Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 3

3 Brains, Part Two

A couple of weeks ago, we did a post entitled “The 3 Brains of an Artist.” Here’s how we described Brain #2:

The second brain is our anti-Resistance brain. That’s the part of our psyche that has learned how to handle our emotions while we’re using the first brain, i.e. the pure artistic brain.

The anti-Resistance brain fights off distraction, overcomes procrastination, continues to work despite self-doubt, fear, laziness, superficiality. It’s our Pro vs Amateur brain. It keeps us moving forward against all odds and adversity.

The War of Art was written for Brain #2. That’s its target. That’s its subject.

The September ’24 Silent Writing Retreat

The Writing Retreat video course I’ve been talking about here and on Instagram is also aimed at Brain #2. It’s not a “writing course” in the sense of addressing theme and structure, plot and characterization.

It’s entirely about the mindset that lets us sit alone in a room with our demons for a year or two years (or as long as it takes to write a novel, a screenplay, a memoir, whatever) … and keep on working at a high level, despite all those crazy voices in our heads.

That’s why The War of Art resonated so powerfully with so many people—because it was about that no-nonsense, non-glam mindset—and why this new video course does the same. The difference is the course is me onstage in-person (or as close to in-person as video can get), rather than words on a page or a voice on audio.

If that’s the way you learn (it’s certainly the way I do), please consider taking a click at www.stevenpressfield.com for more information.

P.S. This Friday, June 30, at 5:00PM Pacific, we’re doing a “Happy Hour” Instagram Live where we give away four scholarships to the Video Course. I’ll keep us updated this week on IG as to how to get your name in!

P.P.S. One of those scholarships will be for a one-on-one half-hour coaching call with me personally.

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A Creative Retreat With Steve

I was fifty-two years old when my first book was published. That’s after thirty years of trying, when I supported myself driving taxis and tractor-trailers, working in the oilfields and as a migrant laborer. I get asked now all the time, “How did you keep going all those years? Why didn’t you quit?”

The answer is in a new three-hour video course called the Silent Writing Retreat. The course went on sale this Wednesday, May 28, and will be available till Thursday, June 5 at 6:00 PM EST.

Here’s the link to learn more and to sign up:

https://silentwritingretreat.com/steven-pressfield/

The actual event took place in Malibu, California on September 7, 2024. It lasted all day with breaks for writing in silence. Every second was recorded on video. It was a day like no other. Everyone had to check their phones at the door, nobody could talk except me. It was all business. No chit-chat.

The substance of the event was simply me alone onstage all day, delivering a distillation of my thirty-year battle with my own Resistance—my compulsion to self-sabotage, my susceptibility to procrastination, perfectionism, self-doubt, fear, etc.

I talk about my mentors—my boss Hugh Reaves at the trucking company in North Carolina, my writer friend Paul Rink in California, and a migrant-fruit picker/former-Marine named John whose last name I never knew—who taught me the lessons you only learn in the University of Hard Knocks. I talk about my C-level career in Hollywood, with its many humiliations but also its manifold lessons in storytelling. And I talk about the lone female who has guided me and stood by me through everything. I’m talking about the goddess, the Muse, who may not be flesh and blood but who is realer than real and without whom none of us could get a single decent word down on paper.

I’ve never done an event like this before, and I’ll probably never do it again. I hope you’ll jump on this opportunity to see and hear me share my fifty years in the trenches, in the hope that it will encourage and inspire all of us to DO OUR WORK and become the person and the artist we were born to be.

[P.S. A VIP feature of this course is the option to book a half-hour one-on-one ZOOM coaching with me. Click this link for more details.]

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My First (And Only) Writing Course

I want to alert you guys to the first and only Writing Course I’ve ever taught. You may remember me talking about this last year. (We held the actual live event in September in Malibu, California.)

Dozens of friends wrote in at the time. “Oh, I wish I could go! I live too far away!” “I’m so sorry to miss it!”

Well, you can go now.

We videoed the full day’s event as it happened. I and my partners Roda and Kriss have been working on this package ever since.

The video version of the “Silent Writing Retreat” is available now. Today.

Here’s the link for full information and to sign up:

https://silentwritingretreat.com/steven-pressfield/

I’ll be writing more about this in the coming days (for starters I’m doing an Instagram Live TODAY at 1:00 PM Pacific) but here’s the short version of what the course is about.

Oh, I almost forgot …

A special VIP feature is the opportunity to book a half-hour, one-on-one ZOOM coaching call with me. (More on that later as well.)

The essence of the September event was summed up in its subtitle: OVERCOMING RESISTANCE. The medium was me onstage for the whole day, with breaks for everyone in attendance—about sixty people—to do their own writing in silence. Everyone checked their phones at the door. There was no talking, except by me. No socializing. No chit-chat.

I spoke pretty much non-stop, delivering a distillation of everything I’ve written in The War of Art, Turning Pro and other books … as well as telling in excruciating detail the story of my own journey as a writer—from driving a taxi in New York City and tractor-trailers up and down the East Coast to ten years as a C-level Hollywood screenwriter to thirty years and twenty-something books as a writer of fiction and nonfiction.

Steve with Roda Ahmed, who produced the Writing Course event and video

If you missed the live event, this is your chance to see and hear it all—in a form you can replay and return to as many times as you wish.

Here again is the link for full details and to sign up:

https://silentwritingretreat.com/steven-pressfield/

For more, join me today at 1:00 PM Pacific for an Instagram Live.

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Scraped!

The first major item in our rebuild process has been completed—Debris Removal.

What this means is the Army Corps of Engineers (or a private removal company if you have insurance) comes to the site of your house with a 30-ton excavator and a crew of half a dozen and basically scrapes the site clean, loads the debris onto trucks, and hauls it away.

Scraped clean

We dug a little through the remains and came up with some pots and a colander … and the blasted remains of my old manual typewriter. These will become mementos for the future.

The emotion? We were with the Army Corps crew for three days. The guys are technically not in the army; they are independent contractors hired for the current catastrophe. We had been warned that they would come in and bulldoze everything, willy-nilly. But they turned out to be great guys. We made friends. We hung around. The crews are working, we learned, 12 hours a day, seven days a week … and there’s work work work still waiting to be done. It’s a bonanza for them.

The first day’s emotion was mainly amazement at how good these dudes were at their job. Just to get the HUGE equipment up our narrow road was incredible. The “chimney topple” was the big moment after that. Then the excavator’s huge steel jaws grabbed the ruins of my 2016 Kia Soul EV, lifted it, shook it like a doll to make all the crap fall out, then set it down gently to be hauled away to the dump.

The next day was when the emotion hit. It’s weird to see the place where you lived for thirty-one years scraped clean down to raw dirt. You did feel, I must say, the sense of a new beginning. We hope the hurdles to come won’t be too high.

I must take my hat off to our guys on site—RTS out of Bakersfield, Tetratech, ECC and the Army Corps. The scale of the fire calamity in L.A. is massive, yet these gentlemen and their cohorts from around the country have made a huge dent in clearing the ruins in just four months. The task is a long way from done, and another long, long way from being restored. But Step One is finally rolling.

The skyline of every street and driveway is silhouetted with the booms and scoops of John Deere, Volvo, Hitachi, Caterpillar, and Komatsu excavators. The shoulders of the highways are lined with haul trucks—independent operators—waiting to be called forward to get their loads. Pacific Coast Highway and Sunset Boulevard (I’m sure it’s the same across town in Altadena, our sister wreckage site) are still one-lane, passes required, with checkpoints manned by the Highway Patrol and the National Guard (almost as many women as men), in camo, with M-4 carbines on slings across their chests.

More to come as the next steps unfold. Thank you, everyone who has pitched in to help keep us afloat. We will never forget it!

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The 3 Brains of an Artist

You and I as artists and writers have to have three brains.

The first is our artist’s brain. That’s the part that writes or sings or dances. The part that invokes the Muse. It’s our “instrument.” It composes the music, bangs out the comedy routines, comes up with the idea for the iPhone or the self-driving taxicab.

The second brain is our anti-Resistance brain. That’s the part of our psyche that has learned how to handle our emotions while we’re using the first brain (above.)

The anti-Resistance brain fights off distraction, overcomes procrastination, continues to work despite self-doubt, fear, laziness, superficiality. It’s our Pro vs Amateur brain. It keeps us moving forward against all odds and adversity.

Then there’s our entrepreneurial brain. I’ve put this third behind the other two but in many ways it’s at least as important.

If we are writers, actors, photographers, filmmakers, we are entrepreneurs. We are in business, and we have to think like businesspeople.

We have to know how to make a deadline, how to conduct ourselves in a meeting with financial people. We have to have a sense of the marketplace. We have to teach ourselves self-sufficiency. We have to be comfortable without an external structure. We have to learn how to trust our instincts when others doubt us or seek to undermine us (or flat-out ignore us.)

We are not hobbyists.

We are not artistes starving in a garret.

We are the Steve Jobs of our own creative enterprise. We have to be our own champion and our own best friend.

Artist = entrepreneur.

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Resistance Recruits Allies

This is the title of a chapter in The War of Art. But let me expand on it here, from recent experience …

Resistance, remember, is that negative, sneaky, brutal, merciless force that you and I wake up with every morning. Its aim is to stop us from doing our work, from becoming the realized individual and artist we were born to be.

All by itself, Resistance is a massive challenge. But Resistance is so diabolical that it can search through our circumstances like some evil form of AI … and add a dimension to its perniciousness.

Resistance recruits allies.

If we are facing any kind of adversity in our lives—a child struggling at school, a health issue in the family, a lost job, a divorce—Resistance will piggyback onto this and use it against us. It will tell us—the voice in our heads—that this exterior headwind is so urgent, so time-consuming, so critical that either we must devote all our time to dealing with it (and thus not do our work), or we must become so demoralized and depressed that we can’t deal with anything at all.

This phenomenon is front-burner stuff for me right now, dealing with the (very real) rebuilding process after losing our home in the California wildfires.

What’s the proper response? First (I’m coming to this realization myself even as we speak), we have to recognize the component of adversity that is Resistance. It’s there. It’s hiding. But it’s real. Fifty percent, maybe more of the intensity of adversity that we feel is almost certainly Resistance.

We have to dismiss it. We have to tell ourselves, “This is bullshit. This is our own self-sabotage. Gear up and fight it.”

At the same time, we have to cut ourselves some slack. If our emotions are on overload over the very real problems we’re facing, we have to take a deep breath and sit ourselves down for a little talk. “Yeah, this feels like hell … but remember, fifty percent of this intensity is just our own Resistance. We can get around this. We can overcome it.”

Again, we must dismiss the element of our issues that are Resistance only. They’re not real. They’re the bully that vanishes as soon as we stand up to it, as soon as we ramp up our commitment to ourselves—no matter how much we don’t want to—and sit down and do our work.

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A New Home

My apologies, friends, for falling behind on these updates … a lot has been happening.

Diana and I have found a long-term (one-year) rental—a nice little house on a nice little street, close enough to the burn area for us to be able to stay on top of developments. We got lucky. The owners showed the house only to us; they have been redo-ing it with great care for a couple of years. It’s spotless, sunny, and the neighbors are great.

Our new home in Mar Vista, L.A.

Meanwhile the massive rebuild process for L.A. continues. For our side of town, the first order of business is clearing the debris—i.e., the remains of houses that burned down—along Pacific Coast Highway. This is a world-class disaster area that goes on and on and on. But the crews and trucks and excavators are in there now, behind barricades that have turned PCH (which was a major commuter thoroughfare) into a one-lane road open only to emergency crews, contractors, and residents with passes. The National Guard is still there, operating checkpoints.

Our specific neighborhood, which is a mile up a steep hill off PCH, has had only the odd Debris Removal operation—a couple here, another one there. Our neighbors two doors down had their property “scraped” and another neighbor a few doors farther had a giant excavator digging yesterday. But that’s all we’ve seen. 170 houses on our hill remain piles of junk.

Supposedly the Army Corps of Engineers will phone us a few days before they come out and give homeowners a chance to plead with them not to be too brutal with their clearance swings. We haven’t heard anything yet.

The big emotional takeaway from developments seems to be this:

Don’t get too fixated on news you hear today. Keep breathing, hang onto hope … stuff may change. I don’t want to complain in these updates, so I won’t vent here. Suffice it to say that the idea that local government was going to help victims of this catastrophe and make a rebuild of their lives easier … we have seen pretty much the opposite . I will say no more for now, remembering the mantra above. It may all work out in the end.

Keeping a positive attitude has been very hard for me. I try to keep in mind how lucky we are in so many ways—and we are!—but sometimes three in the morning looks pretty grim.

What’s keeping me together is Diana (who is a champ in bad-news situations), my friends and family (who have without exception been great) … and the work.

I refuse to let this shit knock me off my writing rhythm. I just won’t let it happen. And surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly) I’m stumbling and bumbling and grinding and the juice is still there.

“Don’t got ahead of yourself!” “Don’t be shy about calling friends.” “Keep your head down and keep working!” That’s what I tell myself.

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COVID!

We just got it. Diana and me. Third time for me, second for her.

The good news is it’s been pretty mild so far. I was down hard for two days but beginning to come back today. April 1 we move into our longer-term rental house. We should be recovered enough by then.

“How is the rebuild going?”

The answer is, “Pretty glacial.”

It’s not that people aren’t trying or working hard. They are. But the logistics are overwhelming, as I’m sure they were in Katrina and every other large-scale natural disaster.

To wit: on the Palisades side of Los Angeles (and this is true with different specifics) for the Altadena side) there are only a few roads—Pacific Coast Highway, Sunset Boulevard, Topanga Canyon, Temescal Canyon. It’s just the geography. There’s only one road possible along the coast and only a few others through the canyons. All of these are major commuter arteries and they’re all now closed except to residents.

It’s no one’s fault. It just has to be that way, so that infrastructure repairs (power, water, phone lines, etc.) can be made. On the smaller roads, like ours, further repairs have to be finished before others can begin, like power lines being ‘undergrounded”—something that should have been done forty years ago. What this means for the restoration is that the heavy equipment for debris removal, i.e. the wreckage that used to be everyone’s homes, can’t get in.

The Army Corps of Engineers, who will be doing most of the work, has of necessity had to prioritize. The miles of destroyed homes along Pacific Coast Highway must be addressed first. This makes perfect sense. The road is indispensable. It has to be cleared.

We heard last night that our area is scheduled for May. I’m trying, personally, not to get ahead of myself. This ain’t easy for types like me. I keep asking myself, “What lesson am I supposed to be learning from this?”

Is it to give up the illusion that I have any control? Is it to “live in the moment?” Is it to focus on gratitude for all the incredible blessings we still have? Is it to try harder to influence events?

My answer so far is to stick with my work and not let nocturnal catastrophizing drive me insane.

This ain’t easy either, I must confess.

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The Game of Numbers

My friend Nick Murray is an advisor and guru to financial planners, i.e. the guys and gals who manage your investing portfolio if you’re lucky enough to have one.

Nick wrote a book a few years ago called The Game of Numbers. I can’t recommend it highly enough to you add me—artists and writers and creative people of all kinds—and NOT for any advice about money.

Apparently in the financial planning biz, a huge part of the game is COLD CALLING. You gotta pick up the phone and pitch yourself to potential clients.

Can you guess where this is going?

Resistance.

My copy of “The Game of Numbers”

Financial planners HATE cold calling. It’s agony. It’s rejection. You feel like a cheap hustler.

Many aspiring planners avoid it. Result: their business stalls or even fails.

Nick’s advice to these young planners:

Make three calls a day, no matter what.

Take no notice of your success rate.

Keep making those calls, no matter how much you hate it.

He calls this “the game of numbers” because as the number of calls pile up, just by sheer attrition you will get a few successes. Then a few more. And a few more after that.

The trick, Nick says, is to trust the numbers. Keep dialing. Keep cold calling.

The ability to do this, Nick believes, is the difference between success and failure.

I love The Game of Numbers because it applies absolutely to you and me as writers and artists.

Keep grinding. Keep showing up. Keep putting in the work.

Take no notice of how “good” your stuff is at the end of each day. Just get up the next day and keep striving, keep hammering, keep working.

The Muse is watching. When she sees the numbers pile up day after day, she smiles. Ah, she thinks, this gal or guy is for real.

And sooner or later, just like the financial planner making cold calls, the numbers begin to pay off. The work gets better. Our stuff begins to be noticed. We ourselves begin to believe, “Yes, I AM an artist. Indeed I AM a writer.”

Michael Jordan did not learn to shoot the turn-around fadeaway from the corner by magic. He played the game of numbers.

Get Nick’s book. It’s a life-changer. The Game of Numbers by Nick Murray.

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“Believe! Believe! Believe!” #2

If you and I had a great coach/mentor/spouse/guru who had our absolute best interests at heart, he or she would stand at our shoulder always … but particularly when we faced adversity (which means every day in almost every circumstance).

What would that avatar tell us?

Without fail, she or he would say, “I believe in you. I believe in your gift. I believe in your Self. I believe in your capacity for work, courage, grit, selflessness and perseverance.” 

(I’m sure you know where I’m going with this.)

That coach/mentor/counselor must be ourselves.

I call this, in my own mind, self-reinforcement.

For me, it’s more important than talent and almost as critical as hard work.

In other words, as Anthony Hopkins says, “Believe! Believe! Believe!”

In the face of political and Constitutional catastrophe, inevitable adversity in our personal and professional lives, the constant “friction” of real life, not to mention the ever-present, intelligent, diabolical force of Resistance that we all must face each morning the instant we open our eyes, you and I must tell ourselves—on the deepest emotional and spiritual level—that we believe in ourselves and in our gift … we believe in the work we feel called to in our soul … and we believe in the inexhaustible source of creativity that powers the universe.

I do this literally, every day. I have to.

Self-reinforce! Self-reinforce! Self-reinforce!

“Believe! Believe! Believe!”

P.S. see Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Lao-Tzu, et al.

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