How to Turn Your Life Into a Video Game & Level Up, With Author Steve Kamb
Improve your decisions, hack your mind, and master the psychology of persuasion with "The Science of Success". This podcast will teach you the tactics and strategies to understand how psychology rules the world around us and what you can do to use that information to make yourself smarter and achieve your goals.
We're very excited about the guest we have this week on "The Science of Success": Steve Kamb, the "Rebel Leader" and founder of NerdFitness.com. He's also the author of the new book Level Up Your Life.
In this episode, you'll learn:
How Steve's Epic Quest of Awesome changed his life
How to achieve your New Year's resolutions
Using game mechanics to create accountability
Overcoming the fear of changeHow to preserve willpower to make the best decisions
How to turn your life into a video game (using science and research!)
Why it's a good idea to floss a single tooth
How to create your own batcave (like Bruce Wayne)
The importance of the "progress principle" in forming habits
And much more!
Thank you so much for listening!
Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions how to do that!).
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Alright, well we've got a special guest on the podcast today, Steve Kamb. Many people believe that Steve Kamb was created in a laboratory in the 1940s as part of a secret government project. Those people are wrong. That was Steve Rogers, who became Captain America. But Steve Kamb is in many ways a real life superhero. Steve is the rebel leader and founder of NerdFitness.com, and the author of "Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story." Steve, welcome to the podcast. Steve: Great intro, I'm just gonna, I'm golf-clapping over here. That was fantastic, I love it. Thanks for having me, man. Matt: Yeah, well we're super pumped to have you on "The Science of Success". I think your book is going to be super relevant for a lot of our listeners, and I think they're really going to love digging into some of this content. Steve: Thank you, I mean, I like to think it's like a self-help book for skeptical nerds that would never read self-help. You know what I mean? Like, I tried to ground this in as much behavioral psychology and the studies of human behavior. Like, grounding this in that stuff, so it's like yes it's super nerdy, yes you're creating or turning your life into a video game, but it's all backed by PubMed research and behavioral psychology stuff, because I just love that stuff and it's been so much fun for me to work through. And now to turn it into a book. Matt: And that's so relevant for our audience because our big focus on "Science of Success" is kind of how we can ground this stuff in science, and how we can have sort of research-backed strategies for improving yourself, improving your decision making, understanding and influencing other people, and all that kind of stuff. Steve: Sure, I love it. I'm in the right spot then. Matt: Absolutely. So I am a huge -- and you know this obviously -- but I am a huge video gamer. And in many ways to me, that's part of the reason that this book spoke to me so much. But one of the things you talk about, and kind of one of the core cruxes of "Level Up Your Life" is the idea of turning your life into an RPG. And, you know, you talk about in the book playing EverQuest, and I was a former Ultima Online player, so there may be some... Steve: Oh man, yeah I know. Matt: It might come to blows later. But tell me a little bit about that concept and how important that is. Steve: Yeah, well, as somebody that was raised on a Nintendo and by the time I was third, fourth, fifth grade-ish, the Super Nintendo came out, and all of these amazing old school (I mean at the time they weren’t old school but now they are), old school Japanese RPG games came out, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI (which is, you know, actually Final Fantasy III), and Secret of Mana. All these amazing games that really shaped, I think, my childhood. In every one of these games is a concept of a small, weak character that is tasked with saving the world ultimately. And I love the idea, especially as somebody that lived in suburbia and was a small, scrawny, skinny, weak kid. I loved the idea of consistent, constant improvement, and leveling up of a character, and being able to explore these far off lands and do these amazing things. And as I got older and older, these games became more complex. The graphics got better, the storylines became more intricate. And there became less and less need for me to use my imagination, because everything was done for me in the game. And, unfortunately, what began as a fun, kind of fun entertainment, started to become an escape for me, and I spent far too much time playing EverQuest, and then EverQuest 2, which are kind of the precursors to World of Warcraft, but it's a persistent online universe in which you create a character that you can spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours playing as and still never see the end of the game. So, as I, after high school, through college, got a regular job but also kind of fell in love with this idea of getting fit and wanting to help others get fit, I wanted to do so in a way that spoke to me and my love of video games, my love of creation of the character, of stories and worlds and things of that nature. So I purchased the domain NerdFitness.com, because I'm a huge nerd and I've built computers and I love Harry Potter and I love digging into the back lore and stories. Just for example, I, yesterday, finished playing through BioShock Infinite. Matt: Dude, I love the BioShock games. Steve: Oh, they're so great. And finished going through them, and then the first thing I did as I sat down and read like four hours of message boards on the history of multiverse theory and all these crazy, crazy things that had no relevance to... but I was like "This is so fascinating to me!" Matt: The ending of that game is amazing. Steve: It's so well done. And you know there's some sort of twist coming, but even when you know it's coming, I still had no idea. I was like "Holy crap, this is, I need to go and talk to some instant message boards about this immediately." Anyway, I apologize, I'm getting sidetracked here. So I bought the domain NerdFitness.com, it's simple, I'm a nerd and I like helping people get fit. But the tagline was "Level up your life", and again, as somebody that was small and scrawny and started to get stronger and looked at my training in the gym as me going on a mission, or me completing a quest to gain strength, gain a strength point in my attributes or whatever. It just jumped out at me. I thought to myself, as I was kind of engineering the site, engineering the business, and truly engineering my life, what were the reasons why I was so addicted to the video games that I loved? And if I was addicted to those games for those reasons, could I apply those same game mechanics, the same psychology, the same psychological reasons why, to my actual life? And I broke it down into a few key components, one of which being the progress principle. It's this concept that we are, as a species, more entertained and happier when we are progressing than we are when we get the thing we're progressing towards. So, for example, there was a study done, I think it's the concept that instead of getting all your satisfaction from the reward at the end of the journey, it's really breaking down the idea that you are on a journey, and every time you can show progress on that journey, you're brain gets a little hit of dopamine, and you get addicted to this idea of making progress. That's why it works in the video game; you love going from level one to level two. Oh, you just got a new sword? Oh, that new sword lets you go kill this new bad guy faster, and when you kill that bad guy, it's like "Oh, that got me a new suit of armor, which allows me to go into this new cave. Which then has this new thing at the bottom of it." And next thing you know, it's like two years later, you have a full beard, and you don't know where your time went. So I thought about how I could apply the progress principle to my own life. So I actually built a questing system that add experience point values to each quest, depending on how difficult they were. As I crossed those things off of my list, my character -- AKA Steve -- would level up. Although, actually, my character's name is Rebel One. I thought that was a cooler, nerdier name than just Steve. So, Rebel One is kind of like my alter ego. So, by day I'm writing articles and sitting at a desk, and whatever. But in the afternoons, evenings, I might be planning my next trip, working on the violin, getting closer to deadlifting 405 pounds or completing a certain gymnastic movement. But it's all done with this idea of progress and this whole progress principle, because it's not as instant as it happens in a video game. If you're trying to lose weight, maybe you're trying to write a book. If you are studying, doing a research paper or something like... If you can find a way to break that down into bite sized missions or quests that you can complete and show yourself that there's a progress bar to be filled up or an experience bar to fill up. Maybe even creating some sort of reward system that every time you cross a threshold or you cross a milestone, that character can, your character can level up. You can earn a new item that helps you further along in your quest. I just fell in love with the idea of life as a Role Playing Game, and as somebody that spent, at this point, thousands of hours buried in games, and imagining myself as that character, I wanted to start living vicariously through myself, and get hooked on leveling up myself as a character. So, I broke my quest system into travel goals, financial goals, volunteering goals, business, social goals, whatever they may be. And broke them down into small enough goals and habits and missions and quests so that they were things that I could consistently make progress on and show it to myself. Prove to myself that I was, in fact, progressing and get addicted to that idea of moving forward. Matt: So, tell me about... You talk about the term that you sort of created your own "epic quest of awesome". Tell me what some of the pieces of that quest and how you created that. Steve: Sure, everybody's got a bucket list, and everybody wakes up on New Year's Eve, I'm sorry on New Year's Day, hungover and says "This year, things are going to be different, and I'm going to run, I'm going to exercise more, and I'm going to eat better, and I'm going to finally write my book, and I'm going to do this and that." Whatever the studies say, it's like three weeks later, ninety percent of people have abandoned their goals. They haven't gotten anything done. Or people get more excited about adding more and more things to their bucket list, that they never actually cross anything off of it. So I wanted to reframe things and I decided to rename my bucket quest my "Epic Quest of Awesome". Why? I don't know. It was like the two most ridiculously superlative words I could pick out was awesome and epic, and throw them together. It's funny, my friend Benny, who is from Ireland, let me know at one point that his two least favorite words that Americans use was "epic" and "awesome". He's like "Everything's epic! Everything's awesome!" I was like "You are not going to like the quest that I just put together then." He was like "What are you talking about?" I was like "Welllll, don't worry about it. It's fine." So I called it my epic quest of awesome, and as I said a little bit earlier, I divided my life into goals and missions that challenge me, things that pushed me outside of my comfort zone, things that improved my health, my physical strength, my endurance. Fun missions. For example, while writing this book, I learned to play the violin because I thought that was a challenging mission that self-doubt had already set in before I even picked up the violin, so I was like "This is a perfect case study for this book. Why don't I use game mechanics and the structuring of my environment to make learning the violin almost like a foregone conclusion?" So I have music quests, I have -- and I can talk a little bit more about the music stuff later, that's a big ass, big part of my life too. You know, I turned life into the game, I segmented it into quests, lines, and story missions, and tried to take a lot of the same, take a lot of the things that you used to, I used to escape into, and instead apply to see if I could have a fun way of reenacting those experiences in real life. So, for example, I love James Bond. I think what Daniel Craig has done with the character is phenomenal. The original book, Ian Fleming's series, I think is really great. So I thought to myself, instead of just watching another James Bond movie, why don't you live out a weekend like James Bond? So I thought what that would look like, and planned it out and structured it out. So I went and stayed in a really cheap hostel in Nice, France. I found somebody there that spoke French, and brought her with me to a costume shop that also happened to rent tuxedos. I then used hotel points to stay at the Fairmont Monte Carlo and had set up an automatic savings account to set aside a little bit of money each week, so I had enough money to gamble with at the famous Monte Carlo casino. So here I am, sitting in a tux, drinking cocktails, gambling at the Monte Carlo, laughing my ass off, and cracking corny jokes like James Bond would, when in reality I was a kid that was traveling around the world with a backpack. There was more money in the table than I had probably spent in the previous week, and it was fun, it was kind of fun for me to see how I could create these amazing, epic experiences without breaking the bank to show other people like "Hey, I'm a regular person like you. Here's exactly how I learned to do this." Or "Hey, if I'm learning to play the violin, or a language, here's a system you can put in place using your favorite games and movies to set yourself up to succeed in those instances as well." Matt: Yeah, I mean I love that example in the book. I think that's a perfect illustration, especially of an epically awesome thing to do. Steve: It was so much fun. I made money in the weekend. I think I won like two hundred bucks or something playing Blackjack. The tux rental was like fifty bucks, and I used hotel points for the hotel. So overall, this amazing weekend that I got plenty of emails from people saying like "Oh, must be nice to be rich." And I'm like "I didn't really, I had a specific mission in mind, I had a goal structure, a goal system in place. I had a progress structure in place. A leveling system, etcetera." I considered like James Bond was like a boss battle. I was building up to that moment, and whether I won or lost, it wasn't going to financially cripple me with the money that I gambled, because it had been slowly, automatically set aside, so that it was all a part of the experience and the stories that I was building. In my mind, whenever possible, I try to spend my money on experiences more than possessions, just because they're something that you will have forever, and things that you will be able to tell stories to your children, and grandchildren and great grandkids about for years and years and years. Matt: So, you touched on this a little bit, but tell me more about the use of game mechanics and structuring your environment to lock in, or put yourself on a path to actually be able to achieve some of these goals. Steve: Sure. There's two things in particular that I found were really helpful for me in starting to cross things off my list. The thing that I found most important was understanding that we are products of our environment. I didn't want to believe it, but after understanding and watching myself, and then doing as much research as I could on the subject and interacting with other people. Asking ourselves, "why is it that we know we should work out, but we can't get ourselves to do it?" We know that we shouldn't watch twelve episodes of a TV show on Netflix, and yet we can't get ourselves to stop. What is it with our environments that are setting us up to fail, and how can we rewire or reengineer the things around us so that we don't have to use willpower, we don't have to rely on motivation? What I've discovered, and in my experience have found to be absolutely true, I look at willpower as if it is a life bar in a video game. Every time you're forced to make a decision or spend any willpower on a new habit, that willpower bar starts to deplete and when that willpower bar is full depleted, the habit falls apart and you kind of have to start all over again. What most people do on January 1st, when they're trying to change their life, like "Oh, I'm going to start flossing, and running every morning, and eating better, and I'm going to write my book, and I'm going to learn to play an instrument." I honestly have no problem with all sorts of goals, however I do have a problem with the way people attack them. So for somebody that makes all these goals and has no structure in place, it's the equivalent of attacking ten different bad guys all at the same time. Sure enough, when you attack ten bad guys at the same time, you're going to get your ass kicked and you're going to die. Your willpower bar gets depleted when you have to make ten really difficult decisions to get yourself to start a new habit all at the same time. On top of that, let's say if you say "I'm going to write a book." You sit down, "Okay, I have to write this entire book soon." That's the equivalent of attacking a bad guy that's way too high of a level. Again, you get your ass kicked. What needs to happen is you need to attack each of these problems in a systematized way, so that you don't deplete your willpower bar, or you set yourself up so you don't even need to use willpower in the first place. Let's say you're trying to get fit and you want to eventually run a marathon. Well, what I would recommend people do is increase the number of steps between you and the habit you're trying to break, and decrease the number of steps between you and the habit you're trying to build. So sleep in your running clothes. Put your alarm clock across the room next to a glass of water, so when you wake up the next morning, you have to get out of bed because the alarm clock's across the room. You get up, you go over, you turn off, you're already dressed, you step into your running shoes, you quickly chug your glass of water and your phone is already set, which is in the other room so that way you're not lying in bed checking it. Your phone in the other room is already set to your workout playlist and you grab it and you tell yourself you only have to go out the door and run for five minutes. That's it. You are building a teeny tiny small habit that does not require a tremendous amount of willpower. You're structuring your environment around you to tell you success. And you've done it in a way so that the default activity for you once you've gotten out of bed, you're already in your clothes; the default behavior is to actually do the thing you're trying to build this new habit. I'll give you a few more examples. So, let's say I was trying to write the book "Level Up Your Life", and writing a book was so overwhelming to me that I just continually put it off because I told myself I don't have time to write this, and I'll write it when I'm more motivated, and I came to realize the idea of motivation is a terrible way to go about doing things you're interested in. I found a great answer that I talk about in the book, but somebody talks about they want to get motivated to write, or they want to get motivated to learn an instrument. The response to them was like "Screw motivation, cultivate discipline." I thought that was so profound and so helpful to me as somebody that was waiting to get motivated enough to write my book. Instead, what I did was I woke up and the first thing I did every morning was make a cup of coffee, then sat down at my computer, immediately turned on a program called Self Control at the time, now I use a program called Freedom. It blocks every time-wasting website on my computer so that even if I wanted to check them out, I can't, so I have to use zero willpower to not check them, because I can't even access them. I then have a playlist that I listen to to get me into the right mood, and then I had a daily goal, where every day I had to write a certain number of words. As long as I wrote those words, it didn't matter if the content was good or not, but I had to write a certain number of words. And every day that I did that was considered a check, a mission complete on this quest of writing a book. Because I had blocked out these websites, because I had canceled my cable, because I had a good playlist set up, I had structured my entire environment around the idea of "Steve is now a book writer, and every morning from around 6:30AM until 10AM, that is what he's going to do. He's going to write a book, he will not be distracted, his phone will be in the other room, all chat programs will be turned off." The environment was built in a way that I could pull those things off. I like to call this "building your Batcave". In the book, I refer to it as this concept that Bruce Wayne has his Batcave full of his tools and gadgets that allow him to defend the city of Gotham. So, for us, as regular real human beings, we are structuring our Batcave to help us succeed in whatever quest or mission we set forth for ourself. Another very basic example, let's say you're trying to eat better. Telling yourself "No, don't eat the ice cream in the fridge or the freezer" is a losing battle. It's all you're going to think about. I'm sure now everybody's thinking about ice cream now that I just mentioned it. Matt: I want some ice cream right now. Steve: Right? Everybody wants ice cream. I want some ice cream now too because I just said it. Fortunately, I don't keep ice cream in my apartment, because I know if I did, all I would do is eat it. The same thing goes for Sour Patch Kids and Goldfish crackers. You could give me one of those family sized tubs of Goldfish crackers and I could eat every single one of them in one sitting, and then be like "Okay, what else, what else can I eat at this point?" So it's almost like I have to enact a restraining order against those things. They cannot come within a certain number of yards of my existence, because if they're there, I know they exist and I can't focus on anything else other than those particular things. So rather than relying on willpower, I just don't keep them in my apartment. I couldn't get myself to stop watching TV or stop playing certain video games, so I got rid of them and I canceled my cable and unplugged my PlayStation when I had to get to these things. I just added as many steps between me and the challenging part as possible because I knew I couldn't... I'm weak minded in that I'm a human in that the things that bring us pleasures are often times the things -- or short term pleasure anyway -- are often the things that are keeping the things we actually want to do with our lives. Matt: So I think that's super relevant and you also had a great example in the book, just flossing one tooth, which I think a buddy of yours had suggested. Steve: Yeah, James Clear. He was like "I'm just going to floss one tooth. That's it." Matt: I think that's genius. Because as soon as you floss one tooth, you're like "Alright, well I need to keep going." Steve: One, yeah, I'm not going to stop at one like an idiot. I think I call it "The Braveheart Technique", but William Wallace, Mel Gibson's character, his buddy, they're covered in war paint, and they have their kilts on, and they're ready to go to battle. They come back over, and the guy goes "Well, we didn't get dressed up for nothing." Okay, if you don't want to work out, that's fine. Just put on your workout clothes and walk into the gym and do a pushup. If you do that, you have succeeded. A hundred times out of a hundred, you're going to get in there and do the one pushup and be like "Well, crap, I'm already here. I already flossed the one tooth. I might as well just do the rest of it." But had you initially set out to say "I have to floss every tooth." You're like, that's not going to happen. But just do one. Just do the one thing. Very much like you can get hooked on negative things, this you can build addictive, healthy habits as well that structure your life in a way that you're consistently improving and making progress and finding a way to properly balance that with gratitude and things that remind you that hey, you're alive, and life's pretty good too. Matt: So, kind of a related concept that you talk about a little bit is people who have a fear of change, right? And sort of struggle with that. What are some of the strategies that you recommend for overcoming that? Steve: Sure. Fear... man. I'm guessing there are quite a few people that are listening to this can absolutely relate, but I can think myself into or out of any situation from talking to somebody, to going to something, to doing something versus not doing something. I will overanalyze the hell out of that thing until it is so terrifying in my head that I'm paralyzed at the thought of actually following through on it. So I have an entire chapter on fear busting and how to break through and how to overcome a lot of these, when we break it down, irrational fears that we have about something. It might be a fear of rejection, a fear of change, a fear of the unknown. So I encourage people to dig in and I draw from Bruce Wayne and Batman. Bruce Wayne falls down a well and, going off of the Christopher Nolan version of the movies, falls down a well and encounters this swarm of bats and it terrifies him, and he's afraid of bats for so long until he thinks about it. And as he is is becoming the Caped Crusader, as he's becoming Batman, he's building his suit and getting his life together, and he's thinking "Okay, well maybe these bats aren't out to get me. They're a species very much like I am. They're doing their thing, I'm doing mine." Once he kind of broke it down, he actually ended up using the bat as his symbol to strike fear in the hearts of his enemies. So he took this irrational or unknown fear that he had, he broke it down into its most base components, and when he did that, it became far less scary to him, so much so that he actually embraced and enacted and used that fear for himself. For anybody that is, let's say you're afraid of going up and talking to somebody, or you're afraid of publishing your first blog post and what somebody might say, or you're afraid of looking foolish at the gym if you try a new class, or you're afraid of something. What I encourage people to do is, and this is a tip I learned from Tim Ferriss, but define what that fear is, and really sit down and think about it. It's like "Okay, what is the worst thing that can happen in this situation? And what is it that I'm so afraid of? And if that worst possible thing were to happen, how would I fix it?" So okay, if I go up and talk to this person, and they say "go away" or "get out of here, creep" or whatever, okay. Then you go back to living your life as if you hadn't talked to them, and now you know that that person clearly was not somebody that you should have talked to, that you should be talking to or concerning yourself with. If you're worried about looking foolish in your first dance class or speaking a language and messing up. What's the worst that can happen? Somebody corrects you, somebody chuckles, you laugh at yourself and then you get up if you fell over. You laugh at yourself if you pronounce something incorrectly, and then you pronounce it correctly and you move on with your life. I found so many times that we're so afraid to get started with something, that if we just took a few minutes to talk to the worst possible scenario, write it down, and then put a plan in place. "If this were to happen, this is what I would do." It makes it so much less scary, and makes it far easier for us to actually carry, follow forward, and try the thing out and see what happens. I found a lot of the time that if I look at things as if I am a scientist conducting a hypothesis, then it removes a lot of the personal problems that I have where it's like "Oh, if this fails then it's a reflection on who I am as a person." Instead, it's like "Okay, that hypothesis didn't work, approaching this person in this way was incorrect, or opening my keynote speech with a joke about this did not go as well as I would have hoped. Okay, hypothesis tested, experiment conducted, I now know how to adapt for future things and I can move on." I think that's a big component of fear. I think another thing that I've loved to do when it comes to me being afraid of something is not giving myself a chance to back out of it. It might mean signing up for something before I can talk myself into saying no. It might be using or working with a friend or a colleague or something on something that scares me, so that I'm not attacking this giant fearful problem alone. Last but not least, I just love, there was a concept from the movie "We Bought A Zoo". It's this concept of using twenty seconds of courage. I think of it kind of like star power from Super Mario Brothers. You can be afraid before and you can be terrified after, but if there's something you know you need to do, .or there's something you want to sign up for, somebody you want to talk to, something that you cannot get yourself started on, very much like only flossing one tooth, tell yourself you only need twenty seconds of courage. More often than not, I have found those twenty seconds of courage is enough to get me to take that first step, to walk out onto a stage. I remember I took Swing Dance lessons, and I sat in my car for fifteen minutes before going in because I was so afraid of walking into this class alone, I had never done it before. I had to get myself mentally psyched up sitting in my car by myself in a parking lot, to walk in to take a Swing Dance class because I knew it would be good for me and I'd have fun, but I was just so afraid of looking foolish that I needed those twenty seconds to get me in the door. Once I was there, I didn't get dressed up for nothing, I might as well just start dancing. More often than not, any time I've followed through in that. There are some great stories throughout the book too of people that have overcome fears by implementing twenty seconds of courage or using a lot of these strategies as well. I know, just like we know we need to exercise more or eat better, there are so many instances where we are afraid of uncomfortable conversation, or afraid of looking foolish, and it's keeping us from doing the things that are going to help us move the most forward. And attacking fear like it's a hypothesis that you're attempting to question has really helped me from an analytical standpoint actually follow through on those things and start having more uncomfortable conversations and getting more comfortable with putting myself in uncomfortable situations. Matt: I love the idea of thinking about it like an experiment. That's actually something that we've talked about before on the podcast. We talked about a book called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. I don't know if you've ever read that. Steve: I think I have? Maybe? Matt: But it's essentially kind of the idea of the difference between the fixed mindset as she calls it and the growth mindset. Steve: Oh yes, absolutely. Matt: And the fixed mindset is all about proving yourself, and the growth mindset is all about improving yourself. There's a bunch of other distinctions, and we drilled down in that episode in particular, but I think that dovetails perfectly with the concept you're describing. Steve: Absolutely. Well done, sir, high five. Matt: Internet high fives. Steve: Internet high five. I just high fived my computer. Matt: Okay, yes, I just did the same. So, as part of that, one of the things you talk about that's really important is the idea of accountability. How can we create that and how can we make ourselves more accountable? Steve: Sure. At our very... Not too in front of you, but at our very base level we try to move away from pain and move toward pleasure and happiness. When we're trying to get ourselves to do the things that we need to do, unfortunately we're up against so much resistance because it's so much easier for us to take the short term pleasure path. Like "Oh, I'm going to run a marathon" or "I'm going to start writing a blog post every day, but man, starting that habit's difficult, and the couch is right there, and the video games are right there, so instead of writing a blog post, I'm just going to play video games." At the moment, on a day to day basis, that works out great for you as a person. You're like "Oh man, instead of having to struggle through a blog post, I get to enjoy playing video games and have fun and whatever." So what I had to do until I could get myself to the point of truly enjoying the activities that I knew were helping me move forward -- for example, writing the book, exercising, playing violin and things of that nature -- I had to apply more video game mechanics, and that is the idea of rewards and accountability. So I had increase the pleasure and happiness associated with completing the healthy task, or the thing I wanted to do, and I had to increase the pain, or accountability, associated with not doing the task. So let's use the blog post for example. So I, as Nerd Fitness was growing, struggled to get myself to consistently write blog posts on time. So what I did was I actually gave five hundred dollars to one of my employees, and I said "For every day that a blog post is late, I want you to donate fifty bucks to the Westboro Baptist Church" or something. Or it was a political cause that I wasn't thrilled with. Because there was no way I wanted my money to go to a cause that I truly despised, I was like "I'll just have to write the stupid blog post" and sure enough, once I got started, "Oh I'm actually enjoying this and having fun with this" and so on and so forth. So introducing accountability and having somebody else help keep you accountable, especially in that first month of trying to build a new habit or move closer to something that is challenging to you, adding accountability up front is so important. In addition to that, I love the idea of building a reward system in. It's built into every video game out there, but the example I love the most is The Legend of Zelda. In every dungeon you enter, there is a big treasure chest that has a new weapon that makes your character stronger and allows you to explore a new location and move advance further in the game. So compare this with what most people do, "Oh I went for a run for four days this week, that means I can eat an entire cake on Friday and feel good about it because I quote unquote 'earned this' ." Or "Oh, I did this one healthy thing and therefore I get to do this negative, unhealthy thing because it's my reward for being healthy." I instead like to build a reward system with things that reward me back. So if you are going for a run, you want to get better at running. If you run four days a week for a month straight, then you get to buy a new pair of running shoes. And when you buy a new pair of running shoes, you're then further incentivized to want to run even further, run more often, etcetera. If you are trying to lose weight and you get to a certain goal weight, then you can buy new healthy clothes, clothes that fit you, or you buy one shirt that is slightly smaller than the rest of them, again, which is further incentivizing you and pushing you and motivating you to continue down this path of a healthy lifestyle. I love the idea of building rewards and accountability into the things that you're trying to do. However, what I've found after a few months is that more often than not this habit that you used to have to rely on accountability and rewards to get done becomes a part of who you are and you're actually more driven by the enjoyment you get out of the activity itself. This is talked about quite a bit in the book "Drive". Matt: It's a great book. Steve: "Drive" talks about more from an economic standpoint, the idea of just rewarding people with money and punishing them with taking things away. If you were to incentivize them or just set them up in a way that they're working on things that are challenging to them that make them feel alive, that remind them why they're doing the things that they're doing, they're going to be more likely to do their best work. I've found through Nerd Fitness and community members, so many times people are like "Man, I've built this reward system, and I started leveling up, but I actually like exercising now, and I never thought I would say that, but I actually look forward to how I feel after I exercise." I'm absolutely at that point now. The feelings that I get from exercise, the feeling I got from finishing a great article or guest post, the feeling I get from practicing and feeling how the violin feels in my hands and these things, they all started with this reward system in place and structuring my environment so that I almost had to, there was no other option for me but to practice, but to succeed, but to exercise, but to read more. But as I'm doing these things more and more often, they become more and more a part of who I am, I get more and more excited about them. It sets you up in a way that's completely different from just waiting on extrinsic reward systems and instead becomes something that's intrinsic and excites you in an interior way. Your brain, your soul, what you get excited about, I've found that happens far more often than not, which is pretty cool. Matt: So, one of the things that kind of underlies your epic quest of awesome, and also one of the big themes in the book is the idea of the hero's journey. Tell me a little bit about that and how people can apply that to their lives. Steve: Sure. The hero's journey is a concept that every great story in history, from the bible, King Arthur, all the way up through to Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and pretty much every video game in between. Every great story in history follows a very similar story arc, and the story arc is the idea of a person, man or woman, or humble origins and normal beginnings, kind of feels like a fish out of water. There is some sort of call to action, either something takes place or they meet somebody or they do something, and they are then drawn into this extraordinary world, and in the extraordinary world, they find allies, they encounter enemies, they have to defeat a bad guy, they learn a lot about themselves, they find buried treasure, they rescue the prince, they rescue the princess, they save the world, and they return home a changed person. So, for example, Star Wars. Let's say, Star Wars. Luke Skywalker's journey -- I know George Lucas was a huge fan of the concept of the hero's journey, I think, and if he wasn't, then clearly he did his research on what makes a great story. Luke is that character; he was a guy on a farm, and after he lost his aunt and uncle, goes into this extraordinary world (AKA up in space) and gets into this amazing space opera scene and really, really cool environment. The reason I'm talking about Star Wars now is the next movie comes out in a few days and I can't focus on anything other than Star Wars at the moment. So every great story in history, from Star Wars all the way up to, all the way back to the bible, King Arthur, etcetera, they all follow this path. So I thought to myself, what if I'm a hero on my own journey as well? What would that look like, and how would it structure the decisions I make, and how would it mentally shift how I attack a certain problem? So if somebody is four hundred pounds, broke, living in their parents' basement and doesn't have a job, one way to look at that is life is over and everything sucks, and life is unfair and blah blah blah yada yada yada. Or you can look at it like "Okay, if I'm on a hero's journey, then I'm clearly at the beginning point of this journey, and a better future awaits me, because if I'm going to go on this path, something's going to happen. I need to take action. When I'm taking action, I need to identify a mentor, find allies, I need to complete quests and missions and things like that. I need to have an end goal that I'm working towards in place." When you start to put these things down on paper and think through them, it shifts how you look at problems. They're not things that have gone wrong; instead, they're obstacles that you need to overcome, a lesson that you need to learn, a plot twist that you need to attack. I realize that that sounds so hokey, but I don't know. As somebody that grew up loving these stories, it made so much sense to me. Once I shared this idea with other people and had them start thinking about it as well, it shifted how they attacked certain problems too. A thing I love about these stories is that they give us hope, and I think that hope is very important. It's the central theme in Shawshank Redemption, which is my favorite movie. But what you don't get, and what they don't tell you with the quotes in that movie is that hope without action is nothing. You're not getting very far is all you're doing is hoping. I think hope for a better future, I think expecting more of yourself is fantastic, but I also think you need to put a structure and a system in place that takes you further away from where you've been, and closer to where you want to go. That's where those game mechanics that I talked about earlier kick in. I felt like I went on a hero's journey when I traveled around the world in 2011. I felt like I went on another hero's journey when I wrote this book, and I'm excited to see every hero's journey is cyclical. We come home, and when you return home from your journey, you're a changed person and then you become a mentor to somebody else, or you get started on a bigger, better journey. There's a farther away mountain or a bigger dragon to slay. I'm excited. The way I see it, this whole book is actually structured and follows the path of the hero's journey. In my mind, the reader is the hero, the book is the call to action, and I get to be the mentor. I get to be Yoda, I get to be Morpheus, I get to be Dumbledore. That's so much fun for me. Years ago when I was getting started on my path, I found a book in a bookstore that changed my life; that was my call to action, and it was Tim Ferriss' "Four Hour Work Week". I'm hopeful that this book can be that call to action for other people too, where they're kind of drifting and heading through life, and they know they need to make some changes, they're not sure how, and they stumble across this book, they get it from a friend and there's a paradigm shift. They change how they attack every day, and they put a system in place that sets them up to win. Once they do so, they complete their hero's journey. They then pass it on to somebody else and hope the message spreads. We have a worldwide community of really fit, adventurous nerds that are living out the heroes' journeys and mentoring other people to do the same thing. Matt: I love that vision. That sounds amazing. Steve: Right? How much fun would that be? Plus, when the zombies start attacking, I think we're going to need that army of super-fit, adventurous nerds to keep us away from all the zombies. Matt: I have a fully built zombie survival plan. Steve: I love it. Absolutely love it. I think we used to think, number one, how to survive a zombie apocalypse. I put a whole plan in place on Nerd Fitness. If you were actually trapped in The Walking Dead, what would you do and how would you do it? Here's a step by step workout plan, here's how you should attack your diet, blah blah blah yada yada yada. You can never be too careful. Matt: Very true. So one of the things that you talk about in the book that I thought was a great analogy was if you're playing something like World of Warcraft, and you're looking for a group, you never want to join the group that is five levels too low and they're going to get their butts kicked when they go into the dungeon. You want to join the group that's totally badass, and that's going to crush everything and carry you along and make you better. So explain that a little bit, why that's important and how people can apply that to themselves. Steve: Sure. It's funny because it's something that so obvious in a video game, and so not obvious in real life. Matt: So true. Steve: Right? In a game, it's like "Oh, of course I want to play on the best team. I don't want to be on the losing team. If I partner up with these total kickass characters, we can go fight way bigger stuff, and we can go explore way farther in the game than I've ever been before, and they're going to make me better." And then in real life, often times we surround ourselves with people that are negative, that are very much not of the idea that they want to grow, that they are looking to improve themselves. They're the type of people that read a great story and say "Oh, must be nice" or "What an idiot" or "Why would somebody want to do that? I'm perfectly whatever." I've found a lot in my community at Nerd Fitness, that more often than not, we have people that are the one person in their group of friends that is interested in getting fit. They come home from a workout, like "Man, I just set a new deadlift record," or "I ran a mile the fastest I've ever run," or "I just rock-climbed, I hit a new personal best on the difficulty level of the wall that I was climbing." Their friends are like "Whatever man, we just need you for this raid," or "We need you for this battle, this guild war that we're about to partake in." They're not interested. I honestly believe this; I think we are the average of the people that we associate the most with. When we surround ourselves with negative people, and if you work in an office, more often than not the people that you spend a lot of your time with at that office, if they're not of the same mentality as you and they're not interested in getting fit, if they're not interested in running more often, or if they're not interested in the things that you're interested in, you're going to be less likely to want to do those things. That sounds so obvious, but nobody does it. We spend our time with the people that we think we should hang out with, or people that we have hanged out with that have long overstayed their welcome and it's just easier for us to just keep hanging out with them. Because we're an average of those people, it makes it such an uphill battle for us to live this life of growth and happiness and adventure and success and improvement, unless we're surrounded by other people doing those things. I don't mean to say "You need to fire all of your friends tomorrow, and then go out and find new ones solely for the purpose that they're going to make you better," but I think it is important to evaluate the relationships that you do have, and see if they are improving your life or if they're not. If they're not, I'd try to minimize time with those people, and if they are, I'd try to maximize time with those people. Whether it's emails back and forth on a regular basis, encouraging and pushing each other to keep each other accountable on a certain project or goal of mission. It's tough. It's tough, but it requires a conversation, personally with yourself, to ask yourself what's important to you, and what your goals are. If the people that are currently in your group are aiding or hurting you on your mission to pull those things off. So, for anybody that has an unsupportive system at home, and an unsupportive system at the office, then I highly recommend they have some sort of online support group of other growth like-minded individuals that are interested in leveling up their lives in the same way. I think that's probably been the most important part of what has made Nerd Fitness successful, and why I'm so proud of it: the community aspect of it. These are people from all walks of life that have succeeded in every different way possible and failed in every way possible. When you post on the message boards, you get in the Facebook groups, attend a live event, you're surrounded by these supportive, engaging, helpful people that just want to see you succeed. It's such a drastic departure from what everybody else usually runs into, and that's the people that try to drag other people back down because that's way easier than building themselves up. So, I find life as a multi-player game is so important, and it's something that we don't look at very often. Unfortunately, a lot of times, it's our own family members or a relationship that has gone on far too long. In the book, I say "Hey, I'm not telling you to fire your family, and I'm not telling you to get out of your relationship, but you got to be happy too, and you got to be surrounded by people that support you. If you're not getting that, then you need to have that conversation with them. Get them on your side. Tell them you're doing it as an experiment, and you need their help in supporting you. If it's a relationship that's run its course, you might need to call it quits and find somebody that does line up with the things that you're interested in. So it's a challenge, but man, life is truly multi-player. If you're not careful, that can be the thing that's sabotaging us the most if we're not aware of it. Matt: So, I think that's incredibly important, and I think the video game analogy is so powerful because in real life, people just don't do it, they don't see it so many times. But as soon as you think about it in the context of looking for a group in a video game, it's stupidly obvious. Steve: The idea of mastermind groups, I've found them to be incredibly helpful. I had a group of friends where every month, we'd have an online challenge. Like, "This month, you have to create your own cocktail, and next month you have to record a song, and the month after that..." It was so much fun trying to learn a new skill each month and see how other people did and whatever. It's tough to find, but when you can find a group of people that are pushing you in that way, it just makes every other aspect of life so much easier. Matt: So, Steve, for people like me who have read and enjoyed "Level Up Your Life", what further books or resources would you recommend checking out? Steve: Hmm, great question. From a business perspective, I can't say enough about "The Four Hour Work Week" from Tim Ferriss. It's a very practical book on if you were to build an online business, how would you do it? That was the book that got me started. Matt: That's the book that got me started too, so it's one of my favorite books of all time. Steve: Yeah, it's a book that I've gifted to more people than anybody. That, and I love Richard Branson's book "Losing My Virginity". His book changed my life as well. It made me shift my focus from "Oh, I just want to travel and play the guitar and whatever," to "I want to build something. I want to build something as powerful as we can make it." Because he's been able to build hundreds of companies and put it all into this idea as Virgin as a company, but he also has a lot of fun on the side, and he's done a lot of good for the planet, and he just seems like a good dude that has the planet and people's best interests at heart. He's done it all while also building a for-profit business; a lot of for-profit businesses. Plus, he owns an island in the Caribbean. If he can do it... It's a good aspirational book, I think, as well. It reads like an adventure novel, even though it's about his entrepreneurial journey. So, I love those two books specifically from a business perspective. I mean, I'm sure everybody if they haven't read it, books like "The Power of Habit" and as you mentioned earlier "Drive", what was the other? There are some other great books in that realm. But yeah, I would say those two probably in particular, "Power of Habit" and "Drive". I just loved the concepts in them and showing people how our brains are actually wired, and how they're working, and how to get us to do the things we always said we wanted to do but can't get ourselves to actually do. Digging into the psychology and physiology almost behind why those things are happening is just fascinating to me, and I think they're really helpful for anybody trying to make positive changes in their lives. Matt: So where can people find you and "Level Up Your Life" online? Steve: "Level Up Your Life" the book is available at Amazon or it's in bookstores Barnes and Noble. It comes out January 12th. I'm not sure when this will be going up. And then you can also learn way more about it at LevelUpYourLife.com. You can actually create a character there as well with experience points and missions to complete and actually level up your avatar. I spend most of my time hanging out at NerdFitness.com, where I'm publishing two articles a week. There's a message board community and we have live in-person events, things like that. So NerdFitness.com and LevelUpYourLife.com. Matt: Well, Steve, thank you so much for being on "The Science of Success". I know people are going to love this interview, I think it's great, and I think a lot of the topics you touched on are really going to resonate, about creating powerful habits, and leveraging game mechanics to transform your life. And I think everybody should absolutely check our Steve's new book "Level Up Your Life". You're really going to enjoy it. Steve: Thanks man, I was going to say, don't get me wrong, I still love video games, I still play them as often as I can, but that life has become the adventurous part. I do my best to stay nerdy and play the things that make me happy, but I'm also doing everything I can to level up myself personally and set a great example for everybody else. Appreciate the opportunity for having me on here. If I can answer anybody's questions, just hit me up on Twitter @SteveKamb or shoot us an email at Nerd Fitness and I'd love to get back to you.