How Small Choices Create Lasting Change (Eric on The Jordan Harbinger Show)

In this special episode, we’re sharing Eric’s recent appearance on The Jordan Harbinger Show. Eric joins Jordan to explore the ideas behind his book, How a Little Becomes a Lot, including why lasting change rarely comes from one dramatic breakthrough, how all-or-nothing thinking keeps us stuck, and what it means to build a better life through small, repeatable choices. They also discuss Eric’s journey through addiction and recovery, the hidden forces that derail our best intentions, and how reducing resistance can help us keep moving toward what matters—even when motivation disappears.

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Key Takeaways:

• Eric shares his story of addiction and the small choices that led him to recovery.
• Why dramatic turning points matter less than the daily decisions that follow.
• The “little by little” approach to creating lasting behavioral change.
• How all-or-nothing thinking keeps us stuck—and what works instead.
• Why motivation is unreliable and consistency matters more.
• Making habits easier by reducing resistance and lowering the barrier to starting.
• Breaking big goals into small wins that build momentum.
• The six common ways we sabotage our own self-control.
• Why changing your actions can reshape your thoughts and emotions.
• How flexibility—not perfection—is the key to sustaining change over time.

Jordan is the host of The Jordan Harbinger Show, where he interviews leading entrepreneurs, celebrities, creators and experts on psychology, performance, life and success. For all his work in the field, Forbes named Jordan one of the 50 best relationship-builders in the world, and Inc. Magazine recently called him “the Larry King of Podcasting.” Jordan has shared his ideas around the world as a speaker and consultant. His work has been presented in Silicon Valley (at companies such as Google, Apple, Twitter, and Square) and to various government branches and agencies (including all branches of the U.S. Military, the Department of State, and Department of Defense). He has also given talks on security, social-engineering and psychology to BlackHat, DEFCON and Harvard Business School, and has advised private companies and law-enforcement agencies on their security and communications. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, Jordan shares all of this experience—and the system born as a result—with his listeners.

Connect with Jordan Harbinger: Website | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Eric and Jordan Harbinger, check out these other episodes:

If you enjoyed this conversation between Jordan Harbinger and Eric Zimmer, check out these other episodes:

⁠How Small Changes Lead to Lasting Transformation in Your Life with Eric Zimmer⁠

⁠How to Make Lasting Changes with John Norcross

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:00:00  You could hop on Instagram and within an hour you could have ten new changes you think you need to make in your life. And we can’t make ten changes. We can make a couple at best usually. And so having the patience to say, like, I’m going to work on this, this is the thing I’m going to work on. And staying with it is how a little actually does become a lot.

Chris Forbes 00:00:28  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:13  On today’s episode, I’m the Guest. This is a conversation with Jordan Harbinger, who’s a good friend and has had a podcast about as long as I have. So he’s a real pro, and we talk about my book, How a Little Becomes a Lot, lightly edited for this show. In the conversation with him, I talk about being at a party in the Hollywood Hills and standing in that house, and what I wanted was money. Two nights later, I was in a room full of starving artists, and what I wanted was their life. I tend to want whatever is put in front of me. Commercials sometimes work on me embarrassingly well. So how do you tell which desires are actually yours? Jordan and I get into that and plenty more. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Jordan Harbinger 00:01:59  So you opened this book, which we’ll link in the show notes, which is what honestly sounds like the worst possible version of your life. You’re about £100 or whatever you said you were. You got hepatitis. You’re a heroin addict.

Jordan Harbinger 00:02:12  You’re maybe going to prison at some point or just killing yourself inadvertently with drugs. What does that actually feel like day to day?

Eric Zimmer 00:02:20  This is a long time ago, so it’s hard to fully bring it into view. But I would say it’s a pretty miserable existence. It is essentially a few moments a day where you get high and feel good for five minutes at that point, and the rest of it is fear and craving and despair and shame, you know, having to hustle to figure out how to get the money that I needed. So there’s crime involved. It’s really a lousy, lousy way of life.

Jordan Harbinger 00:02:53  I mean, it sounds miserable. And everybody who sees it, it looks miserable, but obviously. Well, I guess that appropriate next question is how do you get started with something like that? Because it seems like you see heroin addicts and you go, wow, I would never do that. But that somehow didn’t happen with you.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:09  It’s ironic that I became a heroin addict who’s afraid of needles as I was and am.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:15  I mean, it started like probably most everybody starts with you start experimenting with alcohol and drugs as a teenager. And I reacted oddly from the very beginning. I remember drinking one of my first times, drinking and waking up the next morning, and there was the vodka was still there, and I went to the fridge and I pulled out orange juice. I poured the vodka in and I started drinking. That is just an unusual behavior. I learned that you could get drunk drinking scope mouthwash.

Jordan Harbinger 00:03:46  Oh, man.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:47  Then I learned that in order to offset the problems with that, you could drink half a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. I was on a church youth trip where I unleashed this secret upon all my fellow people. But none of them wanted to do the Pepto-Bismol trick, so everybody was vomiting.

Jordan Harbinger 00:04:04  This is a church trip. The pastor must have loved you for sharing this with the group.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:08  Oh, exactly. I was invited back promptly. And then, strangely enough, I stopped using drugs and alcohol in high school because I had started this tutoring program for disadvantaged kids, and I just saw what alcohol and drug use was doing to their lives.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:22  But when I was 18, my best friend started dating my girlfriend.

Jordan Harbinger 00:04:26  That hurts a lot.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:27  It hurts. And so somebody said, have a drink. I said, sure, and from that moment on, I was rarely sober. Again, it was alcohol. It was weed. And then I played music in bands and I joined a new band, and I was, you know, going to band practice. And these folks were, I mean, more messed up than I was. And I was like, what is wrong with these people? Well, I mean, what was wrong with them was they were heroin users. And one of them said, you want to try it? And I said, sure. And that began several years of misery.

Jordan Harbinger 00:05:00  Yeah. I mean, it just does not. Well, it all starts from pain, I suppose, but then it just gets worse from there. Do you tell the story about getting money from your grandpa? Take us through this, because I think a lot of us can put ourselves in your shoes, and it’s upsetting.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:14  Yeah, I had been sober about a week at this point, and I was convinced that I was done. I was able to see, like, I’m dying, I’m going to jail. I was done, and I was sort of excited about the next chapter of my life and was around Christmas. And I went to the Zimmer family Christmas party, and my grandpa handed me my gift, which was an envelope. I opened the envelope and in it was $25, which just happened to be the exact amount that one thing of heroin was a baggie. I don’t know what the hell we called it then. And immediately that voice that I wished wasn’t there in my head. Just start it up, you know, yelling to go get high. And I resisted it for a little bit, but not for very long. And I called my dealer who said, meet me at AutoZone, which was the shitty place in Columbus. We’d meet behind by drugs. And I remember the drive there. It was winter.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:10  It was snowing. Aerosmith’s Dream On was playing on the radio, and I was sobbing because I so desperately didn’t want to do it. And yet I had no ability not to do it at the same time, which is a really awful feeling.

Jordan Harbinger 00:06:26  Well, yeah. And I think a lot of people can put themselves in your shoes, maybe not with the heroin part, but in the feeling that you’re doing something and you’re letting other people down and you’re letting yourself down and you can’t help yourself and you feel shame, but also compulsion at the same time. And again, you know, most people aren’t probably heroin addicts or former heroin addicts, but I think we’ve all eaten something we know we shouldn’t be eating, or have done something that’s making us sick, or have drank or whatever. Done something to someone that we regret and even in the moment. And we’re like, I shouldn’t do this. And then it’s like, But I’m going to do it anyway. And you’re just like, why? Why am I this person? And I think a lot of us can imagine letting down your grandpa.

Jordan Harbinger 00:07:03  I mean, for most of us, the only thing that’s worse than letting down your grandpa is like letting down your own kids or something like that. I mean, it’s way up there.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:10  Yeah, it’s got to be up there. Luckily, I didn’t take him with me to AutoZone, so I spared him that indignity. Yeah, all of us know that feeling of watching ourselves make exactly the wrong choice. And by wrong, I mean the choice. You know, the best part of us knows we shouldn’t make.

Jordan Harbinger 00:07:26  Well in your life. And in the book, there’s this moment people love to latch on to this, right? You walk back into the room and you’re like, all right, I’m gonna get clean. And like, in the Hollywood version of this, you do. You just get clean. There’s a montage of you, I don’t know, jogging or hitting a punching bag in, like, going and volunteering at an old folks home instead of doing heroin. And it’s like, oh, good job, buddy.

Jordan Harbinger 00:07:46  But with the book, you’re largely saying it’s not this moment that changes your life. So what does.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:53  Yeah. What you’re describing is a moment in the book where I agree to go to long term treatment, and that would be the big moment. Or we often talk about hitting rock bottom or this one thing occurs, but that moment is only significant because of all the thousands of little choices I made after. If I had not made those choices, I would not have stayed sober. And that moment would be just like all the others that I thought I was going to get clean and failed at. And so we over prioritized sort of the epiphany, the watershed moment. And we tend to under appreciate all the little steps that we make along the way. After that, there are how we actually change.

Jordan Harbinger 00:08:36  Why do you think people latch onto the watershed moment? Because it’s sexy. It’s kind of like easy to wrap our minds around the time that this thing happened.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:45  Yeah, it’s a good story. I mean, we love stories.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:47  We like drama And the truth is a little more boring. You know the truth. As I’m saying it here is a little bit more boring to say, like, well, yeah, that was important, but I didn’t hit the punching bag three times. Visit for old people in the nursing home and suddenly I was fixed, right? I got better a little bit by a little bit. Day after day, you know, choosing to go to a meeting, choosing to call my sponsor instead of my dealer, choosing to drive a different route home instead of going by a bar. All those little choices, none of which are monumental in and of themselves, though, are what makes the difference.

Jordan Harbinger 00:09:23  I guess it makes sense to go buy drugs there behind AutoZone. Now you can’t go buy new windshield wipers because you have to go to AutoZone. I mean, what do you gotta do? You have to avoid those triggers forever.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:33  Yeah, I still take the bus everywhere. I haven’t owned a car since.

Jordan Harbinger 00:09:37  Oh, man. Yeah. Oh, man. I can’t refill the wiper fluid. It’s triggering for me. I need honey, I need you to do it. how long are you to lean on this? Excuse, Eric. All right. Yeah, you told me on the phone. I mean, this is years hence, right? I mean, you told me this a couple of months ago. You ended up having to drive. Was it OxyContin or oxycodone to your mom? You said something kind of, I don’t know. Funny is quite the right word. But you said something that I thought was in the moment, quite funny, as you were, like, I would have robbed you at gunpoint for those a few years ago. And I didn’t even think about popping those instead of driving into my mom. So you you have kind of, like, completely turned the ship around when it comes to this.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:18  Yeah. The story that we told about me driving to AutoZone opens up a chapter in the book, and the last story in that chapter is exactly what you said.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:27  I had been picking up oxycodone at the pharmacy and driving it to my mom for several weeks before I even thought about it. And yeah, I would have probably robbed you at gunpoint for those. And now they had about as much emotional significance as a loaf of bread, which is incredible. I don’t tell that story to brag. I tell the story because it shows that what often seems completely insurmountable to us can become second nature down the road. I don’t struggle not to do drugs anymore. It’s not there in that kind of day to day struggle. Now, there’s things that I do that I think keep myself mentally and emotionally healthy enough that those cravings or those feelings don’t come back. But yeah, it’s disappeared as a problem for me and for anybody that’s dealing with the compulsion. That’s part of what’s hard is you think about life without it, and you just imagine that you’ll always want it. Like, yeah, maybe I could give up whatever your thing is. Gambling, I don’t know, maybe I could give up gambling, but I’d always miss it.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:31  I’d always wish I could do it. And the truth of people who get over these things is that’s not true. The thing just ceases to be attractive to you. Which seems impossible. From where I was sitting at one time, I would not have believed you if you told me that I might have believed. Yeah, maybe. Maybe I could stay sober. But I would not have believed that I no longer would care about heroin. That was inconceivable.

Jordan Harbinger 00:11:58  Yeah. You just. What? Thought you’d eventually develop willpower to resist it on a daily basis.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:03  Exactly. Yep.

Jordan Harbinger 00:12:04  So it turns out that it’s the boring stuff. The unsexy stuff that actually helps you change. So I would love to talk about this because first of all, why does the boring stuff work?

Eric Zimmer 00:12:14  Well, I don’t think it works because it’s boring.

Jordan Harbinger 00:12:17  Well, of course not. But there’s no montage, right? It’s just kind of like. All right. I slowly recovered from this situation.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:24  I mean, I think part of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:25  Right, is that anything that we are trying to change that is meaningful tends to be something that is just going to have to continue to go on for a long time. You don’t get in shape once and then it’s over. You don’t eat healthy once and it’s over. These are like lifestyle changes. And so they have to be something that we can continue to do. And the problem for most of us, a lot of the time is we take on too much. We think that we can start working out 90 minutes a day. Also, add cold plunges in journaling and meditation, and I’m going to make all that happen.

Jordan Harbinger 00:13:03  And you got to quit smoking at the same time.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:04  Yeah, yeah. And so we try that and we inevitably fail at least part of it. And then we have a tendency when we don’t succeed at doing something, we have a tendency to then conclude we can’t do it and give up what the little by little approach allows us to do is to set our goals reasonably enough that we can succeed at them, and success builds upon itself, right? We know motivation goes up when we feel good about ourselves and good at our chances of something happening, and it goes down.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:39  When we feel bad about ourselves or we doubt our ability. So by doing something that we’re able to do, we become more motivated and we can build over time if we need to. And little by little, I mean something actually very specific. I mean low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction. So it doesn’t necessarily mean tiny low resistance for you. And I might be different. You might be in really good shape. And so going to the gym for 45 minutes for you, it’s not that hard. I, on the other hand, might be wildly out of shape and go to the gym for 45 minutes would be way too hard. I could never sustain.

Jordan Harbinger 00:14:18  A near lethal experience if you’re in terrible shape.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:21  Exactly. So it means what can I get myself to do? And then consistently over time is how it starts to accumulate. And then in the same direction is also important because you could hop on Instagram and within an hour you could have ten new changes you think you need to make in your life.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:39  And we can’t make ten changes. We can make. A couple at best usually. And so having the patience to say like I’m going to work on this. This is the thing I’m going to work on. And staying with it is how a little actually does become a lot.

Jordan Harbinger 00:14:54  How do people not lose motivation? Because it seems like with motivation, with the idea that you have to stick with something, it’s good to have a big emotional payoff. And that’s really hard when it’s the big emotional payoff is washboard abs and a spray tan or whatever not. I went to the gym on Monday, you see what I’m saying? Like, I think a lot of people, they get motivated by this, like big. Yeah. What is it called? Big hairy audacious goals. That’s like the yeah, that’s a trendy thing people talk about. They have those because it’s like so insanely motivating to think, oh, I’m gonna, I don’t know, have a YouTube channel that a million people watch all of my vlogs about Pokemon.

Jordan Harbinger 00:15:29  That’s motivating. Showing up and turning the camera on. Not motivating maybe.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:34  Well, yeah. And I don’t think there’s a one size fits all prescription for anybody on anything. You know, This book is for people who have found themselves struggling to make changes. If you can set a big, hairy, audacious goal and you can change your life overnight and you can just keep doing it, I would set this book down. Sure, and I would keep going. But for the rest of us, this is an approach that works. But I agree with you because you’re right. We do things emotionally, and one of the problems of little by little is you get into this long middle where not much is happening. So I think there’s a few different ways to work on that. Even if you have a big goal, it always makes sense to deconstruct it into smaller goals along the way because then you are getting emotional payoff, right? I had to write a book or I got to write a book.

Jordan Harbinger 00:16:29  I was going to say, you did make that choice. That one’s on you, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:32  It is 100%. I got to write a book. It’s a big undertaking. And so what I divided the book up into to begin with was simply writing sessions, and if I did the writing session, I tried to celebrate that, and then I got to divide it into chapters. I’d be like, oh, look, the intro is done. Oh, look, the first chapter is done, even though the end goal was certainly a whole book, but there’s emotional payoff along the way. There’s a couple other things that we can tune into, and one of them is that when we do what we say we’re going to do, essentially, if we make and keep promises to ourselves, there is a satisfaction in that. There’s an internal alignment that we feel when we do that. And so if we can tune into that, there is emotional payoff every time there. And we can also tune into when we don’t do what we say we’re going to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:28  We know how that feels. It doesn’t feel good. So those are more subtle clues than the six pack abs, but they’re real clues.

Jordan Harbinger 00:17:35  That’s a good point. I’ve never regretted making a workout right in the morning. It’s never. Probably never happened to me. Never. But I always feel like such crap. If even if I’m sick and barfing and have a fever of 104, if I skip a workout, I’m like, I feel guilty. And my trainer is like, why you? I don’t even want to see you in this condition. What are you talking about? Yeah, and you still feel bad skipping a workout? Exactly. There is. The parable of a little becomes a lot. Tell me about this man who chiseled through a mountain. It’s funny because you told me that story on the phone. And then I heard it again from a friend, like five days later, which I thought was a story I’ve never heard before, was told to me by two different friends in the same week.

Jordan Harbinger 00:18:14  I thought that was kind of a fun coincidence.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:16  Yeah, strangely enough, I came across it sometime in the last few months too, and I was like,

Jordan Harbinger 00:18:21  When did it happen? Is it recent or is that why?

Eric Zimmer 00:18:24  No, it’s not recent. It is not recent. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I feel like it’s like maybe my parents generation or maybe my grandparents generation. It’s not.

Jordan Harbinger 00:18:33  New. It’s totally not recent at all. All right. Not at all. It took its time making its way over to the west.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:38  Yeah, there was a guy named Dashrath who lived in rural India, and his wife became sick, and he took her to the nearest hospital, which took about two hours to get to, and she died on the way. As the crow flies, it’s about 15 minutes to that hospital, but there’s a ridge in between them. And so this guy comes back and he takes out a chisel, and he starts chiseling away at the wall, and people think, what? This guy’s nuts.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:07  Okay. Everybody responds to grief differently, but this guy is saying he’s going to chisel through this mountain to get to the town faster. That’s crazy. It’s never going to happen. Well, he just keeps showing up day after day. He keeps chiseling away, and slowly he begins to make progress. And so the people in the town are starting to become kind of impressed by this. And they’re like, okay, well, yeah, here, here’s a new hammer, here’s a chisel, and let me help for a little while. You know, here’s some food. Well, eventually the guy chisels This small little passage, not very wide and not very far. Actually, I don’t know exactly. Far enough. But he basically makes a cut through a little path to the other place. And now people can get medical care in 15 minutes. Wow. And so what seemed impossible a guy did by just showing up and doing his little bit again and again and again and again. And I think that’s a really powerful story in that regard.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:06  I think luckily for most of it, I mean, you talk about to your point, like the emotional payoff. This guy had nothing until it went all the way through.

Jordan Harbinger 00:20:14  If you stop one foot from the end of that, you have wasted your time. Essentially.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:18  Exactly. Now, for most of us, luckily, that’s not the case, right? We start taking positive action in our life towards things that matter to us. We start getting benefits. So our little bit, we don’t have to wait till it’s a lot for us to get some degree of benefit from it. But he did. But it’s still a very inspirational story of again. What seems impossible can be done if you just have the persistence to do it.

Jordan Harbinger 00:21:10  I’m going to run it right now by saying, okay, fine, Eric, cute story, but what if I pick up one piece of litter a day off the ground? That’s not gonna do anything.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:17  No, it’s not.

Jordan Harbinger 00:21:18  Unless people stop littering, in which case I’ll eventually clean it up.

Jordan Harbinger 00:21:21  I guess that’s where my analogy breaks down.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:23  But actually, it’s funny that you bring this example up because I was just walking last night, and I’ve got this little trail that goes around, like where I live, and there’s a fence and there’s a freeway over there. On the other side of it is just trash. Lots of trash. Yeah. And I came around and there was just this little corner, and it occurred to me like, you know what? I could clean that corner up. You know, if every time I came by here, I picked up a piece or two of trash, eventually this little corner would not have litter in it. So, no, I cannot solve all the world’s litter problems by picking up a couple of pieces of it. But we’re all faced with that to some degree. There’s nothing we can do that solves a lot of problems in general, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t make situations better, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t make our lives better by doing little things, you know, 15 minute meditation practice a day, done very consistently over a long period of time if meditation is the right thing for you.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:24  So I’m not saying it’s right for everybody, but for some people it’s very beneficial. We’ll make a really big difference.

Jordan Harbinger 00:22:29  Why do we resist change so much? I mean, it seems like my brain, even when I know something is wrong, is kind of like, hey, maybe don’t change anything ever. And not for even a good reason. Just like homeostasis just feels good to me.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:44  Maybe I use the example in the book of the biological idea of homeostasis, which means that our systems are always trying to balance themselves out. Your body doesn’t want you to get too hot. It doesn’t want to get too cold. It kind of wants to keep you in the same place. And I think that we, particularly in today’s world, can find a little place that’s mostly comfortable, that we don’t really want to leave because it kind of feels good in there, and it’s easy and it doesn’t demand anything more of us. And yet for a lot of us, there’s a nagging feeling underneath it that says like, oh, I could be more than this.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:21  I could do more than this. I want to do more than this. I want to be different than this. I don’t know why we always have resistance. I mean, I’ve asked this question a ton of times on my podcast because I’m like, like you, every single time I do a workout, when I’m done, I’m like, I’m so glad I did that. Yeah, 100%. Yes. And at this point in my life, we are talking thousands upon thousands of repetitions. You should think I would run to exercise every day.

Jordan Harbinger 00:23:50  Yeah, I still think about what excuse I can come up with that would be.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:54  And yet I don’t. Yes. Which amazes me. And the best answer I’ve been able to come up with is, you know, from evolutionary psychologists who are like, look, the body just does not put out more effort than it needs to unless there is a very clear, tangible, survival based reason.

Jordan Harbinger 00:24:12  Right? Like, I’m going to run if I’m being chased by a leopard like.

Jordan Harbinger 00:24:16  But otherwise, yeah, I’m not doing it, man. Forget about.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:19  It. Or there’s an entire field of strawberries over there that’s going to supply me and my family with food for two weeks. It’s worth the caloric output. But if you just ran around all the time back then and you didn’t gather your caloric input, you die. Yeah. You see it in animals. They just don’t do anything they don’t need to do. Generally, they tend to just sort of hang out. And I think we’re a little bit the same. So I do think that we need nudged into places that we want to be because there is a better, wiser part of us that wants more, wants things to be different. And there’s an animal inside of us. It’s like.

Jordan Harbinger 00:24:57  Yeah, I hear that. Some of it’s biological, right? Like you want to eat better and suddenly you’re craving potato chips or carbs or whatever the heck it is. There’s a biological reason for that. But there’s other things I do that I just can’t wrap my head around the level of self-sabotage.

Jordan Harbinger 00:25:11  So I wanted to go to bed earlier. This is a while ago, before I had kids. Now. Now I go to bed with my kids. I don’t have a choice. And actually, that’s been the best thing for my sleep ever in some ways. But before I’d be like, I’m going to go to bed and I’m gonna be in bed before ten, and then I’m scrolling on my phone for hours until the normal time I would go to bed and I’m like, I slept the same. Well, I did look at Instagram for it’s just the dumbest thing in the world. Or I would want to be productive and I would go in, sit in this like lock myself in my office, and I would come out and I’d be like, okay, I didn’t do anything. But you know what? My desk is clean, it’s organized. Everything is parallel and perpendicular and all the drawers. I got some boxes I threw away. I replaced the Kleenex box. I mean, just the dumbest busy work.

Jordan Harbinger 00:25:54  And it’s like anything to avoid sitting down and typing the notes for this podcast. Basically.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:59  Yeah. A lot of the book is about that question. Yeah, less about why? Because I don’t know always why, but more about how do we solve it. Yeah. And I think there are two things we have to figure out when it comes to making a behavioral change. And the first I call structural, this is like knowing why you want to do something, knowing exactly what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, being very specific about it, making sure you have the tools to do it, making sure you have people to support you in doing it. Setting up your environment to make it easier to do it. It’s all structural and that often solves a lot of problems. It’s stupid things like if I look at my task list, the things that sit on there for a while are the things that are not one task. They’re actually like five tasks that I’ve called one.

Jordan Harbinger 00:26:49  Thing, oh, I’ve made this mistake before.

Jordan Harbinger 00:26:50  Your to do list has like write book on it. Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:54  It’s ridiculous that I should need to deconstruct getting taxes done into the first step, which is go gather up all the mail that’s in the eight different places in my house. Right? But it does matter when I do that. When I get that specific, I do it. So the structural carries us a long way. And then there is what I would call the inner meaning. I know exactly what to do. I know how to do it. It’s all clear. The moment is here. I call it a choice point. I’m at that moment and I don’t do it. That is something that’s happening inside me. I’m saying something to myself, or I’m feeling something in that moment that I don’t know how to get over, and I just turn away. And so in the book, I identify, I call them six saboteurs of self-control, which are like six categories of the sort of things that go wrong in that moment. And all we have to learn to do is not change our entire psyche.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:52  We have to learn. How do I navigate that moment? So writing a book for me? A big one was I just doubted I could do it. If I’m going to be more specific, I doubted I could write a good book. I mean, I was sure I could get a book out, but I doubted I could do a good book. And so that I call, you know, in my Little Six Saboteurs, I call the self-doubt stalemate, which can stop us from doing something. I just find myself not writing. And until I really pause and get myself to the point where I’m like, it is time to write right now, so I’m not procrastinating. Generally, I’m procrastinating very specifically. I can then look and go, all right, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? And when I would do that, what I would see is there’s a voice in me that was like, you can’t do it. And so nobody wants to feel that you turn away. That’s a yucky feeling.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:43  Instead, I could learn just to say to myself something along the lines of, well, I don’t know if you can write a good book or not, but I do know that if you sit down and write, you’re going to feel better about yourself and you have a way better chance of getting better at writing. In order to write a book, I didn’t have to give myself a pep talk like, look out, Hemingway! Here comes Zimmer! I just needed to get that voice to just settle down just enough to do it. But most of us are not aware of what that is, because either we haven’t gotten specific enough to push us to a choice point, or we blow right by it without really understanding what we’re thinking or feeling.

Jordan Harbinger 00:29:23  You talk about this behavior model in the book motivation, ability and prompts. And most people think motivation is the key, but you kind of make the argument that motivation is unreliable at best, which I would completely agree with. I think a lot of people I should include myself.

Jordan Harbinger 00:29:37  We think we get motivated and then we do something. But often, as we alluded to with our gym analogy, we often act and then the motivation follows after that.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:46  Yeah, I do think motivation is part of the equation. You can’t take it out of the equation. We do things for a reason, and we need to feel like what we’re doing matters, and we need to reconnect to that. And it is very fickle, right? If you don’t feel good one day, your motivation is naturally going to be lower. So what we need is to be able to make the ability how hard something is to do easier to do. So for example, if we go back to our exercise one, if I’m not feeling particularly perky in the morning, which is pretty much every morning and I need to go get on the peloton bike. That’s my goal. My brain tends to do like. I’m sort of oversimplifying, but I think what it does is I think it does this little calculation. It’s like, all right, we’re going to go get on the bike for an hour.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:34  That’s going to take ten units of energy. And I check in and my brain is like, well, but wait, we’ve only got one. That’s not going to work. I keep scrolling Substack, but when I change it to like, just get your bike shoes on. My brain can sort of do the math, like, oh yeah, that takes about a unit of energy. I’ve got a unit of energy. Okay, maybe we can do this right? And I get there. Getting started is a surprisingly powerful trick, because once I get that far, I almost always keep going. And then about ten minutes in, I’m like, oh, I’m so glad I’m doing this.

Jordan Harbinger 00:31:04  Oh yeah, this is the whole like instead of saying, you’re going to go run five miles, just put your running shoes on is cliche as that is, that’s when I ran. I don’t anymore because I decided I didn’t like it after two years, but that was what I did. I mean, that’s a fair shake, right? Two years of running.

Jordan Harbinger 00:31:18  And then I was like, I don’t like it. That’s fair. At some point, you have to admit to yourself that you’re allowed to tell yourself that something sucks. But yeah, I remember I would get up in the morning while I was in law school and I was like, oh, it’s snowing. It’s Michigan. This is terrible. All right, I don’t have to go run. I just have to put my shoes on and then go stand outside and, like, get that initial blast of cold air. And if I’m like, screw this. And I go back in the house. I did it once. It was like, freeze, sleet. We call it freezing rain. And I was like, it’s so dang cold. It’s still dark. It’s freezing rain. Everything is slippery, I almost fell. This is just dangerous. I’m not doing it today. But every other time I ran and I would run five miles in the stinking snow in Michigan in the winter. So you’re not saying try harder, though.

Jordan Harbinger 00:32:04  You’re basically just saying make it easier. Which sounds almost too simple, but it does sort of hack that part of our brain, that motivational part.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:11  Yeah. It does. I mean, it is a cliche. It’s been talked about a lot, and yet I accomplish a good 50% of anything I accomplish in life. Basically, using using that trick, I’d like to think I don’t. You know. Oh, I wouldn’t.

Jordan Harbinger 00:32:25  Even need it anymore. Yeah, no, not the case.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:27  You know, because resistance is real. And so how do we get started? There was a line that I heard early in recovery, and it said, sometimes you can’t think your way into right action. You have to act your way in the right thinking. And that really made a big difference because I could not particularly then control whether or not I wanted to get high. My thinking was just all messed up, but what I was given was clear things to do. Go to the meeting. Then when you get to the meeting, shake hands, and then afterwards clean up the coffee.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:00  I mean, I was given actions and what I found though is when I did the action, my inner state started to change. So my sponsor might say, go to the meeting and walk around the room and shake hands with everybody. Which sounds like the worst possible thing I could ever imagine doing. Why? Why would he ask me to do it?

Jordan Harbinger 00:33:18  Why is it so bad to shake hands with people in a room? I’m confused.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:21  Well, because a I’m a shame filled introvert addict who’s shy and feels like I don’t belong anywhere. But I would do it. And suddenly what I would feel is now I would feel more like I did belong there. Not by thinking, oh, I belong, I belong, I bet I belong, but by doing something that shifted my inner state into feeling like I belong. And that’s often the case. I think about it this way sometimes, like we know that, you know, emotion, thought and behavior all kind of interwoven with each other. Emotion doesn’t have a lever on it.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:59  You can’t just reach out and pull the feel better, feel happy lever. It doesn’t have.

Jordan Harbinger 00:34:04  One. You tried that. It’s called heroin. It’s not good for you. Yeah, exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:08  Exactly, exactly. Thoughts? We have a little more control over. You can’t control what shows up in your head, but you can control what you do, but behavior is absolutely something we do have control over. So it is often a really useful starting point. Even if what you want is to change emotion, behavior is a useful way to do it. It’s a starting place now. It’s not always the starting place, and you do need to work on all three. And that’s what the book is really trying to bring together. But behavior is a very useful starting point.

Jordan Harbinger 00:34:40  So essentially we pull the lever of it we can easily reach or the one that exists. I guess in this case.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:45  Yeah, it’s the easier one to pull now. Not always because our emotion controls, you know, dictates our desire to do behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:55  So I’m not trying to oversimplify something, but I am saying it is a more reliable lever. It’s the exercise. Once you start, once you do the behavior, you pull the lever. Suddenly you feel like doing it. Now that you’re doing it.

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Jordan Harbinger 00:37:04  If somebody hasn’t worked out, hasn’t been productive, hasn’t done anything. Whatever it is, someone sitting there with zero momentum. What is the first move? Not something aspirational, but something that somebody can actually do.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:15  What that’s going to be is going to be different per person.

Jordan Harbinger 00:37:18  Sure.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:18  But what I would start with is what is a small version of this that I can do right now, or in an hour or as soon as possible? What is a version of this that gets me moving towards where I want to be, that I can get myself to do?

Jordan Harbinger 00:37:38  Yeah, this is smart.

Jordan Harbinger 00:37:38  I’ve heard people tell me they don’t have time to work out. And I said, what are you talking about? And they’re like, well, if I’m going to work out, I’m going to go all in, and I want to do it every day, and I want to do it for an hour. And I was like, okay, so you’re waiting until you’re retired, I guess, to start exercising, even though you could just do something for 20 minutes. It’s not a real excuse. Kind of. It’s fake. I think it’s to keep them from having to do anything. Well, I can’t do it my way. So, you know, one of my friends was like, oh, I can’t work out because he’s overweight. Said, I can’t work out because I go all in on everything and I’m going to be doing like, protein powders and peptides, which I can’t afford right now, and working out like two hours a day. And I’m like. So your other choices to be literally £200 overweight, like, I just don’t buy it.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:20  It doesn’t make any sense. And people are this way. There’s a lot of all or nothing. Thinking for a number of years, I did a lot of coaching and I called myself a behavior coach, essentially. And people would hire me. And you only hire someone like me when you just are not being successful at doing something. The number of people that were like that, that were either they’re doing it perfectly or they’re not doing it at all. And that is a huge trap because it can stop you from even getting started. And it can also knock you off track. Because if we’re going to do anything like exercise over a long period of time, you’ve probably noticed this to some degree. You’ve got to have some degree of flexibility in it because your life changes. You’re traveling, your mom gets sick, your kids get sick, your dog gets sick. Our lives are not simple enough that we can be like every morning, 8 a.m., no matter what I’m exercising. Not if you’ve got kids.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:15  There’s plenty of mornings at 8:00. Chaos is going to rain. Yeah. So my mantra is a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. So if I plan to exercise in the morning and I don’t for whatever various reasons, I won’t give up on the day completely. I might say, you know what? All I can do today is a 15 minute walk after dinner. But I’ve honored the underlying desire to be healthier, and I’ve kept a little bit of momentum going because I’ve done something and it avoids that all or nothing trap. Because once we are in nothing, when we are totally stopped, it’s harder to get started than it is when we have some degree of momentum. So I’m always just adjusting and being flexible in order to keep moving.

Jordan Harbinger 00:40:00  Yeah, you know what? I just had a realization here in real time. I think this is kind of why I’m a little bit of a workaholic, I think, because if I completely unplug, which I occasionally do, but is very, very rare.

Jordan Harbinger 00:40:11  I almost always go like, oh, I don’t want to start working again. I just don’t want to. I’m not in the mood. I don’t want to, like, read a book, and I don’t want to sit in my office. I just want to play video games and hang out with my kids. And. But what if I go on vacation and I check my email for half an hour every morning and I just, you know, to keep the inbox down? My wife’s like, you really need to unplug. And I know I do, but I also don’t want to because I know the amount. It’s like just a cold start in January when I have to get back to work. For example, if I unplug over Christmas like a sane person would do, I just can’t do it because I’m like, oh God, it’s going to be. So I’m going to look back at this inbox in January. And if I do a little bit every day, there’s going to be 30 emails in there.

Jordan Harbinger 00:40:52  And if I don’t do any, there’s going to be 300. And I really don’t want to see 300.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:57  Yeah. My old joke was nobody needs a vacation more than the person that just got back from vacation because because you just are rolling in. Now, I have gotten to the place where I do turn off completely, give myself time away. And I face the dread that you’re talking about. It starts to come. And I just try and remind myself. Like you’ll feel that way for like six hours and then you’ll just get past it.

Jordan Harbinger 00:41:20  Yeah. If that.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:21  Honestly, it’s worth it to take the time away to face that six hour misery. Yeah, but I’m just like you. I love what I do, but give me two weeks off coming back. I’m like,

Jordan Harbinger 00:41:31  It’s terrible. It’s funny you should mention that because I was like, how long is the dread? And so last time I timed it and it was under two hours for me to feel like I basically had caught up.

Jordan Harbinger 00:41:42  I’d basically need to go to a coffee shop, get one of those Vietnamese coffees that is like 18 shots of espresso in it or something, one of those drippy ones. And then I go through my inbox and I make a huge ass to do list, and then I that sort of erases my panic. And yet knowing that I’m basically 90 minutes away from feeling like I have my head on straight, I still have trouble taking time off. I guess what I’m trying to say is I almost have too much momentum. It’s not a good thing. I’m not bragging about that. I mean, I need, I like I should not be building a Lego tractor with my son and thinking about how to, I don’t know, optimize some workflow on Google Drive. That’s not.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:18  Healthy. I mean, you know, to each their own as to what works for them, right? I know some people who are like, maybe they, you know, they should be able to completely unplug, but they’re like, you know what? If I check my email for 30 minutes a day while I’m gone, it reduces my anxiety about what’s happening back there enough that I can be present the rest of the time here.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:39  I mean, everybody’s got to do what works for them. We are not all the same.

Jordan Harbinger 00:42:43  I hadn’t really thought about that. But you’re right. I do feel like an itch, which is anxiety. If I don’t just go. There’s nothing important in there. I know, because I looked, I got rid of a lot of low hanging fruit that I wouldn’t have to deal with later. I delegated a few things. Now I can go to the beach and watch my kids throw shells at each other or whatever, and I don’t feel guilty. Or like there’s some kind of water tank filler. Like I made a water tank that’s slowly filling up at my neck level, which is kind of how I sometimes feel if I don’t do that stuff. And there’s some awareness happening in real time here, I think for me, which is making me feel a little bit better, you said something small that makes you feel like you’ve got some momentum. People are gonna game this because I would have gamed it, I think if I had no momentum.

Jordan Harbinger 00:43:27  How small is too small? You don’t want people to go, I want to read more. And then they open a book and read one page and then close it and say, okay, growth achieved. I mean, that’s a ridiculous example, but people are going to do that in some fashion or another, up to the point where they can convince themselves that they’re still moving forward, even if they’re not.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:43  Well, yeah, I mean, I think I would be questioning, you know, what’s the point of gaming that.

Jordan Harbinger 00:43:49  To trick ourselves into doing something we know we have to do when we secretly don’t want to do it? Because homeostasis.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:54  Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I would I would start though to make sure like we actually do know that some part of us wants to do it. I see what’s too small. Depends. It’s different for everybody. But my experience is not that people start too small and trick themselves. My experience is almost always that people start too big and fail.

Jordan Harbinger 00:44:14  That totally makes sense.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:15  Yeah, that’s been my experience with people who are sincerely wanting to make a change and are reasonable people who are not locked in deep self-denial all the time. Those people tend the errors. I try and do too much because to be like, hey, I’m going to meditate for three minutes. Sounds stupid. You’re like, that’s dumb. And the reality is, if you meditate for three minutes a day, it’s probably not going to change your life. You do it every day. You might get a little bit more peace, but three minutes can become five minutes, which can become ten minutes. And that’s often the path, right? We start small and we get some momentum, and we’re better able to do it while keeping it at the same difficulty level. So meditation is a good example I had tried to meditate on and off for a long time. This is pre-internet. The only way to learn meditation was from a book. Or the weird guy in Columbus, Ohio who taught TM.

Jordan Harbinger 00:45:12  Dude, I’m telling you, that’s the same experience. That’s it. There’s one weird guy that your parents are like, is he a pedophile? And you’re like, no, he’s just really weird. And you’re like, at his trailer staring at a wall. And everyone’s like, if you’re not back at two hours, I’m calling the police 100%.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:27  And so I would pick up these books and they would say, you know, you should meditate 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour a day. And so I would try that. And that was incredibly hard for me because my brain was pandemonium. I would sit down and it was like the dark circus came to town. It was misery for me. Yeah, I couldn’t get myself to keep doing it. I might be able to do it for a week, maybe a month, but I would eventually give up and then I would come back around. I’d pick up the book again. I’d start reading it, would say, you should meditate for 30 to 45 to an hour.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:58  I would try it, I would fail. This happened two decades, perhaps.

Jordan Harbinger 00:46:02  Yeah. Okay. That makes me feel a little bit better. I think a lot of people probably feel a little bit better.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:06  A long time. Yeah. So finally, at one point, it was after I started the podcast and I started to get introduced to some of these ideas a little bit more and get some clearer things. I was like, you know what? I’m going to meditate for three minutes, but I’m going to do it each day. I can do three minutes. There was a dignity level for me, or I was like, I can’t. No excuse I can make is going to pass muster for why I can’t spend three minutes. And so that was easy enough to do. It was low resistance. I didn’t need a whole lot of motivation to do it. Well, what turned out to happen was that before long, I could sit for five minutes and it was the same level of difficulty because I was getting better at it.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:44  Then I could sit for ten minutes, then I could sit for 15 minutes, and then I could go on week long retreats.

Jordan Harbinger 00:46:50  Oh God, it feels horrible even thinking about having to be quiet for a week.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:54  Yeah, well, you don’t have to. Yeah, that’s the good news. You certainly don’t have to. But that was where I wanted to get with it. But I got there by starting stupidly small and establishing consistency and momentum. And then as I got better at it, as I became more capable. We all know this. It’s the way you work out. You don’t start by bench pressing £250. You can’t do it, but you can start wherever you’re capable of. Yours and I’s would be different if we both took six months off. When we came back to bench press, you might bench press £150 and I might bench press £110. If I tried to do what you were doing, I would give up because it would be too hard. But I could start where I’m at and get better and better and better.

Jordan Harbinger 00:47:39  Have you ever done a darkness retreat? Have you ever tried one of those as opposed to a silent retreat?

Eric Zimmer 00:47:43  I have heard about them, but I have never tried one.

Jordan Harbinger 00:47:45  For people who don’t know what this is. My friend Akshay. Do you know Akshay Nanavati? Is that name ring a bell? Yep, yep. So he’s been a friend of mine for a long time. He’s crazy. I guess. His best way to put it.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:55  He’s given me a decent description.

Jordan Harbinger 00:47:56  The last thing that he did was he told me that he was going to go to Antarctica and cross overland, which he tried to do, which no one has done before. There’s one guy who, like, kind of says he did it, but there’s like no proof or something like that, I can’t remember. But anyway, he’s got to push his food on a sled across Antarctica, and he almost made it. In fact, the reason he didn’t was not because he wasn’t tough enough or whatever it was because it was snowing.

Jordan Harbinger 00:48:19  And instead of walking across like ice pack, he was in deep snow, which made it a million times harder. So he ran out of time because you basically have to pay a rescue crew to, like, wait for you on Antarctica.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:30  Oh yeah.

Jordan Harbinger 00:48:30  I imagine you can’t just be like, yeah, I’ll call you when I need. It’s like, no, we need to be on the continent that you’re on when you’re dying or fall into a crack. So he just basically ran out of, I think, money. And also I’m sure he was sore, but he does these darkness retreats where he’ll be like in Germany, which is because I don’t even know if it’s legal to do this kind of thing here because you’re basically imprisoned by you got to go to the.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:52  Black Forest for.

Jordan Harbinger 00:48:53  This, and there’s no noise and there’s no light and they feed you a smoothie a few times a day to keep you from dying, basically. And it’s the most tasteless thing that they can find. Because the point is, you’re not getting any stimulation.

Jordan Harbinger 00:49:08  And you mentioning that the darkness comes into your head. This is like the whole point for him, right, is you can’t get away. There’s nothing to distract you from these thoughts and things that are in your head because there’s no light, there’s nothing you’re tasting. You’re not looking forward to anything. You’re in there for like a week or ten days or whatever, and you can’t even see anything. Like you can’t even start looking at things to distract yourself. And he said, it’s just like you’re just facing all of your demons in this dark room alone. Which sounds awful to me, but we’re built different.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:37  There’s a part of me that’s like, I’m going to do that. But it does sound awful. I mean, you know, the thing about, like, on a silent meditation retreat is oftentimes you’re encouraged also not to read anything. So there’s no stimulation. And you find yourself like, oh, can I go read the emergency evacuation instructions on the back of the door to have anything.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:57  Yeah, anything except my own thoughts. But at least you get to see things, right?

Jordan Harbinger 00:50:01  Yeah. You can look at a butterfly and that’s like. That’s kind of the point. You’re enjoying nature and enjoying the wonders of nature. No. You’re in a dark room, which I guess has carpeted walls somewhere in the suburbs of Frankfurt. So, speaking of unique folks, you tell the story in the book about this woman whose hand literally fights her, which, again, speaking of things that sound fake alien hand syndrome, apparently a real thing. Tell me about.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:24  That. Yeah, well, if you go in and you sever someone’s corpus callosum, I think is how you say it. Although now that I say that out loud, I feel like I’ve just done a Harry Potter spell, so perhaps.

Jordan Harbinger 00:50:35  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:35  Yeah. I’m not right there. It’s the thing that connects the two sides of your brain together. And if you have epilepsy, one of the ways that they help treat that is they get rid of that.

Jordan Harbinger 00:50:43  They still do that. That sounds. Yeah, like bloodletting. But with your brain. You know what I mean? It sounds right.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:47  No, I think they still do. Yeah. Wow. Because it generally works, but it will cause some unusual things. Sure. And one of those things is that the different sides of your brain can get up to different things. And so this woman had had this happen, and a doctor went to see her shortly after, and one hand was buttoning up her shirt, while the other hand would turn around and just unbutton it. And he was like, oh yeah. Called some people in to look at it. Well, it’s called alien Hand syndrome. And what it basically means is that the hands which are mapped to a side of the brain have a different agenda. Look into, like the split brain studies. They are fascinating. Yeah. You think you’re like a rational, unified creature, and then you start reading this stuff and you’re like, oh man, we are weird.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:34  So, yeah, alien hand syndrome. You know, one hand’s lighting a cigarette, the other hand puts it out, that kind of thing. And I use it because it’s a it’s a great story. And to sort of say that we all have a little bit of that. We talked about it very early on where we want lots of different things. I want to exercise and I want to sit on the couch. I want to write this book, and I don’t know what’s the way I. And I want.

Jordan Harbinger 00:51:58  To play.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:58  Games. Yeah, or yeah, I want to play my guitar or whatever. Whatever your thing is. Sure. We all want multiple things. We’re motivational, complex creatures, and so starting to unravel that a little bit can be really helpful because if we don’t, it does feel a little bit like the alien hand thing. Some part of me is go in this direction and another part of me is going in another direction, and that doesn’t feel good.

Jordan Harbinger 00:52:21  What do we do if the things we want conflict with each other? It’s probably good to give an example of this, because alien hand syndrome essentially says about the brain that those two conflicting wants coexist.

Jordan Harbinger 00:52:30  It’s just that usually our brain, I don’t know, figures out one way to pick one. Whereas with her, which, by the way, that sounds like a Batman villain, someone who’s one hand does one thing and then the other hand does the opposite thing. I mean, that would be I don’t even know who could play a complex role like that, but that would be incredible, right? They light a cigarette and then in a menacing way, and the other hand puts it out immediately or like, takes it out of their hand before they can take a drag. The fact that that’s real is mind blowing.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:54  Totally mind blowing. I’ll give you an example. So even when we think about what’s most important to us, like we get down to the levels of like values, like what do I value? We still have conflict. One of the things I’ve realized is I have a value on adventure. Like I feel most alive. I feel most myself. I feel happiest when I’m out on some sort of adventure.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:19  Not not on oxy adventure. A normal type adventure, right? A normal adventure. So when I feel most alive, I also have a real value on being content right where I’m at. Those are two things that pull on each other, and I don’t think there’s a resolution to the two of them knowing that they’re both there and they’re each pulling, and that that’s totally normal helps me to work with it more skillfully, recognizing that we want multiple different things and that that’s normal, I think can be very helpful instead of thinking there’s something wrong with me. Yeah, that I’m that way.

Jordan Harbinger 00:53:53  Sort of acknowledging that there’s a war inside our head and that all of us have this. It’s just that we don’t all have a hand that can think with the other mind. That’s back. There is an interesting way to look at this. So in the book, though, you do a pretty good job. You mentioned values. You broke this down into values or what we want most. But desires are what we want most right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:13  Yeah. The question that I use is, you know, oftentimes of what a lot of us will look at is we’re trading what we want most, what we value for what we want right now. And that’s a pretty common thing that most of us wrestle with. You’ll notice that a lot of your day to day struggles fall into that camp. And so that’s a particular type of thing that we have to learn to work with. And then there is the example I gave is like, what do you do when two things that you really do want most that are really valuable to you are in conflict. You know, anybody that’s got children in a career feel some degree of this. You value both. You value your career and you value your children. And there is a tension there. There is a natural tension there. It’s why everybody talks about work life balance because it doesn’t go away. And that’s okay. I wish it went away. I wish it was simpler, but knowing that everybody feels that I think does make things better.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:10  But when we look at like, what do I want most? Versus what do I want now? What we’re really dealing with is how do I make the future more real? Because what I want most is the thing that’s out in the future, usually. And what I want now is the thing that’s like, right here, you know, how do I make that more real in recovery? We called it playing the tape all the way through is one of the I mean, I learned it in my first week of recovery. What my brain did was just think about how good it would feel to get high.

Jordan Harbinger 00:55:37  Right?

Eric Zimmer 00:55:37  I see I have to keep it going. I have to go. Okay, well then what? Oh, yeah. Well, what’ll happen after that is I’ll feel good for 20 minutes and then the shame will rush in. The despair will rush in the desire to use even more. Will rush in. Oh, and then the fact that I don’t have money that’s there. Oh, and I’m already facing 50 years in prison and you roll it all the way through.

Jordan Harbinger 00:56:02  Were you really facing 50 years in prison?

Eric Zimmer 00:56:04  I was, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger 00:56:05  For what?

Eric Zimmer 00:56:06  Multiple charges of grand theft and forgery.

Jordan Harbinger 00:56:09  Oh, okay. Because I’m like 50 years. Those are murder numbers, man.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:12  No murder. And those are max sentences. Yeah, but, yeah, I had something like six of each.

Jordan Harbinger 00:56:19  Still, though, like, I mean, forging checks or whatever to buy drugs is like 50 years when you’re 20 or 30 years old is essentially a life sentence. I mean, that doesn’t make any sense to me. Although, again, they’re maximum sentences. I would like to think there’s no chance you would have gotten that, but who knows?

Eric Zimmer 00:56:34  Yeah, yeah, well, what I got was this sweetheart, upper middle class white kid deal, which was diversion. They basically said, if you complete this program, will make this all go away. And the program was I had to, you know, probation officer, I mean, just all the normal things. And if I did that, they made it go away.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:56  And if I didn’t, then I would be facing a very stiff sentence. But I got that opportunity, thank God, because my life would have been radically altered if I had been toting around eight felonies.

Jordan Harbinger 00:57:08  I don’t mean to get sidetracked here, but there’s a guy who listens to the show who sent me an email. He was a mormon, but he became a drug dealer. That’s of course, we’re going to talk about that at some point. But basically, you mentioned the upper middle class white kid deal. And I think a lot of people bristle when you say things like that. But he he told me that this is very real. He went to court. He had, I don’t even know, pounds of drugs, like a ton of drugs. Right. And the guy before him had a little bit, a couple of bags of drugs. And that guy got like multiple years sentence and he was like, oh my God, I have ten times more than that guy. I’m never getting out of jail.

Jordan Harbinger 00:57:40  And the judge was like, what’s a nice boy like you doing in here? Probation. And he was like, I won the judicial lottery and I can not screw this up. And that’s one of the how we got out of it. But he was also like, but wait, that other guy. He had way less than me. And he’s in prison now for like five years. What happened there?

Eric Zimmer 00:57:58  Yeah, 100%. I will always take a mormon drug user story if I can get one.

Jordan Harbinger 00:58:03  There you go. Yeah. Mormon drug dealer.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:05  That’s what I meant. That’s even better. Mormon drug users. Kind of boring, but drug dealer, right? That’s interesting. So we play the tape through, and the key is we have to try to make it as real. We have to see it. We have to feel it, you know, really trying to embody the future situation. Because most of us don’t really do that. We may recognize, like, yeah, maybe I should put the phone down and stop scrolling.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:31  But in your case, right, you would have to really imagine put yourself in the morning person’s shoes like, oh God, I’m going to feel like shit again, and I’m going to feel like an idiot because yet again, I scrolled embody those feelings if we can. Because our job is how do we make the future feel more real? Because the present is always very real to us. And as humans were not good at this, there’s a reason we all struggle with it, right? It’s not easy to do.

Jordan Harbinger 00:58:59  The way you put it is perfect. The present is always is more urgent, right? This is what’s happening now. So I do have a lot of sympathy for people who say, like, I want to build a business, but I also have bills and I have the stability of this career. And it’s like, yeah, you could step into the wild unknown and take a ton of risk. Or you could stay at your job and there’s all these influencers that are like, burn the ships.

Jordan Harbinger 00:59:23  And I’m like, easy for you to say, pal. You’re a multi-millionaire. What are you doing telling this teacher who’s a single parent to burn the ships like you have no place? You have no right to do that at all. It doesn’t make any sense.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:35  No. This podcast, you know, I knew I wanted to do this show, but I had a job in the software business. There was no way I had two kids in high school. I had a mortgage. I had all that stuff. I kind of picked the middle route for me, which was like, I was like, all right, I’m gonna I’m going to do the job, and I’m going to kind of noodle away at this thing over here. And and I was lucky enough that the podcast went well enough that eventually and I did that for five and a half years before I was able to do it full time. But yeah, I agree 100%. Telling people to burn the ships is advice that most often comes from the people who already are set.

Jordan Harbinger 01:00:12  Yes, exactly. I know it sort of reminds me of Scott Galloway, who you probably know says something like the person on the podium telling you to follow your passion made their billions in iron smelting or inherited most of it. And it’s like, yeah, that’s exactly right.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:25  That’s fair. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger 01:00:26  In the book, you add another layer to the values thing, which is that half the stuff we want or values and desires for that matter, half the stuff we want isn’t even ours, right? We absorb it through social media status, games with other people or whatever. So how do we tell the difference between I want this. And I saw somebody else want this on Instagram, and now I think I want it, but I’m not sure.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:47  The thing for me that I can tell is how much does it change? So I was in LA recently and I got invited to a party up in the Hollywood Hills, and when I was there, what I was thinking of was money. You know, this incredible house.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:04  I’m looking around and the people there, they all have money. And suddenly what I really want is money. And then two nights later, I was at a different event with more of the starving artist type person. And I found myself wanting that.

Jordan Harbinger 01:01:19  You wanted to be broke. I don’t think that sounds right, Toby.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:22  I wanted a bohemian, cool, creative life. Right.

Jordan Harbinger 01:01:26  Okay. No, an Echo Park or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:28  Yeah, yeah. So if I look back and forth between those two, which of those tends to be more steady in my desires? Right? And for me, it’s almost always been the more authentic life where I’m doing something that I like doing that feels valuable to me. That’s the part that doesn’t change. Now what? I love you to heap a bunch of money on top of that. Sure.

Jordan Harbinger 01:01:51  Yes. The rock star method, where you’re super loaded. But you can pretend that you’re broke and wear ripped clothes.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:56  And I tried that for a number of years and it did not work.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:59  So I’m looking oftentimes trying to discern like what patterns hold over time, because I do tend to want what you put in front of me and make look good. It’s part of the reason I do not like TV commercials. I feel like I’m unusually susceptible, really.

Jordan Harbinger 01:02:14  I never pay attention to those at all.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:16  Yeah, well, no, I mean, like, I when they’re on, I’m looking and I’m suddenly like, yeah, I really do need to be on a beach with a beer. And I need a, I need a woman that hot. And, you know, everything I’m doing up until now has been a waste of my time. Let’s redirect until the commercial is over, and then you’ve got Pampers commercial. And I suddenly think I need two more kids.

Jordan Harbinger 01:02:36  And maybe you are susceptible. None of these things occur to me. I’ve totally tuned these things out. Sheesh.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:43  Yeah, I think we all have different levels of that, but I tend to get influenced by what is around me, so I have to come back to like, what do I consistently want? What do I consistently value? And that tends to work for me because you go on social media and I mean, our whole culture is based on how do I get you to want something you don’t have.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:07  So you will spend money on this thing. That is the engine that drives a lot of it. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying that’s kind of the reality of it. So I come back to what things do I consistently over a period of time, keep thinking are valuable to me and important.

Jordan Harbinger 01:03:23  On the same token here. Sometimes it seems like my values kind of fight each other. I mean, you mentioned this earlier, money versus, I don’t know, cool bohemian lifestyle. So security versus freedom, family versus ambition is a common one that I see in the inbox. Maybe the original, the OG. Health versus enjoyment, right? I should stop drinking and smoking, but it’s fun. If there’s no clear right answer, how do you decide?

Eric Zimmer 01:03:48  Ideally, you find a way that you do both. I think that’s the ideal world. The ideal world is one in which, yeah, you’re mostly healthy, but you go have a few drinks if you want to have a few drinks once in a while, you go.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:02  You do eat the chocolate ice cream when you’re on vacation. You do those things in the same way that ambition and family don’t get sorted. You don’t just go, well, you know what? It’s going to be ambition and that’s going to be the one. And screw you family. I mean, some people do, right?

Jordan Harbinger 01:04:16  Some people do.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:17  But most of us are not going to make that choice, nor are we going to be like, well, you know what? I’m just going to stay at home with the kids all, all day. And, you know, we’ll live under the bridge. Who cares? For most of us, we’re finding the place in between those two things that is best for us. But I don’t think they resolve. As I said earlier, I think you it’s an ongoing negotiation. It’s an ongoing dance between those two things. Now, sometimes you find yourself, like me, with mind altering substances where the answer is none. But I don’t think that’s ideal.

Eric Zimmer 01:04:49  If I could be in the middle, I would, because having a few drinks is enjoyable. Lots of people love it. I’d do it if I could. My experience just shows that doesn’t work for me, and so you might be that way. There are certain people that are this way that like once they open the the sugar genie up, it just takes over every time. And they’re like, it’s easier to have none. And so there are times that that is the wiser move. Gretchen Rubin came up with an idea that I thought was useful. She was like, are you a moderator or a abstinence person? And I think it’s an interesting question to ask yourself about different things. Would it be easier to just have none of this than trying to do an ongoing negotiation. For me. There is a beautiful clarity to zero when it comes to substances, right? I mean, it’s just it’s zero. There’s no no debate. And I know a lot of people who might do better with that, but they stay in the middle.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:48  But I don’t think there’s a simple answer for how we do it, except we find our place and we continue to negotiate it and think about it is really the key thing, right? To bring some consciousness to it?

Jordan Harbinger 01:06:00  Yeah, this is true. It’s funny. The the moderator idea. I always assumed you had to be abstinent or you were getting it addicted to something. But when I got older and people started putting drugs in front of me, I was like, oh, I can just do this and stop. And other people were like, awake til 7 or 8 in the morning. And I was like, I don’t, why are you doing that? And they’re like, you don’t want more? And I’m like, no, I kind of do. But like, also I want to go to bed, so I’m just gonna go to bed. And as I got older and older and older, I was like, oh, this is not the usual way people’s brains react to white powders, for example.

Eric Zimmer 01:06:31  Yeah. Although strangely, even with white powders, The vast majority of people do not slide into what we would call addiction.

Jordan Harbinger 01:06:38  Yeah. Otherwise, everybody in my law firm and.

Eric Zimmer 01:06:40  All of LA would be in a treatment center.

Jordan Harbinger 01:06:42  Yeah, there’s some additional points that I’d love to highlight here. Values don’t matter unless they show up in behavior. So you kind of have to ask yourself, you know, what does this look like on a random Tuesday night? Not the final product, not the way that I want this to look or how pretty I want to make this. But, like, what does this look like at 8 a.m. tomorrow when you don’t want to work out again, for example? Do you think people lie to themselves about their values? Because it sort of looks to the casual observer that this happens constantly.

Eric Zimmer 01:07:08  This is an interesting one, because there is a certain school of thought that says if you look at what somebody does, you’ll know what they value, and there’s a certain logic to that.

Eric Zimmer 01:07:19  But I also think it’s reductive because even though, yes, on one hand I did value drugs over everything else in my actions, that’s not what I truly valued. I didn’t have the skills to do anything different. I didn’t have the ability to do anything different. I do think we can lie to ourselves about our values. I think it’s really important to do our best to get to like, honestly, like, what do I really value? Like adventure. Adventure is not anything that would have made it on my values list earlier in my life, because I would have thought that’s not a good value. Like who cares? I need freedom and justice and compassion. But as I looked at who I was, I was like, no, I do value that. I do want that. That feels important to me. So I think being clear about what we really do value is important. It’s hard to do values. Work is challenging. I have a bunch of different exercises in the book because I think it reveals itself to people differently with different exercises.

Eric Zimmer 01:08:27  The least useful is usually to be given a list of 100 values, and circle the ten that you like most because you agree with everything that’s on the page. And we used to say in project management, if everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority. And so we have to make some choices about those things. So I don’t think that our behavior is always a reflection of our values, but it is a reflection on some hand of our ability to live into our values, for sure.

Jordan Harbinger 01:08:56  I wanted to mention, I know we’re out of time. There are a ton of drills and practicals in the book, and if you buy the audiobook, there’s like a PDF that it comes with, so you’re not going to miss that stuff. But a lot of stuff about habit change, willpower, setting up your environment for success. Because we didn’t even get kind of just don’t have time to get into all that stuff. If people liked Atomic Habits or B.J. Fogg, who is on the show, they’re going to like that stuff as well, because that stuff is also important.

Jordan Harbinger 01:09:20  You don’t have to rely on willpower to make change, and you’ve got your little system there for that as well. Thank you so much, man. I know we sort of blew past this scheduled time, but that’s usually a good sign. And yeah, thank you very much for coming on, man. I’m glad you’re not a heroin addict and that you’re a successful human being.

Eric Zimmer 01:09:35  Congratulations me to the fact that you mentioned James. Claire. I’ll just say my publisher pitched the book as Atomic Habits meets Think Like a monk. Right. So it’s got that whole practical side of habit and behavior and a deeper side to it also. And yes, thank you very much for having me on, Jordan. I’m really appreciative of it. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better.

Eric Zimmer 01:10:13  And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.