Modern Wisdom - #220 - Steven Pressfield - How To Turn Pro

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Steven Pressfield is an author. Many people's lives are split into two parts; before and after they Turn Pro. Steven's work has helped millions of people overcome Resistance, find their passion and have the courage to take the leap into an activity they love. Hopefully by the end of this episode you'll have all the information you need to make your own transition to leave the amateur life behind. Sponsor: Shop Tailored Athlete’s full range at https://link.tailoredathlete.co.uk/modernwisdom (FREE shipping automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Buy Turning Pro - https://amzn.to/3hjwl0e Follow Steven on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SPressfield  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello humans in podcast land. Welcome back. I guess today is Steven Pressfield. I read The War of Art, one of Steven's best selling nonfiction works at the beginning of this year and it had a really profound impact on me. Then I followed it up with Turning Pro, which did exactly the same and just totally blew my world apart, two books in a row. I just needed to get him on, had to have a discussion with him. I absolutely adore the concept of Turning Pro. Today, within the space of an hour, I think you get a pretty strong overview of exactly why you need to leave the amateur life behind. Steven's such a great guy, he's just filled with cool stories and really interesting off the wall examples of how Turning Pro has really changed people's lives.

I hope that it has as strong of an impact on you as it did on me. And if you fancy checking out either of his books, they've got like thousands of reviews on Amazon and you can get through both of them in probably two hours. If you read a normal speed, they're not very long. There are only a hundred pages, a couple of hundred pages. So yeah, if you end up turning pro by the end of this episode, then let's know. I would love to find out if you resonate with any of the lines and the stories that Stephen brings out today, because I know that I certainly did. But for now, it's time to learn how to turn Pro with Stephen Pressfield.

So we'll have some people listening whose lives could be changed forever by turning pro. Can we make that happen within the next hour, do you think? We'll give it our best shot here. That'll be a pleasure. So as a tiny bit of background, I read both the War of Art and Turning Pro this year and they had a very profound impact on how I view the things that I do in my life and I wanted to kind of gift the audience hopefully with the same insights that your book gave me. So first off, why did you write Turning Pro? You know, it was just a follow-up to the War of Art because I've, you know, in the War of Art there is a section, as you know, called Turning Bro. It's the middle section, but I felt like I hadn't really said everything that I wanted

to say, and that it needed a little amplification. So I just kind of amplified it a little bit. It's a nutty sequel, right? Let me ask you something before we even start. How does the concept of resistance in the war of art? How does that affect what you do? Where did it impact your life? So resistance, thankfully, in podcasting, is not as much of a burden to bear. Reason being that you naturally are on this treadmill with the other person. You have this external accountability, right? So I can't just stop this conversation if resistance arises because you're there. And you can't stop this conversation because I'm here and I'm here to help you. I'll ask you a question. You'll help me. So resistance

to me manifests much more when I'm writing newsletters, which again, your experience is writing book, sitting down, blank page in front of you and you struggle. But it's interesting for me to have that dichotomy, and there may be people listening as well, for whom they have resistance that manifests very strongly in certain areas of their life, and then doesn't in others. And I certainly think things that you can do with other people, team sports. You turn up to training for rugby, and the resistance kind of doesn't really seem to be there.

You turn up to do a solo session in the gym, and you're just swimming in resistance, right? So that's something, that was an insight that I gained this year. Uh-huh, okay, great. So yeah, that was something that I saw. I absolutely adored the idea of turning pro. So how do we define an amateur?

Let's start before we even get into professionals. How do we define an amateur? One of the ways I think is an amateur as a rule is kind of a weekend warrior. And an amateur when they hit adversity are going to quit. That's probably the ultimate sign. And I lived for years as an amateur. And dropping the ball, fumbling the ball on the one yard line to use an American football analogy,

that kind of thing being unable to finish something whenever adversity would strike, I would cave into it. And there are many other aspects of an amateur, but an amateur usually does a lot of talking about what they're going to do. Whereas the professional usually just shuts up and does the work. And I think a lot of the modern maladies that we all suffer from, anxiety, depression, isolation, et cetera, et cetera, that we blame ourselves for, right? We put a judgment on ourselves. We say that, you know, either we're weak or we're, you know, there's something wrong

with us or we sick or we're sick or something like that. We have some neurotic, you know, issue, whatever it is. I think a lot of those problems are really just about the difference between being an amateur and being a pro and just having you know flipping that switch in our mind and You know, we'll get into this a lot. I'm sure but a pro is is Hard on themselves, you know not really not down on themselves, but hard on themselves And an amateur is usually pretty easy on themselves.

Professionals' world is a lot more rigorous mentally and emotionally, psychologically. How did being an amateur before you took the step to becoming pro? You say you've got two stages to your life before and after you turn pro. How did the amateur lifestyle manifest for you before you made that change? Kind of like what I was just talking about, Chris. My life was pretty chaotic, not necessarily in a bad sense. I mean, there was a lot of kind of adventure going on, a lot of drama and stuff like that. And I met a lot of people that turned out to be interesting people and went with a lot of places,

it turned to be interesting places, but I wasn't getting anything done. And I was feeling worse and worse and worse about it. And in general, I was sort of in one form or another, running away from my real work, my real calling in, you know, running away physically, going to different places and running away, you know, in different activities that were what I call in the book, shadow activities, not the real activities. They were close to them,

but they were not really them. And at the moment that, you know, I finally did turn pro, I really just decided, look, this is my calling, this is what I want to do, which is writing. And I just, I have to organize my life in such a way that I can do it. I can't allow chaos to dominate everything. And my resistance be defeating me every morning, procrastination and all that kind of stuff. So you mentioned there, one of the key points that kind of self-identifies an amateur,

which is these shadow activities or even shadow careers. How can someone work out if they're going through with a shadow activity or a shadow career? Let me see if I can define it first, Chris. It's all obviously, nobody can make that judgment except the person themselves. It's very, very hard a lot of times. I worked in the movie business in LA as a screenwriter for about 10 years or so, 10 or 12 years. And one of the phenomenon that you see there, phenomenon that you see there a lot, is there's such a thing as entertainment lawyers. You know, their entire law firms that are about negotiating deals. And if you're an actor, if you're a director, if you're a writer, you have an entertainment lawyer. And the entertainment lawyer, you know,

sometimes you'll actually find work for you and certainly will negotiate all the deals for you. And it's sort of a commonplace there that a lot of entertainment lawyers want to be writers or want to be producers. And I think that, and I've talked to people they admit it, they laugh and they admit it, that they sort of chose being a lawyer because it was kind

of adjacent to the creative field. You know, they didn't chose to be like oil and gas lawyers or corporate lawyers. They chose to be entertainment lawyers. And I think this applies sometimes to agents as well. They're sort of in a field that's adjacent to a creative field, but is not really that field. And I can understand it makes a lot of sense. You figure, well, if I go to law school, I'm going to have a degree.

I'm going to have something I can fall back on. I'm going to have an actual job that pays me. Whereas if I just plunge in being an actor or writer or director, God does what'll happen. Another manifestation of this is Chris' more, I don't want to be sexist here, but it's more women that fall into this. That is to men too, so women that don't get mad at me. People will be somebody else's assistant. They'll kind of sign up to work for a musician or a

director or a producer or something like that. And what they really want to do is they really want to produce themselves. So they really want to be a musician themselves. And so they have this kind of shadow career. And I know that you're doing a thing of six months sober and stuff like that. And I think that a lot of times, addictions are shadow careers. I could get into this in great detail, but I think that a lot of times people will, if they get into alcohol, they get into drugs,

they get into heroin, they get into, all the things you can get into, their life as an alcoholic, or their life as a drug addict becomes their shadow work of art. And rather than write the book that they were gonna write or produce the movie or whatever it is that they were going to do, they create this their own sort of personality, their own

drama, their life becomes like a movie. You know, it's got everything, right? Sometimes it even has violence and God knows what else. So I'm probably wandering on too long, but there's also another phenomenon in America in the States, particularly in the South, particularly in a place like New Orleans, and maybe the UK, you guys have this too,

where people will become quote unquote characters. You know, the crazy old lady that has 33 cats or, you know, the guy with the hat that wanders around the French Quarter or whatever. And what they're sort of doing there, and not that there's anything wrong with being a colorful character, but they're, to me, rather than writing their novel or starting their business, they create this image, this thing of them themselves, this personality of themselves, that that becomes their own sort of work of art. And in some cases, I guess that's cool, but not if it's eating you up inside, and you really know on some level, I should be doing more with my life than that.

I spent a little bit of time last year in New Orleans, and I know precisely the characters that you mean. There's a lady that I saw at one of the parades with, she looked like Mary Poppins, purple hat, green feather boa, like two walking sticks dancing crazy to the Jasmine's cat side. So I know exactly that. I had Aubrey Marcus, so I know that you're a friend of, I had Aubrey on the show last year. And he said something that really stuck with me and I think it ties in with what you're talking about here.

And he talks about how people protect themselves by building up caricatures of themselves by wrapping themselves in ego. He says the reason for that is without vulnerability, you don't ever actually have to put anything on the line. Because if the ego or the character that you're playing fails, well that's not me. I didn't fail. The character I'm playing fails. But the converse of this, which he identified and I absolutely love, was that he said, the ego is incapable of receiving love, it can only receive praise. And I think that distinction is really important, the fact that when you play this metacognisant character, you're not you fully open and actualized your some analogue of that. You're all of the veneers of it,

but none of the core of it. The praise, the failures that you get don't hurt, but the praise that you get doesn't feel like love, because you know that it's not you. And I can attest to this as someone who played kind of a big name on campus, party boy for a long time. I realized that that veneer, a lot of the time,

is because I was insecure or ashamed about the fact that I had particular interests and curiosities that I didn't think other people would think were cool. So I didn't, I thought I had to talk about partying and girls and booze and blah, blah, blah, because I couldn't talk about the Fermi paradox or what consciousness is or why is that we have sexual

selecture? Do you know what I mean? Like, they're all of these things, and maybe a lot of the listeners who are attuned into this as well. I think everyone has elements of amateurs in them, right? Everyone's an amateur in probably some area of their life. Yes.

Yes. You touched on something that I really love. What do amateurs and addicts have in common? that I really love. What do amateurs and addicts have in common? Well, I think that they're both artists, you know, that they both have, and that's why so many musicians are addicts, and so many artists are addicts. It's not an accident. I think that they have, and they feel within them a self that wants to be born and work that wants to be produced, that wants to be brought out into the world. And it terrifies both people, terrifies the artist and terrifies the addict. And I

think what you were just saying, what Mark, what Aubrey said was that rather than be vulnerable, rather than really express that thing, which is of course really hard, because then you really let yourself up for being, you know, particularly these days, you know, massacred. You will, someone who goes into an addiction that's really sort of what you were just talking about. It's a second self, that's not really the self.

So, you know, whatever happens there, how would any bad consequences that come from that are not as bad. It's a protective thing, are not as bad as really trying to be the artist or to speak over to follow the things that you really want, that you really are interested in, you really do want to pursue, and you're afraid you won't be cool. You're afraid that people will think, you know, what kind of a, you know, kind of a guy is this guy interested in this stuff, he should be interested to rugby and that kind of stuff. So, and of course, that's part of growing up too. When you're young, peer pressure is tremendous, and very few people have the guts to really be themselves. It only takes, I think, a lot of pain

living that artificial self before the moment comes where you find this, say, I just can't do this shit anymore. I've got to be me, whatever, you know. I really loved, there was an example used, I think he's Charlie Sheen as one of the examples and he said that the addict's life is really boring. From the outside, it looks super colorful, but in reality, it's the same boring excuse

is the same boring turning up late to work, the same boring story about how many drugs or whatever it was that you had last night. There's no trajectory, right? It's Groundhog Day over and over. I'd never heard that said about addicts before because you see, it almost gets romanticized in movies and popular culture as well. The addict lifestyle, rock and roll, if you've seen that wonderful British film, it has this almost super romanticized view of how the addict spends their time. He's a dying artist, but he's so, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you're like, yeah, that is true, but it isn't in place of art. It's instead of art. It's not as if you can substitute the art for the addiction and it's still as beautiful. It's everything that takes up the space of the addiction with none of the beauty. Yes, and it's funny that when you turn pro and you start really doing your work,

then your life from the outside really does look boring. You know, it's all of a sudden, you know, you're getting up early, you're going to the gym, you're going to your studio or whatever it is. And somebody looking for one of your old buddies that used to know you in your addicted days. You know, they said, what happened to you, man? I mean, he used to be funny.

He's like, hang out with you. Now look at you, you know, you're doing his practicing ballet steps in your studio or whatever it is, but So it is interesting how what we do think is is Exciting is really boring as hell and what we do what looks to be boring on the outside Of course, it's not boring, you know like people used to say to me I think I even wrote this in turning pro that I used to work in this office here Where I am right now that my desk used to face the other way face into that wall and people would say to me, well,

you know, don't you want to have a view outside? How can you how can you look like that? But the but the answer is I'm living up here, you know, the world that I'm inhabiting or the world that the artist is having inhabiting in their studio may look pretty dumb from the outside, but inside, a lot of stuff is going on. It's, you know, a game of thrones is going on inside there. So, you're, and if you're really doing your work, then you are getting traction. You're not just spinning your wheels constantly. It felt you talk a lot about tribes and about how the social imperative, the social influence of other people can cause us to compromise and dilute down our professionality, I suppose, and that our ability to overcome resistance. And it makes total sense with this, right?

Like why wouldn't you want to do the thing that everyone else thinks is cool, that just looks like so much for, oh, he's leading this life. And that's been turned up to 11 with Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and YouTube now. People live these meta-lives where they exist only to create the content. They go on holiday purely to film the content to make. Do you know what I mean?

This is that it would go about to this sort of meta life that people have. And that happens in again small parts for everyone. But I really think the bravery to be able to be called boring is a or weird or different is a powerful mechanism because as my good friend George McGill says, ordinary people get ordinary results, extra ordinary people get extra ordinary results. The closer that you get to normal, the closer you regress to the mean of the results everyone else gets.

Like that's precisely what it looks. I never heard of before, like, yeah. It's wonderful. So think about, anyway, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, these guys don't have normal work ethics, even in an environment of super normal humans. They still stand out, Tiger Woods,

his relationship he had with his dad was so crazy when he was growing up, but look at what the result was on the back end of that. You know, you have to have extra ordinary effort, when he was growing up, but look at what the result was on the back end of that. You know, you have to have extra ordinary effort, gets extra ordinary results. Yeah, I think casting off the tribe is an important part of that. Yeah, another way of looking at that, and I just actually heard this the other day from a friend of mine, Scott Mann, who was a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Green Berets.

And he was talking about, it's sort of like the Maslow pyramid, where you, at the bottom of the pyramid, is sort of the tribal, which of course, we were, where peer pressure is everything, to conform and to be one of the gang. And of course, we evolved as in a environment you know for hundreds of thousands of years is like the primitive hunting band But then you're at kind of in the lower end of the thing But when you get to this top part of the of the pyramid then you're getting kind of a maslow area of

Self-actualization or of Individuation, you know where you kind of have cut free from the the or of individuation, where you kind of have cut free from the demands of the tribe and the expectations of the tribe, and you're really becoming whoever it is that you were born to be, whatever your individual essence is. And it's, of course, it's like with Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, it's lonely up there. And that's just part of the price. How do people swallow that price then? How do people learn to pay it? Is it getting used to being cast off by the tribe a little bit more each day? How do they do it?

You know, I'm not sure that I can really speak to being in it. I'm trying to be, but I don't know. But I do think that you, I'll just speak from my own experience. First of all, to me, it's not a sacrifice at all. I feel much happier being in that place up there because I feel like I'm really in my own skin and serving my own own muse, whatever that is. But the other thing is that I think as you do evolve into that into that place, you sort of leave people behind in a way. I know that sounds kind of ego maniacal or, you know, but they're, they're, I'm thinking of a David O. Russell movies like The Fighter and Joy, if you remember that one, and also Silverlinings Playbook. He talks about this a lot where he'll have a character like the Mickey, I forgot his

name, the played by Mark Wahlberg and the fighter, who is in this family where everybody, you know, he wants to be a fighter. That's his thing. His brother was a fighter, et cetera, et cetera. In the movie Joy, starring Jennifer Lawrence, she plays this gal that started the Mop, the Miracle Mop on the Home Shopping Network. And both of them were embedded in families where the family was sabotaging them.

The family, like the fighter, his mom was his booking agent, and she would, the start of the movie, she'd book some into this fight where the guy outweighs him by 15 pounds, and he'd just massacres him. It's like, what are you putting me in? In other words, if you leave people like's like, what are you putting me in? And so in other words, when you sort of, if you leave people like that behind or you just disengage from them, it's not a bad thing, you know?

You feel like I got rid of something that was really holding me back. So it's kind of painful. I'm a guy that feels guilty and is very loyal, you know, like to a fault, but sometimes you do have to follow your own star wherever it goes. And not everybody wants to go on that same path with you. There's this wonderful quote by James Clear, changing your habits often requires you to change

your tribe. Each tribe has a set of shared expectations. Behaviors that conform to the shared expectations are attractive. Behaviors that conflict with the shared expectations are unattractive. It's hard to go against the group. Often, changing your habits requires you to change your tribe. I love that. I think it's absolutely true. And one of the things there is your level of aspiration. I mean, a lot of times it isn't that you've changed

your outlook or anything like that. It's just you want to be better. You know, you just, you won't accept the level of achievement or commitment or whatever that people around you are very comfortable in, you know, and like Michael Jordan There's a classic example of that, you know, where he had to be really rough on his teammates, you know, that was he was an Absolutely the only way he knew how to do it. Yeah And you could see I mean, I guess we're both talking about watching the last dance ever you see that's it

Wonderful, you know where he would actually you could see on camera when he was being interviewed, where he got, he would get upset, you know, like that one thing where he goes, break, and he gets up from the chair, and ends the interview. Because I guess he felt a little bad about how hard he was on people, but he wanted to be at his level of aspiration was different than the tribe. And he had to bring them with him. When you look at it in the cold light of day with perspective, the choice really is between

being less than you can be to appease other people or being all that you can be and perhaps upsetting someone. And like for me, it takes a lot of bravery to do that, you know, and you're right as well about the age thing. As a younger person, guy or girl, you just that confidence to go against the group, you know, everything's new and novel in the world scary and big. Over time, it's everyone's dad or everyone's uncle, right? You know, the uncle that just doesn't give a shit. Like, he'll fart at dinner and decides to go play golf four times a week or do he does his thing? And I think that like that level of uncleness is something

that we can all aspire to have. Yes, so I'd love for that. Final thing before we move on to what a pro is and the difference between that and an amateur, how can someone self-diagnose if they're an amateur who's chomping at the bit to turn pro? How can someone identify the things? We've got the shadow activity with potentially got the addiction. Is there anything else? Well, I would think anybody that's listening to us talk right now and is in that state,

it's probably very obvious to themselves, you know, I know if I were listening to this, my former self, I would say, oh, holy shit, that's me. That's so kind of on me. That's exactly what I'm doing, you know. And I think we all do know that. It's very clear to us. We're sort of running away from it all day long, trying to keep that perception from breaking through. So yeah, I think it's more obvious than.

Right, obvious. Good, good. And actually, we have done. To a person themselves, you know? We have done our job in the first half. So okay, how do we define a professional? How are they different from an amateur? Well, one of the things that I do say is just sort of like what you were reading there,

a professional has professional habits and an amateur has amateur habits. And so if we kind of look at the, if we look at the way we live our day, you know, do we get up at a certain time in the morning? And do we always get up at that time or something like that? Do we have an aspiration? Are we aiming at something? Are we ruthless with ourselves? Will we not allow ourselves to slack off or only once in a while have a cheat meal or something like that? Or are we just so easy on ourselves, that we're just kind of bouncing around to miss to that to the other thing. I think a professional is usually defined, I think, by

by their aspiration. What is it they're trying to do? You know, if you ask a writer that's a real pro writer, what are you trying to do? They can probably tell you the book they're working on, they know exactly what it is they want to do. They probably know the next one after that and the one after that. And if they don't, they know that they want, at least they know the path that they want to be on. Whereas I'm thinking about my own amateur days, if you ask me what I want to do, I wouldn't have a clue. I would bounce from one thing to another. And another thing is I think, I remember, I used to live in my Chevy van you know I used to you know I didn't think of it as homeless at the time but I used to live in that kind of situation and I remember when I would wake up in the morning you know in my

mattress in the back of my van wherever the hell I was I would sort of have to have like a five minute session with myself just to tell myself who I was and what I was trying to do with the day. And I had no clue, you know, unless I was in some scene, you know, where there were people and I knew I had to, you know, meet so and so or whatever. But in other words, that was, that was a total amateur situation where I had no real, no goal, no aspiration. Nothing that was, that was internal, that was driving me from my heart. I was not in touch with my muse or whatever you want to say, whatever that inspiration is.

I don't know, probably babbling a little bit. No, I don't see even I absolutely love this and it's so insightful. Something that I've just realized there going back to the addict thing. I wonder whether having multiple projects or having a lot of different. Pathways on the go is a form of addiction. So myself and a number of friends, I know we rationalize doing lots of things is hedging. And we say, by having that I'm spreading risk, I've got multiple strengths, whatever it might be. But that's just a form of resistance as well. That's just a form of fear from going all in on the one thing that you should do.

I would absolutely define it. I would absolutely define it as a form of resistance. And I get a lot of letters from people like that where people will say, I've got so many ideas. I just don't know which one to follow, you know? And it's resistance throwing these shiny objects at us, you know, like what do they call a chaff? Like when a missile is trying to track an airplane,

the airplane will release this, you know, what aluminum foil shiny objects, and the missile doesn't know what to do, and it gets lost, right? And I think we will create those shiny objects ourselves to distract ourselves. And I think a lot of times when you read the biographies or you listen to somebody like a Bob Dylan or somebody like that talking about their life, there was no plan B. You know, they were all in for whatever it was. So, yeah, I think if, when I find myself having like a bunch of projects, I will really try

to sit down and whittle those away and just kind of be ruthless in throwing the, it's not so easy to do. It's hard to, in fact, I'm in a place like that right now where I've got two or three things and I'm not sure which one to go. It's hard to, in fact, I'm in a place like that right now where I've got two or three things and I'm not sure which one to go. It's very hard, but I do think that the idea of hedging your bets is not such a great idea. I think you're correct. And to continue to sing Michael Jordan's song, Michael played golf as a way to calm down,

but he wasn't trying to be a pro golfer whilst he was trying to be a pro basketballer. No, that's true, exactly. Yeah. All in on basketball. Hilariously, I didn't know that you'd got him played baseball, which is like just, but even when he played baseball, he was all in on baseball, you know? He wasn't, I'll keep on foot in the door with this thing, like he was, he was all in. And I definitely think that that's one of the more

panicious ways that resistance can manifest because it looks like productivity. It looks like achievement, both internally and externally. And what were we just saying about the way that the tribe and this kind of socialized reward is important? Oh, Stephen, you've got so many things on the go like you've got three books in the podcast and the YouTube and the blah blah blah and you think again, what is it? It's boring. Like it looks from the outside in really exciting and varied, but from the inside out you're not getting the work done. You're just constantly spinning these plates desperately trying to stop any of them from falling down. Yeah. Now, I would, I might disagree with you, Chris, on the Michael Jordan playing baseball thing. Interesting.

And of course, we would, we won't know if until we have him here and he would tell us. I'll get him eventually. But if you remember, I've watched this thing like five different times. So I was very familiar with the last dance. If you remember, his dad died. It was murdered right before that. And I think maybe for him, baseball was just sort of a way of taking some time out, because his dad always wanted him to play baseball and of allowing that grief to process itself, because when the time was right, he went back to basketball. So it was baseball, resistance, do you think perhaps?

No, I think in some way, maybe it was sometimes, like we're talking here now, of course, about sort of relentlessly powering forward towards a goal. But sometimes you need to take a break from that. We are human. And in a way I think somehow maybe, I'm psychoanalyzing Michael Jordan, which is a crazy thing. If we only had him here, maybe he just needed with baseball just to be a regular guy for a little while, you know, just to be one of the guys on the team and then go back to being the greatest that ever lived, you know? But I don't know, I'm just a...

I think that's a really good insight. And that's something I would be very impressed if you have the answer for this. How do you determine when you've been ruthless enough with yourself? Basically, there's always a challenge between being sufficiently compassionate when you've hit your limit and pushing yourself hard enough to find where it is. Yeah, I'm going to disappoint you, Chris, because I'm not going to have an answer here. I really, all I could say is it's really hard to know. I know for me there certainly have been times where I really did back off and just let it things go. A lot of times

that was good, but I'm not sure why. I wouldn't know how to define it. It's intuitive, isn't it? It's a question I've asked. You must be like the 10th guest that I've asked that question too, and it is... Everyone has the same answer, which is essentially that it's just an intuition, it's a notion, you feel that you sense it. And you know when you've gone too far, there's been sometimes where I've pushed myself so hard

with work that I've not been able to get out of bed for a couple of days. You know, you just, you have like minute to break down and I'm just tired and cathodic and I can't think of a thought and muddy. And then I come, I snap out of it and I'm like, wow, I guess I did a little bit to it. And it's always after an intense period of work. You know, you do two weeks, three weeks of like just non-stop, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then that happens and you think, okay, that's my limit. And again, what we're talking about over time,

we get older, we understand our tolerances a little bit more, we're able to see and feel and use intuition a little bit more adaptably. So yeah, I think that's... There's another thought, the whole sort of concept of an off season, you know, that, you know, in certain sports, practically all sports before people became a year-round fitness kind of thing, there would be an off-season, right? And maybe

that makes sense. I mean if you think about the primitive hunting band that we're living that, that's our guts, right? That's our DNA. I'm sure they sort of went out They hunted they chased the mastodons, you know, and then same thing then they brought the food back the bacon back to the cave and I'm sure they took a couple of weeks off, you know and maybe that is kind of a rhythm that we might emulate a little bit ourselves. Because we can drive ourselves crazy trying to get to the top of that pyramid and self-actualizing all that. It's a good question.

I wish I had a meter that I could switch, would go off and say a time to take a break. But like at the moment, yeah, I get it exactly. David Allen is, yeah, yeah, I get it exactly. It's a David Allenism where he says, your ability to deploy power is directly proportional to your ability to relax. Oh, really? That's good too, huh?

Wonderful. Yeah, he's, and that again, like, is that a form of addiction and addiction to constantly doing the same thing, the inability to let go? And what we're seeing here is that the tighter and tighter circles of nuance and complexity that we're talking about as you pivot from being an amateur to being a professional, when you commit to something, the problems don't necessarily

go away, they just get more nuanced and more subtle. But you know, the other thing is I think being a professional doesn't mean that you have to be grinding every minute of the day. You know, like if you and I were, if the Olympic games were three years away and we were whatever an athlete that was going to compete in such a thing. And we had a brilliant coach, like a Phil Jackson or something like that. I'm sure that he would break those three years up for us into periods of intense effort and then a break, you know, and the whole thing aiming to peak at that time, you know, three, three years from now. So I think being a professional doesn't necessarily mean you're grinding every minute of the day.

I really like, we keep on coming back to it because it's an easy analogy to use when we talk about athletics and about sports stars. Yeah. And I think there's so much that anyone who isn't playing sport can take from people who do. So when you think about just how refined a sport stars life is

to maximize their performance, their eating right, their sleeping right, their working on their mental game, their doing their accessory movements, their doing their conditioning, their doing drills, technique, training, they're working with a mindset coach, they're working with, you know, every base is covered. I have a friend Alex Ok'Connor who was on the show recently and he, I would be surprised if he doesn't become one of the best known vegan philosophers on the planet, Peter Singer's sort of style guy. But I know and I've told him before, I'm like, man, if you want to be the person you want to be, the new hitch, you want to be the new Christopher Hitchens, if that's who you want

to be, you need to be refined in every area of your life because he's made the commitment to being vegan, but he only eats three meals. I'm like, dude, you need to have 20 meals. You need to be able to someone asks you about it. You've got the most moments of diet. You've got the best sleep. Do you know what I mean?

When someone wants to go all in on something, what is this? What's all this stuff over here? Why are you not committed to this? If it's in service of something that you genuinely love, that you genuinely believe is your calling in life, all of these 1% are in service of that. Yeah, that's true. Now, I'll take the opposite side of that Chris. I'll go you you want. Do you know who Bobby Jones, the golferfer is is that ring and bell at all? No. Bobby Jones was an American golfer from Atlanta who won the Grand Slam in 1929.

I think it was US amateur British amateur, US Open British Open as an amateur. He was just kind of a he founded the Masters. You know, he anyway, one of the all-time great players ever. And he was an amateur all the way through. And that was back in the days when amateur meant something different. But he was a lawyer. And he worked full-time as a lawyer. And the way his year would go is when winner came around, he was from Atlanta,

you know, he would just go to work as a lawyer. It wouldn't touch a club all winter long. And then when it started to get warm in the spring, he would sort of, the phrase he used was play himself back into shape and he would just kind of get, and by the time, but somehow he was able to do it where he just beat everybody. Like the great discolvers of their day, at that

time was Walter Hague and Gene Sarasin. These are names I'm sure don't mean anything to you, but during his period, Bobby Jones period, these other guys never won a major tournament that Bobby Jones was in. Anyway, so the point I'm trying to make here is that there's a, there are different ways to peak. Now, the other thing about Bobby Jones, they said about him, was that in a four-day tournament, he would lose between 12 and 18 pounds just from burning it off. And it was, you played in neckties in those days and it was routine.

They would sweat that he had to cut the necktie off with a knife at the end. So in other words, at the level that he was performing was at the Kobe Bryant level, but he did not have you know the coaches and then all that sort of thing. So I'm not lobbying for one way or the other, but there are definitely different ways to do it. Even in that situation, what we're seeing is someone who is incredibly present when they're doing it, right? If you're losing 18 pounds over four days,

it's because every fiber, every cell in your body is focused on the task. Yes, that he was able to really bring it, you know, when, when, when, when it counted. In fact, this is off the subject a little bit here, but in the year that he won the Grand Slam, his main challenge was not to screw it up. It's like, from the start of the year, he sort of knew I can win all four of these things. All I have to do is show up and bring my game. And he talked about, I'm gonna wander off a little bit here, but there were like, he heard of one other player,

might have been a baseball player who was shaving, back in the days when he had razor blades that went into a thing and He dropped the blade and his reflexes were so sharp. He grabbed it and he cut his hand and He couldn't play, you know, whatever it was baseball is and so part of Bobby Jones day was don't do that You know don't do anything that's gonna happen and Don't do that. You know, don't do anything that's going to happen. And anyway, I don't know.

That's apropos if nothing but just, I love this. I love to read about Bobby Jones and talk about him. His, a lot of the stuff that we do, we sell sabotage, right? Both consciously and unconsciously. But avoiding doing stupid things, at least we did it to him. It's so dumb. Three days before I snapped my Achilles,

I did a tweet that said avoid stupidity, don't chase success. And then obviously I can put this like around my shoulder, my Achilles. But yeah, like how did you do that, Chris? What were the circumstances? Playing cricket. You know, my, my asking. Playing cricket, which is the most British way that you can rupture in Ach's. So batting in cricket and just setting off. So exactly the same way that Kobe Bryant did. In fact, if anyone that's listening is interested, there's a 3D rendering on YouTube of precisely how Kobe Bryant's physiology worked during the match as is a killi's snapped. And if you have your heel off the ground a little bit

and then you push back, what you're doing is you're contracting the muscle whilst the eccentric portion of the movement is happening. And that's one of the real, sort of perfect storms for it, that you've got this build of pressure and then eventually your heel hits the floor and all of that elasticity gets snapped and it pulls. because you can hang a car off your Achilles tendon.

But really? Yeah, so you can think about how much force is going through it, but it's more to do with that snapping, that jerking motion that comes from the plyometric. So I mean, that was an ugly day. But even with that, I might just might, I might sort of just tell yourself and the viewers what my experience upon reading Turning Pro was. And this has been a defining characteristic of this year for me that a lot of people and myself as well, I'm still recording in my bedroom. It's still me and one guy were an independent show. It's not like we have this

big team or some production company behind us Which means that it's much easier to be an amateur It's much easier for me to just oh, it's a side thing. It's a hobby. It's a diss that and the other And partway through the year upon reading the War of Art I thought hang on you you love doing this. This is something that you're compelled to do. It's something that you're called to do. Why are you not going all in? Why are you allowing these other areas to distract you?

Why are you not turning up 10 minutes early to every interview that you do? Why are you not preparing as much as you can for every guest that you do? All of these things, all of these foot, one foot out of the door situations were me doing the Aubrey Marcus. Well, if the episode's a little bit crap, I didn't prepare all that much, therefore it's not a comment on my capacity. I could have

done better. I just chose not to. You inoculate yourself from public failure by assuring your failure privately. And yeah, that's very well said. Yeah, it's something I've thought about a lot this year, really, really have. And I hope that we can start to give everyone that's listening, the impetus, the ability to get over that inertia to move out of amateur and into professionals. So we've spoken about going all in. We've talked about the fact that you need to be ruthless with yourself. What are some of the other heuristics that people can use to ensure that they make the transition from amateur to professional as well as they can. You know, I never have like checklists or anything like that because it's so unique to

each individual. Like in Turning Pro, there was a passage about Roseanne Cash, the singer, and the dream that she had. Can I tell that story here for your this to me was like the kind of the ultimate turning pro moment. Rosanna Cash is Johnny Cash's daughter and she had a career at the start of her career that was quite successful kind of as a you know she had a bunch of hits and as a singer but she always had she always wanted to be a songwriter and a singer. She wanted to do concept albums

that really came from her heart, rather than picking songs that other people had written. So she had a dream, and it's really important that this is a dream because it shows it's coming from a part of her, right? And in the dream, oh, she, one of the people that she idolized was Linda Ronstadt, the singer. So in the dream, she was at a party

and she was sitting at a bench and Linda Ronstadt was on one side. She was on the other, in between them, was an older man that she somehow knew his name was Art, capital A, R, T. And Art was an intense conversation with Linda Ronsat in the dream. And Rosanne was kind of trying to get into the conversation, you know, and suddenly this guy turned to her art and looked her up and down with utter contempt and said, we don't

have anything to do with delitants. And Rosanne, as she describes this in her book, composed, she said, I woke up from this dream, shaken to the core because she felt like she had really been called out. This was really the truth. And she says, from that moment on, I changed my life. I changed everything about my life. I changed the way I wrote, I attacked music. I started studying painting, I started getting in shape physically, I started, you know, working out, I started studying voice and this and this, and she started attacking certain habits that she had. Like she, one of the things she said was she had a habit of daydreaming, of just kind of

getting off into a fog, and she said she would like, teach yourself to snap back out of that. And she also had a habit of like not working as hard as she could on some settling for something like that. And also of writing a song or preparing a song that was good enough, you know, but it wasn't, it didn't have the element of madness to it that she was looking for. So that's kind of a case where she herself decided, she just knew, she knew, I've got to change, I've got to, I can't keep going the way I'm going. So she sort of invented what, what the changes were that she was going to make. She was going to study this and study that

and get up earlier and eat better and all that sort of thing. So in other words, I think that once we kind of make that commitment, we'll know. We'll know what we're supposed to do. We'll know where we've been sloughing off eating sugar, whatever it is like, you know, that kind of thing. That's a beautiful story. I really, really love that. And then you yourself, was it the first time you turned pro, you locked yourself in a hut in the woods for like $15 a week or something like that? That is great. That's great. There's a way people over here know what, but I really thinking back over it, because I have been thinking back. I probably have had maybe 15 turning pro moments. You know, there wasn't just one, you know,

but what I did then was I saved it up money and moved to a small affordable house, a little house. It's covered in the woods, Steven. It was a covered in the woods. It's a cold, small, a wood sort of. But yeah, so I really just sort of locked myself in this underwater thing where I couldn't leave because I knew that my resistance was so strong that I would quit otherwise. So anyway, but we do have a bunch of these turning pro-moments, not just one. Do you think that something symbolic like that is a potential tool that people can use? Yes, definitely. To commit to that. Because you don't want to work in politics.

Yeah, I mean, look at Rosanne Cash's dream. You know, there's a guy called Art. I mean, you know, really, that's the way the mind works. So yeah, I mean, I wonder if your Achilles injury wasn't a way of making you focus on, you know, the podcasting and stuff like that. Very well might be. But don't let me psychoanalyze you. Hey, I would love it.

One thing, an example that the listeners will be familiar with from last year for me was I've had a back injury as well, a couple of bulging discs. And I read a book by the world's expert on spinal pain, guy called Dr. Stuart McGill. I had him on the show. I really enjoyed him. And I thought, I keep on going to different physios. Nothing really seems to be working. I'm gonna make a commitment.

I'm gonna make a pilgrimage to go and see him in Canada. So I'm in America. I've done this road trip that I mentioned where I went through New Orleans and Nashville and a bunch of other places. And at the end of that, as opposed to, I'd already booked my flight home, but Stu very, very kindly said, if you come out fishing with me and you catch a fish, I'll do your consultation for you. And I decided to sack the flight off that was going home. So that was, you know, maybe 700 pounds. I flew

from Norfolk to Toronto, then rented a car, then drove for two hours north on my own to go and see this like crazy white moustache man and met him and his wonderful wife and their dog and stayed stayed with them and spent the evening and he did this like brilliant assessment. And that to me was a symbolic pit. It was like a pilgrimage, right? It was like a journey that I made. And as soon as I came back, my compliance on the things that he told me to do was monomoniacal. I did. If he said it, I did it. And part of that was the pilgrimage, this symbolic gesture that I'd made to him and myself. Yeah, that's a great thing. You know, there's, we're probably running out of time.

I'll see if I can cram this in here. Oh, we've got loads of time. Keep going. There's a wonderful book about interpretation of dreams called Inner Work by Robert Johnson, which I highly recommend to anybody. He's a Jungian. And one of the things he said is when you have a dream, that's a powerful, a real powerful dream, do something physical in your life to, to memorialize that. And so your trip to Canada, that was that.

And I think there's, there's a lot to be said for that. Like here, I don't know if you can see this, you know, I had that dream and I talked about the war of art, called LARC, can you see that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, logo. Where I was, I was a character called LARGO in a dream in anyway.

So I had a little LARG code logo. I did take, but it's amazing. But that was, you know, a memorial. So I think that was what you did when you went to Canada. It was a great thing that you did. I take my hand and look at, you know, the bulging disc turned out to be one of the best things that happened to you.

I couldn't agree more. I wonder how many people, again, that a listening can try and think about what small, symbols symbolic gestures they can make to themselves and to the world around them. You know, like, how do you self define now? So previously, I would have, I remember this was only at the start of this year. I went to a party and I, we were surrounded by very, very rich British aristocracy and the guide organized London 2012 and people were asking, also, what do you do?

What do you do? What do you do? And I remember feeling almost this pride in saying, oh, well, that's a very long answer. I do this and I do this and I do this and I do this. And now I just say I'm a podcaster because that is how I chosen to self-define. And I wonder whether there's people listening who are moonlighting as a dance teacher or as a football coach or as an artist or a comedian or whatever it is, but they still self-define as job title who has an interest in doing this. Like the subtext, the subtitle.

So even that is a symbolic gesture. How do you self-define? Yeah. Yeah. I can tell you, for me, it took me probably 30 years before I could say with a straight face, not on my writer. I think a lot of times we can sort of say, well, let me, I'll just claim that identity now prematurely. I'm not so sure that works. I think sometimes it doesn't, but it certainly is great. You are a podcast, Chris, so you said it. You did it. That's great.

You got to learn it through the self-doubt and the imposter syndrome and the complete lack of confidence and everything else comes with it. Yeah. I got two questions. Anybody feel any better? I'm just starting a new book right now and I am completely terrified and I have no idea if it's the right thing. The only thing I'm telling myself is just keep going for a while. Just keep getting 80 or 90 pages and then worry about it. But I'm as terrified as anybody. And that's after 50 years. I'm going to say, after such a long half a century of writing words down and you're

starting a new book and terrified. But I think that's good. You know, I think that's the way it ought to be, you know? Didn't it show that you can even Michael Jordan when he came back after playing baseball, it came back to basketball. He was scared, you know? He was like, no, am I going to be able to do this? I have a friend who's been on the show, a very famous DJ called Christoph, supported

Eric Prids, played some of the biggest festivals in the world. And he, every set, this is a man who I've known DJing, I've watched DJ for 15 years, he's played to 20,000 people, arenas, toured with the biggest DJs on the planet. And before every set, even now, he'll have played half a thousand sets, he'll have done, he feels sick. They have a sick book, it ready from before he goes on every single time and it's because he cares, it's because he gives a shit. Yeah, I think that's good. I think that's a great sign, even though it might not be fun for him. It doesn't feel like it's fun, but it's, I think that's the way it ought to be. If you get complacent and you think I got this down, that's not good.

You've touched on something there which was a question I had. Is it possible to fully defeat resistance? And it feels like a bank account that you need to put money into every day to overcome. It feels like that's what we've never defeated. You know, it's sort of, I always, resistance really gives meaning to life just like the devil gives meaning to, you know, any pursuit of anything. If it wasn't there, you know, so it's a good thing that it is there that we do have to slay that drag in every morning. The same thing with death, right? Like the reason that life has meaning is the thing that it is there that we do have to slay that dragon every morning. The same thing with death, right? Like the reason that life has meaning is the fact that it's going to end.

Yeah. Yeah. We might not be happy about it, but yeah, it's true. That's the way it works. I have a final question for you, which I was listening to you on Lex Friedman's podcast. I highly recommend anyone who's listening to go and check that episode out. And your description was that was spiritual beings trapped in a physical form. What did you mean by that?

Well, I'd certainly, that's not original with me, you know that. But I absolutely do feel that, that we're... that life exists on two levels, you know, that there's the material level that we're on, you know, where... the everyday world where we have a body, but then there's a higher level that we are on, where the everyday world, or we have a body, but then there's a higher level above us. And the artist is trying to reach that level. So is the athlete. So is anybody that's trying to reach that sort of flowed state.

And I think that we on this level, we sort of remember that level. We can't put our finger on it, but we know that, you know, and I also think that when we see some, when we're on the material plane and we see somebody act according to the rules of the higher plane, it moves us tremendously, you know, somebody that runs into a burning building to save a child that they don't even know that, you know, that kind of thing. So, yeah, I definitely think that we are, we're spiritual,

I don't know why we're in bodies. You know, God must have some plan. You know, there must be some concept we're doing penance or we're trying to learn something or I don't know what but but definitely I always define my speed and say well what is your job and I just say I'm a servant of the muse and what I mean by that is I'm I'm serving this level I'm trying to communicate to that level and and play according to the rules of that level as much as I can. They say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person you could have been. And I suppose that gap between the physical and the astral or the literal and the spiritual, I suppose that's the gap we're all trying to close.

Yes, I think so. Oh, the gaps were all the pain, anxiety, all that comes where addiction comes from, is that gap? All the fun stuff. That's it. Yeah, yeah. And I suppose that's also the gap between amateur and professional. So all maps are. Yes, I think so.

Yeah. Today's been wonderful. When can we expect you back on to talk about this new book? Is it going to be 2021? Is it going to be 2022? I'd love to do it. The book comes out in March. I bet it'll be you bet better get a shuffle on then.

There it is. It's called a man in arms and it's a novel. Oh, wow. And so let's put it on the schedule somewhere. And they call it and they will get you. Whatever you want, sometime in the new year, that'll be great, Chris. Wonderful. Anything else that people should check out online, obviously, link to the War of R and Turning Pro will be in the show notes below.

Do you want to send people? Well, actually I do have a little talk about amateur. I do have a kind of a no frills video series going on right now on Instagram and stuff. It's called the Warrior archetype. And I'm sure if you kind of search for it's like on two days a week, like just me on camera film by my girlfriend Diana and edited by my friends Jeff and Matt. And it's two times a week and it's going to go for, I don't know, into the new year somehow. I'm just kind of talking about that. The thing that you access when you're playing cricket and when you're doing that other thing, the warrior archetype. I love it. Stephen, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure. Hey, great. It's a pleasure to meet you and let's do this again and thanks for having me, Chris. And my best to all of your viewers and listeners.

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