Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 21

Training = Self-training

We were talking last week about the writer or artist’s need for training.

You and I are no different from athletes or warriors. We do what we do in the face of an opposing force.

Call it Resistance, call it self-sabotage, call it demons of self-destruction. This force is as real as a headwind or a contrary current is to a triathlete or an armed foe on the battlefield is to a soldier.

The athlete or the soldier has an advantage over you and me, however. They can work with a coach. They have a sergeant or a lieutenant to hold their feet to the fire. They can literally be TRAINED by a professional. Some pro athletes have entire retinues of coaches and training professionals.

Some athletes have entire retinues of coaches and trainers

You and I are alone.

We can’t train. We have to self-train.

I break it down into three areas in my own work.

Self-motivation.

Self-validation.

Self-reinforcement.

And I add another:

Self-preparation, meaning my interior rehearsals for various emergencies.

What form does this self-training take?

It’s talk. Self-talk. It’s interior conversations between me and myself.

An example: I’m in a situation right now where, for reasons I can’t talk about, I’m not able to publish stuff I’ve already written. I’ve got two books done and ready to go. But I can’t do anything with them.

Here’s my self-talk addressing this situation (which covers all four of the categories above):

Steve, an external event (just like an ambush in war or a setback in an athletic event) has broken your normal rhythm of production. The temptation now is to slack off. The voice of Resistance in your head will tell you to “take it easy” or “explore new possibilities.” You will feel like, “Hey, I’ve done my bit, let me back off for a minute until we can get back on track with our normal work rhythm.”

In other words, I’m saying to myself what a professional coach or trainer would say to me if I had one.

What you must do now, Steve, is the opposite of what Resistance wants you to do. You must raise your intensity. Pick the next project and plunge in with the same level of concentration and aspiration (or higher) as if there had been no external interruption. Block that out. The enemy now, as always, is Resistance.. 

Instead of slacking off, even a little, increase your level of exertion. Put your head down and work. Self-reinforce every day. Self-validate every day. Self-motivate every day.

Things now are NOT normal. They are harder. They are an insidious form of emergency. Treat this moment that way.

That’s training. That’s self-training.

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The Willing Embrace of Training

We were talking a couple of weeks ago about the artist’s or warrior’s “willing embrace of chaos.”

There’s another, far less glamorous item that the artist or warrior embraces.

Training.

There’s an axiom in every army in the world.

“In an emergency you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.”

“We sink to the level of our training.’

Soldiers train, athletes train. Why? Because they know that under game pressure or the surprise and dislocation of an emergency, the mind goes into a freeze or a fog. Training is to embed a conditioned response to this state, one that doesn’t require cognitive thinking. “Run to the sound of the guns.” “Drop and return fire.” “Get out of the house!”

Sailors practice “Man overboard!” drills, families rehearse earthquake drills. Even in elementary school (sad, sad to say), kids and teachers practice active-shooter drills.

You and I as writers face an emergency enemy too. Its name is Resistance. Resistance says, “You had a great day of work yesterday, let’s slack off today.” Or “This new idea of yours is a loser. Let’s drop it.”

In Act Two, we hit walls. Close to the finish, we experience panic. When it comes time to take our work to market, we freak, we freeze, we run for cover.

In an emergency we don’t rise to the occasion, we sink to the level of our training.

There’s only one answer for you and me, or for any solitary artist or entrepreneur.

Training.

We must rehearse and reinforce ourselves every day to respond to these emergencies without haste and without panic. The firefighter knows that walls will unexpectedly crash and floors will give way beneath him; the triathlete knows her bike chain will snap out of nowhere or her hamstring will seize up two miles from the finish line. 

To prepare for these exigencies, they train. They rehearse. They prepare mentally.

You and I are athletes and firefighters too. It’s not glamorous or cinematic to prepare mentally for the hour when two years of work unspools into nothing. But it’s professional. It’s the game. It’s the life we’ve chosen.

 “Run to the sound of the guns.” “Drop and return fire.” “Get out of the house!”

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In Praise of Mothers

We’ve talked often in these posts about the Warrior Mindset as a template for the writer or artist or entrepreneur’s inner world. Treat the struggle as a war. Fight it like a warrior.

But there’s another paradigm, another archetype that may be even more powerful.

I’m talking about the Mother.

When you think about it, the writer or artist is more like a mother than a warrior.

First, she is doing that which only God Himself and other artists have done. She is bringing forth onto the material plane a living being that has never existed before.

The artist’s work is the Mother’s baby. She conceives it, she carries it to term, she gives birth to it. 

Now consider the Mother once her issue has been brought into the world. In many ways, she is more ferocious in its cause than a warrior. 

A mother will run into a burning building to save her child.

A 110-pound mom will lift a Buick with her bare hands to protect her baby.

A mother will kill for her child. She will sacrifice anything, even her own life, in defense of her offspring.

A mother will give up her own vanity (no small thing) in favor of raising her child. Fashion? Weight? Hair, nails, skin? In the tradeoff of time—for herself or for her child—a mom will show up uncombed, un-made-up, in yoga pants and flip-flops to register her kid for pre-K or to root her child on in soccer.

More amazing than these, a mother will emancipate her child from her own vanity of expectations. Does she wish her daughter would graduate from Stanford and become a professor of French Literature? She’ll release her to become a professional wrestler. And never lose a jot of love or commitment.

You and I have to be like that mother.

We are here to serve, not our own selves or our own ambition, but the new life that will be born through us.

We must protect that life. We are its vessel. That which we perform for ourselves is in service only of that new life. 

Nor can we cling to or possess that new life. We are only the medium through which it has entered the world. We must not force it or manipulate it into being what we want it to be. We must let it be what it is and what it will become.

We must release it. We must let it go.

This is nature. This is life. This is our role.

We are warriors. And we are mothers.

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The Willing Embrace of Chaos

I gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. The title of the talk was “The Warrior Mindset.”

(Whenever you see the term “warrior” in something written by me, insert/replace it with “writer” or “artist.” In my mind, they’re the same thing.)

In the talk, I cited this passage from the great Israeli general Moshe Dayan. It comes from his 1967 book, Diary of the Sinai Campaign:

Moshe Dayan

To the commander of an Israeli unit, I can point on a map to the Suez Canal and say: “There’s your target and this is your axis of advance. Don’t signal me during the fighting for more men, arms, or vehicles. All that we could allocate you’ve already got, and there isn’t more. Keep signaling your advances. You must reach Suez in forty-eight hours.” I can give this kind of order to commanders of our units because I know they are ready to assume such tasks and are capable of carrying them out.

In Hebrew, the word for chaos is balagan. (It’s actually part-Russian, part-Hebrew.) Its usage goes something like this:

“What was it like, jumping out of that airplane in a thunderstorm?”

“It was a complete balagan!”

Warriors, athletes, stand-up comedians, moms pushing strollers, cops, firemen … they all know that their day can be plunged at any moment into chaos. (Moms perhaps most of all.)

They learn to incorporate this awareness into their mindset.

Some come to live for this chaos. It’s the most fertile and exciting part of their day.

You and I as writers and artists must learn to embrace chaos as well. 

Chaos is a product of Resistance.

Chaos will hit us in Act Two. It’ll hit us at the finish of our novel, our dance, our documentary film.

Chaos = fear. Chaos = mental disorientation. Chaos = confusion.

Can we function in this state? Like that Israeli officer, can we keep pushing forward even when we’re out of touch with higher command and have lost contact with friendly units on all sides? Can we maintain our focus? Can we keep our confidence?

The poet John Keats gave this skill a name. He called it “negative capability.”

… 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 …

Embarking on a new work of fiction or nonfiction, a new startup, a new enterprise of any kind, you and I need to prepare ourselves mentally for periods of chaos. We need to be able to feel our flight suit become drenched with sweat, our own terror-sweat … and still keep flying the plane.

We need to be able function in the midst of a balagan.

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The Pain Zone

John Naber won four swimming gold medals at the ’76 Olympic Games in Montreal, each in world-record time. He said something in an interview once that sticks with me to this day.

John Naber, deep in the Pain Zone

A reporter asked Naber, “What’s the difference between a good swimmer and a great swimmer?”

Here’s how Naber answered (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

The thing about competitive swimming is that the instant you hit the water, you enter the Pain Zone. Your heart is hammering, your lungs are on fire, your muscles are straining to their maximum. It’s hell.

The difference between a good swimmer and a great swimmer is that the great swimmer has the capacity to go a little bit deeper into the Pain Zone … and to stay there a little bit longer.

I’m just now finishing a novel—filling the blank pages on the climactic chapters—and I am deep into the Pain Zone. Resistance is kicking my ass. I think of John Naber every day.

Gloria Steinem once said

I don’t like to write. I like to have written.

It helps me a lot to remind myself first that there is a Pain Zone, and second, that it’s universal. Every one of us hits that wall. Every one feels our lungs burning, our heart about to explode out of our chest. Every one of us wants to quit. Every one wants to back off, just a little, so this damn struggle will stop hurting so much.

I keep thinking back to John Naber.

The difference between a good swimmer and a great swimmer is that the great swimmer finds a way to go a little bit deeper into the Pain Zone … and to stay there a little bit longer.

The post The Pain Zone first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

“I wasn’t even operational”

Do you know the word “operational?”

I didn’t. 

It’s a military term, used in armed forces all over the world. 

It means “certified for combat.” It means they give you the keys to the plane or the tank or the aircraft carrier. You have passed the test. You’re cleared hot.

I was interviewing Zvi “Kantor” Kanor, a pilot who at age seventeen got called out of flight school to fly combat missions in the Six Day War.

“It was crazy. I wasn’t even operational!”

Other pilots have described harrowing action in the sky.

“This happened on my first mission. I was barely operational!”

Here’s a true story from Afghanistan. My friend Major Jim Gant of the Special Forces wrote a book called One Tribe at a Time. It was a white paper, laying out a different type of strategy—what came to be called a Tribal Engagement Strategy—for fighting the war in that overwhelmingly tribal country. General David Petraeus was in charge of all US and Coalition forces in Afghanistan at the time. He read Major Gant’s paper and thought it made a lot of sense. 

Major Jim Gant (right) in a tribal shura, Kunar province, Afghanistan

The story is that General Petraues called his staff together and, dropping the paper on the table before them, declared, “Operationalize this.”

{Full disclosure, there was no happy ending for the Tribal Engagement strategy.]

The point is the word.

Operational.

“Officially certified to participate in a military operation.”

Or operationalize. 

“To make operational. To make ready for ‘live’ or ‘kinetic’ action.”

Are you and I operational? Are we cleared, even if only in our own minds, to fly or trek or sail into combat, even if that combat is only against our own Resistance and the problems of our work?

If we’re Charles Dickens, are we ready to wrangle Pip and Fagin and Mr. Micawber? If we’re Jon Krakauer, are we ready to leap Into Thin Air? If we’re Elizabeth Gilbert, have we got the guts to Eat Pray Love?

In a way, our writer’s type of combat is harder than the kind faced by military men and women. It’s harder because nobody certifies us. There’s no flight school or boot camp or BUDS training for us. Nobody mentors us or validates us. Nobody pins a Trident or an SF tab or an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor on the breast of our tunic.

We have to train ourselves. We have to test ourselves. We have to validate and commend and reinforce ourselves.

And even when we are truly operational, nobody issues us orders or points us toward the enemy, let alone honors our efforts or recognizes our contributions or even evaluates and takes note of them.

We have to declare ourselves operational, then find the operation to enlist our energies in. Then we have to do all that must be done within that operation. And after that, when we come home (if, in fact, we do make it home) our task is to recognize ourselves and validate our efforts and rally our intensity to do it all again, when all too often no one beyond our immediate family knows or notices or cares.

That’s operational, brothers and sisters!

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Sweating Through Your Flight Suit

Here is a scene I heard over and over, interviewing Israeli fighter pilots (and I’m sure it’s commonplace in air forces and other combat units all over the world.)

A pilot would describe returning to base after a combat mission. He’d land safely, taxi to a stop; his ground crew would come running to the plane; they’d set the ladder against the aircraft’s flank, open the the cockpit cowling so the pilot could climb out and down … only he, the returning fighter pilot, would be so wrung out emotionally and so shattered with fatigue that he couldn’t get out of his seat.

Ground crewmen would have to literally lift him from under the arms and carry him down to terra firma.

A Mirage IIIC cockpit. Sometimes a pilot didn’t have the strength to get out.

And yet …

And yet, he, the pilot, had completed the mission. He had dropped his bombs, he had fought off enemy attacks in the air, he had done what he was sent out to do.

In such a situation [here is Gen. Ran Ronen on the subject], the pilot’s body will exhibit all the manifestations of fear. His heart rate will soar; his flight suit will become drenched with sweat. But his mind must remain focused. His thinking must stay clear and calm.

I know it’s a stretch to compare what you and I do—safe in our offices with our cups of tea or coffee beside us—with the peril faced by pilots in life-and-death air-to-air combat. But there is, at least metaphorically, a parallel.

You and I deal with panic too. We feel our lives flash before our eyes. Our hearts race, our blood pressure soars, our figurative flight suits become soaked with sweat.

The lesson here is that doesn’t matter. That’s just the body doing what bodies do.

It’s okay to feel terror. It’s okay to break down in tears (as I myself have done countless times). It’s okay to finish the day so weak and limp, you have to pour yourself out of your chair and collapse into the arms of the nearest spouse/wet bar/loyal Labrador. 

It’s okay to feel and do all that.

Just keep flying the mission.

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When panic strikes …

Can you stand another Fighter Pilot Wisdom post?

Let’s start with another moment from our friend, fighter ace Giora Romm. Flying in the north of Israel on Day Two of the Six Day War, Giora’s Mirage IIIC got hit by an enemy missile. Here’s Giora describing his situation:

The plane was for the moment still airworthy but I knew I had to get on the ground fast. The nearest landing strip was about twenty kilometers south. I turned toward it and lowered my landing gear. But the missile had hit the Mirage’s undercarriage, right beneath my seat. Had the landing gear in fact lowered? I had no way to know. The indicator on the instrument panel had been knocked out by the missile strike. 

Mirage IIIC cockpit. Sometimes even your instruments can’t save you.

What did Giora do?

It was late afternoon. The sun was low in the sky. I descended to near ground level and banked so that I could see my plane’s shadow on the ground.

Yes, the landing gear were down.

Another pilot from Giora’s squadron, Arnon Levushin, ran out of fuel on his first solo training flight. He could see the emergency landing field in the distance. He turned toward it. But did he have enough speed and altitude to reach the runway? No control tower could tell him. No gauges or instruments could make the call.

I lined up my pipper (the gunsight on the plane’s windscreen) with the forward edge of the runway. I figured as long as the targeting “X” stayed above the horizon line, my glide path was good. But if the pipper dropped below the apron of the runway, that meant I would not make it … and I’d have to start looking for a farmer’s field to crash-land in.

(Yes, Levushin made it.)

I love these stories because they inspire us all to use our noodles, as my mother would’ve said.

What clever solutions!

What simple, straightforward answers!

And how great that in moments of potential panic and paralysis, these fliers were able to keep their heads and come up with such smart and unorthodox solutions.

The post When panic strikes … first appeared on Steven Pressfield.

“Just write the damn thing!”

Let’s get back to our “fighter pilot wisdom” series.

Flashing back to our friend, Israel Air Force ace (for shooting down five enemy planes) Giora Romm, let me paraphrase something he told me about fighter pilots in general.

There are some pilots in any squadron who are excellent fliers, undoubtedly brave in many air-to-air contexts, yet who in action will often loiter around the margins of an engagement rather than plunging aggressively into the fray. I witnessed this a number of times in confrontations with the enemy along the border. This is in wartime, remember. Certain pilots would stay on our side of the line and not cross over.

Wow. I had never thought of that. But hearing Giora tell it, I could believe that was a common phenomenon.

Air-to-air combat. Who’s who? What’s what?

It got me asking myself what the equivalent was in the writer’s world. I realized I had an answer, at least for me, immediately to hand—and on the very book I was interviewing Giora for.

When I got back from Israel after conducting interviews for The Lion’s Gate, I had almost five hundred hours of tape from about eighty interviewees—soldiers, tankers, and airmen who had fought in the Six Day War of 1967.

I took this responsibility very seriously. This was not fiction, where I could make stuff up or change the story to suit my own aims. This was real. I had to be absolutely true to what had factually happened.

I began transcribing the interviews. Each one took about a week. I was scrupulous. I was religious. I was painstaking.

I was loitering.

The realization hit me one day. There’s the enemy. There’s the engagement. And here I am, hanging back, flying in circles on the wrong side of the border.

I said to myself, “Just write the damn thing!”

Immediately all problems cleared up.

Resistance takes many forms, and one of them is the temptation to loiter around the margins of our book, our movie, our startup.

Giora, in our interview, went on to make a further point.

I don’t believe these pilots’ problem was lack of courage. The issue was that they were unsure of the contours of the problem. Planes were zooming this way and that. Who’s who? What’s going on? The pilots were hanging back, as if they were waiting for a photo to develop. Whereas other pilots (like me) were comfortable jumping in, even when we weren’t sure exactly what was going on. That’s airmanship—the ability to make a judgment based on minimal cues, sometimes even totally insufficient ones.

I was like those hanging-back pilots at that point in writing The Lion’s Gate. I peered at the work before me, and all I saw was confusion. I kept waiting for the picture to come into focus. But it never did. I could’ve spent a year transcribing interviews and been just as uncertain as I was at the start.

Sometimes you have to fly straight into the chaos.

Sometimes you have to tell yourself, “Just write the damn thing!”

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Abrahams on the carpet

Here’s another “hand over your badge and your gun” moment, but without a badge or a gun. It comes from the movie Chariots of Fire, which won the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay in 1981.

I cite this to illustrate the “hero’s journey” beat in so many novels and movies, in which the hero is stripped of his institutional approval, in whatever form that may take, and must make the choice to continue his journey entirely on his own hook.

To set the stage:

Harold Abrahams (Chariots of Fire is a true story, by the way, and Abrahams a true historical character) is a Cambridge undergraduate slated to run in the hundred-meter dash at the 1924 Olympics. He’s also a Jew, experiencing all the subtle and not-so-subtle prejudices we might imagine in that era in an institution that represents the centuries-old soul of the English class system.

Ben Cross as Harold Abrahams in “Chariots of Fire”

In one scene, Abrahams is summoned to dinner with the Master of his college at Cambridge (Caius College, pronounced “keys”) played by Lindsay Anderson and the Master of Trinity College, played by Sir John Gielgud—both at their stuffy Old English best. Abrahams himself is played by Ben Cross. The three men meet in the Masters’ Rooms, a book-lined Gothic setting radiating history and tradition. All are attired formally.

Why has Abrahams been called on the carpet? It takes a few minutes before the two Masters get to the point.

                                                            TRINITY

                        Abrahams, I’m afraid there is a growing suspicion

                        in the bosom of the University that in your enthusiasm

                        to succeed, you have, perhaps, lost sight of [Cambridge’s

                        loftiest traditions.]

                                                            ABRAHAMS

                        May I ask what form this disloyalty takes?

                                                            CAIUS

                        It’s been said you use a personal coach.

                                                            HAROLD

                        Mr. Mussabini, yes.

                                                            CAIUS

                        Do I take it that you employ Mr. Mussabini on a

                        professional basis?

                                                            HAROLD

                        Sam Mussabini is the finest, most advanced, clearest

                        thinking athletics coach in the country. I am honored

                        that he considers me worthy of his complete attention.

                                                            CAIUS

                        Nevertheless, he’s a professional.

                                                            HAROLD

                        What else would he be, he’s the best!

                                                            TRINITY

                        Ah, well there, Mr. Abrahams, I’m afraid our paths

                        diverge. The University believes that the way of the

                        amateur can produce the most gratifying results.

                                                            HAROLD        

                        I am an amateur!

                                                            TRINITY

                                    (suddenly vitriolic)

                        You are trained by a professional. You have adopted a

                        professional attitude. For the past year you have

                        concentrated wholly on developing your own technique,

                        in the headlong pursuit, may I suggest, of individual glory.

                                                            HAROLD

                        I am a Cambridge man first and last. I am an Englishman

                        first and last. What I have achieved, what I intend to achieve,

                        is for my family, my university, and my country, and I

                        bitterly resent your suggesting otherwise.

                                                            CAIUS

                        My boy, your approach has been, shall we say, a little

                        too plebeian. You are the elite, and, as such, must be seen

                        to run rather to the manner born.

                                                            HAROLD

                        Would you prefer I played the amateur — and lost?

                                                            CAIUS

                        To playing the tradesman? Yes!

Abrahams regards the two Dons—petrified, as they are, in a bygone age. He stands. He extends his hand to Caius.

                                                            HAROLD

                        Thank you, sir! The evening has been most illuminating.

                                    (to Trinity)

                        And good-night to you, sir!

   Abrahams starts toward the door, then turns and faces back.

                                                            HAROLD

                        You know, gentlemen, you yearn for victory just as I do.

                        But achieved with the apparent effortlessness of gods.

                        Yours are the archaic values of the Prep School play-

                        ground. You deceive no one but yourselves. I believe

                        in the relentless pursuit of excellence — and I shall

                        carry the future with me!!

Caius and Trinity watch Abrahams exit. Trinity turns to Caius.

                                                            TRINITY

                        There goes your Semite, Hugh. A different God.

                        A different mountaintop.

See how Abrahams has been called on the carpet and ordered to “hand over his badge and his gun”?

Prior to this scene, Abrahams had trained and competed believing he did so with the blessing of his college and his university. He felt like a fully-vetted Englishman competing under the banner of his beloved native land.

By the time he exits this evening, however (even though he did not hear the “Semite/mountaintop” comment), Abrahams feels that the scales have fallen from his eyes. He realizes that he will never be accepted, at least not by the deeply conservative masters of his universe, as a true Englishman and member of the elect. He will always be, by one definition or another, “the tradesman.”

In hero’s journey terms, the stakes have gone way up in this scene. Abrahams’ inclusion among the elite has been jerked out from under him, exactly like a police detective being forced to hand over his badge and his gun. From here on, Abrahams realizes, it is him (and Sam Mussabini) against the world.

Our hero has been forced to make a choice. Does he cave or does he dig in and fight?

It seems that this beat, or a moment very much like it, is necessary in any hero’s journey story. How much, the hero must answer, do I really want my objective? What price am I willing to pay? For us as storytellers, that price must be as high as possible. The higher the price, the better the story.

P.S. Abrahams (in the movie and in real life) goes on to win the gold medal in the Olympics. The filmmakers give us a brief scene in which the Master of Trinity College is informed of this. Sir John Gielgud delivers his line with supreme aplomb.

                                                            SERVANT

                        He did it, sir! Abrahams. He won! 

                                                            TRINITY

                        As I always knew he would.

Chariots of Fire was conceived by David Puttnam, written as a screenplay by Colin Welland, and directed by Hugh Hudson. Its producers were Jake Eberts, Dodi Fayed and David Puttnam.

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