Life

Judd Apatow and the Moment of Creation

Recently, Emmy Award-winning director, screenwriter, producer, author, and comedian Judd Apatow jumped on Sam Harris’s “Making Sense” podcast and talked about comedy, creativity, and flow.

One quote in particular jumped out at me – the “moment of creation” that makes it all worth it. It’s these pure moments of creativity that allow Judd to put up with all of the frustration and heartache and chaos that comes with Hollywood:

What I’m trying to get to is a moment of creation.

The best part of what I do is…the moment we think of a joke. I love reading all those books about flow state, and they’re usually about people doing X-games like activities.

But for me, it’s about sitting in a room with a few funny people and someone just thinks of something, and we just start laughing. That space. That’s as close as I get to real spirituality.

For Apatow, his flow state is a collaborative process. When somebody makes an offhanded comment that leads to another joke, and a joke that builds on that joke. That’s the highest form of spirituality Judd can be a part of: the “moment of creation” in which a joke that did not exist suddenly bursts forth from the void into existence.

He follows it up with a quote that brings it home for me:

…the moment of ‘oh my god I just thought of the dumbest joke’ and that’s where pure joy can come from.

I’m not a spiritual person either, but I do believe that rituals can help me reach a higher “plane” of creativity.

I go through the ritual of grabbing my favorite seat at my local coffee shop, 16 oz cold brew (even in the dead of winter) next to my laptop, my Restart (Focus Mix III) Playlist on Spotify playing on my headphones, HeyFocus.com activated, and a blank Google Doc.

I put on my hard hat and just start typing.

Eventually, I type something that makes me say “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever thought up” I start laughing. That “dumb thing” might become the premise for a new post, or a chapter section, or an idea for an entire book. Of course, it probably ends up getting trashed, abandoned or forgotten.

But that’s fine – it’s not whether or not the idea actually makes it onto a page.

It’s the fact that the idea had its “Big Bang”.

I conjured something out of thin air today. An idea, a sentence, a joke.

Something that didn’t exist now exists.

That’s magic.

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2022: Retrospective

Did you watch The Rings of Power or The House of the Dragon this year?

Both new shows were perfectly…fine. They took place in lovely locations, had solid production values, and were a good connection to their respective universes. However, both shows felt like they were setting the chess board and moving the pieces around to prepare for the REAL show, which will take place in Season 2.

My 2022 was just like that, just with fewer wizards and dragons (unfortunately).

This is my third annual review, which is two more than I thought I’d actually complete by now:

This annual practice was inspired by my friends James Clear and Chris Guillebeau. The goal is to take a few days to actually reflect on how the year went, and see if I’m l deliberately moving in the direction of the type of life I want to live.

Specifically, am I living a life that’s congruent with my values?

2023 was my first year of married life, and my first year (kinda) in the new role at my own company. It came with the excitement and terror of starting a big, new creative endeavor. It also had plenty of travel, plenty of good food, a LOT of golf, and the first year in a decade where I adjusted my overall strategy to my health and fitness.

Here’s the breakdown:

2022 Overview

2022 was settling further into life in Nashville with my wife Alex and the dogs. It was also a year of crazy travel that surprised me when I looked back. Lastly, it was a year in which I struggled to find my footing on how I wanted a typical day to look.

I FINALLY built a journaling habit, and between that and reading a few books on time and creativity, I realized I had strayed quite a bit from why I started all of this in the first place!

My goal is to just be a creator who does interesting things, has interesting conversations, and shares fun work that inspires people to live differently.

Everything else is superfluous.

In Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny, he talks about the ability to “keep the main thing the main thing.” I built my career on creating content that got people to live differently, and accidentally found myself in charge of a 40-person SEO-driven coaching company.

My day was spent studying Google Analytics and management books, not doing creative work that lasts.

2022 was the START of a return to creative life, and taking a deeper look at my values and seeing where I could make some changes. I realized I wasn’t living a life aligned with the goals I truly wanted to focus on. So I made a simple document of my values (borrowing the idea from Georgetown professor Cal Newport), and then really pared everything back to focus my day around those values.

That focus has been largely been around CREATING more consistently. I reorganized my life over the first 8 months of 2022, and now feel like I’ve “put my ass where my heart wants to be” to quote author Steven Pressfield.

Maybe most importantly, in addition to writing more and saying NO to more things, I’ve started slowing down my expectations, and starting cutting myself some slack. This is due to Oliver Burkeman’s Four-Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

I have spent the past decade trying to get better and better at being more efficient and productive, and I’m finally realizing I’ll never actually “get there.” If I want to do great work, I don’t need to clear the decks before I can start. I just need to start, and be okay with other parts of my life slipping a tiny bit behind.

In other words: time management is like trying to hold back the tide. We can spend our lives perpetually living in the future, just waiting until we finish “the next thing” and then we can slow down and start living.

That’s not how life works!

In the same vein, this book finally opened my eyes to something that I knew to be true but didn’t want to believe: I’ll never have enough time to play all the best video games, watch all the best shows, watch all the best movies, listen to all the podcasts, AND do great work and be a great husband.

There’s too much content, I have too many hobbies, and life is too short. Even if I dedicated my life to reading books and playing games, I still couldn’t do it all. It’s time to let go of this pursuit.

If I want to spend time with my family, or playing music, or playing golf, and exercising, AND do important work, that really doesn’t leave time for much else.

I reread Oliver’s book twice, and came to the conclusion I needed shake things up, with my day, my work, and my career. Here’s how it all went down:

2022 Work Update

I officially ‘stepped down’ from my role as CEO at Nerd Fitness in January 2022.

It was kind of weird to ‘demote’ myself, but after 12 years of being in the wrong seat in my own company, it felt freeing to acknowledge this. It wasn’t a failure or abdication, it was an acceptance of reality: I’m good at a few things, and I have a passion for a few things:

“Head of a 40 person company” isn’t one of those things.

I demoted myself to “Head of Marketing,” while simultaneously acknowledging that this wasn’t the right role for me either! In May of 2022, we brought on a true Head of Marketing at Nerd Fitness (shout out Taylor!). We now have a functioning marketing team that is humming and working incredibly well together. Honestly, I didn’t realize how bad I was at “managing” a team until I saw Taylor organize our Marketing Department, and I realized quickly just how badly I was serving my coworkers by sitting in that seat.

The final piece of the puzzle was to get me out of the day-to-day management of Nerd Fitness’s social media experience, and that was taken care by September 2022 with another new hire.

I am still creating occasional content for Nerd Fitness’s instagram page and our YouTube channel, but since October of 2023, I’ve been able to finally have a singular focus:

Write my next book.

The toughest part for me of 2022? Letting go. I still felt compelled to come to most meetings, worried that my team would think I had abandoned them. The reality? I was probably holding most of them back, or sending them on various wild goose chases instead of just letting them do their jobs!

December 2022 was a month where I was completely removed from Team NF (for travel), and it’s been incredibly helpful for me to be able to keep my focus on JUST the book, my ideas. The ideas are flowing!

After a few months of bouncing ideas back and forth with my agent, I sit here today in Arizona, in a coffee shop, with a solid book direction, and ideas for my next 2-3 books after this one.

It’s also scary as shit, and I have all the fun things that comes with working on a book: impostor syndrome, extreme self-doubt, an overwhelming desire to curl up into a ball and not do any work…

But I’m also excited in a way I haven’t been in years.

Speaking of excitement…after a 6-year hiatus, we got to do Camp Nerd Fitness again!

(More Camp NF photos here from the amazing Will Byington).

We brought a few hundred nerds back to North Georgia for a 4-day adult summer camp. For an introvert like me that hates being on stage, it’s both incredibly exhilarating and emotionally draining. I also know it’s an experience I’m lucky to be a part of, and I’m glad we got a chance to do it again.

Oh I also got to dress up like Quailman from the cartoon Doug, but I was clearly upstaged by George Titsworth’s “Matt, a radar technician costume,” and a solid Ellen Ripley from TaylorTries:

Now that I’ve handed over most of my day-to-day responsibilities to far more capable people at Nerd Fitness, my brain has been back to focusing on the creative process, something I haven’t had the space (or the confidence to attempt), in probably six or seven years.

2022 Creative Update

In addition to Instagram and other video content for Nerd Fitness, I managed to publish a few pieces on SteveKamb.com in 2022:

You’ll notice a theme: rebuilding the muscle of creating again. It took 8 months of 2022 to reorganize myself and the company to get me out of the way, which is 8 months longer than I wanted it to take, but that’s okay. As I learned from Four Thousand Weeks, everything is going to take longer than expected, it’s never going to really get easier, and life is happening NOW.

I didn’t need to clear the deck, I need to just suck it up and prioritize the stuff that’s most important to me:

Absorbing interesting material for future content creation.
Having interesting experiences for future content creation.
Writing more often than not-writing.

The biggest creative change I made in 2022 was finally started taking the “everything is material” mantra seriously.

I read a LOT, and watch a lot of great shows, listen to a lot of great podcasts, have a lot of great conversations, but often don’t retain a lot of the information I hear/read.

So I’ve implemented a new “second brain” system that has been in action for about 6 months.

I downloaded Roam (RoamResearch.com) and have been wading deeper and deeper into creating a system for content and idea capture. Essentially, it’s like building my own “wikipedia.” I highlight favorite passages and quotes in books and articles I read in my Kindle (I use the newest Kindle Paperwhite), I then take the time after reading each book to document the content in Roam, and share my perspective on them.

By doing so, I’m both absorbing the information more fully AND creating future places to draw content connections from.

Each idea, person, place, gets a page. With each new idea, new connections are automatically created. A wordmap of all my pages and ideas is also generated. And over time, unusual pairings or unique perspectives start to pop out.

Articles, books, and content starts to become much easier to generate, simply because it’s all being pulled from my second brain, which is one giant interconnected wiki. This is a digital version of the Zettelkasten notecard system.

I use an app called Captio to email myself quick notes and thoughts each day. The next morning, I quickly process all the emails to myself to see where they belong:

A new page or idea in Roam.
A new task or an update to a task in Asana (project management software).

It’s been 4 months of really diving into Roam, but this is already starting to pay dividends. My only regret is not doing so sooner! I’m revisiting a lot of my older favorite books so that I can truly flesh out my second brain of content ideas and adventures.

Now, in addition to reading books and documenting the fun adventure, I also traveled quite a bit in 2022 which led to plenty of fun experiences and ideas too.

2022 Travel Update

I honestly forgot how much I traveled until I started putting this recap together – no wonder I feel stretched a bit thin! After two years of traveling significantly less, this was like letting all of the air out of the balloon at once.

February: Alex and I drove out to Arizona for a few weeks to escape Nashville winter, and to spend time with her parents. I also played a LOT of Elden Ring (my game of the year) remotely via my PS5, and it was totally worth the wait.

March: This was followed up with my annual trip to visit my brother in San Diego for the first weekend of March Madness. It’s been something we’ve done off and on for the past 15 years, and it’s something I was glad to finally bring back.

I also got a chance to spend time with my buddy Sameer at a beach bar. There’s nothing better than a hazy IPA, college basketball on TV in an open air bar at 3PM, and the ocean breeze rolling through:

May: Things started to get crazy. I had Camp Nerd Fitness in Georgia (above in Work), and then immediately flew to Scotland to spend time with my wife who was over there on a work trip. She built an AMAZING itinerary, and it led to some epic experiences that really invigorated my love of travel again. Her parents even flew over to do some whiskey tasting and join us on a few hikes.

(If you go to Instagram.com/SteveKamb and click on the Scotland highlight, you can see the WHOLE trip)

July: I flew out to Bandon, Oregon for a 5 day golf-trip at Bandon Dunes (home of 4 of the top 10 public courses in America), where I played 9 rounds of golf in 5 days with a killer group of 12 dudes. My feet and body were wrecked, but my heart was full. More on this in the “Fitness and Golf” section.

Two days after returning from Bandon, it was time to drive up to Cape Code to visit my family for the summer, including meeting my niece for the first time! Here she is with my Gramma (her Great Gramma):

August: off to Tampa for another golf trip with my Vanderbilt friends. No clue why we picked Tampa in August, which was unbelievably hot and muggy. Still fun though!:

Things finally slowed down for the months of September and October, only to go absolutely haywire in November again.

November: We started with a big fake Thanksgiving for a week out in San Diego. My family and Alex’s family were all there:

The day after Thanksgiving, I flew down to Puerto Rico to meet up with my buddy Cash (friend since first grade) and head out on the SeaDream on the invite of my mentor and old boss, Andy Levine.

It was a small charter to my favorite place on the planet: Jost Van Dyke (home of the famous Soggy Dollar Bar). Highlights included hanging out with my longtime friends Dr. Morrie and Barb, Ashley, and old co-worker Kappy (who now manages one of the biggest country acts on the planet) – watching the US soccer match at a beach bar in St. John, and catching up with all my old friends from my past pre-Nerd Fitness life!

The day after returning from this cruise, absolutely wrecked because I partied like I was 26 and not 38, my wife and I drove out to Arizona.

December: After a few days in Arizona getting ready, and one technical delay (which was totally my fault), we caught flights to New Zealand to spend the end of the year for our anniversary/honeymoon. See the full story by clicking on New Zealand on Instagram.com/SteveKamb:

Looking back, no wonder many of the other parts of my life fell behind: my workouts weren’t super consistent, my golf game didn’t really improve, my work schedule was haphazard, and we accomplished significantly less when it came to renovating our house (unlike last year!).

HOWEVER! I’m totally okay with this. Life happens outside the gym. I could do this travel and Nerd Fitness didn’t suffer because we finally put the right people in the right places!

2022 House Update

With all of our travel and me reorganizing my entire work-life, quite a bit of the work we wanted to do happened on a slower timeline, and that’s okay.

There were a few big ones:

My office finally came together! Alex designed an UNBELIEVABLE office for me, and over many months we finally got it built. It now looks phenomenal whenever I’m on camera or Zoom meetings, and I’m inspired every time I sit down to work.

Outside of the office, we got our driveway redone, and fixed the front of our house too.

Oh and Alex built one heck of a side garden!

We also had some new tenants in our walls we had to evict: squirrels! So far we’ve had to evict a raccoon, moles, voles, and armadillos from our property – we live IN civilization, I promise. Squirrels were a cakewalk comparatively.

We have big plans for 2023, but I’m also cutting us some slack and acknowledging that this stuff will take as much time as it takes. Luckily I don’t believe we’ll be traveling as much.

Onto my physical scorecard for the year…

2022 Fitness and Golf!

Due to all the shit going on in 2022, I pretty much coasted on my fitness. In other words, I didn’t gain or lose weight, and I didn’t really gain or lose progress on my lifts.

Looking back at Evernote, here’s how the workouts broke down by month:

January: 18
February: 9
March: 10
April: 18
May: 10
June: 17
July: 6
August: 16
September: 10
October: 16
November: 10
December: 3

This is easily the ‘least’ amount of time I’ve spent with a barbell since I was probably 18, but I’m also obviously in a different phase of life. I have a family and hobbies and dogs and travel and rearranging my entire work life:

My mentality about training is very different now.

I train in the “gym” (my basement) for life outside of the gym. Travel and life was more important to me than my fitness, so I was okay just putting things on auto-pilot. After working with my friend Anthony for the past 7 years, with him now being a father of two and me moving into a different phase of my life, we amicably parted ways and I’m back to doing my own ‘programming’ for the past 6 months.

I’ll probably hire another trainer in the near future, but with a different focus as I approach my 40s, with a few areas of excitement:

Mobility and injury bullet-proofing
Gymnastics and strength training

I’m also on board with fitness coming second in my life to another hobby that I picked back up at the beginning of the pandemic: golf!

I continued to take lessons over at Profectus golf, and each lesson feels like 3 steps back before I take 3.5 steps forward.

The best round of the year was a 78 I made while playing at Gaylord Springs with my friend Sameer. He also got a chance to witness my 3rd-ever eagle at Nashboro Golf Club. After 20 years of no eagles and not breaking 80, it’s been awesome to break 80 twice and get two eagles in the past year.

My BEST shots are getting better – I still have trouble removing the bad shots and bad individual holes from the scorecard. I’m currently hitting the driving range regularly to continue to simplify my swing and reduce those mistakes.

I did get a chance to play golf in 3 epic places.

Scotland (Braveheart golf, essentially):

Bandon Dunes (9 rounds in 5 days!)

New Zealand (I felt like I was playing golf in The Shire):

I probably carded 30+ rounds, by far the most rounds of golf I’ve ever played in a year since high school. My handicap also improved fairly dramatically, getting down to an 8.6, currently a 9.4.

Heel bursitis kept me off the course for most of October and November, and now I’m I’m tinkering with my swing during the offseason, so I’m probably playing closer to a 15 at this point.

The hope is that 6 months from now, the foundation of my golf swing is significantly strong and the mistakes start to get smaller and less frequent. We shall see!

2022 Media Recap

Favorite Video Games: Elden Ring, by far, was the best game I played all year. It might be the best game I’ve ever played. Ever.

Zelda Breath of the Wild is up there with best ever, but nothing has captured my attention the way Elden Ring did.

The world design is brilliant. The level design is unparalleled. The enemy design is barbaric and demonic and gorgeous. I think I played 200 hours of this game between February and April. It took over my brain.

I also REALLY enjoyed Outer Wilds, which is one of the best “puzzle” experiences I’ve had in a game (up there with The Witness). I played through and would recommend Returnal, Ghost of Tsushima, and God of War: Ragnarok.

I played plenty of great indie games too:

Loop Hero
Death’s Door
Stray
Tunic
Prey

Favorite show: Bill Burr at Bridgestone Arena. Burr is my favorite comedian – his podcast has been part of my life for probably 8 years. Seeing him at the top of his game, commanding the attention of tens of thousands…it’s amazing.

Favorite podcast: Ramit Sethi’s I will Teach You To Be Rich: Ramit interviews couples about money, but REALLY he’s interviewing them about their upbringings, deeply held beliefs, and everything in between. Alex and I can’t get enough of it!

My favorite non-fiction book: Four-Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. This is one of the books that I’ll look back on a decade from now and say “my life was different as a result of that book.” Tyler Cowen calls this a “quake book”, because it shakes your core.

My favorite fiction book: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Great recommendation from my friend Megan – it’s about a young Korean man who starts developing video games with his friends. It’s so well written that I feel like I KNOW these characters intimately. Even if you don’t care about video games, please read.

Favorite movies: Everything Everywhere All at Once and Top Gun: Maverick, with some fun campy horror shout-outs to Saint Maud and Barbarian.

Favorite shows: White Lotus and Andor. The Season 2 theme song to White Lotus plays each morning as I’m writing. No joke.

I started cataloging my content consumption (with Roam), and thanks to Oliver, continually realized I’ll never be able to “do it all.” I’ve stopped books that no longer held my attention. I didn’t get 100% completion on games that stopped being fun. I gave up on shows halfway through.

Life is short, there’s so much great content out there that time can’t be wasted on sunk-cost fallacies!

Lately, I’ve been scaling back my podcast and gaming to only the BEST stuff, and freeing up more time to read and think.

2022 OVERALL GRADE

In the picture above, I’m trying to figure out the right way to go while biking in Scotland, which perfectly lines up with my struggles in 2022: trying to figure it out!

I’ll give myself a C+/B- for 2022, with a caveat: it was the first year back after a 2-year pandemic (which is still ongoing), a wedding that got delayed, moving into a new house (that’s 80 years old), and a complete rearranging of my company and my place within that company.

I learned to slow down a bit, stopped expecting things to happen quickly, and to stop ONLY living for the future.

Like House of the Dragon, most of the time was spent moving chess pieces around to gear up for Season 2. Plenty happened, I got to travel the world with my wife and play golf in some of the most amazing locations ever, I started a journaling habit that I was able to stick with for most of the year.

2023 is gonna be that Season 2. The pieces have been moved. It’s time to advance the plot!

2023 and Beyond

I write this post from an AirBNB in Arizona, where I’m staying with my wife and my two dogs.

I’ve narrowed and simplified my life considerably – I wake up each morning and I write. I play some golf, I hit the gym, and I read books.

I took the time to create my Values System, which I can now make sure I’m in alignment on when it comes to how I’m spending my time.

This month has been a return to form for training. I am going to hire another online coach, and come up with some goals and routines as I approach my final 18 months of my 30s.

The goals for 2023:

Get a book deal and finish Draft 1 of Book 2.
I regained the rights to Level Up Your Life. I’d like to get a 2nd edition done!
Get my 4 workouts per week done, with an emphasis on mobility.
Practice golf once per week.
Advance a few major house projects.
Community and life in Nashville: seeing friends weekly.

These are just rough guidelines – I’m going to focus on making each day a good day. And figure these goals should take care of themselves.

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2021: Retrospective

“This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live.”
-Seneca

2021 was a Tale of Two Cities for your boy Steve: the best of times and the worst of times. My 2020 Retrospective covered all of the parts of life that dramatically changed last year:

My fiancée Alex and I moved to Nashville and rented a house.
A month after that, we postponed our wedding by a full year.
Two months later, we bought a house.
Outside of two road trips to visit family, we lived like Hobbits.
On Christmas Eve, we adopted a second dog, Olive.
Team Nerd Fitness exploded in size, and we had our best year ever.

I hoped 2021 would be a “return to normalcy.” Looking back now in the early days of 2022, it’s pretty obvious that “normalcy” has left the f***ing building.

And it ain’t coming back.

2021 Life Updates

Let’s start with the fun, exciting stuff. Alex and I finally got married!

In mid 2020, we pushed our Dec 2020 wedding back by 12 months, which seemed extreme at the time. We knew vaccines were coming and assumed an extra year would give the world a chance to get its shit together.

LOL.

By June 2021, with the vaccine rolling out everywhere and America seemingly on the rebound, we decided to move forward with our wedding. We sent out new Save the Dates, we updated our website, and we put the wheels in motion to get hitched.

And then a month later, the Delta Variant started ripping through the country (Tennessee especially). Unnerved but undeterred, Alex and I (okay, mostly Alex) continued planning for an as-scheduled wedding, hoping that Delta would wind down before our wedding would happen.

What we held strong to: the wedding and all parties were taking place outdoors, in an international location: Aruba! Alex and I had visited the Marriott in Aruba twice prior, and thought it would be the perfect spot for a 4-day party with all of our friends and family.

We also knew all guests would be vaccinated, need to get texted before landing and before returning home. This made us feel much safer about planning a wedding with Alex’s 92-year old grandmother involved!

And then a comical list of “omg what next” events took place:

Our wedding planner got sick just 6 weeks before the wedding. One day it was “can we push our meeting back by an hour?” and then two weeks of radio silence, followed by “She no longer works with this company, we’re assigning you a new wedding planner.” Luckily Jessika who stepped in absolutely CRUSHED it!

Then…weeks before the wedding, first details about Omicron started coming out, and Alex and I just started laughing. We had planned and paid for this 4-day party, and the rules on how to visit Aruba were changing daily. In fact, days before we were scheduled to leave, the CDC changed their plans for allowing people into the country from international destinations.

However, Omicron hadn’t spread widely yet. Cases in Aruba were low. Everybody who got to Aruba had to be tested, we asked all guests to be vaccinated, and everybody had to test on the way home as well.

So we figured it was now or never: The wedding was on!

Of course, the best laid schemes of mice and men…

On the day we were scheduled to travel to Aruba, Nashville had a torrential storm that grounded all flights for hours:

Because we couildn’t get to Aruba that day any more (after getting up at 4AM and having a 6AM flight)…our Covid Tests were now invalid due to a 72-hour window rule.

So we got off the plane…

Rented a car…

Got NEW covid tests…

Then drove to Atlanta…

Spent the night…

And then flew to Aruba the next day.

FORTUNATELY!

For as many things that had gone wrong before the wedding, everything went right from the moment we set foot on Aruban soil.

We started with a welcome Party on Wednesday at sunset, and I was overwhelmed with joy at seeing all of our friends and family in the same place at the same time! I hate the spotlight, but I do love giving people a reason to get together.

So I’ll take it 🙂

Thursday was a beach party (complete with steel drum), followed by a killer rehearsal dinner at Infini.

Friday was the actual wedding. HOO BOY!

I enlisted the help of Barron Cuadro from EffortlessGent.com, who helped me figure out my suit situation so I didn’t look like a complete chump next to my bride. Rented tuxes never fit me correctly, so I invested in a custom suit from SuitSupply. It was fairly pricey, but I’ve never felt more like James Bond.

I also rocked some pretty epic Captain America Cufflinks that let me stay a bit nerdy.

The ceremony itself kicked all sorts of ass: a violinist and guitarist to play our favorite songs. Alex’s gramma served as our “flower granny” which was a highlight.

Alex and I didn’t do any sort of first look, so I didn’t get a chance to see her until she was walking down the aisle.

DAMN SHE LOOKED GOOD!

One of my best friends from college, Megan Morgalis, served as our officiant. My brother Jack was my Best Man, and two of my best friends served as groomsmen.

After the ceremony, it was time for cocktail hour poolside, dinner and dancing:

And then yes, everybody ended up in the pool.

It was surreal having all of our friends and family in one place for a 4 day party. In my opinion, it was worth every penny, every gray hair, and every ounce of shortened life expectancy.

Of course, Alex might feel differently, as she bore the brunt of the planning and stress around each detail…

But now that we’re married she’s stuck with me 🙂

2021 Work

Something I’ve known for a decade finally hit me square in the head, around May of 2021: I’m not a particularly good boss or manager.

I’m terrible at managing people and overseeing initiatives. I don’t particularly enjoy managing and stewarding a ship of 50 people.

I love making stuff, I love writing, I love the creative process. I love sharing my ideas in interesting ways. I like working with my hands. I like DOING stuff.

I am a creator.

And for the past 5+ years, I haven’t been doing much of that.

2021 was the year I rectified this: I dipped my toe back in the creativity pool by creating content daily for Nerd Fitness’s Instagram, and that got me kickstarted. It was mostly memes, but I enjoyed the constraints to keep me creating:

I also started sharing regularly on Twitter, and it seems to be resonating. Here’s my most popular tweet of the year:

How to live a pretty darn good life:

-Move more than you sit.
-Give more than you take.
-Earn more than you spend.
-Listen more than you speak.
-Create more than you consume.
— Steve Kamb (@SteveKamb) May 7, 2021

I try to think of creating for Nerd Fitness in terms of stand-up comedy:

Twitter is my “Tuesday night at the Cellar” attempt to try out new material.
For those tweets that truly land, I can then punch them up and incorporate them into my regular act (Instagram).
And then if they do well on Instagram, they might make it into my special (long form articles).

Speaking of which, I didn’t write nearly as much long form content as I would have liked. I did publish a few posts on SteveKamb.com:

I’m starting to detect a pattern in the stuff I enjoy writing about: I’m fascinated with the creative process and the challenges of putting one’s work out into the world.

So, as I spent the first half of the year making stuff, I finally accepted the truth that THIS is what makes me happiest: when I’m writing and creating.

It led me to make two big decisions with Nerd Fitness:

I realized I was holding my own company back with my role in my own company.

I made some big changes towards the top of my organization in June 2021, and spent the second half of 2021 unwinding a few things and making some bigger changes.

The most important decision: I promoted my COO, Adam Baker, to become the CEO of Nerd Fitness. I’m shifting myself over to “Chief Creative Officer.”

What does my future look like? More creation. I’m working on a second book proposal, and considering what type of podcast it would be fun to host/create.

It’s taken 6+ months to get this new strategy sorted out, and probably months more before everything is humming along, but for the first time in a long time, it feels right.

My biggest challenge? I’m good when my back is against the wall, or when I’m on the hook to deliver, but less motivated when things are going well.

I’d like to synthetically replicate those things without losing my creative fire.

And I believe this means my best efforts should be on building the habit of “chop wood, carry water.” When I just need to create for creativity’s sake, how do I stay hungry? I believe a second book deadline would help, but also building the daily habit of making things.

I also have tremendous Impostor Syndrome.

I’m fortunate to have very creative and successful friends that inspire the heck out of me. But their work also intimidates me – it’s easy for me to say my work isn’t good enough to be published in comparison to their body of work, but I’ve come to realize I’m playing a different game than them!

And that’s what SteveKamb.com has become, and I hope will continue to become: a place for me to chase my curiosities and see what the hell comes out of it.

2021 House Rennovations Update

I’m now a seasoned home owner (18 months, lol), and this year brought all the highs and lows that come with ownership:

We completely re-did our guest room (well, Alex did most of it), and now it looks absolutely fantastic. Except now it’s pretty much a “dogs lie on the bed and bark at the squirrels in the back yard room:”

We started renovating my home office, which will eventually have floor-to-ceiling book shelves, something i’ve always wanted. I’ve just never stayed in a place long enough to make it worth it!

We got new air conditioning units… and then two days later had a flood of epic proportions.

Torrential rains over the course of one night, and a backed up drain led to 18 inches of water in our basement. Turns out our home gym also had a pool installed:

Fortunately, everything dried out, nothing important was ruined, nobody was hurt, and we turned it into quite the party.

We continued to upgrade our yard and surrounding property, getting our poison-ivy filled hedges removed and a new wooden fence installed:

Oh, and Alex built one HELL of a garden. I helped with the manual labor, but she did all the work:

We put quite a few projects on hold to both financially and mentally prepare for our wedding, but we still managed to get quite a bit done during the year.

Lastly, I noticed a shift in myself towards the end of the year.

I spent the first 12 months of homeownership lamenting the upkeep and renovations. I couldn’t wait to be “done.”

Now? I’m finding a better rhythm.

I work on a house project with Alex, I’m not complaining like a toddler as I do it, and then occasionally take a weekend or two to play video games or catch up on a bunch of books.

2021 Golf and Fitness

In 2021 I managed to do something I hadn’t done since I was 18.

I broke 80 for 18 holes of golf!

I also had my first eagle in 20 years.

And I shot even par on 9-holes for the first time ever.

Even better? I did all of these things in the same round.

On the morning of my wedding.

Wearing sneakers, using rented clubs, 3 beers deep, and playing in 30MPH winds on a tough course in Aruba.

I birdied this hole by putting my tee shot about 8 feet from the cup. Look at how much that flag is blowing!

I shot a 77 at Tierra Del Sol in Aruba, while playing with my dad, brother and childhood best friend.

It was the best round of golf I’ve ever played. I shot a 42 on the front, and an even par 35 on the back, complete with an Eagle and two birdies.

Comically, I think it was because of the wedding later that day that I played so well. I was so scared about getting sunburned that my brain was preoccupied the whole round. Sure, the few beers also probably took some of the edge off!

I got a chance to play a fun round at Sweeten’s Cove outside of Chattanooga, TN too:

I continued my lessons with Errol over at Profectus Golf, and I have no doubt it was these monthly lessons that helped me put each of the pieces of my swing together for my big round.

I finally decided to upgrade my golf clubs, and will be retiring my Titleist 981s (20+ years old!) in favor of new Taylor Made P770s. At Profectus I was hitting these irons a good 15-20 yards farther than my old clubs.

I played 13 rounds of Golf, which is definitely the most golf I’ve played in a year since high school. I was able to drop my handicap down to a 10.7, which is also the lowest it’s been since high school.

NOW! Let’s talk about workouts.

Admittedly, my workouts took a backseat to the rest of my life in 2021. But I still did them. Like brushing my teeth or showering, I worked out because that’s just what I do. I missed more workouts than I have ever missed in a year.

I probably half-assed many of them too.

January: 18 workouts
February: 16 workouts
March: 14 workouts
April: 3 workouts
May: 12 workouts
June: 6 workouts
July: 10 workouts
August: 11 workouts
September: 15 workouts
October: 13 workouts
November: 15 workouts
December: 13 workouts

Although my workouts were probably the most inconsistent they’ve been in a decade, I also stayed in pretty darn good shape. Working out just took a big back seat for me this year with everything else going on.

Fortunately, because of the 15 years of training, I could coast this year and still not need to do anything special to prepare for our beach wedding.

My coach, Anthony Mychal, has a philosophy of “never be more than 2 weeks away from your goal physique.”

That resonates with me.

I do pretty good, 95% of the time.

I took 3 big trips (3+ weeks out in Arizona, a week in San Diego, and 3 weeks in Cape Cod, and didn’t work out at all on any of those trips. It made for some rusty workouts the week after returning, but that’s okay.

2021 Travel

I figured the world would return to normal once we all got vaccinated. And for a time there, we did actually travel.

We took a roadtrip out to Arizona to visit Alex’s parents for a few weeks. The road trip was actually kind of fun, and I got a chance to play quite a bit of golf out there.

We flew out to visit my brother Jack and his wife in San Diego, which was the first time on a plane in 18 months:

I also got to meet up with two longtime internet friends!

Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, whose internet meme game is unparalleled:

And Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, who was nice enough to take me for a ride in his sweet Tesla:

This was at the lowest point of Covid transmission on the year, so we felt very safe and didn’t run into any issues.

We also took a month and drove up to Cape Cod, MA to visit my parents for the summer, and had 3 weeks of relaxation as well.

Oh, and we flew to Aruba for a week for our wedding! So, 4 total flight

2021 Media Quick Recap

I feel like I still spent too much time CONSUMING Media and not enough time CREATING my own…but I at least managed to consume some damn good stuff.

I’m also now realizing this section is kind of half-assed, but that’s alright. I’m trying to downplay media consumption in my life, so maybe it’s appropriate! Ha!

I watched Ken Burn’s Civil War series. For an extra $4/month, PBS unlimited through Amazon Prime is one of the best deals out there. I plan on making my way through lots of other documentaries as time allows.

My favorite special of the year was Bo Burnham’s “Inside,” which totally feels like an accurate next phase for the man that wrote the Kanye Rant.

On the literary front, I read the first 1/3rd of the first 1/3rd of the Churchill Biography. That is gonna be an adventure in itself.

After watching the show on which it was based, I started reading The Expanse Book series, and this quickly took over most of my reading time for months and months. I’m now 6 books in, and can’t wait to see how this wraps up.

I read tons of other books, but none of them gripped me the way Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks did.

I hate hyperbole, but this might be the most important book I’ve read in the past decade. It’s responsible for my large sense of calm I’ve felt since getting married.

Here’s one particular quote that jumped out at me:

“It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up.”
Oliver Burkeman

I also did the impossible – at the behest of my friend Mark, I finally managed to read ALL of War & Peace. And made this video to commemorate the journey:

I played through 4 big video games in 2021:

Dark Souls 3 (my grade: B)
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (my grade: B-)
Demons’s Souls (my grade: B+)
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (my grade: B)

I fell in love with FromSoftware’s video games, and managed to complete all games Miyazaki has created since Demon’s Souls. I’m eagerly anticipating Elden Ring.

Favorite movie of the year: Spider-Man: No Way Home. This felt like epic, homage, and self-awareness done RIGHT.

I’m realizing this is feeling a bit light, and have resolved to start documenting my favorite things as they happen throughout the year so that 2022’s media recap is a bit more beefy!

Or, more individual articles are crafted here on SteveKamb.com. Only time will tell!

2022 and Beyond

I type this recap in early 2022 with an overall sense of calm I don’t think I’ve ever felt.

I feel like I’ve spent the past decade always working towards the next thing, and staying unsatisfied until I get there. Of course, I’d always move the goal posts to further prolong my dissatisfaction, or life would pull the football out from underneath me before I could kick it.

Now? I’m just focused on being present.

I am excited to renovate this house at a reasonable pace, but also to enjoy it along the way.

I’m pumped to get my new office finished, but I’m not in a rush.

I’m excited to continue playing golf and improving my swing, but I’m not going to be disappointed if I have a bad round.

My workouts are back on track, and I plan on bulking up while reaching for a goal of a simple set of 5 on a 225 back squat. Squats have always been my weakness, so I’ll be slowly plugging away at reaching this goal, but at a comfortable pace as dictated by my coach Anthony.

I’m hoping Omicron subsides, and Alex and I can start to rejoin society again here in Nashville. We took this entire pandemic with an abundance of caution, but I also think it’s time to start really putting down roots.

I’ve started doing Morning Pages (as laid out in The Artist’s Way), and it’s helped me start each day in 2022 with actually writing and creating.

Alex and I will take a honeymoon at some point in 2022, provided we can do so safely and without spending the entire time stuck in quarantine!

I’m starting up a book club with some friends.

I’m hoping to finish a book proposal and get a second book deal, but I’m also not too worried how that shakes out. The important part will be writing the proposal and the book.

Let’s see what the rest of this year brings. I don’t have expectations or goals.

Instead, I’m going to work on being creative each day, spending time with my family, and seeing where this leads me.

I’m hopeful for things to improve, but I’m also quite happy with where things are now.

Let’s do this.

###

Bo Burnham’s Brilliant Burrito Ballad

I woke up today and decided, “Damnit Steve, it’s time to finally write that article about burritos and existential crises.”

If that first sentence is making you go, “Steve has stepped off the deep end,” then just keep reading.

I promise you, it’s only gonna get weirder from here on out.

I’m hoping you’ve had the privilege of watching comedian Bo Burnham’s 2021 Netflix special, INSIDE. If you haven’t, drop what you’re doing and go spend the next 75 minutes doing so.

I’ll wait.

Burnham’s INSIDE is receiving universal praise from critics and the general public. It’s one of the most enjoyable, empowering, depressing, creative, thought-provoking, and somehow encouraging pieces of experimental art I’ve seen in a long time.

Of course, I’d expect nothing less from the man.

Bo has been putting out thought provoking comedy for a over a decade (wild considering his age), and I’ll admit that I largely avoided him until about 2016.

I had made the false assumption that Bo was a one-trick pony who wrote gross but clever lyrics.

Luckily, a few years back I stumbled across a clip from his previous 2016 special, Make Happy.

Today, because this is my sandbox and I’ll do what I want…

I wanted to spend a ridiculous amount of time breaking down the final song from this special, the “Kanye Rant.”

It’s a satirical takedown of Kanye West’s lengthy, auto-tuned Yezus tour diatribes.

If you watched and loved INSIDE, but thought to yourself, “Damn dude that was DARK…”

Then it’s time to rewatch this Kanye rant. Bo’s depth has been here all along, and even hiding in plain site.

Burnham’s document internal struggles started long before INSIDE, and him sharing this openly started 5+ years back.

To the Kanye rant!

The Best 7 Minutes of Your Day

Please set aside 7 minutes right now, and watch this Kanye rant.

Then allow me to break it down, line by line, because this is apparently how I’m choosing to spend my morning.

Irony Can be so Painful

After singing about a first world problem that Pringle cans are too narrow to fit one’s hand in the can, he drops a line that nearly everybody can relate to:

“I don’t go to the gym, because I’m self conscious about my body.
But I’m self-conscious about my body because I don’t go to the gym. Irony can be so painful.
That’s a catch-22!”

This doesn’t require much analysis, other than it’s immediately relatable. It applies to the gym, but it also applies to most of the things we want:

People are afraid to exercise because of how they look, and they’re unhappy with how they look because they don’t exercise.
I don’t write much because I don’t have much to say. But I don’t have much to say because I don’t write.
I don’t play music because I’m not very good at it. But I’m not very good at music because I don’t play.

Damn you, irony. You beautiful bastard.

Of course, this quick aside was just the appetizer for the true main course of Burnham’s brilliant ballad:

Chipotle.

The Burrito is a Metaphor

Bo recaps ordering a burrito, where everything behind the glass looks AMAZING! He gets every ingredient and ends up with a fully loaded burrito.

And as for anybody who’s ever eaten at Chipotle, we know what happens next.

At the end of the line, the dude wrapping the burrito can’t fit it all inside the confines of the tortilla. It’s a burrito disaster!

Dude you should have warned me.
You’re the burrito expert, you should have told me halfway through, ‘Hey man, you might be reaching maximum burrito capacity here.’
Do you think I want a messy burrito? No one wants a messy burrito!

Do you see what’s going on here?

This burrito is an overstuffed metaphor for fame.

And it’s brilliant.

“I wouldn’t have got HALF this shit if I knew it wouldn’t fit.
I wouldn’t have got the lettuce if I knew it wouldn’t fit. I wouldn’t have got the cheese if I knew it wouldn’t fit.”

Burnham is sharing his cautionary tale – he hit fame at a VERY early age (before he could legally drink), and found himself standing shoulder to shoulder, and getting respect and accolades, from some of the most well respected comedians in the business.

Guys who grinded out dingy comedy clubs for decades before finding their footing. Guys who probably WANTED to hate Bo for his almost overnight success, until they discovered the thoughtfulness and self-deprecation with which Bo handles himself.

In other words – his success was earned, not given.

So imagine you’re Bo. You’re making YouTube videos in your bedroom and just a few years later find yourself sitting next to Gary Shandling, Ray Romano, Judd Apatow, and Mark Maron, and earning their respect:

And that’s how this introverted, shy, deeply introspective nerd finds himself on stage in front of thousands, has already earned the respect of his heroes, and gets to perform his own art for a captive audience on a nightly basis.

And it crushed him.

The story of the burrito here is a warning for those that can heed the message:

“Sure all of this fame LOOKS good, but once you have it you’ll realize you don’t ACTUALLY want it.

I’m telling you now, from experience. I was lucky enough to reach the peak and it’s not as great as you’d think. If I could, I would give back most of it!”

In other words, filling up one’s life with all sorts of stuff that doesn’t actually fit makes for a bad burrito experience.

Once we finish with our burrito metaphor, Bo goes “full send” on his struggles with creativity, fame, and happiness.

Part of Me Loves You. Part of Me Hates You.

I could sit up here and pretend like my biggest problems are Pringle cans, and burritos, but my biggest problem is you.
I want to please you, but I want to stay true to myself. I want to give you the night out that you deserve, but I wanna say what I think, and not care what you think about it.
Part of me loves you. Part of me hates you.
Part of me needs you. Part of me fears you.
And I don’t think that I can handle this right now.”

Bo’s trying to share his love-hate relationship with fame and an audience and the anxiety that comes with putting art out into the world or performing it on stage.

He wants to create, and make stuff, and share.

But goddamnit, he hates that he desires the approval of fans when he makes this stuff. And yet, he needs his art to be true to himself, without depending on what the audience thinks.

Of course, without fans – who could he make these things for? Author Mark Manson shared a quote from Will Smith that fits perfectly here:

I’m world-class at only a couple of things. And every hour I’m not doing those things, I am doing a disservice to myself and the world.

That’s the rub.

You can choose to NOT create, or share. Of course, you might be doing the world a disservice by not putting your art out into the world.

And author Seth Godin said it even more succinctly : “Be criticized, or be ignored.”

Making art is hard. Sharing art and baring your soul is hard. It can feel easier to NOT share, but then you are depriving the planet of art!

I imagine Bo went to some VERY dark places during the filming and editing of INSIDE, and probably oscillated between “this is hot garbage, I will never set this see the light of day” and “this is hot garbage, but fuck it, I’m just gonna ship it.”

And the world is a better place as a result of him creating this art. Millions of people have watched INSIDE, like myself, and saying “Wow, I thought I was the only one who felt this way! I feel heard.”

Then Shit gets DARK

“Look at them they’re just staring at me. Like, come and watch the skinny kid with the steadily declining mental health, and laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself.”

That’s some darkness right there, wrapped up in an auto-tuned satirical rant.

Burnham struggles immensely with his own self image, desperately wants to make others happy, and yet gets stuck inside his own head and struggles with happiness, anxiety, and depression himself.

He has discussed his struggles with anxiety on numerous podcasts:

We all know the tragedies that often befall the people who entertain us the most.

From Prince to Robin Williams, Elvis to Heath Ledger…being a human is fucking brutal sometimes. We’re emotional bags of meat on a floating rock and often trying to find meaning where none might exist.

I recently spoke with a friend who wrote a very successful book – so successful that essentially he never really has to work ever again if he doesn’t want to.

In other words, he achieved the goal that most authors hope for: to be paid well enough for one’s writing that they can then only write for the fun of it.

Which introduced a WHOLE new set of problems.

“Do you know how much of a mindfuck it is to reach ALL of your life’s goals within a week?”

n fact, as we come to learn in INSIDE, his mental health declined so furiously that after multiple on-stage panic attacks during performances, he took 5 YEARS off of performing to get better.

Taking “Kanye Rant” and INSIDE as a single package, the audience gets to learn an amazing lesson – if we’re smart enough to listen:

We get the cautionary tale without the tragedy of an overdose or suicide.

We get the knowledge without the shock of another dead celebrity.

This is a gift.

Let’s move onto the conclusion.

Back from the Brink.

“I put on a silly show, I should probably just shut up and do my job so here I go.”

This is Bo pulling himself back from the brink. “Sorry for getting so introspective there. You’re here for entertainment, not depressing self-loathing, so let me dance like a monkey for you.”

“You can tell them anything if you just make it funny, make it rhyme. And if they still don’t understand you, then just run it one more time.”

In other words – “Who knows if people even understand the message I’m trying to make here. But who cares. I’ll just make it funny and catchy and hope you eventually catch on.”

Thank you. Goodnight. I hope you’re happy.

In the end, that’s all we really want right? To be able to say “Here I made this. I did my craft well, and I hope you enjoyed it.”

Feels weird to dedicate a post to a 30 year old dude wrapping about Burritos, but damn when you create art this clever, it’s worth the analysis. Or maybe it wasn’t.

Part of me doesn’t care what you think about this analysis. Maybe Bo was really just talking about burritos.

Of course, the other part of me DEEPLY cares what you think about this analysis.

But that doesn’t matter. I wanted to write this. I lost track of time while doing so, and I feel like I did my brain justice in putting this out into the world.

So, thanks for reading.

I hope you’re happy.

Get Back to What Got You There.

I’ve been trying to work myself out of creative debt for the past 18 months.

Creative debt occurs when somebody spends more time consuming other people’s creative endeavors than creating their own content:

Reading more books about writing, instead of writing another book.
Watching more TV rather than creating more video content, etc.
Listening to myriad podcasts instead of finally starting one.
Spending time at museums looking for more inspiration, rather than picking up a paintbrush and making bad art.

So, as I’ve been working my way out of creative debt, I’ve found comedians talking about their comedy process to be some of the most helpful stories to draw inspiration from.

As an example, I was IMMEDIATELY drawn to a passage in Jerry Seinfeld’s recent book, Is This Anything?:

For about two years after I finished [Seinfeld] I didn’t do anything. I moved my life back to New York. I had breakfast with Colin Quinn everyday. I played pool at Amsterdam Billiards at night. Very late sometimes. I met and married my wonderful wife, Jessica.
But no stand-up. No writing. Nothing.
Felt lost. And wanted to.
In LA, two of my comedy pals, Chris Rock and Mario Joyner, were doing a show at the Universal Amphitheater and I went to see them. The amphitheater is a big house, about six thousand seats. I sat there watching these two smooth, confident professionals handle that room and that crowd so easily.
I laughed and enjoyed that show so much. And then I thought, “What an amazing talent and skill set that is to witness. What a great time we’re having in this audience. How are they able to do that?!”

Here’s one of the funniest, most successful comedians on the planet, watching other comedians working on their craft, and thinking, “How are those comedians able to do what they do on stage?”

Again, this is JERRY effin’ SEINFELD!

A killer stand-up comedian and creator of arguably the best and most successful show ever…struggling to figure out how to get back to creating comedy.

I found myself in a similar position for the past two years.

My company, Nerd Fitness, started as a fun blog where I had to keep my own attention by writing funny content about health and fitness. Most of my time was spent writing and building, because that’s what paid the bills.

Since then, Nerd Fitness has evolved into a company with 45 employees, systems, processes, and an engine. I drifted more into a CEO role and away from a creator role. More spreadsheets and meetings, more growth and forecasting, more analysis and less “messy, creative process.”

As a result, trying to create ANYTHING started to feel daunting, and almost all of my creative ideas never left the port:

I couldn’t write a follow up book to Level Up Your Life until I had the PERFECT sequel idea. I currently have 7 half-finished book proposals.
I couldn’t write articles that didn’t fit the search engine optimization strategies that fit Nerd Fitness’s business plan.
I couldn’t started a new project unless it aligned with the greater vision that was Nerd Fitness.

And then I attended a writers retreat with some of my longtime internet friends.

These are writers who specifically chose to build their careers around their writing and their creative process. These are ALSO authors who have sold millions and millions of copies of their books, and crafted their businesses around their strengths and skillsets.

At that retreat, as we swapped stories and struggles about writing and business and life, I couldn’t help but feel like Seinfeld admiring Chris Rock from the crowd: “Man, my writer friends are really good at what they do, and they seem really happy too. How did they do that?”

And then the answer came to me, just as the answer came to Seinfeld as he thought about his Comedian friends:

I thought, “I want to do that. I want to be like them.”
Then, “Wait a minute! That’s what I used to be! I used to know how to do everything they are doing. I still want to be that.”
[Chris and I were] having dinner at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. I explain my situation. Chris says, “Well, at least you know there’s only one way to do it.”
It did feel great to be reminded of that.
I didn’t have to waste one second of time wondering how to approach the problem. I don’t use writers.
So, it’s back to tiny clubs with flimsy stuff, night after night, month after month. And it takes however long it takes.
When you see a comedian with a ton of great stuff, what you’re really marveling at, or should be, is “How could someone crawl on their belly that great a distance?”

My work here on SteveKamb.com is my attempt at building a little sandbox, and working on ways to get out of creative debt.

To create stuff just for the hell of it.

To write about what interests me.

To “chop wood and carry water,” and create because that’s what I’m on this planet to do.

In addition to occasional articles here, I’m publishing every single day over on Nerd Fitness’s Instagram and sharing regularly on Twitter @SteveKamb, which has turned out to be pretty darn fun.

So, this is me – getting back to what got me here in the first place.

Crawling on my belly for as long as it takes.

(Typed on my belly, at the start of a journey whose conclusion is unknown.)