1162: How to Set Yourself Up for Successful Change with Eric Zimmer

Pete Mockaitis
Eric, welcome back!

Eric Zimmer
Thanks, Pete. I’m really happy to be here, years later.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that was wild. A thousand episodes ago we chatted and, in the meantime, you’ve been doing some really cool stuff. So I’m excited to talk about How a Little Becomes A Lot.

Could you kick us off by sharing what do you think is among the most fascinating or surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made as you’ve been, you know, learning these lessons and researching and packaging them into this book?

Eric Zimmer
Well, I think the first one is the idea that small change is what matters. So I start the book with a story that I think illustrates it well. And if you were filming the movie of my life, you would see a really pivotal scene where I walked into a treatment center in 1994 in Columbus, Ohio, and it’s the dead of winter. I’m a homeless heroin addict. I weigh a hundred pounds. I’m jaundiced and I’m yellow from hepatitis C.

Prosecutor says I might be going to jail for fifty years. I’m just really broken. And I go in, and they say, “We think you need to go to long-term treatment.” To which I say, “Meh, no, thank you.” And I go back to my room and I have what we call in recovery a moment of clarity, which I could say was more like just being scared to death when I looked at what was coming, right?

Because I was just like, “I’m going to jail or to die, and soon.” And so I went back out, and I said, “All right, all right, I’ll go to your treatment.” And that would be the really big pivotal moment. The director would spend a lot of time there. You know, the music would swell in the background triumphant.

Pete Mockaitis
Push shot.

Eric Zimmer
Exactly. And it’s not that that moment wasn’t important. Of course, it was, but that moment has significance because it was followed by thousands upon thousands of little decisions, little actions that I made after that, to move towards recovery and away from addiction. If I didn’t do those things, that would just be yet another failed attempt.

And so I think when we think about changing, we all want to make the big change that will change things quickly, change them for good. You know, we think about the epiphany or the watershed moment or this thing. And those things are useful.

But a lot of big change efforts fail because nobody is really understanding that it has to happen little bit by little bit. And we could go into a thousand different examples of that. But that’s the core principle that underlies a lot of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, well said, in terms of if you had a moment of clarity, you showed up for a moment or a few days of of rehab, and then that was, you know, and then relapsed, then it’s interesting that that moment doesn’t seem as consequential without the future ahead of it.

Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And, I mean, and, frankly, that moment came about because of lots and lots of little small moments before that where I did make attempts to change, right? All of those were important, too. And we tend to think of, when we go to change something, we tend to think of just the action piece of it, and the action piece is part of it.

But if you look at models in behavior science around change, you recognize, and the most famous one is called the stages of change model, right, where you go through pre-contemplation, then you you’re going through contemplation, you’re thinking, “Should I make this change? Is it worth it?”

Then you’re doing planning before you actually even get to the activity. And so this book is really trying to show all of those mechanisms and how we can get better at both making change. That’s the first half of the book. And then the second half of the book is, “How do we get better at working with the sort of changes that life just tends to throw our way that we don’t really like?”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Yeah. Okay. Well, then, lay it on us, in terms of when we want to make changes, how do we do it better? And can you keep illustrating it with real changes made?

Eric Zimmer
Sure. I mean, let’s just pick something like you want to get an exercise routine. The way most people do it is they, one day, wake up and they go, “All right, I’m going to get in better shape.”

Now, oftentimes, this is just a vague idea for a while, right? Maybe you go to the gym occasionally, you take a walk occasionally, but nothing’s really happening. So I would say, you know, we’re kind of in the contemplation stage there, right? We’re thinking about it.

We might be taking certain things that we’re doing, but we’re not really making progress. And so the first thing is the book walks through it, is to sort of accept and understand the little by little approach. Then what we need to figure out is like, “Why are we changing? Like, what is it that we’re changing? And why does it matter?”

Because we really do need to be motivated to do it and understand why it’s important to us. How does it tie into the things that are most important to us in life? And then from there, I have a method in the book called the SPAR method, where we go through and we plan the change out. We get very, very specific.

And we can go into that in more detail if you would like. And then the next piece is we learn to navigate the moments that are difficult. So if I do the the work right in the planning phase, I kind of get pushed to what I call a choice point.

It’s the moment where you basically say, “Oh, yeah, I am going to get on the bike,” or, “I’m going to continue to lay here on the couch.” And so the next skill we need to learn is we need to learn how to negotiate those choice points.

Because if we go the direction we don’t want to go, we end up on the couch when the best part of us wants to be on the bike, then it’s because we were feeling or thinking something, or saying something to ourselves at that moment, that we didn’t know how to work through. And so then we can look at those moments and find our way and work through them.

And that’s the basic process of setting up a new positive change. And we can go into any more detail on any aspects of that, but that’s the framework broadly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s hear it. Let’s work through the S-P-A-R there.

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, so the S stands for specificity. When we’re trying to do a new behavior, we need to be really specific about what we’re doing.

“What’s the exercise? When am I doing it? How am I doing it? Where am I doing it?” All that specificity is important because ambiguity is really often our enemy. Because what happens is we’re trying to figure out what to do and do it at the same time.

The best example I can give you is that, like, in my day-to-day work, I get off a call and I have an hour and a half window. And now I’m sitting there, I’m going, “Well, what should I work on? Well, I could work on this, and I could work on that. But you know, I should walk. I haven’t really moved much at all today. And, you know, oh, I could check this score.”

And we end up burning a lot of that time because we don’t know, specifically, what we’re doing. I know I do much better when I’m like, “Oh, that hour and a half between the call with Pete and my next conversation, that hour and a half is going towards interview prep for the two interviews I need to do on Wednesday,” right? So specificity is always our friend in the beginning. Ambiguity is our enemy.

P stands for prompts. It’s basically we get reminded to do the thing. Now that sounds sort of silly, but it’s not. Like, I’ve been doing this thing where I’m trying to take a walk about every 30 minutes for five minutes. It doesn’t always work. You and I are going to talk for 45 minutes. I’m not going to get up in the middle of it.

But if I don’t remind myself to do it, I just don’t do it. If it’s the morning, and I’m on the couch, and at a certain point, I need to go get on the exercise bike, and at that moment, I’m doing what I like to do in the morning oftentimes, which is read Substack. So there I am reading Substack.

If I don’t have an alarm that tells me it’s time to get up and go do it, I’ll often go right by it. And then I’ll suddenly be like, “Oh, I only have 15 minutes to do it now. Why bother?” So prompts are important. Alignment is about setting up our environment to support us in what we’re trying to do.

So the simplest example of that in my life is, if you could see over my shoulder, I’ve got two guitars there, and they are sitting out on stands. I play my guitar probably 75% more often when it’s on the stand versus in the case laying right there, which makes me feel like, “Well, what kind of dumb animal am I? Like it takes five seconds to open a guitar case.”

But friction, you said it before we started, thinking about friction, right? If I want to make something easier, if I want to do more of something, I want to make it easier to do. How can I set up my environment, alignment? And a key part of our environment also is other people.

So what kind of support do I have? Who’s helping me? Who am I sharing this with? Who might help me be accountable to this? And then finally the R is for resilience, which is where we step back and we go, “Okay, what could go wrong with this plan?” So if I’m walking a client through this, we go through all that, and then I’ll say, “All right, now let’s find the flaws in what we’ve planned.”

You can’t plan for everything. But if I’ve got a client who is trying to finish a novel, and the plan is to write for an hour after the kids get on the school bus, the thing we have to talk about is, “What happens when they don’t get on the school bus?” because that’s inevitable. That is going to happen.

Now the answer might be, “If the kids are home sick, that’s just a day I don’t write. Okay.” But it might be like, “Oh, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go in the room where the kids are, and I’m not going to get any actual real writing done but I’ll use that as research time.” We just have a plan. And so that’s SPAR: specificity, prompts, alignment, resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m thinking about the specificity part, and I think you’ve nailed it in terms of, “Oh, hey, I got some ‘free time’ in between my calendared obligations with other humans.” And there’s a question there, like, “What should I do?”

And, in a way, the answer is infinite in terms of there’s billions of things you could do, and maybe dozens of things that would be useful to your general goals and values and priorities. So how do we land at that kind of clarity like, “Ah, of course, I’m preparing for interviews,” or, “Of course, I’m writing this book,” or, “I’m getting on the exercise bike”?

Eric Zimmer
Well, I mean, I have a section in the book where we kind of start by talking about like, “What do we value? Like, what’s most important to us?” And I have a bunch of different exercises for doing that. And then there is a process of translating that value into action, right?

And so I can’t give any advice that says, like, “Here is exactly how you always figure out what the most important thing is.” As professionals say, in a career, that’s part of what we get paid to do. We get paid to look at all the stuff that has to get done, which is always more than can get done. And we’re paid to decide which of those things is going to add the most value.

But the more often we ask that question, the better, right? The more often we ask that question, the better choices we make. Whereas, a lot of times, we just run into the default. So if I’m not planning well, what will happen to me is I’ll get off the call, and I’ll look at my task list.

And what ends up usually happening is whatever is easiest to do, right? And I call this separating decision from action. I want to decide. And then, at a different time, I want to act. And what I want is the the wisest version of myself deciding what’s important to do this week. There’s no shortcut for that, right?

There’s no shortcut for spending the time to go, like you said, “Of all the things I could do, what matters here?” And then deciding that those are the things that are going to happen, and then trying to stick to it. So there’s not a simple answer to that.

But starting, you know, Stephen Covey, in his famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said, “Begin with the end in mind,” right? Like, “Where am I going and why? What matters to me? What’s important to me?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So do you have any thoughts for separating what you “should do” from what is, in fact, truly, deeply, resonantly aligned with your deepest value-ness?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I mean, values are hard to figure out. They really are. It’s hard work, because two things happen, right? One is we’re very often just presented a giant list of values to pick from, and you agree with nearly all of them, right?

Like, you look at it, you’re like, “Well, I value, yeah, I value truth, I value honesty. Sure, I value freedom, and I value responsibility, and I value…” right? I mean, okay, great. I don’t know how to figure that out, right? It’s just a giant list.

The other reason values work is really difficult is that, often, as you start to determine what you really do value, you start seeing the gap between what you value and what you do, and that’s uncomfortable, but it’s good medicine, right? It’s the kind of medicine that tastes bad going down, but is really good for you because that’s the only way we end up with a life that feels meaningful to us, is to take the time to figure it out.

So I’ll give you one quick one that’s from the book that people could do. And it’s called pick a guide. And it basically says, “Find somebody that you admire, and write down what is it about them that you admire. Why do you admire them? What are the traits about that person that you value?” And that’ll tell you something about what’s important to you. Because you’ve put this person here as somebody that you admire, “Why? Why do I admire them?”  So that’s a very simple one.

Like I said, there’s a bunch of others, and my recommendation is just to do a variety of different values exercises, like, you know, do one today and do another tomorrow, and then one next week. And, ideally, then we start to triangulate in on what is most important to us.

Now there’s an important thing to know, though, which is that in that chapter I talk about two types of conflicts, right? One is values versus desires. And values are the thing, you know, the way I define a value is it’s the thing that the best part of me has decided is worth wanting.

Desires are the things you just want. So we have values-versus-desire conflict all the time. It’s kind of the way I frame it is, “What do I want most?” a value, versus, “What do I want now?” a desire. And those are very difficult sometimes, but you can work through those.

The harder type of conflict is the values-to-values conflict, when you value two things. If you have a family and a career that you value, you are familiar with this values conflict all the time. We call it work-life balance, right? And we want it to balance so we don’t have to keep having it tug us in different directions.

But the reality is that I don’t think, that ever goes away. It doesn’t ever go away. But for me, when I recognize that and I can say, “Oh, look, this value is conflicting with this value,” and I can name the stakes. It doesn’t necessarily mean I know exactly what to do.

But I can relax a little bit because I go, “Oh, this is just totally normal that I’m going to feel this pull.” And then I can think about, “Well, okay, how can I work with these?” And I think of it less in my life these days as like this tension and pull, and more as sort of a dance.

You know, it’s a little bit more of a dance between these different values. So, yes, that’s my not-short answer.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. That’s good. Well, then in the universe of prompts, alignment, and resilience, do you have any favorite examples or tips and tricks, do’s and don’ts for doing this well?

Because, I mean, I think, in many ways, prompt it’s like, “Okay, I could set a timer on my phone. That’s handy.” I’d love to hear what are some cool, creative, clever approaches to these bits?

Eric Zimmer
Well, prompts can be lots of different things. The obvious one is a time-based prompt. If something goes off on my phone at a certain time and it tells me to do X, Y, or Z. And these are really important. It’s basically how we organize most of our lives, right, “Oh, it’s time to go to that meeting,” “It’s time to eat dinner,” “It’s time to go to bed,” right? So that’s one type of prompt.

But there are also some others. And another is like a preceding-event prompt, right, “I do this, then I do that.” So an example of this is I will spend five minutes meditating after I take the dogs for a walk. You take the dogs for a walk, ideally, every day. It’s something that consistently happens. You just bolt something onto it.

That’s a really good one. I think the term, one of the terms in behavior science that is used for this sometimes is habit stacking. You’re stacking one on top of the other. You need to make sure that what you’re stacking it on is something that actually happens consistently. So we’ve got that kind of prompt.

We can have a location-based prompt. We can be like, “Every time I come to a red light…” Now, again, you’re not going to be like, “Every time I come to a red light, it’s time to get on my bike,” right? But it could be, if you’re trying to change a way of thinking, like you’ve got a thought pattern, “You know, every time I come to the red light, I could just reinforce the thoughts that I want to have.”

“Every time I come to a red light, I will just spend two minutes thinking about, like, what’s actually going well in my life.” So those location-based prompts are also really valuable. So that’s a couple different tips on prompts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then with regard to alignment, environmental setups, we got the guitar example, which is delightful. Any other good moves you’ve seen there?

Eric Zimmer
Well, I think there’s a basic principle we just want to keep in mind. And it’s if we want to do more of something, make it easier. And you want to do less of it, make it harder. So it’s the classic, you know, if you don’t want to eat junk food, don’t have it in the house.

Now, DoorDash and Uber Eats and Delivery and all that has really made that one harder. But if I have to, if it’s just open the fridge and there the thing is, versus I maybe have to get in the car, or I have to spend the time getting on an app, I mean, you just want to have friction, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Eric Zimmer
And so that’s the basic idea. And you just want to get creative, like, “What can I do to make this easier? Oh, I can, if I have trouble getting out the door in the morning, I could have all my gym clothes set out and right by the door. I could set the coffee to automatically brew 10 minutes before I get up.” I mean, we could just do things to ease us along.

And again, oftentimes, we think of these, and we go, “That’s so obvious, it doesn’t matter.” But there’s the guitar case example, right? And again, like I said, when I think about that, I’m like, “That is stupid. Why can’t I just open a guitar case? That’s dumb.” But it’s unquestionable that I do it more when it’s sitting there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And, likewise, with junk food in terms of if it’s there, I mean, I will eat it, even though I don’t want to. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Try not to. Just make it harder. You know, I had a client for a while who was dealing with some issues with pornography, and it just wasn’t what he wanted to do.

And so we started, and we were like, “You know what, let’s have you log out of your computer before you go to bed.” Well, that wasn’t enough friction. “Oh, let’s have you power the computer off.” Not enough friction.

Where we ended up was, “Let’s have you put your computer in your car before you go to bed.” That was enough friction. It gave him enough time to think, “Do I want to do this?” And that is really valuable in that way.

Here’s an example of an environmental setup. So my digital tick, such as I have one, is checking my email too often. There’s just no need to check my email as often as I sometimes will. So, for me, what I have is a little app on my phone, in that when I click my email app, this other app pops up, and it says, it makes me take a deep breath, and then asks me, “Do you want to do it?”

Very often, my answer to that is no. I just was doing it automatically. So by introducing that little bit of environmental change, a little bit of friction, I go, “No, I don’t want to do it,” because it’s given me a moment to contemplate.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And then with regard to people, I mean, they can do that as well. Like, I’ve had a friend say to me, “Hey, if you see me in this shared office space, playing XBOX for more than 20 minutes, say, ‘Hey, looks like you’ve been playing for more than 20 minutes.’”

And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right.” And then he immediately shut it off. It’s like, “Oh.” Like, that’s all it took was enough of a prompt in terms of, like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. I kind of totally zoned out. Now I’m zoned back in. So thank you, and we’re done now.”

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, find a friend to meet you at the gym. Find a friend to take a walk with you. Those are all people prompts. And many of us may know a person prompt that’s just no good for us, also. The minute we see so and so, you know, we know we’re going to get in trouble that night.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Understood. Okay. Well, now, let’s talk about these choice points, where the rubber meets the road, the battle. Yeah, there’s a thing and the time comes to do the thing, and, by golly, you just don’t want to. What do you do with that?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, so again, I want to stress the first part of this, the structural, the planning, the why I’m doing it, like, we need to do that. If we don’t do it, we will lose at choice points far more often than we win.

So we want to stack the deck. That’s one thing almost all behavioral scientists would agree on. It’s, like, don’t rely on self-control more than you have to. And self-control is the kind of thing that we need when it’s that moment.

So the good news about being at a choice point is that we don’t have to analyze our whole life for why we’re not doing something. We analyze that moment. And in the book, I have something I call the six saboteurs of self-control.

But what I really did is I thought about, like, “What are the common things that are going on inside someone at the moment that they make the choice that the best part of them wishes they hadn’t?” You know, I just discussed one, which is like the autopilot, “I’m not even choosing, it just happens automatically. I have my phone in my hand and I don’t even know how it happened.” “Oh, I wasn’t even thinking, and the next thing you know, I’m eating a Twinkie,” right?

Another one is, and I had this a lot with writing the book, it’s around self doubt. Like, I really didn’t think, I really doubted my ability to write a good book. I mean, deep doubt. It brought up self-doubt I haven’t had in a long, long time.

And so what I would find is, it’s time to write, and I don’t want to. There’s resistance. And if I would examine, “Okay, what’s going on in that moment?” what I would realize, it’s some form of there’s just this underlying like, “You’re not any good at this. It’s not going to go well. What’s the point? None of this is going to…You’re not good enough to write a book.”

And so, in that moment, I don’t have to solve self-doubt, because you can’t in a lot of cases. All I have to do is turn it down enough to allow me to do the action. So I might say something to myself, like, “Well, do you know that you can’t write a good book?”

And the answer is, “Well, no, of course, I don’t know that.” Even my most pessimistic self is like, “Well, we don’t know.” And sometimes I just go, “Okay, well, do you believe if you sit down and write that you’ll get better at it and you’ll have a better chance of writing a good book?” And I’ll go, “Yeah, I think so.” And that would be enough, right?

I don’t have to suddenly believe that I am the next John Steinbeck in order to do it. I can’t tell myself, “You’re an amazing writer,” because I don’t believe it. But I find what I can say to myself that gets me to do the action.

So, there’s another one which is like emotional escapism, right? Like, for whatever reason, when I get close to doing this thing, I just feel yucky inside. Okay, well, how can I work with that? You know, how can I say, “Okay, well, what am I actually feeling? Oh, what I’m feeling is, oh, I’m actually tired.”

Okay. Well, how would I talk to myself if I’m tired? I might say, “Well, you know what, it’s always hard getting started. Just get started, see what happens, you know, and let’s check in five minutes down the road.” Enough to get me started.

So a lot of times, in those moments, it’s just we’ve got to find out what to say to ourselves, how we coach ourselves to go in the direction we want. And most people have the experience of, very often, once you start something, it gets easier to do. It’s that initial friction.

I’ve been watching this show about space, and every time I see a rocket launch, I think about this. I’m like, that’s sometimes what it feels like to start something, right? You see, and you’re like, “They use so much energy to get the thing out of the atmosphere. Once it’s free of the gravity of the earth, it tends to go on its own.”

We’re often the same way, “I’ve got to get out of the gravity of the moment that’s pulling me down. If I can start, then I go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. You know, I’ve coaxed myself successfully a number of times in terms of, “Oh, that just feels too hard.” But sometimes even five minutes feels like too big of a commitment. And so it’s like, “You know what? I’m going to do one minute. I will do one minute, and then we’ll see what happens.” And that’s enough.

Eric Zimmer
I use that trick far more than I think I should. I’m like, “Oh, I’ve hosted a podcast about this stuff for 12 years. I’ve coached hundreds of people around the world. I’ve written a book on this. Surely I don’t need to do that.” Well, yes, I do, right, because it works.

You know, my one is I keep talking about the Peloton bike because it’s just a consistent thing, right? It’s a big part of my workout routine, and I face resistance in the morning. So I’ll just be like, “Just go put on your bike shoes.” By the time I’m in there, off the couch, I’ve escaped the gravitational pull of my couch. And now, I can take the next step, and I can take the next step.

I use that so often. And it’s another example of the little by little principle, right? One idea is that you try and make a small change. The other is that you take a big change and you just try and bite off the littlest part of it to start.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay, so we’ve got six saboteurs. We’ve got three. Let’s hear some more.

Eric Zimmer
Let’s see. We’ve got the insignificance trap. This isn’t where I so much doubt that I can do it. I doubt that it matters. This is where I’m not connecting the dots of little bit by little bit, a little becomes a lot. My favorite story of this is I had someone I was good friends with, and she was an alcoholic addict also.

And she tells this story, and she’s totally serious. She’s like, “My landlord would come to me, and say, ‘You haven’t paid the rent again, and yet here you are on the porch drinking a six-pack. Why can’t you take that money and put it towards the rent?’”

And she would say, “You dummy. Like, I can’t pay rent for the cost of a six-pack.” Like, she could not connect the dots in her mind that if she didn’t do that every day, she would have a whole lot more money. It just didn’t add up.

And so that’s often the way we are also. It’s like, “Well, what does this one time matter? It’s not going to go anywhere.” I think finances, people fall into this. I know I have. Like, I’ve made the mistake that we all caution every young person against, which is start early – saving. Well, I didn’t.

So what happens is, let’s play that forward 15 years, and my brain starts going, “Well, I didn’t really start early enough. And so what I’m able to put away now, like, I’m not going to be able to get where I need to get. So I don’t do it,” right, which just then perpetuates the same problem. So that’s a really big one. We have to kind of convince ourselves that the little things we do, do, indeed, add up to something more.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot in the world of finance because I’m thinking about, when I look at a recurring monthly expense, like a subscription or something, it’s like, “Oh, it’s whatever, it’s five bucks a month, you know, whatever.”

And so I just now habitually rephrase that to, “It’s $600 per decade. So a decade from now, would I rather have 600 bucks that has, hopefully, been invested and growing? Or would I rather have that subscription?”

Eric Zimmer
Exactly. And then the other thing that’s really helpful for me, also, is sometimes that works. Other times, I have to say like, “What else could you do with that money?” That’s always a really helpful one. Like, “Oh, I’m spending $200 a month on this business system that does X, Y, or Z. Oh, I could take that $200, and I could put it into ads for the podcast. Oh, well, that might be even more valuable.”

So that’s another one for me is always recognizing, like, “What am I trading it? What’s the actual trade here?”

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And the other saboteurs?

Eric Zimmer
Another is that we physically just don’t feel good. And this one is, part of it is the response, part of the response goes back to planning, right? Like, the thing, you know, it’s the most obvious thing in the world, but most people don’t obviously think of it.

If you’re going to do something in the morning, you actually have to start that process the night before. Because if you don’t go to bed until 2:00 in the morning, your odds of doing something at 6:00 are very low, right? So we could say that this tiredness is partially planning.

We have a phrase in recovery, “Don’t allow yourself to get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired,” because that will manifest for you as wanting to drink. And so I think we can look at this same thing. Like, “What is going on here? Am I too hungry? Well, do I need to eat?”

Sometimes we just need to take care of the physical stuff that’s going on. Or, again, back to tired, “How do I learn to talk to myself through tired?” And, for me, that is usually a version of it’s always hardest at the beginning. Once you get going, you’re going to feel better, you’re going to be more into it, you’re going to get energy from doing it. And so I talk myself through that physical state.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the last one?

Eric Zimmer
Oh, yes, a classic one. I gave it the clever name out of the short-sighted stumble. But, basically, it is the incredibly human tendency that says that, “I value what’s happening right now way over something that’s in the future.” Researchers call this delay discounting.

We’re just not good at it as people. We’re not good at going, “Oh, well, you know, I want this little thing right now, but what I really want is this.” So the short-sighted stumble, there’s two ways to work with that.

The first, for me, is to ask myself that question, “What do I want most versus what do I want now?” It puts it in time. That works for me a lot, because I go, “Well, what I want most actually is to be healthy. What I want now is to eat the ice cream.”

The other tool for this is another thing I learned early in recovery. We called it playing the tape all the way through. And it meant that, for a lot of us, we just think about the first scene. So if I go back to myself and drug addiction, what I’m playing through is how good it would feel to get high, or how bad I feel right now, and how that would help that.

But I got to keep going because what’s going to happen after that? “Oh, well, about five minutes after that, what’s going to happen is that all the shame and the fear are going to come rushing in. And then I’m going to want to get high even more because how do I cope with shame and fear? It’s by getting high.”

“Oh, and how do I have the money to do that? Oh, I got to go steal something. Oh, you know, well, you’re looking at 50 years in prison already.” I play it all the way through. And so we can do this with so many different things.

Imagine you’ve got an issue where you scroll too long on Instagram in the morning, you end up being late for work. It’s one thing to think, “I should get off Instagram.” You know, you may have that thought vaguely. It’s another thing to pause and go, “Okay, what’s going to happen next? Oh, well, I’m going to end up in 15 minutes, frantically rushing out the door, saying to myself, ‘Why do you always do this?’”

“Then I’m going to get in the car and I’m going to hate everybody on the road for going too slow. Then I’m going to get to work and I’m going to have to do that sort of awkward shuffle past my boss’ office, hoping they don’t see me. And then I’m going to sit there and wonder all morning, like, ‘Did I screw up again? Am I jeopardizing my career?’”

When I think through that and I see it and I feel it, that’s a lot more visceral than “I should probably stop doing this.” So that is the short-sighted stumble.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. All right. Well, tell me, Eric, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Eric Zimmer
I think the only thing I’ll say about the book, also, is that the second half of the book is really about dealing with the sort of changes that happen to us, and really about some of the ways that our mental attitudes shape our response to both change we’re trying to make and change that happens to us. So, in some ways, it’s kind of two books in one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, is there any kind of critical guiding light or mantra about that second piece you’d like to share?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think that it’s that we are – we’ve heard this before, I’m sure you’ve heard people say it – we are meaning-making machines. Meaning, we always are constructing meaning out of the facts of what happens.

We don’t see that. We just think the way we see it is the way it is, but learning to be able to question that is really valuable. And there’s just three quick questions we can ask ourselves, right? The first is, “What am I making this mean?” It just recognizes that we are, indeed, constructing a meaning.

And then, “What else could it mean?” And then the final one is, like, “Which of those two is most useful?” So if I have a day where I’m writing, and it goes really badly, at the end of the day, I could say to myself, “See, I knew you couldn’t write a book. You’re not a good writer. This is never going to work,” etc.

I could also say, “You know what? You just had a bad day. Everybody has bad days. You didn’t sleep well last night.” So that’s the “What else could it mean?” Which meaning is more useful? Well, the one that says, “You had a bad day. Try again tomorrow,” is far more useful.

It’s not necessarily even more true because the future is not written at that moment. It’s not that one of those is true and the other isn’t, but one of them is decidedly more useful than the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Eric Zimmer
It’s a line from a song, and the song is called “My Mind’s Got a Mind of Its Own.” It’s by Jimmie Dale Gilmore. And I love that phrase, “My mind’s got a mind of its own,” because it points to this fact that we do want multiple different things. We are motivationally complex creatures. And I just think it’s a clever way of making that obvious.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Eric Zimmer
My favorite is probably the Rat Park experiments.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Eric Zimmer
It’s basically, you know, there were a bunch of studies done that showed that if you give a rat heroin or cocaine, and it’s a rat in a cage, it will take those drugs till it dies, which tells us the basic idea is how terrible those drugs are. And this is really the way it was used, particularly, in the ‘80s, the war on drugs.

But there was a researcher named Bruce Alexander, who asked a question, he said, “Well, what if the problem isn’t the drugs, but it’s the cage?” And so he, basically, constructed what he called Rat Park, which was like paradise for rats, you know, lots of other rats to hang out with, lots of room to run around, fun things to do.

And what he found was that most of the rats, not all of them, but most of the rats moved away from a constant heroin-cocaine addiction to a normal life. Now some remain addicts, just like there’s addicts in every population. But it really pointed to the important role that our environment plays in what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Eric Zimmer
My favorite book is, it’s called The Brothers K, not The Brothers Karamazorov, which is the Russian novel by Dostoevsky. It’s called The Brothers K, and it’s by an American writer called David James Duncan, and it is a fiction book, and it’s a family saga epic. And it’s still my favorite novel, you know, 30 years after I read it, probably.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Eric Zimmer
My favorite tool is that little app I shared on my phone that allows me to sort of cause myself to pause before I do something.

Pete Mockaitis
And what is it called?

Eric Zimmer
ClearSpace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with clients, they quote it back to you often?

Eric Zimmer
“A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Eric Zimmer
OneYouFeed.net. That’s O-N-E-Y-O-U-F-E-E-D.net. You can find the book, the podcast, our weekly newsletter, all things related to what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Eric Zimmer
Keep thinking about what really matters. Keep thinking about what adds the most value. Can I share a quick story on that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Eric Zimmer
Okay. So when I started the podcast, I was leading really large software projects, you know, $150, $200 million software projects. And I, all of a sudden, had this side job that I wanted to give all my time to. And so I had this real challenge because, I mean, my professional career was really, really demanding.

And what I found out was something really interesting, is that the more time I spent thinking about, like, “What really matters in this project being successful? What really matters in this software release? What really matters?”

And I was doing that because I wanted to spend more time doing this other thing. I got better at what I did. I was spending less time doing it, and yet I got better at it, you know? And it was because I was so focused on, “What is the most important thing here?”

We do so many things every day that don’t actually really make that much difference. And by being ruthlessly focused on what did, I became better at my job while freeing up time to do something else.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Eric, thank you.

Eric Zimmer
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s wonderful to see you and talk to you again.