🌱 Why Big Changes Start Small — and What Happens After the Aha Moment

+ 📆 Join our first-ever Pivot Coaches Panel on Navigating Mid-Career Pivots on April 24

Mar 31, 2026

Hi Friends,

Since my earliest days on stages (two decades in now), I’ve channeled my anti-Tony Robbins, telling audiences to forget the mantra, “Go big or go home!”

I’m a fan of “Go tiny!” Start somewhere small.

To that end, before I turn it over to an excerpt from Eric Zimmer’s powerful new book on wise habits (and why dark nights of the soul are sometimes necessary for change but not sufficient), two quick programming announcements:

Back by popular demand, if you have big creative ideas bubbling, but your notes are scattered across various apps, browser tabs, voice memos, notebooks, and forgotten fragments you thought you’d remember but don’t—join the upcoming Create Your Idea Collection Systems course on April 30 and May 1!
🐿️ Learn More and Register »
You’re also invited to our first-ever Pivot Coaches Panel on Navigating Mid-Career Pivots coming up later this month on Friday, April 24 at 12 p.m. ET.

I’ll be facilitating a fireside-chat style conversation with Cherie, Laura, and Taku about some of their biggest blessings-in-disguise, how they handle plateaus and setbacks, the unique challenges of making mid-career changes, and how we’re incorporating AI into the work we do, while helping others traverse an economic landscape where the map continues changing under our feet with every step. We’ll also revisit the Pivot Method, helping you double down on what’s working so that you can set up small, resonant experiments to help you pilot what’s next.

📆 Register Here »

Speaking of what’s next . . .

🌱 How a Little Becomes a Lot with Eric Zimmer

I’m delighted to share that my friend Eric Zimmer’s beautiful book launches today, How a Little Becomes a Lot, described as “Atomic Habits meets Think Like a Monk.”

You might remember Eric from the Pivot podcast, and I was also grateful to be a guest on his show, The One You Feed, talking about Free Time:

📘 👀 The first pages of his book are so compelling I can’t resist giving you a peek into the introduction through his words, not mine!

Here’s Eric Zimmer:

IF YOU WERE WATCHING THE MOVIE OF MY LIFE, THE PIVOTAL SCENE would show a dingy yellow room in what was once a tuberculosis hospital in Columbus, Ohio, in the winter of 1994. A counselor would be talking to a young man slumped in exhaustion, looking equal parts frightened and lost. Me.
I weighed one hundred pounds, my skin jaundiced from hepatitis C, with the shadow of fifty years in prison hanging over me. I was a homeless heroin addict at the end of his road, and even I could smell the despair on my own skin.
“Eric, you need to go to long-term treatment,” the counselor told me.
“No, thank you,” I said, summoning what little dignity I supposed I had left. Then I dragged myself up and slouched down the hall like the wounded animal I was.
Back in my room, I had what they call a “moment of clarity” as I looked out my clouded window at cold gray skies. It was a few days before Christmas. I realized with sudden, terrifying lucidity that my current path led only to death or prison. Dope sick, shaky, and afraid, I turned, walked back down the hall to that yellow room, and opened my mouth before I could change my mind. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll go to your treatment.”
That would be the high-drama, dark-night-of-the-soul turning point in the movie of my life. And it was an important moment—but it’s also anything but the full story. In getting from that wounded place to where I am today, that scene is not as monumental as it may seem. Deciding to enter treatment would be nothing without the countless tiny decisions I made day after day, year after year afterward: deciding not to take the route past that bar, calling my sponsor instead of my dealer, showing up to a meeting when every cell in my body wanted to stay home and hide.
When we think about life-changing events, we tend to think in the singular. The epiphany. The miracle. The watershed choice that will put us on a new trajectory for good. But that’s not how real change happens for most people, most of the time. It happens little bit by little bit, with a thousand chances to do A or B, each choice a thread woven into the fabric of who we become.

Get your copy to learn how Eric approaches wise habits little-by-little, both habits of thought and habits of behavior: