Want to change your life? Start small! (w/ Eric Zimmer)

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This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. And today, I wrote three pages in a journal. I exercised for seven minutes and I just finished my second glass of water. Now, I mention those things because they're all habits that I'm trying to build. They're small ones, but I think they are remarkably difficult for me to actually do every day.

And if I'm being honest, the only reason I did those habits today was because I knew that I was gonna record this podcast and I wanted to be able to talk about them. You know, I think a lot of habits are like that, right? Things that we try to force ourselves to do because they're the habits of the person that we want to be. And our hope is if we do the habits enough. it'll stop feeling like something we have to force and we'll just be closer to that ideal self.

Well, our guest today on the show is Eric Zimmer. He's the host of the One You Feed podcast, and he's the author of the new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. I'm so excited to talk to Eric. For a number of reasons, but two of the biggest are that Eric has been thinking for years about how the small actions we do every day add up to be the big meaningful results of how we live our life.

And I love that Eric is very honest about how hard it can be to change those small actions. Here is a clip from his 2016 talk at TEDx Columbus. Making lasting changes in our behavior is a battle. It's difficult, and most of us don't succeed at it for very long.

And I host a podcast where I've talked to over 150 thought leaders, and authors, and psychologists, and spiritual teachers, people like Andrew Solomon, Carol Dweck, Simon Sinek, Don Miguel Ruiz, and we talk about what it means to live a good life. And right at the heart of living a good life is being able to choose how we want to behave and actually follow through on it.

Most of us think when it comes to creating new habits that it's a matter it's a matter of willpower or discipline and that we don't have enough of ideas. We might suspect inwardly that maybe we're just the kind of person who can't follow through on things. We think that making lasting change is something that only other people can do.

One of the key ideas I'd like you to get today is that changing behavior is a skill. It's something that you can learn to do. You can get better at creating new habits. We're going to talk about how to create those habits and keep them with Eric right after this break. Första hoppet från femna. Första tryckaren. Första sjutsen. Bostaden. Eller vad är det? Det finns en första gång förall. Det är det för dig mellan 18 och 35 som ska köpa din första bostad. Läs mer på Sverb.

Jag heter Charlotte Nobell och driver eget företag som kommunikatör. Starta eget var en av mina största drömmar men också ett av mina största beslut. Av kastan för företagare gav mig tryggheten att spåga satsa fullt ut. Du är ute som funderar på att starta eget eller som redan tagits eget, gör det tryggt med små A. pengar till barn, kanske fond. Det är lilla sisterfummer och alla andra barn fummarkanse. Vi känns gåva på 90 20 900. Tack för att ni får snälla.

Today we're talking with Eric Zimmer about how small changes can make our lives much more meaningful. I'm Eric Zimmer. I'm the author of the new book How a Little Becomes A Lot The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life, and I am also the host of the award winning podcast The One You Feed. Many people who know you will know you from your fantastic podcast, The One You Feed. Um, for people who have not listened, can you tell them how you start every episode of The One You Feed?

Yeah, I start by reading an old parable of unknown origin, and it goes like this. There's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent, and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed. So this is a a very meaningful story to you, a very meaningful parable. You've you've had hundreds of conversations with people about what that means to them. Um do you remember when you first heard it and and why it stuck with you?

It would have been in some church basement in Columbus, Ohio, probably somewhere around thirty years ago when I was dealing with heroin addiction and somebody in a meeting. Told that story and I immediately got it. I think we all do, right? It's a parable. The point of a parable is you hear it and you're like, oh I know it. Okay. But it was really resonant to me at the time because my bad wolf was destroying me. I don't even know if I was feeding it so much as it was just eating meat.

But I was able to see really clearly at that point in my life, and luckily I had people helping me see this, like there are certain ways of acting and thinking that lead me towards my recovery. And there are other ways of acting and thinking that lead me further down. the uh death spiral that my addiction had become. And so it resonated really, really strongly with me. Now, it was a lot of years later when I started the podcast.

uh with the parable, but it still spoke to me. It just felt like a easy jumping off point to talk about the things that matter. This parable of the wolf is about like the biggest questions there are, right? What are the things that you that drive you? What are what's the good and what's the bad? What's the helpful, the harmful, what's the the good and the evil? I'm curious to hear a little bit how about how you think about the the scale in your own life between big and small.

Yeah, well If you were going to write film the movie of my life. Uhhuh. You would start by seeing me in a a dilapidated old tuberculosis hospital in Columbus, Ohio. in the winter that had been turned into a detox center. And you'd see me go in there and I was in bad shape. I was a homeless heroin addict. Uh I weighed a hundred pounds, my skin was yellow and jaundiced from hepatitis C. The prosecutor told me I was facing up to fifty years in prison.

And you'd see me go into a counselor's office and they say, very reasonably, we think you need to go to long term treatment. And me saying, No, thank you. And then I went back to my room and I saw with uh Real clarity that I was gonna die or go to jail if I left that building. And it was gonna happen soon.

So if we were filming the movie of my life, that would be the pivotal scene. That would be the big moment, right? We'd have the emotional strings in the background. That would be the whole thing. And sure, that's an important moment but it's only important because of the thousands of little choices I made after that. All of the off camera moments.

that add up. And I think that's sort of a way of tying the big and the small together is that yes, there are big moments, there are big uh epiphanies, there are big questions to answer in our lives. But that's just part of it, because the rest of it is the how we live those things out. And that can really only be done choice by choice, action by action, day by day. In those days after you made the the decision, right? Like I'm going to

Detox. I'm going to change my life. I'm not going to keep going down the path of of heroin addiction. I think we a lot of us, right. Like feel like that should be the moment. And then there's this weird thing that you have to actually then live your life every day after that. So can you tell me some of what what like filled the time or what Helped you to make those small choices as you were going? Well I was in a position whether fortunate or unfortunate where staying in long term treatment

was both an option for me, I happened to just be poor enough that it could ha it could happen. Um, and highly incented by the courts to do the same thing. So my first days after were entirely consumed with recovery. I was in a treatment center. I went to uh twelve step meetings, we had groups, I was sent off to write assignments, I was I l I did nothing but live recovery for a period of time.

And so for me in the beginning it was easy. It was later, you know, when I got out that of course then you start asking that question of of, you know, what do I do with the time? Now I am luckily a person who tends to by nature be pretty interested in a lot of things.

So filling time is usually not my challenge. So let me take it from the the very serious to W a place where the stakes are a little bit lower at least. Yeah. Which is I'm curious about the meta level of writing a book. And having it be about making small, meaningful choices. Because to me, when I wrote I this was my first book that I just wrote, I thought one of the most challenging parts was actually just getting myself

to sit in front of the computer. Like not even the writing, just being like, now is the time where I will do the writing. So how did the lessons that you wanted to convey either help or ironically not help you as you were writing this book? Well they helped completely. Because I did write the book little bit by little bit. As as you as the only way you can do it. You can't write the whole book now. I didn't know how to do it. I'd never done it.

I love books. They mean so much to me. And I was like, I don't I have no idea if I can write a good one. I really doubted that I could. Hm. Very relatable. I very much relate to that. Yeah. Yeah. So the only thing I really could do is as you said, I set out times that I was gonna write. And the only thing I measured was did I stay in front of the computer for the period of time that I said I was going to write? I do 30 minutes.

Then I would take a break, unless I was on in a role, but then I would take a break and I would reset and then I would be like, Okay, thirty more minutes and I would set a timer. I had a whole little routine. Set a timer, put on certain music.

set up the little apps that uh on my phone that block everything. Absolutely. Because one of the things that we know about motivation from from behavioral science is that we become more motivated When we believe in ourselves and our abilities to do the thing, we become less motivated when we doubt ourselves and we don't think we can do it.

So for me, if I had been trying to compare it against the big thing, I would have felt constantly deflated. But when I compared it to Did I Do My Thirty Minutes? Not did I write anything useful in that thirty minutes, just did I do it? Then I could go, yes, I did. Okay, good. I feel I I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, which made me more motivated, which made the next thirty minutes easier. And lots of days, yes, just like you. The trick was

Just sit down in front of the computer and start the timer. Not even 30 minutes. Even that felt like too much. And that's a surprisingly effective trick that I use in all aspects of my life, way, way more than I think. Then I think I should have to. I think it's really interesting and I love that yours was thirty minutes because I think that actually feels really

Manageable, right? Like you could just sit and stare at the wall for thirty minutes. I think you people would really struggle to stare at the wall for two hours. I have been trying to be a meditator since I was eighteen years old. This is a long time ago, right?

And way before there was the internet, way before there was anything, all there were were books on Buddhism. But but I resonated with them a lot. And they all talked about meditation and they would say you need to meditate for thirty or forty five minutes. I would sit down to meditate and it was like the dark circus rolled into town in my head, right? Like sitting there was really, really hard for me. It was unpleasant. I didn't like it.

And so I might do thirty minutes for a day, a week, maybe a month, as long as I kept my motivation sky high. But when that motivation came down, which it inevitably does, I would quit. And this pattern repeated itself for decades. This is where little by little comes in. And by little by little I actually mean something fairly specific. Please toss. I mean low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction.

Now, what low resistance means will be different per person. There are people out there who sit down and meditate and immediately will tell you, I found it so peaceful. I'm like, Okay. I I've never felt found it peaceful. Now that's not true now, but back then I never did. So for that person, thirty minutes might be low resistance. But for me, thirty minutes was way too hard.

So low resistance just means it's something that we will do. Mm-hmm. Done consistently over time means we keep doing it and in the same direction. You know, we're sort of just doing a bunch of little things in all scattered directions doesn't lead to a lot. Mm. It just leads to a bunch of little things scattered all over the place. And so by doing this, by focusing on What we can succeed at the same time.

That's how we build confidence. Now, I've coached a lot of people over the years. I used to describe myself as a behavioral coach. Maybe I still would. I don't know. But people come to me. When you hire a coach to help you change a behavior. Let's just say it's safe to say you failed at that thing a whole bunch of times before you're willing to spend money for someone to teach you how to make a change. Uh-huh. So the people coming to me do not believe in themselves.

One of my core beliefs is that change is a skill, but we take it as a state of our character. I'm lazy, I'm undisciplined, I don't have enough motivation. And when we believe that and buy into it, you're right. Our motivation w our motivation is down and we we almost bring the thing into reality.

At the same time, we can't BS ourselves. I can't say like when I was writing my book, I couldn't be like, keep going, Eric, you're like the next Hemingway. This is one of the best nonfiction books ever written. Right like My brain was mostly going like has anyone written a more boring sentence since an accounting textbook, right? Like

So I can't BS myself. So we can't believe that we're capable of achieving great things. But what we m at first, but what we can do is start from where we are, not where we wish we were, but start from where we are, and measure success in ways that are reasonable. And allow that to accumulate.

So I I wanna just drill in a little bit more to that like low resistance piece'cause I think a lot of us have this high resistance piece in our head that is the the first step. Like I have to have this giant thing. So how can we take that and like

make it into something smaller. Yeah, you're very perceptive in that because Little by little, I mean one thing is you just pick like you make the thing really small, but another way of applying little by little is you break something up into smaller pieces. So for me, I have the same issue on my task list. And when something on my task list keeps getting moved, it looks something more like this. Get video done for

X project. That's the task. That is not a task. That is about eight different steps. I have to decide what am I talking about? Then I have to build the talk. Then I have to practice delivering it, right? Then I have to work on memorizing it. And so when I look at my task list, very often what I have on there are sort of mini projects.

Even something like get taxes done is a multi-step thing. I gotta go gather all the it's this that time of year. I got 1099s and all that stuff, you know, fli all kinds of different places in my house. I gotta go get them all gathered up. Right. I need to package it up. I need to get the books uh tied up and I gotta send them to my account. I mean there's a bunch of steps in it, but I call it get taxes done.

Mm-hmm. And I see this in people all the time. And so yeah, a a way of doing little by little is to is to break it down. What is the literal first action in this process? We are strange creatures, right? In that our motivation and our ability to do things is. I I wish it was better than it was. But for example, if I have to if I've got call doctor.

Literally, there are times that I have to say the first step I have to write down is find doctor's phone number. Uh-huh. Right? I feel like an idiot. I'm like a behavior coach. I teach this to people. Surely I don't need to do that. But sometimes I do. You know, I shouldn't it doesn't seem like I should have to

trick myself into getting on the exercise bike by saying just put on your bike shoes. It seems like I should just go get on the bike. I've done it thousands of times. Every single time I've done it, I've been like, that was a great idea. Never once was I like, oh I shouldn't have done that. You'd think it would be easy. You'd think with everything I know. And yet there are lots of days where that's exactly what it is. Go put on your bike shoes.

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Okay, can I give you one that's on my to do list and you'll help me figure it out? This is a real one. You know, there's the the famous saying is like when's the best time to plant a tree, right? Yep. Twenty years ago, but the second best time is today. Yep. On my to-do list. For several weeks now I've had Plant a tree. Okay. And I get that this is I'm like, this is the quintessential example of like I should have already done this. And if I'm if not, I should do it.

today, but I keep putting it off. Because this is really genuinely has been on my to-do list for almost two months now. One of the things that I often say is that ambiguity is the mother of procrastination. Right. So immediately when you say plant a tree, I have a bunch of questions that maybe you know the answer to, but if you don't are standing in the way.

Yeah. What kind of tree? I I don't know. That's the first thing. Where are you going to plant it? Yep, not positive. What are the tools you'll need to plant it? Right. Like so where can I go plant a tree? Or even what kind of tree do I want to plant? But I even think where? That's the bigger question, right? Because I mean I more or less know I can get a tree from a nursery. I more or less know how to plant a tree.

I can pick the tree, the variety itself once I know the spot, because the spot's gonna dictate like what kind of tree will grow well there. I genuinely think that it even just the way you ask the questions of like what tree, where do you want it, what tools, th that is Answering those questions is It's making me realize that um having a a task that's actually a project

is not a task, right? Like it's a this is a series of tasks. The other thing about that though, and you you you have a sense of humor about it and that's all good. But oftentimes we don't. We see that thing that sits there and we think, what what is wrong with me? Why can I not get this done? Like this is ridiculous. This should be an easy thing. Why am I not doing it?

Which is we don't feel good about ourselves, makes us less motivated, less capable. So I'm I'm really glad that you brought that up. I've been Pushing you on some of the

You know, practical, actionable ways to make small changes and have those add up. Because I think those are really interesting. And I think anyone who's listening can. can apply those. The thing that I think is actually really special and different about your book is that it's not just about making changes, right? It is about how those changes are meaningful. It's about meaning in your life and purpose and identity.

For people who haven't read the book yet, can you tell people a little bit about how those tie together into the meaning piece? There are two components we have to figure out. The first is what I would call structural. The things we've been talking about. What am I doing? Where am I doing it? Um, how am I doing it? But there's a second component. That's really important. Which means even when I know what to do, when to do it, let's just say we got it all figured out and

You are going to uh go plant a tree tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. You've already got the tree, everything. Ten a.m. comes in, you just sit there and you go, I should plant the tree, but you don't do anything. You're just scrolling on your phone. Eleven o'clock comes by, why haven't I planted the tree? Right? You just don't do it. You have all the plans, you have all the structural things lined up and you don't do it. Why?

Well that's almost always some sort of uh emotional or mental process gone wrong. You're feeling or thinking something at that moment that is stopping you from doing it. And so that's the second really important component of change is how do we work with that moment? There is an emotional element.

of all this also that we cannot discount. We are not robots. So the first half of the book kind of covers all that. The second half of the book are about things that I would say are mindsets that make change. More meaningful. easier to do and are actually valuable in and of themselves. So an example would be self-compassion. Besides

Stopping doing drugs, self compassion, being kinder to myself inside is probably the biggest upgrade I've ever given myself. I spend a lot of time with myself, as do you, with yourself, and not Cohabitating with a jerk is a really big upgrade. But also self-compassion turns out to be the way that we are much better able to make change. But I think the thing that I will say is I am very much a realist.

Mm-hmm. Or as Hans Rosling would say, actually I'm a possibilist. But nonetheless, we we could talk about that later another time. I still have voices that pop into my head that are shockingly negative. My point being that's some pattern that's wired somewhere into some synapses of my brain that just fires off. So I can't stop it from showing up. We can't often stop the first thing that arises in us because it's just conditioned. It's just it's it's it's cause and effect.

What I can do though is what I do now, which is I hear it and I go, Hang on a second. Like, you know, and I kinda laugh at it now, because again, it's it's ridiculous to me. Because I I'm not really feeling that. It's just something that happens. I think with self compassion we want to learn to relate to it in a similar way, which is that it's gonna come back up.

None of us are gonna get to the point where when we make mistakes that we don't have some critical voice. We don't want to lose all ability to reflect on our actions. So for me, what happens when that sort of comes up and it's really strong is that I just go, Oh, look, this thing is here again. Thirty years I've been doing some form of recovery, inner work, all that stuff. Long time. Yeah. A couple years ago, I had something happen that thoroughly destabilized me. Where I was likely.

I was really, really shook up and I c I just couldn't shake it off. And part of me was going, What is r what I thought I did all this work. I thought I already covered all this. I thought we've already been through this. Like what is it doing back here again? And a therapist I was talking to said something that I thought was valuable. And he just basically said, You know what you've done is you've expanded

the range of things that you can handle without that happening. Mm-hmm. Right? That used to happen to you, you know, every three weeks and now it happens to you every twenty years. And so an analogy that I often think about with growth is it's like a spiral stair. And if you imagine going up a spiral staircase where there are things on the wall, there are pictures on the wall, you keep coming back around to those same pictures. But ideally, you come around to them at a slightly higher level.

You come around with a slightly different perspective. Maybe you have a little bit better light as you get higher up. Doesn't mean that if you've got a history of being really mean to yourself inside, that that just goes away. But for you, the next time it comes up, me you can relate to it and go, Oh, here I am again. All right, this is what this is what my brain does.

I okay, I don't like it. And I know how to talk to myself now in a way that I didn't know then, and I'm just gonna do my best with it, and we do make progress. But it's not linear. It's it's much more, as I'm describing, like a spiral like that.

I think maybe this is also a reason why the parable of the wolves speaks to you, but I'll just say maybe why it speaks to to everyone is that has to do with how you treat the wolves, not with banishing the wolves completely. Right. It's not like it's not like, oh, What uh what I'm trying to do is get rid of these wolves inside me. That's what I need to do. I'm gonna be wolf-free. Instead it's no, which one do you nurture?

Yeah, a grandfather's not like well what you do is you pull out a rifle. What you do is get a bear, because the bear scares away both wolves and now you just have one bear. That's not how it works. Yeah. Th these things are always with us. It's which do we we give the attention and the energy to. Yeah. It's one of the things I love about the parable is it says we all have these things inside of us.

The other thing that I think is interesting for me is I I have meditated before, but it's not a daily thing for me. It's not it's not a practice that I probably should do. I'm sure it would be helpful, but I I haven't done it. But maybe. I was uh I was really surprised the first time that I meditated to hear that The goal was that you know, they say like clear your mind or You know, focus on your breath and nothing else. I was shocked.

when I learned that the goal was not to have a completely blank experience the whole time, but instead to notice when I went away and went somewhere else and to try and come back. Yeah that it was it was actually about finding the Places where I stopped meditating and brought myself back.

Uh a hundred percent. Th you're never gonna have a completely quiet brain. It's not what brains do. I mean y y if you're if you're dead you might have a quiet brain. Like completely quiet. And I'm not saying that meditation you don't settle on different levels. But the brain is always doing something. Thoughts appear.

It y it's not something we just turn off completely. And you're right, the the the the heart of the process is just realizing, oh, I've gotten lost in thought again. Let me come back to where I am. The reason I bring that up is it feels like a lot of what we've talked about is you have the desire to get to this place where you're trying to be. But in fact

the muscle or the work of doing the return, the not being there, but finding your way back and maybe finding your way back more quickly or a little bit more easily or just finding your way back at all, that that is actually the point. It's not about getting to the perfect place.

A hundred percent. And I have a whole uh section in the book where I talk about this where Anything that we're going to do long term, which is most things that we think are important, if you're gonna be healthier, if you're gonna eat better, if you're gonna meditate, if you're gonna write a book, if you're any of these things, they are a matter of something you just keep doing. Now maybe a book ends and you then you're a little bit more than a little bit.

period of time, but you're probably then creating something else. I mean, I read y your book recently and I mean you've got a thousand irons in the fire, right? You're it's not like you finish it and you're like done. You're like, okay, that's done, but I still I create, so I'm over here. It's part of why we're obsessed with habits. Because we want it to become easy, right? It's hard.

to keep making the right choices in life. It's effortful. And we want that effort to go away. We would just like to program the robot to just do all the right things. From here on out. But we are not robots.

I think we have a culture that really pushes us to how can you get the most done in the least amount of time? And and that re involves you cutting a lot of corners and getting places fast, which is actually maybe not the best for our growth and our learning and for meaning, which is, you know, again, this is what so much of the book is about. Yeah, I think you're right. It it is hard to know what we really want.

We are creatures who have a great deal of motivational complexity, which just means we want a whole lot of things all at the same time. There's a lot of stuff swirling inside us. There's like values, then there's our desires, and then maybe there's needs, and there's just all of this. I call it motivational complexity and I think about it like a soup. It's hard to tell like why do I want this or why do I want that? And so all we can do is make our best guess at what's important to us.

But the challenge that we often face is what do I want most Versus what do I want now? Right? And that fundamental question is a real way of orienting back towards meaning again and again. What do I want most? Now, the challenge here is that that's a that's sort of desire versus value conflict, right? We also run into values to values conflicts, and and these are challenging. I really value my family and I really value my career. Those two things are going to be intentional.

They they pull in different directions. And so I don't have the answer for how you resolve it, because I don't think you can. But I think that by reflecting regularly, what do I want most? We're able to try and make the best decision that we can. And it's also why little by little applies here. Because we don't just get we just don't choose once.

I value my family over my career. I mean, how many parents have said this? A g a gazillion. Me, probably a hundred, two hundred times when my son was younger. I'm really gonna prioritize my family. I'm giving too much energy to my career. Great, that's probably true. But it's the day to day moment where I'm making the decision. Do I shut down the computer and walk out the door, even though my boss is in the office next door, and go to my son's football game?

Or do I sit here? And sometimes the answer is you shut down the computer and you go out the door and you go to your son's football game. There are other times that the answer is you stay in your office. Because there's something really important happening. And when we try and solve these things with big decisions. They don't they don't work because life is always changing. So little by little is a way of asking ourselves again and again, frequently and regularly, what does matter?

What's the wise response to this situation?

But like you said, we wish it would all be figured out. We wish it would be done, sorted, and and that's but that's just not the way life is. Yeah, I think this is this is why I think your work is so powerful and interesting to me, is because it really is in this way radical, right? Like we live in a society that really wants Quick, definitive. Once again. And done answers. Right. Like we want the

Shake it and bake it, put it in the microwave, it's done for everything in our life. We love certainty. We we love uh easy, quick answers. I mean I do too. Like I believe very, so very deeply that they don't exist. And yet I'll read something and I'll be like, maybe it is that easy. Maybe if I just took that program, I could reprogram all of my subconscious beliefs in a week.

And it would all be it would all be easy. Even I and I know that's nonsense. And yet I I want it, you know, we we can't help but want it. Yeah. I mean that's also what's funny about uh like sometimes this this sh this show gets categorized as like a self-help or self-improvement podcast. And uh I'm not even saying that's wrong, but it's funny to me because I feel like the genre Prides itself on like

These six tips will guarantee you sleep through the night every night for the rest of your life. And I'm like, wow. I I tried those and I still kind of woke up at two. So so I must be broken. Like, what? Why is it not working a hundred percent of the time? I yeah, I think that's a really important point is

The problem with quick answers and easy solutions is one, they don't they don't work for us. But I think the bigger problem is often that when they don't work for us, we conclude that we are the problem. Right? If you say it's six easy steps and this person's been on 30 podcasts and their podcast has a hundred million downloads and they say you just need to do those four things, and you do those four things, and you're not different.

What do you conclude? Most of us don't conclude, oh, life's not that simple. Most of us don't conclude, oh wait, I'm I'm complicated. I'm I might be different than the average. You know, like we conclude there's something wrong with us. And that's really problematic. Because the more that we think that something's wrong with us The less we have the ability to hope in our ability to change, in our ability to live the life we want to live.

And it's back to this idea that I that I believe in so strongly is that that change is a skill. We can learn to do it, but we are not all the same. Right, when I coached people, there were some people who were so hard on themselves that what I had to do was be like, all right, we have got to lighten up, we've got to relax, you've got to give yourself a lot of grace and slack.

There were other people who took no accountability for what they did. Those people I needed to say, like we gotta like we need to be a little more firm with ourselves, right? Completely different advice. But those were different people in a different place. And so with all advice, I think we need to take it on board and go, okay, does this fit with me? Does this work? Does this is this helping?

Um instead of one size fits all advice. I think there are principles that are useful. I've a I've attempted in this book to lay out what I think are a lot of principles. But if you look at my story, going to treatment, long-term treatment, is a pretty radical big step. But I I was a homeless heroin addict. Like I needed a a radical big step. And even within that, it was the little, you know, each day that I chose not to walk out of the treatment center.

But it's not to say like what's small for me might be you might need a bigger change. It's there's no rule. I guess is the is the point. Eric Zimmer, thank you so much for being on the show. Your book, How a Little Becomes a Lot The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is is such a

Wonderful accomplishment. I really recommend people read it. And I think that we need a world where everyone has read this book. So I I hope that as many people as possible do read it. Thank you so much, Chris. It's uh always a pleasure to talk with you. I really enjoy it. That is it for today's episode of how to be a better

Much to our guest, Eric Zimmer. You can listen to his podcast, The One You Feed, and read his new book, How a Little Becomes A Lot. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my new book, Humor Me, How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy is out now too. You can find out more about my live show dates and other

Projects at Chris DuffyComedy.com. How to be a better human is put together by a team led by two wolves. One wolf works for Ted and the other works for PRX. Reporting to the Ted Wolf, we've got the Lupine, Daniela Ballarazzo, Ban Ban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe, Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bo.

Hanini, Laney Lot, Tanzakasung Manibong, Antonia Le and Joseph DeBrian. Ryan Lash hunted down this video, and this episode was fact-checked by Mateus Salas, who howls at anything that is less than the truth. On the PRX side, our pack of producers roaming the audio hills.

Morgan Flannery, Norgill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please do one small action for us and send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it. We will be back next week with even more how to be a better human. Until then, take care. Erksberg Alkoholfri presenterar de riktigt uppslukande samtalen om de stora frågorna.

Ja, men tänk om en gorilla bliar av en sörn tiger och så hoppar de in i en bil. Och sen visar det som var riktigt rishög. Ja, då är ni tigen. Eriksberg, för kvalitetstid. Världens kanske mest ikoniska handbörjare behöver ingen introduktion. Du vet att den består av 100% nötkö och är oemotståndligt god Big Mac och Company. Du vet var den finns. Bara på McDonald's för bara 79 kronor. Hej, Roadrunner! Varför snabbt du är? Ja, jag blicker Red Bull. Red Bull är det vingar. Men jag är lite.

Sångens ljud börjar rapporteras in på flera håll i landet. Till exempel har ljudet av högtryckssträtt, robotkräskar och slangvindar noterats. Intresset bekräftas även från Klossolssons butiker som står ren.