How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos & Making Change That Sticks

With this down-to-earth guide, Kamb (Level Up Your Life), founder of the online fitness community NerdFitness, lays out a roadmap to starting over after failure. After signing a contract in 2023 for a book about making “progress when life doesn’t go according to plan,” the author endured a number of disruptions of his own, including a divorce and business problems that led him to downsize his company, forcing him to reconsider his goals and begin again. Drawing on those experiences, he explains how readers can do the same by reframing setbacks as the result of trying something worthwhile and a source of valuable information about oneself. He outlines a four-part program for starting over: pausing to assess whether “what we’re doing is actually helping or hurting us,” accepting the situation instead of avoiding it, formulating a new strategy using lessons from past failures, and adjusting the plan according to internal feedback. Kamb offers plenty of concrete tools for making change, like racking up quick wins to build momentum, connecting with others who have similar goals, and swapping out long-term objectives for less overwhelming time-bound “experiments.” (For example, rather than setting out to lose weight, readers would be better served testing out whether running a few times a week for 30 days improves their health.) Enlivened with plenty of personal anecdotes and a solid dose of self-deprecating humor, it’s an upbeat invitation to start afresh. (June)