The Tim Ferriss Show - #501: Steven Pressfield — How to Overcome Self-Sabotage and Resistance, Routines for Little Successes, and The Hero’s Journey vs. The Artist’s Journey

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Starting point is 00:05:09 What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job each and every episode to interview world-class performers, to try to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, favorite books, and so on. Favorite cereals, maybe. Who knows? That you can apply to your own life. My guest today is Steven Pressfield. I have wanted to have Steven on this

Starting point is 00:05:46 podcast for a very long time. You can find him on Twitter at S Pressfield. Steven is a former Marine and graduate of Duke University. He became an overnight success as a writer after 30 years of abject failure. Those are his words, not mine. So we'll dig into that. Identifying the omnipresence, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, of resistance, the interior force of self-sabotage she described in The War of Art, one of the best book titles of all time, has saved his own artistic life and helped many others struggling to find their creative calling. Pressfield's novels of the ancient world, including the nonfiction The Warrior Ethos, are required reading at West Point, Annapolis, and in the Marine Corps. He lives in Los Angeles. His newest book is A Man at Arms,

Starting point is 00:06:29 an epic saga about a reluctant hero of the Roman Empire and the rise of a new faith. You can find him online, Stephen with a V, stephenpressfield.com, on Twitter, at S Pressfield, and Instagram, Stephen underscore Pressfield. Stephen, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Tim. I've been wanting to have a conversation with you as well. So I'm excited about this too. It's great. And we are going to run out of time well before we run out of content. I think in part because I have all these notes in front of me, I have all these questions. And then there is, I'd say at least 51% of me that just wants to turn this into a selfish opportunity to have therapy from you. So we'll see what blend of all of those elements.

Starting point is 00:07:16 All right. I was hoping for the same thing. Oh, wonderful. Okay. From you. From me. Well, we know, we can turn this into a mutual therapy session in that case. All right. So let's go back in time for those who don't have much context on your life. And perhaps a good entry point is a prompt that you provided, and that is, ask me about my house for $15 a month and the backwoods cat I made friends with. So that's where I'm going to start. Please tell me about

Starting point is 00:07:51 this house at $15 a month and the backwoods cat. I went, when you talked about 30 years of abject failure, that's really true. I mean, from the time that I originally tried to start writing, quit a job like you did, and actually had a book published was about 28 years, 30 years, something like that. And at one point, I was driving trucks, tractor trailers in North Carolina, and had just come out of living in a halfway house, which was when people are released from mental hospitals. Not me, but everybody else was there. And I found this house out in the country for 15 bucks a month. It had no doors, no electricity, no kitchen, no toilets, nothing. I just basically lived in my van, which I parked on the dirt road there.

Starting point is 00:08:47 And I used to cook. There was no way to cook. So I used to have a little fire. I'd make a little fire out in the back behind this little house. And it was right up at, you know, in North Carolina, there's a lot of pine woods. And this was right in the middle of the pine woods around Raleigh. And there used to be this feral cat, this wild cat that lived in the woods behind me. And when I would come out and cook, and I'd be sitting on the back

Starting point is 00:09:11 stoop and the woods started like maybe only five feet from the house, this cat would sort of materialize. He's an old battle-scarred tomcat, you know, and he would sit there across from me while I would make, you know, hot dogs or whatever I was doing. And I could never feed him. He would never take anything from me. You know, I think it was sort of like he didn't want to be a pet, you know. And he would sit there. This is all true, Tim. I'm not making this up.

Starting point is 00:09:35 I believe you. He would sit there across from me, just kind of eyeballing me. And there was no doubt which one of us was the superior being, you know, and no doubt which one of us had his shit together and the other one didn't. And he would look at me like he was trying to decide whether or not to kick my ass or not, you know. But I felt that this cat was a great omen. I felt that in some way, you know, why does a cat materialize like that? Why does anything happen like that? You know, like in the Native American tradition, when an animal is kind of a spirit animal or something. And so I took a lot of courage from

Starting point is 00:10:16 that cat appearing. I sort of felt like in some way, my energy had sort of drawn him out of the woods because he kept coming back. I mean, this wasn't a one-time thing. And so anyway, that's for a little, I don't know if that's context, Tim. I don't know. That's quite a while ago, but that was sort of at the heart of my darkest hours. Well, it provides a bunch of fertile ground for exploration. Before we leave the cat, though, what meaning did you take from that? What effect did that have on you? And then we're going to come back to the halfway

Starting point is 00:10:54 house because you mentioned everyone else was there after being released from a mental hospital or something along those lines. So I want to know how you ended up there. But first, what meaning did you imbue this cat with after these repeated visits? Well, I felt like the cat was a little bit of a role model for me, that it was a cat that was obviously completely self-sufficient, lived in the woods, didn't require anybody to feed him, wouldn't let anybody feed him, was a totally autonomous individual. And I thought to myself, first of all, why did anything come out of the woods? But if this is what came out of the woods, that it was such a positive kind of person. And so I thought, if this cat has come here,

Starting point is 00:11:39 maybe he's come here to kind of encourage me and tell me that, Steve, you can do that too. You can be like me too. You can be like me too. You can be autonomous. You can be self-sufficient. You can take care of yourself. You know, it makes me think a bit of the poem, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, the first few lines. I'm not familiar with that. Tell me. I'll tell you. The first few lines are, you do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. That's the beginning. tendency. And what I mean by that is mankind's tendency, men and women both, to view themselves as apart from nature as opposed to a part of nature. And the halfway house, so let's connect the dots from the beginning to the Tomcat at the end of that first response. How did you end up

Starting point is 00:12:38 there? And what was your state at the time that you were there? I don't know. We're getting into some deep stuff really early here, Tim. I know it's a first date and everything, but I'm going to skip the foreplay a bit, if that's okay. Well, I was in North Carolina at the time. I had married a gal from North Carolina. We'd been married for like five or six years at that time. And we were at the state where we were desperately trying to, you know, we were coming apart at the seams and we were desperately trying to hang on together. And we had come back from North Carolina and we were living with our mother out in the woods in a farmhouse that also rented for about 20 bucks a month.

Starting point is 00:13:17 And I had this job delivering industrial food. I drove a little truck and I would deliver things like Salisbury steaks and frozen crinkle cut French fries to little restaurants and stuff like that. And without going into a long story, I got fired from that job. And in a state of great shame, I was just like totally ashamed in front of my wife, in front of my mother. And I just sort of, I just couldn't stay there anymore. I couldn't, you know, I couldn't stay with them. So I kind of, I moved into town trying to find a job desperately. And the only place I could find was this sort of boarding house that,

Starting point is 00:14:02 this is in Durham, North Carolina. That was also a halfway house where the state government would pay for people who had been released from mental institutions and were on their way back into the real world. And so I found a room in the basement there, and that was how I came to that halfway house. Wow. And I have a theory about halfway houses and about the people who are in there. Do you want to hear this, Jim? I do.

Starting point is 00:14:29 Because I've been in a bunch of other kind of situations like that. And you would think that people were really struggling mentally. But in fact, the people in this halfway house, and we used to hang out in the kitchen and talk all night long, were among the smartest people that I ever met

Starting point is 00:14:44 and the funniest and the most interesting. And what I concluded from hanging out with them and from others in a similar situation was that they weren't crazy at all, that they were actually the smart people who had sort of seen through the bullshit. And because of that, they couldn't function in the world. They couldn't hold a job you know because they just couldn't take the bullshit you know and that was how they kind of wound up in institutions because the greater society thought well these people are absolute rejects they can't fit in but in fact to my mind they were actually the people that really saw through everything

Starting point is 00:15:23 so in a way i felt kind of bad when i had to leave this this house because i like the people that really saw through everything so in a way i felt kind of bad when i had to leave this this house because i like the people so much it also speaks it seems to not say it isn't worth it but some of the possible risks of seeing through the thin veneer that is what we consider civilization. Yeah, yeah. And just how… It's a dangerous thing. Just how slippery it can be to sort of realize how arbitrary so many of these social constructs are. You have just an incredible resume. I mean, it reads like, I don't want to say hero's journey because we'll

Starting point is 00:16:07 probably come to that and clarify that a bit later, but you have an eclectic, to put it mildly, collection of professions. You have tractor trailer driver, cab driver, school teacher, you picked fruit as a migrant laborer. And the list goes on. Of all of those, does one stand out as having been especially formative for who you then later became as a writer, as a creative? Driving tractor trailers was probably the most formative thing for me in that sense. In the sense that once you're out on the road, delivering a load, you're completely on your own. And if anything goes wrong, I mean, obviously you can call for help if you're really desperate, but pretty much you've got to get it together one way or another. And other people are depending on you, whatever that load is,

Starting point is 00:17:01 you've got to deliver it. The shipper wants it, the people that's being shipped to want it. And there's really sort of no mercy. You have to be a professional and you have to do it. And at the time that I was doing this job, I was really dealing with my own tendency to sabotage myself. I mean, I was like a self-destruction machine, where I would just screw up constantly. And I had to be constantly, you know, monitoring myself that I wouldn't act out in some crazy way and destroy everything that I was, you know, trying to do, which was just to survive. So first of all, the help from the people that I worked with, from the other drivers, from the dispatcher, who was kind of a mentor to me, a guy named Hugh Reeves, who really saved my life in a lot of ways. And also just the need to deliver, to really actually deliver the goods

Starting point is 00:17:51 and the self-imposed pressure of that, that really helped me. And there were a bunch of instances when I found myself really up against it and having to get it together completely on my own. And when I thought I never could, and each time that I was able to do that, it reinforced that. And it kind of like the cat that came out of the woods. I sort of felt like I was being a little bit of my own role model and that there was hope that I could get it together one way or another. At that time, in that period, you mentioned the self-sabotage. I'll give you two questions and you can take a stab at either or both. What was the particular form or most common form of self-sabotage, if you could give an example or just describe that because there are so many different types? And then also, Hugh Reeves as a mentor, what type of mentor was he? What did you glean or learn from him? I'll give you a specific. When I was driving the little trucks and delivering institutional food to these little restaurants

Starting point is 00:18:50 like toddle houses and stuff like that, the way I got fired was it was early in the morning. I had just finished delivering to a restaurant. I hadn't had breakfast. I was coming back out through the sort of the warehouse section at the back of the restaurant. And they had a whole bunch of rows of little cans of fruit juice, pineapple juice and stuff like that. And so I just reached out and I grabbed the one for myself and the boss caught me and I'm fired. And I really feel like me doing that was an act of self-destruction that I had. And I absolutely am certain of it. I just sort of knew, why do you do something like that? So that was

Starting point is 00:19:31 the sort of thing that I would do kind of over and over. And driving trucks, I could tell a bunch of stories, but one of them was where I dropped the trailer one time delivering it, meaning I pulled the tractor out from under the trailer in this warehouse parking lot right in front of about 500 people and just dropped this entire trailer nose down onto the thing and was just a complete fiasco. So that was the kind of thing that I would do, or I would just be careless. You know, you, you know, you need to, like, if you're an airline pilot and you're doing your, your checklist, you know, you have to, before you take off, you got to hit check the flaps and the engine and blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. I would, there was something in me that would make me forget to check the one most important thing that I had to do. And as soon as it went wrong, I knew it. You know, it wasn't like, oh, what a surprise.

Starting point is 00:20:27 It was like, oh, shit, I've done it again, you know? And getting back to your, Hugh Reeves, who was the dispatcher, who was my mentor in this thing, he, after I got fired, I'm really, I don't know, I guess this is interesting. I don't know. I find it interesting.

Starting point is 00:20:46 After I got fired for stealing that can of pineapple juice, I was in a state of utter shame. I didn't even tell my wife or her mother. I just, and I had already applied for, I had gone to a truck driving school and I had applied to like 50 different companies throughout North Carolina and couldn't get on anywhere. And I was just leaving town in my 65 Chevy van, heading for the oil fields in Louisiana, where I'd worked once before and where I knew I could at least get a job. All you needed was a pulse and they would take you on. And so on my way out of town in like the dead of winter, worst possible rainy North Carolina, I stopped at this one trucking company that I had already applied to a couple of times and they rejected me.

Starting point is 00:21:35 And Hugh Reeves was the dispatcher. And he was a former Marine and he knew that I had been Marine. And I just stopped just for the hell of it. I thought this is where things are going to happen. And he just stopped just for the hell of it. I thought this is where, you know, nothing's gonna happen. And he hired me. So that kind of saved my life right there. But throughout the whole,

Starting point is 00:21:52 my struggles to learn the business and stuff like that, there was, I'll tell you, there was one moment where he kind of sat me down and I had kept screwing up, like I said. And he sat me down alone in his office, and he said, you know, son, and I was like, I don't know what, 25 years younger than him. He said, I don't know what's going on in your head, son. I don't know what journey you're playing out here.

Starting point is 00:22:16 I don't know what your issues are. I don't know what you're trying to solve in your own inner mind. But this company is a business. We're in business to make money. You are a driver. You represent this company. When I give you a load to take somewhere, you better fucking deliver that load. And so that was a great thing for me. It was like a slap in the face because in my mind, I definitely was kind of on this odyssey. I was living on an inner world. I don't know what it was. And he was absolutely right. This is a business, you know, this is for real. I have a real job. People are

Starting point is 00:22:55 depending on me. I have to, I have to, and that really helped to sort of think of myself as much as I could as a professional and not somebody on some crazy adventure. I can definitely see how that ties into a lot that came later. That's a great story. Yeah. That's a great story. Let's flash forward. We're going to bounce around quite a bit. And in doing so, I want to maybe first bring up just a common belief or sentiment that I hear a lot, which is like, you're going to do your best work in your 20s. It's like a professional sport. You do A, B, and C, and you've kind of reached escape velocity or not by the time you're 30, 35, whatever the number might be. But it tends to be around there. Your first novel, you mentioned in some comments a few minutes ago, and I mentioned

Starting point is 00:23:42 it, the bio, 30 Years of Abject Failure. Okay, so your first novel published after around 30 years of effort, The Legend of Bagger Vance. How old were you when that was published? I think I was 53, maybe 54. Okay. So now a lot happened up to that point, obviously, in your life. You had a lot of experiences. Where I want to go next is to ask how you developed your facility with words, because you are a very good writer. The jobs we've mentioned so far seem to have nothing to do with wordsmithing. You have an incredible vocabulary. How did this happen? I'll accept. Thank you for saying that, Tim. I accept that at face value.

Starting point is 00:24:32 Please do. Through the whole time that I wasn't only doing blue collar jobs. I worked in advertising like in New York three or four times. And I also had about a 10 year career as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where I am now. And so through that time, you're trying to learn what a writer is and what writing is. And also, of course, I was writing novels through that time. You know, I wrote three of them that never got published. So, and each one took about two years full time. What drove you to do that? If I could just pause there for a second, because most people don't write periods. So what was driving you or compelling you or inspiring you to do that?

Starting point is 00:25:20 You know, I don't know. Why does anybody write or why does anybody paint or anything? It sort of originally started for me. It was not a dream I had as a kid. You know, I didn't, you know, like Jack Carr, the thriller writer and former Navy SEAL. He always wanted to be a thriller writer from the time he was like six years old. But not me. It never occurred to me. My first job was in advertising in New York, and I had a boss named Ed Hannibal, who wrote a novel, quit, wrote a novel, and it was a huge success overnight. And I sort of thought, well, shit, why don't I do that too? Seems like an easy gig. Let's try it. Nothing too, right? I mean, he's in that office. I'm in this office. Why can't I do it? So that sort of at least started this kind of dream for me, you know? And then once I had failed at it really badly, I thought I was even more

Starting point is 00:26:11 motivated to do it, right? I've got to like, somehow I've got to, you know, write my way out of this thing one way or another. So that was how it initially started, Tim, in terms of just the intention to do it, to finally make it work. I want to allow people to peek behind the scenes here for a second, just to see sort of how the sausage is made with this podcast. And I'm looking in front of me at a whole raft of papers, but one of them contains prompts and exploratory bullets. And I always ask guests if they would like to provide any prompts that might lead to interesting or fun stories, fertile ground, as I like to say, for exploration. And you learn a lot about guests looking at the bullets they provide or the lack of bullets they provide. And your bullets are fantastic.

Starting point is 00:27:07 And this will be tied into what we're talking about in just a second. So for instance, ask me about the house for $15 a month in the backwood cat I made friends with. Another one, which we're not going to get into right now, but we'll probably come back to, we might come back to, is ask me about the time when I was driving trucks, when they told me, quote, whatever you do, don't, in all caps, go past that last right turn, end quote. Now, to me, then speaking- And of course, I did go past that last thing. Of course you did. Now, as someone who has read, I want to say it was John Caples and all these books on copywriting, I can see very clearly, and I say this as a compliment, the influence of your time as a copywriter working at agencies. It's so obvious to me because you can't not ask. I mean,

Starting point is 00:28:00 it is very well crafted in that sense. Could you speak to your learnings in the world of advertising? What did you gain from working as a copywriter, whether at, I think, Benton and Bowles? Is that one of the names? Yeah, that was one of the places. Yeah. And I do think in many ways I learned a tremendous amount in advertising. I mean, I hate advertising. I hate it when it's on the screen. I hate watching TV commercials. I hate the whole concept of it. But I've met a lot of great people there and I learned a lot. And one of the things, one of the books that I've written about writing, as you know, is called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit. Yeah, please, for those people who don't know it, this is just a spectacular piece.

Starting point is 00:28:42 If you could describe it. And this is, to me, the number one lesson that any writer or artist should know before they know anything else. And you learn this in advertising. Because as you're trying to write an ad or a TV commercial, one thing you have to always keep in mind is that nobody wants to see it. In fact, they hate it. Sight unseen, they hate it. If it's a TV commercial, they've got their remote in their hand, they're going to click right through it as fast as they can. Or if it's an ad that's in a newspaper or magazine, they're going to turn the page as fast as they can because they hate it. They don't want you to sell them Preparation H or anything like that. So the lesson for that as a writer, knowing that you're facing so much resistance from

Starting point is 00:29:28 the reader, is that whatever you're going to put on that page or on the TV screen, it's got to be so good and so compelling and so interesting that people will have no choice but to watch it. And so it makes you work really, really hard and also makes you really project yourself into the mind of the viewer or the reader in an empathetic way, in a really good way, and try to say what would be interesting to them, what would catch their interest, and what would hold their interest. And you realize too that writing and reading is a transaction, that the reader or the viewer is giving you a very valuable commodity, which is their time and their attention. And you've got to give them something.

Starting point is 00:30:13 You can't just put some crap out there and expect that they're obligated to read it or watch it because they won't watch it. So that was a great lesson for me that applied in writing novels or movies or anything at all that you're going to do. A restaurant, if you're going to open a restaurant, you know, nobody wants to come in there and buy your greasy cheeseburgers, you know? You've got to come up with something that makes them say, I've got to go in there, you know? And that's where the work comes in and that's where the creativity comes in. And another sidebar to that, Tim, of what you learn in advertising is a 30-second commercial cannot have more than 60 words in it. Two words per second because an announcer or people speaking, actors speaking, can't

Starting point is 00:30:59 deliver it. It becomes so fast that you can't hear it. So there's pressure on you every time you write a piece of copy. Like I would bring a piece of copy into my boss, whoever he was or she was, and they would say, get out of here. This is way too long. Go back to your cubicle and cut it down.

Starting point is 00:31:16 And I'd spend like hours cutting it down and bring it back. And then they'd say, cut it down again. And so that was a wonderful skill to learn, to find that you can say maybe in 25 words, what you had said in 250 words before. So you're right, Tim, you're right on target that there was a lot of lessons that came out of that experience of writing ads. I mentioned in passing, and I'm by no means an expert here, but mentioned in passing hero's journey in reference to your life in a sense. But my understanding is that you consider the hero's journey, as perhaps we know it in the Joseph Campbell sense, different from the artist's journey. Could you please elaborate on that? I definitely feel this time that you and I are talking about now, when I was driving trucks and

Starting point is 00:32:10 doing things like that, and being sort of lost and in the wilderness, as my quote unquote hero's journey. I mean, I think we all have many hero's journeys, but we probably have one sort of overarching one. And to me, the hero's journey of our lives takes us from believing that we are what our parents told us we are, or what society told us we are, or what we imbibed from the culture, shedding that and finally finding out who we really are. And that's sort of the moment, the hero's journey always ends in Joseph Campbell terms, with the hero coming home, right? Like Odysseus coming back to Ithaca. And at that point, hopefully we've kind of found who we are and what our calling is. And for me, you know, it was, it was a long, it was a long journey. But

Starting point is 00:33:05 at that point, a new stage of our life takes over. Like I'll say for me, it was when I finally got a novel published, The Legend of Bagger Vance. So that took me like 28 years of quote unquote hero's journey. And in my view, this is me thinking about this later. I had no concept at the time. At that point, at that point, I said to myself, I'm a writer. I'm a real writer. I can do it. I've paid my dues. And then the next question became, okay, now what am I going to write about? What is my gift? If I'm here to bring kind of a gift to the people, as the Hero's Journey template says, my question to myself is, what is that gift? And so for the rest of my life, I feel at that point, I got on my artist journey. And now I'm a writer, I'm going

Starting point is 00:33:53 to write one thing, I'm going to write another, I'm going to write another. And the question I'm asking myself is, what is what is book one? What is book two? What is book three? What is my gift? What am I here to give? And, you know, I'll blather on for a bit here, Tim, if you don't mind. Please. I love your blathering. If you've ever heard of Richard Rohr, who wrote Falling Upward, I think it is. He's a Franciscan monk and a very deep thinker. And he kind of divides life into two halves, first half and second half. And the first half of your life, he says, is when you're sort of finding your identity

Starting point is 00:34:33 and kind of establishing your presence on the planet. You know, like maybe you're a mom and you say, okay, I'm a mom, you know, I'm that, or I'm a lawyer. I bought a house. I have a wife. I have children. You're sort of, in his words, Richard Rohr's words, R-O-H-R, if you want to look it up, I highly recommend anything by him. You're creating the vessel that is your life. And then in the second half of your life, you're filling that vessel. So you sort of ask yourself, okay, now I can do it. I've got a house, whatever. I have a profession. What am I going to do with this? Am I just going to be another crappy person that's continuing the societal garbage that we have? Or am I going to try to find my gift that's unique to me and bring it forth to the world and try to help one way or another?

Starting point is 00:35:28 So that to me is the hero's journey comes first. And when the hero's journey is over, our artist's journey begins. And I would define art as the broadest possible terms. Anything that is a gift to the wider world. professionals. Get ready to exceed your 2021 sales goal with the help of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. That's what it's built for. The best salespeople know that closing deals is about understanding your customers' needs and building relationships. It's time to reimagine in-person selling and cold calling for the digital world. Nowhere is this more true in post-COVID. So tap into the power of LinkedIn's 700 million plus member network. LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you 20

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Starting point is 00:37:08 to start your 60-day free trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. One more time, linkedin.com slash navigator. Part of the hero's journey, as I understand it, and please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, is what is sometimes referred to as refusal of the call. When Luke Skywalker is just bitching and whining and doesn't want to go see Yoda, et cetera, he's just being a pain in the ass to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Everyone should rewatch Star Wars if you don't remember this part or this section. Was there that element in your hero's journey getting to the point of having created the vessel? Was there a refusal of the call? Did that play any role? Oh, absolutely. And I think it does in everybody's life. In the hero's journey,

Starting point is 00:38:03 as Joseph Campbell lays it out, there's a bunch of stages. And The Hero's Journey, usually it starts in what Joseph Campbell would call the ordinary world. And it's just, you're living your regular life, but something is wrong. Like in the case of Luke Skywalker, he's on Uncle Owen and Aunt Veru's evaporator farm on Tatooine, I guess, is the planet, right? You got it. And he's just, right? And this is his ordinary life, right? He's stuck.

Starting point is 00:38:32 He's nowhere. In fact, I think there's a, somebody asked him at some point, where are you? And he says, if there's a spot that's the farthest point away from the bright center of the universe, that's where I am, right? And so that's kind of the ordinary. And then what the next stage, this is very early in the hero's journey. And then the next stage is the call. And it's something happens that tends to pull you out of this ordinary world. Like in The Wizard of Oz, it's Dorothy gets swept up in the tornado.

Starting point is 00:39:02 In Star Wars, it's that Luke Skywalker finds R2-D2 and he unplugs the little hologram that says, Princess Leia, help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope, right? So that's the call, right? Suddenly he realized, uh-oh, I've got to do something here. And then what follows immediately after that in Joseph Campbell paradigm is the refusal of the call. For Luke, he goes, no, I can't leave. I've got responsibilities to Aunt Veru and Uncle Owen, blah, blah, blah. And that seems to be across the board.

Starting point is 00:39:34 If you remember the first Rocky, the movie, when Rocky, when Apollo Creed or the promoter calls Rocky into his office and says, I'm going to give you a shot to fight the champ. And Rocky's first reaction is, no, I can't do it. You're crazy. This is a joke. I can't do it. Or if we want to go back to another one, when Odysseus is being summoned to go fight in the Trojan War, his first reaction is, no, no, no, I don't want to do it. And if you remember the myth, he pretends to be crazy, and he goes out and he's sowing his fields with salt. And the messenger who was sent to summon him takes his baby, the young Telemachus, Odysseus' baby, and puts him in a furrow in the path of the plow and when odysseus comes to the baby he veers around it right he's not going to run over his baby and the messenger says some ah you're faking you're

Starting point is 00:40:31 really not crazy get on the boat we're going to the trojan war so that's the refusal of of the call and for me it was the first novel that i tried to write, which I had no business doing. I got like two minutes from the end and I just blew it up and blew my whole life up. That was my refusal. I refused to go into the unknown world. How did you blow it up? Do you mean that you just stopped? I'm not going to tell you actually details but i did something that made my wife hate me and kick me out i got it okay so that's why i acted out what as they would say in psychological terms in other words another form of self-destruction you know that that was that was my those are my demons forever they may be your demons forever but perhaps you're getting or have become better at dancing with them instead of struggling against them. It seems like, at least referring to your mentors and lessons learned,

Starting point is 00:41:31 that in some respect, and please correct me, disabuse me of this so it's not true, that you've been able to at least strike a deal with these demons because you went from being unable to finish a novel to producing many works. What is that deal? Or how has that come to be the case? Well, let me just talk about a novel for a second. Please. After the first one that I wrote that I couldn't finish and that I went on these various spiraling down the rat hole type of things. I finally got it together. I saved some money. I saved $2,700 working in advertising in

Starting point is 00:42:11 New York. And I moved out to a little town in Northern California and determined to write a novel and finish it. And I rented this little house and I was just by myself. And through that whole time, again, I was aware every second of my tendency to sabotage myself. So I just said to myself, I'm going to finish this son of a bitch or I'm going to kill myself. And when I finally did, and I write about this in The War of Art, when I finally did finish it, and I've typed those words, the end, I felt like my DNA changed, you know? And I will say that as an encouragement to anybody that's listening, that's struggling with the same stuff. Once I was able to finish that thing, that novel, I've never had any trouble finishing anything ever again. But it was just sheer willpower driven on by shame. I think shame is a great thing, but I just couldn't stand myself if I failed yet again. So I just had to keep going, keep going, keep going. It seems like it's possible, and I'm speculating here, but when you finish that novel and you have the end, right?

Starting point is 00:43:28 Because confidence is just not something you can fake, right? In the respect that your true self knows whether you've earned it or it's unearned. When you typed the end, the story of I always self-sabotage now had a counterexample. That statement was no longer always true. I never thought about it that way, Tim, but I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, a counterexample. Yeah. With the Legend of Bagger Vance, so finishing a novel is one thing, getting a novel published is quite another endeavor in many respects. So 30-year overnight success.

Starting point is 00:44:07 What happened? Did you end up drawing straws and you became the bridge partner of a book agent? What actually happened that allowed this publication, publishing your first book? Well, like I said, I wound up writing three novels that never got published. Right. And when I finished the third one, that was sort of like another kind of an all is lost moment, a suicide moment for me, because I couldn't get any, even my friends wouldn't read it. And I knew that I just didn't have the wherewithal to do this again, you know, to save up money to work for two years. That's it. I just didn't have the wherewithal. And so I decided, or it sort of came to me as a flash that I would go to Hollywood. I thought, let me write a screenplay. Let me write,

Starting point is 00:44:55 let me try Hollywood. If I failed as a novelist, let me go fail as a screenwriter. So I did go out to Los Angeles. And after about four or five years, I did have an agent. I kept writing screenplays that also didn't sell. And finally, I got kind of teamed up with an established writer, a guy named Ron Shusett, who did the first Alien, among other things, and who was like a real brand name and a guy that really could get work. How did you get teamed up with him? I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but Alien turned into an iconic film. I mean, they created a franchise. Great film. How did you get teamed up with him?

Starting point is 00:45:36 I had an agent, a wonderful agent named Mike Warner, who tragically died at a young age. He had other clients, and Ron was one of his other clients. And Ron usually worked with a partner. And at that time, because he was more, Ron was more of a producer-writer than a writer-writer. What is a producer-writer? A writer-writer is the guy that actually sits down at the page, the typewriter, and actually writes the scenes and so on and so forth. A producer writer is somebody who is great at coming up with the ideas, the big ideas,

Starting point is 00:46:11 and also sort of shepherding a story through from start to finish, and also is a producer in the sense of being able to get financing and take the meetings and make a deal. So, whereas Ron was not the kind of writer that could actually sit down and write the screenplay, you know, but he could say, you know, I would sit there and come up with like 30 ideas. What if we do this? What if we do that? What if we do that? And he would say, 29 of them suck. Do this one. He's the guy who would say it's jaws in space act one two three here's the deck he could line up all of the ducks in a row to get the financing for instance the great scene in alien where the thing bursts out of john hurt's chest right you know that's mean that was ron's you know that was his idea which is burned into into anyone's mind who has ever seen one of the Aliens movies.

Starting point is 00:47:09 So you can't say just because maybe he didn't actually physically write it at the typewriter, that was his. So it's a very creative thing to be a producer. So he usually works with a partner. He's more of a producer-writer instead of the writer-writer. You have the same agent. Please continue. So the agent said, Mike said to us, so let me team you guys up and you'll be a team. So that, from my point of view, I now became like an apprentice. I was like the junior partner of this team.

Starting point is 00:47:38 And when we'd go to meetings in Hollywood, nobody wanted me. They wanted Ron. He was the brand. And I was just, you know, I was the guy that actually sat at the keyboard. So in any event, for maybe 10 years or so, I did have a career as a screenwriter. So that was gaining credibility for me. And also I was learning what a story is, you know, by, you know, the process that you go through. And then at one point, I just had this idea for The Legend of Bagger Vance, and I had it as a book, not as a movie. And so when I told that to my agent, then at the time, he basically fired me. He basically said, my story is that I fired him, but his story is that he fired me.

Starting point is 00:48:27 But basically, he was absolutely right. Because what he said to me was, I've spent the last five years trying to get your career going. And we're now just about to get going. And you're telling me you're going to write some stupid golf novel that nobody's going to buy and nobody's going to read. It's going to take you a year to write some stupid golf novel that nobody's going to buy and nobody's going to read. It's going to take you a year to write it. And by that time, everybody will have forgotten who you are here in the business in Hollywood. And I'm back to square one. I've spent a lot of time working with you. So get out of here. But in any event, that was how an actual novel that I wrote actually got published. So it was sort of a smooth transition. And when you know

Starting point is 00:49:05 the actual passage there, it didn't just come out of nowhere. So if you broke up with this agent or he broke up with you, you go off to write this thing. The agent has these doubts and believes that you're going to sort of sink into oblivion and become irrelevant, right? You're just going to be completely forgotten. You march off to pursue this dream and this project. From there, not to beat a dead horse about this, but how does it then find a home with a publisher? You know, it was like, I joke that I was an overnight success after 30 years. And I think sometimes your bad luck builds up to such an extent that it turns into good luck. The law of averages starts to work for you.

Starting point is 00:49:54 Right. And what happened was to try to get you have to get a literary agent, right, which I didn't have. I had a Hollywood agent. So I went to my lawyer. I had an entertainment lawyer named Larry Rose, and he sent me to an agent named Jody Hotchkiss in New York who worked for Sterling Lord, who's a big literary agent, who is still my agent and just turned 100 years old, by the way. And so almost overnight, that manuscript just found a buyer, boom, boom, boom. It found a buyer, found a movie buyer, found everything right away. So I think it was just the law I might segue at least indirectly into some therapy for myself. So I am looking at an interview you've done, and it's discussing the little successes approach. And I'm just going to read a first paragraph, then you can tell me if things have changed.

Starting point is 00:51:03 But the first paragraph, and this is your response to a question, I think this is on writingroutines.com. I'm at the gym at 5.30 every morning, but it takes me until around 11.30 to actually sit down and start work. I used to be able to put in four hours, but these days, two and a half is my outer limit. I close the office then. I never work later or at night. And then you talk about your friend, Randy. Could you speak to the little successes approach and what this schedule represents? Randy is Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart and has directed a bunch of movies as well. And he's a good friend of mine out here. And he has a theory that he calls little successes. And it means that from the moment he gets out of bed, and I believe

Starting point is 00:51:45 this too, exactly, he's looking to build up. He's looking ahead to the moment when he actually sits down and has to write whatever time that may be for him, nine o'clock, 10 o'clock, whatever. And he's trying to produce a series of little successes between now and then to generate momentum. And he counts like brushing his teeth as a little success. And I do too. And one of the reasons I like to go to the gym early or do something physical early is because I'm trying to build up little successes so that by the time I get to sit down at the page, I feel like I've got some momentum going. You know, I've done this, I've done that. I've taken out the garbage, you know, I've, you know, fed the birds and I've got a little momentum going. And I think it's very important. I mean, even if you think about,

Starting point is 00:52:36 let's say a basketball player, think about Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or anybody, Steph Curry or whatever, going to a game tonight, You know, they're at the stadium like three and a half hours early. And even before then, they've been at the gym or they've been getting a massage or mentally they're preparing themselves. And they go through, you know, they do their – if you watch Steph Curry do his routine, you know, it's like, I don't know what, it's amazing what he does. You know, rubber bands between his knees to strengthen his knees and he does a hundred shots from beyond the arc. And he's trying to build up little successes so that when the game starts, he's in the flow immediately and he's at the highest possible level. That's the theory anyway. What is your preferred exercise routine? Do you have any favorite exercises or workouts?

Starting point is 00:53:31 I'm in the now in the COVID thing where I'm doing it out on my deck. But for up until the COVID thing, I trained with a wonderful trainer named T.R. Goodman at a place called Pro Camp, Gold's Gym in Venice. And he has a whole thing that he does with us who train with him. We usually train in a group of two or three guys. And it's basically just really straight, basic weight training, squats and curls and stuff like that. Legs on one day, just very basic stuff. That's a very iconic location as far as gyms go.

Starting point is 00:54:08 Yeah. Yeah. It's now, it's all in a tent in the parking lot now. Right. So it's changed a bit during pandemic times. So the little successes approach makes sense to me and really appeals to me. And there's so much variation, of course, when you talk to writers about process, right? So I recently interviewed Joyce Carol Oates, and when I was an undergrad, I took just a wonderful seminar with John McPhee, and both of them seem to basically sit down, chain themselves to a desk, and write for eight hours. And their feeling is you can't wait for mood. You can't wait for the muse to strike. You really just need to start writing and that will produce the conditions for writing. I have sometimes had the experience of that working, but perhaps it's just

Starting point is 00:55:00 a weakness of character. I often break. I also just break. I'm just like, God, this is fucking terrible. And I stop. And then you have maybe a contrast. And I'm not saying this is all or nothing, one approach to the other, but folks like BJ Novak, who people might recognize, who spends quite a lot of time getting himself into a good mood. So he might take a few hours to get himself into the proper mood to write, and he's prolific and very successful. And then there's this little successes approach. I suppose the question piggyback off of this is, how should someone think about developing a routine for their own writing process or creative process? Let's stick with writing just because it's what we're talking about, even though I think the discussion extends

Starting point is 00:55:52 to many other areas. How should somebody think about figuring it out? Because even for me personally, I have, well, we'll talk about this afterwards, but I've been having quite a lot of challenges writing in the past few years. I've tried to reach into the grab bag of different routines, and I found it challenging because so many of them are diametrically opposed or seem to be. How would you talk someone through finding something that works for them or making sense of conflicting advice? The one thing I would say is that it seems to me that every writer or artist has a unique way of doing it. And I don't think there's any kind of one size fits all type of thing. Like there was an article in the LA Times a few years ago where they interviewed screenwriters and they were asked, you know, what was their routine? They interviewed like five writers

Starting point is 00:56:45 and three of them wrote in their cars. And this is true. That's amazing. One of them wrote in the car when it was moving. I don't know how they did this, but it just goes to show you that whatever works, works. You know, like Joyce Carol Oates or John McPhee doing eight hours, that is beyond my comprehension. I just can't imagine.

Starting point is 00:57:13 It's just, I mean, that's, yeah, that's like Alex Honnold in Free Solo. But for the writing world, I can't process that. But I do agree with them that, you know, there's a famous quote that I quoted in The War of Art, and now I'm blanking on who it was, a famous writer who they asked him, do you write on a schedule or only when inspiration strikes me. He says, fortunately, it strikes me every morning at 9.30 sharp. So he was a believer in routine, right? And another person, there's a wonderful book by Twyla Tharp. I'm sure you're aware of this, Tim, called The Creative Habit. And she kind of describes her habits. And she's kind of like me.

Starting point is 00:58:04 She goes to the gym at the crack of dawn. Every day, she catches a cab at exactly the same time, goes to the exact same place. And she's trying to build up those little successes for when she gets to the studio and actually has to work. But to go a little deeper than that, in my book, The War of Art, I talk about the concept of resistance with a capital R, which is, again, that force of self-sabotage is a big theme in my life that will try to stop you as a writer or an artist or anybody from achieving your best work, from following your calling. It will try to distract you, undermine your self-confidence, make you procrastinate,

Starting point is 00:58:51 make you quit, make you give into fear, or on the other hand, make you such a perfectionist that you spend all day on one paragraph and you accomplish nothing. And the whole thing of little successes, the concept of little successes or of a routine is to help you overcome that resistance, to help anybody. That's the wall that you know you're going to hit, you know? And so you're mentally preparing yourself for that moment when you sit down and that negative force hits you, that you've got enough momentum and enough self-confidence, or your friend who gets himself in a good mood, you're in enough of a good place, you got enough good karma and good juju going for you that you could get through that wall of resistance and then just get into a rhythm and get into the flow and then just keep it going. That's the whole sort of concept behind little successes or a routine or habits.

Starting point is 00:59:41 And I'm a big believer in habits. Me too. When I have been, I suppose, what we might call successful in writing, just getting anything consistently on pages, it's been with some form of scaffolding in the form of routine. And one that actually worked for me, I hadn't thought about this, to finish at least one book, maybe two, was copying what I believe it was Maya Angelou, maybe, who would rent a hotel room to work out of to put herself in a different environment that was dedicated to writing. And when I was living in San Francisco, I remember Hotel Vitale was this hotel right on the Embarcadero. And I would rent a room when I got really stuck to put myself in a different environment. And for whatever reason, I mean,

Starting point is 01:00:33 I'm sure it's placebo effect because how could it not be, right? It's got to be harnessing the mind and kind of pulling a Aikido move on your own psyche, that really, really helped. You've mentioned a number of books. The War of Art, I think everyone should read, certainly. Then Twyla Tharp's A Creative Habit. I've also read you mention Stephen King's On Writing, Ernest Hemingway On Writing, Larry Phillips and Henry Miller On Writing. Henry Miller's just incredible. One that I'm not familiar with, I would love to hear you just expand on for a second. And the line here that I'm reading is, for integrating the editor's mindset into the writing process, the best book is The Story Grid by Sean Coyne. I think it is C-O-Y-N-E. What does that mean, the editor's mindset into the

Starting point is 01:01:21 writing process? Before I say to that, I want to say that your idea of checking into a hotel room, I think is a great idea. And it is, and that's something that might be unique to you, Tim, that might be a trick that works for you. It's safer than driving a car and writing. Because yeah, but it is kind of an Aikido. It's a way of tricking yourself to somehow, you know, oh, I can't work there, but I can work here. If it works, it works, you know? Right, right. Totally. But the story grid, Sean Coyne is actually, was my first editor. He was the editor who bought

Starting point is 01:01:55 Gates of Fire. Oh, no kidding. Amazing. And we are, we're really good friends and we're partners in a little publishing company that we have called Black Irish Books. So I know Sean very well. And Sean, he's a Harvard guy. And he has evolved this concept of editing that he calls the story grid. And it's incredibly deep. If you and I were looking at this, it's like Einstein. You know, I can't even begin to grasp what it is, but he really has a whole concept from A to Z of what a story is, what a

Starting point is 01:02:33 scene is, and so on and so forth that he calls a story grid. And he actually, I highly recommend his website, www.storygrid.com. If you want to be an editor, if you want to be a writer, he teaches this whole concept and it's great. But getting back to integrating the editor's mindset to the writer's mindset, a lot of times I've found me as a writer, I will just sort of spew stuff out in a novel, let's say. I'll just be consumed with a story and I'll just take it from A to Z without even thinking about it. And then I have to bring it to Sean and he kind of tells me what the story is about, which I never had any clue what the theme is, and also will help to shape it into an actual story that really works. And a lot of the editor's mindset has to do with the hero's journey

Starting point is 01:03:26 and that whole concept of act one, act two, act three, refusal of the call that we were talking about earlier. And Sean has another company of his own that he calls Genre Management. And he's a big believer in genre in the sense that like a thriller has certain obligatory scenes and conventions, and a love story has certain obligatory scenes and conventions. A Western has certain, and you

Starting point is 01:03:52 have to know them. And that's what an editor does. You know, for instance, if you're going to have a love story, there always has to be a rival. That's a big big thing think of any story in love story in the world and there's also almost always has to be the lover's part in the middle or towards the end and then they come back together at the end or they fail to come back together at the end and that's kind of what an editor brings to uh to a writer's huge pile of papers that you bring and dump on the editor's desk is he or she is kind of aware of the various structures that actually work and the kind of the principles of storytelling. And when you violated them, an editor can bring you back from that, you know, or when you have left certain things out that need to be in there, an editor will say, you know, or when you have left certain things out that need to be in there, an editor

Starting point is 01:04:46 will say, you know, you need to do this. And so if you can educate yourself as a writer in that editor's way of thinking, you can sort of become your own editor in a sense. And it really helps you. I mean, I do maybe 15 drafts of a book and, you know, seventh, eighth, ninth, I'm really thinking like an editor. I'm looking at this and saying, what's missing? What have I done wrong? What conventions have I violated? And if I have violated them, do I have a good reason for it? So I'm not sure that's an answer, Tim, but that's- That is an answer. I highly recommend anything to do with Sean Coyne and StoryGrid. I'm going to ask you about a man at arms. First, I want to take this opportunity to paint a picture

Starting point is 01:05:32 of the last week in my life, if I may be self-indulgent for a second. Please do. Please do. So I have this newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. It's five short bullets of things that I found interesting or helpful or novel throughout each week. And I had the experience- I'm a subscriber, by the way. Oh, wonderful. I appreciate that.

Starting point is 01:05:55 So I know all about it. I love doing it. And it serves as a diary of sorts for me. And I had the experience in the last week of one of those bullets expanding dramatically and ultimately becoming close to a 10-page blog post, which if people want to check out, it's related to conservation and ethical choices in the world of psychedelic compounds. They can find it at Tim.blog. But the point that I want to make, or the contrast maybe, is I wrote this piece. I was very happy

Starting point is 01:06:26 to have finally written this piece, even though I'm catching heat from certain factions within the psychedelic communities for it, because it's been a very long time since I've written a blog post, a long-form blog post. That having been said, I was interviewed yesterday by a friend of mine, Harley, of Shopify fame. And he read a passage from the 4-Hour Workweek in the course of that interview because he's read the book, he's very kind, he wanted to use it as a launching pad for discussion. And he read a few paragraphs for the four-hour work week. And here's what you can probably guess. Here's what I thought to myself. God damn, I have done nothing but become worse at writing since I was 29. What in, you know, for fuck's sake,

Starting point is 01:07:19 what am I doing with my life? And I became hyper self-critical. I was like, man, look at how many em dashes I have in this long form blog post I just put up. What kind of crutch is this? I'm using em dashes like they're going out of style and so on and so forth. So this just like litany of abuse just kind of rolled off the brain while it attacked itself. And this has been a large part of my own resistance, the feeling that my best work is behind me and I can't replicate it. Or not replicate it, because I don't want to become an imitation of myself. But that for whatever reason, the pixie dust has been lost, or that I've atrophied. I've so let the muscles atrophy that there's just,

Starting point is 01:08:08 I'm past the point of no return. Have you ever contended with this? If you haven't, what advice or even if you have, what advice would you give for people who are bumping up against this? Because it's been a real hindrance. I recognize it's self-imposed, but it's been a real hindrance to me actually putting pen to paper, so to speak. Here's my thoughts on that, Tim. Resistance, with a capital R, the force of self-sabotage, is tremendously diabolical and nuanced and protean and subtle, incredibly subtle. And it will attack us at our weakest point. And it usually will attack us in an area where there's some truth to what we might fear about

Starting point is 01:08:55 ourselves. So I would say for sure, Tim, that thought that you have is bullshit. It's resistance. It's totally resistance. There's nothing wrong with you. You haven't lost any pixie dust. That is pure resistance. It's finding a weak spot in you. It just knows it. It's like the alien knows how to get after you, right? And so the form it takes for me might be different. The weak spot it might find in me might be different. But I think it's just finding that in you. And I think the only way to deal with it is to just dismiss it. Take my word for it.

Starting point is 01:09:34 It's bullshit. There's no grounding in it at all. Just keep doing what you're doing, you know. And I'm sure that I remember I had a friend when I first came out into, uh, to Los Angeles, a fellow screenwriter, and he got on the phone with me one night, he was in hysteria because he was sure that he was over the hill. And I asked him, I said, Tom, you know, how old are you? He said, 22. And so this is true. So resistance will find that weak spot, that chink in our armor. But don't pay any attention to it, Tim.

Starting point is 01:10:10 Dismiss it. It's bullshit. Thank you for that. And I have to follow up by asking, what purpose does resistance serve? Why does it exist? I try to think of things in evolutionary terms. Maybe this is just some sort of vestigial mutation that has just persisted but doesn't actually have a utility, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on why it exists. I'm not sure. Seth Godin thinks it's the

Starting point is 01:10:38 lizard brain, the amygdala, whatever it is is that I never have quite understood. But to me, and I'm going to get a little airy-fairy here, a little metaphysical, I think that if we think of our identity, we can say that there's at least two parts of it. One, I would call the ego, and the other I would call the self with a capital S, the Jungian sense of self. And the ego is our rational mind. It's the part of us that pays taxes and goes down and gets a driver's license and becomes a lawyer or whatever, whatever, right? And that ego is our I, the letter I. And we obviously have to have an ego, right? We have to have that I that we know how to, you know, stop at a stoplight and all that sort of stuff.

Starting point is 01:11:28 And then there's the other thing that Jung would call the self with a capital S. And that self includes the deep, deep unconscious, the collective unconscious, the hero's journey, the archetypes, all of these things that we're not aware of until Freud, you know, finally discovered this, but that are driving us, you know, in a good way, many times in a really good way. And also, according to Jung, the self with a capital S butts up against what they call

Starting point is 01:12:01 the divine ground. And I love that. It's what I would say is where inspiration comes from. It really is divinity. It's beyond mortality. It's the muse. It's inspiration. It's anytime you get into the zone, that's where you are, right? As an athlete, as an artist or whatever. So I'm getting back to resistance. Trust me. I believe you. What I think is when we as artists or as athletes or as anything begin to shift our identity from our ego to ourself, when we start trusting in intuition, when we start trusting in our deep dreams, in our deep inspiration from sources that we don't know

Starting point is 01:12:46 what it is. Like for me, writing the novels that I wrote that I never thought, that just came out of nowhere, right? It had no, made no sense, but are coming from a deeper source. Anyway, when we start to identify with the self and turn over our nexus of control to that, the ego becomes threatened because the ego realizes that it's going to lose. The ego strikes back and creates resistance. And its goal is to try to convince us that this other world of inspiration, of intuition, of the muse or the self is a phony world. It's bullshit. Don't pay attention to it. Stay here with me, Mr. Ego. I'm the ego. That's what it is to me. And I just had an email. I've got into an email correspondent with a monk from Self Realization Fellowship, Brother Kivivasananda. Are you familiar with

Starting point is 01:13:46 Self-Realization Fellowship? I'm not. Anyway, it's a wonderful thing. It's Paramahansa Yogananda's thing that he started. And he was telling me about beyond the Bhagavad Gita and the story of Arjuna and Krishna, in this great battle in the Bhagavad Gita, is the ego, is a character named Bhishma. And Arjuna finally slays the ego, shooting him with 108 arrows. And he's shot so full of arrows that he's on his back, supported by the arrows. And he takes him a month to die. And even as he's dying, Bishma, he's constantly spouting his bullshit about how he's still in charge, he's still in charge, he's still in charge. And I think that we as artists or athletes, I think, are trying to get beyond the ego. Or Buddhist meditators or people doing ayahuasca or whatever, we're trying to get beyond

Starting point is 01:14:46 the ego into whatever is next. But the ego doesn't want us to get beyond it. And the ego will hang on and take a month to die. That's what I think resistance is. It's the ego's way of trying to hang on to control of us. I really like that. And it rings true to me in so many respects. I mean, the ego, if we are not what our ego believes us to be, a lawyer, a this, a that. Which we're not. Right.

Starting point is 01:15:16 Someone who does X, someone who always or never does Y, then what are we? And that uncertainty is very threatening. So it makes a lot of sense that there would be a violent opposition by the ego. I mean, I may be completely wrong, but this is my theory. Yeah, it's certainly helpful to think of. It's a useful lens to look at this through.

Starting point is 01:15:47 And this may be very related. I would love to hear you define or describe what a shadow career is. I read a relatively short blog post of yours that discussed this, and I think it could be very helpful to explore. I'll give you kind of an example from the movie business. As you know, in the movie business, you need a lawyer. There are law firms, entertainment law firms. In fact, Rich Roll, a wonderful podcaster and athlete, used to be an entertainment lawyer. He did. And entertainment lawyers, directors, if you're a director, an actor, a writer, you have to have a lawyer because when deals come up, you know, they make the deals for you, right? They get the contracts, right? And I have found that when you

Starting point is 01:16:37 talk to not all entertainment lawyers, but some entertainment lawyers, secretly they want to be writers or they want to be directors. And what they have done in becoming lawyers, to some extent, is their law career is like a shadow career. It's like adjacent to what they really want to do. They really want to direct or they really want to write, but for whatever reasons, they were afraid to do it. So they thought, well, I can go to law school and that will give me a trade, an occupation, a profession I can count on. And so the law becomes kind of a shadow career for them. Or another instance of that is a lot of times people will work as other people's assistants, right? They'll pick up their dry cleaning. They'll do all of that sort of stuff, which can be, and that's a shadow career, which can be, of course, it's also a

Starting point is 01:17:33 legitimate thing. It can be an apprenticeship where you're working for a photographer or whatever, whatever you're learning. But it also can be because a lot of times those people who are people's assistants really want to do what their boss is doing, but be a musician, be a rock star, whatever it is. But for whatever reason, they're afraid to. And so they pick a profession that's kind of adjacent to where they want to be, but it's not actually, doesn't have the same risk. I want to underscore this for folks because I think it is exceptionally common. I see the temptation in myself and around me in certain capacities. So it's really worth having on the radar, I think. I'm going to read just a little bit of this blog post from 2012, which is on your website, studentpressfield.com.

Starting point is 01:18:26 I think this is more from Turning Pro. At least that's the URL. So here we go. Sometimes when we're terrified of embracing our true calling, we'll pursue a shadow calling instead. The shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar. Its contours feel tantalizingly the same, but a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us. Are you pursuing a shadow career? Are you getting your PhD in Elizabethan, that's how you say that, studies because you're afraid to write the tragedies and comedies you know you have inside you? Are you living the drug and booze half of the musician's life without actually writing the music? Are you working in a support capacity for

Starting point is 01:19:04 an innovator because you're afraid to risk being an innovator yourself? These are really good questions. I think they're really important questions. And the drug and booze half example, I think, is also very important because it's possible to grab the romanticized risky portions of a possible real passion and emulate them in a shadow career in a way that actually has quite a lot of downside risk with none of the upside potential. Yeah, true. I mean, I think, you know, not to overstate it, but sometimes addiction is a shadow career. You know, that you're acting out the kind of wild and crazy lifestyle rather than actually doing the work to be a musician or to be a whatever. And what do you say to people who would answer yes in the sense that they are able to be honest with themselves and say, you're totally right. I am actually doing that. But like you said, this is low risk and the

Starting point is 01:20:11 pursuit of what I really want to do does entail risk and I'm afraid. Well, there's no way around it except to actually do it. It would be, if I were advising anybody or advising myself, if I were in that condition, I would say, you know, get into some kind of therapy, get into something that will help you elevate your consciousness about this, let you explore it, introspection. And at some point it will become pretty clear what your real dream is. You know, maybe if you're a photographer's assistant, you really say, oh, I want to be a cinematographer. I'd love to be Vilmos Zygmunt. I want to shoot Scorsese's next movie, whatever. I'd love to do that. Then it's sort of a matter of kind of,

Starting point is 01:21:00 I hate to talk about the ego, but getting back into rationality and saying, okay, how do I pursue that? Should I go to school? Should I apprentice myself on a track that will actually take me there? Or should I, you know, whatever, figure out what the actual track is that will get you to that dream. And then the other thing I'd say is, talking to myself again, is be very aware of your own tendency to self-sabotage, of resistance. And watch out for any of those mental self-conversations that will try to talk you out of doing it. Build up your professional habits and just go for it. Just go for it. I'll add one thing to that, which has been very helpful to me. So I'm saying this to myself also, because it's probably time for me to do this again with respect to writing. And that is take a look at an exercise. You can find it online called fear setting that I've written quite a bit about. And I also did a TED Talk related to the subject because it's saved my life in some ways. And it's really just a rephrasing and presenting of an exercise

Starting point is 01:22:12 from the Stoics called premeditatio malorum, so meditating on the worst case. This is just a practice of actually putting to paper what the worst things are that could happen, how you might mitigate against them, how you could minimize the damage or reverse the damage. And as Seneca the Younger has said, of course not in English, and I'm paraphrasing here, but we suffer more in imagination than in reality. And it's easy to believe or to overestimate the threats that exist from action while underestimating the risks of inaction when they're trapped in your head. But when you put them on paper, it actually loses oftentimes a lot of its force. So I would just recommend people take a look at fear setting with a hyphen in the middle. Let's talk about A Man at Arms. You have your creative how-to books, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Do the Work, and so on. Then you have your historical fiction,

Starting point is 01:23:19 which is just outstanding, Gates of Fire, Tides of War, The Afghan Campaign, and now A Man at Arms. Why did you write this new book? How did it come to be? What was the genesis story? Before we go away, let me come back and talk about Fierce Setting. I want to say something after that when we're done. There's only been one recurring character in my historical fiction, and he is this sort of gunslinger of the ancient world, Telemann of Arcadia, a one-man killing machine of the ancient world. And he's been in three books of mine, and as a minor character. But I've always been fascinated by this guy. And in fact, a lot of readers have been fascinated by him too. And I've always wanted to write a book only about him. And this is another kind of weird thing, Tim, about the creative process.

Starting point is 01:24:09 A lot of times I will block out a story and I know exactly what each character represents and who they are and what they're going to do. But this one character, Telamon, the one man killing machine of the ancient world, came on the page to me fully formed. I didn't plan him. I had no idea where he came from. And not only was he fully formed, but he had a deep philosophy and a very dark philosophy, a real warrior samurai philosophy. And so I wanted to write this book about him because I only about him because I wanted to follow his journey. It's really, he was really sort of in the other stories at the end of his

Starting point is 01:24:52 hero's journey. And I was wondering where was he going to go from there? And for like 13 years, I tried to come up with a story that would work. And I just did outline after outline. I never could find it. And finally, I just had a flash about adding to his world, a young, vulnerable girl, a nine-year-old girl, a mute girl. And somehow that sort of cracked the story for me. And so this book came very fast. It's set in first century AD, right after the crucifixion in Jerusalem and in the Sinai desert. And I just wanted, this guy, character of Telamon is sort of an alter ego for me. I know on some crazy unconscious level, I'm bound to this character in some way.

Starting point is 01:25:43 And his story is my story in some way, although I don't know what it is. And so I wanted, you know, writing, as you know, particularly fiction, it's like a dream in that you enter another dimension of reality when you're sitting down to write, and you don't know what's going to come a lot of times. The work takes on a life of its own and it'll pull you along. So that was this book for me. I wanted to see where Telamon would go and what his arc would be. And I know I'm going to have to write another one because I haven't got to the end of it yet, but that was the genesis of A Man at Arms. And when you write a book like this, since I have no experience with fiction,

Starting point is 01:26:24 although I'm endlessly fascinated by it, I think I'm afraid of it, honestly, because I read good fiction and I think to myself- There's a good reason to be afraid of it. Good Lord, I just don't know how humans do this. Do you write a book like this simply because you are a writer and fiction is a way of exploring this alternate reality? Is it because you hope it to impart certain messages or lessons that people will learn from? What are the reasons behind an undertaking? I'm absolutely a believer, as you know, in the muse. You know, I believe in another dimension of reality. I believe that there is, that books or songs or businesses exist in the realm of potential

Starting point is 01:27:15 before they exist in the real world. And I believe that as a, you know, as a writer, I am a servant of the muse. And I believe this book, A Man at Arms, existed. It existed in that other dimension. And I was called on to bring it forth in this dimension. So I really don't have a message. I really don't have, I do want to explore certain aspects of the character. But mainly, this story just kind of seized me. And I felt like I've got to tell this story. I've got to get it. I've got to make it work in a hero's journey terms,

Starting point is 01:27:53 and I've got to tell it in the right way and solve all those problems. But mainly, I just wanted to tell this story like a singer would want to sing a certain song or a dancer would want to sing a certain song, or a dancer would want to dance a certain dance. So that was the reason. The story just seized me and came very fast and very easy. What would you say, if you have an answer for this, distinguishes the books that come fast and easy from those that are more difficult, those that are maybe just a hard slog? It seems the hard ones don't work and the easy ones do. It's almost like if it's hard, maybe there's a reason why it's hard. Right. Why are you pushing a boulder uphill? Right.

Starting point is 01:28:40 Which is not to say even the easy ones are hard in the sense that there are a lot of technical problems to solve. Like I just was doing a video on Instagram. I was talking about the original manuscript of Gates of Fire was 802 pages long. And the book was finally 384. So I had to cut basically cut it in half. So that was like a technical problem that was hard. But the book itself was easy. The book, you know, came with a lot of energy, just like a man at arms just kind of came.

Starting point is 01:29:15 You know, in fact, I don't even have really a memory of writing it. You know, I know I wrote it last year, but it just came in a real rush. I would love to experience more of that in my writing. It sounds like I just have to get on the playing field a bit more often. You know, sight unseen, Tim. We don't know each other. It's the first time we've really talked for a long time. And if you'll forgive me for being your psychotherapist here for a second. Yes, please. I think maybe you should think about writing fiction at some point. I agree with you. I agree with you. I do. I do. I think I'm psyching myself out. And

Starting point is 01:29:50 I think it would be so freeing for me to do it because my nonfiction books are so carefully, meticulously architected. There are no surprises. I mean, everything is intended to be as clear, which is fine, and prescriptive and represent such a logical sequence and building. Right. I know what you mean. For the writer, for me, there's very little element of surprise that harnessing of the muse is minimal in a sense, right? It exists with turns of phrase and certain thoughts about composition, but I appreciate you saying that. And I agree. I would like to try some fiction and just write it maybe for a handful of friends. Although let me make one

Starting point is 01:30:38 comment actually coming way back to something you said at the very early beginnings of this conversation when you said you wrote a novel and even your friends wouldn't read it. I wanted to just say that if you write, for those people out there who haven't written much, don't be overly offended or demoralized if your friends don't read it because my friends and especially my family, I'm not going to name out names, are the last people who will ever read my stuff, including now. I think it's just kind of like sometimes- It's absolutely true. I couldn't agree more, Tim. And there's a reason for that too.

Starting point is 01:31:19 They are the last people who, I couldn't get my mother to read anything. You know? It's because they are, the people who I couldn't get my mother to read anything. You know, it's because they are the people who are close to you. Since when you write something or you take a chance, they sense you changing. You're becoming a different person and their, their fears, they're going to lose you. And so they want to make you stay the way you are.

Starting point is 01:31:43 And, and that's, it's in a crazy way, it's love. It's out of love. But it's a dark side of love. Let me say a couple of things to you, Tim, for whatever this is worth. Forgive me for being presumptuous. But if you do decide to write fiction, here's what I would suggest.

Starting point is 01:31:59 First of all, don't start small. Don't say, oh, let me write a short story. Because that's kind of a pussy don't start small. Don't say, oh, let me write a short story. Because that's kind of a pussy way of doing it. Seriously, and the muse doesn't like that. She wants you to go big. So go for something big, I would suggest. And also, the way you'll know the idea is that it will be terrifying to you.

Starting point is 01:32:24 Prospect of exposing yourself to do this. And that's the one you should do. I love that. And I encourage you to do that. Don't piss off the muse with small ambitions. Really? Or maybe not piss off, don't insult the muse. I mean, a four-hour work week was a big idea, a huge idea, you know, and an idea that could have, you could have fallen completely on your face, you know, people could have just laughed you out of,

Starting point is 01:32:51 but you did it, you know, and it worked. So I would say, you know, to the same concept only with fiction. Thank you. I, I'm going to take that to heart. Let me get back for one second to fear setting. There's just one thing I wanted to say. Yes, please. To reinforce what you were saying. A few years ago, I wrote a book called The Lion's Gate, which was about the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the six-day war. And I went over to Israel and I interviewed a bunch of fighter pilots. and I had never really talked to fighter pilots before. And the thing that they have in common, the mindset of a fighter pilot, is exactly what you were saying. Before they would go up on a mission, they would sit down and for hours, in solitude, run the mission in their mind, thinking of every possible thing that could go wrong.

Starting point is 01:33:45 You know, what if I get a flame out over the Sinai Desert? You know, what if my guns don't fire? What if I'm attacked from out of the sun, whatever? And they would sort of, in their mind, play out all of these worst case scenarios. And when they had played them out and they knew what they were going to do, then they were ready to go. And I thought that is a great way to think about things, you know, because the last thing you always want to have to be able to have to save something is, oh, I never saw it coming. Right. So I, I heartily agree with that, that idea of fear setting that whole stoic concept. I think it's a great thing. Let's use that as a jumping off point to something I know very little about, but I've seen it come up in some discussions,

Starting point is 01:34:34 and that is the concept of, I'm not going to get the pronunciation here correct, but Yetzir Hara. Yetzir Hara. Yetzir Hara. What is Yetzir Hara? I wish I had my rabbi, Rabbi Mordecai Findlay here to explain it to us, but he apparently, it's a phrase from Genesis, and it's translated by Rabbi Find this is a concept in kabbalistic thought in jewish mysticism and it's the equivalent of my concept of resistance with a capital r it's that force that exists in the world to stop us from going to a lower level to a higher level like in

Starting point is 01:35:19 to realizing our calling to coming into our own it's that negative force. And in Jewish mysticism, there's a concept that life happens on more than one dimension, and that we live on the material dimension, and above us is a higher dimension that's called the neshama, and that is the soul. And what they talk about the soul is that above every blade of grass is an angel saying, grow, grow. The soul, or what I would say would be the unconscious or the muse, is actively engaged in our life and trying to help us. And we are trying to reach up to the soul. At the same time, the soul is trying to reach down to us and help us. And we are trying to reach up to the soul. At the same time, the soul is trying to reach down to us and help us. And in between the two is this force called the Yetzir Hara,

Starting point is 01:36:12 this negative force of self-sabotage. And when Rabbi Finley told me that, that that was something that existed in Jewish thought for years and years, I thought, ah, I'm not crazy. Other people have thought about the same thing. And so actually in Genesis, as I understand this right, I may be getting it wrong, but that is the story where God decides to destroy the human race. And he regrets and repents that he made us. And he looks down and he sees everywhere a turning toward evil, meaning this is the yetzer hurrah. And this is when God decides to send a flood to wipe us out and Noah survived, right? So in this kind of spiritual sense, it's almost a flaw in the universe that when God created us, at least according to Kabbalistic thought, he made a mistake. He screwed up.

Starting point is 01:37:09 A bug in the software. Yeah, a bug in the software. And certainly, if you look at the human race, there is a turning toward evil everywhere, right? There's something wrong with us. And I would say it's a lack of connection to the soul, what we were talking about, about the self and the ego, resistance and everything. So in any event, that's what the Yetzir Hara is, as I understand it. I may be wrong, but as I understand it, in Kabbalistic Jewish mysticism. So I would love to ask just a few more questions. And the first few are going to be related to my homework assignment or recommendation

Starting point is 01:37:45 of writing fiction. So you said, go big. And in my mind, I'm thinking that could mean a novel, could mean a screenplay. So I'd like you to elaborate on what that means. But also, I know that I have a tendency to read and prepare, perhaps excessively, often as a form of procrastination. I can read 10 books before I ever set pen to paper. Since I have no exposure or experience with fiction writing, are there any books I should read or things I should consider before I begin? Or literally, should I just say to myself, I'm going to write a novel. I don't even know how novels are structured, but I'm going to start with page one today. So there's the question of what is big? What does that actually mean to you? And then how much preparation, if any, or education is the right amount before beginning?

Starting point is 01:38:47 I think when I say go big, I think that the muse likes it. Fortune favors the bold. And I think when we try for something big, we're taking the initiative and we're kind of um invoking a tailwind behind us whereas if we're kind of timid and we say oh well just let me do this small little thing that i'm going to do i don't think the muse likes that and i don't like in advertising when i was working in advertising i used to come up with the tiniest ideas it was really pathetic you know and i bring them in and they would like just throw me out you know it, this is an idea the size of a postage stamp, you know, get the fuck out of here, you know, come back with something big. And it was really hard for me to do, you know, because I was afraid of it. So I do think going big helps, invokes the muse in a good way.

Starting point is 01:39:41 And sort of as a parallel to that, Tim, I would say, even though eventually you are going to have to learn what the story principles are, I would say just plunge in and follow, just do something that you love. I mean, I have, it's too bad we're not on video here, because I have behind me a book by a friend of mine, Mike McClellan, called The Sand Sea. And it's like 780 pages long or something. And Mike is a lawyer. He's a functioning lawyer. He's got a wife and kids. And over like a 13-year period, he would get up at the crack of dawn and go out to his garage where he had an office. And he would put in, he would write 500 words a day. But this book, The Sand Sea is a huge book. It's like a Tolkien type of book. And, you know, with all kinds of crazy characters

Starting point is 01:40:31 from everywhere. And I really applaud that he did it that way. And now he's on to the second book in the trilogy. There's going to be a third one. So for him, going big really worked. And it has gone, it has worked for me too. That doesn't mean that it necessarily has to be 800 pages long, but just a big idea, an idea that's kind of a scary idea. You say to yourself, when I show this to people, they're going to look at me and go, what happened to you, Tim? Are you okay? That's what I mean by big. And should I just assume this is never going to be read by anyone? Is that a helpful assumption to make? A couple of follow-up questions. Do it only for yourself. Do it only for yourself. And is the... Because when I hear stories of someone working on things, say in the mornings, like the kite runner, right? But I mean, it's a similar story. I think the author was working in medicine at the time and would wake up super early and worked for a long period of time on this book. When I think of my first foray into fiction, if I think it's going to be

Starting point is 01:41:39 a homework assignment, like a daily homework assignment for years, there is a very large part of me that just does not want to do it unless the purpose behind it is therapy or this is going to be cultivating your connection with this other dimension you've described. And that's the purpose of doing this. Do you have any thoughts on those points or concerns? I mean, it may be, Tim, that writing fiction is your calling. I don't know. It could very well be. You could say that nonfiction books and podcasts and stuff like that

Starting point is 01:42:14 might be, if you'll forgive me, might be a shadow career for you. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, could be. So in that case, the exercise of writing fiction would be like a lifelong calling, you know, a practice from now till the end. And I would think that it's a good idea to hope that it will myself too, to turn off the self-censor and not start to think, oh shit, are people going to like this? Or is this, have I gone too far in this scene?

Starting point is 01:42:52 You know, in other words, trying to second guess the audience. Because an audience, if it's out there, it'll find it. You know, it'll find the work. And if it isn't, it won't. But I would say, just write to please yourself and always take the brave choice. You know, should I write this scene this way? It's kind of a chicken way. Or should I go really go for it and write it the big way? And I would say always take the brave choice and monitor yourself as you go. Because what should happen is once you're into this, you should really start to feel good.

Starting point is 01:43:23 You should really feel a tailwind and really feel like, ah, shit, my feet are on the ground. I may be a beginner. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm on the right path. And if it doesn't feel like that, then maybe it's not the right idea. Well, if it's okay with you, I may reach out to you as my- Yeah, please do. In fact, please do. Absolutely. As my stabilizing wing at some point. No, I'm serious, Tim. Please do.

Starting point is 01:43:56 Thank you. I really appreciate that. Stephen, this has been so much fun. I would love to do another round at some point, have another conversation like this. I'm game. Put me down in the books whenever. There's no shortage of topics to cover. And maybe after I've actually given this a shot, I think that should be the stakes for me. That should be the accountabilities. I can't have you on again until I have actually spent some time on this scary thing called fiction.

Starting point is 01:44:26 And just a few last questions. And this one doesn't always work out, but I like to ask it. And it's not an easy question necessarily. But if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message or a quote or a question or an image out to billions of people, assuming they would all understand it, what might you put on that billboard? Ah, and you know, actually, this was a question in Tribe of Mentors that I actually wrote an answer to. It was. But what I said in that, in Tribe of Mentors was, I would not put up any billboard at all and I would tear them all down. But to answer your question a little more

Starting point is 01:45:03 seriously, because you're sort of saying, well, what would be kind of a, if you had to say one thing to somebody to help them? Exactly. I would say, life is long. This is what a friend of mine, Phil Slott, once said to me. He said, they always tell you life is short, but actually life is long. And if we find ourselves making mistakes or we haven't yet found our real calling, don't drive yourself crazy with

Starting point is 01:45:33 that. You know, there's plenty of time. Everybody thinks they've got, oh, if I don't do it in the next six months, I'm going to kill myself, you know? And I thought that too forever. But look at me. It took me forever to break through into anything. And I still feel that I've got a whole other lifetime ahead of me. And you know, you Tim, you've got like three lifetimes ahead of you. So be patient with yourself. I would say to people, be kind to yourself. You're on a journey, whether you realize it or not, we all are. There's no way not to be. And things will reveal themselves as they go, but don't beat yourself up too much. Steven, this has been so much fun. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Starting point is 01:46:15 And people can find you at Steven Pressfield, again with a V, stevenpressfield.com, Twitter at S Pressfield, Instagram, steven underscore Pressfield. We'll link to all of your books, including the newest and one that I'm quite excited about, A Man at Arms, an epic saga about a reluctant hero, the Roman Empire, and the rise of a new faith. Checking all the boxes for me. And are there any other comments you'd like to make any requests of my audience any uh parting questions or anything at all that you'd like to add before we bring this this conversation to a close no i think that billboard that's that's my billboard yeah that would be that would be the final thing other than

Starting point is 01:47:00 to say you know thanks for having me tim it's great talking to you getting to know you a little bit and i hope i didn't overstep my bounds and, you know, giving unsolicited advice, but I hope, I hope what I said helps a little bit and you know, we'll, we'll talk again. I think, I think, you know, if this writing thing doesn't work out for you, maybe that's your shadow career for becoming a psychoanalyst. Maybe that is your real calling. And I have found this very helpful personally, and I'm sure it will help many other people out there. So thank you again, Steven. And to everyone listening, once again, you can find links to everything that we mentioned

Starting point is 01:47:38 at TimDopLog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends,

Starting point is 01:48:26 for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up,

Starting point is 01:48:51 I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in the 4-Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multimineral greens complex, probiotics, and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, and much more. I usually take it

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Starting point is 01:50:10 and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Tonal, T-O-N-A-L. I'm super excited about this one, and I was skeptical of it in the beginning. Tonal, quote, Tonal is the world's most intelligent home gym and personal trainer, end quote. That's the tagline from their website, folks, to give you the one sentence summary. And this device, it's really a system, is perfect for anyone looking to take their home workouts to the next level or someone who just wants to get maximum bang for the buck

Starting point is 01:50:50 in a tiny, tiny footprint of space. Tonal is precision engineered to be the world's most advanced strength studio and personal trainer. It uses breakthrough technology of all different types to help get you stronger, faster. I was introduced to Tonal by three different friends. All of them are tech savvy. One of them is a former competitive skier who's doubled his strength in a number of movements using Tonal, even though he has a long athletic background. And I'll paint a picture for you.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #501: Steven Pressfield — How to Overcome Self-Sabotage and Resistance, Routines for Little Successes, and The Hero’s Journey vs. The Artist’s Journey

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #501: Steven Pressfield — How to Overcome Self-Sabotage and Resistance, Routines for Little Successes, and The Hero’s Journey vs. The Artist’s Journey

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