Steve Kamb

Life

2020: A Retrospective

“Build a life you don’t need to escape from.” – Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

Looking back, 2020 was a dumpster fire in many aspects.

From being cooped up indoors for months and not being able to visit friends and family, to the absolute uncertainty of “What does this mean for  my family? My business? My life?” the year couldn’t have been more bizarre and frustrating.

2020 also happened to be a year of incredible growth, change, and leveling up. 

This is my first attempt at a “year in review,” which I found to be both cathartic and informative.

Without taking this step back and looking at the year as a whole, I would have told you “not much happened in 2020, it was pretty boring.”

Which is a big fat lie, as I did a lot of shit in 2020! 

  • 2020 began in a rented townhouse in Hoboken, NJ.
  • 2020 ended in a 1940’s home I own on an acre of land in Nashville, TN.
  • For the first time in 5 years, I own a car. 
  • I’ve gone from Peter Pan to Bob Villa.
  • My company, Nerd Fitness, has doubled in size.
  • The number of dogs in my family have doubled.

Here’s how it went down.

2020: COVID CHANGED EVERYTHING

Back in January 2020, My finceée Alex and I were living in a townhouse Hoboken, NJ, with a lease that ended in April. 

After a few years in Manhattan, and one year across the river in Hoboken, we were both interested in shaking things up and getting away from the chaos that is NYC. 

I had spent most of 2019 reevaluating what was important to me:

  • I didn’t NEED to be in or near Manhattan anymore.
  • Instead of trying to scale Nerd Fitness as quickly as possible, I shifted my focus to creating a great daily schedule. 
  • I wanted to live in a place where I could do good work and take on projects that were interesting to me.

My life shifted from an aspirational “need to get this done ASAP” goals to simply, “how do I make today better?” 

I used this quote from author Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key, “Build a life you don’t need to escape from,” as my guiding principle. 

Alex’s parents were moving out of the NYC area, and our ties to NYC had weakened. We were both interested in a few things: a home we could own, a big yard for our dog and for entertaining, and a quieter life focused on the right things. 

We both love Nashville – and I’ve lived here twice before – so we flew down in February and found a house to rent in the Belmont area, and scheduled our move for early April. 

Then Covid hit.

We hunkered down in Hoboken, waiting out the weeks until we could move to Nashville. We managed to get out just in the nick of time before everything got locked down completely. We made the drive in one day, and suddenly we found ourselves in a great house with a huge backyard!

Once the dust settled, we realized Covid wasn’t going to be a few weeks of disruption, but rather MONTHS, it was obvious that we weren’t going to be able to get married as planned in December.

We made the tough decision to postpone our wedding by a full year. This was initially frustrating and sad, but looking back it was the most obvious decision we could have made. 

After decorating our rented home, Alex grew frustrated with putting time and energy into a house that wasn’t ours, and building a garden in a backyard that we were renting.

So, after just two months into our lease, we decided to begin a search to buy a home for ourselves. We figured if we couldn’t travel, and we couldn’t get married yet, then we could at least start the rest of our life and make a more permanent home.

We had been aggressively saving for a house downpayment for years prior, so advancing this timetable didn’t stretch us too thin.

We also figured Nashville was only going to become more popular: no state income tax, relatively low cost of living, covid, and a burgeoning entrepreneurship/tech scene meant that people were flocking here in droves.

Apple Music, Google Music, and Amazon were all building large presences here, which boded well for future property value.

We started the search for a home and found one that checked 9 out of 10 boxes for both of us.

And thus, after spending the previous 18 years moving 18 times…Steve Kamb became a homeowner!

2020 HOME OWNERSHIP

We managed to find a house on nearly an acre of land, within walking distance of the amazing coffee shops, stores, and parks of 12 South.

It also had everything else we were looking for (4+ bedrooms, a huge backyard, a basement in case of tornadoes, and in a quiet neighborhood).

We followed Ramit Sethi’s 3 rules for buying a home.

Rather than taking our income and asking “how much house can this buy?” we instead asked, “How much house do we reallllly need, and what’s important to us?” 

This is how we ended up with a good-sized home, on an acre of land, in our preferred part of town, with a monthly mortgage that’s less than half of what our rent was in Hoboken/NYC.

The house was also built in 1946, so it has plenty of…character. Ha!

Although we paid extra for additional inspections during the buying process, there were areas we absolutely should have gotten extra specialists.

Here’s what I wish we had done differently:

  • On the second day of homeownership, we discovered there was a raccoon living in the attic, which wasn’t accessible until we cut a hole in the ceiling. We paid an pest-control specialist to evict the poor thing, and also had to pay to replace alllll of the insulation in the attic as well. We should have paid to cut a hole in the ceiling to get up in there before buying.
  • In December, we paid to have the chimney cleaned and inspected before having our first fire of the season. The verdict: please do NOT put a fire in this fireplace, as the entire chimney needs to be replaced. We wouldn’t have expected the previous owners to do this, but we could have used this to negotiate our final cost down, as this is going to be costly to replace. We should have paid to get a chimney inspector out to the property during our due diligence period.  
  • The second floor air conditioner crapped out two months after we moved in. We knew it was OLD, and would have to be replaced sooner than later, but it’s a shame that it barely lasted a few months. Oh well. 

These are all things we probably could have negotiated with the owners to reduce our offer.

I don’t feel too badly – though there were multiple offers on this house within 24 hours of it hitting the market, and we knew the house was 80+ years old, so we figured that into how much we wanted to spend monthly on mortgage.

2020 HOME PROJECTS

You don’t buy an 80 year old home without expecting to make a lot of updates, right?

Alex grew up in an 200-year old home her family refurbished over 30 years, so this is nothing new for her.

Of course, I’ve spent the past 18 years in rented condos and apartments, not needing to fix a damn thing.

So, this has been an area of my life I’ve done a pretty dramatic about-face! I now try to fix most things myself, and learn what I can in the process.

Here’s what I did in my first 4 months of home ownership:

  1. I bought a hedge trimmer, trimmed the hedges, which were in desperate need of a haircut. I also ended up with so much poison ivy that I still have scars 6 months later, but I wear these scars with pride.

2. We built a chain link fence to hold us over until we put in a new fence. Digging these post holes, pouring concrete, stretching the fence, exhausting, but fulfilling. 

I fixed my office closet, patching the wall, using joint-compound, sanding down the wall, and re-setting the shelves. 

I replaced the kitchen faucet and water lines. This required 4 trips to Home Depot and two lacerated fingers, but it was worth it. No more drip!

I wall-mounted our 75-inch television, drilling pilot holes and setting lag bolts into our wood studs beneath or plaster walls.

I built a workbench, which should make future home renovation projects easier!  

Looking ahead, we have big plans for the rest of the house:

We want to renovate the kitchen, replace the windows, open up the staircase, and partially finish the basement.

We want to turn the backyard into a fun place for entertaining, add a screened in patio and deck, eventually add a pool, and more. 

2020 CAR AND TRAVEL

I haven’t been on a plane since February 2020, which is easily the longest I’ve gone without getting on a plane since I was probably 4.

Because I knew we’d be road tripping to places instead of flying for the foreseeable future, I bought a Jeep – the same type of car I’ve owned multiple times in the past.

I had no interest in haggling for the best possible price with a car dealership, especially during covid, so I used CarMax and picked out my car online. I had Alex drive me over to the CarMax dealership, where I test drove my car for about 15 minutes, then made the purchase. 

It was nice to just pick what I wanted, see the price, and then buy the car.

Despite not going on any planes, Alex and I still did two major trips:

We drove from Nashville to Phoenix with our pup to visit her parents for 2 weeks in October. We drove through Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and finally Arizona.

While out in Arizona, I managed to play 6 rounds of golf.

We also drove up to Cape Cod to visit my parents for Thanksgiving, going up through Virgina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, NY, Connecticut, Providence and Massachusetts.

Luckily, our pup Pepper was an absolute champ in the car during this whole trip. 

The roadtrips were a bit stressful, but ultimately good quality time with Alex and myself. 

2020: DOUBLE DOGS

We adopted a second dog!

Our older pup Pepper loves dogs. When we lived in Hoboken, we lived 5 minutes from a dog park, so we could walk over there every day. Pepper was a dog park favorite, as she would be so excited to play and have fun with each and every dog. 

Now that we’re in quarantine, and in Nashville, Pepper doesn’t get to spend nearly as much time playing with other dogs. So we adopted a second one.

Her name is Olive.

She’s adorable. But also, a handful.

2020 HEALTH AND FITNESS

I’ve been going to the gym 4 days a week, every week, for the past 15 years.

Covid wrecked this plan…initially.

For the few weeks before we moved out of Hoboken, I was doing home workouts exclusively with bodyweight a door frame pull-up bar.

As soon as I moved to Nashville, my friend Tyler Thompson (owner of Title Boxing Nashville) dropped off a barbell and some weights for me to use while I was getting settled. 

I also immediately ordered a squat rack and my own barbell and plates. I got this squat rack from Rogue, and I got the weights and bar from FringeSport. They showed up a few months later. 

Once I hung up my gymnastic rings, I suddenly had a full blown gym! 

I have missed more than my fair share of workouts this year, but I’ve got my nutrition dialed in so I’m still around 9-10% body fat at 170ish pounds.

Oh, I started playing golf seriously again. I played golf in high school, but living in manhattan and playing regular golf isn’t very easy. 

Luckily, my friend Sameer here in Nashville is also is trying to play more, and golf is the perfect Covid activity. During the summer and fall, we played golf once a week or so. 

My childhood best friend Cash happens to live in Knoxville, so every other week we drove halfway between our two cities and played a round of golf. 

My best score of the year was an 81 out in Arizona. I knew I had taken my swing as far as it could go, and I was never going to shoot consistently in the 70s if I could hit my driver. 

So I’ve been taking lessons over at Gaylord Springs at the Profectus Center with Errol. I’m signed up for an ongoing monthly membership, which pretty much FORCES me to take a lesson each month. It’s worth it to me. 

2020 BUSINESS

I’m very fortunate that I’ve spent the last 11 years building a remote team and writing about home workouts. 

Once the reality of Covid set in, our business got busy. We now have a team of 45+ people, including 25 coaches and 15 full-time team members, and another 5-10 part-time people.  

We also launched a new habit building app, NF Journey. The response to this app has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’m excited to see how people respond to it. 

I spent a lot of 2020 handing off other parts of my role to more capable team members, which freed me up to focus on the app and so on.

I also spent quite a bit of time cleaning up all of the management /tech /financial /entrepreneurial debt I had accumulated over the past decade

Now that I have a proper home office, I finally got a good minimalist desk setup going:

Nerd Fitness also got its first corporate client! It’s a company I’ve loved since I was a child, and a key member of that company happened to be an online coaching client of ours. He loved our Journey app so much that they bought 250 slots for his team members.  

2020 FINANCE AND CHARITY

I am a nerd for personal finance. I track my net worth in a google document on a monthly basis, and I have 25 different automated savings accounts for various emergencies, contingencies, or upcoming projects I want to tackle.

Outside of saving more, I’ve been working on GIVING more.

Heavily inspired this year by my friend Ramit, I made a $10,000 donation to the ACLU, and made monthly ongoing donations to Propublica (investigative journalism) and Effective Altruism. 

I made donations to other causes and services that were important to me: friends who had lost their jobs due to Covid, others who lost family members due to cancer, and pretty much anybody else I knew doing an activity for any charitable reason 

This is an area I want to level up even more in 2021. I’m glad I’ve set up automated donations to ProPublica and Effective Altruism, as I no longer have to think about it…so I’d like to think of more ways I can donate my time and money to worthwhile causes!

I’m also very excited – once the world opens up again – to find local organizations here in Nashville that I can make an impact with!

2020 CREATIVE PROJECTS

I finally got off my ass and started writing here at SteveKamb.com – I’ve been threatening to do this for 5+ years and finally gave myself permission to start. 

I heard Seth Godin in a recent interview on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. “Flip the question: What would you do if you KNEW it would fail?” 

For me, it’s writing. 

I spent the past decade exclusively writing about personal development, strength training, nutrition, and wellness, which is how I built Nerd Fitness to 1 million+ readers a month. 

This site is going to be my sandbox for just writing and trying out new stuff.

I only published 4 posts on the site in 2020, but it’s a start. My goal is to continue publishing creative work, and see where my brain takes me.

I don’t write when I have a good idea, I write to find a good idea.

I’m still dabbling with Piano, Guitar, and Violin – but it’s mostly keeping my current subpar skills where they are rather than focusing on improving them. 

2021 AND BEYOND

I’m in a place where I don’t feel compelled to set audacious goals for myself or my business.

Instead of trying to set a goal and being dissatisfied until I get there, instead I’m inverting things. 

I want to work on improving my day-to-day life: chop wood, carry water.

I still spend too much time sitting at my computer out of habit, and have tried to put steps in place to really time-box myself and get away from my computer when I’m done. 

So I’ve gone old school: I keep an actual hourglass on my desk, and try to accumulate as many 30-minute focused sessions as possible each day, and tracking this on a physical wall calendar.

I’m rereading Essentialism, Effective Executive, and other books on the creative process to remind me to cut out the noise and focus on the most important work you can do each day.

I know that if I’m spending a few hours each day on the most important task, Nerd Fitness is going to be in a good place, and I’m going to be a good place.

Chop wood, carry water.

Close out all programs, flip the hour glass, and start typing.

Let’s see what 2021 brings…

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Avoid Creative Debt

I think about debt quite a bit.

Mostly, that I try to avoid it.

These days, we have a team over at Nerd Fitness that is approaching 50 employees and contractors.

As the company has grown and evolved, I’ve found my attention and time pulled in many direction: meetings, projects, a new app, mentorship of team members, and so on.

My fiancée and I also just purchased an 80-year house in Nashville, and we adopted a second dog, Olive (pictured here with our other rescue pup, Pepper):

Oh, and there’s no shortage of amazing TV shows and video games to play, especially when trapped inside during the apocalypse.

Over the past two years, I’ve slipped more and more into the most unfulfilling and insidious type of debt:

Creative debt.

I’ve been spending a lot of time consuming other people’s creative works.

From playing through the Dark Souls series on Playstation, to reading Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants, to watching Queen’s Gambit on Netflix twice, I’ve been absorbing a LOT of other people’s amazing creative content, and not producing very much of my own.

Simply put, it hasn’t been a priority, because I’ve left the rest of life happen to me rather than making time for it.

Which is a shame, because I LOVE making stuff.

My youth was spent building LEGO sets, tree forts, pillow forts, cardboard box forts, and everything other type of fort imaginable.

I started playing piano when I was 9, I picked up the guitar in college, and started playing the fiddle at age 30.

I’ve publish 700 2000+ word articles over on NerdFitness.com, which is how that site now receives a million+ monthly readers.

I even wrote an actual book, Level Up Your Life, which has helped people all over the world live better.

I’m sharing all of this to paint the picture of who I am: somebody who creates. I’m not particularly good at music, nor do I think I’m a particularly great writer.

I do know that creating stuff makes me happy and fulfilled.

And because I had spent too much time consuming other people’s creative work and not shipping any of my own, I found myself unhappy and unfulfilled.

Once I came to this realization, how do you think I tried getting out of creative debt?

I did exactly what we all THINK we should do.

I read articles and devoured books and listed to podcasts to get motived and inspired to create again.

Here are some of my favorites:

I kept reading more and more works from other, more creative people than myself about being creative, trying to find the motivation to write another book or begin another big project.

These incredible resources were wasted on me – I used them as a crutch rather than a springboard.

I kept psyching myself out:

I told myself I needed a BIG idea that was worthy of my time; an idea that I could dedicate weeks and months of my life to. The bigger I tried to think, the more pressure I put on myself, and the more I scared myself out of starting.

Even worse, the more creative work I read from other people, the more I told myself “your work has to be at least as good as this – otherwise, don’t bother.”

I accumulated more and more creative debt, waiting for inspiration to strike.

(In South Park terms, I was collecting creative underpants).

All of this came to a head in 2020 when I declared a creative debt emergency.

I faced the cold hard truth: I couldn’t inspire myself out of debt. I couldn’t motivate myself out of debt.

The only way out was to just f***ing START creating.

My Plan to Get out of Creative Debt

I have a very specific plan to get out of creative debt:

Not with micro-dosing LSD or going on a vision quest or cutting my ear off, but with boring consistency.

Boring consistency got me in the best shape of my life.

Boring consistency is the only reason I was able to write Level Up Your Life and grow Nerd Fitness.

Boring consistency is going to get me out of creative debt too.

Every morning, whether or not I’m inspired, I create.

I’ve blocked off the 30 minutes of every day in my calendar. I use Focus to block time-distracting websites. I can’t check my email or do anything else until my 30 minutes of creating are up.

I have a Spotify focus playlist of a few songs that help get me in flow.

And I’m creating crappy work. Some days are easy, while other days it feels like playing basketball in quicksand.

(Terrible idea, I might add)

Most of the stuff I’m creating is hot garbage. Almost all of it will never see the light of day. But every once and a while, I stumble across a thought or idea that becomes eventually becomes pretty cool.

And my only goal, each day, is to not break the streak.

I no longer write when I have a good idea.

I’m write until I find one.

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13 Ways I Made Money as a Kid (before 18)

At age 5, I started my first entrepreneurial venture.

At age 10, I got in trouble at school for selling illegal goods at the lunch table.

At age 14, my first official job only lasted two weeks.

Now that I’m 11 years into my bootstrapped venture (NerdFitness.com, now with 25 full time team members), I thought I’d be fun to look back at the jobs I had as a kid, and the lessons I learned along the way:

The 13 Ways I Made Money before 18

1. “Art” Dealer (Age 5). I grew up on Cape Cod, MA, about a 5 minute drive from the beach. I don’t even remember where the idea came from, but I decided I was going to create and sell art.

So I convinced my dad to take me to Sandy Neck Beach at low tide, where I collected quahog shells, enough to fill a garbage bag. I then put all the shells into a giant Rubbermade trashcan, filled it with bleach and water, and bleached the shit out of those damn shells.

I then painted various designs in the shell, and sold them in front of my house. The shells with poorly drawn Red Sox logos were the best sellers.

I think my parents forced all of their friends to buy one, which I suppose would qualify as a neighborly shakedown.

2. Beverage Salesman (age 5-8). During hot summer days, my friends and I would sell Country Time lemonade on our street. Yellow lemonade always sold better than the pink lemonade.

We quickly learned that very few cars drove down our street, but if we parked ourselves at the end of the neighborhood, 10x the number of cars would drive by.

3. Black Market Creepy Crawler dealer (age 10). In 4th Grade, my friend Cash and I both had a Creepy Crawly machine. Imagine an easy bake oven, but to make insects:

You would take these metal molds of various bugs, fill up the molds with (probably) toxic goup, and then stick them in the Creepy Crawlers oven.

Cash and I would then bring the Crawlers to school and sell them to classmates in Mr Kelleher’s class and at the lunch table. Black scorpions were the big sellers at 50 cents.

This career was short-lived, as word got around to the teachers we were selling illegal insects, and had to shut down productions. Sorry, Mr. Kelleher!

4. Beach Plum Jelly Production and Sales (age 10?). About a 5-minute drive away from our house, there was a public orchid of beach plum trees. I went there with my mom and picked a few baskets full of beach plums.

We then spent a few days turning the plums in the beach plum jelly, canned them in mason jars, and then sold them at the Wing School Fair.

5. Successful lawn-mowing business (age 11-16). I made business cards and put them in everybody’s mailbox. Most of the time I could just push the mower or run it down the street and then walk it back home. Sometimes, if I was nice and she wasn’t busy, my mom would let me throw the mower in the back of her Jeep and she would drive me over.

Lawn-mowing memory: putting my Lit (Our Place in the Sun) CD into my Sony Discman and trying to walk as smoothly as possible so the album wouldn’t skip.

By the end of my lawn-mowing career, I saved up to buy an Intel Pocket Concert MP3 player. I think it could only hold like 30 songs…but man, having that to mow lawns was the BEST.

6. Raked leaves during the fall. (age 11-16) Same customers who had me mow their lawn. All I needed was some trashbags and a rake.

7. Shoveled snow during the winter (age 11-16). Same customers who had me mow their lawn and rake their leaves. All I needed was a shovel and a willingness to deal with frozen toes and fingers.

8. Caddying at the Ridge Club (age 13). This job wasn’t great, as I was quite small and not strong. I also managed to consistently get stuck with the old guys who tipped poorly….which was probably due to the fact that I was quite small and not strong. It DID give me a chance to play this private golf course on Tuesday afternoons without being a member, which was by far the best perk of the whole job.

9. Custom bracelet business with my friend Eric (age 13-17). There was a great yarn store at the end of Eric’s neighborhood, so we could walk down to it in the summer, buy our colors, and then go home and make our bracelets. I think I still owe Eric his half of the profits, probably $20.

10. Dishwasher (age 14) – I lasted 2 weeks as a dishwasher at Marshland Restaurant, my first official “job.” I would spend my first hour peeling potatoes, then waiting for the dishes to start rolling in. If the restaurant was slow, I would be bored. If the restaurant was busy, I would be miserable, sweaty, and get yelled at.

In both instances, I made the same amount of money, which didn’t make sense to me.

After two weeks I quit. I remember being so nervous and walking into tell my manager in person, I might have even cried because. I felt like I had failed and I was letting them down. She wasn’t surprised, told me things were fine, and wished me well. Later that day, I got a new job as a…

11. Busboy at Jillian’s Restaurant (age 14-16). 2-3 nights per week, 8-9 hours a night. This was WAY more fun. For starters, most of the waitresses were very cute and treated us busboys nicely.

More importantly, the busier the night, the more money I made thanks to tip kickbacks from the servers.

The best part: each table got a basket of fresh garlic breadsticks, and Dave (fellow busboy) and I would eat no less than 10 of these things every night.

At midnight after everything was cleaned up, the head chef (Jillian’s Dad) would make us a quick meal. Once in a great moon, he’d make us chicken parmesan. Today this day, chicken parm is still my favorite meal.

12. Burned CDs with custom playlists (age 15). This was peak Napster era. We had a decently fast CD burner. So I created an order form people could fill out with 14 of their favorite songs, and I would “procure” those songs and put them on a disc to play in their car CD player. Good thing I didn’t try to scale this business up!

13. Babysitting the neighbor’s kid next door (age 16). My nextdoor neighbors were Mario and Adrianna. They also had an awesomely overexcited dog named Penny. I only did this a few nights, as it went against Lesson #1 (see below).

The 6 Biggest Lessons Learned

I am so damn lucky that I had parents who actively encouraged, supported, and helped me with each of these ventures. I learned about marketing, money management, dependability, time management, and customer research.

Here are the 6 biggest lessons I learned as young Steve:

  1. Don’t trade time for money. I hated the jobs in which I was based based on the time I was in a location, having nothing to do with my efforts or the circumstances. I loved the jobs and ventures in which I made more money if I worked harder, hustled more, or came up with something more clever.
  2. Go where the people are. I made way more money selling lemonade at the end of the neighborhood than I did on my street in the neighborhood. I made more money selling Beach Plum Jelly at the School fair than I did on a card table in my front yard.
  3. Give the people what they want. I could make way more money if I created a custom Creepy Crawly Creation for somebody than a pre-made one. I could make more money if I let them pick out their bracelet colors rather than something already designed.
  4. Existing customers are important: If I mowed somebody’s lawn, they might make a good leaf-raking or snow shoveling customer in the next season.
  5. Repeat customers are clutch. Because I did a pretty good job on mowing lawns and showed up consistently, most customers had me come back every 10-14 days. Recurring revenue was really helpful for budgeting purposes.
  6. You make way more money when you’re in charge. When you control the supply, the means of production, and can sell directly to customers, you make significantly more money…if you can find customers!

Anybody else have clever ways they made money as a kid? Share below!