Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 11

My Religion

When I reached the depths of my own journey, living in an abandoned cinder-block house with no doors or windows, no electricity, no bathroom, and no running water, I found that my requirements for reading material had altered dramatically.

I couldn’t read even good books from outstanding authors—books I had read and loved in the past. They didn’t work for me anymore. They felt shallow. They didn’t give me what I needed.

The only things I could read were Homer, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible.

I loved these. I would crack the Old or New Testaments at random, not for anything “religious,” just for the poetry.  Within three verses, I’d be weeping.

And Ruth said to Naomi, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to refrain from following after thee. 

For whither thou goest, I will go; where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, I will die, and there shall I be buried.

The Lord do all this to me and more, if aught but death part thee and me.

That was when I became a believer in art. I was deep in my own myth. I needed help. Only real myth could sustain me. But once I found it, I recognized it—and it did sustain me when nothing else could.

It was clear to me, then, that my heart and my journey were no different from those of every soul throughout history, male and female, who had made the passage before me.

A few of these artists, inspired by who knows what, had managed to leave a sign for us who followed, a blaze on a tree, three stones piled up beside the trail. God bless them. They saved my life.

No one can ever tell me that art is trivial, or mere diversion, or entertainment. The real stuff is mother’s milk. We can’t live without it. It guides us and sustains us.

It’s my religion.

The post My Religion first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

A Second (Bad) Self

“There is a second self inside you, an inner, shadow Self. This self doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t love you. It has its own agenda, and it will kill you. It will kill you like cancer. It will kill you to achieve its agenda, which is to prevent you from actualizing your Self, from becoming who you really are. This shadow self is called, in the Kabbalistic lexicon, the ‘yetzer hara.’ The yetzer hara, Steve, is what you would call Resistance.”

Rabbi Mordecai Finley, in conversation, July 4, 2010

Rabbi Finley

Rabbi Mordecai Finley of Ohr HaTorah congregation in Los Angeles (one of the few rabbis who was a U.S. Marine) is a mentor and friend to me. When I was working on Turning Pro I invited him to breakfast and turned on the tape recorder. The quote above is one of the things that popped out. I came upon it again recently and it struck me with even greater power than it did the first time.

My own conception of Resistance has always been (probably mistakenly) that this force of self-sabotage is “out there” somewhere. I experience it as radiating off the blank page or invading my brain from some other, extra-dimensional location.

Rabbi Finley sees it the other way.

He sees it as a “second self” that lives inside us.

Somehow, to me, that makes it even scarier.

It’s like a sci-fi movie. Like the first Alien.

The first thing I say to myself when I think of Resistance this way (and I do think Rabbi Finley is right) is, Why would our Creator pull such a trick on us?

(Or, if you prefer, Why would Nature/Evolution have evolved us this way?)

Whatever our answer (and I’ve got one for myself), the subjective reality of a “second self” seems undeniable.

This second self seduces us with distractions and excuses. It terrorizes us with visions of our own defeat and humiliation. It whispers to us in the night (and in broad daylight), convincing us that we are without worth, talent, dignity, resolve, courage.

It runs us down.

It sells us short.

It sabotages our best efforts.

It will kill us, as Rabbi Finley says, if we let it.

I declare on the Home Page of this site

Trust me: you will NEVER, NEVER achieve your dreams until you learn to recognize, confront and overcome that voice in your head that is your own Resistance.

The key word here is recognize.

Paradoxically (and aligning perfectly with Rabbi Finley’s statement above) as soon as we recognize this “second self,” fully acknowledge its existence, and grasp the fact that its intentions toward us are diabolically negative, we have found the strategy and the weapon that will help us overcome it.

Awareness first.

Respect for this foe second.

Then: determination and resolution to overcome it.

Our first self is our real self. It is in a battle to the death with our second self.

Which will win?

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“This Might Not Work”

The phrase above is one of Seth Godin’s trademarks. I love it because, like all of Seth’s stuff, it crams a ton of wisdom into very few words.

Does anyone lead from the front more than Seth?

What does Seth mean by “This might not work”?

Here’s what I think:

There’s a concept in marketing called “the Avatar.” Are you familiar with this? An avatar is the archetype of Your Customer.

The idea, if you’re a marketer, is to keep this avatar in the front of your mind, particularly when you’re developing a new product, writing a new book, organizing a new enterprise. You want to ask yourself questions like, “Am I serving my avatar properly? Am I giving her what she needs? Is there something more I can do for her?”

Apple, for example, knows its avatars down to the minutest detail. You can bet that BMW does too, as do McDonald’s, the NRA, and the Democratic and Republican parties.

Focus groups and customer surveys are tools used by marketers to communicate with their avatars and to learn from them. Questions can be asked. “Do you want cup holders in the backseat? Which is more important to you in a baby stroller—comfort for your child or ease of packing and unpacking? Should Catwoman return in The Dark Knight Takes a Vacation?”

The avatar concept makes a lot of sense. I see how it works. I would even implement it myself in certain cases.

But a writer can’t work like this. An artist can’t. If you do, you’re a hack.

Did Picasso ask his buyers if they were ready for Cubism? Did Quention Tarantino focus-group Reservoir Dogs?  Did Springsteen workshop Darkness at the Edge of Town?

Sometimes you gotta lead.

You gotta get out front.

George Lucas was working on Star Wars for five years before it hit the big screen. How long did Herman Melville toil over Moby Dick before the book was published in 1851? Did either of them have a clue, during those long lonely years, whether their babies would fly or crash?

The audience doesn’t know what it wants. It’s the artist’s job to tell them. Or more accurately show them.

The audience will know it when they see it.

Even in the world of tech/marketing, I don’t think the avatar concept works. How did Steve Jobs evolve the Macintosh or the iPhone or the iPad? He did them for himself. Because he thought they were cool.

Apple customers don’t know what the next cool Apple product will be. If you ask them, they can’t tell you.

They’re waiting to be surprised.

They’re waiting to be thrilled.

I don’t know what Steve Jobs was thinking throughout his years of great product development, but I’ll wager it was no more complicated than this:

“I’m betting that what I myself love, my customers will love too. So let me ask myself only, ‘What do I love?'”

Then there’s the Muse factor.

Our Muse is always ahead of us.

The audience is always behind.

I’ve said before, of my own projects that have been hits, that at the time I started them I thought I was out of my mind. I thought no one would be interested but me. But I was seized. I had to do them. I had no choice.

(Again, I’m not knocking the avatar concept in totality. In the proper context, it’s absolutely appropriate. Nothing works better. I have used it myself and I would use it again.)

But not for any enterprise that aspires to or touches upon art.

Which brings us back to Seth’s phrase, “This might not work.”

These four words are what every artist and entrepreneur should be saying as he or she launches their new novel/zombie flick/videogame/Andalusian restaurant.

It might not work. Really. It might bomb big-time.

That’s the chance you and I have to take, if we want to get ahead of the curve. Ahead of the curve is where hits happen.

Ahead of the curve is where the Muse lives.

If we call ourselves artists or entrepreneurs, that’s where you and I have to live too.

The post “This Might Not Work” first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

Alone in a Room, Wearing a Mask

The following is from an interview with the writer and director Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Light Sleeper,” “First Reformed,” and his newest, “Master Gardener”) from the L.A. Times, September 13, 2020.

“ … over the years I’ve developed my own little genre of films. And they usually involve a man alone in a room, wearing a mask, and the mask is his occupation. So it could be a taxi driver, a drug dealer, a gigolo, a reverend, whatever. And I take that character and run it alongside a larger problem, personal or social. It could be debilitating loneliness like in ‘Taxi Driver.’ It could be an environmental crisis like in ‘First Reformed.’

            “I’m looking for deep-seated problems, either personal or societal, and some kind of oddball metaphor. The more you get closer, you run these two wires next to each other, the more sparks you see flying across. And it’s in the sparks that the viewer comes alive.  If the wires ever touch, there’s nothing left for the viewer to do. But if you keep these two wires really close to each other, the viewer will start to spark from one wire to the other. And that’s the greatest thing you can give a viewer or a reader, an opportunity to be part of the creation.”

            I love analogies like this because they really help me as a writer.

            When Mr. Schrader says “a man alone in a room with a mask on,” that strikes me as a different way of saying “get to true identity.”

            “Man” of course means man or woman.

            “In a room” means a circumscribed environment.

            “Mask” is false identity.

            The story’s job is to get the mask off and reveal the hero’s true identity.

            But I love the second part of Mr. Schrader’s construct even more—the idea of the “two wires”—the character’s story running side-by-side with a greater story but never quite touching.

            I started thinking about Dr. Zhivago.

            The man in the mask is Yuri—Dr. Zhivago (Omar Sharif). 

            The room is Russia in the time of the revolution.

            Yuri’s true identity (mask off) is a great poet, whose works and depth of sensibility transcend temporal upheavals, however monumental or Earth-altering.

            The parallel societal story is the White-Red clash that ended with the victory of the Communists and their idealistic, well-intentioned but in the end soul-destroying totalitarian worldview.

            The central scene to me, if you recall it, is when Zhivago, seeking to flee with his family to their dacha in the countryside, is snatched up and dragooned by Red Army partisans under their ruthless commander Strelnikov (Tom Courtenay), whom Zhivago had known briefly in pre-revolutionary days as the unhappy student radical Pasha Antipov (who was also the husband of Lara [Julie Christie], whom Zhivago would come to love as well and for whom his greatest poetry would be written.)

            The scene between Zhivago and Strelnikov takes place on Strelnikov’s armored high-speed train. It’s an interview, face to face, in Strelnikov’s office/cabin. The two men speak briefly of Zhivago’s poetry, which Strelnikov dismisses, not with contempt or ill will but simply as out of phase with the times.

                        STRELNIKOV

            I should find it absurdly personal.

Zhivago is stung and even unnerved by this appraisal. To him, the personal is everything. Love. Depth of emotion. The imperatives of the heart.

                        STRELNIKOV

            The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.

            See the sparks?

            Paul Schrader is right. When you set a greater issue in parallel with a unique personal one, particularly one that involves the hero seeking his or her true identity, you get drama and magic and insight.

            Zhivago’s whole life-odyssey (and his poetry) is a testament to the permanence of the personal … of love and of feeling … over the transience of “greater” political events, even if these produce massive societal transformation that could not have been brought about in any other way.

            Zhivago collapses and dies at the end of the story, post-revolution, of a heart attack, dismounting from a streetcar in a moment of frantic passion, after spotting his great love, Lara, on the street and pursuing her as she walks past without seeing him.

                        ZHIVAGO’S BROTHER YEVGRAV (ALEC GUINNESS)

            The walls of his heart were like paper.

            The story ends with the triumph of Communism and the (justifiably true) point of view that such a mass movement was necessary to awaken Russia and bring her into the modern, industrialized world. The final scene takes place at a massive dam—a feat of engineering and construction that pre-revolutionary Russia could never have even dreamt of.

            But who “won?”

            In the end it is Zhivago’s poetry, speaking to the timeless Russian soul, that remains vivid and ineradicable, ever-alive in the hearts of the people.

            Paul Schrader’s concept is true.

            Sparks did fly between these two parallels, didn’t they?

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Resistance is Infallible

I wrote in a post a few weeks ago that

Resistance knows more than we do.

What I meant by that was that our Inner Self-saboteur, by some mysterious alchemy or algorithm, can tell when we are onto something good. It can even tell how good it is.

Resistance responds accordingly.

The better the piece we’re working on (and by “better,” I mean “more important to the evolution of our soul and to our progression as an artist”), the more Resistance we will feel to advancing it and to completing it.

Resistance is a Force of Nature

In other words,

Good Idea = Big Resistance.

Great idea = Humongous Resistance.

Let me add a further corollary.

Our progression as artists or entrepreneurs never happens in a smooth upward line. Instead, we get better in stair-step fashion, i.e. plateau plateau plateau, then … breakthrough!

Thus:

Pre-breakthrough moment = super-humongous Resistance.

Resistance is a mighty and diabolical enemy, but it has a weakness. Its weakness is that it’s a force of nature and thus operates by fixed and immutable laws. Resistance is predictable.

The more Resistance we feel to a project or idea, the more certain we can be that that idea is critical to the evolution of our soul.

And the more certain we can be that that idea is GOOD.

So, brothers and sisters, when we feel ourselves becoming irritable and impatient for no reason, when we can’t sleep and we’ve lost our appetite (or our appetite has mysteriously doubled), when we can’t stand to face the typewriter or the dance studio or the editing suite, when the lamest distractions pull us irresistibly off-course, when we hate ourselves and everything around us … take heart. It’s Resistance! And its message is:

That idea you’re working on, honey?

It’s a winner. Suck it up and go for it!

Resistance is infallible.

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Sh*t doesn’t just happen

My friend Tony has a theory about accidents, i.e. fender-benders, sprained ankles, etc. He believes they’re the body’s way of grounding us when we get too far into our own heads.

An accident, Tony would say, should make us ask, “What’s going on in my life? Have I floated too far away into airy-fairy land?”

My own theory is parallel in that, like Tony, I don’t believe accidents are “accidental.”

I think accidents are a form of Resistance.

(I include minor maladies like colds or sore throats or mild fevers, particularly when they come on the heels of other mishaps and random impairments.)

I think accidents are our Inner Saboteur’s way of throwing us off our game, of presenting us with excuses to slack off or even stop entirely our pursuit of our current project or vision.

An example from my life right now: I recently hurt myself at the gym. Nothing serious—a tweaked shoulder—but enough to put me in pain and make me change the way I worked out. Then I got sick. Again nothing life-threatening … a virus or something that hung around for a week or ten days. Meanwhile my sleep was off. You get the picture.

I labored under this low-level stress/pain-in-the-ass for a couple of weeks before the thought hit me, “I wonder if this is Resistance.”

My conclusion? It was.

I thought, “I’m at a really tough part of a piece of fiction I’m working on now … two-thirds of the way through a fourth draft, where the thing is starting to wobble off the tracks. Enough that it worries me. I may have screwed the pooch on this section. I’m getting scared.” 

Then I thought further, “Shit happens like this when you’re about to break through to something good.”

I decided to go with that self-diagnosis. This constellation of ills, I concluded, is Resistance. And since Resistance is infallible in the sense that it ramps up its power specifically when it senses that you or I are about to break through to a higher level … I took heart.

I told myself, “This is a good thing.” And I tore apart the section I was working on and re-did it in a new and (hopefully) better way.

My shoulder still hurts but I’m sleeping well again … and I’m definitely happier with the new version of that hard part at the end of Act Two.

Our psyches communicate with us in many odd languages. Shit doesn’t just happen.

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Training = Turning pro

[Special thanks to Maxima Kahn for bringing back one of my favorite posts. And even more special thanks to Rosanne Cash for inspiring it. Here it is:]

Amateurs have amateur habits. Pros have professional habits.

How does the pro acquire professional habits? 

By training.

(The amateur by contrast either trains like an amateur or doesn’t train at all.)

The passage below comes from Rosanne Cash’s wonderful 2011 memoir, Composed.

Rosanne Cash, post-training

From that moment I changed the way I approached songwriting, I changed how I sang, I changed my work ethic, and I changed my life.  I sought out Marge Rivingston in New York to work on my voice and I started training, as if I were a runner, in both technique and stamina. I started paying attention to everything, both in the studio and out. If I found myself drifting off into daydreams–an old, entrenched habit–I pulled myself awake and back into the present moment. Instead of toying with ideas, I examined them, and I tested the authenticity of my instincts musically. I stretched my attention span consciously. I read books on writing by Natalie Goldberg and Carolyn Heilbrun and began to self-edit and refine more. I went deeper into every process involved with writing and musicianship. I realized I had earlier been working only within my known range–never pushing far outside the comfort zone to take any real risks. I started painting, so I could learn about the absence of words and sound, and why I needed them.  I took painting lessons from Sharon Orr, who had a series of classes at a studio called Art and Soul.

There’s a word for the changes Rosanne incorporated into her life.

Training.

And another one: Turning pro.

I remained completely humbled by the dream [that had precipitated these external changes] and it stayed with me through every waking hour of completing King’s Record Shop … I vowed the next record would reflect my new commitment. Rodney [Crowell, Rosanne’s then-husband] was at the top of his game as a record producer, but I had come to feel curiously like a neophyte in the studio after the dream. Everything seemed new, frightening, and tremendously exciting. I had awakened from the morphine sleep of success into the life of an artist.

When we take ourselves and our artistic aspirations seriously, we resolve to move from working like an amateur to working like a pro.

We ask ourselves, “How can I get better? What do I have to do to become a worthy vessel for my gift? How can I elevate myself from where I am now to the higher, truer, more realized artist I know I can be?”

There’s a word for that answer.

It starts with a “T.”

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“Dvekut baMesima”

As a 22-year-old lieutenant, Giora Romm became the first fighter pilot ace (shooting down five enemy planes) of the Israel Air Force during the Six Day War of 1967. It was my great good fortune and honor to have met Giora and interviewed him (and his wife Miriam) for The Lion’s Gate (Penguin Sentinel 2014). Giora passed away this Saturday after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.

In honor of this great and good man, I’m excerpting below a part of one of “his” chapters in The Lion’s Gate. I cite this specific passage because, although Giora is speaking of the mindset of a fighter pilot, what he’s saying applies equally to you and me as writers and artists. 

Giora Romm in 1983 with sons Assaf and Yuval

The passage is Giora speaking:

When I was fifteen, I applied for and was accepted into a new military boarding school associated with the Reali School in Haifa. The Reali School was the elite high school in Israel. The military school was a secondary school version of West Point. We attended classes at Reali in the morning and underwent our military training in the afternoon.

I don’t believe there is an institution in Israel today that can measure up to the standards of that school. Why did I want to go there? I wanted to test myself. At that time in Israel the ideal to which an individual aspired was inclusion as part of a “serving elite.” The best of the best were not motivated by money or fame. Their aim was to serve the nation, to sacrifice their lives if necessary. At the military boarding school, it was assumed that every graduate would volunteer for a fighting unit, the more elite the better. We studied, we played sports, we trekked. We hiked all over Israel. We were unbelievably strong physically. But what was even more powerful were the precepts that the school hammered into our skulls.

First: Complete the mission.

The phrase in Hebrew is Dvekut baMesima. 

Mesima is “mission”; dvekut means “glued to.” The mission is everything. At all costs, it must be carried through to completion. I remember running up the Snake Trail at Masada one summer at 110 degrees Fahrenheit with two of my classmates. Each of us would sooner have died than be first to call, “Hey, slow down!”

Second: Whatever you do, do it to your utmost. The way you tie your shoes. The way you navigate at night. Nothing is academic.

Third: En brera. “No alternative.”

We are Jews; we are surrounded by enemies who seek our extinction and the extinction of our people. There is no alternative to victory.

Fourteen months after the Six Day War, over the Nile Delta, an Egyptian missile exploded beneath the tail of Giora’s Mirage IIIC. Within moments, Romm found himself hanging by the straps of his parachute, with a broken arm and a leg shattered in a dozen places, looking down from 10,000 feet. Streams of farmers and field workers converged below onto the spot toward which his chute was descending, with the intention, he was certain, of hacking him to death as soon as his feet touched the earth.

No Israeli pilot had survived capture in Egypt or in any other Arab state. Giora was the first. His book, Solitary, (in Hebrew, “Tulip Four,” for his plane’s call sign), is his story of his imprisonment, torture, interrogation, release, and return to service.

“Solitary,” Giora’s true story of his captivity as a POW in Egypt

In my mind, Solitary is a classic of the literature of war. It was my privilege, and my publishing partner Shawn Coyne’s, to bring it out in English translation (by Anne Hartstein Pace) in 2014.

But above and beyond Giora’s heroics in the air and in captivity, he was a great guy, funny, charming, not at all impressed with himself. He never hated the enemies outside his country or those of opposing agendas within, but always (he retired as a two-star general, having served as well as military attache to the Israeli consulate in the US) looked for common ground. I salute you, Giora. You were the best of the best.

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Self-doubt, Part 4

A story from WWII:

In the early fighting in Southeast Asia, the Japanese were seriously kicking the British Army’s butt. Things had reached such a desperate pass that an entire division, including its Gurkha components, had to be airlifted 1500 miles to safety—an emergency evacuation, though smaller, nearly on a par with Dunkirk.

A Gurkha soldier of WWII

But one Gurkha sergeant had been accidentally left behind. The poor guy was alone, with no radio, no compass. He had only his rifle and a map. The distance between him and his brothers-in-arms was unfathomable, across trackless jungle with which he was totally unfamiliar, to a needle-in-a-haystack place he had never been. He set off nonetheless.

Short version: nine months later, the Gurkha sergeant staggered into the base to which his division had been evacuated. He was barefoot, emaciated, sick with every kind of tropical disease imaginable. But he had miraculously made it! His mates swamped him ecstatically. His British colonel saluted him and made plans to honor his incredible achievement. Surely the sergeant’s feat was the greatest solo walking escape in the history of warfare.

The Gurkha sergeant spoke little English. but he was able to communicate his feelings to the colonel and his officers. He did not see his 1500-mile trek as particularly exceptional. After all, he said, “I had a map.”

He handed the map to the colonel. The paper was falling apart, the map itself torn and ragged and stained with jungle mud and dirt. “This is the map you used?” the colonel asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“The only one?”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel held the map up for his officers to see. “This is a city map of London!”

Here’s the moral of the story, as I see it:

Self-belief (no matter how crazily-founded or materially divorced from reality) plus instinct plus grit may be the most powerful antidote to self-doubt.

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Self-doubt, Part 3

There are certain skills that must be mastered by every writer, artist, entrepreneur, and athlete if she or he wishes to succeed. These skills are not taught in school. Many don’t even have a name.

These skills are not about craft. They’re about management of emotion. I’ve heard them called “soft skills,” though to me they’re anything but “soft.”

One of them is the ability to keep going when in the throes of desperate self-doubt.

John Keats, 1795-1821

Keats called this skill “negative capability.” From a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, in 1817:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke (Charles Wentworth Dilke, a writer and editor whose home in London, Wentworth Place, is now called Keats House—a museum to the great Romantic poet), upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason … This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

My own poster boy for this skill is Christopher Columbus. Talk about uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts! “OMG, what if the world really is flat? Will my ships sail off the edge? No, that’s ridiculous. I know the world is round. But what if I miss the Indies? What if my course is too far north? Or south? Maybe the wise move is to sail back home … right NOW!!!”

The thing about soft skills like this—the ability to follow your vision when every cell in your body is revolting against this—is there’s no glamor to them. They’re boring. They’re quotidian. They’re the scenes we would cut out of a movie.

But they are the way we defeat our own Resistance. 

Sit down. Get to work. Don’t stop.

Nobody gives you points for this stuff. No one cheers. No one even knows. The reason soft skills are so hard is they’re totally internal, producing no reward except that which we give ourselves.

A thought experiment:

Which writer/filmmaker/athlete/entrepreneur would you and I bet on?

1. A one-in-a-million talent, but one who habitually faltered when confronted by self-doubt.

2. A far more modestly gifted performer, but one who could buckle up each day, no matter what emotional headwinds he or she was facing, and keep grinding.

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