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

Steven Pressfield — How to Overcome Self-Sabotage and Resistance, Routines for Little Successes, and The Hero’s Journey vs. The Artist’s Journey | Brought to you by Tonal http://tonal.com/ smart home gym, LinkedIn Sales Navigator http://linkedin.com/navigator, the best version of LinkedIn for sales professionals, and Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement. More on all three below. Steven Pressfield (@SPressfield https://twitter.com/SPressfield), a former Marine and graduate of Duke University, became an overnight success as a writer after 30 years of abject failure. Identifying the omnipresence of “Resistance,” the interior force of self-sabotage he described in The War of Art https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, has saved his own artistic life and has helped many others struggling to find their creative calling. Steven’s novels of the ancient world, including the nonfiction The Warrior Ethos https://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Ethos-Steven-Pressfield/dp/193689100X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, are required reading at West Point, Annapolis, and in the Marine Corps. He lives in Los Angeles. His new book is A Man at Arms https://www.amazon.com/Man-at-Arms-Novel/dp/0393540979/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, an epic saga about a reluctant hero, the Roman Empire, and the rise of a new faith. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Tonal http://tonal.com/! Tonal is the world’s most intelligent home gym and personal trainer. It is precision engineered and designed to be the world’s most advanced strength studio. Tonal http://tonal.com/ uses breakthrough technology—like adaptive digital weights and A. I. learning—together with the best experts in resistance training so you get stronger, faster. Every program is personalized to your body using A. I., and smart features check your form in real time, just like a personal trainer. Try Tonal http://tonal.com/, 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. Visit Tonal.com http://tonal.com/ for $100 off their smart accessories when you use promo code TIM21 at checkout. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Navigator http://linkedin.com/navigator! LinkedIn Sales Navigator http://linkedin.com/navigator is the best version of LinkedIn for sales professionals. Tap into the power of LinkedIn’s 700 million+ member network. LinkedIn Sales Navigator http://linkedin.com/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. Start your 60-day free trial http://linkedin.com/navigator—that’s a two-month free trial!—of LinkedIn Sales Navigator http://linkedin.com/navigator today by going to LinkedIn.com/Navigator http://linkedin.com/navigator. * If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim 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.

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  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, 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.

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  Week. It's really incredible what you can do with Eccentrics. They also have all sorts of other really, really cool advantages 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, check it out. Try Tonal, T-O-N-A-L, the world's smartest home gym for 30 days in your home. And if

• 2:51Tim Ferriss?

  you don't love it, you can return it for a full refund. Visit www.tonal.com, T-O-N-A-L.com, and for a limited time, get $100 off of smart accessories when you use promo code TIM21. Like I'm ready for my first drink at checkout. That's www.tonal, T-O-N-A-L.com, promo code TIM21, T-I-M-21. Tonal, be your strongest.

• 3:23Tim Ferriss?

  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 Four 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.

• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 4:46Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  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?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:23Tim Ferriss?

  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 Stephen Pressfield. I have wanted to have Stephen on this podcast for a very long time. You can find him on Twitter at S Pressfield. Stephen 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,

• 6:07Tim Ferriss?

  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, Stephen with a V, stevenpressfield.com, on Twitter, at S Pressfield, and Instagram, Stephen underscore Pressfield. Stephen, welcome to the show.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:53Tim Ferriss?

  And we are going to run out of, 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. We'll see what blend.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  I was hoping for the same thing.

• 7:20Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wonderful. Okay, so it's

• 7:23Speaker 03

  From you.

• 7:24Tim Ferriss?

  From me. Well, you know, we can, we can turn this into a mutual therapy session in that case.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  All right.

• 7:29Tim 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 going to start. Please tell me about this house at $15 a month and the backwoods cat.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  I went, when you talked about 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, and actually had a book published was about, you know, about 28 years, 30 years, something like that. And at one point, I was, I was driving trucks, tractor trailers in North Carolina, and had just come out of living in a halfway house, that was, which was, 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

• 8:36Speaker 03

  that 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 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. He was an old battle scarred tom cat, you know?

• 9:20Speaker 03

  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, this is all true, Tim. I'm not making this up.

• 9:35Tim Ferriss?

  I believe you.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  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, 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?

• 10:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  And so I've, 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 because he kept coming back. I mean, this wasn't a one time thing. And so anyway, that's, that's, uh, that's for a little, I don't know if that's context, Tim. Well, it's quite a while ago, but it was, that was sort of at the heart of my darkest hours.

• 10:38Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it, it provides a bunch of fertile ground for exploration. Before we leave the cat, though, what meaning did you take from that? What, what effect did that have on you? And then we're going to 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. So I want to know how you ended up there. But first, what meaning did you imbue this cat with after these repeated visits?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  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. 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 woods, that it was such a positive kind of person, you know? And so I thought, 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.

• 11:49Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. You know, it makes me think a bit of the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. The first few lines are-

• 11:58Speaker 03

  I'm not familiar with that. Tell me.

• 12:00Tim Ferriss?

  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 a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." That's the beginning.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 12:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I think about that quite a bit and contact with nature and man's 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 there? And what was your state at the time that you were there?

• 12:42Speaker 03

  I don't know, we're getting into some deep stuff really early here.

• 12:46Tim Ferriss?

  I know, it's a first date and everything, but I'm gonna skip the foreplay a bit, if that's okay.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Well, I was in North Carolina at the time. I had married 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 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 I had this job delivering industrial food. I drove a little truck and I would deliver things like Salisbury steaks and frozen crinkle cut-

• 13:31Speaker 03

  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 this is in Durham, North Carolina. That was also a halfway house for, you know, where the government, the state government would pay for people who had been released from mental institutions and were on their way back into the real

• 14:14Speaker 03

  world. And so I found a room in the basement there. And that was how I came to that, that halfway house.

• 14:22Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  And I have a theory about halfway houses and about the people who are in there. If I, you want to hear this, Tim?

• 14:28Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Because 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, 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.

• 15:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  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 because I liked the people so much.

• 15:29Tim 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.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  And just how

• 15:47Speaker 03

  It's a dangerous thing.

• 15:48Tim Ferriss?

  Just how slippery it can be to sort of realize how arbitrary so many of these social constructs are. You, you have a, just an incredible resume. I mean, it reads like, I don't want to say hero's journey, because we'll 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

• 16:33Tim Ferriss?

  became as a writer, as a creative?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  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, you've got to deliver it. The shipper wants it, the people it's being shipped to want it, and there's really sort of no mercy. You know, 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

• 17:19Speaker 03

  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 need to deliver, to really actually deliver the goods and the self-imposed pressure of that, that really helped me. And, you know, there were a bunch of instances when I found myself really up against it and having to

• 18:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:20Tim Ferriss?

  At that time, in that period, you mentioned the self-sabotage. And 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?

• 18:44Speaker 03

  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 early in the morning, I had just finished delivering to a restaurant. I hadn't had breakfast, and I was coming back out through the warehouse section at the back of the restaurant, and they had a whole bunch of rows of little cans of fruit juice, you know, 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, bum, bum, bum, 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, you know? I just sort of knew, you know, why do you

• 19:29Speaker 03

  do something like that? So that was kind of the sort of thing that I would do kind of over and over. And, you know, and driving trucks, I can tell a bunch of stories, but one of them was where... I dropped the trailer one time delivering, 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 know, you need to, like, if you're an airline pilot and you're doing your checklist, you know, you have to, before you take off, you gotta hit check the flaps and the engine

• 20:14Speaker 03

  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? 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. 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

• 20:58Speaker 03

  applied for, I had 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 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 Carolinian, I stopped at this one trucking company that I had already applied to a couple of times and they rejected me. 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

• 21:43Speaker 03

  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, uh, my struggles to learn the business and stuff like that, there was, I'll tell you, there was one, 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, like 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. 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.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  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? 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, 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.

• 23:06Tim Ferriss?

  I can definitely see how that ties into a lot that came later. That's a great story. 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 gonna do your best work in your twenties. 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, The Bio, 30 Years of Abject Failure. Okay. So your first novel, published after around 30 years of effort, The Legend of Baggard Bants.

• 23:51Tim Ferriss?

  How old were you when that was published?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  I think I was 53.

• 23:56Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Maybe 54.

• 23:58Tim Ferriss?

  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, 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 with, with wordsmithing. You have, you have an incredible vocabulary.

• 24:26Tim Ferriss?

  How did this happen?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  I'll accept. Thank you for saying that, Tim. I accept that at face value.

• 24:31Tim Ferriss?

  Please do.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Through the whole time that, you know, 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, as a screenwriter in, in Los Angeles, where I am now. And so through that time, you're trying to learn what, what a writer is and what being, 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.

• 25:10Tim Ferriss?

  What drove you to do that? If I could just pause there for a second.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 25:14Tim Ferriss?

  Most people don't write, period. So what was driving you or compelling you or inspiring you to do that?

• 25:20Speaker 03

  You know, I don't know. Why does anybody write or why does anybody paint or anything? I, it sort of originally started for me. I, 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, 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?

• 25:54Tim Ferriss?

  Seems like, seems like an easy gig. Let's try it.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Nothing to it, 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 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.

• 26:26Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  I bet, I bet.

• 27:05Tim Ferriss?

  And your bullets are fantastic. And 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 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 of-

• 27:32Speaker 03

  And of course, I did go past that last thing.

• 27:34Tim Ferriss?

  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 compliment, the influence of your time as a copywriter, working at agencies. It's so obvious to me because it's, you can't not ask. I mean, 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?

• 28:15Speaker 03

  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, you know, one of the books that I've written about writing, as you know, is called, Nobody Wants to Read Your Ship.

• 28:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, please, for those people who don't know it, this is just a spectacular piece. If you could, yeah, describe it.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  And 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 going to 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 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, right? So the lesson for that as a writer, knowing that you're facing that with so much resistance

• 29:27Speaker 03

  from the from 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 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 it or and reading is a transaction that the reader or the viewer is giving you a very valuable

• 30:08Speaker 03

  commodity, which is their time and their attention. And you've got to give them something. 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, you know? So that was 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

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Cannot have more than 60 words in it. Two words per second because 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 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. 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.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:41Tim 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 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?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  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 imbibe 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

• 32:51Speaker 03

  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 going to write about? What is my gift?

• 33:36Speaker 03

  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? So for the rest of my life, I feel, at that point, I got on my artist's journey. And now I'm a writer. I'm going 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 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. I love, 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,

• 34:21Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  So you sort of ask yourself, okay, now I can do it, I've got a house, I've, whatever, I have a profession, what am I going to do with this? Am I just going to be another crappy person that's, that's, you know, 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? So that, to me, is, the hero's journey comes first, and when the hero's journey is over, our artist's journey begins.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  And I would define art as the broadest possible terms. Anything that is a gift to the wider world.

• 35:50Tim 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 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 monthly in-mail messages, lead recommendations, unlimited searches, actionable insights and news, and access to free courses on LinkedIn Learning.

• 36:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 37:18Tim Ferriss?

  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, right? Like when Luke Skywalker is just bitching and whining and doesn't want to go see Yoda, etc. Like, you know, he's just being a pain in the ass to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Everyone should re-watch 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, did that play any role?

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. And I think it does in everybody's life, you know, the, 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 Uncle Owen and Aunt Veru's evaporator farm on Tatooine, I guess is the planet, right?

• 38:26Tim Ferriss?

  You got it.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  And he's just, right? And, and this is his ordinary life, right? He's stuck, 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 that's, so that's kind of the ordinary. And then what the next stage, this is very early in 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, you know, unplugs the little hologram that says,

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Princess Leia, help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope, right? So that's the call, right? Suddenly he realizes, 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 for Aunt Veru 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 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.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  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's 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 going to run over his baby. And the messenger says, 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.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  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 my whole life up. It was that was my refusal. I refused to go into this, the unknown world.

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  How did you blow it up? Do you mean that you just stopped? You threw in like?

• 41:01Speaker 03

  I'm not going to tell you actually details, but I did something that made my wife hate me and kick me out.

• 41:06Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. Okay.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  So that's why I acted out what, as they would say in psychological terms.

• 41:12Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  In other words, another form of self destruction, you know, that that was that was my, those are my demons forever.

• 41:19Tim 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, but that you've that you've been able to at least like, strike a deal with these demons because

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Yes, I have.

• 41:42Tim Ferriss?

  You went, 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?

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Well, let me just talk about a novel for a second.

• 41:56Tim Ferriss?

  Please.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  After the first one that I wrote that I couldn't finish and that I went on these various, you know, spiraling down the rattle type of things. I finally got it together. I saved some money. I saved $2,700 working in advertising in New York. And I moved out to a little town in 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 gonna finish this son of a bitch, or I'm gonna kill myself. And when I finally did, and I write about this in The War of Art,

• 42:38Speaker 03

  when I finally did finish it, and I 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.

• 43:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's interesting.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  But it was just sheer willpower driven on by shame, you know, that I just couldn't, you know, I think shame is a great thing, but I think, but I just couldn't stand myself if I failed yet again. So I just had to keep going, keep going, keep going.

• 43:19Tim Ferriss?

  It seems like it's possible, and I'm speculating here, but the, when you finished that novel and you had the end, right? Because confidence is just not something you can fake, right? In the respect that you, 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 counter example, that that statement was no longer.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Ah, you know, I never thought about it that way, Tim, but I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, a counter example.

• 43:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. With The Legend of Bagavans, so finishing a novel is one thing, getting a novel published is quite another endeavor in many respects. So thirty year overnight success. What happened? Did you end up like drawing straws and you became the bridge partner of a book agent? Like what, what actually happened that allowed this, this publication, publishing your first book?

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Well, like, like I said, I wound up writing three novels that never got published.

• 44:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  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, 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, I did have an agent. I kept writing screenplays that also didn't sell.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  And finally I got kind of teamed up with an established writer, a guy named Ron Chousette, who did the first Alien, among other things. And who was like a really, a real brand name and a real, uh, you know, a guy that really could get work.

• 45:25Tim Ferriss?

  How did you get teamed up with him? I am sorry to keep interrupting, but like, like Alien turned into an iconic film. I mean, they created a franchise.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  Great film.

• 45:34Tim Ferriss?

  How did you get teamed up with him?

• 45:36Speaker 03

  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. And at that time, cause he was more, Ron was more of a producer writer than a writer writer.

• 45:55Tim Ferriss?

  What is a producer writer?

• 45:57Speaker 03

  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. 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. Uh, from start to finish and also is a producer in the sense of being able to get financing. And

• 46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 46:41Tim Ferriss?

  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. Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  For instance, the great scene in Alien where the thing bursts out of John Hurt's chest.

• 46:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  You know, that's me. That was Ron's scene, you know?

• 47:02Tim Ferriss?

  Which

• 47:03Speaker 03

  That was his idea.

• 47:04Tim Ferriss?

  Which is burned into every, anyone's mind who has ever seen one of the Aliens movies.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  So you can't say just because maybe he didn't actually physically write it at the typewriter. That was his, you know? So, so it's a very creative thing to be a producer.

• 47:19Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  So the agent said, Mike said to us, so let me team you guys up and you'll be, 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. 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, by, you know, the process that you go through. And then at one point,

• 48:06Speaker 03

  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. You know, he basically said,

• 48:21Tim Ferriss?

  Unceremoniously broke up with you.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  My story is that I fired him, but his story is that he fired me. But basically, he, uh, 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 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. And I've spent a lot of time working with you, so get out of here. So, but in any event, that was how an actual novel that I wrote actually got published. So it was, it was sort of a smooth transition. And when you know the actual, the actual passage there, it didn't just come out of nowhere.

• 49:08Tim Ferriss?

  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, 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, this dream and this project. From there, not to beat a dead horse about this, but like, how does it then find a home with a publisher?

• 49:40Speaker 03

  You know, it was like, I joke that I was an overnight success after 30 years. And I think sometimes, uh, your bad luck builds up to such an extent that it turns into good luck. Right? The law of averages starts to work for you. 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, uh, an agent named Jody Hachis in New York, who worked for Sterling Lord, who's a, a, a big literary agent, who is still my agent and just turned a hundred years old.

• 50:18Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  By the, 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 it was, I think it was just the law of averages finally evened out a little bit.

• 50:33Tim 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 where I might segue at least indirectly 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 going to read a first paragraph, 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 writing routines.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

• 51:17Tim Ferriss?

  limit. I closed 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?

• 51:30Speaker 03

  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 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, one of the reasons I like to go to the gym early or do something

• 52:14Speaker 03

  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, 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 because 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 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

• 52:55Speaker 03

  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 amazing what he does. You know, rubber bands between his knees, strengthen his knees, and then he does, you know, a hundred 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.

• 53:24Tim Ferriss?

  What is your preferred exercise routine? Do you have any favorite exercises or workouts?

• 53:31Speaker 03

  I'm 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, 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 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, just very basic stuff.

• 54:03Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. That's a very iconic location, as far as gyms go.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. It's now, it's all in a tent in the parking lot.

• 54:13Tim Ferriss?

  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, there's so much variation, of course, when you talk to writers about process, right? So I recently interviewed Joyce Carol Oates, and I've, 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.

• 54:54Tim Ferriss?

  I have sometimes had the experience of that working, but perhaps it's just 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 or 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 you 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

• 55:37Tim Ferriss?

  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 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, 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.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:19Tim Ferriss?

  How would you talk someone through finding something that works for them or making sense of conflicting advice?

• 56:26Speaker 03

  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 and three of them wrote in their cars. And this is true.

• 56:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  And one of them wrote in the car when it was moving. Now, I don't know how they did this, but it just goes to show you that whatever works, works.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  You know, like Joyce Carol Oates or John McPhee doing eight hours? That is beyond my comprehension. I just can't imagine.

• 57:13Tim Ferriss?

  It's just, I mean, that's, yeah, that's like Alex Honnold in Free Solo, but for the writing world, I, yeah, I can't, can't process that.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  But I, I do agree with them that, you know, there's a famous quote, uh, that I quoted in, um, in The War of Art. And now I'm, I'm blanking on who, who it was, the famous writer who they asked him, uh, "Do you write on a schedule or only when inspiration strikes you?" Oh, Somerset Maugham. And he said, uh, "I write only when inspiration strikes me." He says, "Fortunately, it strikes me every morning at nine thirty sharp."

• 57:50Speaker 03

  He was a believer in routine, right? And, uh, 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. She goes to the gym at the crack of dawn every day. She, 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, you know, in, 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

• 58:35Speaker 03

  or an artist or anybody from achieving your best work, from following your calling. Will try to distract you, undermine your self-confidence, make you procrastinate, 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 go, that's the wall that you know you're gonna hit, you know?

• 59:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  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. And I'm a big believer in habits.

• 59:43Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 1:00:22Tim Ferriss?

  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, let's, I'm sure it's placebo effect, because how could it not be, right? It's gotta be harnessing the mind and kind of pulling an Aikido move on your own psyche. That really, really helped. You've mentioned a number of books. So The War of Art, I think everyone should read, certainly. Then Twila Tharp's A Creative Habit. I've also read, you mentioned 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.

• 1:01:07Tim Ferriss?

  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 writing process?

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  Safer than driving in a car and riding.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Because, yeah. But it is kind of an Aikido. It's a way of tricking yourself to somehow, you know, oh, I can't, I can't work there, but I can work here. If it works, it works, you know?

• 1:01:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right, totally.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  But The Story Grid, Sean Coyne is actually, was my first editor. He was the editor who bought Gates of Fire.

• 1:01:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no kidding?

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  And we are, 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 Sean very well. And Sean is, he's a Harvard guy. And he's, 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 was like, 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 scene is, and so on and so forth, that he calls the Story Grid. And he actually, I highly recommend his website, wwwstorygrid.com.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  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

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  journey 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 have to know them. And that's what an editor does, you know, for instance, if if you're going to have a love story, there always has to be a rival. That's a big thing. Think of any story, love story in the world.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  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 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,

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  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, you know, what conventions have I violated? And if I, 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.

• 1:05:21Tim Ferriss?

  That is an answer.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  I highly recommend anything to do with Sean Coyne and Story Grid.

• 1:05:26Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to ask you about A Man at Arms. First, I want to take this opportunity to paint a picture of the last week in my life, if I may be self-indulgent for a second.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Please do, please do.

• 1:05:39Tim Ferriss?

  So I, I have this newsletter called Five 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.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  I'm a subscriber, by the way.

• 1:05:54Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wonderful. I appreciate that.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  So I know all about it.

• 1:05:56Tim 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 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 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

• 1:06:35Tim Ferriss?

  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 Four 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 Four Hour Workweek. And here's what, you can probably guess, here's what I thought to myself, goddamn.

• 1:07:12Tim Ferriss?

  I have done nothing but become worse at writing since I was 29. 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 M dashes I have in this, this long form blog post I just put up. Like, what kind of crutch is this? I'm using M dashes like they're, they're going out of style and so on and so forth. So this just like litany of abuse just kind of, 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.

• 1:07:56Tim Ferriss?

  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. Yeah. Have you ever contended with this? If you haven't, like 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.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  Here's my thoughts on it, Tim. Resistance with a capital R, the force of self-sabotage is tremendously diabolical and nuanced and protean and that it will, and subtle, incredibly subtle, and it will attack us at our weakest point. And it 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. 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?

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  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 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?

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  He said, 22.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  So this is true. So resistance will find that weak spot, that chink in our armor. But, uh, you know, don't pay any attention to it, Tim. Dismiss it. It's bullshit.

• 1:10:13Tim 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 utility. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on why it exists.

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  I'm not sure. Like, like Seth Godin thinks it's the lizard brain, the, what is it? Amygdala, whatever it is that I, 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 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 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.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  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 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 the divine ground. And I love that.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  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 our self, 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.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  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 it's bullshit. Don't pay attention to it. Stay here with me, Mr. Ego.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  I'm the ego. That's what it is to me. And, you know, I just was, I just had an email. I've got into an email correspondent with a monk from Self-Realization Fellowship, Brother Kiva Shenanda. Are you familiar with Self-Realization Fellowship?

• 1:13:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Anyway, it's a wonderful thing. It's Yogananda, 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, in this great battle in the Bhagavad Gita is the ego is a character named Bishma. 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, 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,

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  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 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. And that's what I think resistance is. It's the ego's way of trying to hang on to control of us.

• 1:15:02Tim Ferriss?

  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,

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Which we're not.

• 1:15:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right. 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'd be, there would be a violent opposition by the ego to...

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  I mean, I may be completely wrong, but this is my theory.

• 1:15:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I, it's certainly helpful to think of. It's a useful lens to look at this through. And...

• 1:15:47Tim Ferriss?

  This may be very related. I would love to hear you define or describe 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.

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  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. In fact, Rich Roll, wonderful podcaster and athlete, used to be an entertainment lawyer.

• 1:16:21Tim Ferriss?

  He did.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  And entertainment lawyers, directors, if you're a director, an actor, 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 talk to not all entertainment lawyers, but some entertainment lawyers, secretly, they want to be writers, or they want to be directors, or they've, and what they have done in becoming lawyers, to some extent, is their, 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 they, for whatever reasons,

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  they were afraid to do it. So they thought, well, let me, I can go to law school, and that will give me a trade, that I can 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 legitimately, 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,

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 1:18:02Tim Ferriss?

  I want to 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 going to read just a little bit of this blog post from 2012, which is on your website, studentpressfield.com. 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

• 1:18:43Tim Ferriss?

  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. And the the drug and booze half example, I think, is also

• 1:19:17Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, true. I mean, I think, you know, not to overstate it, but sometimes addiction is a shadow career. You know, that you're you're acting out the kind of wild and crazy lifestyle rather than actually doing the work to do to be a musician or to be a whatever.

• 1:19:57Tim Ferriss?

  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 pursuit of what I really want to do does entail risk and I'm afraid."

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Well, there's sort of, there's kind of 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, 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 Vilmaus Zigmund, you know? I want to 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

• 1:21:02Speaker 03

  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, you know? Build up your professional habits and just go for it, you know? Just go for it.

• 1:21:44Tim 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 the 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 Prima de Tatiom Malorum, so Meditating on the Worst Case. This is just a practice of actually putting to paper what the worst things are that could

• 1:22:26Tim Ferriss?

  happen, how you might mitigate against them, how you could minimize the damage or reverse the damage, and as Seneca the Younger...

• 1:22:37Tim Ferriss?

  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, 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

• 1:23:19Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  Before we go away, let me talk, go come back and talk about Fear Setting. I want to say something after that when we're done. I have, there's only been like one recurring character in my, in my historical fiction, and he is this sort of gunslinger of the ancient world, Telamon 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. A lot of times, I will block out a story, and

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  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, 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, and I never could find it. And finally, I just had a flash about adding to his world,

• 1:25:10Speaker 03

  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 Telemann, is sort of an 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 wanted, you know, writing, as you know,

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  particularly fiction, is like a dream, in that you, you enter another dimension of reality when you're sitting down to write, and you don't know what's gonna 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 Telemann 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.

• 1:26:21Tim 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. Because I read good fiction, and I think to myself-

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  There's a good reason to be afraid of it, yeah.

• 1:26:33Tim Ferriss?

  Good lord, I can just cannot, 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?

• 1:26:59Speaker 03

  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 before they exist in the real world. And I believe that 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'm really not, I really don't have a message. I really don't have, I do

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  want to explore certain aspects of a character, but mainly, this story just 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 got to tell it in the right way and solve all those problems. But mainly, I just, I just wanted to tell this story like a singer would want to sing a certain song, or a dancer would want to dance a certain dance. So that was the reason. It's just, the story just seized me and came very fast and very easy.

• 1:28:14Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  It seems the hard ones don't work and the easy ones do.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  You know, it's almost like if it's hard, maybe it's a reason why it's hard.

• 1:28:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Why are you pushing a boulder uphill? Right?

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:29:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  The book, you know, came with a lot of energy, just like a man at arms just kind of came, 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.

• 1:29:24Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to experience more of that in my writing. Sounds like I just have to get on the playing field a bit more often.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:29:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  I think maybe you should think about writing fiction at some point.

• 1:29:45Tim Ferriss?

  I agree with you. I agree with you. I do. I do. I think I am psyching myself out. And 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, they're, they're, everything is intended to be as clear, which is fine, and prescriptive and represent such a logical sequence and building.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  Right. I know what you mean. Yeah.

• 1:30:14Tim Ferriss?

  That for the writer, for me, uh, there, 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 uh, thoughts about composition. But I appreciate you saying that and, and I agree. I would like to try some fiction and you know, just write it maybe for a handful of friends. Although let me make one 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.

• 1:30:52Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  It's absolutely true. I couldn't agree more, Tim. And there's, there's a reason for that, too. They, 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 are close to you sense when you write something or you take a chance, they sense you changing. You're becoming a different person. And their, their fear is they're going to lose you. And so they want to make you stay the way you are. 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,

• 1:31:58Speaker 03

  here's what I would suggest. First of all, 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. Do, seriously, an amuse doesn't like that. She wants you to go big, you know? 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. Prospect of, of, of exposing yourself to do this. And that's the one you should do.

• 1:32:27Tim Ferriss?

  I love that.

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  And I encourage you to do that.

• 1:32:33Tim Ferriss?

  Don't piss off the muse with small ambitions.

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:32:37Tim Ferriss?

  Or maybe not piss off, don't insult the muse.

• 1:32:39Speaker 03

  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, but you did it, you know, and it worked. So I would say, you know, to the same concept, only with fiction.

• 1:32:58Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I, I'm going to take that to heart.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Let me get back for one second to fear setting. There's just one thing I wanted to say.

• 1:33:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  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 was that isn't that they have in common, the mindset of a fighter pilot is exactly what you were saying. Like when 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. You know, what if I get a flame out over the Sinai Desert?

• 1:33:49Speaker 03

  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 have to be able to have to save something is, oh, I never saw it coming. Right? So I heartily agree with that, that idea of fear setting, that whole Stoic concept. I think it's a great thing.

• 1:34:24Tim Ferriss?

  Let's use that as a jumping off point to something I know very little about, but I've seen it come up in, in some discussions. And that is the concept of, I'm not going to get the pronunciation here correct, but yetzer hara.

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  Yetzer hara.

• 1:34:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yetzer hara. What is yetzer hara?

• 1:34:45Speaker 03

  You know, I wish I had my Rabbi, Rabbi Mordecai Finley here to explain it to us. But he, apparently it's a, it's a phrase from Genesis. And it's translated by Rabbi Finley as a turning toward evil. And he has said to me that 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 to realizing our calling, to coming into our own. It's that negative force.

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  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. It's called the neshama, and that is the soul. And the, 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.

• 1:36:07Speaker 03

  And in between the two is this force called the yetzer hura, 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 the, 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 what, and he sees everywhere a turning toward evil, meaning this is the yetzer hura.

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  And this is when God decides to send a flood, you know, to wipe us out and Noah survived, right? So it's, in, 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. A bug in, bug in the software. Yeah, a bug in the software. And if you, 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 of resistance and everything. So in any event, that's what, that's what the Yetzer Hara is, as I understand it.

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  I may be wrong, but as I understand it in Kabbalistic Jewish mysticism.

• 1:37:37Tim Ferriss?

  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 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, right? I can read 10 books before I ever set pen to paper. Since I have no exposure or experience with fiction writing,

• 1:38:21Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  I think when I say go big, I think that the muse likes it, you know? Fortune favors the bold. And I think when we, when we try for something big, we're taking the initiative and we're kind of 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'd bring them in with the boss and he would like just throw me out, you know? He'd say, this is the idea the size of a postage stamp, you know? Get the fuck out of here, you know? Come back with something big.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  And it was really hard for me to do, you know? Cause I was afraid of it. So I do think going big. Help invokes the muse in a good way. 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.

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  And over like a 13 year period, he would get up at the crack of dawn and, you know, go out to his garage where he had an office and he would put in, he would write 500 words a day. But this, this book, The Sand Sea, is a huge book. It's like a Tolkien type of book. And, uh, you know, with all kinds of crazy characters from everywhere. And I really applaud that he did it that way. And now he's on to the second book in a trilogy. There's going to be a third one. So for him, going big really worked and I, 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. And I did, it's kind of a scary idea that you, you say to yourself, when I show this

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  to people, they're going to look at me and go, what happened to you, Tim? Are you okay? You know, that, that's where, uh, what I mean by big.

• 1:41:05Tim Ferriss?

  And should I just assume this is never going to be read by anyone? Is that a helpful assumption to make? Couple of follow up questions.

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  Do it only for yourself. Yeah, do it only for yourself.

• 1:41:15Tim Ferriss?

  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, same, it's similar, I, the 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. And when I think of my first foray into fiction, if I think it's going to be 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.

• 1:41:59Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any thoughts on those points or concerns?

• 1:42:02Speaker 03

  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 might be, if you'll forgive me, might be a shadow career for you. I don't know.

• 1:42:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it could be.

• 1:42:20Speaker 03

  So in that case, the exercise of writing fiction would be like a lifelong calling, you know, a practice from now to the end. And, and I would think that it's, I think it's a good idea to hope that it will be successful, that it'll find a market, that people will love it, you know? But at the same time, I think it's very important, and I'm talking to 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? 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.

• 1:43:01Speaker 03

  But I would say just write to please yourself and always take the brave choice. You know, should I write this scene this way, which is 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. You should really feel a tailwind and really feel like, ah shit, my feet are on the ground, you know, and this, you know, I may be a beginner, I maybe 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.

• 1:43:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I if it's okay with you, I may I may reach out to you as my

• 1:43:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, please do. In fact, please do. Absolutely.

• 1:43:46Tim Ferriss?

  As my my stabilizing wing at at at some point. And I

• 1:43:54Speaker 03

  No, I'm serious, Tim. Please do.

• 1:43:56Tim Ferriss?

  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. There's

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  I'm game. Put me down in the books whenever.

• 1:44:06Tim Ferriss?

  There's no shortage of of topics to cover. And maybe after I've actually given this a shot, I think that should be the stakes. That should be the accountability is I can't have you on again until I have actually spent some time on this scary thing called fiction. And well, 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?

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  Ah, and you actually, this was a question in Tribe of Mentors that I actually wrote an answer to.

• 1:44:54Tim Ferriss?

  It was.

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  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 seriously, you know, because you're sort of saying, well, what's what would be kind of a if you had to say one thing to somebody to help them?

• 1:45:11Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  I would say, life is is long.

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  This is what a friend of mine, Phil Slot, 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.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  Don't drive yourself crazy with 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 gonna 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.

• 1:46:09Tim Ferriss?

  Stephen, this has been so much fun. I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, for me too.

• 1:46:15Tim Ferriss?

  And people can find you at Stephen Pressfield, again with a V, stevenpressfield.com, Twitter at S Pressfield, Instagram Stephen 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 of 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 parting questions or anything at all that you'd like to add before we bring this this conversation to a close?

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  No, I think that billboard, that's my billboard. Yeah, that would be, that would be the final thing, other than 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.

• 1:47:16Tim Ferriss?

  I, 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.

• 1:47:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:47:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I have found this very helpful personally, and I'm sure it will help many other people out there. So thank you again, Stephen. And to everyone listening, once again, you can find links to everything that we mentioned at timdoplog/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? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before 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.

• 1:48:09Tim Ferriss?

  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, 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 fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, 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.

• 1:48:54Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:49:39Tim Ferriss?

  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 supplement. 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.

• 1:50:24Tim 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, truly 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.

• 1:51:06Tim Ferriss?

  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, 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

• 1:51:50Tim Ferriss?

  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 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've been 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.

• 1:52:34Tim Ferriss?

  It's really incredible what you can do with eccentrics. They also have all sorts of other really, really cool advantages 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, check it out. Try Tonal, T-O-N-A-L, 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.

• 1:53:19Tim Ferriss?

  Visit www.tonal.com, T-O-N-A-L dot com, and for a limited time, get $100 off of smart accessories when you use promo code TIM21. Like I'm ready for my first drink at checkout. That's www.tonal, T-O-N-A-L, dot com, promo code TIM21, T-I-M-21. Tonal, be your strongest.