Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 2

Empathy

We said in last week’s post that Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. And that as soon as you and I grasp this concept, we have made a primary Artist’s Breakthrough.

We have acquired empathy.

When we understand that nobody wants to read our shit, our mind becomes powerfully concentrated. We begin to understand that writing/reading/painting is, at its most fundamental level, a transaction.

The reader or viewer donates her time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you and I—the writer/artist/poet/singer/dancer—must give her something worthy of her gift to you.

How do we do this?

We work to develop the skill that is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs—the ability to switch back and forth in our imagination from our own point of view as writer/painter/seller to the point of view of our reader/gallery-goer/customer.

Is she following where we want to lead her?

We say to ourselves, “Recognizing that no one wants to read our shit, we must therefore stop at nothing until our shit is so interesting, so eye-catching, so funny/sad/sexy that the reader would have to be CRAZY not to jump at it.”

We learn to ask ourselves with every sentence and every visual image:

“Is this interesting? Is it fun or challenging or inventive? Am I giving the reader enough? Is she following where I want to lead her?”

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Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t

While we’re on the subject of hardball lessons that the aspiring artist needs to learn, let’s go straight to the Big One. What follows is the underlying truth that every writer and artist from Homer to R. Crumb needs to know and deal with:

Nobody wants to read your shit.

The book-length version

My first real grownup job was in advertising. I worked as a copywriter for a big ad agency in New York. The first thing you realize, writing ads and TV commercials is

Nobody wants to read your shit.

By shit, I mean your ads and commercials. Everybody hates them. Sight unseen, the audience despises everything you put before them. Your coupon ad for Preparation H, your trade pitch for Nugenix Man-Boosting Formula. They fast-forward through your commercials. They turn the page of the magazine. They hit the SKIP AD button on your YouTube spot.

This is true not just for ads, but screenplays, novels, comedy sketches, art installations, dances, one-act plays, musical revues, strip acts, standup routines. Nobody, not your dog or your mother, wants to read your grant application or sit through your opera or screen your documentary on the plight of indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon.

It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy. They’ve got stuff to do.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Understanding this admittedly unpleasant truth produces, paradoxically, the single greatest breakthrough any writer or artist can achieve.

Empathy.

(More on this next week … )

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The Code of the Entrepreneur

I’m borrowing (again) from my entrepreneurship guru, Dan Sullivan. Dan has crystalized the statement that every entrepreneur makes to him or herself, whether she does this consciously or not.

It’s the entrepreneur’s code, the independent businessperson’s declaration of principle:

I will expect no remuneration until I have created value for someone else.

Let me repeat that:

I will expect no remuneration until I have created value for someone else.

We write a book. It’s got to sell. It has to “create value” for the reader. Otherwise, we’re not artists, we’re artistes.

Dan Sullivan of StategicCoach.com

You and I must remember always that art is a transaction. The viewer or reader or gallery-goer brings to the table something precious. Her time. Her attention. She may even actually pay money. In return, you and I must deliver something—an image, a song, a story—worthy of our reader or viewer’s time and attention.

This is not easy. Why are there forty million songs released every year but only six hundred that anybody actually remembers? Because it’s hard!

Why do I cite this Entrepreneur’s Code? I do it to get our feet planted firmly on the ground. So that you and I as musicians and filmmakers and video game designers can operate in the world as it really exists—and not in some “artistic” fantasy.

I will expect no remuneration until I have created value for someone else.

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Artist = Working Stiff

We declared in the first post in this series that an artist is an entrepreneur. Let’s go further.

An artist is a working stiff.

The mentality of the artist is the mentality of the blue-collar worker

Are you a ballerina? You are not a sweet, sylph-like damsel.

You are a jock.

You are a professional athlete. You are tough. The ordeals you put your body through would cripple an NFL linebacker.

Yes, it’s romantic to be onstage at the Met in The Nutcracker and yes, your Mom and Dad will burst themselves with pride and little girls will gaze at you in awe and envy. But behind the legitimate romance of the balletic stage—and it is legitimate—are thousands of hours of grueling practice and classwork, nights coming home on the subway alone and freezing and exhausted. Torn ligaments, ruptured ACLs, bone spurs, sciatic nerve damage, plantar fasciitis, broken bones. Politics within ballet companies. Getting screwed out of roles. That’s not romance. That’s hard, backbreaking work, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

And we’re not even talking about self-doubt, fear, struggles with self-belief, sabotage by oneself and by others, arrogance, complacency, perfectionism, ambition.

Yes, succeeding as an artist takes skill and talent and genius. But more than that, it requires mental toughness. Because the artist is alone. Indeed, the ballet dancer may be part of a company and the comedy writer may have a gig on a cable show. But these jobs can end in the blink of an eye. We can all be on the street any moment.

How does the artist navigate this lonely, pitiless, competitive jungle? She must inculcate within herself the mindset of the entrepreneur, the professional, the warrior.

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The Romance of Being an Artist

I hate the word “creative.” Particularly when it’s used as a noun. That a person is a “creative.”

Why do I hate it?

Because it implies someone who is different from—and better than—the average blue-collar working stiff.

Van Gogh’s bedroom at 2, Place Lamartine in Arles, circa 1888.

There’s a romance to being an artist, isn’t there?

The novelist starving in a garret like Dostoevsky. William Burroughs on junk, Charles Bukowski the barfly. The ballerina, the photographer, the actor, the musician, the concert pianist. That’s romance, right?

What I’m hoping to do in this series of posts that I’m calling TK THS JOB N SHOVE IT is to disabuse all of us of this notion.

Being an artist is NOT romantic and if you and I undertake any artistic pursuit with that notion, we will flame out in a hurry.

The mindset of the artist is the mindset of the blue-collar worker, the mindset of the warrior, the mindset of the entrepreneur—the individual who is alone in his or her aspiration and must be tough as nails inside if she’s going to keep going and succeed.

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The Ultimate Entrepreneur

If you think about it, the artist is the ultimate entrepreneur.

Virginia Woolf, entrepreneur.

She is in business entirely for herself.

She has no boss.

No mentor.

No paycheck.

No medical, no dental, no safety net.

She has no imposed daily schedule, no externally prescribed structure.

The artist possesses total workplace freedom. She can tackle any project she wants, execute it any way she wishes, take it to market in any manner she pleases.

She can write To the Lighthouse, audition for a Broadway play, compose a symphony, lay out the next Assassins’ Creed.

The artist is the ultimate rugged individualist.

She can rise to the top or crash to the bottom.

Nothing is stopping her from either outcome except her own exertions.

[P.S. This is the fourth in this series I’m calling TK THS JOB N SHOVE IT. You can see video versions of these chapters on Instagram at @steven_pressfield. I’m guessing there’ll be between 30 and 50 “chapters” when all is said and done.]

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What Is an Entrepreneur?

My online dictionary says the word comes from the French, entreprende, “to undertake.” It’s related to “enterprise.”

A person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.

Dan Sullivan, the biz guru, defines an entrepreneur as

Someone who has an exceptionally intimate relationship with the 15th of the month.

In other words, payday.

Payday where nobody is going to pay you except yourself.

Payday when YOU are the only one generating income.

We said in last week’s post that if you are an artist, you are an entrepreneur, whether you like it or not. And we all—you and I—need to start thinking like one.

[More to come on this subject in the next weeks!]

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Artist = Entrepreneur #2

Are you a writer? A filmmaker? A dancer?

Then you’re an entrepreneur.

You have more in common with the young Steve Jobs and the early Bill Gates than you do with your dad who worked all his life for AT&T or your aunt who’s five months away from collecting her pension from the Post Office.

Steve Jobs. This is you and me, whether we realize it or not.

Are you a returning vet?
A recent or soon-to-be retiree?
Did your company just lay you off?

You’re an entrepreneur too. And you’d better start making the Jedi mind-shift from Working for Somebody Else to Working for Yourself.

These are two completely different ways of looking at the world and of thinking about yourself.

One way looks to others for daily structure, for validation, for monetary support. The other way looks for these primarily from herself.

This is a HUGE difference, an earth-shaking, life-changing, monumental watershed of the mind and the heart.

[This post is the second in a series I’m going to call TK THS JOB N SHOVE IT. We’ll be doing a lot more in the coming weeks … and also a video series on Instagram.

[Stay tuned!]

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Artist = Entrepreneur

Are you familiar with the work of Ryan Holiday or Jack Carr?

These gentlemen are what I mean when I say “artist = entrepreneur.”

Both are excellent in their specific creative spheres. Both can handle their emotions despite any external adversity or their own internal Resistance. (I.e., the first “two brains” I cited in last week’s post.)

But where Ryan and Jack truly separate themselves from the competition is with the third brain—the mindset of the entrepreneur.

Ryan Holiday’s “Painted Porch” bookstore in Bastrop, Texas

Ryan and Jack are not just writers, they are industries. In movie terms, they are studios. Both have podcasts, both have extensive speaking careers, both have massive online presences. Both tour. Both have teams to support them. Both have online stores with as much merchandise, it seems, as an old-time Sears Roebuck catalog. Ryan has an actual physical bookstore in Bastrop, Texas (outside Austin) that doubles as his office and podcast studio.

You may say (and I might myself), “Hey, I don’t wanna do that. I’m a writer. I don’t have the time to build an empire and I wouldn’t want to if I could!”

Consider this, however. The year is 2025. The world has changed. You and I can’t hope for a review of our newest novel in the New York Times. The apparatus of awareness generation that once supported writers and artists no longer exists (or at least has changed form dramatically.)

When a Big Five publisher evaluates our work and ponders bringing it out in print, its editors and sales team and marketing people ask, “What else, beyond her talent, does this writer bring to the party? Does she have an online presence? Does she speak at events? Does she do personal appearances? How will she come across on podcasts or radio or TV? Does she have a podcast herself?”

I’m not trying to discourage us, I swear. I’m only trying to point to the hardball reality of the 2025 creative world.

Each of us must be the face of our brand. We must have a brand, even if it’s the idea of NOT having a brand.

Nothing is more dispiriting than to launch a work of our best and truest art into the world and have it vanish without a trace.

We are of necessity entrepreneurs, you and I, and we have to learn, one way or another, how to represent ourselves and our work as such.

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LAST CHANCE: The doors are closing. Resistance isn’t.

We’re in the final hours of enrollment for my new course, Overcoming Resistance: From Start to Finish. If you loved The War of Art, think of this course as a live, immersive companion.

The doors close and your opportunity to meet with me one-on-one ends on June 5th at 6pm EST.

Recording the video course, September 2024

There are just a few VIP spots left which include a one-on-one Zoom call with me, and every student who signs up by Thursday gets access to a FREE bonus live group coaching session this Saturday, June 7th.

I’ll be there to help you kick off the course, tackle Resistance head-on, and get the momentum rolling.

JOIN US HERE

This whole thing started with a conversation.

Roda Ahmed @RodaWorld (some of you know her from the Silent Writing Retreat) said something simple but surprising:

“You’ve written so much about Resistance, but have you ever thought about teaching about it in person? I think people would love it if you did.”

I hadn’t and I decided to trust her and try it. 

So we teamed up.

Roda helped me think about how to reach people in a new way. How to get out of my comfort zone. She was actually one of the first ones to show me that people were sharing my work on this thing called Instagram.

This has been a humbling and deeply meaningful experience. After years of writing about the creative fight, it feels good to offer a roadmap that walks with you through it.

To those of you who’ve already joined, thank you. To those who’ve come to the Instagram Lives, entered the giveaway, shared your Resistance stories, thank you.

And to those still standing on the edge of the pool wondering if now’s the right time to jump:

I hope you’ll leap.

Resistance isn’t going anywhere. But neither is your power to beat it.

JOIN US HERE

See you Saturday,
Steve

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