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Steven Pressfield - The Artist’s Journey, Wisdom In Little Successes, & More | The Tim Ferriss Show

Steven Pressfield (@SPressfield), a former Marine and graduate of Duke University, became an overnight success as a writer after 30 years of abject failure.

Tim FerrisshostSteven Pressfieldguest

Mar 1, 20211h 53mWatch on YouTube

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Transcript

105 min read · 20,933 words

0:00 – 5:06
Intro
1. TFTim Ferriss
  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 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. By eliminating traditional metal weights, dumbbells, and barbells, Tonal can deliver 200 pounds of resistance, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's actually [laughs] it feels like a lot more at the high end, in a device smaller than a flat-screen TV. And you can perform at least 150 different exercises, and these different technologies are exclusive to Tonal. And you can dial weights up and down with the touch of a button in one-pound increments using magnets and electricity, so the movement is extremely smooth. And even though I have a home gym already in my garage, I'm still getting a Tonal installed. I've used Tonal for multiple workouts now to do things I just cannot do in my home gym, such as the chop and lift exercises from The 4-Hour Body, all sorts of cable exercises that would usually involve much, much bigger piece of equipment. Eccentric training. For instance, you can do, to give a simple example, bicep curls where you are lifting, let's just say, 20 pounds in each hand up, and then Tonal will automatically increase the weight, because you can lower more than you can lift, to, say, 25 or 30 pounds on the way down. And I do kettlebell swings. I do all sorts of deadlifts, this, that, and the other thing. And after one workout on Tonal focusing on pulling, I was blasted for a full week. It's really incredible what you can do with eccentrics. They also have all sorts of other really, really cool advantage that you can apply to any of your favorite movements. Tonal learns from your strength and provides suggested weight recommendations for every move with detailed progress reports to help you see your strengths grow. Tonal also has a growing library of expert-led workouts by motivating coaches, from strength training to cardio. So you can do really just about everything. Every program is personalized to your body using artificial intelligence and other aspects of the engineering, and smart features check your form in real time just like a personal trainer. So try it out. Try Tonal. At least check it out. Watch the, uh, videos on YouTube, and see if you can pick out a familiar voice. It's not me, I'll say that. But try Tonal, the world's smartest home gym, for 30 days in your home, and if you don't love it, you can return it for a full refund. So visit www.tonal.com for $100 off of smart accessories when you use promo code Tim, T-I-M, at checkout. That's www.T-O-N-A-L.com, promo code Tim. Tonal, be your strongest. [upbeat music] 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 once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient-dense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. From travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D, I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/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/tim. [upbeat music] Optimal minerals. At this altitude, I can run flat-out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question? Now
5:06 – 7:27
Tim introduces Steven Pressfield and frames the conversation around “resistance”
1. TFTim Ferriss
  we see that I've broken time. What if I give you the option? 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. And my guest today is Steven Pressfield. I have wanted to have Steven [laughs] on this podcast for a very long time. You can find him on Twitter at SPressfield 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. [laughs] So we'll dig into that. Identifying the omnipresence, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, of resistance, the interior force of self-sabotage he 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, an epic saga about a reluctant hero of the Roman Empire and the rise of a new faith. You can find him online, Steven with a V, stevenpressfield.com, on Twitter, @SPressfield, and Instagram, steven_pressfield. Steven, welcome to the show.
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  It's great to be here, Tim. I've been wanting to have a conversation with you as well, so I'm, I'm excited about this too. It's great.
3. TFTim Ferriss
  And we are gonna run out of, we are gonna 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. Uh, so we'll see what-
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
5. TFTim Ferriss
  ... what blend of all of those elements-
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  All right.
7. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] We'll see what blend of-
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  I mean, I was, I was hoping for the same thing.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  Oh, wonderful. Okay. So it's, it's, it's-
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  From you.
11. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] From me. Well, you know what? We can, we can turn this into a, a mutual therapy session in that case.
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  All right.
7:27 – 12:11
The $15-a-month house and the feral tomcat as a personal omen
1. TFTim Ferriss
  So let's, 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 gonna start.
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
3. TFTim Ferriss
  Please tell me about this house at $15 a month and the backwoods cat.
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  I went, uh, the... When you talk about, uh, 30 years of abject failure, that's, that's really true. I mean, from the time that I originally tried to start writing, quit a job, like you did, and, uh, and actually had a book published was about, you know, about 28 years, 30 years, something like that. And at one point I was, uh, I was driving trucks, tractor trailers in North Carolina, and had just come out of living in a halfway house that which, which was, um, you know, when people are released from mental hospitals, not me, but everybody else was there. And I finally found, 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. And, um, 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, it's... 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 stoop, and the woods started, like, maybe only five feet from the house, this cat would sort of materialize.
5. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  He was 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 wanna be a pet, you know?
7. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  And he would sit there... This is all, this is all true, Tim. I'm not making this up.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  I believe you.
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  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-
11. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... and the other one didn't. And, and he would look at me like he was trying to decide whether or not to kick my ass or not, you know? And 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.
13. TFTim Ferriss
  Right.
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  And, uh, so I f- I took a lot of courage from that cat appearing. I sort of felt like in some way my energy had sort of drawn him out of the woods, 'cause he kept coming back. I mean, this wasn't a one-time thing. And, uh, so anyway, that's, that's, uh, that's for a little... I don't know if that's context, Tim. [laughs] I don't know.
15. TFTim Ferriss
  Well-
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  That's quite a while ago, but it was... That was sort of at the heart of my darkest hours.
17. TFTim Ferriss
  Well, it, it provides a bunch of fertile ground for exploration. Uh, before we leave the cat, though, what meaning did you take from that? What did, what effect did that have on you? And then we're gonna come back to the halfway house, because you mentioned everyone else was there after being released from a mental hospital or something along those lines-
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah
19. TFTim Ferriss
  ... so I wanna know how you ended up there. But first, what meaning did you imbue this cat with after these repeated visits?
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  Well, I, I feel like the cat was a little bit of a, of a role model for me, that it was, it was a cat that was obviously completely self-sufficient, you know, lived in the woods, didn't require anybody to feed him, wouldn't let anybody feed him, was, you know, a totally autonomous individual. And I thought to myself kind of, 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, you know? [laughs] And, uh, so I thought if, if this cat has come here, maybe he's come here to kind of encourage me and tell me that, "Steve, you can do that too," you know? "You can be like me too. You can be autonomous. You can be self-sufficient. You can take care of yourself."
21. TFTim Ferriss
  Hmm. You know, it makes me think a bit of, of the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. The, the first few lines are-
22. SPSteven Pressfield
  Ah, I'm not familiar with that
23. TFTim Ferriss
  ... the first-
24. SPSteven Pressfield
  Tell me
25. TFTim Ferriss
  ... I'll tell you. The first, 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.
26. SPSteven Pressfield
  Wow.
12:11 – 15:47
Marriage strain, shame, and landing in a halfway house
1. TFTim Ferriss
  And I think about that quite a bit, and contact with nature and, uh, man's tendency, and what I'm- 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 there, and what was your state-
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  Well, it really-
3. TFTim Ferriss
  ... at the time that you were there?
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs] I don't know. We're getting into some deep stuff really early here, Tim.
5. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] I know it's a first date and everything, but-
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  Uh-
7. TFTim Ferriss
  ... I'm gonna skip the foreplay a bit, if that's okay. [laughs]
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  Well, I was in North Carolina at the time. I had married a, a gal from North Carolina. We'd been, you know, 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, we had come back from North Carolina, and we were living with her mother out in the woods in a farmhouse that also rented for about 20 bucks a month. And, um, I had this, uh, job delivering industrial food. I drove a little truck, and I would deliver things like Salisbury steaks and, uh, frozen crinkle-cut french fries to little restaurants and stuff like that. And, uh, without going into a long story, I got fired from that job, and in a state of, uh, great shame. I was just, like, totally ashamed in front of my wife, in front of her 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, uh, this is in Durham, North Carolina, that was also a halfway house for, you know, where the gov- the state government would pay for people who had been released from mental institutions and, uh, were on their way back into the real world. And so I found a, a room in the basement there, and, um, that was [laughs] how I came to that, that halfway house.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  Wow.
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  And I have a theory about halfway houses and about the people who are in there, if I... Do you wanna hear this, Tim?
11. TFTim Ferriss
  I do.
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  'Cause I've been in a bunch of other kind of situations like that, and you think, 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, 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.
13. TFTim Ferriss
  Hmm.
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  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. So in a way, I felt kind of bad when I had to leave this, this house, 'cause I liked the people so much.
15. TFTim Ferriss
  It also speaks, it seems, to, not to say it isn't worth it, but some of the possible risks of seeing through the thin veneer that is what we consider civilization. [laughs]
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah. Yeah.
17. TFTim Ferriss
  And just how-
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  It's a dangerous thing
15:47 – 23:10
Driving trucks as a proving ground: responsibility, self-monitoring, and mentorship
1. TFTim Ferriss
  ... just how slippery it can be to sort of realize how arbitrary so many of these social constructs are. Y- you, you have a, just an incredible resume. I mean, it, it reads like... I, I don't wanna say hero's journey, because we'll probably come to that and clarify that [laughs] 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. It, it... and the list goes on. Uh, 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?
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  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 gotta get it together one way or another, and other people are depending on you. Whatever that load is, you've gotta deliver it. The shipper wants it, the people that it's being shipped to want it, and there's really sort of no mercy. You know, you're, 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, you know, 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, the need to deliver, to really actually deliver the goods, and the self-imposed pressure of that, that really helped me. And yeah, 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 kinda like the cat that came out of the woods, I sorta felt like I was being a little bit of my own role model, and that there was hope that I, that I could get it together one way or another.
3. TFTim Ferriss
  At that time, in that period, you, you mentioned the self-sabotage. And I'll, 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?
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  I'll give you a specific. When I was driving the little trucks and delivering institutional food to these little restaurants like toddle houses and stuff like that, the way I got fired was it was, uh, early in the morning, I had just finished delivering to a, to a restaurant. I hadn't had breakfast, and I was coming back out through the, 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, of fruit juice, you know?
5. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  Pineapple juice and stuff like that. And so I just reached out and I grabbed one for myself, and the boss caught me, and, you know, bumpity, bump, bump, bump, I'm fired. And I really feel like me doing that was an act of self-destruction that I had, and, and I'm, I absolutely am certain of it, you know? I just sort of knew, you know, why do you do something like that? So that was kind of the sort of thing that I would do kind of over and over. And, um, you know, a- 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, uh, 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 kinda thing that I would do where I would just be careless.
7. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  You know, you, you know you need to... Like if you're an airline pilot, you, and you're doing your, your checklist, you know you have to, before you take off, you gotta 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." It was like, "Oh, shit, I've done it again," you know?
9. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  And getting back to your m- Hugh Reeves, who was the dispatcher who was my mentor-
11. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... in this thing, he... After I got fired, I'm really [laughs] I don't know, w- I guess this is interesting. I don't know. Um-
13. TFTim Ferriss
  I find it interesting. [laughs]
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  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, I had already applied for... I'd gone to a truck driving school, and I'd 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 y- I could at least get a job. All you needed was a pulse-
15. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... and they would take you on. And so on my way out of town in, uh, like, uh, the dead of winter, worst possible rainy North Carolina st- I stopped at this one trucking company that I had already applied to a couple times and they rejected me, and Hugh Reeves was the dispatcher. And, uh, he was a former Marine and he knew that I had been a Marine, and I just stopped just for the hell of it. I thought, "This is where, you know, things are gonna happen," and he hired me. So that kinda saved my life right there. But throughout the whole, uh, my struggles to learn the business and stuff like that, there was... I'll tell you, there was one, one moment where he kinda sat me down. And, uh, I had kept screwing up, like I said. And he sat me down alone in his office and he said, uh, you know, "Son," and I was like, I don't know, what, 25 years younger than him. He said, um, "I don't know what's going on in your head, son. I don't know what journey you're playing out here. 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," you know?
17. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  And, and so that was a great thing for me, you know, to... You know, it was like a slap in the face, 'cause I, 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 depending on me. I have to, I have to... And that really helped me to, to sort of think of myself as much as I could as a professional-
19. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... and not somebody on some crazy adventure.
21. TFTim Ferriss
  I can definitely see how that ties into a lot that came later. That's a great story.
22. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah. Yeah.
23:10 – 27:03
Late publishing success and learning to write through ads, screenplays, and failed novels
1. TFTim Ferriss
  That's a great story. Let's flash forward. We're gonna 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 gonna 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 it in the bio, 30 years of abject failure. Okay, so your first novel published after around 30 years of effort, The, The Legend of Bagger Vance. How old were you when that was published?
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  I think I was 53.
3. TFTim Ferriss
  All right.
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  Maybe 54.
5. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] Okay. So now a lot happened up to that point, obviously, in your life. You'd had a lot of experiences. Where I wanna go next is, is to ask how you developed your facility with words, because you are a very good writer. The, the jobs we've mentioned so far seem to have nothing to do-
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
7. TFTim Ferriss
  ... with, with wordsmithing.
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  That's, that's true.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  You have, you have an incredible vocabulary. How did this happen?
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  I'll accept... Thank you for saying that, Tim. I accept that at face value.
11. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] Please do.
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  But through the, through the whole time that, um, you know, I, I wasn't only doing blue-collar jobs. I, I worked in advertising, like in New York three or four times, and I also had about a 10-year career as a sc- as a screenwriter in, uh, in Los Angeles, where I am now. And, um, so through that time, you're, uh, trying to learn what, what a writer is, and what being a... what writing is. And also, of course, I was, 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.
13. TFTim Ferriss
  What drove you to do that? If I could just pause there for a second-
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  Sure
15. TFTim Ferriss
  ... because most people don't write, period, so what was driving you or compelling you or inspiring you to do that?
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  You know, I don't know. It's why does anybody write or why does anybody paint or anything? I, um... It sort of originally started for me... I ne- it was not a dream I had as a kid, you know? I didn't... You know, like, uh, Jack Carr, the, 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, 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, uh, quit, wrote a novel, and it was a huge success overnight. And I sorta thought, "Well, shit, why don't I do that too?"
17. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] Seems like a, seems like an easy gig. Let's try it.
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  There's nothing to it, right?
19. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  I mean, uh, he, he, 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 motivated to do it, right? I've gotta, like, somehow I've gotta, you know, write my way out of this thing one way or another.
21. TFTim Ferriss
  Hmm.
22. SPSteven Pressfield
  So that was how it initially started, Tim, in terms of just the intention to do it, to finally make it work.
23. TFTim Ferriss
  I wanna 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 ex- exploration. And you learn a lot about guests looking at the bullets they provide or the lack of bullets they provide. [laughs]
24. SPSteven Pressfield
  I bet. I bet.
27:03 – 31:40
Advertising lessons: “Nobody wants to read your shit” and the craft of compression
1. TFTim Ferriss
  And, and, and your bullets are fantastic, and I, I... This, this, uh, this will be tied into what we're talking about in just a second, but... So for instance, right? "Ask me about the house for $15 a month and the backwoods cat I made friends with." Another one, which we're not gonna 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,'" uh, end quote. Now, to me, and speaking as-
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  And of course, I did go past that last right. [laughs]
3. TFTim Ferriss
  Of, of course you did. Now, now, now as someone who has read, I wanna 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 a- at agencies. It's, it's so obvious to me because it's... You can't not ask. I mean, it is, 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, the names?
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah, that was one of the places. Yeah.
5. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  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 met a lot of great people there, and I learned a lot. And one of the things, you know, one of the books that I've written about writing, as you know, is called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit.
7. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] Yeah. Please-
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  And this-
9. TFTim Ferriss
  ... for those people who don't know it, this is just a spectacular piece. [laughs] If you could-
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  And-
11. TFTim Ferriss
  ... yeah, describe it. Yeah
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... and the, the... sort of the... this is to me, like, 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, 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 and they're gonna click right through it as fast as they can, you know? Or if it's an ad that's in a newspaper or magazine, they're gonna turn the page as fast as they can 'cause they hate it. They don't want you to sell them Preparation H or anything like that.
13. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  Right? So the lesson for that as a writer, knowing that you're facing that res- so much resistance from the, from the reader, is that whatever you're gonna put on that page or on the TV screen, it's gotta 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, 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 is a... or, or, 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 gotta give them something. You can't just put some crap out there and expect that they're obligated to read it or watch it, 'cause they won't watch it, you know?
15. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  So that was, that, that was a great lesson for me that applied in writing novels or movies or anything at all that you're gonna do. A restaurant, if you're gonna open a restaurant, you know? Nobody wants to come in there and, and buy your greasy cheeseburgers, you know?
17. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  You've gotta come up with something that makes them say, "I've gotta go in there," you know? And, um, 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, 'cause an announcer or people speaking, actors speaking, can't 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 in to my boss, whoever he was or she was, and they would say, "Get outta here. This is way too long. Go back to your cubicle and cut it down." 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 g- a wonderful skill to learn-
19. TFTim Ferriss
  Hmm
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... to find that you can say maybe in 25 words what you had said in 250 words before. So you're, you're right, Tim. You were right on target that there was a lot of lessons that came out of that experience of writing ads.
31:40 – 37:19
Hero’s journey vs. artist’s journey: identity, calling, and “filling the vessel”
1. TFTim Ferriss
  I mentioned in passing, and I'm by no means an expert here, but mentioned in passing hero's journey in, in reference to your, your life in a sense. But, uh, 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?
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  Uh, I definitely feel this time that you and I are talking about now, when I was driving trucks and 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 is... 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, at that point, the... We've, we've... Hopefully we've kind of found who we are and what our calling is. And for me, you know, that was... It was a long, it was a long journey. But 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 gonna write about? What is my gift?" If I'm here to bring kind of a gift to the people, as the hero's journey, uh, template says, my question to myself is, what is that gift? So for the rest of my life, I feel at that point I got on my artist journey. And now I, I'm a writer. I'm gonna write one thing. I'm gonna write another. I'm gonna write another. And the question I'm asking myself is, "What i- 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, um, I'll, I'll blather on for a bit here, Tim, if you don't mind.
3. TFTim Ferriss
  Please. I love f- I love your blathering. [laughs]
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  Um, if you've ever heard of Richard Rohr, who wrote, uh, Falling Upward, I think it is. He's a, he's a Franciscan monk and, um, 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 and kind of establishing your presence on the planet. You know, like, maybe you're a mom, and you say, "Oh, okay, I'm a mo- you know, I'm, 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 wanna 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.
5. TFTim Ferriss
  Hmm.
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  So you sort of ask yourself, "Okay, now I can do it. I've got a house. I've... Whatever. Um, I have a profession. What am I gonna do with this? Am I just gonna be another crappy person that's, that's, you know, uh, continuing the, the societal garbage that we have, or am I gonna try to find my gift that's unique to me and bring it forth to the world and try to help in one way or another?" So that to me is there's... The hero's journey comes first, and when the hero's journey is over, our artist journey begins.
7. TFTim Ferriss
  I love that.
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  And I would define art as, as the broadest possible terms, anything that is a gift to the, to the wider world.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best version of LinkedIn for sales 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 customer's 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 monthly InMail messages, lead recommendations, unlimited searches, actionable insights and news, and access to free courses on LinkedIn Learning. Target the right prospects and decision-makers, unlocking 15% more pipeline from sourced opportunities, a 17% lift when saving leads on Sales Navigator, and 42% larger deal sizes. As the world adapts to new working habits, sellers must also shift tactics to stay ahead. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is here to help sales professionals do exactly that. So start your 60-day free trial, that's a two-month free trial, of LinkedIn Sales Navigator today by going to linkedin.com/navigator. That's linkedin.com/navigator, N-A-V-I-G-A-T-O-R, to start your 60-day free trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. One more time, linkedin.com/navigator. Part of the hero's journey, as I understand
37:19 – 43:51
Refusal of the call and the turning point: finishing a novel and changing the story about yourself
1. TFTim Ferriss
  it, and please correct me if I'm getting this wrong, is what is sometimes referred to as refusal of the call, right? Like when Luke Skywalker-
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  Uh-huh
3. TFTim Ferriss
  ... is just bitching and whining and doesn't wanna go see Yoda, et cetera. Like, y- you know, he's just being a pain in the ass to Obi-Wan Kenobi. You- everyone [laughs] should re-watch Star Wars if you don't remember this part-
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah, yeah
5. TFTim Ferriss
  ... 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, did that play any role?
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  Oh, a- absolutely, and I think it does in everybody's life, you know? The ref- In, in the hero's journey, as Joseph Campbell lays it out, there's a bunch of stages, and the, the hero's journey, usually it starts in what Joseph Campbell would call the ordinary world, and it's just, you know, you're living your regular life, but something is wrong. Like in the case of Luke Skywalker, he's on, uh, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's evaporator farm on Tatooine, I guess, is the planet, right?
7. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm, you got it.
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  And he's just... Right? And, and he... This is his ordinary life, right? He's stuck. He's nowhere. In fact, I think there's a... Somebody asks 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."
9. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  Right? And that's, so that's kind of the ordina- 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. In Star Wars, it's that Luke Skywalker finds R2-D2, and he, uh, you know, unplugs the little hologram that says, "Princess Leia, help me. Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope," right?
11. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  So that's the call, right? Suddenly he realizes, "Uh-oh, I've gotta 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 Beru and Uncle Owen," blah, blah, blah. And that seems to be across the board. If you, 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 gonna give you a shot to fight the champ," and Rocky's first reaction is, "No."
13. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  "I can't do it. You're crazy. This is a joke. I can't do it." Or if we wanna 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 wanna 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, of the plow. And when Odysseus comes to the baby, he veers around it, right? He's not gonna run over his baby, and the messenger says to him, "Ah, you're faking. You're 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 s- business doing. I got, like, two minutes from the end, and I just blew it up, and blew my, my whole life up. It was... That was my refusal. I refused to go into this, the unknown world.
15. TFTim Ferriss
  How did you blow it up? Do you mean that you just stopped? You threw it, like-
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  Well, I'm not gonna tell you exactly details-
17. TFTim Ferriss
  Okay
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... but I did something that made my wife hate me and kick me out. [laughs]
19. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] Got it. Okay.
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  So th- uh, so that's what... I acted out, what, as they would say in psychological terms.
21. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
22. SPSteven Pressfield
  In other words, another form of self-destruction. You know? That, that was, that was my, those were my demons forever.
23. TFTim Ferriss
  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, that in some respect, and please correct me, disabuse me of this so it's not true-
24. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
25. TFTim Ferriss
  ... but that you've, that you've been able to at least, like, strike a deal with these demons because-
26. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yes, I have. I have
27. TFTim Ferriss
  ... you went, you went-
28. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yes
29. TFTim Ferriss
  ... you went from being unable to finish a novel to producing many works. What is that deal, or how, how has that come to be the case?
30. SPSteven Pressfield
  Well, let me just talk about a novel for a second.
43:51 – 50:31
From Hollywood to publishing: partnerships, agent breakups, and the breakthrough of Bagger Vance
1. TFTim Ferriss
  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, what happened? Did you end up-
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
3. TFTim Ferriss
  ... like drawing straws and you became the bridge partner of a book agent? Like, what, what actually happened that allowed-
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  Ah
5. TFTim Ferriss
  ... this, this publication, publishing your first book?
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  Well, like, like I said, I wound up writing three novels-
7. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... that never got published.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  Right.
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  And, uh, 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, et cetera. I just didn't have the wherewithal. And so I decided, uh, uh, 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... 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, you know, four or five years, I got my a- 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-
11. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... and who was like a really, a real brand name and a real, uh, you know, a guy that really could get work.
13. TFTim Ferriss
  How did you get teamed up with him? I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but like, like, Alien turned into an iconic film. I mean, that-
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  Oh, yes. Great, great
15. TFTim Ferriss
  ... they created a franchise.
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  Great film.
17. TFTim Ferriss
  How did you get teamed up with him?
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  I had an agent, a wonderful agent named Mike Warner, who tragically died at a young age. But, uh, and, you know, he had other clients, and Ron was one of his other clients. And Ron usually worked with a partner.
19. TFTim Ferriss
  Hmm.
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  And at that time, because he was more, Ron was more of a producer/writer than a writer/writer.
21. TFTim Ferriss
  What is a producer/writer?
22. SPSteven Pressfield
  A writer/writer is the, the guy that actually sits down at the page, at the typewriter, and actually writes the scenes and so on and so forth.
23. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
24. SPSteven Pressfield
  A producer/writer is somebody who is great at coming up with the ideas, the big ideas, and also sort of shepherding a story through-
25. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm
26. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... uh, from start to finish, and also is a producer in the sense of being able to get financing and-
27. TFTim Ferriss
  Right
28. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... and take the meetings and make a deal.
29. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
30. SPSteven Pressfield
  So whereas Ron was not the kind of writer that could actually sit down and write the screenplay.
50:31 – 1:00:57
Little successes and routines: generating momentum to break through resistance
1. TFTim Ferriss
  That's just incredible. What a story. So I'd like to ask you about momentum in your life, and I'm asking, this is, this is where I might segue at least indirectly [laughs] into some therapy for myself. So I am, I am looking at an interview you've done, and it's discussing the little successes approach, and I'm just gonna read a first paragraph, and then you can tell me if things have changed. 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, what this schedule represents?
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  Randy is Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart and has directed a bunch of movies as well.
3. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  And, uh, he's a good friend of mine out here, and he has a theory w- that he calls little successes, and he means that from the moment he gets out of bed, and I believe this too, exactly, he's looking to build up... He's, he's looking ahead to the moment when he actually sits down and, 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. [laughs]
5. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  And one of the, 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, at the page, I feel like I've got some momentum going. You know, I've done-
7. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... I've done this, I've done that, I've done... I've tooken out the garbage, you know, I've, uh, you know, fed the birds, uh, and I've got a little momentum going 'cause I... And I think it's very important. I mean, even if you think about, let's say a basketball player, think about Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or anybody, Steph Curry or whatever, going to the, a game tonight. You know, they're at the, 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 they've... or mentally they're preparing themselves, and they go through, you know, they do their... If you watch Steph Curry do his routine, it, you know, it's like, I don't know what. It's am- amazing what he does. You know, ba- rubber bands between his knees to stre- strengthen his knees, and then he does, you know, 100 shots from, you know, like 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.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  What is your preferred exercise routine? Do you have any favorite exercises or workouts?
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  I'm in the, now in the COVID thing where I'm doing it on, out on my deck, but for up until the COVID thing, I trained with a wonderful trainer named T.R. Goodman at, uh, a place called Pro Camp at Gold's Gym in Venice, and he has a, you know, a whole thing that he does with us who train with him. We usually train in a group of two or three guys, and, uh, it's basically just, just really straight basic weight training. You know, squats and curls and stuff like that. You know, legs on one day, you know, the s- just very basic stuff.
11. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm. That's a very iconic location as far as gyms go. [laughs]
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah.
13. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  It's... Yeah. It's now it's all in a tent in the parking lot now.
15. TFTim Ferriss
  Right. [laughs] So it's changed a bit during-
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah
17. TFTim Ferriss
  ... during pandemic times. So the little successes approach makes sense to me and really appeals to me, and there's, there's so much variation, of course, when you talk to writers about process, right? So I've, I recently interviewed Joyce Carol Oates, and I've, uh, when I was an undergrad, took a, 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 a weakness of character. I often-
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
19. TFTim Ferriss
  ... break. I also just break. I'm just like, "God, this is fucking terrible," and I stop.
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
21. TFTim Ferriss
  And then you have maybe a contrast, and I'm not saying this is all or nothing, one approach or the other, but folks like, uh, B.J. 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. Uh, 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, it's what we're talking about, even though I think the discussion extends to many other areas. How should somebody think about figuring it out? Because, uh, even for me personally, I have... Uh, well, we'll talk about this afterwards, but I've, I've been having quite a lot of challenges writing in the, in the past few years, and so 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. [laughs]
22. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah.
23. TFTim Ferriss
  How would you talk someone through finding something that works for them or making sense of conflicting advice?
24. SPSteven Pressfield
  The one thing I would say is that it seems to me that every writer or artist fi- has a unique way of doing it, and I don't think there's any kind of one-size-fits-all type of thing.
25. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
26. SPSteven Pressfield
  Like, there was an article in the LA Times a few years ago where they interviewed screenwriters, and they were asking, you know, what was their routine. They interviewed like five writers, and three of them wrote in their cars.
27. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
28. SPSteven Pressfield
  And this is true.
29. TFTim Ferriss
  That's amazing. [laughs]
30. SPSteven Pressfield
  And one of them wrote in their car when it was moving.
1:00:57 – 1:05:24
Editing like an editor: Story Grid, genre conventions, and shaping drafts
1. TFTim Ferriss
  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, uh, and the, 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 Shawn Coyne," I think it is, C-O-Y-N-E. What does that mean, the editor's mindset into the writing process?
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  Before I say to that, I wanna say that y- your idea of checking into a hotel room I think is a great idea, and it is, and that's something that, uh, might be unique to you, Tim. That might be a trick that works for you. Um-
3. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs] It's safer than driving in a car and writing. [laughs]
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  'Cause, yeah. But ser- it is kind of an aikido. It's a way of tricking yourself to somehow, you know, "Oh, I can, I can't work there, but I can work here."
5. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  If it works, it works, you know?
7. TFTim Ferriss
  Yeah. Right. Right. Totally.
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  But, but The Story Grid, Shawn Coyne is actually, was my first editor. He was the editor who bought Gates of Fire.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  Oh, no kidding.
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  And we are-
11. TFTim Ferriss
  Amazing
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... we're best, we're really good friends, and we're partners in a little publishing company that we have called Black Irish Books. So I know Shawn very well. And Shawn is, he's a Harvard guy, and, um, he's, uh, has evolved this concept of editing that he calls The Story Grid, and it's incr- it's incredibly deep. If you and I were looking at this, it would, it was like, it's like Einstein, you know? I can't even gra- begin to grasp what it is, but he really has a whole concept from A to Z of what a story is, what a scene is, and so on and so forth that he calls The Story Grid. And he actually... I highly recommend his website, www.storygrid.com. If you wanna be an editor, if you wanna 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 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, uh, 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 Shawn, and he kind of tells me what the story's 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 and that whole concept of act one, act two, act three, refusal of the call that we were talking about earlier.
13. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  And Shawn has a, 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 y- and you have to know them, and that's what an editor does. You know? For instance, if, if you're gonna have a love story, there always has to be a rival. That's a big thing. Think of any story in, love story in the world. And there's also almost always has to be the lovers 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, the kind of the principles of storytelling. And when you violated them, an editor can bring you back from that, you know?
15. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm.
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  Or when you have left certain things out that need to be in there, an editor 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, uh, you know, what conventions have I violated? And if I, if I have violated them, do I have a good reason for it?"
17. TFTim Ferriss
  Hmm.
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  So I'm not sure that's an answer, Tim, but that's, uh-
19. TFTim Ferriss
  That is an answer. An excellent-
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  I highly recommend anything to do with Shawn Coyne and Story Grid.
1:05:24 – 1:15:34
Tim’s fear of declining skill, Pressfield’s model of ego vs. Self, and the purpose of resistance
1. TFTim Ferriss
  I'm going to ask you about A Man at Arms. First, I wanna take this opportunity to paint a picture of the last week in my life, if I may be self-indulgent for a second.
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  Please do. Please do.
3. TFTim Ferriss
  So, so I, [laughs] I have this newsletter called 5-Bullet Friday. It's, it's five short bullets of things that I've found interesting or helpful or novel throughout each week, and I had the experience-
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  I'm a subscriber, by the way.
5. TFTim Ferriss
  Oh, wonderful. I appreciate that.
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah. So I know all about it.
7. TFTim Ferriss
  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, uh, close to a, a 10-page blog post, uh, which if people wanna check out, it's related to s- to conservation and ethical choices in the world of, of psychedelic compounds. Uh- 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 to have finally written this piece, even though I'm catching heat from certain factions within the psychedelic communities for it-
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  Mm-hmm
9. TFTim Ferriss
  ... because it's been a very long time since I've written a blog post, a long form blog post. And that having been said, I was, 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 was... he's read the book, he's very kind, he wanted to use it as a, as a launching pad for discussion. And he read a few paragraphs from The 4-Hour Workweek, and, and here's what I... You can probably guess. Here, here's what I thought to myself, "God damn, I have done nothing but become worse at writing since I was 29."
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
11. TFTim Ferriss
  "What in... You know, for fuck's sake, what am I doing with my life?" And I... And I became hyper self-critical. I was like, "Man, like, look at how many em dashes I have in this, this long form blog post I just put up. Like, what kind of crutch is this? I'm using em dashes like they're, they're going out of style," and so on and so forth. So this just, like, litany of abuse just, uh, kind of, kind of rolled off the brain while it attacked itself. And thi- 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, like, the pixie dust has, has been lost or that I've atrophied. I've so let the muscles atrophy that there's just... I- you know, I'm past the point of no return. Have you ever contended with this? Uh, if you haven't, like, what advice... Or, 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.
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  Mm. Here's my, uh, thoughts on that, Tim. Resistance with a capital R, the force of self-sabotage, is tremendously diabolical and nuanced and protean, and that it will... Uh, and subtle, incredibly subtle. And it will attack us at our weakest point, and it'll usually will attack us in, in an area where there's some truth to what we're, what we might fear about ourselves, you know? So I would say for sure, Tim, that thought that you have is bullshit.
13. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  It's resistance. It's totally resistance. There's nothing wrong with you. You haven't lost any pixie dust. That is pure resistance. You... It, it's finding a weak spot in you, you know?
15. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm.
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  It's... It, it just knows it, you know? It's like the alien knows how to get after you, right? And so, um, you know, the form it takes for me might be different. The, you know, the, 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, it's bullshit. There's no grounding in it at all. Just keep doing what you're doing, you know? And, uh, I'm sure that, uh... 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."
17. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  And... [laughs] So this is true. So resistance will find that weak spot, that chink in our armor.
19. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm.
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  But, uh, I... You know, don't pay any attention to it, Tim. Dismiss it. It's bullshit.
21. TFTim Ferriss
  Thank you for that. And I have to follow up by asking, what purpose does resistance serve, right? Like, why does it exist? Like, I, 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, a utility, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on why it exists.
22. SPSteven Pressfield
  I'm not sure. Like, I... Like Seth Godin thinks it's the, the lizard brain, the... What is it? Amygdala, whatever it is-
23. TFTim Ferriss
  Yeah
24. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... which I never have quite understood. But to me, and I'm gonna get a little airy-fairy here, a little metaphysical, I think that, uh, we- if we think of our identity, we can say that there's, 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, in the Jungian sense of Self. And the ego is our rational mind. It's the part of our, of us that, uh, 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. 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, 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, um, a- also according to Jung, the Self with a capital S butts up against what they call 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
25. TFTim Ferriss
  I believe you
26. SPSteven Pressfield
  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 what it is, like for me writing the novels that I wrote that I never thought, that just came out of nowhere, right? That 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 gonna lose. The ego strikes back and creates resistance, and its goal is to try to h- to, to convince us that this other world of inspiration, of intuition, of the muse or what- the self is a phony world. It's, it's bullshit. Don't pay attention to it. Stay here with me, M- Mr. Ego. I'm the ego. And that's what it is to me.
27. TFTim Ferriss
  Hmm.
28. SPSteven Pressfield
  And I, you know, I just was, uh... I just had an email. I've got into a- an email correspondent with a monk from Self-Realization Fellowship, Brother Keavashananda. Are you familiar with Self-Realization Fellowship?
29. TFTim Ferriss
  I'm not.
30. SPSteven Pressfield
  Anyway, it's, it's a wonderful thing. It's Yogan- Paramahansa Yogananda's thing that he started, and he was telling me about the... beyond the Bhagavad Gita and the story of Arjuna and Krishna, there's the, the, uh... 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 e- and he takes him a month to die. And even as he's dying, Bhishma, 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.
1:15:34 – 1:53:40
Shadow careers, fear-setting, yetzer hara, and Pressfield’s push for Tim to write big fiction
1. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm. Yeah. I... it's certainly helpful to think of. It's a, it's a useful lens to look at this through. And this may be very related. Uh, I would love to hear you define or describe what a, what a shadow career is. I read a short, relatively short blog post of yours that discussed this, and I think it's, I think it's... it could be very helpful to explore.
2. SPSteven Pressfield
  I'll give you kind of an example from the movie business. As you know, in the movie business, there are... you need a lawyer. There are law firms, entertainment law firms. Um, in fact, Rich Roll, the wonderful podcaster and, uh, athlete-
3. TFTim Ferriss
  Mm-hmm
4. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... used to be an entertainment lawyer.
5. TFTim Ferriss
  He did.
6. SPSteven Pressfield
  And entertainment lawyers, directors, if you're a director, an actor, a writer, you have to have a lawyer, 'cause 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 talk to, not all entertainment lawyers, but some entertainment lawyers, secretly they wanna be writers, or they wanna be directors, or they ve- And what they have done in becoming lawyers, to some extent, is their l- their law career is like a shadow career. It's like adjacent to what they really wanna do. They really wanna direct, or they really wanna write, but they, for whatever reasons, they were afraid to do it. So they thought, "Well, let me... I can go to law school, and that will give me, uh, a trade that I... an occupation, a profession I can count on." And so the law becomes kind of a shadow career for them. Or another insti- 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 legitimate thing. It can be an apprenticeship, where you're working for a photographer or whatever, whatever, and you're learning. But it also can be because a lot of times those people who are people's assistants really wanna 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're just... they have a, uh, they pick a profession that's kind of adjacent to where they wanna be, but is not actually... doesn't have the same risk.
7. TFTim Ferriss
  I wanna underscore this for folks because I think it is, it is exceptionally common. I see the temptation in myself and around me in, in certain capacities, so it's, it's really worth having on the radar, I think. I'm gonna read just a little bit of this blog post from 2012, which is on your website, stevenpressfield.com. And 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 an innovator because you're afraid to risk being an innovator yourself?" These are really good questions. I think they're really important questions, uh, and the, the drug and booze half example, I think is, 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. [laughs]
8. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah, true. I mean, I think, you know, not to overstate it, but sometimes addiction is a shadow career. You know? That, uh, you're, you're acting out the kind of, uh, wild and crazy lifestyle rather than actually doing the work to do, to be a musician or to be a whatever.
9. TFTim Ferriss
  And what do, what do you say to people who would answer yes in the s- 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 pursuit of what I really want to do does entail risk, and I'm afraid."
10. SPSteven Pressfield
  Well, there's sort of a... [laughs] There's kinda no way around it except to actually do it. It's, it would be... If I were advising anybody or advising myself if I were in that condition, I would, I would say, you know, get, 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, uh, if you're a photographer's assistant, you really say, "Oh, I wanna be a cinematographer. I'd love to be Vilmos Zsigmond, you know? I wanna shoot Scorsese's next movie," whatever. "That's... I'd love to do that." Then it's sort of a matter of kind of, 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, uh, you know, uh..." 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, you know? Build up your professional habits and, and just go for it, you know? Just go for it.
11. TFTim Ferriss
  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, 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 this subject because it's saved my life in some ways. And it's really just a rephrasing and presenting of an exercise 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, uh, Seneca the Younger has said, of course not in English, uh, but I'm paraphrasing here, but we-
12. SPSteven Pressfield
  [laughs]
13. TFTim Ferriss
  ... we su- we suffer more in imagination than in reality. And, uh, it, it's-
14. SPSteven Pressfield
  Ah
15. TFTim Ferriss
  ... easy to, to believe or to overestimate the th- 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. Uh, so I would just recommend people take, uh, 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, 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?
16. SPSteven Pressfield
  Before we go away, let me talk... go, come back and talk about fear-setting. I wanna say something-
17. TFTim Ferriss
  Sure
18. SPSteven Pressfield
  ... after that when we're done. I have... There's only been, like, one recurring character in, uh, my- in my historical fiction, and he is this sort of, uh, gunslinger of the ancient world, Telamon of Arcadia, the, 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. 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 gonna 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 he... 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, uh, 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 hero's journey, and I was wondering where was he gonna 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, 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 really, I just wanted... This guy, character of Telamon, is sort of an ar- alter ego for me. I know on some crazy unconscious level I'm bound to this character in some way, and his story is my story in some way, although I don't know what it is. And so I, I wanted... You know, writing, as you know, particularly fiction, is like a dream in that, in that you, you enter another dimension of r- of reality when you're sitting down to write, and you don't know what's gonna come a lot of times. The, 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 gonna have to write another one because I haven't got to the end of it yet, but that's where, that was the genesis of A Man at Arms.
19. TFTim Ferriss
  And when you write a book like this, since I have no experience with fiction, although I'm endlessly fascinated by it, I think I'm afraid of it, honestly, uh, [laughs] because I read good fiction and I think to myself-
20. SPSteven Pressfield
  Well, there's, there's good reason to be afraid of it, yeah
21. TFTim Ferriss
  ... [laughs] good Lord, I can... just cannot-
22. SPSteven Pressfield
  Yeah
23. TFTim Ferriss
  ... I just don't know how humans do this. Do you write a book like this simply because you are a, 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?
24. SPSteven Pressfield
  I'm absolutely a believer, as you know, of, 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, in the realm of potential before they exist in the real world. And I believe that as a, you know, as a writer, I, 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, in this dimension. So I'm really not... I really don't have a message. I really don't have, uh... 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, and I've gotta tell it in the right way and, and solve all those problems. But mainly, I just, I just wanted to tell this story, like a, like a singer would wanna sing a certain song or a dancer would wanna dance a certain dance. So that, that was the reason. It's just the story just seized me, and, um, came very fast and very easy.
25. TFTim Ferriss
  What would you say, i- 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 a, a, just a hard slog?
26. SPSteven Pressfield
  It seems the hard ones don't work, and the easy ones do.
27. TFTim Ferriss
  [laughs]
28. SPSteven Pressfield
  You know? It's almost like if it's hard, maybe there's a reason why it's hard.
29. TFTim Ferriss
  Right, right. Why are you pushing a boulder uphill, right. [laughs]
30. SPSteven Pressfield
  Which, which is not to say, even the easy ones are hard in the sense that, um, there are a lot of technical problems to solve. Like I just was doing a, I just did a video on Instagram. I was talking about the original manuscript of Gates of Fire was 802 pages long, and I, 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.

Episode duration: 1:53:51

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Intro

Tim introduces Steven Pressfield and frames the conversation around “resistance”

The $15-a-month house and the feral tomcat as a personal omen

Marriage strain, shame, and landing in a halfway house

Driving trucks as a proving ground: responsibility, self-monitoring, and mentorship

Late publishing success and learning to write through ads, screenplays, and failed novels

Advertising lessons: “Nobody wants to read your shit” and the craft of compression

Hero’s journey vs. artist’s journey: identity, calling, and “filling the vessel”

Refusal of the call and the turning point: finishing a novel and changing the story about yourself

From Hollywood to publishing: partnerships, agent breakups, and the breakthrough of Bagger Vance

Little successes and routines: generating momentum to break through resistance

Editing like an editor: Story Grid, genre conventions, and shaping drafts

Tim’s fear of declining skill, Pressfield’s model of ego vs. Self, and the purpose of resistance

Shadow careers, fear-setting, yetzer hara, and Pressfield’s push for Tim to write big fiction

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