Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 10

Having a Practice

We’ve been talking for the past two posts about starting a New Project before we’ve finished the Project We’re Working On Now.

Why do we do this? What’s the principle behind it?

We do it because to stop (or pause) after Project #1 means we are one-hit wonders. We are dabbling. We are amateurs.

To continue, on the other hand, means we are pursuing our calling as a practice.

It means we are pros. It means we are on the right side of the Muse’s ledger. It means we are aligned with the Cosmic Juju.

We can have a meditation practice

What is a practice?

You and I can have a yoga practice. We can have a meditation practice. We can have a martial arts practice.

We can also have a writing practice … or a painting practice, or a musical composition practice.

Here are just a few of the characteristics of a practice.

A practice is enacted as a ritual.A practice is engaged in every day.A practice is lifelong.A practice is pursued for its own sake, not for any societal or financial gain.A practice is a spiritual pursuit embodied in a physical or psychic endeavor.A practice often involves a teacher or mentor.

Do we—you and I—call ourselves artists? Then we are in this for life. Book #1 (or Album #1 or Podcast #1) is only one link in a chain we will build from now until they take us out feet-first. There will be a Book #9 and a Book #99. 

We will not stop after Album #11 or Podcast #798. 

This is what we do.

This is our practice.

P.S. The final (bonus) week of The Daily Pressfield—after the first 365 days—is about having a practice. It comes last because it’s the deepest, bottom-line truth of the artist’s life. Signed copies are still available.

P.P.S. More to come on “having a practice” in the following weeks.

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“Start the next one today”

We talked last week about my old friend and mentor Paul Rink’s advice to me when I told him I had just finished my first manuscript.

“Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.”

Let’s examine this wisdom a little more deeply.

When you and I finish a project and release it to the world … and then STOP, waiting breathlessly for the response, we are messing with the primal laws of the universe. 

1. We have planted ourselves dangerously in the ego.

The ego is selfish, fearful, shallow, competitive. The ego clings. It lives in what Vedantists would call Attachment, meaning “emotional attachment to the outcome of its endeavors.”

“You have the right to your labor, Arjuna,” declared Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, “but not to the fruits of your labor.”

2. Another principle of Vedanta:

“Labor without attachment is worship.”

What this means, as I understand it, is that when we let go of all attachment to the outcome of our novel publication/album release/opening of our Thai Fusion restaurant … we shift the locus of our enterprise from the ego to the Self (or the soul if you prefer.),

The Muse likes this. Heaven likes this. 

We are now operating on the plane of the soul, not the plane of the ego.

3. The point of a practice (by which I mean a daily ritual practice, as of yoga or meditation or martial arts) is to seek the spiritual by means of the physical.

We hold ourselves in Warrior Pose physically while seeking, through our psychic focus and intention, to reach out to the spiritual.

The making of art is a practice too. This is writing, this is music, this is filmmaking. This is any daily enterprise engaged in with full attention and full commitment.

In other words, Book #1 (or Album #1 or Movie #1) should be followed in seamless succession by Book #2 and so on. That’s what makes writing or music or filmmaking a practice. That’s what elevates it beyond the selfish, shallow, fearful, competitive Little Mind of the Ego.

“Good for you. Start the next one today.”

P.S. Thanks again to everyone who ordered The Daily Pressfield. We’re running out of our signed first printing (more to come in a few weeks) but there are still a few left in time for Christmas gifting.

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Post-partum

Signed copies and gift boxes of The Daily Pressfield are flying out the door and I’m depressed.

It’s weird. In the hours when you’d think you’d be most gratified, you sometimes only feel deflated. I’ve had moviemakers tell me they feel the same after their film comes out … and painters and photographers and dancers. And let’s not forget mothers!

This is what Seth Godin calls “the Dip” and it is a mo-fo.

In The War of Art, I told the story of the first time I finished a manuscript. This was back in the days of typewriters so I actually had a pile of pages (and a second pile of “carbon copies,” if anyone remembers those) that I could lift in my two hands. Victory! I had finally finished something! I went down the street to my friend Paul Rink’s camper (he was a writer, about thirty years older than I, who had mentored me all the way through the book). I told him I had just typed THE END. I had slain the dragon.

“Good for you,” Paul said without looking up. “Start the next one tomorrow.”

That was twenty-something books ago, and the only cure I’ve found for post-partum depression is to do just what Paul said. In fact, I’ve gone him one better in the intervening years. My theory now is that I want to be at least a third of the way through the first draft of the next book when I finish the one I’m working on now.

There should never be a “between books.” The Dip is too gruesome. We can’t fall into that pit. Our own Resistance will destroy us.

So it’s back to the grind, brothers and sisters. We gotta get another bun in the oven!

Seriously, thanks again to everyone who has pre-ordered The Daily Pressfield. I know we’ve had issues shipping to Europe, Australia, and especially Canada. And there’s no audiobook yet. My apologies! We are working full-tilt on both.

Signed hardbacks and Special Edition Gift Boxes are still available (in time for Christmas).

“Start the next one tomorrow!”

The post Post-partum first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

A new kind of Resistance (for me)

First, thanks to everybody who has jumped on board to order THE DAILY PRESSFIELD.

You should see our garage and back room. Diana (who is the brains of the outfit) has been feverishly packing Gift Boxes for days. The first UPS pickup is today. I think everyone is going to be pretty happy when they get these packages. They are truly “Publishing above and beyond.”

Meanwhile, I’m down with the flu so forgive me if this post is a quickie.

It’s about a new and quite diabolical expression of Resistance that I’ve never experienced before but that I want to pass along in case anyone else experiences it.

It’s like the flu. It might be going around.

I’m lying in bed (something one should never do), “thinking.” Suddenly, my mind starts going on grievances. Personal issues I have with a specific person. You can imagine where this is going. Within ten minutes, I have built myself up to such a fever that I’m on the brink of phoning this person, who is very close to me, and telling them off in such a furious manner that they’ll never speak to me again.

Instantly, it occurs to me that I am at the very end of a really difficult draft of a new fiction book.

What a minute!

This is freakin’ Resistance!

My fear of finishing that draft (and I’m also worried about THE DAILY PRESSFIELD coming off well) has morphed into this Grievance Monster that, if I had acted on it, would have torpedoed a lot of good stuff.

I immediately flashed back to various fights I’ve had over the years with people close to me.

OMG, have some of them been triggered by this kind of fear/self-sabotage/BS?

Arrrrrggggh!

I pass this on for what it’s worth as Thanksgiving approaches. Resistance is diabolical. It can fool us completely. Let’s all be grateful … and for sure keep an eye out for any runaway Grievance Dialogues.

Happy Thanksgiving … and thanks again to everyone who pre-ordered THE DAILY PRESSFIELD.

Signed copies and Gift Boxes are still available here.

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Before I Go Public…

For my loyal friends of Writing Wednesdays, I have an announcement and a special offer…

My newest book, THE DAILY PRESSFIELD, goes live for preorder today. But—only for you—I want to offer a 10% discount… and the first shot at signed copies.

This offer is available only through my online store at www.sassmediallc.com.

Here’s the coupon code: TDP-WW-2023

No one else will get this.

THE DAILY PRESSFIELD is 365 days of motivation, encouragement, and inspiration. It’s a fantastic gift for anyone who’s struggling to write a book, launch a startup, or commit to any long-term project where Resistance is kicking their butt. Please order early to be sure to get the book in time for the holidays. Books will start shipping on November 21.

There are two ways to get signed copies:

1. We’ve put together 750 numbered, Limited Edition Gift Boxes.

The Special Signed Gift Edition comes with a Companion Journal and other goodies

This is a gorgeous premium package that will pop the eyes of that special person who’s fighting “the war of art” and can use a little help. It comes with a hardcover first edition signed by me and Vic Juhasz, the great illustrator who contributed 52 fantastic drawings to the book, one for each week.

The package also comes with a companion journal to use with THE DAILY PRESSFIELD, a boxed set of ten notecards and envelopes with ten different illustrations from the books … and other goodies.

2. The Pressfield-signed first edition (by itself, without the Gift Box and extras) is also available at www.sassmediallc.com. We have 750 copies in stock.

“The Daily Pressfield” is BIG… 537 pages, 1.7 pounds.

Think of it as THE WAR OF ART squared.

Again, this offer is only available through www.sassmediallc.com. You can’t get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any brick-and-mortar store.

(P.S. An apology in advance: the unsigned hardback of THE DAILY PRESSFIELD is not yet up on Amazon. Should be there “at any moment” but isn’t yet. Sorry! The eBook is there but the hardback is still to come as of 11/10/23.)

Let me say thanks once again to all my friends—many who may have never written into the Comments section, but whose attention and community I feel keenly—who have stuck with me and my crazy philosophy of creativity over all these years.

Happy Holidays!

I hope THE DAILY PRESSFIELD helps make the next 365 days everything you dream them to be!

The post Before I Go Public… first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

Publishing “as if”

Publishing “as if”—meaning, for an independent writer like me, to bring out a book AS IF it were from Random House, as if it were from Simon & Schuster—is a dream and a philosophy that my partner Diana and I have been trying to put into practice for the past two years.

We published PUT YOUR ASS WHERE YOUR HEART WANTS TO BE that way, and we did the same with GOVT CHEESE: A MEMOIR. The idea is to bring out a book that, on every level—literary merit, originality, creativity… and the quality of the actual physical production—is as good or better than anything from a Big Five publisher.

Further, the aim is to promote the work and get it into readers’ hands with the same or better reach and presence as a Big Five publisher. (If you’re a writer who has relied on a mainstream publisher for such support, you know that, as Stevie Nicks once sang, “It all comes down to you.”)

Beyond that, publishing “as if” aims to follow Seth Godin’s concept of the Smallest Viable Audience, i.e. know who reads you and give them what they want… even if (especially if) they don’t know what that is until you put it before them.

Does this work? Is it fun? Is it a business model that can succeed for a broad span of writers and other artists?

One thing I can testify to: it ain’t for the faint of heart. The learning curve is ferocious. The tech tools have definitely not been perfected. (Try making WordPress work with ShipStation.) And, if you’re an introvert (like me), you’d better get over it fast.

But it can be done and the payoff is not just in dollars, which are hard to come by in any universe, or creative freedom (which can be pretty hollow if your stuff can’t find an audience), but in independence and the sense of betting on yourself and your own Muse—win or lose.

Let me recommend a blog and podcast to any who might be thinking of venturing into this uncharted wilderness. Do you know Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn? Her books, blogs, and podcasts are the cutting edge of this new indie world. Most of what she and her colleagues across the pond (she’s English and a lot of her mates are too) are beyond my ken or capability. That’s why I love it and her … and why I’m so impressed by it.

Log onto Joanna’s stuff and see what you think. Meanwhile, Diana and I will continue reporting from our own rarefied cosmos of publishing “as if.”

P.S. We’ve got a new book, THE DAILY PRESSFIELD, coming in a week or so. We’re pushing the envelope a little on this one, too. Full reports to follow!

The post Publishing “as if” first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

Sabotage and Self-Sabotage

One thing you learn though, if you’re a writer, is that nobody gives a damn. My friend Jake will ask me, “How’s the book going?” and it’s all over his face that he couldn’t give less of a shit. If anything, he’s hoping I’ll fail. When I report any setback, I can see him fighting to keep from grinning.

My uncle Charlie’s the same, even though he loves me like a son. “Still writing those books?” he’ll ask, in the same tone he’d use to say, “Still squeegee-ing windshields at the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel?”

from “The Knowledge” (2016)

Self-sabotage, as we all know, is a real thing. It’s called Resistance.

But there’s such a thing as sabotage by others.

We might think that those closest to us—our parents, our spouse, our best buds and BFFs—would be proud of us for embarking on our artistic journeys and rooting us on to succeed. But more often than not, the opposite is true.

Our friends will slip subtle digs at us. They’ll ridicule or make fun of our work. They’ll minimize it. Refer to it as a “hobby.” Or they’ll warn us “for our own good” not to become too invested emotionally in the creative dream we’re pursuing.

When I first really committed wholeheartedly to writing fiction, a person very close to me remarked (to me and to other friends), “Steve escapes into typing.”

Jennifer Lawrence in “Silver Linings Playbook”

It’s not that these friends and family members are bad people. What’s happening is they are dealing (unconsciously) with their own Resistance. Deep inside, they know that they have an artistic dream—and they know they’re doing nothing to pursue it. When they see you and me sitting down at our desks or heading into the studio day after day, the act becomes a reproach to them. They think, “If Janie can do it, why can’t I?”

So they sabotage us… or try to.

The writer and director David O. Russell has made this a theme of his movies. Have you seen “The Fighter,” starring Mark Wahlberg? Or “Silver Linings Playbook” with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence? Or “Joy,” starring Jennifer Lawrence?

They’re all about families sabotaging the one member who steps out of the comfort of mediocrity and takes action to live out their dream.

Be careful when you venture out of the shadows. Not everyone will turn out to be your friend.

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My Head in the Morning

When I wake up in the morning, I’m almost always in a bad mood. I’m irritable, I’m short-tempered, I’m grumpy.

Coffee doesn’t help. I can’t watch Joe Scarborough. If I have to drive anywhere (and I do), I’m always pissed off at the other cars. Road rage is only a moment away. 

It’s all Resistance.

Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you wake up peppy and cheerful. Maybe I’m demented. But this is what my day feels like out of the box.

I have to counteract it right away. The worst thing I can do is lie in bed. If I let myself remain horizontal, my head starts spiraling off into dangerously dark places. The day can get out of control in a hurry.

It took me years to understand that the voice in my head is not me.

It’s Resistance.

Hovering before me as I wake is the work I know I need to do that day. Inevitably, that labor is daunting. Inescapably, it brings up fear. I don’t want to do it. This fear and this avoidance combine to create the witch’s brew that boils and bubbles in the cauldron of my brain.

I must take action to counter it.

Two things work for me. They might not work for you, but they do for me. One is exercise, the other is getting out of the house.

I’m a gym person. That’s my medicine. You’ll see my car pulling into Gold’s before dawn and me trashing what’s left of my body on the treadmill or under the bar in the squat rack.

The gym isn’t about exercise for me. It’s about beating Resistance. The purpose of working out, for me, is to give me a “little victory” (my friend Randy Wallace’s phrase). Momentum. Something I can build on.

From the moment my soles first touch the floor in the morning, I am seeking to manage my emotions for that day.

If you’re like me, you work by projects. For me, it’s books. My life isn’t a one-day-one-thing-the-next-day-another affair. I’m almost always working on some long-term enterprise. I’ll have six months put in and eighteen to go.

Resistance loves long-term projects. They’re so easy to sabotage. Resistance can derail them at the start, at any point in the middle, or at its favorite ambush site—the end.

Maybe that’s why I wake up so grumpy.

Resistance has seen me coming. It knows right where I’m going to be. It can take up a hidden position beside the road and wallop me broadside as I go past.

What I’ve found is that if I can get past my bad-tempered, pissed-off self early, I can make the rest of the day go my way.

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“We Are Jews, We Cannot Commit Such Acts”

This is going to be a long post. I want to tell you a story from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. It’s about a clash between my friend Lou Lenart and Yitzhak Rabin, who would go on to become prime minister of Israel and a great champion of peace—before he was assassinated by another Israeli on November 4, 1995.

U.S. Marine captain Lou Lenart on Okinawa, 1945

First, a little about Lou. He was a Jew (he died a few years ago in Israel at age 93), born in Hungary in 1921; the family emigrated to the States when he was a boy. Lou enlisted in the Marine Corps at the start of WWII, eventually becoming a fighter pilot in the Pacific.

When Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the country was immediately invaded by the armed forces of three Arab states—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—whose intention was to destroy the Jewish state before it could be born.

Lou got himself to Israel, volunteering as a pilot. He led the four-plane mission (the Israel Air Force only had four planes, total, at the time) that stopped an armored Egyptian column eleven miles south of Tel Aviv, literally saving the infant state of Israel.

Not long after, Lou was made Operations Officer for the Israel Air Force. The IAF had upped its complement by then to about a dozen planes. Lou’s post was basically him, a driver, a radio, and a jeep. Rabin, a rising young captain, was the Operations Officer for the Army.

Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel, 1974-77 and 1992-1995.

Fighting the Egyptian army in the Negev, the air force’s only bomber (with a crew of three) was shot down.

Here’s the story of what happened then, as Lou told it to me for my book, The Lion’s Gate. What follows is in Lou’s voice (my condensed version):

The ground fight was just starting. Days passed before we could assemble a force and search for the aircraft. 

The plane had crashed on the shore alongside the Arab village of Ishdud. We went in with six or seven trucks and jeeps, lots of guns.

Yitzhak Rabin was ops officer for the army, as I said. I was the same for the air force. The wreckage of the plane was on the beach, burned to a cinder. Our guys rousted out the whole village, including the mukhtar, the mayor. We gathered them in the central square, with the trucks and guns around. A Haganah intelligence officer was interrogating the mukhtar in Arabic.  

The plane had been on fire when it crashed, the mayor was saying. The villagers had tried to save the crew but the flames had kept them back. The Haganah officer asked what had happened to the bodies. The jackals got them, said the mukhtar. He and the villagers had tried to keep the beasts back but they couldn’t. The parts of the fliers’ flesh that hadn’t been burned in the crash were devoured by wild animals.

While the mukhtar was reciting this bullshit, my eyes were fixed on his left wrist. He was wearing the watch that had belonged to the pilot of the [bomber].

I got Rabin aside and told him to burn down the village. Put a bullet in the mukhtar’s head and drive all the villagers out. I pointed across the plain. The Egyptian lines are only a few hundred meters away. Let the villagers take their belongings and get out.

“I can’t do that,” said Rabin.

“Why not?”

“Lou, collective punishment is against the Geneva Convention.”

“The hell with the Geneva Convention! You think these Arabs are following the Geneva Convention? They burned our guys to death, then cut ’em up and fed ’em to their dogs—if they didn’t carve ’em up first while they were still alive!”

Already I was thinking that I would have to tell the fathers and mothers of these airmen what had happened to their sons. I would lie like hell, I knew that. I would never tell them the truth of how their sons had died.

I told Rabin again: Shoot the mukhtar and burn the village.

He refused. “We are Jews. We cannot commit such acts.”

Rabin was an idealist. The founding generations of Israel had suffered pogroms and persecution for so many centuries in Russia and Eastern Europe, not to mention the Holocaust only three years earlier, that it had become a point of honor with them that if they ever got their own country, they would not treat others with the same cruelty that they’d been treated with. You have to admire that. It’s honorable. It’s noble. But in war it’s bullshit.

“Would Alexander hesitate to burn this village? Would Caesar?”

“Would Stalin?” said Rabin. “Would Hitler?”

He put his hand on my shoulder.

“We cannot do it, Lou. If we take such actions, we abandon every principle we are fighting for.”

What could I say? Israel was Rabin’s country. I was a foreigner. I couldn’t force my way.

But if you ask me today whether I have any regrets in my life, I will say only one: that I didn’t shoot that mukhtar right then and there—and let Rabin and the Haganah do whatever they wanted with me.

Who was “right” in this case—Lou or Rabin? Whose point of view, if enacted across the board as policy, had the best chance of producing, over time, peace and harmony for both peoples?

Rabin’s position is clearly the most high-minded and moral. Would it have “worked,” in the sense of inspiring in the minds of Israel’s enemies the motivation to negotiate in good faith, seeking a political solution that was equitable for all? We’ll never know because Rabin’s championing of peace over the following nearly fifty years resulted in his assassination by forces within his own nation opposed to such a posture.

What about Lou’s point of view? Certainly, the actions he urged, assuming what he accused the mukhtar of was true, would have produced “justice.” But wouldn’t they, as Rabin stated, betray the ideals of the fledgling Jewish state… and in fact create such hatred among any Arab who learned of them that they would, over time, produce generations who would grow to embrace the ultra-barbaric terrorism we’ve seen from Hamas over the past few days?

Would Rabin’s open-handed policies have produced the same result for different reasons?

I don’t know. My own instinct is that neither point of view would have produced an outcome of peace, or even embittered co-existence, then or now. I put this story of 1948 forward mainly to provide a bit of historical context for the moral and political nightmare that Israel finds itself in today.

Is there some third solution? Is there some policy or course of action somewhere between Rabin’s reaching out and Lou’s Old Testament eye-for-an-eye vengeance?

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My Religion: Part 2

We talked in last week’s post about being at the depths of one’s Wilderness Passage and how, in that hyper-conscious psychic condition, one becomes sensitized to what is true and what is false in any writing or art that we might read or view or listen to.

I noted that for me, in such a period, the only works I could read were Homer, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. 

Thinking more about this, I realize I’ve got far more questions than answers.

Why, when we’re in that raw, exposed-nerve place, do certain works (of books, music, movies, even food) seem so false and superficial, while others pour powerfully into our psyches and bring us comfort? 

What does “comfort” mean in a state like that? Myself, I certainly was not “healed” in any sense. My downward spiral kept rolling along for years. Did the relief and reassurance I felt reading the Iliad or Sonnet 64 “help” somehow on some deeper level? Did it pay off at some future interval?

And what about “content?” It seemed to me then that the actual subject matter of the piece that I read with such emotion meant very little. It wasn’t that Aphrodite had rescued Paris from the battlefield of Troy by enveloping him in a fog or that the breasts of King David’s beloved were like unto ripe pomegranates. It was something else. What? Beauty? Truth? The indefinable magic of verse and meter and rhythm?

Was it soul? Did the books and music my heart rejected at that time lack soul, while the ones that I embraced possessed it? What is soul anyway?

Do you remember the movie Network? There’s a scene where the actor Peter Finch, as the wigged-out news anchor Howard Beale, gets asked what it was that sent him over the edge. He answers, “I just ran out of bullshit.”

There’s a reason why Homer is Homer and Shakespeare is Shakespeare and Solomon of Ecclesiastes is Solomon of Ecclesiastes. There’s a reason why we’re still reading them thirty centuries after some of them were written.

I wish I could put my finger on it, but I can’t. A gift? Inspiration? Genius? 

And what exactly do they give us, except some once-in-ten-centuries elixir that enters our bloodstream like honey and, for a moment (or maybe more), gives us hope?

P.S. Here’s Sonnet 64:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras’d

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,

Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

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