The One You Feed - How a Little Becomes a Lot: A Conversation with Eric Zimmer and Sahil Bloom

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

In this special episode, Eric Zimmer is interviewed by Sahil Bloom, as they discuss Eric’s new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. Their conversation explores how small, consistent actions, not dramatic moments, lead to lasting transformation. Eric shares personal stories of addiction and recovery, discusses the complexity of motivation, and introduces practical frameworks like the SPAR method. They emphasize self-compassion, resilience, and the importance of aligning actions with values, while critiquing the pressure to be extraordinary. The episode offers actionable strategies and thoughtful insights for building positive habits and embracing change with kindness. Exciting News!!!  My new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life, is out now! Key Takeaways: Behavior change and its complexities The role of motivation and willpower in personal transformation The significance of small, consistent actions leading to meaningful change The distinction between values and desires in decision-making The importance of self-compassion in the process of change Practical frameworks for behavior change, including the SPA method The impact of social media and comparison culture on self-perception Strategies for visualizing consequences to aid in decision-making The concept of “still points” for cultivating new habits of thought The balance between striving for improvement and practicing acceptance in life For full show notes:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Eric Zimmer and Sahil Bloom, check out these other episodes: Redefining Wealth: The Truth About Money & Happiness with Sahil Bloom Why Willpower Isn’t Enough: The Tiny Habits Method Explained with Dr. BJ Fogg By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠David Protein bars deliver up to 28g of protein for just 150 calories—without sacrificing taste! For a limited time, our listeners can receive this special deal: buy 4 cartons and get the 5th free when you go to www.davidprotein.com/FEED Shopify – The commerce platform that helps you build, grow, and manage your business all in one place. Start your $1/month trial at shopify.com/feed. Pebl – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at hipebl.ai Brodo Broth: Shop the best broth on the planet with Brodo.  Head to Brodo.com/TOYF for 20% off your first subscription order and use code TOYF for an additional $10 off. Alma is on a mission to simplify access to high-quality, affordable mental health care. Visit helloalma.com to learn more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Specificity, particularly in the beginning, is always our friend. What am I doing? Where am I doing it? How am I doing it? Any unknown about it? Get it out of there. Because if we're trying to figure out what to do and motivate ourselves to do it at the same time, we're in trouble. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. and yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Okay, so this is a slightly different type of episode. I am being interviewed about my book.

And as I thought about who I wanted to interview me for my book, I first thought of Chris, and then I realized he is largely incoherent, so he was out. Don't anybody get upset. Chris and I are still great friends, it's a joke. And then I thought about somebody that was on the show over the last year named Sawhill Bloom. When I talked to him, I was really struck by his clarity of thought. He's both

very rational, but also really contemplative and thinks really deeply. He's also very kind. He seemed like the perfect person to interview me about my book. And it was really fun to see the parts of the book that he chose to pull out and focus on, because they might not have been what I would have chosen. It's a great conversation back and forth, and there's a lot of things that get featured about my book that I'm hoping will be really useful to you. Here's Sawhill and I discussing how a little becomes a lot, the art of small changes for a more meaningful life. Find all of it at one you feed.net slash book. I truly and deeply appreciate any and all of you that do this. Thank you. Eric, what a pleasure to get to do this. How are you doing?

Good, Soil, thank you so much for doing it. This is really fun for me, and I appreciate you doing this. Well, it's an honor for me. So without belaboring it too much, I do want to just dive right in. And where I want to begin this conversation is with a quote from the book, which just said, when we think about life-changing events, we tend to think in the singular, the epiphany, the miracle, the watershed choice that will put us on a new trajectory for good. But that's not how real change happens for most people, most of the time. It happens little by little bit. With a thousand chances to do A or B, each choice a thread woven into the fabric of who we become. Could you speak to that? Yeah, I mean, I think the tail end of that, that each choice gets woven into the fabric of

who we become, is a metaphor that makes a lot of sense to me, or is it a simile or an analogy? I don't know. I never can keep those three straight. But because that's how our life does get. formed. It gets formed by one little thread at a time over and over and over. And so, yeah, we're thinking about big things and big moments matter in a way, but they're anything but the full story. I start the book by sharing, if you were going to film the movie of my life, that it would show me walking into a treatment center in Columbus, Ohio, in the dead of winter in 1994, as a homeless heroin addict weighing 100 pounds, yellow and jaundiced from hepatitis C, prosecutor telling me I had up to 50 years. And I went in and they said to me, we think you need to go to long-term treatment.

And I said, no, thank you. And went back to my room. It still cracks me up to think of what was that guy thinking. And in my room, I had one of those, we call moments of clarity where I saw so clearly, like if I leave here, I'm going to die or go to jail. And so I walked back out and I said to them, okay, I'll go to treatment. And in the movie, that would be the pivotal moment, right? It would get a lot of time. And it is an important moment in my story, but it is not the whole story because it would only have meaning based on the thousands of choices that I made afterwards. And so that's kind of what that section of the book is speaking to. We can have an epiphany, we can have an insight, we can have a moment where it appears that things turn. But those have to be lived into. I had,

plenty of moments before that where I said, I'm going to get sober, and I didn't because I wasn't quite ready to make those changes. And so those moments seemed significant in the moment, but they weren't because I was unable to do all the things after that kept them significant. I guess what you're speaking to, which is a really important point for all of us, is this idea that epiphanies rarely feel like epiphanies in the moment in some way. They may feel significant in some way, but an epiphany is really something that we denote with the benefit of hindsight. And in this context, this epiphany moment for you, which was extremely powerful to read right at the heart of the book, right at the beginning, this gut punch, it is very clear

that it is only an epiphany because of the millions, I would argue, of tiny actions that you have made since that have led you to this point where you are here releasing this book into the world. What about that moment, with the benefit of hindsight, acknowledging it, made it the one that you felt started this snowball or this ripple that allowed you to start taking and start threading these tiny threads that have led you to hear today? That's a question that can best be answered with some degree of speculation. It was certainly a culmination of all the little moments before that that led up to it. the times that I tried to get sober before and didn't. Those were important. I learned something. We talk a lot about a bottom in recovery, you know, hitting rock bottom. And in many ways, I was at a rock bottom,

but I've seen people continue digging far beyond any kind of bottom that makes sense. So I think, yeah, there has to be some degree of consequence. Like, there's got to be a reason to change. And at the same moment there has to be hope. It's like a mixture of despair and hope coming together at the same time. And somehow, I got that when I was there. Somewhere in their hope started to take root. And I think it was borrowed hope, certainly, for a long time, because I didn't have faith in myself, but I saw enough people saying, I was just like you, and they could talk about it. And I was like, yeah, they are just like me. and they were sober. And so I went, oh, well, maybe this is possible.

Yeah, I think that's the main piece. You know, the thing that I think is so powerful about this book in particular, and I was saying this to you before we started recording, but I think it bears repeating here, is I've read hundreds of books within this category, of self-improvement, personal improvement broadly. I obviously wrote a book in this category. The thing that I think most suffer from

that we often fail to acknowledge is they are, about efficiency at all costs, productivity at all cost, productivity maxing, right, optimizing all areas of your life. And in particular, when it comes to habit formation, behavior change, you lose something if you focus on productivity at all costs. It is possible to optimize the life out of your life. And what I felt came across so powerfully in your words and in your book and in your story and in the frameworks that you offer is this idea that the behavior change and the actions you are taking and those threads you are starting to weave together all flow alongside this pursuit of meaning, this pursuit of mattering, of significance of actually figuring out

who you want to be just as much as what you want to do along that journey. Was that intentional? Where did that come from in your own journey? journey, and why do you think that's so important? It was intentional, and it started in a program I started a number of years ago that I called spiritual habits, and the idea that I was interested in is, can we use the science of behavior change to help us become better people, you know, to not just optimize for productivity, for an exercise habit, but can we use it to change how we we think and how we relate to the world. And so that was what I tried to do. And those were my two

interests. I looked at the podcast over the years. I kept going, where are the two things I come back to? And I kept going, I keep coming back to the science of behavior change because I'm fascinated by how and why people change. And then I keep coming back to what does it mean to live a good life? What's a meaningful life? And so, yes, it was very intentional to try and thread those two together. And I do think that's one of the things, and I'm glad you're calling it out, that does differentiate the book. You know, the other area that jumped out to me was how clearly you address the struggles of like motivation or willpower when it comes to behavior change. I think that so much advice that you see in this space comes down to like, hey, you know, just grind it out,

get the thing done, you know, just push through it, you know, wake up, rise and grind, whatever it might be, right? The 4 a.m., the cold plunges, like, whatever the thing is, hey, I'm just going to grind it out. And we know if that were what it took, everyone would have six packs and be rich. It's not enough. Willpower, motivation, it fails, and it fails spectacularly and very quickly for the vast majority of people, myself included, by the way, and I consider myself to be an extraordinarily disciplined person. I recently tried to, you know, cut my phone addiction. This was a big thing that I was trying to do this year. And the first month that I tried to do it, I completely failed. And the reason was because there was a lot more to the most of the

motivation around it than met the eye. It was not so simple as to say, like, well, my motivation is there. You talk about motivational complexity. Explain that idea, what you mean by it, and sort of how we should really think about the role of motivation, the role of willpower when it comes to these changes. Yeah, I think there's a few questions embedded in that one. The first thing I'll say is, for the people that can get up and grind, go to it. This book is for the other people, right? This book is for the other people who are like, I try to make changes and maybe I do okay at it, but then I slip back. They're slightly frustrated. That's who the book is for. This question of motivational complexity, I think, is important because we are a soup of competing motivations inside of ourselves. And we need

to acknowledge that. That's part of why the parable that I used to start this show I have used for so long because it speaks to that. It speaks to like there are these competing forces within us. It would be nice if it was as simple as two of them. There's a whole bunch of them. I simplified it down for the purposes of the book, and it's an oversimplification of our inner world, but sometimes oversimplification is useful, into values and desires. Values are the things that, like, the best, wisest part of us have decided are worth wanting. Desires are the things that you just want.

They just show up. There's a whole bunch of them. I'll have 50 of them in a day that are all over the place. And so we all do that. And so the first type of thing that most of us struggle with is, I phrase it as a simple question. It's what do I want most versus what do I want now? What I want most are my values. What I want now are my desires. And not that my desires are bad because they're part of the energy that drives us. But we want to start to sort these things out. So would you recommend to someone that they actually just sit down and go through that. exercise, like, you know, get a blank sheet of paper in front of you and split it in two and just start writing down on one side. What do I want most? What is that life that I'm actually trying to create? Yeah, there's one exercise in the chapter itself and then there's a whole

bunch of exercises in the appendix which has all the chapter exercises that people can do to start to get in touch with their values and figure that out. But as you said, there's a very simple way to do it is just to start to identify like where am I trading what I want most for what I want now? And most of us will know the answer to that fairly quickly. It is such an interesting thing that knowing something and doing something about it are very different. Yes. I perceive that the most disciplined people that I know and I would put myself into this bucket a lot of times in my life, I think there's a wiring that I just have around this. Have this ability to, what I would say, is bring the after into the before. So you sort of, you know, you're sitting where you are and there might be something hard that

you have to do, but you know you feel good after doing that thing. Whether it's working out or waking up early or doing the work that you didn't want to do, whatever it might be. They have sort of like a time traveler's ability to like pull that feeling from the after into the before so that they can go and endure whatever that struggle is. Is that something that you have seen in your own pursuit and your own learning and research? Absolutely. The term we used in recovery was play the tape all the way through. The problem is we all stop at the first scene.

We stop at the scene where we know how it would feel to get high. We know what that cupcake would taste like. We know how comfortable it is sitting here on the couch, reading substack. Whatever our thing is, we see that, but that's all we tend to see. And so playing the tape through is exactly what you said. bringing the after into the before, I see what comes next, both in positive changes and negatives. So an example I use in the book is imagine your thing as you scroll to Instagram in the morning, you end up being late for work regularly.

If you're sitting there, you've got to play that through, but it's not enough to just go like, oh, I'll be late. What we have to do is see and visualize and feel that. So if you do that and you look at, oh, and then it's going to come the frantic scramble out the door with the drive where I'm angry at everybody because they're not going fast enough. And then I got to do that awkward shuffle past my boss's office. And then I'm going to all morning have that low burn of fear like, did I screw up again? Or self-criticism, like, how could you do this again? And if we can see and feel that, we're a whole lot more likely than to be able to set Instagram down, get ready for work.

And that's the trick is doing that, walking through that process. It's not the only thing that happens. I mean, part of what the book tries to address is the idea of a choice point. And there are things that we can do before the choice point to stack the deck in our favor. and then there are ways that we can examine that choice point and we can learn to re-script what we're saying and feeling to ourselves in that moment. Because if we know what we should do, for example, it's like, all right, I know I need to leave the house by 8.30 to get to work.

And 825 comes and we don't respond. It's because something was happening inside of us in that moment. I call them the six saboteurs of self-control that hung us up at that time. And the good news is we can just examine that choice point very closely. And we can learn how to change that. We don't need to do Youngian analysis on our entire life. We simply need to say, what am I thinking, feeling and saying to myself when I make the choice I wish I didn't. It reminds me of this like general process that I've heard in the past of sort of the key to all of this being make the pain of not doing the thing greater than the pain of doing it.

And so, like, when you, when I hear you speak through the, you know, you think about shuffling past your boss and think about the drive when you're angry and all these things, a lot of what that is is like, make that pain feel much more visceral. Yes. Because you know the pain of doing the thing, which is like, ah, it's going to hurt. I really want to be procrastinating and scrolling Instagram now, so I have to put it down that. I know that pain. I know what that is because it's right in front of me. Let me make the pain of not doing that thing that I should do just as bad right in front of me. Yeah, and it's hard.

I mean, researchers call it delay discounting, which essentially means. we value what's right in front of us far more than we value things in the future because the future is an imaginative exercise whereas present is very clear and so there's a whole bunch of different strategies the book covers a lot of them of how do we do that but that's the big piece of it is as you said is really trying to visualize and feel the future make it more real somehow some way every day is really important to me and it's harder than it sounds. I'm pretty confident I'll get it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but that afternoon gap is where things fall apart. I need one more good amount of protein as a snack and that's almost always a David protein bar. And when I'm

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People who find a therapist through Alma save an average of 80% on session costs. They also have a free cost estimator so you know what you'll actually pay before you begin. Getting started is often the hardest part of anything and it is definitely the hardest part of therapy, finding that therapy, and Alma can help with this. So find the right therapist for you at helloalma.com slash feed. That's hello alma, a-l-m-a-com slash feed. You speak to BJ Fogg's behavior model in the book. Could you just briefly lay that out? And then I want to sort of use that as a transition point into your SPAR method and talking through sort of your core framework around this.

Yeah. People can look it up online or it's in the book, a visual of it because it works better as a visual. But it's a graph and its axes are one is motivation vertically and the other is, effort going horizontally. And his point is that an action happens when behavior and motivation and a prompt, an ability to remember something, come together at the same time. The key insight of the chart, though, is that the harder something is to do, the more motivation you need. The easier something is to do, the less motivation you need. And we know motivation goes up and down. So what we're trying to aim at is how can we find a task that is easy enough that

will do it when we know our motivation is going to be fluctuating. So that's the core idea. You bring up an example of your own experience with meditation. Talk about that. Like for me, personally, that one slapped me in the face just because of my own experience with this exact challenge that you're referencing. So just talk a little bit about that and how it relates to all of this. Yeah, I tried to get a regular meditation practice for a long time. I got interested in meditation when I was 18 in Columbus, Ohio. There was no internet. There were books and some weird guy teaching transcendental meditation once in a while. That was it. That was all it was available if you wanted to know anything about meditation. And so what I was reading were books by Buddhist teachers.

And they would say in the book, you should meditate 30 minutes to an hour a day. So that's what I would try and do. And I could do it maybe for a day or a week, maybe a month. It was really hard for me, which meant I had to have sky high motivation. The reason it was hard for me is that I would sit down and it was pandemonium in my brain, like the dark circus rolled into town. I did not like it. It was very hard. I didn't settle easy. And so eventually what I did is I shrunk the task down far enough, I started at three minutes, that I could do it. And the good news about that approach, and this is the little by little approach, is that by doing it successfully, I felt better about myself. And as I felt better about myself, my motivation went up, because motivation goes up

when we feel good about our chances of success, when we believe in ourselves. And it goes down when we don't believe in ourselves, or we don't think we can do something. And so by succeeding, at my little thing, I was able to build. I was able to do harder things, i.e. more meditation with the perceived difficulty staying about the same because I was easing into it and my motivation was going up versus what would be a sporadic longer meditation but twice a week or something. And all I would do is spurate myself about the five days a week that I didn't do it. So that's how I got into meditation. I think it's a good example of the motivation and the effort that's in the fog model and why this

little by little approach works. And it also just creates profound ripple effects into every other area of life. You know, one of the things that I have certainly seen that I think you allude to frequently is motivation doesn't exist in a silo. When you're talking about your life, the motivation that you can build as a result of doing this tiny thing, whether it's meditation or something else, the three minutes, that winning sensation that it starts to create, that has ripple effects into every other area of life. And so not only do you start to feel a little bit more motivation for this one action

and doing it a bit more and showing up on a daily basis, but you also start seeing yourself a little bit differently in terms of the type of person that you actually are, that who you become in the process. And so you show up a slightly little bit better at work maybe that day, or you show up a little bit more present with the people you love or a little bit more energy for whatever it is that you're taking on. And that is this profound riffle effect that you've just created through this tiny action that you just happen to show up for. Yeah, I don't remember quite where it is in the book, but I have a little section that I call the stakes of change.

are two core things if we're trying to do something. So let's imagine we're trying to build an exercise habit. There's the benefit that we get from doing the exercise habit. There's a reason we're doing it. We want to be healthier. We want to live longer. We want to have more energy. Whatever your thing is. And if you're not doing that successfully, you're not getting the benefit of that thing. So that's a problem. The deeper problem is that we start to not believe in ourselves. The deeper problem is we start to think that we can't make changes. And when we feel that, we lose a sense of agency in our own life. We lose a sense of us being the author of our own life. And so a lot of what I'm trying to do is help people get to a point where they can make and keep promises to themselves. Because that is

so foundational to how we see ourselves and our ability, as you say, it ripples into all aspects of life. Yeah, you summarized it well. You said, we believe, we get motivated, and then act. But often, it works the other way around. We act, and motivation follows. Motivation is a byproduct of movement, right? So just start moving. Yes, that's my general strategy is get moving in any way I can, ideally towards the thing I'm trying to do. I want to transition or at least extend this thought into your SPAR method, specificity prompts, alignment, resilience. Can you speak to that?

I know obviously if a reader, which they should, gets deeper into this, they'll be well versed, but I would love to have you just sort of lay out the high-level idea around the framework. Yeah, the first thing I'll say is that

I think change needs two core competencies from us. One I call structural. And this is what the SPAR method is. It's all structural. It's what am I doing? When am I doing it? How am I doing it?

Why am I doing it? Who's supporting me and doing it? And I'll go into more detail that in a second. That's really important. And it solves a lot of what we think are motivational problems. And then even when we know what we should do when we should do it, we've got the plan, there's then that moment we talked about before where we have to make the right choice. But the structural is where we start.

And the SPAR method is a way of going through that. And so we take a behavior that we want to create and first we get specific about it. Ambiguity is often the mother of procrastination. The things that sit on my task list the longest are the ones that are semi-ambiguous. I don't know exactly what the first step is. It's get video done when that's actually a six-step process. So specificity, particularly in the beginning, is always our friend. What am I doing? Where am I doing it? how am I doing it, drive? Just any unknown about it, get it out of there. Because if we're trying to figure out what to do

and motivate ourselves to do it at the same time, we're in trouble. So, specificity. The P stands for prompts. It's how do I get reminded to do it? That sounds obvious, but it's not always. For me, in the morning, I need a prompt to tell me it's time to put substack down and get on the bike.

Like, I need my alarm to go off on my phone. That's what wakes me up. So we need a prompt. The A stands for alignment. And it's about structuring our environment in whatever way we can to make it easier for us to do the thing. It's who is supporting us. You know, James Clear, we both know James. He talks about this in his book. He talks about making something easy and attractive. You're doing everything you can to have the thing be as easy for you to do as possible. And then finally, the R stands for resilience. And I used to do this with coaching clients. We'd work through a plan and I'd say, okay, what's going to go wrong? Right? Because something's going to come up. Like, let's think through. You're planning to meditate in the morning after the kids get on the school bus.

Well, what are we doing on mornings that the kids don't get on the school bus? That's something we can predict and plan for. The answer might be, on those days, I just let it go. It's fine. I didn't meditate today. Or it might be, you know what, I'm just going to sit in the room where they are and I'm just going to spend three minutes watching my breath. But I have a fallback for what I do in those situations. And so that's the SPAR method, is it gives us a way of creating a framework for the behavior.

And if you look at one of the best known models for change, it's catchily called the trans-theoretical model of change, often the stages of change model, you realize that there are three full steps in it before you ever do anything. And the SPAR method is helping us with some of those. The thing that I love about this SPAR method in particular is the R, the resilience. And the reason I find it so important and worth reiterating is my own experience in my own life and also with the thousands of people that I've interacted with around behavior change is that the ambitious mind is particularly bad with resilience.

For one reason, when they miss, which inevitably you are going to miss with whatever behavior change you're trying to create, their bias is to try to make up for a miss. I'm going to say make up for in quotes. And what that means is like, you know, let's just use an example to actually bring it to life. Hey, I'm going to do, you know, 30 minutes of cardio every single day because I'm trying to get healthier. I'm going to walk for 30 minutes every day. Well, something happened, chaos.

My kid was up all night. I didn't sleep. I had to get straight to work. So I miss on Tuesday. But I tell myself, okay, I'm going to make up for it tomorrow. So I'm going to try to do an hour tomorrow so that I can make up for the miss because it was 30 minutes. I'm going to add it to tomorrow's. And then they go out and they run for an hour.

Then they get hurt because they tried to run for an hour. Their foot is really sore the next day, so they miss the next day. And then they have to go to the doctor, so they miss the next day. All of a sudden, this desire to try to make up for the miss, to try to like punish yourself in a way for the fact that life happened leads to a cascading negative in your life. The resilience you tried to embed into the model actually ends up hurting. you rather than helping you. And I have seen that over and over again. This desire to make up for

something being something that actually, oddly enough, holds you back. It's one of the reasons this way, this way of thinking about resilience really stood out to me. It's also a reason why I loved this quote where you talked about, you said, besides no longer using mind-altering substances to burn my life to the ground, no single change has made a bigger difference in building a life worth living than this. Learning to treat myself with kindness. That I think of as a beautiful transition point for this conversation, but also as a beautiful way to capture this idea of resilience

because resilience is often about kindness. Yes. Kindness to yourself, this recognition that it is okay. You are on the path. There are going to be storms. There are going to be moments where the dark wolf, to use your analogy, wins out. but you don't continue feeding it by punishing yourself with this self-loathing on the back end.

Anything you would add to that as we hinge point? I think that's a really beautiful insight that you have. And it's true. And so it's part of why I have a phrase, which is just a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Meaning, if you plan to run for 30 minutes that day and something gets in the way, the way I deal with that is I try then, you know, kind of, I get a five-minute walk in.

Yesterday I had this. I'm in the middle of a book launch. I did not exercise as I should. I sat down in the morning and got started on something. Day got away from me. But after dinner, I went and did a 15-minute walk. I'm doing something to honor the underlying value of health. So yes, you're absolutely right. And then, yeah, kindness is the key part of it.

And that's why I said the one option might be, if the kids don't go to school that day, I just say it's okay to not meditate. That's it. Done. No problem. That's a kindness to yourself. And so, yeah, I do think kindness is both the biggest upgrade we can give ourselves in our life, and it is critical to how we change.

So to this point in the conversation, we have mostly circled around what you speak of as habits of behavior. We've talked a lot about in your book framing the beginning, right? the mechanics of the change, values versus desires, the spar method, BJ Fogg's model, all of these things. I want to transition, because kindness is a good transition point for this, into what you speak about as habits of thought, which is one of the areas that I think makes this book so unique, because you address this. You speak to all of these different schools of wisdom and ancient thought and parables and these beautiful ways that tie together. What is habits of thought as a general framing? And from there, I want to talk about a couple of the frameworks that you offer there that I think are really sticky for people to learn about.

Yeah, habits or thought are just what are the predictable patterns that our brains fall into? And we all have them. We all have predictable things that we tend to think consistently. A Zen master called it habit-ridden consciousness. And I love that idea. You know, we think of habit often, particularly with James' work and BJ Fogg's work, habit now is often associated positively, but for a long time it was associated with bad habit. And we have, you know, quote unquote, bad habits of thought, thoughts that cause us to suffer, thoughts that cause us to be less effective, thoughts that cause us not to be able to change. And so that's what the focus is there. And when it comes to habits of thought, you have this idea of these still points. It relates

to something that you said a couple of minutes ago just related to the like five minute walk, but I sort of think of it as like the thought version of that, these still points that you create in your life. What are still points? And for an average listener that's sitting there listening to this today, this to me feels like one of the you can go do this right now today implemented in your life and start to feel a dramatic change, not a tiny change, a really dramatic change and ripple effect from this. So just frame it up for people and make it actionable because I would love to see more people take this idea immediately and start implementing it. Yeah, it comes from the concept of if we're going to change how we think or relate to the world, that process is not going to change

instantly. You're not going to read a book Sunday night where you see something important about the way you think and then that's it. Even if you get to a daily meditation habit, which is great, but a lot of people can't get to or a reflection period in the morning where you think about what's important, then the day starts and you're off and running. I'll give you an example of a practical still point. Let's pretend that you want to be more patient with your children. That's what we're going to work on. A still point is a very small moment of time, 30 seconds, a minute, that you do frequently throughout the day. And we can drop whatever we want into a still point. So let's take patience as the example.

you decide that the prompt you're going to use is every time I go to the bathroom. So every time you go to the bathroom, as you're going about your business, you think about why is it important for me to be patient with my children. What about that matters to me? You go to the bathroom three or four times. You get home that night, you're far more likely to be able to be patient with your kids because you thought about it four times that day than you are if you read about it and felt bad snapping on Sunday night. That's the core idea. And so we can all weave into our day. We don't

have to set aside time because we're all busy. You can weave into your day ways of reflecting that over time change how you feel and how you think. And so that's what a still point is. And the key is we have to architect them into our life because they don't happen automatically. We don't remember. So prompts become really important there. an alarm is a prompt. We have an app we've created called a Stillpoint app. And what it does is it randomly goes off. And you say, I want it to go off five times between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Or whatever hours you want. And it'll display a message. Your message could be, you know, I want to be patient with my children. It goes off, a little ding on your phone. You pull it up, you look at it and you go, yeah, that is important. Why is that? You just take very brief reflection. Those all really, really do add up.

And little by little, you find yourself relating very differently. We talk about we're going to get into self-compassion, and I said that's the biggest upgrade I gave myself. That happened by thinking about it a lot, lots of little times. I think it was Victor Frankel, famous psychologist, Holocaust survivor, that said, between stimulus and response, there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response. When I read about steel points, that was what popped into my head.

was it's a mechanism for creating space in your life. Yes. Because we all know this and we experience this, that modern life has this feature of just feeling like this constant fixed loop of stimulus and response. You know, you wake up in the morning. You know, you probably have your phone on your bedside table. The alarm goes off.

You grab it. You're still lying in bed. And a thousand people come rushing into your bedroom, right? Text messages, email, social media notifications, all of it. And from that moment until the time you get into bed and put your phone down, you are in this constant fix-the-loop. Yep. And if you do not force space into your life, modern life has sucked every bit of it out.

Yes, it has. There is no ventilation. And so in a lot of ways, what you're talking about is like ventilating, forcing the air of space into your life through these triggers, through these, whether it's your still points app or whether it's your own ability to create this, of just these tiny little pockets of space and deliberate space, intentional space that is leading you to act and behave in the way that your ideal self

wants to show up in the world. I think the parent example is such a powerful one because consistently I have found, I've a young, I have a toddler son. It is very easy to say how you want to be as a parent. It is very difficult when you get caught in those moments. You know, in those, you're tired at the end of a long, day and your kid isn't behaving or they're not eating the meal you made for them or they're not going

to bed at night. I find that it gets, you know, it's kind of linear or maybe even exponential in terms of the difficulty over the course of the day. You're like really patient and kind first thing in the morning and you're like, oh yeah, so work with you, whatever. And at the end of a long day, it's anything but, right? The difficulty level is so much higher. And so what you're talking about is like insert space so that you can circumvent that curve and continue to show up. Remind yourself of who that person is. You talk about self-compassion, speak to that a little bit more, and whether it's your own journey with it or just the importance of it as it relates to this process of change. Yeah, self-compassion is so important for two reasons. Reason one is it just is really lovely

not to occupy brain space with an asshole. I mean, to put it simply, it's just nice to have, it'd be pleasant in here, and spend more time with myself than anybody. So that's, that's, that's, That's very nice. And again, probably biggest upgrade I've given myself, it's also really important to how we change. Because change is a learning process. And when we are being hard on ourselves and when we're falling into our usual scripts of, you're lazy, you're this, you're that, you always do it, you screw up, what's wrong with you? All of that ramps up our emotional state. And when that state is ramped up, the part of our brain that does, the learning is sort of turned off. And that's the exact opposite of what we want. What we want to

have happen is, oh, I was exercising, you know, every day this week, but then Friday and Saturday it fell apart. Huh, I wonder why. What was different? What was different between Thursday and Saturday? Then we learn. But all we do is go, see, I knew you would do it. You always screw up. You haven't learned a thing. And so self-compassion is really critical in the that dimension also. Where do you think self-compassion, or do you think, rather, self-compassion can go too far for some people? And I guess the question here that the origin of it for me is to just say, what is this balance point? You know, for someone that it does need dramatic change in their life, even not dramatic. So let's say they just need, they need to create change in their life.

Yep. At what point does self-compassion become self-sabotage or a... Excuses. Yeah, an excuse. Yep. So I define self-compassion as a middle place between self-improvement and self-acceptance. So self-compassion is not about justifying anything, any behavior. I can still hold myself accountable, but I can do it in a kinder way. I score high on conscientiousness on the Big Five personality test, which means I pay a lot of attention to what I do.

And so I frequently see ways in which I have, for lack of a better term, fallen short of what I wanted to do, of the person I wanted to be. But I can be self-compassionate in that by looking at the behavior, focusing on how do I change the behavior, what can I learn from it without having to say mean things? things to myself. An example I use in the book is if you can imagine two students, Bobby and Susie, Bobby is in class and the teacher says, Bobby, what's three plus four? And Bobby goes eight. And the teacher goes, Bobby, you moron, what is wrong with you? It is not eight. You're never going to get it. You'll be lucky to get out of elementary school, let alone college. You might as well write that off. Bobby is going to struggle in math, right? Susie, on the other hand, is asked what three plus four is. and she says eight, and her teacher doesn't go, you're right, Susie, eight it is, great job.

She goes, no, Susie, it's not at seven. Here's why, right? Three, you know, we could do this. And by the way, if you want a little extra help, stop by after class, and I'll give it to you. I know you can figure this out, right? We can tell who's going to do better. That's what self-compassion is. It all sort of feels to me like it relates to this middle way concept that some people will be familiar with from Buddhism.

but you speak to and write about in the book. Can you connect it to that? Yeah, that's exactly what self-compassion for me is a middle way between self-criticism and self-indulgence. And so I'm a cliche of the middle way. I feel like that way of thinking has so imbued so many aspects of my life. And I give a lot of different examples of it in the book. Now, there are certain things I can't do middle way. I'm a recovery and substance addict, right? For that, I am extreme. It is abstinence. But most things in my life, I find a middle way approach works.

A middle way approach works if we're trying to make a change. Because if you think you should do it perfectly all the time and you don't, a lot of people just give up. It's not like there's a place in either I do it perfectly or I don't do it at all. You could think of this on a day. You're trying to eat well and you have breakfast. And, you know, somehow you end up with crispy cream donuts for breakfast. Most people in a non-middleway approach go, ah, fuck it, you know, and the whole day is gone.

They're at McDonald's at lunch and they're at Baskin-Robbins for ice cream after dinner. The whole thing derails. A middle-way approach says, yeah, okay, I messed up a meal, no big deal, but I can still keep with my plan. It all sort of relates to this embrace of the ordinary. that I absolutely love. There's this poem, like one of my favorite poems, it's by a man named George Martin. It's about parenting, but the final two lines of it are make the ordinary come alive and the extraordinary will take care of itself. You sort of lament this idea that people are told everyone can be extraordinary and you should strive for the extraordinary. It all kind of

connects to this middle way, this embrace of the ordinary, this middle path, this boring, show up, daily, basic, small. Can you talk a little bit about that and your relationship with ordinary versus extraordinary what you have seen and your conversations that you've had with people and what that means to you? Yeah, I think there's a lot of pressure and the self-help movement is one of the main perpetrators of this of exactly like I said, everybody can be great, everybody can be exceptional. You can do anything. And I just kind of think that's BS. And the pressure to do that leaves us always feeling like we're not enough. It's not enough to be a good parent anymore. You also have to have a job where you're killing it and you're on LinkedIn influencing people

and you also started a charity in Africa for children and you're on the PTA board at school and and and there's no ever is enough and that does not lead to a satisfied life and it certainly doesn't lead to a life where we're our best self for other people because if we go back to this idea that we do better when we feel better about ourselves if we constantly are focused on the things that I don't do then we don't feel good and I've coached so many people like this who are wonderful people. They're successful at work. They've got children that they're a great parent to. They're a decent and kind person overall. And all they feel is, I'm just not enough. I'm just not enough. Because they're comparing themselves against Mel Robbins. I don't know. Whoever your,

comparison point is. And that's a really crappy way to go through life. And so for me, the more that I am able to just be a person among people doing the best, I can and not having to be extraordinary or special, the better I do. Writing a book is an interesting process in this because there's a certain amount of ego in it to do it and get it done and to promote it and to push it into the world. But I have to be very careful about gauging all of my life on how successful this book is. You know, gauging myself worth on what podcasts I got on or whether I got on the Today Show. It's a very slippery slope. That's the sort of advanced version of it.

But if you're in that mindset, it doesn't matter. You will always think there needs to be more. How much of that challenge, let's say, do you feel has become 10 times more difficult in 2026 as it maybe was in the 1990s or even the early 2000s pre-social media, pre-the-in-internet? I think it has definitely gotten worse. I don't want to blame the internet and technology for what are human things, right? People have had problems with comparing themselves to others. There's the old phrase, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, right?

That was all about you're comparing yourself to your neighbor who has more than you. So this is not a new thing. This has been around forever. And social media is a constant comparison engine. It just runs and runs and runs on that. And to expose ourselves to that again and again and again is definitely problematic. If that's where I go for my relaxation and my downtime, but what it causes me to do is feel less than as I'm doing it, it's not a great strategy for relaxing. Right?

I mean, we all fall prey to it to a certain degree. We all have our little digital tick. Mine is checking my email way more than is possibly needed. But yeah, I think social media has exacerbated all of these things. And the fact that social media is driven by an algorithm that prioritizes the extraordinary, the extremes, the best or the worst, it makes it even worse. The thing that I find so damning about it is keeping up with the Joneses has always existed. But the Joneses was it within eye shot, right? It was actually like the people on your street that you could see.

The Jones has lived there. And so your comparison, while it existed, was always local in nature. And so it was somewhat bounded in what you could experience. Now comparison is global. And you are comparing yourself to the top 0.0001% in whatever area and whatever domain. And you're comparing them, you're comparing yourself to that group and the 0.01% of their life that they are actually willing to share. So it's even worse than that. It's not like, hey, I can see the Jones is on the corner of the street.

I see that they have a nicer car, the man, a nicer house. But I also see them arguing in the window every single night. So I know there's different sides to their life. On social media, all you see is the beautiful house, the car, the private jet, whatever, and the beautiful marriage and the children and none of the other issues, right? And so it steadily creates and compounds this thing. And in addition to that, the algorithms feed the negative. We know scientifically that negativity drives clicks and shares at an outsized rate versus

positivity. And so all of it is designed to create this perception in your mind that you are not doing enough that you need to do more. The entire consumer economy is built on that idea, right? Yeah. You're not doing enough here, buy this thing and you'll be better. You'll be feeling better. I have found when you ask people to map their happiness during the course of a day, just self-mapping it, your least happy moments tend to be times when you're spending too much time on your phone, screen time. Yep. It's a pretty simple hack to circumvent that to step away from that a little bit, get away from that comparison engine. Realize that most of these comparisons are completely arbitrary in nature.

Before we conclude and sort of get into some concluding thoughts, I want to just ask you about this framing that you share, suffering equals pain times resistance. I've loved that ever since I read it. Yeah. And it has clicked with me in so many different ways in my life that I see on an ongoing basis. my resistance in particular. Like, what is the resistance that I'm feeling here? Talk a little bit about that and how to think about that in our own lives. Yeah, I believe the meditation teacher, Shinseng Yang, is the originator of that phrase.

So, credit, due. And it's been extraordinarily important in my life. And so the idea is that, like, suffering is the total overall, let's just call it yuckiness of something. Pain is the situation. It's the back pain or it's the job that you don't really like or whatever it is. And then resistance is all the stuff that we're saying in our heads about it. And the reason that equation is so good is the precision of it. It's a suffering equals pain times resistance.

So let's just take back pain. That's a simple one. My back hurts on a scale of five. Five points out of 10 of back pain. And I'm resisting it at a five because I'm thinking it shouldn't be that. this way and what am I going to be like when I'm 80 and why me, you know, whatever our thing that we're spinning around the fear, the resistance. So 25 total points of suffering. If I can turn that resistance down a little, I don't think we can turn it off. I just don't think that's what.

I think enlightenment is when you turn the resistance totally off. But for most of us, most all of the time, that's not possible. But if I turn that resistance just down two points to a three, five times three, now I've got 15 total units of suffering. So the whole experience is less yucky. And again, that's a very scientifically precise term. The whole thing is less yucky, but I didn't have to change the underlying problem at all, which is good because sometimes we can't. It reminds me of that Buddhist parable of the two arrows. You know, if you're struck with one arrow, does it hurt? Yes. If you're struck by a second arrow, does it hurt even more? Yes. And then the Buddha teaches that the first arrow is the thing that happens in your life. You cannot

control it. The second arrow is your reaction to the first. Yeah. And it's within your control to send that arrow into the ground rather than into you. That is avoiding that resistance. One of the questions that you offer that I thought really stuck with me that I found myself continuing to ask myself, when I feel this resistance, particularly when it comes to like professional related stress is, will this bother me in five hours, five days, or five months? Yeah. That has been this aha moment for me. Like all of these random little stresses that hit my life that then linger, that I feel

this resistance towards that increases that suffering, most of them melt away when you realize that they aren't going to matter. And I mean, frankly, most of them in five hours, but definitely not in five days. So I would definitely recommend that to anyone listening to this, whether or not you end up reading this book, when you encounter a stress, when that situation comes up, Will this bother me in five hours, five days, or five months? Generally speaking, you will find that the answer is not more than five hours, and so it's probably not worth ruminating over and so sitting with in this moment.

That question saves me so many hours of frustration. I'm on hold for customer service, and I find myself starting to get irritated. Like, why, you know, they should answer this phone quicker. And I'm like, by dinner, I will forget this even happened. Unless I choose to keep stirring myself up. And sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is you go, yes, this will matter in five months. And that's good information because that is worthy of your time, your energy, and your concern.

The things that matter. We just dissipate so much of that time and energy on the things that really don't. You conclude the book by offering that this is all really about changing our relationship with change itself. What did you mean by that? What do you want a reader to come away from this conversation and from the book itself understanding and thinking when it comes to change? Yeah, it's a bit of a paradox, right? It's a book about how we make changes. And then ultimately, it's a book that argues on some degree that we need to not approach everything from a change mindset. There's a place where we focus on becoming better people, becoming healthier, succeeding, whatever those things are. And there are ways to do that and they're worth doing. And there are lots of parts of life that that mindset is problematic.

It's both my best and my worst quality that I always see how things could be better. That's good. That's part of why I've been able to do the things I do. It's the gift I have to give to the world. and it is profoundly a pain in the ass for a lot of parts of my life. If I don't know how to set that down, then again, nothing is ever good enough. My partner will accuse me of this. She's like, you're just never satisfied.

Now, of course, sometimes I'm satisfied. Never is a way to start an argument. But her point is that's my default, that I have to consciously work to counter. And so that's why I wanted to end with presence and acceptance because a person, like me who's focused on change all the time, needs to know that not everything in life needs to be changed. You write, little by little, we become who we are. What does that mean to you? Our thoughts and our behaviors, the little things that we do day by day, it is who we are. It's back to that idea of the threads that are woven in. And it also speaks to the idea that

who we become is important, not just in what we accomplish, but who we are. And the things I have in the second half of the book around self-compassion and a middle way approach and acceptance and presence, when we weave those threads in, those are the people that we become. And those kind of people, to me, are a gift to the world. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for writing this, spending the time doing all of the tiny little actions the, I know, millions of actions that actually lead to producing and publishing and actually releasing into the world, a book, no small feat, something you should be extraordinarily proud of. Having read this and having had the opportunity to have this conversation, I know that it's going to impact many people all around the world

that take the time to read it, that engage with the ideas, and more than anything else, that actually go and take some tiny action according to what they learn. You know, read the first 10 pages and then go and dive into something. Go and create one of those still moments, those space that we talked about, go and do one tiny thing. Because the message here is powerful, but the ripple effect it can create in your life is even more so. Thank you so much for coming on and doing this. I always appreciate the way you think and your views on things. So having you talk with me about this book was a great pleasure.

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you.

Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom, one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community. If you're listening in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I'll be doing a live event at Garcia Street Books on April 19th at 4.30 p.m. Mountain Time, where I'll be in conversation with Henry Shookman, one of my favorite guests, a mentor, and a Zen master. We'll talk about ideas from my new book How a Little Becomes a Lot. It's about what stands between us and our best

intentions between who we want to be and who we are and what we can actually do about it. I'd really, really love to meet you there. I'll make time to connect with each of you that shows up. You can find the details and register at one you feed.net slash booktour.