In this episode, Eric joins Dr. Laurie Santos on The Happiness Lab to explore why lasting change takes more than willpower—and how to develop the skills that make it easier. Drawing on his recovery from addiction and his book, How a Little Becomes a Lot, Eric shares how manageable actions help us build momentum and regain trust in ourselves. They also discuss how to choose goals that reflect what matters to you and keep making progress when motivation fades.
Free Guide: Outsmart the Hidden Saboteurs of Self-Control. What’s been holding you back lately? In this free guide, Eric shares the six common saboteurs that quietly derail our best intentions—like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, and emotional escapism—and offers practical strategies to help you regain control and move forward. Download your free copy at oneyoufeed.net/ebook.
Key Takeaways:
- Why struggling to change doesn’t mean something is wrong with you—and how treating change as a skill opens up new possibilities
- How starting smaller than you think you should can build motivation and confidence
- Why resistance can persist even when an activity consistently makes you feel better
- How to distinguish your own values from desires shaped by comparison and your surroundings
- How specific plans and small adjustments to your environment make following through easier
- Why planning for setbacks and asking for support help you sustain change over time
Dr. Laurie Santos is a Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. She is the host of the podcast The Happiness Lab and is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices. Her course, “Psychology and the Good Life,” teaches students what the science of psychology says about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. Dr. Santos has been featured in numerous news outlets including the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, and more. She has won numerous awards both for her science and teaching from institutions such as Yale and the American Psychological Association.
Eric Zimmer is an author, teacher, speaker, and the creator of The One You Feed podcast—an award-winning show with over 50 million downloads across 800+ conversations exploring meaningful living. At 24, Eric was homeless, addicted to heroin, and facing prison. His journey from those depths sparked his lifelong inquiry into human transformation and resilience. Through his behavior coaching, workshops, and mentorship, he’s guided thousands worldwide in creating sustainable habits that last—not through willpower or epiphany, but through steady change. His approach blends cutting-edge science with timeless wisdom, offering practical pathways to more integrity and deeper meaning.
Connect with Eric Zimmer: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
Connect with Dr. Laurie Santos: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Eric Zimmer and Dr. Lauri Santos, check out these other episodes:
Small Steps to Happiness: The Science of Mindful Living with Laurie Santos
How a Little Becomes a Lot: A Conversation with Eric Zimmer and Sahil Bloom
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 00:00:00 This week. You’re getting me as the guest. Laurie Santos interviewed me for The Happiness Lab, which is one of the best podcasts out there, and the conversation was good enough that I thought it belonged in this feed. We start with a trombone. If I handed you one and you played it badly, we wouldn’t decide you’re a bad person. We’d just conclude you don’t know how to play the trombone. When we fail to change, we skip that logic and go straight to something being wrong with us. Most of the hours about what to do instead start smaller than feels reasonable. Protect momentum and figure out what’s worth wanting. I think this is a really great conversation, and I’m excited to present it to you on the one you feed.
Laurie Santos 00:00:43 Behavior change is hard. That’s something we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab, and I’m pretty sure no one knows this fact about the mind better than today’s guest.
Eric Zimmer 00:00:51 I had been in detox before. I had been in treatment before, so there were lots of times that I made an attempt to change and none of them had worked.
Laurie Santos 00:01:01 This is podcaster and author Eric Zimmer.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:04 I think for a lot of, if not most addicts, there will be a story that is similar, which is probably years before they achieve full sobriety. There’s a lot of little attempts at change. There’s lots of attempts at moderation. Only on the weekends, or I’ll drink whiskey, but I won’t do heroin, right. And I’d had all those. I’d also had my. Okay. That’s it. I’m done. I’m swearing it off. I’m detoxing. I’m going through cold turkey moments where I tried that it hadn’t worked, and I really felt like I couldn’t change.
Laurie Santos 00:01:39 But Eric was wrong. He did eventually change in ways that his younger self could never have imagined were possible.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:45 My life has gone on to do all kinds of incredible things right. I’ve written a book and I’ve hosted podcasts. I started a solar energy company. I was part of a lot of software startups, but I had to get recovery nailed first.
Laurie Santos 00:02:00 And now Eric is working to help others do the same, not just when it comes to major life changes like addiction, but also the more mundane ones that we all struggle with.
Laurie Santos 00:02:08 Things like getting to the gym more often, getting to sleep on time, or spending less time scrolling on social media. Whatever behavior you’re working on, chances are it’s something that you’ve tried to change before without quite getting the results you hoped for. In Eric’s new book, how a Little Becomes a Lot, he argues that making the lasting changes we want could be more within reach than we think. And in this episode of our Back to School book series, Eric will share what he’s learned about why our attempts to change often fail and how we can massively improve our likelihood of success. So whether you’ve been struggling with the same goal for years, or you’re hoping to make a fresh start this fall, stay tuned because Eric and I have got you covered. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us? Leading us away from it will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction.
Laurie Santos 00:03:09 You’re listening to the Happiness Lab with Doctor Laurie Santos. I’m chatting with Eric Zimmer about his new book, how a Little Becomes a Lot The Art of Small Changes for a more Meaningful Life. But the ideas behind Eric’s book stretch back decades back to his own recovery from addiction and to a well known parable that continues to inspire his award winning podcast.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:34 There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their 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 is 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. I first heard that parable probably somewhere around 30 years ago in some church basement in Columbus, Ohio, as I was in recovery from heroin addiction. And at that time, that parable really hit home so strongly.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:18 I’m not even sure I was feeding the good wolf or feeding the bad wolf at that point. I almost feel like it was eating me at that point, but it was really clear that there were actions that I could take that led me towards my recovery and actions that I could take that led me towards where I was headed, which was death or an institution. And so that parable just was very poignant for me in that moment, and has remained so in the years since, primarily in the sense that it’s a good parable. We hear it, we know what it means, our choices matter. But I also love it because it points to something I think is really fundamental, which is that we do all have competing desires. Forces call it what you want within us. We’re motivational, complex creatures, and I love that that parable normalizes that.
Laurie Santos 00:05:10 So what’s the basic idea behind your new book? What’s the goal?
Eric Zimmer 00:05:14 The basic idea behind the new book is that we’ve been sold a pretty dramatic version of change.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:22 We’ve been sold the idea that there are big moments. If you had been filming the movie of my life, what you would see is me walking into this detox center in Columbus, Ohio, in 1994. As a homeless heroin addict, I weighed £100. I was yellow and jaundice from hepatitis C, the prosecutor said. I might be going to jail for 50 years and I am asked to go to treatment, long term treatment. And I say, no, thank you. And I go back to my room and I have what we describe in recovery as a moment of clarity, where I see very clearly, if I leave here, I’m going to die or go to jail, and soon. So I go back and I say, okay, I’ll go to treatment. That would be the big moment, right? The director would spend a lot of time there, and then there would be, you know, inspirational music in the background. And that moment was important. But it only has its significance because of the thousands of little choices that I made after that day after day, month after month, year after year that made that change possible.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:26 And so my book is trying to set that idea in people’s mind. And it’s also just a book overall about how do we make any kind of change in our lives. Not big dramatic change like I did, but the sort of change we all wrestle with and what allows us to do that more effectively.
Laurie Santos 00:06:47 I think when we’re having trouble with change, the thing we often tell ourselves is that there’s one thing that could get us to change more, and if we could just harness that thing, everything would be great. And this is something I know you talk about in the book. What’s the one thing we assume we need for change, and why is that assumption wrong?
Eric Zimmer 00:07:03 Well, we almost always assume it is something that you would call either willpower or discipline or self-control. That’s usually the thing that we think we are lacking, and we usually think that there’s something wrong with us. And one of my big messages in the book, and in all the work that I do, is that I truly believe that change is a skill.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:26 It’s something we can learn to do. I eventually got sober because I figured out the puzzle of what it took for me to make that change. And so most of us are taking it as there’s something wrong with us, right? If I handed you a trombone right now, you’re not a trombone player.
Laurie Santos 00:07:47 No, you’re both player.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:50 If I handed you a trombone and you picked it up and started playing, it would sound terrible. We wouldn’t conclude that you were a bad person. We just conclude you don’t know how to play the trombone. But when it comes to our own behaviors and our own emotions, we take it very personal and we think it tells a story about us. And I think it’s incredibly important that we flip that story and we say, okay, we can learn to change. And some of that is skills and things we do before we even get to the moment of change. And we can also learn how in that moment when we make decisions that we don’t want to make, when we see ourselves making the choice we wish we didn’t.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:31 We can learn to develop more self-control, discipline, willpower, whatever you want to call it in that moment. And so that’s the key, is to recognize that we all can do this if we have the right resources, the right learning and the right attitude.
Laurie Santos 00:08:51 And one of the things that we need to learn is just how change works and the kinds of things that tend to inhibit change. And you’ve argued that one thing we need to learn about is how our biology and our nervous systems sometimes affects our ability to change. What’s the problem with how our nervous system reacts that we need to understand better?
Eric Zimmer 00:09:08 Well, I’m oversimplifying a complex process here called homeostasis, which is that things like to largely remain the way they are. Our bodies are always trying to balance things out. If I get too warm, my body’s trying to cool me down. If I haven’t eaten enough, my body tries to get me to eat. There’s a constant balance for equilibrium, and I think something similar happens within us when it comes to change, because change does make us uncomfortable.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:37 When we start doing things that are different, there is a discomfort that often comes with it. There’s a lot of good that can come with it also, and we can learn to tune into the good and less of the bad, but that discomfort makes us want to revert back to what we know. And so I think we’re fighting that. And I think there’s a certain resistance that is built in to doing some of the actions that we want to do that make our lives better. Right? We think about getting off our phone or exercising or eating better. There’s a reason why these things are hard for everyone, and some of it just has to do with there’s a resistance to doing those things that we all face.
Laurie Santos 00:10:21 Talk to me about what this idea of resistance looks like in practice.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:24 I think resistance is what we all feel when it’s time to do something, and we don’t want to do it. Every single time I’ve exercised in my life, and I’m not a young person anymore. So we are talking thousands upon thousands of times every single time.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:41 When I’m done, I go, I’m glad I did that. You would think, based on basic reward learning that I would run to exercise every morning and yet I do not. I find myself still a lot of the time facing resistance. There’s a book out there called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and he talks about this very idea, too, that creatives face this. There’s a resistance to doing these things that are really important to us. So I think first is recognizing that resistance just exists and I don’t think it goes away. I think it’s part of why we’ve become obsessed with habit literature is because we just want this to be easy. We want it to be automatic. We don’t want it to be hard to exercise. We don’t want it to be hard to sit down and work on the novel we’re trying to do. We want it just to be easy and it gets easier. But I have found that resistance remains part of the game, and that’s okay, because we can learn how we overcome resistance and we can build Momentum that does make it easier.
Laurie Santos 00:11:47 How do we make it easier to overcome that resistance? Because I know I’m great at setting ambitious goals, but equally great at sitting on the couch when the time comes to follow through when we get back from the break. Eric will outline an approach from his book that can help us all get off that metaphorical sofa and start making progress on the things we want to achieve. We’ll break it all down when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Podcaster Eric Zimmer’s new book is called how a Little Becomes a Lot The Art of Small Changes for a more Meaningful Life. And that title is also the basic idea behind his approach to behavior change. Instead of focusing on one big transformation. Eric says we should focus on the small actions that can add up over time. He calls this the little by little approach.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:39 When I say little, by little, I mean something fairly specific. I mean low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction. And so the sneaking up on change, part of that, the low resistance actions, is that when we do what we say we’re going to do, when we make and keep promises to ourselves, even if they’re really small, there is a subtle feeling inside that feels good when we do that, and we know that motivation tends to go up when we feel good about ourselves and good about our chances of success.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:16 So by doing a little bit that we can get ourselves to do, we also become more motivated. So, for example, imagine you’re trying to become a runner in the beginning. If you do a half a mile of walking, that might be relatively easy for you to do. Well, a couple weeks from now, you might be able to run a half mile, and it remains the same level of difficulty because you’re getting better, you’re getting stronger. And so that’s what little by little does. It allows us to raise our motivation and keep tasks at a difficulty level that we will do them. And then success breeds success.
Laurie Santos 00:13:53 I know when I think about making a change in my life, it’s so tempting to start off big, right? It’s so tempting to start off like, I want to hit the gym five days a week, or I’m gonna write the entire novel. Walk me through why that’s so bad. Like this temptation to go big. It seems like it always backfires on us.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:11 Well, it’s important that we go back to the definition of little by little.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:15 Because little by little doesn’t necessarily mean tiny. It means low resistance actions, things you can get yourself to do. So if you can get yourself to do a big thing and you can keep doing it, have at it, right. This is for people who keep trying big and that not working. The harder something is to do. The higher your motivation has to be to do it. So if you are going to go to the gym five days a week for an hour and you haven’t been working out at all, that might be really hard. And when I say hard, I mean lots of different things. I just don’t mean the effort in the gym. I mean, how much time is it in your schedule that matters, right? If you don’t have a lot of time in your schedule and you now try and insert five new hours in, that’s going to be difficult. So difficulty can be a lot of different things. But when we try and do difficult, the only way we can do it is if we are super, super motivated and we generally don’t stay that way, it comes up and it goes down.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:21 And so inevitably we start not doing the action, which is then what we start to focus on. So if I’m like, well, I’m going to work out five days this week and we do it. Two, we’re focusing on the two days we didn’t do it.
Laurie Santos 00:15:34 Completely, beating ourselves up like, oh my God, I screwed up. I can never do this. ET cetera. Etc..
Eric Zimmer 00:15:39 Exactly. Which reinforces that. Well, I’m just the kind of person who can’t do this. I don’t have the willpower, I don’t have the discipline. And our motivation then goes down. And so I always work with people on like, let’s start smaller if we can and then build. My story of this is meditation. I have been trying to become a regular meditator since I was 18 years old, and when I wanted to start meditating, the options were there were books to read, and there was some weird guy in Columbus who taught transcendental meditation, right? This is a long time ago, and so I’d read the books and they’d say, do it for 30 minutes to an hour a day.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:17 And even the Transcendental Meditation, people were like 20 minutes twice a day. Well, that was really hard for me. When I sat down, it was like pandemonium in my brain. It was like the dark circus came to town so I could do it. When I was really motivated for a day, a week, maybe a month at the outside. But inevitably I would not stick with it. Then I would start thinking, see, you’re going to quit again. And I would. And then a few months later I’d be like, I really need to learn to meditate. Though. I did this again and again for decades, embarrassingly, until finally I was like, all right, you know what? I’m going to just do three minutes a day. And I did it. And I would try and do my best, like after I did it. Good job. You did what you said you were going to do. That led to five minutes. That led to ten minutes. That’s led to multiple seven day, ten day retreats.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:09 It’s led to studying deeply with a Zen teacher passing 100 koans, all of that really deep study. But that came for me being willing to start at what seemed to be an almost embarrassingly basic level.
Laurie Santos 00:17:24 You had this Roman saying that you shared in your book that I loved, that captured this idea really well. What’s that?
Eric Zimmer 00:17:29 Justyna lent make haste slowly, and it means we can often go faster if we actually slow down in the moments that we are in, right? I have been trying for two decades to get to be the sort of person that could meditate daily and go on meditation retreats, and I was trying to do it fast, right? Every time I’d pick up the book, I’d be like 30 minutes or an hour. It didn’t work. When I went slow, the three minutes a day, I got where I was going far faster. I got there in a couple of years when I had been trying for decades the other way. So it’s that make haste slowly really pays off in these sort of situations.
Laurie Santos 00:18:12 So do you have any ideas for how to know if a goal is too small to fail? Like, how do we know when we’re really in the little range that you’re talking about?
Eric Zimmer 00:18:20 It’s a trial and error calibration process. What I generally say is, if you’re succeeding consistently, I don’t mean perfectly, but I mean consistently, then you’re probably doing just fine. But if you’re not, if your goal is to do five days a week and you’re doing two days a week. We probably need to change the goal, and I think it’s always better to start a little bit smaller than we think because it’s easy to add. Okay, great. Two weeks went by where I went to the gym three days a week. Let’s add a day. Let’s see what happens. But the downside of it, of going too big, is that we increase our belief that there’s something wrong with us. When we fail, we increase our belief that we can’t change. We don’t have the discipline. We don’t have the stuff.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:08 Whatever it is, we don’t have it. And those stakes are really big, right? I talk about the stakes of change in my book, and one of the stakes of change is simply you don’t get the benefit from the thing you’re trying to change. So if you’re trying to build an exercise habit and it keeps not working, you don’t get the benefits of what exercise would bring you. Okay, that’s important. But I think more importantly is that we erode our trust in ourselves and we erode our belief that we have agency over our own life, and that is a very high cost. I was a behavior coach for years. I still do some of it. And the only reason somebody hires a behavior coach is when they’ve tried to make a change a lot, and it has not worked. And so it’s the same thing there. We had to try and undo the story that they had now convinced themselves of, that there was something wrong with them. We had to get success going, and we had to get them internalizing that success and getting back to believing that they are the kind of person who can make change, who does offer their own life.
Laurie Santos 00:20:19 So that’s one way that we can get success going, is we pick a goal that’s little enough that we can’t mess it up. Another thing we get wrong, though, is we pick too many goals at once. You’ve talked about how we’ve gone on these self-improvement binges. What do you mean, there?
Eric Zimmer 00:20:33 Yeah. Well, coming back to the definition of little by little, I said low resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction. And part of what I mean by that is, yeah, we are exposed to so many ways to change our lives. If you get on Instagram and you’re sort of linked to all the self-help type accounts, you could have 30 ideas of things you need to do to improve your life in the first hour. So which of those do we do? And there’s a temptation to try and do all of them, which doesn’t work because we’re trying to do too much. Also, we try something. We do it for a few days. We expect change to happen.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:15 We’re like, okay, I’ve started meditating and I’ve done it for four days now and I’m not a different person. Right. So we give up and we try something else. And that scattered ness does not help. It’s been far better for me to narrow down to like, okay, what is the next most important thing that I want to change in my life? And let me really give that my attention and give it time to work.
Laurie Santos 00:21:42 In your book, you talked about a case where you mess this up with some of the first times you tried to go to treatment where it’s like, I’m going to get sober, but I’m also going to do many, many things at once. Yeah. So explain what you learned from that.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:52 The first time I went to treatment, longer term treatment, and I came out and I was like, all right, I’m 30 day sober. I need to stay sober, but my life is way behind course, right? I’m 23 years old and I never been to college.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:07 I have no job. I make no money, I don’t have a car. I need to get sober. But I also need to get in great shape because I’ve been in bad shape and I better start eating right. And I need to enroll at the local community college because I’ve got to get my education on track. And what ended up happening for me was by doing all those different things. I missed the thing that enabled all of them, which was my recovery. My recovery needed more care and attention for a little bit longer before I was ready to diversify. It was the enabler of everything else and that was what I did differently this time around. I made it the priority. I gave it the attention it needed for the time it needed so that it was solid, and then I was able to start building on top of it.
Laurie Santos 00:22:57 And this idea of making sure that you give whatever your goal is, the time it needs, gets to another part of your little by little strategy, which is that rather than trying to cultivate some particular habit, we should instead think about cultivating momentum.
Laurie Santos 00:23:10 Why is momentum so important but so underappreciated?
Eric Zimmer 00:23:14 Well, back to what I said earlier about habit. We want habits because we want these things to be easier, and most larger behaviors we do in life aren’t going to fall into the category of what researchers would call a habit, which is something that happens automatically, and it typically happens in the same way around the same time. And one of the big problems is that most of us have lives that have constantly shifting context. Meaning, I might say I’m going to work on my novel right after the kids get on the school bus every day. But there are plenty of days the kids don’t get on the school bus, or the dog is sick or something comes up, which means it doesn’t become automatic. But we can have momentum, which makes it a lot easier. And we can work to keep momentum even when we can’t do the thing perfectly. An example I often use is my goal is to move my body every morning, and usually in some way, vigorously.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:17 There was a stretch of time that my mom kept ending up in the hospital, and when my mom would be in the hospital, it sort of took over everything, and I would have to get up at the crack of dawn and get into the hospital, because you never know when the doctors are going to come by. It’s not like they’re like, well, check on your mom at 830. You just have to be there if you want to talk to a doctor. So I couldn’t exercise, but what I could do is walk up and down the halls for 20 minutes. There are ways that we can do a smaller version. I often say a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing, so we can do a smaller version of whatever our activity is. That helps us keep momentum, and we all know what momentum feels like. Imagine it on a bike. The first few pedal strokes are kind of hard. You’re a little wobbly. You’ve got to put extra effort in. Once you get moving, it’s easier.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:04 It’s not like you don’t have to pedal or steer. You do, but it’s easier and that’s what we’re after.
Laurie Santos 00:25:10 Another thing we can do to keep momentum going is to celebrate the tiny accomplishments along the way. And this is something that I struggle with, especially when I’m using your little by little approach. If I go to the gym every day for a month, then I can check off the perfect gold star. I’m like, you know, pat on the back. But when I just look at momentum, I’m like, well, I’m working out a little bit more than I was last month. It’s so hard to realize that as a win. So any hints for how to celebrate even when we’re not perfect?
Eric Zimmer 00:25:38 There’s two parts of that question that I want to address. The first is about the celebration aspect, and I think it’s important, and I think the word celebrate might be overselling what we actually do, but I try, anytime I do what I say I’m going to do, big or small, I try and have a moment where I inside give myself just a little good job, nice work and I try and notice the feeling.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:04 It’s subtle, but it is always there. In my experience of I did what I said I was going to do. There’s an internal alignment that feels good, and I try and notice that, and we can contrast it when we don’t do what we say we’re going to do. And we all know the mental agitation that comes along with that. So some of it is recognizing like, oh, this good feeling is subtle, but compared to that other thing. Boy, this is much better. I think the perfection is a different animal because it is a real problem in my experience with people trying to change. We expect that we’re going to do it perfectly, and that simply does not exist for the vast, vast, vast majority of people. I often talk about the 80% rule, which means if I’m trying to do something daily, and those two things for me are moving my body for 30 minutes and meditate. If I’m doing that 80% of the time or so, I consider myself successful. I try and give myself the gold star for it, because if I can do that week after week, month after month, year after year, I get all the benefit there is to get that 20% that I missed just doesn’t matter.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:19 But if I focus on that 20%, I’m not doing. I threatened to derail the entire project. And so getting away from that all or nothing thinking is critically important when it comes to making lasting change.
Laurie Santos 00:27:35 And another thing we need to get right in terms of our thinking is that we need to understand which goals we really want to be pursuing in the first place. You’ve argued that one reason behavior change is hard is because we often want more than one thing at once. Give me some examples of this and explain why it can be such a huge problem for behavior change.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:52 Well, I think if any of us pay attention to what shows up in our day to day life, we recognize we want lots of things. I very recently was just in New York City, and I wanted to enjoy New York City. I wanted to also continue to promote the book that was out. I also wanted to take a nap because I was tired. Right. I mean, I’ve got all these things that just show up moment to moment.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:17 And the chapter in the book is called What Is Worth Wanting? And there’s a little snippet from a song, one of my favorite songs by artist Jimmie Dale Gilmore that says, my mind’s got a mind of its own, and I think we can all relate with that. When we start getting into all the competing things inside of us. Boy, there’s a lot of theories on it, and I ended up really simplifying. I hope not oversimplifying, but definitely simplifying into two things. Values and desires. Values are the things that the best, wisest part of us has decided are worth wanting. And desires are just the things that show up. You just want them because you want them. And so the first type of conflict we find ourselves in is the value to desire conflict. Or as I like to call it, what I want most versus what I want now. And we’re all familiar with this one. What I want most is to be in shape. What I want now is to continue to sit on the couch and read Substack, because, my goodness, there’s a lot of great writers out there.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:23 That’s what I want most versus what I want now. But the phrasing of that question is really valuable, because it makes me realize that I do want the thing that I currently don’t feel like doing. And I think that’s that’s critical. Now there’s a lot more that goes into solving that. But even phrasing the question allows us to make better choices. Then there’s a second type of conflict that comes up, and these are even harder in some ways. And the values, the values conflicts.
Laurie Santos 00:29:53 Give me some examples of those harder ones.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:57 Well, I’ve done some exercises on my values and I’ve ended up with two values in my list. One of them is adventure. I’ve realized that I am happiest, most fulfilled, most alive. When I’m on some sort of adventure. I don’t mean I have to be summoning Everest, but I’m doing something I haven’t done before or I don’t know how to do so. That’s one value. Another value that’s really important to me is to be able to be content right where I am with my life, the way it is.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:27 Well, there is a nearly constant tension between those two values and I don’t know how to solve it. I actually got to the place where I finally realized, like it doesn’t get solved. It’s a constant negotiation or a dance between the two. And for me, that helps me relax. I used to ask some version of that question on the podcast all the time, like how much should I be ambitious? Versus how much should I be content? As if somebody would give me a formula and this tension would disappear. And my experience is it hasn’t worked that way. But knowing it’s there allows me to think about and go, oh, okay. Yep. I’m feeling the call to adventure again. Well, you’ve been on the road for the last four weeks. Maybe it’s time to spend a little bit more time on contentment. I face this with book launch, right? Book launch puts you into a future mindset of like all this energy going to this day. And I found that that has made it harder for me to be content with the moment that I’m in.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:33 So I’ve had to try and emphasize that a little bit more, because the other one is just sort of happening. Another one that almost everybody will recognize is the tension between their family and their career. It’s why we talk about work life balance so much. Because it’s hard, because it’s the tension that doesn’t disappear in us.
Laurie Santos 00:31:54 It’s time for another break. But when we return, Eric will tell us how he figured out what his values really are. He’ll also share his thoughts on how we can all spend more time pursuing what matters, and less time frantically checking inane things off our to do list, the Happiness Lab. We’ll be right back. Before the break, Eric and I spoke about the importance of figuring out what we really value so that we can choose goals that matter, but that can be harder than it seems, because sometimes the things we think we value aren’t really our own values at all. Eric had this realization a few years ago while driving through an affluent neighborhood in Atlanta.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:38 My partner’s mother had Alzheimer’s and she lived there, so for six years, we were kind of back and forth between Columbus and Atlanta.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:44 And her mom lived up in the northern part of Atlanta, and I would drive to a library to work, and I would drive through Buckhead, Atlanta. And if you’ve been to Buckhead Atlanta, one thing you will probably notice that I certainly did is it is lined street after street after street with enormous houses with giant yards. Like jaw dropping wealth. And I found myself one day driving down those roads. And what was happening with what sometimes happens when I’m on those roads is I start thinking, I want that you know what’s wrong with me? That I don’t have that. So I’m noticing that. And at the same moment, I pay attention to what’s playing on my car stereo. And it’s a band I love called The Gaslight Anthem, who are kind of like a punk band. They’re punk rock. And it caused me just for a second to reflect because I was like, well, what is it about that that matters? And I realized, oh, it’s there’s an authenticity to punk music. There’s a doing what really matters to you ethos to it.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:45 There’s a contributing ethos to it. And I was able just to see in that second, like, here’s one value being presented to me that I’m finding myself wanting, and here’s another value. And what I was able to do, though, in that moment was see that one of those values is one that I have wanted for a long, long time. It’s deeply embedded in me. It’s the value of being authentic about doing what I want to do, about doing things that matter. This other one, this wealth value, seems to only show up when I’m exposed to it. And that’s a way of telling which is which for me is which ones am I constantly kind of coming back around to that they remain there and which ones show up when I’m exposed to them or when I’m around them. I was in LA recently, and one night I was in a party in the Hollywood Hills, and there’s a lot of money up there. Gorgeous house, lots of people, lots of money. And I find myself thinking like, oh yeah, okay, maybe I want to be here.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:49 And the next night I was hanging out with a bunch of, you know, quote unquote starving artists, and I found myself wanting to be like, oh, I really want to fit in there. And I just noticed, like, I’m affected by what I’m around. So being clear on who I am is really important as I move through these different places in the world.
Laurie Santos 00:35:10 Another dichotomy between our goals that we should pay attention to is kind of how they feel to us. You’ve talked about this distinction between want two goals and have two goals, and how they interact differently with this idea of resistance. Explain the difference between these goals and what they might look like.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:26 Well, if we think of saying to ourselves, I should do x, Y, or Z, and I’m not against the word should, I think it’s a nice shorthand sometimes, but what is it that I’m telling myself I should do? And is it something that I have to do? Or is it something that I want to do? And when we are constantly embedded in have two goals, we become unmotivated, we become dispirited, we feel trapped.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:51 And so an example of this for me that I talk about is when the kids were younger, I was driving one to soccer practice here, and I had to get another one to the other side of town for that. And then I had to and my brain is going ridiculous. I have to drive these kids all over the place. I have to do this, then I have to do that. And I just had the thought and I was like, no, I don’t. There is no law out there that says that I have to take these kids to these traveling soccer leagues and all these different things. And so I paused and I went, well, why am I doing it then? And that allowed me to go, oh, I’m doing it because I believe it’s good for them for X, Y, and Z reason. I’m doing it because I really value my son’s development. Now I’m doing the same thing, but I’m doing it in a slightly different spirit. And I think a lot of us fall into this.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:41 We’re actually doing a lot of the things that are important to us, but we allow ourselves to get into I have to do it, which becomes problematic because then we feel trapped. So step one for me is often just reconnect. Why am I doing the things I’m doing now? If you go through your list of that and you find that there are things that you are doing that don’t actually matter to you, that you do feel like are have to’s that don’t matter, then that is where we want to work to change. I don’t want to keep doing something that I feel like I have to. If it doesn’t align with what’s truly important to me, those are very difficult things. I’ve had to spend a lot of time as I looked at my relationship with my parents. You know how much of this lines up with my values, of what I want to do to take care of them, and how much of this lines up with some inherited sense of duty? Those are hard to tell apart. Often it takes some time thinking about those things, but I do think the more time we spend thinking about like, why am I doing the things I am doing? The far better chance we have of leading a meaningful and intentional life.
Laurie Santos 00:37:54 And so that’s thinking about all the values and the goals we have so that we can create the right kind of lasting change. But once we pick our goals, we don’t just need to set our internal compass. We need to make sure that the world is not messing us up. We don’t want to be sabotaged by the world around us. And in the last part of our conversation, I wanted to talk about what you’ve learned about behavior change in terms of setting up our external environment. Right. I know in your book you’ve talked about different structural ways that we can go about bringing our goals to life. And you have this handy acronym that you use to do that. What’s that?
Eric Zimmer 00:38:27 So we’ve got to get the structural right, the ways we set ourselves up for success. So I roll out a process in the book I call spa, which is a way of walking through all of these things. S stands for specificity, because so much of what seems to us a failure of willpower is often failure of clarity.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:49 We’re not specific enough about what we need to do. So we might have a goal, but are we really specific? If I have to figure out what to do and then do it at the same time, I’m in danger of failing. Right. I know this one really well. I wake up, it’s the weekend and I know I’m going to exercise, and I’m like, okay, well, what am I going to do? It’s kind of a nice day. Maybe I should go for a bike ride. Yeah, but if I go on a bike ride, then I’m going to have to pack a lunch. You know what? I’ll go to yoga instead. Well, what time are those classes? Right before long, I am completely lost trying to decide what to do. So that ambiguity is a real problem. The next part of it is prompts. How do I get reminded to do the thing that I’m doing? This sounds simple, but it’s actually often not right. The mornings that I overcome my Substack exercise challenge are the mornings that an alarm goes off and says, now it is time.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:44 Alignment is really sort of what you just mentioned. Our environment, right? And our environment consists of have we made it easy to do the classic when people always use is like, do I set out my exercise clothes the night before my version of this that shows me how important environment is, which every time I tell it, I feel like a flawed creature is that I play my guitar so much more when it’s on a stand versus in a case right next to it. It takes about 30. I’ve timed it. It takes about 30s to open the guitar case and take the guitar out. The fact that I end up playing more because of some 32nd friction again, makes me think like, what kind of weird animal am I? And yet it is undeniably true. So the more that we set up our environment, the better chance we have. We used to say in recovery all the time, if you hang around the barbershop long enough, you’re going to get a haircut, right? It speaks to if I’m around people that are using, I’m going to end up using.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:44 And so who supports us? And the environments we’re in are all really important. And then the last part of it is are for resilience, which is planning for what am I going to do when my plan goes wrong. So when I would be coaching somebody, we’d work out a great plan and then I would say, okay, how is this going to fail? Back to the example I gave earlier work on my novel right after the kids get on the school bus every day. What are we going to do? On days the kids don’t get on the school bus? The answer might be I go, that day is just a wash and that’s fine. It’s better than feeling bad that we didn’t do it that day. It’s much better just to go. Well, days of the kids don’t get on the school bus. I just don’t do it. But we might come up with an alternate plan. So those are the structural elements and the environmental alignments that are so critical. All of these things are really important to our chances of success.
Laurie Santos 00:41:38 A final aspect of resilience that you talk about a lot in the book is the importance of other people and social support. Talk to me about the power of social support.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:47 The more people support you that are in your corner, your chances of change go up multiple times. So this can just be a friend asking you, hey, you know, how’d you do with that thing today? It can be sharing it on social media that I’m going to try and make this change. It can be asking your partner, I did it this morning. Last week was not a great week for me exercise wise, right? It was a book launch week. So I said to my partner last night, I really need to get back to exercise in the mornings this week, you know? Could you help encourage me? She helped encourage me. Right. I got back to it. And so it’s that sort of thing that makes such a difference. And my experience of change in my life that, you know, some of the biggest changes and obviously the biggest one being my sobriety, came with the support of lots of other people.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:39 You know, it came through 12 step support, but we don’t all have to have a support group to be getting support from people around us. And it’s just important to ask because we are much more likely to achieve the goal. I’ve had friends who are heroin addicts and cigarette smokers tell me that quitting cigarettes was harder. Now I think there are a few different reasons for this, so I don’t want to vastly Oversimplified, but I think one factor is that they’re trying to get over heroin addiction. They were surrounded by people helping and supporting them, and when they tried to quit smoking, it was just them. They just said, today’s the day. I’m not going to smoke. I’m not going to smoke, I’m not going to smoke. They have no help. Makes a big difference.
Laurie Santos 00:43:23 And so any strategies for asking for that help like you did with your wife? Because I think it can be tough to admit to other people that we want to change and then we need some help.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:32 So having the humility to be able to do it is hard.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:36 I get it, and it makes such a big difference. One way to do it is just get other people to want to do the thing with you. A number of years ago, when I worked in the software business, I worked in an office. People would always come in and be like, hey, I’m not going to eat that today. I’m on a diet this week, and this person would try it and that person would try. None of them really ever seem to change very much. And so finally, at one point, I was like, you know what? Let’s try something. Let’s do a body fat challenge where we’re just going to take our body fat at the beginning and the end, and whoever’s body fat changes the most in that window wins a prize. But what was remarkable is that about all seven of us made significant changes in those three months. Sometimes our support was not support in the way you’d think of it. Sometimes we’re teasing each other. We’re playing, but we’re still doing it together.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:24 There’s more than just me involved in the endeavor. And so I think there’s lots of ways to set it up. There are people in your life you may not feel safe asking that. You don’t want to ask. Don’t ask them. Your partner may not be that person. It might be random people on Facebook as you join some group where they’re all trying to do it. So there’s lots of ways to find it, and I think it’s just a matter of finding the one that works best for you.
Laurie Santos 00:44:48 And so we’ve talked about so many different ways that we can build our skills to change better. How is taking this little by little approach affected the way you achieve your own behavior change?
Eric Zimmer 00:44:58 It’s essentially how I wrote the entire book. I have had the privilege of reading great authors for 12 years now for my podcast. I’ve read probably 5 or 600 books in this space, so I know what a really good book in this space looks like. And so I got a book deal and I started writing.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:15 And I can assure you that in the beginning, my writing did not look anything like that. I had levels of self-doubt I hadn’t faced in forever. And so when I would sit down and think about writing for a long period, I just didn’t want to do it. It brought up such feelings of doubt and uncomfortableness. I would try and just turn away. So I wrote the book 30 minutes at a time. Now I might say, oh, okay, it’s Monday afternoon and I have four hours available for writing, but I every single time would sit down. I would start my 30 minute timer, I would put on my playlist, I’d set up all my distraction blockers, and my goal was not to bail out in that 30 minutes. And if I got to the end of that 30 minutes and I was rolling, I would still reset the timer and I’d do it for 30 minutes. But if I got to the end of that 30 minutes and I was really struggling and I was really miserable, I could stop and walk away and I would do a little of the good job.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:15 You did it, you did it. You hung in for 30 minutes. In the beginning, I simply was like, if I put the time in, I get the A plus gold star. Now over time, you start to see results from that and the process gets a little bit easier. It never gets easy, but it gets easier. But that’s kind of how I wrote the book. And so I follow that advice. And then the other one is I use that phrase a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. I used it this morning. I meant to exercise this morning. I did not make the best choices in the world early on. You know, I’m still checking. Like, how are the reviews on Amazon? And, you know, did so-and-so share it? And and then I realized, okay, well, I don’t have time to do what I plan to do. Then I hopped on the exercise bike for 15 minutes. I still was like a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing, and that is valuable.
Laurie Santos 00:47:09 So if there’s been a small change you’ve been struggling to make, why not take Eric’s advice and start small? Choose actions that feel manageable to you. Focus on consistency over perfection, and make sure the goal you’re working toward is something you actually value. Because those little bits of progress repeated over time can ultimately change your life. If you’d like to hear more about Eric’s advice on how to make lasting change, check out his book how a Little Becomes a Lot, which is out now. Next week, we’ll continue our Back to School book series with comedian Chris Duffy. I’ll ask him about some of my favorite takeaways from his new book. Humor Me, and we’ll learn that embracing your inner goofball can help you become a better version of yourself.
Multiple Speakers 00:47:50 The humor that I want to celebrate is the kind where you are just laughing so hard that you’re holding your sides and tears are streaming down your face, and it’s really hard afterwards to even explain what was funny about that. But in that moment you are so locked in 100% present, and that is these days, very rare to have that complete 100% presence with another person where they’re not like half on their phone or half thinking about something else.
Laurie Santos 00:48:14 That’s all. Next week on the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:22 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. 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.
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