SOLVED with Mark Manson - What It Really Takes to Accomplish Your Dreams (ft. Steven Pressfield)

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Steven Pressfield was 52 years old when he published his first hit novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance. Prior to that, he wrote tirelessly for decades in obscurity, supporting himself with odd jobs along the way. After writing several more novels and movie scripts, he distilled all of his wisdom into The War of Art, his now-famous treatise on the grinding process of creativity. Now in his 80s, Steven looks back on his work and life with a clear-eyed view of what it truly means to make it as a creative professional. In this episode, he explains why he persisted writing for decades with little to show for it, how he compensated for his own lack of talent, why creating great art is actually a grueling war fought within the artist’s own mind, and much, much more. Enjoy. Steven’s new book, The Daily Pressfield All of Steven Pressfield's Books Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person:markmanson.net/breakthrough Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose. dot app. Stephen Pressfield is your favorite author's favorite author. No one describes the emotional struggle of the creative process and the terror of presenting your work to the world in as much detail and depth as Stephen has. If I had to guess, his seminal book, the war of art, is on more bookshelves of writers, musicians, producers, and artists.

than almost any other book. Stephen has a long and story career with many winding and twisting paths. When he was young, Pressfield was an advertising copywriter, a school teacher, a tractor trailer driver, a bartender, an oil field roused about, a mental hospital attendant, and a fruit picker. He wrote tirelessly during this period for over 20 years before he got his first break with some screenwriting jobs in Hollywood in the 80s. But after working on a bunch of scripts for B&C movies to pay the bills, he broke through with his first novel, the legend of Bagra Vance at the age of 50. It was only then, after nearly three decades of struggle, that his career finally took off.

In today's episode, you're going to learn from Stephen about how persistence isn't actually about persistence. We discuss how the skill of something is usually not actually the skill of something, i.e. the thing that makes a writer or singer or artist great usually isn't simply how they write, paint, or sing. It is the skills around how they write, paint, or sing. We talk about career longevity, and suffering for your creativity,

creativity, and whether that's a myth or not. We talk about how turning pro is such an important concept, not just for aspiring artists, but for people who have big goals around anything in life in general. And of course, we talk about the capital R resistance, that mental and emotional barrier that we all create for ourselves and stands between us and our deepest desires. The resistance rears its head in all of us, particularly when we're on the cusp of some important breakthrough or change. Stephen has written multiple books on the resistance, and the resistance concept is central to much of his work. So I guess I will stop resisting this episode and just get on with it. This is Stephen Presfield.

Bro. Do you even podcast like bro? This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Steve, it's good to see you again. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for coming on. I want to talk about persistence because, you know, know, just to do a little bit of math here, you spent all of your 20s and most of your 30s attempting the right novels failing. You came to Hollywood, tried the right screenplays.

Your writing career didn't even really get going until you were. Yeah, it was 52 when Legend of Bagger Vance got published. So your hit came at 52. Even just being able to like, it sounds like pay rent didn't happen until around 40. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that is decades of persistence. Like, talk to me about what the mindset was during that time. Like, how did you, how did you keep going for that many years? I just couldn't do anything else and be happy. You know, from time to time, I took jobs in advertising back in New York, you know, because he could make some money. But at the end of the day, I would be so depressed that I had to go home and try to write something for real. And I, and, um, and, um, the trying to write real stuff was what kind of kept me sane. So I just really knew there was no other thing for me to do. And then like when I when I got to Hollywood, then you actually, I was actually making money. I could pay the rent. And I felt like I was learning that I was on the path. So even

though I hadn't succeeded in any real sense, I felt like, okay, I'm, you know, I'm in graduate school or whatever it is and I'm working towards it. So, you know, it wasn't, it really, it's Sounds hard that long period of time when you look at it from the outside. But it really wasn't. I just didn't have any other choice. And it was fun along the way. It's funny because I imagine you get some of this too. I often get emails from 22-year-olds, you know, saying, I've been trying to do this for three years.

And, you know, it's too late. Like, I'm too old. It's never going to work. Yeah. And, of course, I, you know, I'm 40, so I chuckle. Yeah. I'm like, oh, yeah, so old. I'm just, I wonder what your perspective on, on people's, the power to keep going through

adversity and doing it for the right reasons, I suppose, right? Like doing it because writing the things you genuinely love, not because it's going to get you a book deal, but because it's what keeps you saying. Yeah. I mean, I think if you're a dancer, you know, you're a dancer, you know, you're a, body's breaking, but you want to dance, right? That's the thing. If you're a, if you're a singer, if you're a musician, you know, it's in your fingers, you want to do it. Yeah. I think it has to be a real calling and not, you know, you're doing it for fame or together. But I don't,

but I don't know today, if anybody could really have a sort of a career like I did, where you did, it took so long, you know, I don't know how people do it today. But I guess it's true. It never, it's life. That's the way it is. You do, I mean, it does happen. I do think it happens more in writing than other art forms. A long, lined up. Yeah, yeah, like a long buildup over a long period.

Like I think E.L. James, the 50 Shades of Grey Woman, I think she was in her 50s or 60s when she wrote it and it was her first book. You do hear stories, but it is, like, what stands out to me with your answer to that is is that it just sounds like you would have done it anyway. Yeah, I would have done it anyway. It wasn't for the money.

I certainly wasn't making any money. Yeah. You know, I read a thing about when Cormac McCarthy died. I love to read obituaries. Yeah. Because it's a great sort of, you know, biography of a person. That apparently he, I don't know if this happens anymore, but he had written like before he broke through with, I guess, all the pretty horses

was his kind of breakthrough. He had written like four or five, like really good novels that didn't sell for shit. Yeah. But apparently he had either an agent or a publisher that kind of protected him and threw enough money at him to kind of keep him going. And it was like, you know, this was like a 20-year deal before he finally broke through. So, but I'm not so sure that maybe that happens more than we realize today. Yeah.

Where somebody is brought along by another mentor or somebody that has a little bit of power. You popularize this concept of the resistance with a capital R. Generally, it's the resistance that we feel towards not just creatively expressing ourselves, but like positive changes in our lives. I'm curious. So you, according to my count, this might be wrong. You have done five Hollywood screenplays, 10 novels, 11 nonfiction books. I'm curious, when is resistance shown up the most for you in your career? and how did you fight through it?

Oh, wow. What a question. I mean, resistance is sort of omnipresent. I mean, the worst that it ever was for me was at the beginning. When I first sat down and tried to write something where it just, resistance just completely defeated me. You know, my own self-sabotage. I couldn't finish anything.

I had a hell of a hard time starting anything. And resistance, you know, is a real diabolical, ever-changing protein, intelligent force that will fake... Can we use a profanity here? Of course. This is the fuck podcast. That will fake the fuck out of you, you know? I've been doing this now for almost 50 years.

Yeah. And it never goes away. It never diminishes. It's always subtle, always nuanced, always devious. So I face it, you know, all the way through a project, beginning, middle end, and in between. Can you give me an example of how? maybe how it showed up earlier in your career, like maybe a story of a way you sabotaged yourself. And then I'd be curious, how is it shown up recently with, say, your most recent book or one of your recent books?

All right, I'll plunge you in right to the deep end right away. The first book that I tried to write, I was like 22 or 23 years old. I had quit a job in advertising. I was married. I was a young guy with a young wife in New York City. And I wrote for like two years and got right close to the end, a great. place when resistance will strike, right? You're afraid to put something out there to be. So the bottom line was I cheated on my wife in such a way that she would find out about it. In other words,

I really acted out in psychological terms to just blow up my life and my wife's life and the book so that I wouldn't have to face that. So that was pure resistance. I had no concept that there was such a thing, but it was this negative force of self-sabot. to stop, you know, me from finishing what I was trying to do. I'm glad you bring up the wife thing because, because, you know, going back through the War of Art, which at this point I think I've gone through three or four times, you know, it's every five years or so, I'll go back and kind of go through it again. It's like a nice reminder. I do too. But I'm glad you bring that up because when I was kind of going back through it, to me, the concept of the resistance, it can apply.

apply so well in personal relationships. Yeah, definitely. Family relationships, romantic relationships. I think there's something, there's definitely, it's very much tied to like a sense of vulnerability. You know, like writing a novel is such a vulnerable, or any book, any creative work is such a vulnerable process. Like you are putting such a deep and personal part of yourself out into the world. And that's fucking terrifying.

I think in the same way, a marriage or a relationship or, you know, having intimacy with somebody, it's very similar and that it's terrifying because you're making yourself vulnerable. You're exposing like a very deep personal part of yourself and making it possible to be hurt. Yes. And so the resistance is like it's like the protective shield that shows up, you know? I mean, my sort of rule of thumb of that is that resistance. will strike anytime you're trying to move from a lower level to a higher level. Politically, morally, you're trying to take a, you know, a stand on something like that. Or, you know, in terms of giving to the world or risking anything, that's when it'll strike.

It isn't necessarily only creative. Right, right. So, like you say, it is, you're getting vulnerable. You're going to, you're going to dare to stand out from the crowd, say something that'll put you. And in a relationship, too, when you have that hard conversation, you know, that, you know, then resistance will really tend to to sabotage that and make you act out in some crazy way. Yeah. So you don't have to have that conversation.

Yeah. Yeah, I know how that goes. It's funny. So this is super recent. I actually just, my wife and I had a big fight about a week ago. And it was kind of unresolved. And she's Brazilian. So she's like, you know, explosions everywhere.

You know, it's like emotions going everywhere. But, you know, I'm a classic middle America Anglo-Saxon male. You know, it's like I just like bottle like just suppress, deny, you know, everything's fine. Nothing's wrong. But it was funny because a couple days went by and it was like, it's like, we really need to resolve. Like we need to pick this conversation back up and deal with it. And we're not.

Like, and I wasn't, like, I was finding reasons to always, you know, oh, I got to go do this thing. So I finally, after a couple days, I guess you could say, I felt the resistance. And the resistance was saying, oh, well, I need to go back to the studio. And like, ah, well, I've got this work thing. And, like, this friend's in town, you know, and we'll do it tomorrow. We'll do it tomorrow. And then finally I realized, I actually sat down the right, a letter to her. Wow.

Because that felt easier than actually like standing in front of her and having the conversation. And I've done this a few times throughout my marriage. And so I sit there and I write this letter to her and just pour everything out on the page, which I guess it like feels more natural for me. So I've got the letter. I print it out and then I stick it in the desk drawer and like go back to my like as if nothing happened. And like another two days go by and I told her. like, I wrote you a letter and she's like, well, give it to me. I'm like, uh, I'll give it to you tomorrow. It's just, so it's funny because it's like the resistance. It's like this amoeba that

just like, you know, fills the vacuum. Like, no matter which way you pivot, it pivots with you. Yeah. You know, and it's the only way through it is, is through it. Like, you have to meet it head on. Yeah. So have you given your wife a letter? I did. I did. Actually, what happened? Last night. We actually had an amazing conversation. Good for you. But it was terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. I have found, and I'm curious what you think about this,

like I have found that when dealing with resistance, it's sometimes it's too intimidating to just try to take it all on at once. Like I've often found it simpler to just kind of chip away at it. You know, like a book, for example, if you think about this big magnum opus that you want to write, often that's so intimidating that you just never start. And so I've always found it useful to just think about, okay, let's write one good page, you know?

And like not worry about anything past that. And then like once you have one good page, it's like, okay, now let's write another good page and like not worry about anything past that. Have you found that true in your life? Absolutely. In fact, I just was reading, I'm reading a book now called 4,000,

weeks. Have you heard of it? Yes. You know, it's sort of, it masquerades as a time management book, but it's much deeper than that. Basically it says, we mortals cannot manage time, you know. Right. And one of the points that, that he was making is in a long-term project, like a novel or something like that, that people flame out and resistance to defeats them when they think, oh, I got to write this goddamn thing in three weeks, you know, let me charge. Whereas when the person that succeeds and this is deaf for whatever reason this is how I work for this is one area I haven't had problem with is being really patient and saying this is going to take me two years you know I'm only going to get you know another inch yeah today you know if it's like a like an infantryman that's

going to you know get one trench closer to the enemy so I am patient that when it does work yeah you know to take the pressure off because it is a marathon you know and and yeah so I'm I'm I with you completely. Just biting. All you can do in one day is what you can do in one day. Right. In physical training, the same thing. You're not going to become, you know, a decathlon champion today. You know, it's going to be whatever you're going to do. It's going to take a year or two year or the rest of your life. Yeah. It's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scarious Hell.

Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-Fi Vision comes at the best show streaming right now. We're running out of time and we still don't know the rules. Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From Binge All Episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. For sure. Let me say one thing, Mark, that flip side of your story about your wife.

Yeah. I have sort of a different thing with my girlfriend. Okay. Which I've never told her. If she watches this and don't give me a hard time. where I found myself bringing up all kinds of grievances in my head about her. Ah, there, this, that, the other thing, right? And thinking, you know, I got a really, you know, face.

And then I suddenly realized that whatever I was working on in the book world, whatever I was writing, I was really afraid of the next step. And this, of, you know, deflecting it. If I had done that, if I had opened my mouth, which I did not, Yeah. That would have fucked me up completely, not to mention my girlfriend. And that would have sabotaged the work that I was doing. So when I said to my, I said, this is resistance.

This is my own resistance to facing what I'm afraid to do on the page. Right. And immediately, all the grievances went away. And I thought, oh, this is just bullshit that I'm making up in my head. So resistance is going to work the flip way too. The other way, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.

One thing that I have learned throughout my career is that is like learning my own patterns. Ah, yeah. Like the, the mental gymnastics that my resistance plays. So it's, I think in the, if there's anything that gets easier, it's just recognizing those patterns. So the things that trip me up on book number one by like book number two and three, I'm like, oh, I remember when this happened the other time, I'm not going to play that game with myself. You know, you can like, can you give me a specific thing, Mark, that you were thinking up? You know, there's this thing in, and, and, and, and screenwriting about the second act, you know, being like where everything falls apart. I, for me, with every single book I've written, it's always chapter three. And I don't know why.

Chapter three out of how many? Doesn't matter. It's always chapter three. I'd say it's generally around 10 to 15,000 words. And I think it's the same reason the act two thing happens, which is the initial idea is very clear in my head and exciting. You know, so, Chapter one is always exciting. There's always kind of this honeymoon phase you have with any project. And then that carries through to chapter two. In my experience, or just generally how I do chapters, by the time I get to chapter three, that's when you find out if the idea really works or not.

And, of course, if it's not working, there's all sorts of, like, frustration and denial and justification, rationalization, you know. And it's, I have spent probably more time working on a chapter three of a book than like half the rest of the book combined. And eventually, by the time I got to my third book, I just kind of realized like, okay, this is a thing that seems to just keep happening with me. And what's your answer to it? What was your solution to? My answer was, don't get so emotionally invested. You know, it used to be the first couple times it happened.

It was like, oh, my God, my book is a failure. Like, it doesn't work. no, like, I need to start over from scratch. And a couple cases, I did start over from scratch. Whereas by the time I, you know, I got a few books in, I'm like, okay, it's, everything's going to feel like it's, it falls apart soon. So like, be ready for it. Ah.

And then we'll, we'll deal with it when we get there. And, like, we'll kind of go through it logically and not overreact and not make a huge deal about it. Interesting. Yeah. That's exactly what I, what I do. My exact same experience. And, you know, I would sort of analogize that, like, if we were football players,

if we were in the NFL, we're going to go through a season, right? We've got the preseason, that's kind of exciting. Then we get into the first few games and we go, oh, this is pretty, you know, it's exciting. We're getting somewhere. And then you're six games in and you're three and three. Yeah. And right, you go, oh, fuck. You know, the season could go over the cliff right now.

And you're really sort of faced with the stage where it becomes, the season becomes a grind. Yeah. Right. It's another eight more games until you get anywhere near the postseason. And you get that, you know, that choice. And so for me, it's like in a book, it's like, just keep doing it. Keep going. This is where tedium, you know, it's right, you know, you just got to keep grinding week after week. And, and like you say, it's very important not to panic and not to overreact

to that. So it's really interesting that. Thanks for saying that. It helped me a lot. Yeah. I feel like I'm not alone. I believe, like, one of the times that we hung out together, I vaguely remember you mentioning that you, you often struggle with the last chapter. Am I, remember that correctly? I think everybody does. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you don't. It's funny because I often have, like, the last chapter is often like very clear.

No problem. From when I start, I kind of know where I'm going to end. I mean, I do too. But still when you get to it, I find that's the one, the last two or three chapters, let's say out of 45 chapters, I put them off. I've like sort of maybe it's a good thing because it's fresh when you do it. But those are, you know, real terror kind of strikes then. And also for me, it's now you're close to the point where you're actually going to ship it.

Like in Seth Godin's phrase, you know, you're going to expose it to the world. And then it's like, that's always been, for me, a real hard moment. Interesting. One of the things that I've noticed, too, and I, again, I think this is analogous to relationships and just things in your personal life. Like, as I've become more experienced creatively, I've realized that the resistance is actually a sign of a good thing because it means I'm doing something novel and important to me. You know, like I've noticed that when I don't feel any resistance, it's because I'm usually just kind of on autopilot creatively. And I'm not very emotionally invested in what I'm making. And so, you know, I don't know.

I feel like there's a, it's something I say to my team sometimes. It's like the fact that you're nervous about putting it up means it's probably good. Like that's been my experience is that like the things, the things that are good are like, I've never not been nervous about them. And then the things that aren't good, I'm often not nervous about them. Yeah, that's been my experience too. It's like we were talking, you and I before we got on the camera here, about as you were moving in your business in a different direction, that it was a challenge and it was difficult. And you were sort of looking for that, you know?

And I feel the same way. I mean, I think if I'm not racked by self-doubt through whatever part of the process, something's wrong. Yeah. You know, and there's something that I know I've said this before, but I'll say it, I'll say it again here because maybe it'd be helpful. My theory about resistance is that resistance always comes second, by which I mean that the dream or the project is first. In the sense that there would be no resistance if there wasn't a dream. If there wasn't a book or something like that. And the bigger the dream and the more important it is, I say this to myself all the time, the more resistance I'm going to feel.

So like when I have that self-doubt or when you say something is really challenging, and for anybody on your team or whatever, that's a good sign. Yeah. Because it means that whatever it is that's creating that resistance is something important. Otherwise, it would be, you know, big dream equals big resistance. Little dream equals little resistance. So big resistance is a good sign to me. It doesn't make it any more fun.

You know, it makes it really hard, in my opinion. But it is encouraging. And I've certainly had many moments where I'm freaking out over something. And I'll just say to myself, wait a minute, you know, the fact that there's so much, you know, blowback coming at you is a good sign. So relax, you know, and just keep plugging. Yeah. It's funny. I'm just imagining somebody who dreams about having a creative career listening to this. When I think about my younger self, my image of, when I was young, I wanted to be a musician. And my image of being a musician was very much a fantasy. It had nothing to do with what is actually involved with being a musician.

But it's just, it's all fun, glory, attention, accolades. Yeah, yeah. Whereas the reality is much of what we're talking about. It's like a very emotionally demanding and exhausting process that is still fun and invigorating. But it's also, like, it is extremely taxing in a way that I think, like, I guess, most people don't. Don't assume to be true. Yeah. I mean, I'm the same way, you know, I thought the same thing.

But it's definitely the process is not cinematic. Yeah. It's not, there's no glamour, right? It's you're grinding a lot of the time. Like Robert Green talks about this, the tedium is a big part. You know, if you're a pianist, you've got to do scales. You got to do it. How long does it take to master, you know, Beethoven's 9th or something like that, right?

And the only way to do it is, you know, just do it over and over and over. And in many ways, that's the difference between a pro and an amateur. An amateur will fold. And I certainly folded many, many times before I sort of realized this is, this is what it is. You know, you signed up for this and you don't want to do anything else. So, you know, shut the fuck up and do it, you know. And in its own crazy way, it is rewarding. Yeah. Because you do feel like, you know, these are the trenches. We're in the trenches now. And it's a war of attrition. Yeah. So speaking of which, you have another book here called Turning Pro. I'm glad you

mentioned that. I love this concept just because, and again, this is something that I find applicable both within creative work and also outside of creating work. But can you describe briefly just what is your concept of Turning Pro and what is the significance of it? Okay. I certainly think in my own struggles that, like, what? when I blew up that book I was just telling about and other things. And I asked myself, what am I doing wrong? Yeah. And I think the answer for me, because was I'm acting like an amateur and not like a professional.

And an amateur is really kind of a weekend warrior, right? When an amateur, if you have an amateur attitude, you hit adversity, you fold. Yeah. You know? And, of course, a professional will not fold. And so there's certain things that a professional will do in anything, even just a regular job. You show up every day.

You show up on time. You stay there the whole day. You don't quit at lunchtime or anything like that. You do the best you can. When you run into troubles, you dig deep. You know, you solve the problem. You work the problem and you solve it. Another thing about a professional is a professional plays hurt, like athletes.

I always think about Kobe or Michael, Jordan or something or, but there's so many Tom Brady as kind of a consummate professionals. Like an amateur, if you get hurt, they'll, it's like, okay, I got to take, you know, some time off. If you're a pro, you just have to, you just do it. And that way of thinking really helped me a lot because it took any judgment or self-judgment. I didn't say to myself, oh, you're weak, you're lazy, you're crazy, you're sick. I just said, you know, you're thinking like an amateur. And the other thing is it's free turning pro.

It doesn't mean you have to say, okay, I'm only going to work for money from now on, right? But you can just flip a switch in your head and say, in fact, I had a friend, a woman, who took up golf at age 35 or something like that. And she'd been doing it for a little while. And she said, let's meet. We'll go down to whatever it was and we got together. And she came out. She'd been playing for, you know, like a month or two months. She looked like an LPGA pro.

She had like the Primo clubs, you know, and she said, you know, I just thought of it this way. I'm not going to be an idiot that's out there hacking. Even though I'm not good, I'm going to think of myself as a professional and I'm going to take lessons. I'm going to build in a program that I'm going to work on my short game, blah, blah, blah. And I thought, wow, that is really smart. I never heard of anybody doing that. So it is a great flip of the switch to just kind of think of yourself. as a professional instead of an amateur.

I love this idea. I've written in relationships, and not just relationships, but like major life decisions, you know, I think people often wait to feel good about something before committing to it.

And I've often written that, you commit to something and then that's what makes you start to love it. Yeah, yeah. I think it's true with people. I think it's true with occupations. I think it's true with choosing a place to live. I had this conversation.

Actually, this book, reviewing the book helped me in a conversation recently. I was talking to somebody, a friend who she's wanted to start a business for a long time and she's saved up a bunch of money and she's got ideas and she keeps dabbling.

Like she'll test something here or she'll like hire somebody and do a little project here. And she keeps giving up. and one of the things she told me is she said, I'm wasting money. Like, it didn't go the way I expected I'm wasting time and I'm wasting money. And I told her, I was like, look, like,

fuck all that. First of all, like, go, you know, sign up, do your LLC paperwork, open a bank account, put your savings in that bank account, give yourself six months, and then like set a schedule and just work the schedule, like pretend the business already exists

and then give yourself like a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time. And then if the money runs out and the time runs out and the business isn't, you're still not making any money. Like, okay, well, you gave it your, a legitimate shot. But if you're going to just sit here and, like, dip your toe in the water over and over, like, nothing's going to happen, you know? So there's something about formalizing, like, the professional mindset of, like, building time into your schedule, building a place in your house, you know, setting aside. if it involves money, setting aside money, and maybe a separate bank account.

Yeah. Like, I just think there's, like, so much mental utility to doing that. I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, the gods noticed that. Yeah. You know, they look down, they say, you know, Mark's got an office, he's got a payroll, he's got a sign outside on the door.

You know, I'm going to give him, I send him a customer. I'm going to send him a few ideas. Yeah. I think that it's truly, it sounds like I'm being facetious, but there is a sort of a law of the universe. I don't know what it is.

Yeah. That when we commit to something like that, things start to happen in some crazy way. The universe does respond. If you were to make a pie chart. Okay. Hear me out. If you were to make a pie chart of the importance of hard work, skill, and talent, like, what would that look like? Hard work would be 75%.

Okay. Talent would be 15% and skill would be 10%. Because I think that like if you read something that I had written when I was 22 or 42, you'd say, this is dog shift, you know. But I flatter myself that, you know, finally in my 50s I was able to produce some stuff that was readable, you know. And that is purely a process of hard work. and learning the skill and getting better rather than talent. I mean, I would say for me, I don't have very much talent at all. Yeah.

But you can get better. One of the things that, like something, an idea that I've been noticing or thinking about a lot more is that often the actual skill of something is not what people think the skill is. And let me give you an example. So like, well, what do you mean? Well, with writers, it's, it's easy. Like, the example for us is easy, right? It's like, the skill is less the writing. It's more the editing and revision, right?

Like, it's the difference, everybody's first draft. Everybody's first draft is garbage. What actually distinguishes like a great piece of writing from a mediocre piece of writing, other than the idea is just how well you're able to go through and polish and compress and, and, you know, make it sing, as they say. Like, I would personally argue that I think revision and editing yourself is a more important skill than just pure putting words on the page. I don't know if you would agree with that or not.

But, like, when I think about music, I know so many, especially, like, I went to music school. I studied music. I initially aspired to be a professional musician. I knew so many insanely talented musicians. I still know some insanely talented musicians who never made it. And who in many cases were, quote, unquote,

the best musician, you know, of our class or of our cohort. But they didn't make it. And quote unquote, worst musicians did make it in the industry. And what I, I've kind of discovered as I've gotten older is that the skill in the music industry isn't actually the pure musicianship.

Like the people you hear on the radio aren't the best singers in the world. They're not the best songwriters in the world. They're not, you know, they're not the most talented at their instrument. it's they have come across some sort of stylistic or creative there's something unique about them creatively that they've put together that the combination of many things works in a way that it doesn't for most people and like for instance I have a friend she is an amazing singer like just gorgeous voice but like her like the style of music that she does the audience values other things

more than just purely the quality of the voice right there's like the image and the energy and the vibe and the stage presence and all this stuff like in in that genre of music that that is actually the skill that gets you paid

and so I just I guess where I'm going with this idea is that often like the skill that gets you paid in a creative field is often not the skill that you initially assume that it is. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Yeah. And it's, I guess when I was young, that was very disappointing to me.

But now that I'm older, I'm like, you know, it's just, I guess it's, it's learning to think about the right things, you know, in what you're doing. I would actually put a different set of skills in there. Not that I don't agree with you 100%. But then there's the sort of the skill of how do you do it over a long period of time? Yes. How do you manage your emotions? Forgetting about the music itself.

Totally. How do you handle rejection and come back again, right? That I think are the skills that, well, nobody teaches you that, number one. You don't learn that in school. Yep. And I think a lot of the people that do have tremendous talent and don't make it, that's why they don't have. And a lot of it is self-promotion too, you know. How do you go on another audition and another audition and learn to present yourself in such a way that people will respond to it?

Yeah. Or if you're a writer and you're basically alone in a room, how do you weather the various crises that come up? been a two-year project, right, that would, you know, knock somebody else off their footing and make them, make them quit. That is such a good point. The emotional process, I realize that too, like, there are a couple, like, my roommate in music school, to this day is one of the most talented musicians I've ever been around, ever heard in my life.

And, but it was funny, he lacked focus. He would start one project and then get excited by this other project and then get excited by this other project. And so he was never able to go like all in on one thing for many, many years. And I would say that's a form of resistance. Yeah. You know, that's sort of whatever, you know, going from one or another. And so even though he was, you know, musically just off the charts in terms of talent, the, like the emotional side of it wasn't lined up. I'm sure this is true of athletes too.

Yeah. There must be so many people who are like incredibly fast runners or whatever. Yeah. But some who is the one that winds up being Hussein Bolt? There probably are 10 guys out there that could, they could beat them. But they flamed out somewhere along the way. Yeah. It's interesting.

If you follow college sports, you run into that. I bet. My dad is just obsessed with college football. And so very frequently there are stories of like just this insanely talented 18 year old. Yeah. who can't stop partying, doesn't show up the workouts, you know. Yeah. Johnny Mansell, Johnny football.

Exactly. That's a perfect example. Yeah. Yeah. Do you believe there is this perception or I guess conventional wisdom that to create great art, you have to live this varied, dramatic, tumultuous life. And, you know, you do. definitely had a lot of wide variety of life experiences. Your bio has this list of all these

odd jobs that you worked. And, you know, I had a wild and crazy 20s, lived all over the world. Do you think that's necessary? Do you think you have to, like, go experience a bunch of wild hardship and make catastrophic mistakes? I certainly think some of that helps. Yeah. But I mean, didn't Emily Dickinson like never leave her room or something like, you know. Yeah, I do think obviously you have to see a few things and, but I think at least for fiction writing, it's coming from the imagination a lot of the time, you know. And I think we also, all of us know a lot more than we think we do and can access things that we don't think we can. I mean, Arthur Golden that wrote memoirs of a geisha or somebody Golden wrote, you know, a male Jewish guy, right?

A Western guy was able to put himself in the mind of a Japanese geisha in the 1930s and 20s. Yeah. And where did that come from? He didn't do that, you know? So the imagination is a big thing. I think, yeah, I don't know if you have to do too much of that. stuff but just enough yeah so you don't so you don't damage yourself you know you don't want to get over the you know I also think there's there's a tendency to like glamorize

artists who have suffered yeah yeah you know the look at like the Kirk Cobain's and yeah the you know Amy Winehouses and the I think there's a faulty assumption that it's like oh you you kind of have to be that way but this comes back to the skill's not the skill, right? Like, Kirk Cobain wasn't emotionally equipped to have a full career. Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of those kind of like emotionally unstable artists flame out like that frequently. Yeah.

On the other hand, to take the other side, I was thinking of a mentor of mine named Paul Rink that we were once talking about a guy that we both knew. who had been like a merchant seaman he'd been in the war, he was in jail, and was finally, was succeeding as a writer and was really found his groove in his 60s or something like that. And I asked, I said to Paul, how do you explain it? The guy's been through so much crap and he can still do it. And Paul said something like suffering has never hurt any writer that I know with. Yeah.

And so there's something to that in a way too. Sure. as long as it's not so much that breaks your heart and you can't do anything. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's probably some combination of the hardship and the struggle plus a certain amount of like self-awareness and ability to like communicate. Yeah. Like I'll speak it from my own self for a minute here.

Sure. Gates of Fire is a book about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, right? It's a and so I've never fought with a spear and a shield. I don't know anything about that. It's all entirely, you know, imaginary. But yet my time in the Marine Corps gave me a little bit of a sense of what, you know, men in groups are like and what that sort of thing is. But then the imagination has to take it the last 90 yards, you know? Right, right.

Yeah. So you've used a couple war analogies just in our conversation already. You're a veteran, former Marine. Most of your fiction, all of your fiction is military. Pretty much it's all of, you know, war related. Yeah. And then even your nonfiction books talking about the creative process is there's so much language around conflict, battle, war, you know, resistance. I'm curious, how did your time in the military inform your.

your creativity or teach you about creativity. I mean, I'm not sure it really did too much, but I certainly see life as a battle. And each day as a battle, you know, in like the first chapter of the Daily Pressfield, my newest book, said that the title of the chapter is, resistance wakes up with me, which it does. And it sort of, you know,

it's like people ask me maybe, or anybody, when in your day do you first experience resistance? And I always say the minute I open my eyes, right? So in other words, the way I experience a day is I wake up and there's like an enemy immediately, you know, and that enemy is trying to make me stay in bed, a fuck off any way I can, right? Like Arnold Schwarzenegger has a thing when he talks about, I just saw this on Instagram or something, of like when he wakes up in the morning and he opens his eyes,

his motto is don't think. He says, get out of bed. Get out of bed and go to the gym. If you start to think, that's the voice of resistance. So that's the enemy that's going to try to undermine you and try to sabotage you. And to me, that's just the fabric of reality. Maybe you don't experience life like that, but I do. I feel like I have to win each day.

If I don't, you know, give me another four days and I'll be an alcoholic. It won't take very long, right? I'll go spiral down something. Sure. So I guess that's why. I don't even really know why so many of my books have been war themed. I'm just pulled to that. Yeah.

Because it's a metaphor for the way I view life. It is clearly so helpful for thousands and thousands of people to. I mean, I find it interesting in that it's almost like your fiction is kind of about external conflict. And then the nonfiction is about the internal conflict. Exactly. I think that's just how I look at it. I'll give you another metaphor that's the opposite of a military metaphor for a creative person. And that is the metaphor of a mother.

That if you think about an artist or a creative person, we're bringing something new into the world. We're pregnant with something, right? And while that thing is gestating inside of us, it's everything. Yes. Right? Our ego, we don't care about ourselves. Everything is to protect this new life that's inside of us. And a mother, like compare a mother to a warrior, a mother will run into a burning building

to save her child, right? She'll pick up a Buick with her bare hands. Right. And even once the child is born and is out there, it doesn't stop. The mother is still, you know, protective. And everything that she does is to enhance, you know, that child. So that's another great way, I think, more of a feminine way to think of this. the creative wars, you know?

I've thought about that quite a bit as like, you know, the things you create as children. And it's like, none of them turn out perfect, but you still love them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Equally. Yeah. And the world accepts some more than others. Yeah. But, like, you know, you still love them all equally.

It's a fun way to look at it. You often talk about the concept of a muse, but like in the ancient, Greek sense. And you also mentioned the, like, trusting the mystery. Like, what does that mean? Let me just describe for our listeners or viewers of who the muses were, just as a start. They were Greek goddesses, nine sisters, the daughters of Zeus and Nemasini, which means memory. And their job was to inspire artists. And there was a muse of. epic poetry, amuse of dance, amuse of music, blah, blah, blah, right? And the, um, sort of the classic image of the, of the goddess is Beethoven or somebody at the piano, and this sort of

spectral female figure is at his ear, kind of whispering in his ear, you know, da-da-da-da-da-da, you know, that kind of thing. So I think that I'm, when you, when you work in any kind of creative art for a period of time, you have to, you realize that the ideas that you have are not coming from you. I'm sure you would agree with this, Mark, right? They're coming from somewhere else, right? And we're just sort of the channel that they come through. So that idea of these goddesses of the muse, you know, flying around overhead really resonates with me. And I really sort of feel that my job as, as an artist, is to do. do whatever the muse tells me to, and to be open to any impulse or intuition or idea

that's coming in. From another dimension of reality, maybe it's your unconscious. I think it's somewhere out there in some other place. Sure. But that's so, you know, as I'm working on one project, and you're probably the same way, part of me is always looking out for the next one, you know, side of my, and I'm waiting for the phone call you know, from the muse, you know? Yeah.

Or the radio signal or whatever. And when it comes, then I feel like, ah, that's great. Thank you, you know. Yeah. And my job is just to serve that idea. That's how I, that's how I sort of view the whole creator. I didn't always. Sure.

But I do now. It's interesting because it's similar to the, you know, the waking up thing. It's like, don't think too hard about it. Yeah. When it shows up, don't judge it. Don't analyze it. Don't obsess over it. Like it's just kind of like, it knows a lot better than we do.

Right. We may think we know, but we don't. Yeah. For me, it shows up a lot like sometimes I'll have an idea. I mean, I have ideas all the time and I'll be like, oh, cool, that's an idea. But it's sometimes there are ideas that just persist. They like, it's like they get lodged in my brain. And I mean, some of them have been there for years.

What do you do with ideas, Mark? Do you like write them down or dictate them into your phone or how does it, how does it, how does it work for you? I will take, I'll take some notes, you know, so I have various, I've actually got a folder in my Google Drive of just called book ideas. And there's probably a dozen little documents there. With anything, I do too, by the way. Okay. Yeah. So within it's anything from, I mean, some of them are literally just like three sentences, three bullet points and maybe a title. Whereas others are like more fleshed out, outlaw. lines, examples, you know, even full paragraphs written.

But it's interesting because some of them, it's like a lot, most, I'd say most ideas that come, they're gone within a day or two. Every once in a while, you'll get one that sticks around for a while and maybe feels really pertinent for like a couple months or maybe a year. And then every once in a while, there's a, you know, probably could count on one hand. One will show up and it just sticks year after year. every year until you make it.

And then it goes away. And then you don't want to have anything to do with it anymore. And then you're like, I'm so sick of you. Yeah. I find sometimes that an idea will come to me and I'll reject it immediately. You know, oh, that's a dumb idea. You know, but I might write it down. Sure.

And maybe three months later or six months later, I'll look at it and I'll go, wow, that is a good idea. And then I will start, you know, to get some traction, you know, and I'll start to actually, let me put a little time in on this to see where it goes. Yeah. Yeah, but a lot of times, for me, at least, the first flush of an idea is, like, it's rejection of the call. You know, they, I'll blow it off right away. Oh, that's a dumb idea.

And then later, I'll go, yeah, it was a pretty good idea, you know? It's almost like a screening mechanism, right? Because it's like the bad ideas will go away. Like, they won't come back. But like the good ones will come back. Yeah. It's like the muse keeps knocking on the window, you know. Don't forget that one, you know.

Yeah, yeah. This is a good one. Yeah. Where do you go for inspiration? I watch movies. I read books. I'm always trying to steal something. Yeah.

That's another thing. Seriously, this is a great lesson from advertising. Sure. I remember as I'm a junior copywriter and I'm working with an old-time art director, a guy named Zoltan Medvecchi, a great mentor to me. And I remember we, we, we have a junior. had an assignment, we had to do an ad for something. And he immediately pulls out his trays of art books and old stuff. And I said, what are you doing, Med? What do you do? And he says,

I'm stealing. And everybody does this, right? You look for, oh, that's a look we want. But he would always say, it's not stealing if you put a spin on it, if you give it a little bit of a twist. So I always try to steal from anywhere I possibly. I mean, the legend of bagger Vance is the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, just stolen, lock, stock, and barrel, and just translated from a war environment to a golf environment. Yeah, that's wild. That's totally wild. The advertising thing is, it's so interesting. First of all, there's so many successful authors who have backgrounds in advertising. Yeah, true. It's really, it's really interesting. And directors, Ridley Scott, you know, so on and so forth, yeah. That's a, I'm not surprised, you know, I, I studied

copywriting when I was fairly young. I studied it because I was just trying to sell shit on the internet. So I also wasn't particularly excited or passionate about it. But it's when young, when aspiring writers reach out to me, it's often a common piece of advice that I give to them is learn basic copywriting. Just because it is a good piece of advice. Because copywriting teaches you to think about attention and hook you. people. And I think as an author or a writer of any sort, ultimately what you're doing is you're

grabbing people's attention. Yeah, exactly. And you have to think like, you know, what's the best way to open this chapter? Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's the best way to proceed from this idea and this idea? And I've just found it like overwhelmingly useful in my career. Actually, I have a book, I don't know if it's in this thing called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit. Are you familiar with that one? And that really was sort of the lesson of advertising because everybody hates advertising. Yes. And nobody wants to read it. So if you're writing an ad or do or a storyboarding at TV commercial, you have to ask yourself,

and the teeth of that resistance, the people that hate what I'm about to sell, preparation age or something, how can I engage them? You know? Yeah. You've got to come up with the most clever thing you possibly can, showing respect to the audience. Right. And the same thing, like you say, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, how do I start this? How do I keep people going? Yeah. Because nobody wants to read it. Yeah. You've got to really hook them. It's got to be good. Yeah. It does. Airtight. Like not, as you said, not a wasted word. Yeah. Tell us about the daily press field. Okay. The daily press field is my newest book. Yeah. I actually got the idea from Ryan Holiday. He told me this. He has a book, The Daily Stoic. You know, a 365 day thing that you read. each, you know, and he said, you know, you got so much content, you should do something like that. So I thought, as I'm thinking about this, that's a good idea.

I thought, how could I take the material that's in the War of Art and Turning Pro and these other books in separate little books and put it together in a way that somebody could use as they were working on a project of their own, like if they were taking a year-long thing? And I thought, the 365-day format is a great way to do that because you can sort of start a day one. Yeah. And we were talking about you and I about second act horrors. Right? In the middle of the book, you're going to have a section about the second act, you know. And then at the end, you're going have a section about the terror that you get when you're, you know, close to the end. So I just thought that format, the daily, the daily, actually Ryan gave me that title. Yeah. I would never be

ego maniacal enough to do that. But so I think it's a 365 day format. Yeah. It's a great, way to kind of coach somebody through all of the shit that you're going to run into, all of the meant what we were talking about, the mindset. So that's what the daily press field is. It's brand new. And I sent you, we don't have it here. I totally fucked up. It's all right.

Can I make a little pitch to the camera? Yeah, do the pitch, do whatever you want, because I, I, my, my, my, we, my wife cleaned the office and we, I had a whole stack of books and they disembate. Peered on the bus. But the Daily Pressfield is self-published. My girlfriend, Diana, designed the book, blah, blah, blah, blah. She did a great job. Yeah. And one of the ways we tried to make it different from what you would get from

Simon & Schuster or something like that is we created like a really special gift pack that came with the book and gave a, you know, a secondary exercise book, some cards, some other goodies, all kinds of stuff, and that would be a great gift if you know somebody that's struggling and needs to kind of get it together. And so if you can't get this from Amazon or in a bookstore, you have to get it from my website, which is just my name, stephenpressfield.com. And it's more expensive, but it's a great gift and a big, a really pretty package. Amazing.

We'll link to that in the show notes. and the next time I start on the next book. Tell your wife to clean up to us. The next book that I start on, I'll, I can go through it. Okay, you can do it. I'll let you know how it goes. Like you don't know enough. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. Hey, Mark, this is great. Thank you for the great questions. We've got to do this again. This is a great conversation. I think we've only touched, scratch the surface. Absolutely. So thanks a lot for having me.

It's great. Cool. The subtle art of Not Getting a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie. It's edited by Andrew Nishamura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.