• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Steve Kamb

  • Newsletter
  • Essays
  • About

Personal

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:

  • 2021 annual review
  • 2020 annual review

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!

Photo by @WillByington © 2022

(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:

  • Write the Truest Sentence you Know
  • Put on your Hard Hat:
  • How to Create Deep Work that Survives

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.

###

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.

Don’t write WHEN you have a good idea, write to FIND a good idea.

Don’t take action WHEN you’re motivated, take action to BECOME motivated.

Don’t exercise WHEN you have energy, exercise to GET energized.

(What else?)

— Steve Kamb (@SteveKamb) December 18, 2020

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…

###

Steve Kamb

Copyright © 2023 · Steve Kamb · Log in