Steve Kamb built a 45-person company, then fired himself to get back to writing

In 2007, Steve Kamb spent his days getting rejected. He had a sales job renting construction equipment, and he was bad at it. He would drive to a job site, get told no, sit in his car and read the next chapter of a book, then drive to the next site and get told no again.

He needed the job. He also could not make himself care about it.

What he wanted was to stop spending his life on work that wasn't his. He just didn't know yet that the answer was already sitting in him.

The book he kept reading in the car was the 4-Hour Workweek, and one day a question landed. What's something I'm good at or love, and a group I'm a part of? He typed "nerd fitness" into Google, nothing came up, so he bought the domain and started writing. The articles were bad at first. Then he learned that if he wrote the way that was fun for him, jokes, Lego photos, the geeky references nobody else was mixing with nutrition, people actually showed up. A Google algorithm change sent traffic through the roof. The accidental blog turned into a company. Seventeen years, a team that grew to forty-five people across twenty-five states, and somewhere in there the writing he loved got buried under meetings, payroll, and quarterly planning.

So I demoted myself, and then I fired myself, so that I could get back to writing.

That's not a line you hear often from a founder. He'd spent five years trying to be a less-bad CEO, waking up every day telling himself to push through. Eventually he admitted the truth. He wasn't helping the company by forcing himself into a job he wasn't built for, and he wasn't helping himself either.

The public version of Steve is the one a lot of people already know. He's the founder of Nerd Fitness, the site that helped self-described nerds get in shape without the intimidation of a CrossFit box or a big-box gym. At its peak it pulled a million and a half visits a month. His story shows up in Atomic Habits. His quote is on the back of Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F. This week his second book, How to Try Again, hit shelves, published by St. Martin's Press.

So we had him on Sacred Business Stories the day after the book launched. The part most people don't hear is what it cost to write it, and what was happening in his life while he did.

Four years ago Steve told his agent he wanted to write again. He spent four months on a proposal for another Nerd Fitness book, the safe one, the audience he already had. His heart wasn't in it, and his agent passed. Then on January 1st an idea arrived. Everyone goes all in on a New Year's resolution. All becomes nothing, every time. What about a book for the moment three weeks later, after you've already given up?

He signed the deal in 2023. The book was supposed to be out in January 2025. It came out in June 2026, twenty drafts later.

Three things hit in close succession while he wrote. His first skin cancer diagnosis, the good kind, scooped out of his scalp. Nerd Fitness losing eighty percent of its traffic as Google changed and AI started scraping the content, with nothing he could do to bring it back. And an amicable but heartbreaking divorce. The book stopped being a tidy guide about restarting a workout and became something closer to the truth.

What happens when life doesn't go the way that you expected, and you're beating yourself up because something you worked on didn't work out?

The word he uses for that stretch is treading water. Not making progress, but not giving up either. Doing the bare minimum to remind himself he was still there. A friend, the author Josh Kaufman, gave him a phrase for the way out of it. Maximum Steve. The weird, specific combination of his experiences and his jokes and his obsessions. When he leaned into that, the book worked. When he tried to sound like someone else, it sagged. He's about eighteen months into writing as Maximum Steve now, and it shows.

Two things stood out from the conversation.

The first was a question he asks himself before he commits to anything.

Don't just ask, is the juice worth the squeeze. Also ask, do I like juice?

His point is that in an internet business, the reward for getting good at something is that you have to keep doing it. If you only push through a thing so you can be done with it, success is a trap. It means more of the thing you didn't want. So the better question isn't whether you can do it. It's whether you'd be glad to keep doing it for years.

The second was about failure, which is the first chapter of his book on purpose.

Failure is the most human thing we can do, outside of breathing and complaining about traffic.

He tells a story in the book about visiting the Museum of Failure, where the last exhibit is a wall of Post-it notes, strangers writing down the things that didn't work out. He found it freeing. His problems felt private and unsolvable until he saw how common they were. He built his own version at howtotryagain.com/fail, a digital wall where readers add their failures, because most of us cram them down while everyone around us is busy projecting success.

What are the things that you're willing to keep doing for as long as it takes to share your message?

The thing Steve's story reframes is what resistance actually means. For five years he treated his dread of running the company as a weakness to power through. It wasn't. It was information. Life was telling him, with flashing lights, that he was doing the wrong job. The moment he stopped forcing it and went back to the one thing he's uniquely good at, he became a better version of himself at work, even though the company got smaller and the traffic kept falling.

He's also stopped planning a specific future. He used to build toward a detailed five-year vision. It didn't survive contact with reality, so now he takes it a week and a day at a time, and says that's working better than the plan ever did. As he put it, if the cost of information is going to zero, the thing left worth paying for is a real human connection. That's what he's betting on.

You can find Steve at howtotryagain.com, where the book lives, and reading his weekly essay on Substack.

He writes for the people who have always prided themselves on working harder to solve a problem, right up to the moment that stops working. Or, as the line at the top of his book puts it, for the rest of us who don't wake up at 4am to run fifteen miles barefoot and take an ice bath.

I'll add one personal note. I used Nerd Fitness more than a decade ago, back when getting in shape felt like a club I wasn't invited to, and Steve's writing helped it feel possible. Watching him talk about firing himself to get back to that writing was its own kind of proof. Check out the full replay. He doesn't waste the hour.