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Hi there. I'm Steve.

I founded Nerd Fitness way back in 2009. Wherever you are coming from, I’m glad you are here. Every week, I send out a short email that’s guaranteed to make you live a tiny bit better, think a little deeper, and overcome the obstacles that get in the way.

Posts
Featured Post

The Big Problem with Self-Care

To view this email as a webpage, click here I bet you feel burned out right now. Overworked, underpaid, anxious, stretched too thin. All of those fun things! I also bet you’re frustrated you can’t lose weight the way you’d hoped, you wish you had more energy to get your job done, and you wish you could be a better partner and parent. You’re struggling, and you wish you could just get your sh** together. Have no fear, self-care is here! The solution to all of our problems can be found with...

7 days ago • 6 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here In 2009, I was an enthusiastic, optimistic, and slightly (very) naive nerd who started NerdFitness.com to help other nerds level up their lives and live a tiny bit better. Since then, I've done my best to build an identity as a lifelong learner who isn't tied to a specific ideology or philosophy. This meant I got plenty of things right, and I also managed to get plenty of things wrong. Certain views I held in the past were factually incorrect. While...

14 days ago • 12 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here I keep track of all the games, books, shows, and movies I experience. (It’s a long list. I’m a bookworm-cinephile-gamer.) And I don’t just watch a show, I find three podcasts analyzing it too. I don’t just play a video game, I watch YouTube deep dives into its lore and development. I was looking back over my last few months of content, and I found a pattern: I recently rewatched Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. I started rereading Shogun and...

21 days ago • 4 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here Are you familiar with Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” Rule? This is a popular habit-building strategy that I’ve successfully used in the past. The idea is built around the simple phrase: “don’t break the chain”: Here's how one comedian recalled his interaction with Seinfeld, who shared his advice for the craft of joke writing: “He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next...

28 days ago • 3 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here Today’s newsletter is different because I have some fun updates! (Well, “fun” might be an overstatement, but bear with me). This month, we finally got a chance to make a much needed change. We updated NerdFitness.com! Real talk: the site had been a Frankenstein's Monster of broken fonts, outdated structure, and unreadability for years (eeesh). I was honestly embarrassed that every month, hundreds of thousands of people found our site for the first...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here I once smuggled John Mayer, under the cover of darkness, off a cruise ship at 4AM. Don’t worry, he was in on it. We just needed to get him off the boat before the guests knew he was gone. Mayer was the headlining host of the Mayercraft Carrier, a music festival at sea in 2009 with 2,500 John Mayer fans. Here’s how I got there: Before I started Nerd Fitness, I worked for an amazing company called Sixthman that chartered floating music festivals....

about 1 month ago • 2 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here In 2012 Alex Beachum had an idea about dying. Repeatedly. In really funny ways: “What if you’re an astronaut exploring a mini-solar system, but the sun explodes after 22 minutes?” This is the entire premise for one of the most thought provoking video games I’ve ever played: Outer Wilds. A graduate student at the University of Southern California, Beachum’s year-long thesis became the project Alex would spend the next seven years working on. Along...

about 2 months ago • 3 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here I’ve had a love-hate relationship with “hope” for a long time. Shawshank Redemption, my favorite movie, tells the story of developing hope in a hopeless place. It has multiple lines that move me to tears and lift me up, but the best is “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” I’m generally hopeful that the future can be better than the present, both for myself and for this planet. I also know how important hope...

about 2 months ago • 4 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here I spent this past weekend at a small writer retreat in New York City. It was 6 of my favorite people on this planet, all of whom are incredible authors and writers. I also got to try out the Apple Vision Pro. I couldn’t possibly rob you of this absurd photo of me looking dumbfounded at being “on the moon”: Anyways! I would have attended this retreat if it took place in Antarctica or actually on the moon. It’s unbelievably important to spend time...

2 months ago • 2 min read

To view this email as a webpage, click here You know the story of Sisyphus, right? In case you’ve been living under a rock (boulder?), his story is one of the most famous cautionary tales in Greek mythology. Sisyphus, the king of Corinth, was a tyrant who killed his visitors and plotted to murder his own brother. These things are generally frowned upon. Oh, he also treated his children as political pawns and managed to cheat death. Twice. Needless to say, all of this behavior did not make the...

2 months ago • 4 min read
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