Steven Pressfield has sold millions of books, seen his first novel become a Hollywood film…and he thinks talent is wildly overrated.
Here are 19 things he taught me about fear, art, and channeling the creative muse:
1. The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
2. Find work you can do for its own sake — not fame, fortune, attention, or applause.
3. You can test if your desires are genuine by asking yourself: "If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?”
4. Discipline beats talent when talent isn’t disciplined. Pressfield: “If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have a lot of talent and no discipline.”
5. Every day you don't spend writing is a day spent putting off the work you really want to do, the things you really want to achieve, and the person you really want to become.
6. Pros know that you shouldn't wait to start writing until you have every idea. You find ideas by working.
7. The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
8. If you're going to do high-level creative work, you're going to have to get good at saying no. The committed writer needs an empty schedule.
9. The artist faces a daily battle between the life they live and the life they could live. Between the two lies The Resistance.
10. Are you living life on amateur mode? Here are the signs: “When we're living as amateurs, we're running away from our calling — meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves."
11. An addiction can become a surrogate for your calling too. Why? Because it takes work to follow a calling. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain zone of effort, risk, and exposure.
12. To write is to subject yourself to a certain kind of torture... to endure isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
13. Hesitation is the graveyard of great ideas. Pressfield: “A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.”
14. Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. They help you go through patches where a “sane” person would quit.
15. Ambition is precious: “Ambition is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls."
16. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.
17. The Blitzkrieg Method: During your first draft, you will be blasted by anxieties from all sides. If you slow down to deal with them, it’s over. He recommends the Blitzkrieg Method instead—if you come to an obstacle, go around it. Forward momentum is everything in a first draft. Get words onto the page.
18. To be a writer is to hold the warrior and the artist inside yourself.
19. It's time to turn pro: “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9DtH-tVQUI&t=1s
Here are the timestamps for our conversation:
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:40 Starting a writing career
00:07:00 Writing rough drafts
00:11:10 Copywriting
00:13:20 Hemingway
00:14:20 The Legend of Bagger Vance
00:18:40 Fiction vs non-fiction
00:19:15 Storytelling advice
00:29:20 Editing your work
00:40:55 Discipline in writing
00:43:45 Why you need a villain
01:02:45 How Steven started writing
01:05:15 Lessons from Robert Greene
01:08:50 Lessons from Tim Ferriss
01:12:00 The 60 scenes method
01:13:20 Writing styles
01:20:20 Make your heroes suffer
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