held up the book on his, he did a periscope. He's like, oh, if I hold it up at this angle, it looks like I'm the guy on the cover and and it's my chin and blah, blah, blah. And as soon as he did it, he's like, okay, somebody take a screenshot of this. and send it to Steve Cam on Twitter. And all of a sudden, I had no idea what's going on. My Twitter feed just started exploding with people sending the screenshot of Pat. And as soon as I just burst out laughing, I'm like, I'm supposed to be the creative guy.

And I helped come up with the idea for this cover. How the hell did I never think of this? So now people have been sending photos of them, holding the book up in that pose, holding it in front of their kids, doing the pose, babies, dogs, cats, just random. It's so funny. I'm like, I can't believe I didn't think of that. So, Pat, thank you very much for coming up with the idea. It's so freaking funny.

But, yeah, I'm really proud how it turned out and a pretty cool idea. And I'm glad that that's the thing that people have kind of jumped and latched on to. That's pretty cool. Pat was guest, what, episode seven, I believe I have to go check. But, man, he's been on a while ago. And I love Pat. He's such a giver, man. Just a really good thing.

I don't know how he does all that he does. It's amazing. I know. It's incredible. He's got the best home office I've ever seen, by the way, too. If you went to search Pat Flynn's home office, that's insane. It's on a side note. But, Steve, this is great.

I loved hearing that story about your book and how it all got done. I'd actually love to talk to you even more about that process offline because this is really, I'm just fascinated by that process as well. And a big fan of you and your work and your book. I got one more question before we take off here, and that's around. You know, I mentioned before we started recording the whole purpose behind my show is the fact that I love studying the art and science of leadership. all about learning, constantly getting better, leveling up, surrounding yourself with those types of people.

But I'm curious, when you hear the phrase learning leader, what's the first thing that pops into your mind? Learning leader, I would say it's somebody that's humble enough to realize that they probably don't know everything. And the more that they learn, the more they realize they don't know. And that's why I think my favorite or the people that I've found that are the most successful are just, are their sponges. All they want to do is absorb more information and talk to more people and learn from others and see what sort of bits of information they can use to make themselves a better person, a better leader, a better boss. So I don't think a leader is somebody that just blindly, blindly charges onto the battlefield, but rather somebody that is consistently humble enough to realize that they don't know everything and they can learn from anybody from the person.

that works, you know, somebody that's taken their coffee order to somebody that is a world leader and anything and everything in between and understanding that, you know, you're never, you're never not learning. I think we're all students first and foremost. And if you're, if you're going to be a great leader, then remembering that and consistently hoping and trying and doing and learning is what makes you a better person. Love it, man. Love it. Thanks again, Steve. I, where would you send everybody to find you online? Yeah, you can go to nerdfitness.com. Or you can actually, if you go to levelupyourlife.com, you can read the first chapter of the book and create. This is free, even if you don't buy the book, but you can create your own character and write your origin story and then actually create your list of quests and missions and assign experience point values to them and check them off and level your character up and level your character up your life.

So instead of having to do it on an Excel sheet or pen and paper in a book, you can actually create a character and we've automated and digitize the entire process. So level up your life.com. You can find the book in Barnes & Noble or, you know, bookstorage nationwide or on Amazon. And then I hang out on Twitter and Instagram at Steve Cam, S-E-E-V-E-K-A-M-B. Awesome. Thanks again, Steve. And like I mentioned before, I definitely want to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. This has been great.

I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to learningleadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again and we'll see you next time on the Learning Leader Show.