Eric is such a wise, helpful, and truly fun teacher. You may know him from his long-running podcast The One You Feed, which is wonderful. And I just read and loved his new book, which is called How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. Like everything Eric does, this book and his approach to change is full of nuance and complexity—but then he also has all these really practical and useful tools.
Today, we talk about what Eric has learned about how we can best create meaningful, lasting change in our lives. He draws from varied research, philosophies, and teachers, as well as his own life and a particular dark night of the soul he experienced—years ago, Eric was addicted to heroin, which we talk a bit about today.
Eric has a particularly helpful way of thinking about the relationship and tension between our values and desires, and what we might do when they seem to clash with one another. I think he also has a really healthy grasp on the role that self-control and motivation play in our lives. And, the next time you feel like you’re getting off track—Eric has a very useful, and non-judgemental way of seeing this, and coming back to where you want to be.
MORE FROM ERIC ZIMMER:
Podcast: The One You Feed
Eric’s Website
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
Eric, like you, a lot of books cross my transom. I thought your book was so generous, so helpful, fun. And I think full of not only potent wisdom, but I think applied wisdom, which I really appreciated because I feel like I’m going to assume you feel the right way, but let’s start here, which is that when we read about the impending prominence of ChatGPT and whatnot, and I think about how much content out there that isn’t as good, right? As current ChatGPT, it feels ever more important to have people like you leading people through wisdom that’s applied, that you’ve lived, that’s been really battle tested versus just sitting in a studio somewhere and telling people how to think and feel about their life. You’ve done it, right?
ERIC:
Yeah. Yes, I have. And I’ve done it through my own recovery journey and just trying to change myself in different ways. And with hundreds of people I’ve worked with one-on-one and thousands of students, I’ve actually really made an attempt to say, “What actually works?” And what comes out of that is not a simple message, unfortunately. I wish that I could just be like, “Here it is. Here’s the one secret to making changes that last and are meaningful.” But it doesn’t work like that because we’re all different and the world is complex and it is always changing and we are always changing. But I think I’ve set down some principles and ideas that can be guiding, that can be applied in lots of different situations. But I do think that that complexity is part of the work that some of us are trying to do. I’ve really been looking forward to talking with you because A, it’s always a joy and part of that is the nuance, right?
You are nuanced. You think deeply about these things, and that’s what this book is for. It’s for the people who are thinking deeply, feeling more strongly, and who do want a path to change without the slogans, without the cliches, without all the, “Just do it, “ kind of stuff.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and the false promises. I mean, in reality, we do much better with nuance and complexity and it’s life, right? At the end of the book, when you’re talking about
Doubt, I loved ... You do such a great job too of just sourcing lines I have never heard, but you write about these three essentials of Zen practice, great faith, great doubt, great determination, and the Zen phrase, great doubt, great awakening, small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening, right? And in this culture that pedals certainty, one trick, a single theory that’s going to change your entire life, I think we’re left feeling like, “Well, that was a not very delicious cup of skim milk. I need cream. I need substance trying to cook with gas here, right? I’m trying to foment something substantial in my life.”
ERIC:
Yes, a hundred percent. I think that unfortunately, a lot of what seems to sell the most is the certainty, the quick fixes, all of that. But if I had a brand, it would be nuance. Another way I thought about the book is I could write It’s Complicated and just hand it back to my editor, but I was like, “Well, that doesn’t really help, but it’s accurate.”
ELISE:
Yeah, but I think the title is perfect. Will you talk about that, that Tanzanian proverb and how it jives with, you have the story in so many ways that every author wants, right? And you describe it in the opening pages of the book, that Dark Night of the Soul that’s so clear, so real, so tangible, and yet you also very gorgeously and generously undercut it in the first few pages as well. So if you talk a little bit about that, just like that framing, which is so important.
ERIC:
Yeah. I mean, if you were watching the movie of my life, if someone made a movie of my life, there would be a really pivotal scene that would show me walking into a old tuberculosis hospital that had been turned into a detox center in the winter and I was in bad shape. I weighed a hundred pounds. I had hepatitis C. I was a homeless heroin addict. I had just been hauled out of the place I worked in handcuffs and been told I was facing 50 years in prison and I was just defeated as a soul. And I went in there and they said to me, “You should go to long-term treatment.” And I said, “No, thank you. “ I have so many better options.
ELISE:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
ERIC:
I’d love to go back and ask that guy like, “Well, what exactly did you think? “ But I went back to my room and I did see with terrifying clarity that I was going to die or go to jail really soon if I left that facility. So I went back and I said, “All right, I’ll go to treatment.” And that would be the triumphant scene, that moment, the epiphany, the big thing. And that moment is certainly important, but it’s only important because of the thousands of other decisions, choices that I made after that, all the little off camera moments that add up to what makes that a really important day. And all of our lives are that way. We prioritize the epiphany, the quick fix, the moment of enlightenment, the insight, and those things are all important, but they only become important if we’re able to live them out in some way.
And my experience of that is that the way we all actually change, if we look at it, is little bit by little bit. Small steps taken consistently is the way that it happens.
ELISE:
Yeah. Why are we so entrained against that? I mean, I get it’s just compelling to think I can do one thing differently and this change becomes permanent, but it’s wild that we just fall for that over and over again, right?
ERIC:
Yeah. I mean, I just think we are wired to want low effort. I think to get all evolutionary psychology on us, I just think there’s a default setting that’s like, if possible, conserve energy, right? It’s true. Only go do something if you know there’s a reward and you want to put out as little energy as you can to get that reward. I just think that’s woven into us, but also then it’s just cultural, right? There’s a lot of cultural things. What I think is interesting is we all know little by little, we say it all the time, Rome wasn’t built in a day and you eat an elephant one bite at a time. So we all know it, but we don’t necessarily know how to embrace it. And we particularly don’t know what to do in the long middle of change. And also, a lot of the changes that people are going to want to make, the people who are reading this kind of book are not the sort of changes that you do for 30 days.
They are changes to how we live. They’re lifestyle changes. They are emotional thought pattern changes. It’s something that’s going to go on and on. And so we have to embrace this idea of, I just kind of keep doing this stuff because it becomes who I am.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, and I think that’s a beautiful through line in the book, including at the beginning, I loved this distinction that you make. And obviously in my work with women in particular, I do a lot of workshops and whatnot about wanting because women have such a hard time actually even knowing what they want, much less naming it or proclaiming it or going for it because we’re so conditioned to pursue serving other people’s needs as our core primary incentive. But this distinction that you do, which I think is so helpful between values and desires. Can you talk a little bit about that as sort of this two, it’s almost a future state and a present state?
ERIC:
Yeah. I mean, inside author talk here, that chapter nearly broke me. It’s the second chapter in the book. I wrote something on the order of 60,000 words before that chapter was done because I just could not sort it all out because we are motivationally complex creatures and there are a thousand theories on what all is swirling around inside of us. We’ve got needs, we’ve got beliefs, we’ve got desires, we’ve got values, we’ve got trauma, we’ve got, I mean, there’s all this stuff.
ELISE:
Yes. And then you layer onto it, the cultural idea of, “I don’t want that. If I want too much, the world’s already on the precipice of collapse and who am I to want this and imposter syndrome.”
ERIC:
So
ELISE:
You do a great job, I think, of distilling it. And I feel so cutely, I’m looking at my 140,000 word first draft right now too, Eric. I get it. I get it.
ERIC:
Yeah. So what I ended up doing was radically simplifying it into what I thought would be a useful and practical way to look at it. And as you said, it’s values and desires. Values we can think of are the things that we’ve decided are worth wanting. It’s what our best self, our wisest self wants. And then desires are the things that we just really can’t help but want, right? They just show up. We want them. And so what then happens is since we’re motivationally complex creatures, we have clashes. A very common one that many of us will face is a values versus desires clash. It’s a, what do I want most versus what do I want now? And we all recognize this a lot in our day-to-day things. I want to be healthy, but I also, I want to eat that cupcake. Value, being healthy, cupcake, desire, what I want most versus what I want now.
But then the other thing that I think is worth talking about, and I don’t have good answers for, is the values to values clash.
So for me, I value deeply the ability to be with the way things are and to be content with that. I also have a strong value towards adventure. These pull at each other because contentment says you don’t need to go anywhere and you can be fine. And adventure says, “We got to go somewhere. Let’s go do something.” So those are two values of mine that are intention with each other, but naming them and knowing that that tension is there and knowing that I’m going to dance with that in an ongoing way helps me just to relax a little bit. Yeah. Helps me just to say, “Okay, that’s there.”
ELISE:
My next book is really about the tension of opposites. So it’s all about what you’re describing in the book and you’re writing about sort of this middle way of handling or learning how to navigate those dual urges or the way that we’re structured for wanting to be boundless and being limited and a million different variations on this, exactly what you’re describing now. I want to go and be Alex Arnold. I have no interest by the way in being ... I find that whole thing so odd and I just want to be with my family at home. It seems though culturally that balance is not something that we ever strive for, right? It’s not on the bingo car. It’s just not what we’re trained for. What is that? Even though we are, right? You write about this. Our bodies are built for balance.
ERIC:
I think that part of the challenge is that we don’t think about what’s important to us regularly enough. We just get going in life and life pulls and it tugs and this arises and that arises and we run over there and we run over here. And so when that happens, it’s easy to get out of balance because whatever screams loudest gets the attention. And that is challenging. So in a spirit of little by little, right, I think one of the best things we can do is learn to ask ourselves just very regularly, “What’s important about this? Why am I doing this? Why am I doing that? What do I want to be doing? How am I balancing these values? Oh, I value adventure.” So for me, I could look at my life. I go, “Okay, I value adventure. It’s part of what makes me come alive.” And I can look and I go, “Am I having any adventures?” I’m not right now.
I’m way over prioritizing work. Okay, I can come back. And I don’t think we can ever achieve balance in a day-to-day kind of way. I just think that’s crazy. I think the only type of balance we can get is by taking a much longer time horizon and saying, “Let me look at this over weeks, over months, over quarters, even over years.” Seasons are part of what we know about the year. So there’s those seasons, but there’s also just big seasons of life. There was a period of time where I had two young boys. That was a very different season for me. People often say, “How are you able to do this and do that and do that? I can’t do any of that. “ And I’m like, “Well, it’s because you have two ... You have a three-year-old and a six-year-old. Of course you can’t do all that.
I can only do that because my son is 27 and I don’t see him very often.” That space all opened up. And so that’s another aspect of balance, I think, is to kind of say, “All right, what season am I in right now? And what fits ... How do I honor my values within this particular season of my life?”
ELISE:
Yeah. You write really beautifully about self-control and the bad rep, right? Understandably of self-control and the way that it’s pushed on us as you’re this sort of out of control, lascivious, desiring, lunatic, and you need to be brought to reign. I think that’s how so many of us experience that concept and you’re far more punk than I am. And though I love people like you. So I know you’re tight, Eric, but can you talk a bit about that? Because it’s another one of those, the balance of austerity,
ERIC:
Discipline. Yeah. I really tried to talk about this in a way that is helpful because there’s one school of change that has become very popular in the last few years that says motivation and self-control just aren’t important. It’s other stuff. It’s all things about ... James Clear’s book is very much focuses sort of in that direction, like set up your environment, get support, make it easy, make it attractive, all that stuff. And then there’s the other school of thought, which is one that we’ve dragged around much longer, which is that you just need motivation, discipline, and self-control. And I, in the predictable way that I am, say, “Well, it’s both.” Self-control is real. And a lot of researchers don’t like to use that term, but I think it’s one we understand. It’s just a little bit intuitive. It’s the ability to me to choose what I want most over what I want now.
So self-control is valuable. Now, if we got all the behavior scientists together in one room and ask them to agree on something, I think the one thing they could agree on is don’t rely on self-control more than you have to. Remove temptation, make it easier. All the stuff, the structural side of change is really, really important. We want to do as much of that as we can. And then comes the moment, I call them choice points where we’re sort of just staring down the, do I get on the exercise bike or do I stay here reading your Substack, for example, which is a very difficult trade for me because I want to exercise and yet, but that’s a classic one. So self-control comes together in that moment. So we need some of it. And I try and identify in the book the things that get in the way of that self-control.
Now, the problem is, like anything, if we put that into overdrive and we become too disciplined, too focused, we can suck the joy out of life. We can become rigid. We can become uncompromising. We can find it very hard to turn off and relax. And so yeah, I’m advocating for a bit of a balance. Yeah, we do want to be able to direct ourselves, to do the things that we say are important to us. I often refer to it as making and keeping promises to ourselves. We do want to be able to do that, but we also want to be able to turn that off and be.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, I think that this too is what you do so beautifully. It’s who you are, right? And obviously in your world and in your podcast as well, which is a deeply thoughtful, philosophical person who’s like, “What are we even orienting toward? What are we optimizing to? “ These are big questions about who are we? But then you also are like, “I also have a lot of 12 step advice and tools because I’ve been talking to everyone for 800 episodes.” Is that accurate? Yeah. 900 episodes to say, okay, Halt. I love Halt. Hungry, what is it? Hungry?
ERIC:
Angry, lonely,
ELISE:
Tired. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired, which I guess is from the world of 12 step. You offer things like the Six Saboteurs, the autopilot, pitfall, fatigue, fallout, shortsighted stumble, emotional escapism, the self-doubt, stalemate, and the insignificance trap. So I think it’s important just to even name it that throughout this book, which is more meta, it’s full of tools, right? You are coaching people through, here are the ways to control your environment a bit more so that you get to your values. Fair?
ERIC:
Yeah. The book is intended to handle the two elements I think are foundational to change. And the first is structural. Let’s talk about it in the context of starting a behavior, for example. We want to be specific about what we’re doing, not a vague, “Well, I’m going to get in better shape, but I’m going to run every Monday morning for 30 minutes at this park.” So ambiguity gets in our way. We need to be reminded. We need to plan for what goes wrong. We need to ask for support. We need to set up our environment. It’s all structural, and that will go a long way in a lot of cases. And then the second component is the emotional. What’s happening inside of us at these moments where we basically make, I’ll just say the wrong choice to make it simple. By wrong, I mean the choice we didn’t want to make.
We have to learn to work with that part of ourselves too. And I think if we don’t get both of those elements together, our change often doesn’t really stick or last. But when we can get both those things together, that’s when things get better, they get easier, and things start to click.
ELISE:
Yeah. And I would imagine sort of the aperture widens, your perspective widens about what’s possible. Obviously, your life is dramatically different than it was when you were 24 in that tuberculosis hospital, looking at a really fascinating choose your own adventure, right, Eric? And you’ve had many careers. I
ERIC:
Have had a variety of careers. Yeah, my life has transformed so dramatically. I tell a story in the book of picking these things up for a few weeks, not even really thinking about standing in line at the pharmacy and getting the paper sack with a receipt that’s way too long and driving with them in the passenger seat and taking them to my mom and giving them to her after her fall. And what I’m talking about are opiates, Oxycontin in specific, like the good stuff, right? At one point, I might’ve robbed you at gunpoint for those. I destroyed my life for those things, and now I’m taking them to my mom, not only not using them, not even thinking about them. They had no more significance to me than the loaf of bread until I realized it, until I went, “Oh my God, look at, this is incredible.” And that’s not a bragging story.
That’s just a story about how we can really change. Yes. We can really transform. It’s not fast, it’s not overnight, but that is a whole rewiring of the entire way I oriented to the world, and that is possible.
ELISE:
Yeah. When I think we live in a culture that suggests, A, that it’s not, but you think about our landscape of people who sit in seats similar to yours and so many are filled by people who have grappled with addiction in part because it’s one of the most challenging, right? That conversation about want and desire and being enslaved to forces outside of yourself. It’s one of the most Herculean ... It’s a wild experience that I think many of us, people can sort of touch the edges of that type of impulse and contextualize it within their own lives and then also not at all, right? But it is amazing to get to the other side, to have lived it.
ERIC:
Yeah. I think the mechanism of action underneath it though, we all understand very well. And that mechanism of action is, “I don’t like how I feel or I don’t like what I’m thinking, so I’m going to change it. “ There are positive ways to do that, for sure. And there are negative ways to do that, and there’s probably a bunch of neutral ways to do that. But to me, I often think that the heart of getting over addiction for me was to be able to say, “I’m feeling X, I’m thinking Y, I hate it, but I don’t have to change it. I don’t have to run out and yank the cord that makes it instantly go away.” I can be with it for a longer period of time. And that is what that is. But I think a lot of us will recognize in our own sort of smaller, I don’t know whether you want to call them addictions, right?
I talk with people in this space a lot about, should we talk about cell phone usage that you do all the time as an addiction? Is that trivializing addiction? But that’s just a word. Yeah. The point is anything that we say to ourselves, I don’t want to do that anymore and we keep doing it is that mechanism of action. And I think we all have some versions of those in our lives. And so that’s the way in which I think the experience of someone through addiction translates because I still have the same sort of things. They still happen in me. It’s not like I’m now impervious after having won this one battle. Now, I mean, I want to eat the chocolate cake just as much as anybody else when I’m trying to eat healthily. And so, but what I’ve learned are the skills to negotiate that more skillfully most of the time.
Addiction for me is one of those things where I’ve made a, it is all or nothing in my case, right? I’ve just chosen nothing and there’s a beautiful clarity to zero, but everything else in life sits in that gray middle. This morning, I made a number of less than optimal choices. I had to drive yesterday. I had to drive to a funeral of a friend who lost his son.
ELISE:
Oh, I’m sorry.
ERIC:
And I got back late last night. Anyway, this morning I was like, “All right, I’m going to get up. I’m going to meditate. I’m going to exercise.” I had to return the rental car and I got sucked into doing something work related early and I spent the whole morning doing that. And then I finally was like, “Oh, I have to talk to Elise in 35 minutes.” So now I’m rushing, at which point I realized the rental car, I did not return, right? I just got sucked into my computer and I just kind of with that sort of thing go, “Oh, well, it’s a day.” Yeah. “It’s a day. It’s not my best day.” And I think that’s how we should approach these sort of things is with, “I want to do the best I can with these things, recognizing that there are gray areas, there’s times where I’m going to do better, there’s times I’m going to do worse.”
ELISE:
A hundred percent. Yeah. And I feel like that’s the reality of all of our lives, right? You have Days where you’re like, wow, I made a massive cognitive breakthrough in this draft and I was so productive. And then I have days at least where ... And I’ve learned to love these parts of myself as well as the productive, aggressive part of myself where I can say, “Well, I had nothing. It was just one of those days. It was a fallow day in the same way that the pasture needs to be left to rest.” But this idea that we train on of every day can be exquisite or ideal or optimized is definitely a setup for being cruel to ourselves at the very least, although so much of your book is about kindness.
ERIC:
Well, I think being kind to ourselves serves a number of purposes, but yes, I agree with you completely. In the book, I call it the 80% rule, which is for things that I’m committed to doing long term. So for me, those things are meditation, exercise, eating right, trying to connect with people every day. If I am doing those things 80% of the time that I intend to, it’s great. If I can do that month after month, year after year, I am a transformed and changed person. Yeah. If I get fixated on the 20% that I don’t do it, that’s often where people just give up. That’s what happens is we get off track, everybody does, but we don’t think that’s the way it should be. So we become alarmed by it and we start telling ourselves stories about it. I could tell myself the story this morning.
I see you just don’t stick with anything and you’re not being disciplined. I mean, I could do all of that. Or I could go, “Eh, all right, not a great day. What did I learn?” “Oh, I learned I really do need to try and be disciplined about not getting on my phone before I do these things. “And also some self-kindness. I drove back from a really heavy event last night, a funeral of a 27-year-old boy. Man, it’s okay if the next day I don’t have it all together.
ELISE:
Yeah. It’s too ... So much of the last half of the book, which is so beautiful, is this perspective taking and zooming out because I think we ... And I’m one of these people, I keep a daily planner. I love crossing things off my list. I even write down things that I did so I have the thrill of crossing them off, Eric.
ERIC:
I’ve been there. Yep.
ELISE:
I double up in my Google. It’s so dumb. It’s this self-soothing thing that I do. And I get after myself when I’m like, “ I’ve had an unproductive day. “But as you say, it’s that zooming out that’s so much more important. And will this bother you in what, five minutes, five hours, five days? And so often we overestimate what we can do in a short period of time, setting ourselves up for failure while we wildly underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years, let’s say. When I think about the last 10 years, I’m like, “ Holy shit, I’ve done a lot. “But I still have these days where I’m abusive toward myself and I lose sight of that.
ERIC:
Yeah. That is, I think, such a truth for so many people. And I really try to measure ... When I was writing this book, I couldn’t ... It wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t think to measure how many pages I could write in a day, how many words I could write. I had no idea. I’d never written a book before. I have zero idea. Now, I could just say,” All right, the book’s due in a year. Let me divide that by number of pages and days and then go, okay, I need ... “Instead, what I did is all I measured, I couldn’t measure quality either because what I wrote in the beginning was terrible. Yeah, maybe not terrible. It just wasn’t great. I could tell it wasn’t great.
All I could measure was, did I show up most of the time to the sessions I set for myself for writing, and did I hang in there with it during those sessions? I could measure that. And that’s what I tried to measure and keep track of, because if I got into the bigger picture, I would get freaked out. And so in many ways, I wrote the book with the title of the book, which was little bit by little bit. I would set a timer for 30 minutes, I would put on my headphones, I would turn on all my special distraction blockers, I would put on a playlist and for 30 minutes, I had to stay in it. Even if I stare at the screen, nothing happens. And then at the end of 30 minutes, oftentimes the timer would go off and I would be in it and I’d just keep going.
But there were times I wasn’t and I was like, “ Oh, thank God that’s over 30 minutes. “And I would go take a break, reset and come back and do 30 more minutes. And I feel like I wrote the book in these 30 minute segments. Now, those might be five, 30 minute segments in a day or six, 30 minute segments, but there was something about that that kept it manageable to me, kept me from getting lost in the, I’m not getting enough done, this isn’t good enough. It was just, if I did my 30 minutes, I kind of gave myself an internal,” Great job, you did it. I made a promise to myself. I kept it. That feels good inside.
ELISE:
“I don’t know if you’ve read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, but for any want to be writers, it’s a great book. It’s also just excellent perspective taking for this entire ride when your book comes out and you think the world’s going to change and then nothing happens, et cetera. All of it is, it’s like-
ERIC:
Does she get that far in it? I’ve read parts of
ELISE:
It.
ERIC:
So I should read it for the post book feelings.
ELISE:
Yeah. There’s a scene where she and a friend both have books coming out the same day and then they just call each other and start laughing because nothing’s happened, nothing has changed. But yeah, the premise of that book is you got to just write bird by bird by bird. And then the perspective taking that we’re talking about comes into play too, because at least the way I work on books is I zoom out and then maybe I spend some time restructuring and thinking about things and then I go back in and I just don’t have the same brain from day to day.
ERIC:
I feel really fortunate that in the work I do, I’ve interviewed, I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of authors, many of which have done incredibly well. And in talking to those people, I just knew that self-doubt was part of the process, that it was embedded in it for everyone. And I’m really glad I understood that. Because if I didn’t, the story I would tell myself is the fact that you are struggling and the fact that you doubt yourself means you’re not cut out to do it. Instead of going, “Oh, it’s part of the process.” And I think we can take the same mindset to any change that we make, which is that getting off track is not something in you, it’s part of the process itself. And so the question just becomes, how do I get back on track with the minimum amount of emotional drama?
And it was the same with me, right? I got all this self-doubt about just, okay, that’s normal. I don’t have to make it go away. I don’t have to go into Youngian therapy for six years on this because what I’m trying to do right now is write a book. I just have to work with it well enough to go back to my next 30 minutes.
ELISE:
Yeah. And it comes down to the value, desire paradigm, right? I’m guessing from knowing you and your work and spending some time with you, that one of your values is truly helping people in a substantive way. And I’m guessing that when someone in your coaching practice or in the wider community is, “I think you saved my life, Eric,” or whatever it is,
Whatever you’ve laid down for them that they’ve been able to sort of pick up and translate into action, that feeds you, right? I would imagine that’s probably your value and substantive change. And it’s very difficult in this world, particularly right now, I think of them as mostly vanity metrics, although that might be me being self-protective. But when I look at the people who are sort of winning the game and hacking the algorithms, it’s not my value, right? I don’t care about that. I care about meeting listeners of my show or people who are in my wider Substack community and convening with them and being like, “This isn’t giving me an identity crisis. If anything, this is amazing to be in community with so many compelling, interesting people. This is my dharma.” And when you get around to launching things like books, it’s the vanity metrics, which means something, but it can make it really hard to stay aligned with the value of you really want people not to just buy the book, but to use the book, share the book, talk about the book, recommend the book, which I think that people will do.
ERIC:
I think back to this idea of being motivationally complex creatures is important because yes, I have a deep desire to help people. It is my dharma, right? I mean, I guess my dharma, if I had to sum it up in one sentence would be, help people suffer less, right? The dedication of the book is to all those who still suffer. So that’s my dharma and that’s deeply important to me. And my podcast and the book and the things that I offer to people is how I make a living. I care about that. I do get sucked up into a little bit of vanity or ego. I recognize that’s all in me. And I try not to be hard on myself for that part of me that’s there. And I mean, my podcast is the one you feed, right? We got these two wolves inside of us.
We probably have a whole bunch of wolves, but to keep it simple, for me, it’s a very frequent process of noticing I’m getting pulled away and coming back and then refocusing. This funeral that I was at, my friend is very successful. Him and his wife, very, very successful, very wealthy, and most of the people there are very successful and very wealthy. And we are incredibly susceptible. It’s called mimetic desire, right? I get in that situation and I suddenly start going, “I want that. I want that. I want that. I want that. “ And I have to reorient. It’s fine that you want that. That’s okay. And I’ve chosen a different path. I stepped off of the software executive path where I was making a lot of money and chose a different path. And so for me, yeah, it is this coming back to, what part of myself do I want to feed?
And in my case, it’s the part of me that wants to help people. It’s the part of me that realizes that every single email I get about it helping someone, that is valuable. That is enough right there.
ELISE:
Yeah. And the universality of suffering, right? That having a lot of money and being really successful doesn’t ensure that you won’t be burying your child.
ERIC:
Exactly. Yeah.
ELISE:
It’s so hard.
ERIC:
Heartbreak.
ELISE:
Yeah.
ERIC:
Heartbreak comes for all of us. I mean, the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows is the Buddhist term. And I love it because I think it just points to that’s life, right? And they often are both there at the same time.
ELISE:
Yeah. And you think about our culture, particularly right now, and you think about those who have the most seemingly, right? And their pursuit of more and how for so many people it’s unfathomable, you have $225 billion, you need more. And yet when you get it, you’re like, of course you do because money doesn’t solve emotional problems. It solves money problems, which can obviously create emotional despair, but so many of us are convinced we’ll get there, we’ll get somewhere and be able to live with ourselves and be able to protect ourselves from life. And it’s just unfortunately not true, right?
ERIC:
No, no. I mean, we know how the whole thing turns out, right? Yeah. Right? I mean, I am going to get older, I’m going to get sick, I’m going to die, and the people around me are going to also. I know how it turns out. There’s no mystery there. Yeah, I think a lot about that not making that everything is about preparing for the future, but I do think that a lot of what I do really around emotional, mental health, healing, all of that is so that as the inevitable storms of life come, I can bear them with a degree of grace.
ELISE:
Yeah. You mentioned the magical trio of autonomy, competency, relatedness. I always think of it as the need for individuation and growth and separation and also relationship. And so often in our culture, men hold one side and women hold the other and never the two shall meet. And one of the things that I love about you, and I’m grateful for men like you in the culture, is how well you hold that feminine, even though maybe it was hard to come by as an introverted anarchist, but none of this happens outside of community, right? It’s the relatedness and in terms of even your Dharma and what you’re doing, which is you’ve been on the hero’s journey, you have the antidote and you’re bringing it back into community and relationship is what we’re all supposed to do, right? I think. I don’t know if you agree with that.
ERIC:
No, I do. I mean, I think that whatever way we want to look at it, we are better off in some degree of relation to other people. We are not solitary creatures, we’re not wired to be that way. If you look at it from a health and longevity perspective, Robert Waldinger has done a great job of showing that the single biggest effect on longevity is the quality of your relationships. So there’s that. Many other people would argue it’s the single biggest factor in your happiness. I think that change happens best in community. I make this analogy sometimes, and like any sort of model, it’s not 100% perfect, but I think about the difference between quitting something like intravenous cocaine use or heroin use and stopping smoking. And I have friends who have done both and they will say, I think stopping smoking was harder. Now- Yes,
ELISE:
I’ve heard this. Yeah.
ERIC:
There are reasons for that that have to do with the frequent repetition of cigarettes, but one of the big things is that those people, when they tried to stop doing heroin, they got a lot of help. They were around people. They were in community. They were supported. But when they stop smoking, it’s just, “I’m going to stop smoking.” And you’re on your own out there doing it. Again, I don’t think that’s the only reason that that’s difficult, but I think it points to a truth. There is no way I would have gotten sober and into recovery and stayed that way without support groups. It’s simply, I don’t think it ever would have happened in my case. And I see a lot of people that that’s the case. Part of the challenge that I think I’m seeing in a lot of people is we know that community is good for us.
We know that relation is good for us, but there’s no problem that’s really driving us to it. Addiction drove me. I have to go do this. Most of us don’t have that. And so what happens is we think, “Yeah, I should be more in community. I know that’s good for me. “ And you know what? It’s really easy just to sit here on the couch and watch this great show on Netflix because there are a lot of great shows out there that I mean I think are art. They are art, but it’s become so easy to just optimize for that, for comfort. And it’s a lot harder to get out or even get online and connect with other people. And so as somebody trying to build community, that’s something I consistently wrestle with is the number of people who say they want community compared to the number of people who engage in it, it’s a very different ... Those numbers are very different.
And I’m not saying to be harsh or shaming to anybody. I feel the same pressure. I just know enough that it’s worth pushing myself to do.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and I think it’s so ... You think about AA as this mutual aid society that’s free, anonymous, et cetera, and how so many people would benefit in some way from something concurrent. But again, that forcing mechanism. But it’s so beautiful at the beginning too, how you write about, I don’t know if it was a sponsor or just the pressure from the group that you understood a couple of things. One, that you also had a job within that to serve, right? Cleaning ashtrays, whatever it may be. You had to participate. This wasn’t just a receiving, this was also a giving. And that I think it was one of your sponsors who was like, “You will go around the room and shake everyone’s hand and introduce yourself, sort of forcing you out of that isolated, introverted...” I get it. I’m the same way. I will happily pack produce boxes at the food drive without talking to anyone.
I’m just shy and I’m very comfortable being by myself. That doesn’t make me anxious, but we need that collectively, right? Where you are forced into contact and forced to serve, which is a beautiful thing, I think.
ERIC:
Yeah. And that’s part of the challenge is that there isn’t a forcing function for a lot of us. And I’m not saying that go get addicted to heroin because it’ll help you make more friends. It’s how to win friends and influence people. Start by years of ... No. Yeah, it was really powerful for me in a way because it gave me a lot of things that I needed in one tidy package. But the day came where I felt like my growth is not in 12 step programs anymore, this isn’t working for me, but I was very careful because I actually did after eight years of sobriety the first time, go back out and drink for a few years, and then I had to get sober again, which tells you how that experiment went. And so later, after I’d started the podcast and I felt like I wanted to step away from 12-step meetings, I was really cautious because the first time that I did that, I ended up going back out and I was like, “I don’t want to do that again.” So I thought about it and I was like, “What am I getting here?
What makes this thing work?” And to me, there was community and people, there was the ability to give back and there was a structured program of change and it was all embedded in that one thing.
So I was able to look at my life and go, “Okay, well, do I have those things?” Yes. Okay. I do have a mechanism in which I think I’m helping people and I’ve got a pretty good community of friends and people I talk to. I’m pretty connected and I’m deeply immersed in Zen practice right now, which is its own structured program of change. So I’m like, “Okay, I got all those things.” The 12 steps meetings are great because it just bundles it all together. But I do think those three things are really important, particularly in overcoming addiction, but I think they are three things that we could all look at and go, “If we have those things going, I think we’re in good shape.”
ELISE:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know you do groups and communities, but I think it’s going to become even more, as you were talking about, nobody belongs to the Elks Club anymore, right? We’re not bowling together. These opportunities are dwindling, but I see it in my community, just the hunger and desire to commune, be present, be witnessed, be heard and understood, and to offer support. It’s just deeply human. So thank you for your work and I’m excited for this book to come out into the world. I think it’ll be really helpful, both as a practical distillation. You’re so generous. It is so rich of really helpful advice, guidelines, things to think through and ways to structure your process for change, but also just it’s deep. You’re a deep person and it feels grounded and ballasted by something real, which I deeply appreciate because I’m done with the ... I don’t want the aspartame, you know?
ERIC:
Yep. Well, thank
ELISE:
You. So thanks, Eric. So if you haven’t listened to Eric Simmers podcast, The One You Feed, I really think he is a wise, kind and present guide through so much of what he teaches and his book, How A Little Becomes A Lot, The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life really lives up to that promise, which is no quick fixes, but really helpful tools and ways to contextualize your day toward engineering it towards those highest values for yourself. And it’s nuanced and it’s complex, but it’s also extremely digestible and he has a really great voice. All right, friends, I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it.
That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.