The One You Feed with Eric Zimmer
This week I'm talking with someone who has an impressive 12 years of podcasting and over 800 episodes, Eric Zimmer, is the host of The One You Feed podcast, taking the name from the parable of the two wolves inside you and asking which one grows, well, it's the one you feed. After struggling with heroin addiction and homelessness in his twenties, Zimmer became deeply interested in how people make lasting changes in their lives. Drawing on both behavioral science and his own experience with addiction and recovery, Zimmer’s work focuses on exploring behavior change, meaning, and what helps people build better lives. Zimmer is also the author of How a Little Becomes a Lot.
In our conversation, Eric and I talk about why lasting change is usually built with the small, unglamorous days after the big moment and not in the moment itself. We explore how structure can reduce the need for willpower, how it can help separate deciding from doing, and how change becomes easier when we treat it as a skill to practice rather than a test of character. And while Eric hasn't been diagnosed with ADHD himself, we still get into topics like time blindness, using tools without shame, and why a little bit of something often beats a lot of nothing.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/317
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
William: All right. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. And I guess really the best place to start here is just hearing a little bit about your story, because I think that plays a lot into what we're going to talk about today.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. I could introduce myself as what I do today, or I could talk about the story that begins my book, which is the story of my addiction. Where do you want to start?
William: Yeah, let's hear about what you do today and then kind of how you got here.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. Today I am the host of a podcast called The One You Feed, which has been—we've been around for about 12 years and have done pretty well. I'm also the author of a book that just came out recently called How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. I'm also a speaker. I do one-on-one coaching with people. I lead lots of different workshops. So that's what I do today.
In order to understand how I got to a place where I wanted to do this sort of thing, it is important to go back to what is the origin story for me, which is that at 24, I was a homeless heroin addict. I weighed 100 pounds. I was jaundiced, and I was yellow from hepatitis C. The prosecutor told me I was facing up to 50 years in jail, and I was generally a fairly broken person at that point.
And so I was fortunate enough at 25 to find my way out of that and into recovery. And from there, I just became very interested in how do people change? Why do people change? Why do some people not change, right? Obviously because I was interested in it for my own life, but also because I was seeing people around me. Some of those people got into recovery, and they're with me today, and some of those people that I was close to are dead today because they were unable to make that change.
And what is it? So as I watched that, I began to see it in my own life too, post-recovery. Why sometimes could I stick with an exercise routine and yet other times I just, no matter what I did, I couldn't? Why sometimes could I be really productive at work and other times procrastinate all the time? So just this idea of these things were always in my mind, and I navigated my way into the software world. So I had a software career for a number of years. I had a solar energy company that I ran for a few years.
But about 12 years ago, I just got the idea to start a podcast where we would talk about what it means to live a good life, and I would interview people who were writing books on that topic. And I started it because I kind of needed it. I was in a marriage that was not going well. Even after addiction, I've had depression challenges. There was some of that going on. And my best friend was an audio engineer, and I thought, "This would be great for us to get to spend some more time together."
So I just launched it on kind of a whim 12 years ago, and now I've been fortunate that's been what I've been able to do for the last number of years for a living.
William: Awesome. Yeah, I totally relate to following your own itch there, where it's like, "I need this." That's very much how I started this podcast, where it's like, "I need to be doing something more," but having the structure of the podcast really let me follow through with that desire.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. I think a lot of people have benefited from my podcast, and I say that without being arrogant, right? Over 12 years, I've gotten, at this point, thousands of notes from people about how the podcast has helped them. But it has helped no one more than it has helped me. I am the biggest beneficiary of it of all, because I just got to swim in ideas and in the water of mental and emotional health.
And I also am... if you take a Big Five personality test—it's one of the most standardized, known personality tests out there—I score very high on conscientiousness, which means that it's hard for me to not do what I say, right? And so since I'm on this podcast talking about all these things, I feel that to be talking about them all the time but not living them to the best of my ability causes an internal contradiction that is very hard for me to live with. So it's caused me to behave in a way to live up almost to the person I'm being in the podcast, if that makes any sense.
William: Oh yeah, absolutely. I do a lot of monologue episodes for the podcast, and I cannot write about something that I can't do myself. It just does not work, because if I don't have a clear image of what I'm writing about, I'll just sit there and stare at that blank page and just be like, "I feel like I have an idea here, but I can't manifest it yet."
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. Yep.
William: So looking at the title of your book, How a Little Becomes a Lot and this idea of "The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life." The idea of small changes is something I find a lot of people have almost more trouble considering than having a big change. They always want to take that big swing to make a change, but I know in my life when I've tried to do that, it usually does not work out well. There's times when it has, but more often it does take those small changes.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. My book starts by me describing walking into a treatment center 30 years ago at this point, and I say, "If you were filming the movie of my life, there would be a moment there that you would see where I go into the treatment center and they say to me, 'We think you need to go to long-term treatment.' And I say, 'Ah, no thanks.' And I go back to my room, and I have a moment of clarity where I see clearly, 'I'm going to die or go to jail if I leave here.' And I go back and I say, 'Okay, I'll go to treatment.'"
That would be like the big moment. The camera would spend a lot of time there, and the music would swell triumphantly in the background. And that moment is important, but it's only important because of the thousands of little off-camera moments that happened after that. If I didn't keep taking the small little daily actions that led to my recovery, that moment would've been just another of my attempts at getting sober that didn't work.
And so on one hand, you could say going into treatment is a big step and a big change, and it was. I'm not saying that sometimes we don't need to try a big change. But even when I looked at the big change, I was like, "Oh, it still boiled down to: day by day, I stayed in treatment. I did what they said." I just did all these little things.
And if we look at any sort of change that we make, particularly any sort of change that we want to make that's long-lasting, it is a matter of there's lots of unglamorous little things that we just keep doing. And I wanted to write about that because we know that on some level. We'll say, "Rome wasn't built in a day," or, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." We know it, but it's really hard for us to kind of buy into.
To your point, we often try and make the big change. And look, if you can make the big change that you want to make and do it and stick with it, please have at it. My book is probably not the thing for you. My book is for the people who feel like, "I keep trying to change and I'm not," or, "I start out good, but I just don't keep going," or, "I can't figure out where to start or what to do."
That's what the book is really pointing at to begin with, is how do we make change lasting, and how do we actually make it meaningful? How do we take what we've learned about behavior science and apply it not just to the things that we do that help us to be a little bit healthier—exercising or eating right or meditating—but also how do we apply it to becoming wiser? How do we apply it to working with our thought patterns?
William: Yeah. And I see it a lot too, especially with ADHD, this allergy to consistency. But I think sometimes it's really about redefining what being consistent means. Because for a lot of people, yes, they're like, "Every day I have to hit this one spot to be consistent." But if we zoom out and we're like, "Okay, if I'm being relatively consistent on a weekly basis or a monthly basis," that's where you start seeing that kind of snowball effect.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah, a concept that is in the book is this idea that structure liberates. We don't think of it that way. We think of structure as imprisoning. And structure can be imprisoning. I'm not saying it's not, but there is a way in which structure liberates. However, the degree of structure and the type of structure needs to be right for us. There isn't one right answer for what structure will help you feel more liberated, more free.
But part of what structure does is it can stop us from having to decide everything all the time. Because some of my hardest days are weekends, and it's because I wake up and I have no idea what I'm doing today. I can do anything that I want. That's a hard riddle to solve for me because I'm like, "I could do this. Yeah, I should probably get some exercise, but I work hard during the week, maybe I should lie on the couch. And I could go over to my friend's house later, but I've got to do laundry."
And this just goes on and on and on, and it doesn't make for a very enjoyable day, because even if what I'm doing is trying to relax, I'm not relaxed on the inside.
If on the other hand I go, "Okay, you know what? I am just going to allow myself until noon to lie on the couch and read and let myself do that. But at noon I'm going to get up and take an hour walk. I'll come back, put the laundry in, and then go to my friend Chris's house." All of a sudden, my day feels much better to me because I gave it a little bit of structure. I stopped having to spend every minute of that day deciding.
And so there's this idea of: if we can separate decision from action—because when we have to decide what to do and get ourselves to do it in the same moment, that's asking a lot for some of us.
William: Yeah. And often it can be, especially with ADHD, following impulsivity down the track you don't really want to go down, but it just seems like, "Oh, I'm going to be productive by rearranging my spice cabinet right now." And it's like, that was not what I wanted to do with my Saturday.
Eric Zimmer: Exactly. And in the book I talk about this idea that there are two elements to us being able to make a change of some sort. The first is structural. It's: What am I doing? When am I doing it? How am I doing it? Why am I doing it? Where am I doing it? Who's going to help me do it? It's setting up my environment for this stuff. It's the sort of things that James Clear's book Atomic Habits talks a lot about.
It's that realm, and it's a really useful and important realm because behavioral scientists will agree on one—they might agree on more than one thing, but one of the things that you hear again and again if you pay attention to the literature is: "Don't rely on willpower or self-control any more than you have to."
That's why the structural can be so beneficial, right? A lot of times, what we might call procrastination isn't even quite procrastination yet, because I haven't even actually decided when I'm going to do it, let alone gotten to the point to procrastinate it. So by filling in the structural, we give ourselves a better chance.
Once that is the case, the structural gets us to a choice point. It's a moment where we decide, "I'm going to do this," or, "I'm going to do that." In that moment, structural is valuable, but then more of what we might think of as self-control comes into play. I don't love the terms willpower or self-control, but there is an element of it, right?
There is a moment where "I'm at this point, and I could choose to either do what I said I was going to do—which is go see my mom for a couple hours—or I could be distracted by the spice cabinet." If we find ourselves going in the direction that the best part of us wishes we hadn't gone in those moments, then the second part for us is to analyze: What was I saying to myself? What was I thinking in that moment? What was I feeling right at that moment? And how can I learn to rescript that or to talk to myself differently next time so that I can make the choice that I want to make?
A lot of books focus on one or the other of those things, but when you get all of it together, that's for me how the basics of change occur.
William: Yeah, because we don't exist in a vacuum. We did get distracted, but what was going on that led to that distraction? What was the thing that made us go down the path that we didn't want to? Understanding that is key to being like, "If I don't want to do that again, how do I change the circumstances?"
Eric Zimmer: Exactly. Distraction is real for everybody, and obviously even worse for people with ADHD. For me, I end up with a lot of things like alarms and reminders and all kinds of different tools because I just get lost. I think the term I've heard is time blindness, right?
I've never been formally diagnosed with ADHD, but I have some of the characteristics for sure, and time blindness is one of them. If I'm going to sit down on the couch and start reading Substack or something, I've got to set an alarm for when I want to get off the couch and stop reading, because otherwise I could be there for hours.
William: Yeah. And it's like, "Oh yeah, I'm just going to do this for..." Even for me, it's always these very small things where I'm like, "Oh, I'm just going to do this for five minutes and then I'll get moving." And then I'm like, "It's half an hour. Now I'm going to be late."
And it's a repeatable thing that I see often. It's also making me think of something I'm dealing with with my son right now, where I'll tell him, "Okay, go get dressed," and then I'll catch him trying to read a book while getting dressed. I'm like, "This is why you're getting distracted each and every time. You are trying to do two things at once, and one of them is way more interesting."
Eric Zimmer: And I think a lot of us fall into that thing where we're like, "I'll put a movie on while I'm cleaning the house," and then find out I'm watching the movie instead of cleaning. I'm like, "That was a clear mistake for me."
We live in a world that has made all of this harder. I'll be like, "All right, I'm going to pick up my phone to do X." I pick it up, but there's a text. So then I look at the text, and that sends me down some different path where, before I know it, I've suddenly decided that I need to buy a cologne that smells like clementines. And I'm like, "How did I get here?"
Because it was just one thing after another showing up in front of me. That can be really, really challenging. Everybody is challenged by that, and if you have distractibility as more of a common factor in your life, it's even worse.
William: Yeah. The phone is just such a hard thing to deal with because it's a requirement for modern life, but setting up your digital environment so that it's not going to be distracting is hard—it is not designed to be that way.
Eric Zimmer: That's right. And that's the structural element that I'm talking about. It all falls into that.
Years ago—and sometimes failing so completely at something is good—what I realized probably 13 or 14 years ago was that my ability to remember much of anything was just not very good. And I started realizing if I want to be able to remember anything, it has to get put somewhere. I started with Evernote 13 years ago, and anything that happens that I need to remember for more than five minutes, I trained myself just to put it in there because I was so fundamentally unable to do it otherwise.
Being really bad at it to that degree was really helpful because I just surrendered. I went, "You know what? Okay." I see a lot of people resisting using digital tools to help us manage our digital life because we think we shouldn't need them.
William: Yeah.
Eric Zimmer: Over and over I tell people, "If you want to be able to get X, Y, and Z done, you need to have this blocker on your phone and this blocker on your computer, and you need to set this thing up." We need help. And people consistently don't do it because they keep thinking, "I shouldn't need to do this."
But we do, right? I do. I've just learned to be like, "Okay, here's what I need."
I wrote a book, which is a thing that takes a lot of focus for a long time. If I had not figured out for me what I needed to do to create a writing container that would work, I wouldn't have been able to do it, right? I knew myself well enough to know, "Okay, here are the elements of the structure that I'm going to need to make this work."
William: Yeah. And this falls right into the conversation about willpower too, because there's so much stuff where people are like, "I should just be able to do this," and feel like it says something about them when they need to use a tool.
Eric Zimmer: I agree. It's a myth that we've got in our culture around willpower, discipline, or self-control. When we don't succeed at those things, we conclude that it's a character trait about us that says something about who we are, and so we try to force it in order to be good enough to keep doing it.
But if you ask all the behavioral people who study this stuff, they'll say, "You're going to lose at that more often than you're going to win." And the people who seem to have motivation, discipline, and self-control have learned somehow—it may be instinctive or they may have learned it somewhere—how to navigate those things.
So one of the key ideas that underlies my entire book is that change is a skill, meaning we can get better at it. But most of us think there's something fundamentally wrong with us. This is where diagnoses like ADHD, depression, or addiction get tricky. The diagnosis is often very helpful in explaining why we are the way we are, but if it becomes limiting...
At least in my experience as a person who suffered with depression and addiction, it's helpful to a point, but at a certain point it's not. If I take on the mantle of being a person who is depressed, then it makes it much harder for me to make certain changes to that.
It's not that I don't have depressive tendencies or that there may not be something specific going on in my brain. I'm not saying, "Oh, it's all in your mind." That is not what I am saying in any way, shape, or form. But we have to open up to the fact that we can get better at these things. We can learn. And anybody listening to this show probably already is sold on that, or you wouldn't be bothering to listen to a show like this.
William: Yeah. I always find the diagnosis piece very helpful in just going: if I'm just "bad at time management" versus "I have ADHD and that makes time management much more difficult," then I can be like, "Okay, there's something I can do about time management with the ADHD piece." But if I'm just "bad at time management," the response is usually just "try harder."
Eric Zimmer: I agree 100%. Like I said, it's a subtle point around when a diagnosis is really helpful—helping alleviate shame, helping us learn what to do, and giving us tools—versus when we allow it to define us completely. That's kind of all I'm saying.
William: Oh yeah, and everyone brings their own baggage along with these kinds of things. I've known people that really don't want a diagnosis because of exactly what you're saying—it would define who they are, and they don't want that. They just want to figure out their own systems without having a label.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. I identified and still identify as an addict and an alcoholic because there's a usefulness to that for me. And I know other people who hate that label and don't want it. So I'm like, "Okay."
Ultimately, with all of this stuff, there is no one-size-fits-all prescription for any of us. Unfortunately, the self-help world likes to sell those, and I just don't think they exist. There are useful tools. I hope my book is a useful tool, your podcast is a useful tool. But there's still a certain element of always asking: "What works for me?" Because I'm not the same as you, you're not the same as Bob, Bob's not the same as Sue, and on it goes.
William: Yeah. Especially with ADHD, everyone has different symptoms and different ranges of symptoms that they experience. I could tell people exactly what works best for me, and there's a good chance it won't work at all for them.
I've talked numerous times about how I don't tend to be late to things, but that comes from having anxiety about being late. It's not a good system for keeping on time, but it's what I've lived with, and I've been working on it to be like, "Okay, let's not be stressed out all the time about being late."
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. Depression is a similar thing, right? People who think deeply about things like anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions start to look at it and go, "This is very interesting because these things present very differently in people." Oftentimes you end up with multiples of a diagnosis.
At a certain point you start going: Is there a commonality? Is there something underneath all this that we haven't yet figured out or discovered? Or is it truly that these things are just multivariable conditions with no common underlying theme because there are so many different causes and conditions? I think addiction is that way for sure. People end up in addiction from a whole lot of different places, for a whole lot of different reasons and whys, and solving it is also a complex thing. My experience has been the same with a lot of mental health.
William: Yeah, because as you were saying in the beginning, you were thinking about why change works for some people and doesn't for others. That's a big aspect: we all have to approach it differently. If we try that one-size-fits-all solution, it's probably not going to work.
Eric Zimmer: The news after me studying this question and interviewing over 800 incredibly smart people over the years is that there is not one single answer to that question. There is not one answer to why people change or don't change. There are a lot of different answers. There are patterns and different things, but you can't reduce it to something simple. You can't reduce it to a "five-second rule," to quote somebody who's doing very well in the self-help space. Life doesn't work that way.
But it doesn't mean that the five-second rule can't be useful to you in some aspect either. I'm not saying that.
William: Yeah. Certain things work in one situation and not in another. I've heard people talk about writing multiple books: in their first book they did this one thing, so for the second book they tried the same thing and were like, "It did not work at all."
Eric Zimmer: Yep. Yeah, that's a fascinating thing, right? I think most listeners might experience this too: you find something that works for you for a while and you're like, "This is great." And then it ceases to work and you're like, "Oh, for crying out loud." Now, that can be a frustrating moment.
William: Yeah. One of the things I find too is that when that's happening, I'm often not considering what's changed in my life. I'm like, "Oh, I'm just doing the same thing." But if I look back and say, "Oh yeah, I did this thing 20 years ago and that worked great for training for a half-marathon," that wouldn't work now because I have kids, a completely different life, and I'm not exercising every day like I used to. I have to do things completely differently if I want it to work.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. It's why life never gets figured out. It's a myth we all have. We want life to get figured out, but it doesn't happen because life just keeps changing and we keep changing. As soon as I figure out what it's like to be 50, I'm now 55, and I'm like, "Now what the hell do I do? It's different."
Life doesn't sit still long enough for us to solve it, which can be frustrating, but it's also liberating to go, "Oh yeah, that's just the way it is." There's nothing wrong with me because I can't quite get it figured out. It's because it keeps changing.
William: Yeah. That's such an important message too for people: "There is nothing wrong with me," instead of getting caught up with, "I can't do this, so there has to be something wrong with me."
Eric Zimmer: Yes. I've spent a lot of time in the self-help and spiritual worlds, and there's this idea that we can fix being human, or that we can fix life being difficult. And you can't. Even at the most basic level, we're all going to get old, we're going to get sick, and we're going to die. Not to be morbid, it's just going to happen. There's no fix for it, and that's the way life is.
As long as we keep thinking that because it's not fixed there's something wrong with us, that's where we suffer a lot. We can be very freed by: "Oh yeah, okay, life is difficult. Of course it's difficult. I'm having a challenge right now. That is what it means to be a human being."
William: Yeah. I was cleaning my office the other day and came across a note from a long time ago. All it said was, "You will always struggle." At first I thought, "Oh, that's terrible." But then I realized why it was there: even if I fix all of my problems today, tomorrow there will be a new problem. So it isn't an "Oh no, I'm always going to struggle." It's like, "Oh, I'm always going to have to find new solutions, and it's up to me to choose how I react to that."
Eric Zimmer: Yes, 100%. I've spent a lot of time studying Buddhism, and people sometimes think there's a bleakness to Buddhism because it starts off with: suffering is a fact of life. But when I first heard that, I found it enormously liberating. I was like, "Finally, somebody's telling the truth about the way things are."
There is struggle in life, but there's also great beauty and joy. In Buddhism, there's a discussion of the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows. That's our lives. We just want 9,999 joys and one sorrow, but our lives are flowing between those things, and there's a way to be more at peace with that when we don't resist it.
William: Yeah, because it's all about our own interpretation of events. The worst day of our lives might be so much better if we just accept it as it is and figure out how to go with it. It doesn't mean it's not bad; it just means we don't have to make it so much worse.
Eric Zimmer: It's so funny you say that, because I've joked that the title of my next book is going to be Just Don't Make It Worse. Because we are so capable of making things worse, whether by how we react outwardly or inwardly.
I spend a lot of time in the book talking about perspective—how we see the world. We think we see it accurately, but we never really do. Every view is influenced by our previous causes and conditions. But the more that we can ask ourselves, "What am I making this mean?" and then, "What else could it mean?" and finally, "Which of those interpretations is most useful to me?"
I'll give you an example from my own life. When I started writing this book, I had so much self-doubt. I haven't had that much self-doubt in a long time, because I interview people who write great books. I've interviewed a ton of New York Times bestsellers. So I sat down to start my book, looked at it, and thought, "It's not that good. It's not bad, but it's not that good."
So I sat down for a day and wrote. At the end of the day, it didn't go well. I came home and said to myself, "See? I knew you couldn't do it. You're not meant to be a writer. You don't have the skill these people have. All those bestselling authors went to Harvard and Yale, and you never even went to college."
Okay, that's what I'm making it mean. I could also say, "You know what? You were just tired today. You didn't sleep great last night. Everybody has an off day. Just get back to it tomorrow."
Which of those is more true? Neither. Neither of them is more true at that moment. I don't know the future. I don't know whether I'm going to write a great book or not. But I do know that one of those interpretations is far more useful if I want to write a book, and it's not the one that says I can't write.
When we realize that we're making all this stuff mean something, we can start to question those meanings and try to interpret things in the most useful way to us. It's not about making stuff up, lying, or forcing a "positive mental attitude." It's recognizing that we really don't know in a lot of cases, but the brain is never happy with "I don't know." It always wants to make a meaning.
William: Yeah. Whenever I'm really struggling with something, I love to fall back on the phrase: "What is the story I'm telling myself?"
Eric Zimmer: There you have it. That's it. Yep.
William: Because so often, when I write it down, I'm like, "That's a dumb story. I really shouldn't be going with that one."
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. And sometimes our interpretations seem incredibly real to us. So all we can do is open up a little bit of space for: "What else could it mean?" Even if I still 90% believe the negative interpretation I came up with, if 10% of me thinks, "Okay, maybe that's not it," I can work with that.
William: And when we're talking about consistency and building our systems, every day we don't have a consistent energy level. If I had a bad night's sleep before and go write and it's crap, I have to look at what led to that day. If it was a day where I was having a great time, maybe I should examine why I can't write when I'm really happy. But more often than not, it's, "Oh yeah, I had two hours of sleep and fought getting the kids out the door, so I was stressed." That explains a lot of why I struggled that day.
Eric Zimmer: Absolutely. That's why structure is valuable, but within structure we have to have flexibility. A phrase I use all the time is that a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.
William: I rely on this one a lot. I'll be like, "Okay, I'm going to work out for an hour at noon."
Eric Zimmer: And at noon, somebody calls me, and the next thing I know I'm on a call for 25 minutes. I've only got 35 minutes left, and I can't go to the class I was planning to go to. But then I tell myself, "You know what? I could just walk for 15 minutes." A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.
We have to be able to roll with the fact that life doesn't sit still. We can make really good plans, but as the famous battlefield axiom goes: plans don't survive first contact with the enemy. You make a plan, and it works sometimes.
When I'm working with a coaching client, we'll build a great, specific plan: "Here's what you're going to do." And then I'll say, "Okay, now what's going to go wrong?" We start working through it: "You plan to work on your novel after the kids get on the bus in the morning. What are we going to do on the days that the kids don't go to school? What else could go wrong? What's gone wrong in the past?"
They might say, "If I don't get a good night's sleep, it's very hard for me to stay on task."
I'm like, "Okay, what do we want to do on those days?" The answer might be, "I'm just not doing anything today, and I'm not going to feel bad about it." Or the answer might be that instead of writing, you just read during that time. You think about what's going to happen. You can't plan for everything, but we can plan for a fair amount of what is likely to come. Most of the time when we build a plan, we're building a best-case scenario, and we get disappointed by those very quickly.
William: Yeah, so quickly, where you're just like, "Man, I did not think about a lot of things involved in this." Especially because the best-case scenario is something I came up with at 2:00 AM when I couldn't fall asleep, having this grand vision of what tomorrow is going to be like. It's completely unrealistic.
Eric Zimmer: Yeah. The other version of that is the rested, caffeinated version of me comes up with a plan that the tired, after-work evening version of me has to carry out. We have to take into account who is actually showing up at that time and what that person's capacity is, not who I am at 9:00 AM. My capacity and enthusiasm at 9:00 AM is radically different than it is at 9:00 PM. The 9:00 AM me will sign up for almost anything. The 9:00 PM me is like, "Nope, forget it. We're not doing that."
William: All right, we're coming up on time here, so I was wondering if you had any final thoughts that you wanted to leave the audience with?
Eric Zimmer: I would just come back to what I said earlier: change is a skill, and we can learn skills. If I asked you, "Could you get better at playing guitar?" you would probably say, "If I practiced, I would get better." Can you get better at—pick your thing. "Yeah, if I practiced at it, I could."
That's the mindset we need to take when it comes to making change. I can learn how to do this. Oftentimes we show up with a lot of previous failure, and it's important to realize: okay, this time can be different. I'm learning new things, I have new skills, and I'm trying a new approach. I'm not the same person that I was.
It's hard not to carry past failures into our current attempt, not that we don't want to learn from them—because we do—but we don't want to limit ourselves. When we start saying, "I'm just the kind of person who..." that's when we need to come back to: change is a skill. I can learn it.
I always tell people I'm working with: "Let's think of this as a puzzle. We don't know how to solve it yet. We're going to keep playing around with moving pieces to see if they fit, but we can solve it." That spirit makes us more able to keep moving in the direction of becoming the people we want to be: "I haven't figured it out yet, but I'll get better at this."
William: Yeah. And you don't have to learn the entire new skill all at once. I remember learning how to juggle: you start with just two balls, tossing them back and forth. It was a sequence of small steps. At the end I realized, "I can juggle now! I wasn't even close when I started."
Eric Zimmer: Everything is that way. You can't solve next Thursday's problem today. You can do things today that will make next Thursday likely to have a better outcome, but you can't solve next Thursday's problems today. I can't jump nine steps ahead in my ability to play guitar, as much as I wish I could, but I can get better by trying.
William: All right, thank you so much for coming on the show. I think there's just so much in here that people are really going to enjoy.
Eric Zimmer: I hope so. Thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.
This episode's Top Tips:
Change is a skill you can get better at, not a trait that is set in stone. While it can feel impossible to change at first, it is something that we can get better at, it just takes practice. This doesn't mean that the process will be easy, just that if you keep at it you can make progress.
When possible, make the decision about what you’re going to do, before you’re in the moment of having to act. By giving yourself a little structure, you’re not asking yourself to make a fresh decision every minute. And while you’ll still have a choice to make when the time comes, you’ve already made that choice at least a little easier.
Often our plans are built out of our best case scenarios and can break down when we hit the speed bumps of real life. So it's important that we remember that a little bit of something beats a lot of nothing. This means that we want to decide the minimum version of what we're doing instead of relying on that best case scenario.