EntreLeadership - #345: The War of Art (and Business) with Steven Pressfield

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

If you’ve ever heard that voice in your head telling you you’re not smart enough or talented enough or good enough, Steven Pressfield says you’re not alone. The bestselling author contends that no one—regardless of who they are or what they do—is immune to this sort of self-sabotage that he likes to call Resistance. Tune in as Steven explains why Resistance is so destructive and details how to not only defend yourself against it, but also overcome it for good.   entreleadership.com/podcast Steven Pressfield's website The War of Art by Steven Pressfield Composed: A Memoir by Rosanne Cash Masterclass with David Baldacci The Game of Numbers by Nick Murray Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield Do the Work by Steven Pressfield Episode #331: Art Williams—Accomplishing Impossible Goals YouTube - Art Williams on How To Accomplish Impossible Goals Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You and I, we are at war. Certainly not with each other, but right now, at this very moment, we are on a battlefield. And the stakes of this struggle could not be any higher. That's because you are in this fight for the person that you were created to be, the work that you are meant to do, and the life that you are meant to live. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host Alex Judd, and today's guest, in a rare interview appearance, is none other than Stephen Pressfield.

As one of the most prolific writers of our time, Stephen has captured what he has learned about this battle in the War of Art. It is a book that everyone from Seth Godin to Oprah Winfrey has listed among the most impactful that they have ever read. And just like any war, this battle that you are in always begins when you identify the enemy. As a writer, which I am, one of the first things that you realize is that when you sit down to the blank page, there's some kind of a force there that's kind of a repelling force, trying to make you go have a drink or do anything else, you know, take the day off, whatever. And I always thought it was unique to me alone. I thought, well, I mean, it must be the only one feeling this thing. But when I wrote the War of Art, I gave a name to it, and I called it resistance with a capital R, because that's what it's kind of feels like to me.

It's resisting this force, this invisible force, is resisting my efforts to put something down on the page. And I thought when I wrote the War of Art that it would be a book only for writers, that only writers would be interested. And I was kind of amazed to discover that other creative people, actors, photographers, film people, stuff like that. And then it was really interesting. and he realized that entrepreneurs, which I had never even thought of. But it does make sense any time you try to move from a lower level to a higher level, on the sole level of your life. In other words, if you're an artist, you're trying to go from a blank canvas to a painting

to something that's there, this force of resistance appears to stop you or to try to stop you. And it seems to me that many, many, many millions of people have been defeated by this and didn't even know that it existed, didn't even have a name to it. And is that maybe part of the sinister part of it, is that you can go your entire life without even realizing this exists? Absolutely. I mean, I certainly never knew it. Resistance kind of kicked my butt for like about seven years, I would say, of, you know, a kind of a dark side journey where before I sort of realized, ah, there is. is this force that nobody told me about in school. Nobody taught me about anywhere. And I better learn to get a handle on this if I'm ever going to be able to do my work. How do people experience

resistance just day to day? Okay, it's a great question. It's a voice in your head. And the voice in your head says something like, you're a bum, you're a loser. Let's say you're going to write a book. It says to you, where did you get the idea that you could write this book? This idea has been done a thousand times. You're never going to do it any better than it's already. You're saying like someone that has heard this voice before. Always, right? But it's a voice of, you know, discouragement and stuff like that. It's a fear is its constant thing. You know, you're going to fail. You're going to embarrass yourself. You know, where do you come off thinking you can pull this thing off? The trick about resistance is that when you hear this voice in your head, you think it's your own thoughts. You think it's your own

objective thoughts like you're objectively analyzing your own capacities, but it's not your own objective thoughts. It's resistance. It's this force that exists, and I can tell you from all the feedback I've gotten, the voice of resistance is the same in everybody's head, except that it's so diabolical that it can tailor itself to you specifically. It'll tell you you're too fat to have a show on T. O'D, you know, or you're too old or you're too ugly or you're too this and that, whatever. You didn't go to college. You can't start that. Exactly. Exactly. That's fascinating. And I think, to your point, I can think back to points in my own life where I will experience what you're talking about, but I'll look at it and I'll call it me being realistic or me being rational. Exactly. In other words,

you're believing this voice in your head that it's you. It's your thoughts. You know, they say, I'm sorry to interrupt. No, no, go for it. They say, you know, in meditation, I'm not a big meditator, but from what I've read, that you sit there and you're trying to empty your mind of thoughts, right? And these thoughts keep coming, and they're usually just distracting, dumb thoughts. And you think they're your thoughts. But in fact, as a meditation teacher would teach you, they're just kind of generic chatter. And you just really want to just let them kind of go and pass right through like clouds

passing across the sky. And it's the same with that voice that you heard in your head. And so it can take many forms. I know you already mentioned it. It seems like it can take the form of something material or physical, something that you're eating, something that you're drinking, maybe not going to them. It can be a voice. It takes many forms.

Is that right? Yeah, it takes many forms. But usually it's that voice in your head or that feeling of fear in your belly. You know, I guess for entrepreneurs, if you're thinking of starting a business or taking a business to the next level, that's another case of kind of advancing on the soul level, going from a lower level to a higher level, and resistance is going to kick in, and that voice will stay to you, you know, what do you dream that you're going to pull this off? You know, you were great at this level maybe, but you can't take it to the next level, et cetera, et cetera. And so do you believe that at any given point in their life, everyone has experienced, whether consciously or unconsciously, everyone has experienced what it's like to be trapped by resistance?

I think so. I mean, obviously, I can't look at everybody's brain, but I certainly. get a million times of feedback, you know, from people. And it's always the same voice and always the same phenomenon. What did that look like for you? Can you take us to the point in your life where you maybe crossed over from being unconsciously to consciously aware that you're being trapped by this thing? Well, for me, it was the first novel that I ever tried to write as a young guy.

I worked for about two years on it. It was like 99.9% of the way through. and this some devil or whatever, I just blew it up. Blew it up and blew up my entire, you know, I was married. I blew up my marriage, bump it, bum, blah, bum, but. Like self-sabotage blew up? Yeah, that's exactly the word. In fact, resistance is self-sabotage.

And that sort of sent me off on a kind of a downward spiral that carried me to a lot of places I didn't want to go. And finally, I just sort of, I just sort of realized that there was this force. and that it had taken me by surprise, I wasn't ready for it. If I had known that that was coming, it would have been a different story. And I sort of said, I've just got it like an alcoholic, like somebody realizing that they have a problem with alcohol, where you sort of admit to themselves, I've got a problem. This is more than I can handle.

That sort of was my realization. And I thought it was unique to me at that time. I didn't realize that it was universal, but it is. So universal affects anyone trying to do. something meaningful. What is it keeping us from? It's almost like you describe it as this thing that has this motive. And then you say, like, we're all engaged in this war that we're fighting. So what are we fighting for that the enemy or the resistance is keeping us from? I'm a believer that we all come into this life with a calling, with work that we have to do.

It might be artistic work or it might be entrepreneurial work. It might be something, it might be raising children or it might be something, you know, helping people in one way or another. But we do have our work that we should be doing. And resistance's entire job, in my opinion, is to stop us from doing our work. That voice that says you're not worthy, you're not good enough, that's just trying to stop us. Or another example, a friend of mine, Nick Murray, is an advisor to financial planners. And apparently, the big thing that you do in the financial planning world, and I'm sure this is true in a lot of entrepreneurial things, is cold calling, prospecting. And that brings up enormous resistance, apparently, you know, to make that horrible cold call. Or honestly,

just to sell anything, it always brings up a little bit of fear inside people. So that force is kind of the force of resistance. And in Nick's terms, trying to advise financial planners, he believes that he's really saving people's lives financially, kind of like Dave Ramsey and the whole system out here, of trying to get people to act rationally in terms of money and in terms of their planning. And so, in other words, it's a positive goal. It's a movement from a lower level to a higher level. And resistance comes in making those cold calls and doing those other sort of entrepreneurial steps. How did you define what your calling was that it was keeping you from?

And then I'd love for you to share with us, what is your calling? What is your work to do? I'm a writer. And so, you know, that blank page is resistance personified. And, of course, for writers or for artists, it manifests in many, many other ways. Does it still feel that way when you see a blank page? Never gets, never gets any easier. Never gets any easier.

I've been doing it for 50 years. It never, the only way it gets easier is that you know. you've defeated it in the past, but it never gets any easier. In fact, it gets a little more diabolical because I almost can personify resistance. It seems it's an intelligent force that can adapt and be creative and change shapes and shift shapes. So yeah, it doesn't get any easier, no. So how did you define your calling, okay, I'm Stephen and I'm a writer. How did you figure that out? My first job was as a copywriter in advertising in New York. I'll give you the long answer. And I had a boss named Ed Hannibal who quit and wrote a novel and a novel was a hit.

So I said to myself, well, why don't I do that? I'll do the same thing. That sounds fun. In other words, it sort of started with a kind of a dumb, you know, really low level aspiration. Was it naive at that time? Completely naive. No concept of what any, what it was involved. Was it tied to a passion, though? Or, I mean, the reason that I was in advertising in the first place, as a writer was I wanted to be quote unquote creative. I just felt like I'm a verbal person. I'm a visual person. Let me do something that people will like.

That was kind of what I thought. So in other words, it sort of started for me as a kind of a dumb, very amorphous, very broad thing. And then as I would fail and try again and fail and try again and fail and try again, there were many of those crossroads where you say, well, I should just give this up. I should just quit. Well, I'm going nowhere, you know. But each time I could not. it. I always would come back to it. And little by little by little, you know, of course,

I'm sure this is true for all writers and artists as they start, self-belief is really the hardest thing. To be able to say, I'm a writer. Probably took me 25 years. But at some point, I was able to say, even though I have not succeeded at this yet, I'm a writer. This is what I do. This is my calling. This is what I'm aiming for. Okay. So we see that all the time. It is a mountain for people to scale when they go from just other people calling them a leader to them saying, I am a leader and I am responsible for leading people. Sometimes they can be in presidents of company. The people that I have talked to that have been, I mean, we look to as influential, but they're not willing to call themselves a leader. Is that, I mean, why do we do that? Why do we not

see ourselves in that way? Or why are we not willing to self-identify? It's a great question. I think it's just resistance. I did a speaking thing yesterday for the first time I've ever done it. And one of the things I said, to sort of boil it down quickly, is that we live on a kind of a lower level here on the material world. And above us is a kind of the higher level, which is our calling that we're called to. It's kind of movement from the ego to the self. But in between these two, what they never teach you is this dark force of resistance. And although our calling is summoning us to come up, to be a leader or to be a writer, to be whatever it is. And we on the bottom are striving upward.

There's this force in the middle whose sole role is to block us, you know, to block the higher level from reaching us and to block us from reaching the higher level. So I think that's, you know, when someone has a real hard time embracing the idea of I'm a leader, I think that's it. It's this force. And that could almost, I mean, I look at that and I think, man, well, that's a kind of negative view. We're all facing this force.

But then I think about the fact that we're all facing that force by nature kind of means that we're all called to something higher. Like we all have this feeling inside of us that's like, I want to make a difference. I think everyone wants to make a difference. Yeah, I think it's absolutely true. Sometimes we underestimate ourselves and others, but I think it's a mistake. Everybody has something to offer. To offer. And a lot of it is not a modest something.

It's a big something, you know. in your time speaking with people about this and hearing people talk about how your book connected with them, how do you look in the mirror and self-evaluate? How do you look in the mirror and say- Very hard for me? Yeah. And how do you look and say, okay, I'm doing what I was created to do versus, man, I'm trapped by this thing. And to a degree, it may be subconsciously getting the best of me, and I'm not even aware of it right now. That's a good question.

I mean, certainly there was a point in my evolution. as a writer where I really sort of hit my stride and I began prior to that, either I wasn't writing, either I was running away from it or doing other kind of stuff or I was in some sort of shadow career that was kind of at the side of it, like say advertising, something like that, or I was writing for other people. I was writing gigs for other people. But there has been a point where, for me at least, I started writing my own stuff, started coming from my own heart. And it was It was very clear to me. Was it scary?

Not at all, actually. Really? Because it really was very liberating because I really felt like I'm writing from my own heart. And I think that higher level that I'm talking about is it wants us to do that. And there is, you know, you could look at it in a faith-based way. I'd look at it in a creative way. But it felt like and still feels like a kind of a tailwind, you know, that I've gotten out of my own way. I'm not stopping myself anymore,

sabotaging myself anymore. Now it's just for me, it's just kind of a question of, what is the next best thing, the next, you know, the next leap for me, the next challenge for me, rather than doing something

that would be off to the side and not really on track. So I think I've experienced this in that there have been times in my career, and we've heard this from business owners as well, where I will respond to a decision or act in a situation or do something in a crisis. And my initial thought is what would so-and-so do in this situation?

And I start, instead of doing what I would do or, in their case, doing what they would do, I start thinking about what would so-and-so do and try and follow. And in doing so, I'm kind of hijacking my own skills and abilities and calling. Is that fair to say? That would be, to me, it's kind of a negative way of looking at it, but a positive way of looking at it is that we all have mentors and we all kind of, I'm sure that, let's say, a guitar player would play like Chet Atkins for a while and then would play like Eric Clapton for a while and would try on those styles as a way of finding their own eventually.

I know it is sort of interesting speaking of guitar playing where you hear since we're in Nashville, Franklin, Tennessee, that sometimes they'll interview somebody and he'll say, He's someone like Keith Richards, and he'll say, you know, I used to play like Chad Atkins or something, and he'll do a few licks, and it's exactly like Ted Atkins. You know, so you can see that they model themselves after someone as a way of getting to. As part of the journey. Part of the journey. Like I used to take pages of Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway and literally type them, copying them, just to sort of get it into my fingers, you know, just to sort of feel. an authentic voice, even if it wasn't my voice.

I think that's a process that people go through. So I wouldn't, don't be down on yourself, Alec, if you're doing that. That's what I can't remember if it was you that told the story or if it was someone else where they talked about Ben Franklin as a writer. They talked about how he would take some of the classics and he would rewrite them in poem form. That's interesting. And he would rewrite them into poetry. And then he would look at the poetry and then rewrite it in narrative form or just

rational form and then he would compare it to the original and he'd say where was I better, where was I worse. That's really interesting. Ben Franklin. Yes, I thought this was you that don't talk. No, it wasn't. Very good. I'll steal that from you. There you go. Very good. Okay, so I think the next step in your work is you lay out this enemy that we all face and inevitably we're faced with this choice and it's almost this perfect dichotomy that we can go one of two ways. you lay it out as the amateur or the professional. So I'd love for you to describe what are the core differences or what really is your definition of an amateur versus your definition of a professional. Okay. So that's a good. Brett's another great question. And when we're confronted with

this negative force of resistance, self-sabotage, and we fail to do, we stop 99% of the way through where we sabotage ourselves. There's usually two ways we look at ourselves at that fail. One way is to say that there's something wrong with us. We're sick. That's a kind of therapeutic model. And we need therapy. We need work. We need to find out what sort of failing we have.

That's one way of looking at it, which is very judgmental, very negative, and doesn't help us at all. The other way to look at it that we look at it is we say we're sinful. There's something wrong with us. We need to be chastised or do a penance or something like that. And I think that also is not helpful at all because, again, it's judgmental. We're judging ourselves. So what sort of worked for me was a third way of looking at it. And that was that if we're failing, it's because we're thinking like amateurs.

And if we want to correct ourselves, we need to flip the switch in our mind and start thinking like professionals. For instance, in our regular jobs, we're all professionals at that, right? If we're working for a living for someone else. And so one of the things we do is we show up every day. We have to show up every day, right? Period. Otherwise, we get fired. Right?

We can't go home at 2 in the afternoon or we'll get fired for that. And we organize ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in that case, where we're working for someone else, we're applying a professional mindset from an external point of view. It's being externally imposed on us. Like people in the military oftentimes, you know, you wake up in the morning. There's a plan of the day. There's a uniform of the day.

You're told exactly what to do, right? There's so many original. You make your bed. You wear your clothes this way. You lace your boots this way. Your hair is cut, so you have an externally imposed structure on you. When you turn pro, you impose that structure on yourselves. Another thing of an amateur is, or someone with an amateur mindset, which, of course, was me for years and years, if you wake up in a morning and you're not in the mood or you're sick, you got the flu, you say, well, I'll take the day off, you know.

But would Kobe Bryant take the day off? you know, would LeBron James, would Tom Brady take the day off? They know that they have to play hurt. And they know that adversity is just part of the game. And they have to deal with adversity. So an amateur mindset is kind of a weekend warrior when the wins are against you, you bail. And like I said, when I finished that book 99% of the way and blew it up, that was total amateur behavior. And if I had been a pro or had been thinking like a pro, I would have just said, hey, we're

this far away from the end, buckle up and do it, you know? Gosh. So I think for me, that was a non-judgmental way of moving from a wrong way of doing something or a way that wasn't working to a way that did work, to say, okay, I'm through being an amateur, I'm now going to think of myself as a professional. And the other great thing about it is it's free. You don't need to have, nobody has to certify you. You don't have to take a class.

You choose to be a professional. You choose, and you can do it at any moment, right, this minute. you can do it. Well, anyway, that's the difference between amateurs and pros, in my opinion. It's two incredibly different mindsets. I'd love to run you through just rapid fire. How would the amateur deal with this circumstance and how would a pro deal with this? So I'm an amateur and I'm working on something that I do care about, but someone invites me to go do something that sounds exciting. How would the amateur deal with that? Well, the amateur might go. Take the, you know, when you're a pro, when you think of something,

as a profession, you're on a mission. You know, you're like the Blues Brothers, right? And I'm a golfer, and I've been many times invited, hey, let's go out to, you know, and I'll say no. And people are amazed, you know, that, gee, there's a free chance, you know, to do this. But I'm on a mission, you know. If I'm working on a book, I know that if I take that day off, it's going to be that much harder tomorrow when I come back.

And it'll be that much easier to take the next day off. So we live in the age of distraction, people say, right? We've got cell phones going off all the time. How does the amateur deal with distraction? How does the pro deal with it? Most people these days, I'm sorry to say, are living their lives completely as amateurs. You know, I always say if you want to make a billion dollars, come up with a business that lets people give in to their own resistance. And they did come up with that business.

It's called the Internet. It's called Facebook. It's called Twitter. It's called that. where it's just, you know. That is terrifying. Well, but it's true, isn't it? And the other thing about thinking as a professional, or one of the other things, is a professional works deep, works at a level of depth.

You know, a professional, like just in writer's terms, you'll sit down and the first hour you might be able to get in so deep, but the second hour you're getting in much deeper. And a lot of times in the third hour, you'll come up with something that you never would have come up with. in the first hour because you've, or I'm sure it's true of music, if you're practicing, whatever. Well, I think leaders, too, fear the ambiguity of deep work. Ah, now what do you mean by that? If I am just following the standard to-do list every day, and I'm not just talking about routine, just doing things that anyone could do, then I'm not moving a project or a

business forward. Uh-huh. Whereas if I choose, I'm going to move this business or this project or this team forward, there's no playbook for that. So it's extremely like ambiguous. It's uncertain. We call that working on the business, not in the business. So how do you, and I mean, you obviously experience ambiguity. How does the professional tackle ambiguity? I mean, I wouldn't use that word. I don't think. Okay. Okay. Why is that? But I know what you mean. Why is that? Why not ambiguous? Ambiguous, I think, as I understand what you mean, would be an area that were legitimately,

You weren't sure whether this was right or whether this was right. You're looking through a fog and you can't quite see, well, you know, is there a ship or a buoy over there? So is it's more just fear of the unknown? That's what I think it is. I think you're really in the zone where resistance is coming up tremendously high at that point. You're really in the zone of, I would say it's sort of like the cut water at the head of a ship, you know, where you're at the zone between the known and the unknown. that that's what's happening and it's very scary to go into the unknown i guess that is would be what you would mean by ambiguous well and what's horrible about it too just makes me so angry is it's

scary to go in the unknown but that fear is magnified by the fact that i can go into the known and people will love me for i mean that just magnifies things yeah yeah what is the difference between i'm looking myself in the mirror right now i've been an amateur and i'm I'm admitting it. How do you bridge the gap and just say, no more, a professional lifestyle starts today? I'd analogize it to an AA situation. Like the moment when you wake up in a gutter in your same clothes you were wearing the night before and there's three bottles of Jack Daniels next to you.

And you say to yourself, oh, my God, I've really got a problem, right, that I can't handle. And so I better change my life completely here. I have to acknowledge that something has power over me that I can't control. And I've got to think, well, how can I do this? We were actually yesterday I was reading, I'm going to recommend a book, Roseanne Cash's book, her memoir composed. It's a wonderful book. And there's a story in there. It's probably too long to go into this story.

Well, she had a dream, didn't she? That's it. Oh, is this, did you get? talked about it in your writing. I forgot about that. Yeah. I put it in, I guess it's a turning pro, I think. But what was it? She had a dream and wasn't in the dream. The guy's name was art. The guy's name was art. And what did he say to her? He said to her, she was trying to get his attention. She was sitting next to him. And Linda Ronstat in the dream was sitting on the other side. And for clarification, at this stage in her life, when she had this dream, she was already successful. She was already successful. She was already successful. She had an album that had four number one hits on it. So she was, I don't know how old she was, maybe 28 or 20. 29, something like that.

And in the dream, this man named Art was engaged in an animated conversation with Linda Ronstat and ignoring Roseanne, who was on the other side. And Roseanne kind of tugged at his sleeve or got him to pay attention, to want him to pay attention. And he turned to her and looked her in the eye and said, we don't mess around with dilettantes. And she said she woke up from that dream humiliated and shattered. And at that point, she decided, although I've had hits and I'm at a certain level of success, I am a dilettante. And I have to change my life. And so she goes in that passage.

She goes through all of the things, concrete steps that she took. She started studying voice with a certain person. She started training like an athlete. She even running. She changed the way she – because what she really wanted to do was write songs to generate her own material rather than, you know, record songs that other people that were written or that she had co-written. So she changed her entire life in concrete steps. She studied painting so she could see what it was like to work without words and just changed her life.

And you're probably more familiar than I would be. What is the difference in her music prior to that versus after that? I think, you know, it's now she's, it's sort of like what I said when there's the, you get that tailwind behind you. now she's writing from her own heart, you know. And when she collaborates with other people, she's bringing her own real self to it. And she's asking the question of who am I? What means something to me? What do I care about?

What do I love? So she has really become a thoroughgoing pro and no longer a diletton. And, of course, the level of her work has gone up tremendously. Not that it wasn't terrific before. Man, I didn't go with a citizen of Rose and Cash. But it wasn't really her, her real stuff, you know. Yeah. So I love that story because it shows that the difference maker between an amateur and a professional is not necessarily success. It's also not talent. So what like – it's a switch in my mind. This is going to sound a little from the ego to the self.

Okay. To the self with a capital S where I think when we're amateurs, like let me speak in terms of writers. Writers start out and they want to write a book, oh, I want to be famous. I want to get rich. I'll have a bestseller. I'll get all the babes. I'll have a whatever, right? That's coming from the total ego point of view, right? At some point, when you turn pro, you switch to the greater self, the capital S self in the sense that Carl Jung would use it. And you're really asking now, who am I?

What's my gift? What's my calling? What was I put here to put forth, you know? And there's a story I was actually, do you know, do you know, how? David Baldacci is the writer? No, I don't. What is he written? He's written a bunch of thrillers and stuff like that. He's a very successful writer. And he does a, do you know about masterclass on the web?

Absolutely, yeah. Which is another great thing I highly recommend. And he gives one. And he was talking about kind of a moment when he sort of hit that point, that Roseanne Cash point. And he was a lawyer. He was a very successful lawyer. And he always had wanted to be a writer. And he had agents and that kind of thing. And there was some sort of movie that was about to go forward. And it blew up in his face and fell through. And he could kind of see that this was never going to work for him.

You know, and he hit the wall where he kind of said to himself, I'm never going to succeed as a writer. I should just pack it in and give it up. And then he thought, you know what, if I give it up, I'm going to be so miserable. So he just sort of switched from the ego to the self. And he sort of said, okay, I don't care if I never sell anything. So he wasn't doing it for other people anymore. No, he really was doing it from his own heart.

He says, I'm just going to keep doing it. And if it works, it works. And if it doesn't, he basically said, I'm a writer. I don't care. I don't care if it doesn't happen. And, of course, immediately he had tremendous success and he, you know, never look back. But it doesn't always necessarily go that way. No, I don't think.

Like regardless of whether or when you make that decision, I'm a writer or I'm a business leader, It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to instantly have success, talent, fame, all that. So what's the payoff of being a professional, even if that stuff doesn't come? That's a great question. Like for me, in my life, there was a moment when I'd kind of turned pro. You know, nobody knew it but me. But I was trying to count the years yesterday. I forgot what they were.

But it was probably like another 17 years before I actually sold my first book. Before you made a dime. Before I made a dime. Now, I was making a living as a writer, but doing other stuff. You know? 17 years. A long time. But is it because the gratification came from being a rider?

Yeah, the payoff was that I knew I was on the right journey. You know, I was on the right path. I hadn't learned enough yet. I wasn't good enough. I hadn't evolved to the point where I sort of knew myself well enough or even that I could sort of surrender to that higher level, to the muse. So it took me all that time. So what you say, Alex, exactly right. that moment that you turn pro mentally you flip the switch doesn't mean at all that everything's

going to fall into place financially materially or whatever may never fall into place but you know on the on the soul level you know you're now on the path you were meant to be on assuming you are you have picked the right thing so often we we look at the professional right and you mentioned some of them Kobe Bryant Tom Brady is one of them yo-yo ma is certainly a professional. And we think the business leaders, Alan Malawi, who led Ford, he's a professional, getting to work under him and with him. I would say Dave Ramsey is a professional.

And we admire those people's results. But I think a lot of times we don't look at their habits. And so I think, like you are, everyone and their dog would consider you a professional writer and you're one of the best in the business right now. I'd love for you to walk us through what does a day look like in the life of Stephen Pressfield? Okay. But let me say one other thing before I say that, Alex, that I think that the people that are working for Dave Ramsey, like yourself or for everybody in this building, are pros too.

They're just at a slightly earlier stage in their own journey. And the people who are working for Dave Ramsey now may go off into their own other paths along the way. And this will just be a part of that journey. But they're professionals too. Yeah. And that, I mean, honestly, I know you're not taking book ideas right now, but I would love to hear you speak, teach right on how do you be an affected professional in an organization working for other people and for their vision. You should write that one. Maybe so, maybe so. I'll kick it back to you. But a day, you were talking about a day.

Yeah, tell us about a day in the life of Stephen Preston. I mean, it's not that exciting, you know, but my day is sort of built around the awareness of resistance. and the overcoming of resistance. That's kind of the primary theme for me. Rather than, I know when I sit down to work, I'm going to work as hard as I can, and I'm going to be aspiring as high as I can. But the whole kind of way, my inner world,

I wake up and resistance wakes up with me, you know. And I feel it. What time do you in resistance make up? I know you're trying to get to this. I get up at like 3.15 or something like that. Holy cow. But I'm just crazy that way, and I'm a morning person, you know. So, but I don't usually actually sit down at work until maybe 1130 or something like that.

So it's like eight hours or something. Okay. So resistance wakes up with you and the battle begins. The alarm goes off, the battle begins. Battle begins immediately. Every day. Every day. Absolutely.

And because I've had periods, a long period of my life where I had was beaten by resistance and I was sort of felt that pain, that coming. comes awake in my mind immediately too. And I know that's the, if I'm not vigilant, I'm going to go down that path and I don't want to go down that path. So I'm a gym person. I get up. I go to the gym right away in the morning. What gym is open at 3.30? They open it.

Gold's gym in Venice. It opens at four. There you go. And as I was telling my girlfriend, Diana, who's out there on the other side of that window, you get there at four and the parking lot's full. You know, you have to go to the subs. city every parking lot. There's a lot of people fighting. Yeah, a lot of people that are doing whatever. But whatever it is, they call it resistance training for a reason, right? And so I'm sort of rehearsing myself for the day. I'm doing something that I don't want to do, that I have

tremendous resistance to. I'm doing something that brings up a lot of fear, and I'm doing something that hurts. So by the time I'm done, like with any workout, right, when it's over, it's great. That's one heck of a metaphor. So you always sort of say to yourself, nothing I do today from here on is going to be as hard as what I just did for the last. So then I'll just kind of do, you know, correspondence. I'll breakfast on. Take care of email and stuff like that. Pay my taxes, you know, go to the dentist.

You see the boring stuff first. I do the boring stuff first because I find that I'm so tired at the end when I finish what I'm, you know, writing that I can't do anything. And you got to pay your taxes. Yeah, right. So if I would leave that, you know, until then, I'd never get it done. So I get that stuff out of the way. And again, this is all on the theme of resistance. I'm clearing the decks so that I can focus.

And then when I sit down to work, which is just in an office in my home, you know, just with a computer like anybody else, I turn everything off. No Facebook. You know, I don't pay attention to that stuff anyway. And then I just, I'll work, you know, for maybe three hours. I used to be able to work for four, but I can't do that anymore. But it is deep, deep work. I mean, not every day because sometimes you're in a draft number 10 and you're just going over stuff you've already written.

And that's already at a pretty finished state. But it's focused the entire time. It's definitely focused. Absolutely. And when I'm finished, I always stop when I start making mistakes. When I start making typos and I can tell right away, which I think, And I always try to know what's coming next, you know, to stop at a point where I know what the next scene is or what's going to happen.

So that helps me next tomorrow morning. I think there's an important corollary there for any work you do. Ah. It seems like, right, to make sure you know what's coming next before you stop. Yeah. Plan tomorrow today, right? Plan the week on Sunday. And I think it's that notion that you've structured your entire day and routine around beating resistance.

You want to make sure there's no foothold. where you could possibly stop. Exactly, exactly. Because I always say, as a writer at least, and however you want to extrapolate it, the struggle is not with the material. It's not with the characters. It's not with the plot. The battle is against resistance.

All the work will take care of itself if you can just sit down there and do it, you know? Sit down and just start. Yeah, just start, but also finish. That's right, yes. And then the other thing is when I'm done for the day, I always say the office is closed. I just turn everything off because at least in creative work, the ideas are coming from another place, from the muse, from the unconscious or whatever it is. And so I don't want to worry about it.

I don't want to obsess about it. I just turn my brain off at that point and let the unconscious do its work until the next morning. Okay. So how do you – my issue is that the brain – I can't get it to turn off. And so I'm constantly thinking, but my guess is your ability to be. to do that and to turn it off makes you way more effective in the three or four hours that you're actually on. Yeah, I don't know about that, but maybe, I mean, I will, like I say, I work to the point

of exhaustion, basically, right? I'm starting to make mistakes. So you've got nothing left. I really, I don't have any, I really don't have anything left for that, or I don't have any energy left to put into this anymore for that day. So it's easy for me to stop. I'm very grateful to stop. I think we romanticize that routine of yours.

It's pretty remarkable that you do. do that every single day. But it's really just blue collar work, you know. It's just like if I was going to a shop, and you wear work boots, right? Don't you wear work? Like, and that symbolizes something. Yeah, that's true. I have a pair of work boots I've been wearing forever. Every day. Because everywhere, every day. When I, as I go to sit down to work, you know, I take off whatever other shoes I have on, put those on. Because I try to think of it as blue collar work, which is what it is. You know, because you can get, if you're in the arts in any way, you can get a little precious, right? Oh, I'm going to do this thing.

You know, but so I try to make it, you know, very lunch pail. This book has a little lunchbox thing, you know, that's the whole point of it. And water can't, you're going into the office for the day. Yeah. I can see it because I am it. People are listening to this right now and like it's really easy to get excited about everything you're saying. And it's like, man, I'm going to establish a routine. I'm going to be a professional.

it's going to be awesome. And then we're all going to wake up at 3.15 tomorrow morning and it's going to be amazing. Day one is super sexy, right? Like, I mean, we're in it. We're a professional. Day 67 does not carry that same vibe. How did you muster the, I don't know, if it's discipline, if it's grit, if it's your willpower to keep going after three months? Well, for me, again, that first book that I wrote that I stopped at 99.9.9.9.

percent, that was such a disaster for me emotionally and every other way that my focus for like the next seven years was I got to learn how to finish. I've got to learn to go all the way to the end. And it took me a long time to learn how to do that. But another part of being a pro is that you're in it for the long haul. So day 67 is just the day before day 68, you know. And also, when you finish book one or venture one, the next day, you're on to the next venture. It's a lifetime commitment, I think, whatever this is.

So I, and if someone fails at day 68, that's part of the process. They'll try again, you know. They'll go away from that and feel terrible and hate themselves. And they'll try again. And next time, they'll say, oh, I get to day 68. I'm not going to quit, you know. But part of being a professional in anything, you know, Kobe, Bryant is not playing basketball anymore, but I guarantee you, I don't even know what he's doing,

but I know it's something equally intense and equally, you know, a lifetime commitment. We've got a lot of people that listen to this in the morning. And so I know for a fact that there's folks out there listening right now that are about to go to battle, right? They're about to go to war with the resistance. The final question that I would have for you is what is the encouragement that you would give that person and what is the action you would give them? And what is the action you would give them and then why is it worth it? Why should they do it? Okay, I'll start with the first one. You can remind me what the other ones were. The one thing to remember about resistance, and this is absolutely true, is that resistance comes second, I always say. What comes first

is the dream, the venture that you want to pull off, the book, the entrepreneurial venture, or whatever it is. I compare it to like a tree in a meadow. That's the dream. And as soon as the tree appears, the shadow of the tree appears. The shadow is resistance. So there would be no shadow if there were no tree. So if you are feeling intense resistance, like fear, self-doubt, tendency to self-sabot, tendency to yield to distraction, it's a good sign. Because you wouldn't feel that if the dream wasn't powerful. powerful in the sense of helping you evolve on the soul level from a lower level to a higher level.

So if you're feeling intense fear, that's a good thing. Anybody that says to me, oh, I'm not afraid at all. They're completely full of beans, I'll say. If you're not feeling tremendous fear, something's wrong. You should feel that fear. So it's a positive thing. And what was the second part? Yeah, yeah.

So if we know that, what's the action step and then why is it worth it? The action step is simply to do the work. I mean, what resistance wants you to do is stop you from doing the work. So do the work, you know, sit down. It's all, like I say, it's a blue collar scenario. There's nothing, I always say, put your ass where your heart wants to be. You know, if you want to, if you want to, if you want to write, sit down at a keyboard. If you want to dance, go into the studio.

You know, if you want to paint, go before the easel. Move your body into that place. And while you're there, do the work. as a sidebar to that, I would say, at least for me, I never judge the work that I do. Is it good, is it bad? I don't even think about that. All I ask myself at the end of each day is have I put in my two and a half, three hours?

Have I done that? That's enough. That's success. And that's success because I know over time, Nick Murray's book, The Game of Numbers, another great thing to read, The Game of Numbers by Nick Murray, is over time, just doing it every day, even if it's only an hour today, even if you can only do an hour before the kids wake up or whatever it is.

Over time, those hours add up. And what's the point of it? The point of it is that we were born all of us with a calling, with a destiny, with something we were meant to do. And that's inside us in potential. And if we don't bring that into material realization, whether it's write a book, start a business, you know, help other people, people, whatever it is that's our calling, that energy and potential goes down darker channels, you know, into things like depression, anxiety, alcoholism, whatever, all of the things that we all know about so much.

So the payoff is that once you have kind of hit that beat like Roseanne hit the beat, you know, when she said, okay, I'm going to commit to this thing, then the forces of the world are tailwind at your back and you're doing what you should be. doing. You know, you can sleep at night and you can wake up in the morning and you can pay attention to your children and then you're kind of, you're on the path. You're doing the, you're doing what you should be doing. The price is facing that fear and doing that work that maybe you don't want to do that's hard to do and it hurts and it's scary. But don't stop. Right. That's the whole point of life, I think, is doing that. Well, Stephen, it's no accident why the War of Art has sold so

many copies and why so many people recommend it to other people. So we're going to do that on here. This is required reading. You'll have to go get this book because this is just a sample of what he talks about in that book. And turning pro and do the work, they're all outstanding. There is something, and I think this is embedded in everything you write as well, there's something so inspiring about someone that doesn't just have a compelling message, but that lives that same compelling message. And Stephen, I think that's you to a T. We're so, so, so grateful for your time. So on behalf of our entire audience, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. Well, there you go. We are at war. And I think the power of Stephen's

message is in its simplicity. There is an enemy. It's called resistance. And we all face it. But we also have a weapon that we can use. And that weapon is doing the work. It was hard in that conversation not to almost immediately think of Art Williams' infamous keynote from our entree Summit event where he said just do it and do it and do it and do it. It's one of the most popular podcast episodes we have ever released as a team. And if you want to go back and experience that episode and that moment, we've got two options for you. You can click the link that's in the show notes to that podcast episode or our team has made it possible for you to watch the entire keynote as it was performed at Summit with the YouTube link that's in the show notes. So if you

want to either listen or watch, just click the links that are in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode, the Entre Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25, Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link that's in the show notes, and be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Will Rutter. I'm Alex Judd, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again. soon. Hey, if you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network,

like The Ken Coleman Show. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly 70% of Americans are disengaged at work. If you dread going into work every Monday morning and you're just trying to make it to the weekend, the Ken Coleman show is for you. Everyone has a sweet spot. Your sweet spot is at the intersection of your greatest talent and greatest passion. We will help you discover what it is you were born to do, and, then we'll help you create a plan to make your dream job a reality. You matter and you have what it takes. Join the conversation on the Ken Coleman Show. To hear full episodes, just search Ken Coleman wherever you listen to podcast or go to Ken Coleman.com.