Steven Pressfield: The Brutal Truth About Creative Success | How I Write Classic Episode

Summary

Podcast Summary: How I Write – Steven Pressfield: The Brutal Truth About Creative Success

Host: David Perell
Guest: Steven Pressfield
Episode Date: September 3, 2025

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Episode Overview

This classic episode of How I Write dives deep into the realities of creative discipline, the struggles of writing, and the spiritual and psychological journeys behind creative success. David Perell interviews bestselling author and legendary writing mentor Steven Pressfield (The War of Art, Gates of Fire), exploring the habits, stories, and brutal truths that underpin a writer’s life.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Discipline vs. Talent in Creative Work

• Discipline trumps talent:
  • Pressfield opens with:

    "If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have giant talent and no discipline."
    (00:00)

  • He details writing as a grueling, daily practice:

    "It's a seven day a week thing...I can now do in two hours what I used to do in four. It's like going to the gym...Movement forward is everything."
    (01:12)

2. Facing Resistance and the Psychology of Writing

• Resistance as the eternal adversary:
  • Both Pressfield and Perell return often to the concept of “resistance”—that internal force that keeps writers from their work.
  • Perell summarizes Pressfield’s core idea:

    "The more you love something, the more resistance you're going to feel and therefore the more you need to do it."
    (00:07, 83:35)

• Cover the Canvas:
  • Pressfield’s writing mantra for first drafts:

    "My job on a first draft is just to get paint on every part of that canvas, doesn't matter how bad it is...It's going to be bad. It just has to be bad."
    (06:43, 06:50)

3. Separating the Craft from Everything Else

• Process of compartmentalization:
  • Pressfield on batching communication and deep work:

    "When I do sit down to actually work, everything else gets shut off. No emails coming in...that kind of thing."
    (02:27)

• On the physicality of typing and writing:
  • Nostalgia for the typewriter versus the delete key’s temptation on computers:

    "Sometimes I'll throw a piece of paper over the screen so I can’t see the mistakes...In those early drafts, letting the schmutz pour out of you can actually be good." - Perell (05:34)

4. Finding Your Authentic Voice

• Copywork and imitation as apprenticeship:
  • Pressfield, inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, copied pages to internalize rhythm and style:

    "I used to sit down with pages of Henry Miller or Hemingway and just copy it on my old typewriter…At some point you will find your own voice. You're just searching for a voice at all."
    (11:12, 13:00)

• Golf as metaphor for the authentic swing:
  • Drawing from his novel The Legend of Bagger Vance:

    "The idea of the authentic swing is we're born with a swing, whether we know it or not...Our job is not to find the perfect swing, but to find the swing we were born with."
    (14:23)

5. Storytelling Structure and Principles

• Application of narrative techniques across genres:
  • Transfer from screenwriting to novels and non-fiction:

    “The same principles that apply to a story or a narrative apply to non-fiction…every story has to have a hero, a villain, a theme, an inciting incident, a climax...”
    (18:41)

• Mapping and editing process:
  • The 60 scenes method and iterative refinement:

    “A movie is about 60 scenes...You can start with a ‘clothesline’ and then fill in the blanks. Constantly upgrading and revising.”
    (72:04)

6. Spirituality and the Role of Inspiration

• Prayer, muses, and the neshama:
  • Creative breakthroughs as acts of surrender:

    "Before I sit down at work each day, I say out loud the invocation of the muse from Homer’s Odyssey...I put myself at the service of whatever that unknown higher force is."
    (24:45)

  • On neshama:

    “Above every blade of grass is an angel saying, grow, grow…There are forces trying to give us ideas, trying to pull us through something.”
    (20:25)

  • Perell’s phrase:

    “Make it obvious, make it obvious to me…there’s a clarity and a simplicity to obviousness.”
    (22:15)

7. The Nature of Suffering and Success

• Suffering as transformation:
  • Pressfield on heroism, hardship, and growth:

    “Make your hero suffer...the more they suffer, the better the story is...There is no real learning without suffering.”
    (80:22)

• The Resurrection and the "All is Lost" Moment:
  • Relating story structures to personal and spiritual rebirth:

    “The all is lost moment...like Jesus on the cross...you can't solve the problem by material means, you solve it by spiritual means...that’s the resurrection in our lives.”
    (58:26)

8. Finding and Maintaining Flow

• Balancing discipline and flow:
  • Perell reflects:

    “There is still a love behind that work and it still pours out of them. They can’t even help themselves to work that hard.”
    (39:14)

9. Practical Writing Advice

• Mindset over craft:
  • If teaching aspiring writers:

    “I would not talk about the craft of writing at all. I would only talk about the mindset...the obstacles...and the mental toughness needed.”
    (32:29)

• The necessity of self-editing, feedback, and humility:
  • Hitting the wall, returning to square one, and iterative improvement:

    “That’s not the kind of thing many people are able to do...to get away from your ego, from all the sunk costs...If a book takes me two years to write, the first nine months to a year, I am racked with self doubt all the way through.”
    (34:17)

10. Coping with Distraction and Saying No

• Protecting creative time:
  • The difficulty, necessity, and etiquette around declining requests:

    "You gotta protect your time…If people don’t understand, you just have to blow those people off and say, I don’t care what they think of me.”
    (70:46)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Resistance and Self-Doubt:

  "The more resistance you feel to something, the more certain you can be that you have to do it." — Steven Pressfield (83:05)

• On the All Is Lost Moment:

  “It’s the moment when the hero hits bottom and has to go to another level…can only solve it by kind of spiritual means...that’s the resurrection in our lives.” — Steven Pressfield (58:26)

• On Creative Suffering:

  “There is no real learning without suffering.” — Steven Pressfield (81:24)

• On Writing and Mindset:

  “As hard as you think it might be, it’s 10 times harder than that. And be ready for it.” — Steven Pressfield (32:29)

• On Authenticity:

  “At some point you just say, I just can’t do this, you know, let me write this crazy shit that nobody’s going to be interested in but me. And then to your amazement, you go, wow, people like this.” — Steven Pressfield (38:27)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00 – Discipline vs. talent
• 01:12 – Pressfield’s writing routine and exhaustion cues
• 06:43 – First drafts and “covering the canvas”
• 11:12 – Copywork, imitation, and finding voice
• 14:23 – The “authentic swing” as a metaphor for authenticity
• 18:41 – Applying storytelling to fiction and non-fiction
• 20:25 – Neshama and the spiritual dimension of creativity
• 32:29 – What he’d teach in a writing seminar: mindset, not craft
• 58:26 – The “all is lost” moment, resurrection, and personal transformation
• 70:46 – Saying “no” to protect creative time
• 72:04 – The 60 scenes method and structural planning

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Thematic Wrap-up

Steven Pressfield and David Perell shine a light on the inner battles, practical frameworks, and enduring questions involved in the writer’s craft. They show that the journey is not about innate talent, but about continual spiritual and mental reinvention—finding one’s authentic voice by moving through resistance, suffering, and self-doubt with discipline and hope. For those pursuing any creative calling, Pressfield’s lessons resonate: movement forward is everything, authenticity emerges from persistence, and the real story is the one you are stubborn enough to keep pursuing, day after day.

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Further Resources

• The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
• The Legend of Bagger Vance, Steven Pressfield
• Nobody Wants to Read Your Sht*, Steven Pressfield
• Writing Wednesdays (Pressfield’s blog)
• Daily Pressfield (companion book referenced in episode)

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For more episodes uncovering the reality of the writer’s life and process, subscribe to How I Write on your preferred platform.

Transcript

[Steven Pressfield]

If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have giant talent and no discipline.

[David Perell]

The more that you love something, the more resistance you're going to feel and therefore the more you need to do it. That concept is a one move checkmate.

[Steven Pressfield]

My job on a first draft is just to get paint on every part of that. Kim's doesn't matter how bad it is. Movement forward is everything.

[David Perell]

You know, Hunter S. Thompson rewrote the Great Gatsby just so he could feel what it was like to write a great novel.

[Steven Pressfield]

Really Thing. God bless them. Great.

[David Perell]

Morgan Housel asked me to ask you this. Has your writing improved throughout your career, throughout your entire life, or has it peaked and plateaued?

[Steven Pressfield]

Ah, that's. That's a great question. Because I think that I. I hate to say this, but, you know, two of my best things were like, right out of the box. The Legend of Bagger Ranch and Gates of Fire. Yep. And I'm now on my like 24th book or something like that, so I hope it's not plateauing. I'm certainly working as hard as I ever did and doing, you know, what to me is new stuff all the time.

[David Perell]

Working as hard as you've ever done. What does that look like for you?

[Steven Pressfield]

You know, it's a seven day a week thing. It's one thing I will say over the years I now, at least I tell myself this. I can now do in two hours what I used to do in four hours. It's like going to the gym or something, you know, for me, the writing process, you just go against the wall as hard as you can until you can't anymore. Until you start. For me, I always stop the writing day when I start making mistakes. Yep. When I start making typos and things like that, because I know I've hit the point of diminishing returns and it's not going to get any better after that.

[David Perell]

What are the typos revealing? Is it like carelessness? Is it like a lack of flow?

[Steven Pressfield]

Like what is just plain exhaustion, you know, you run out of glucose or whatever it is. Because I can go, you know, the first 99% of a working day and not make mistakes, you know, not make typos. And all of a sudden I'll start making them bang, bang, bang, one after the other. And I know that's when it's time to stop for the day.

[David Perell]

How do you separate the writing work that needs to be done from the other work that needs to be done? Emails, conversations with agents, all that stuff, compartmentalization of time.

[Steven Pressfield]

Right. I'll put a certain amount of time on that and give it my full attention. And then when it's over, you know, turn the page and go to the other thing. When I do sit down to actually work, everything else gets shut off. You know, there's no emails coming in, there's no phone calls coming in, that, that kind of thing.

[David Perell]

Tell me about that cabin that you lived in. It was like $15 a month in rent or something.

[Steven Pressfield]

That was a long time though. And I really was running away from writing at the time. I was working as a truck driver at the time. And I wound up working jobs where the only thing you had to have was a pulse, you know, to get the job or where they would train you on the job. And I was just sort of running away in shame from failing on that book so badly, you know. And I always carried my old typewriter with me through all this thing even I never touched it. Yeah, never touched it. And finally one night in, in New York City, I was driving a cab. I was living in a 115 sublet apartment. I was just at that point where what was I going to do this night? Was I going to go out and chase women, get drunk? Whatever was I going to do, distract myself? And I just said, I just can't stand this one more night. I can't do this.

[David Perell]

You're fed up with it.

[Steven Pressfield]

I can't do it anymore. So I sort of pulled out the typewriter expecting, you know, for no reason. What was I. What did I expect? I was going to write the Sun Also Rises or something. So I sat down for like about two hours and just wrote a bunch of crap that I just threw away immediately. And I went back to the kitchen and there was a big pile of dishes sitting in the sink from wherever. And I started to. Started washing them. And as I was washing them, I realized that I was whistling. And I thought, I've turned a corner here somehow. Wow. You know, this thing that I've been running away from for all these years, trying to write now works for me at least. I felt like I sat down crazy and I woke up calm. Yeah. And so I knew that it was going to be forever until I got anywhere with that. Certainly wasn't like immediately anything good was going to happen. And in fact it was like another 20 something years chance before, you know, I had a book published. But at that point my life changed, you know, so you talk about how I do. I believe in gods and goddesses. I do I do believe that something clicked and. And I found the thing that. That worked for me, which was sitting down and trying to fill a blank page. Wow.

[David Perell]

You don't still write with a typewriter, do you?

[Steven Pressfield]

No, I use computer. Yeah. Yeah. But my first few books, I did write because that was all there was.

[David Perell]

What did a typewriter give you that the keyboard doesn't?

[Steven Pressfield]

Well, I only did it because there was no such thing as a computer at the time. I definitely like a computer better because obviously you can move paragraphs around and correct things and import and export all that stuff.

[David Perell]

Well, it's funny. I've been thinking a lot about what handwriting gives you in terms of style, what typewriting gives you in terms of style, what the keyboard gives you in terms of style. And I do worry that the delete key is too accessible with a keyboard. And what I mean by that is. So for years, I struggled when I would write. I didn't feel like my writing had the same style, the same chutzpah as my speaking. And I think it was because when I'm speaking, if I make a mistake, if I go off somewhere, I kind.

[Steven Pressfield]

Of have to follow it.

[David Perell]

I kind of have to run with it.

[Steven Pressfield]

Right.

[David Perell]

Whereas when I'm typing, there's a rigidity to it, and I make a mistake and I can instantly hit delete, copy it, remove it. Sometimes I'll throw a piece of paper over the screen or something so that I can't see the mistakes. And I feel like in those early drafts, like, those mistakes, letting the. The schmutz pour out of you can actually be good.

[Steven Pressfield]

Ah, well, I would agree with that. I mean, the way I work, though, I never worry about correcting the stuff. I just let it go, you know, and then. And then I'll correct it later.

[David Perell]

Well, that's what you're trying to do in your first draft. Like, you're just trying to get to the end. Right.

[Steven Pressfield]

I have a mantra that I use for first drafts, and it's. And it's cover the canvas.

[David Perell]

Oh, that's good.

[Steven Pressfield]

And I feel like, you know, like I'm looking at that TV screen over there. That's a. If that's the canvas. My job on a first draft is just to get paint on every part of that canvas, you know, doesn't matter how bad it is. Yeah. You know, in fact, it's. It's going to be bad. It just has to be bad.

[David Perell]

It's like Jackson Pollock.

[Steven Pressfield]

And that's. Yeah, just like, splattering stuff. Another analogy that I use I wrote a book a few years ago about the Six Day War in Israel. The. The 1967 war, Arab Israeli war. And there's a famous speech from an Israeli general named Israel Tal, who had a armored division on the Egyptian border. And although they didn't know this at the time, they were going to the Suez Canal. Okay. And the. And I liken this to a first draft. What he said to his troops was, there's no slowing down. Whatever you come to that blocks, you, just go around it. I don't care if you lose nine tanks out of 10, keep advancing with that one, with that 10th tank. And so that's my theory on first drafts. No matter what is in the way, go around it or. And it's. It's the idea of blitzkrieg. Yeah. You know, and the theory is if you let some obstacle stop you so that you're getting into as kind of a slugging match or a war of attrition, that's the worst thing that can happen in warfare. And it's the worst thing in writing, too. So if you come to an obstacle, go around it, you know, even if you leave your rear exposed, it's okay. Movement forward is everything in a first draft. Yeah.

[David Perell]

What I think is so cool about you is you have this hard, heavy, masculine war side. The king, the warrior. And then on the other side, you have this magician lover of, like, this tenderness of spirit and this heart of, like, the muses. And the duality there is, I think, what makes you so unique. If you only had one, you wouldn't even be close to who you've become.

[Steven Pressfield]

But I don't think I'm at all unique in that. I mean, I think any. Anybody is. Any, you know, working artist is like that, that they know there's two halves to it, that you are seeking inspiration, you're seeking the flow, you're seeking something coming from another level, but that you have to be your instrument, quote unquote. Like an actor would say, has to be ready for that, has to be ready to. To. To be a professional, to take that voltage. Like, if you're a choreographer, if you're Twyla Tharp or somebody like that, and an inspiration for a move or whatever it is comes to her that she can perform it, to show it to her dancers and stuff like that. So the only way you get to that place is flat out training like an athlete or like a soldier. So I do think you have to have the two levels to make it work.

[David Perell]

I love that turn of phrase. Take that voltage what are you hinting at there?

[Steven Pressfield]

Well, actually, I have a friend. I'm speaking from his perspective and not mine, who's like, a really intense meditator. Oh, wow. I mean, way beyond. I mean, I obviously can't go into his head. Yeah. But he talks about as you get to higher levels of whatever it is. I'm not a meditator, so I don't know. You're receiving stuff from wherever it's coming from, and. And the vibration gets higher and higher and higher. And supposedly you have to. According to him, you have to be physically capable of absorbing that. You know that if you aren't, like, if you aren't trained enough to do that as an athlete, it'll overwhelm you or it just won't come through. You know, it'll just be a block. But I think that's true in any creative art. Actors, filmmakers, certainly dancers, certainly musicians. You know, the jazz musician is getting inspired from somewhere.

[David Perell]

Totally.

[Steven Pressfield]

They have to be able to be so good that they can just do it. Right. You know, I don't know. If you're a musician, I certainly couldn't do that, you know? No. Yeah.

[David Perell]

Podcasting.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah.

[David Perell]

Why do you recommend copy work to new writers?

[Steven Pressfield]

I used to sit down with just pages of Henry Miller or Hemingway and just copy it on my old typewriter. And I think it's sort of the same as they say, that Picasso or any artist would go to the Louvre and just park themselves in front of a Rembrandt or whatever it was and just copy it.

[David Perell]

They sketch it.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah.

[David Perell]

They sit there.

[Steven Pressfield]

They see how the little globs of paint.

[David Perell]

Those are my favorite people to talk to at an art museum. I was at the British Museum. There is a student, and he had this easel right there, and it was this. You would have loved it. It was a beautiful sort of old Roman sculpture. And he was copying it, but you could see it in, like, the wisps of the pen and that he was almost, like, dramatizing the. The movement of the sculpture. I just started talking to him. He was like 21, 22 years old, young guy, studying. He's like, I do this every day. I've been studying this one for, like, three, three and a half weeks. This is, like my 50th time drawing this.

[Steven Pressfield]

But think about Kobe Bryant learning how to do the turnaround. Jump shot, Fade away. Jump shot. Yeah. Michael Jordan helped him out. You know, dude, this is where your one foot goes. This where. And I'm sure he watched film forever and forever.

[David Perell]

One of My favorite articles of the last decade, Wall Street Journal article, and it's about Jayson Tatum, Boston Celtics player, young guy. And his coaches were commenting on how much better his footwork was because he grew up on YouTube. And so what he would do is he would pause the video on YouTube and he would watch exactly what the movement of the feet was. And the thesis of the article was. Now if you have a very perceptive, hard working basketball player, the footwork when they're rookies is as good as it used to be when a player was 10 years in.

[Steven Pressfield]

That's interesting. And I believe that completely. Yeah. So copying is, is great because at some point you will find your own voice. You're just searching for a voice at all, you know, and if you're, you know, like Bob Dylan sang, like Woody Guthrie, you know, and you know, it all kind of evolves.

[David Perell]

So what specifically in Miller and Hemingway were you trying to emulate?

[Steven Pressfield]

You know, it's a great question. I'm not even sure it was just something. I just loved the way they wrote. But there's a difference between just reading it closely and actually writing it and then writing it again and writing it again. You know, it just sinks in more on some, some level, deeper level, I think, than, you know, purely intellectual.

[David Perell]

You know, Hunter S. Thompson rewrote the Great Gatsby just so he could feel what it was like to write a great novel, really entire thing.

[Steven Pressfield]

God bless him. Great. And then his style became completely different from Scott Fitzgerald.

[David Perell]

Yeah, that's interesting.

[Steven Pressfield]

I mean, in golf, people, you, you know, people will copy Tiger Woods Swing, Rory McIlroy Swing Nowadays, like you say, when they have YouTube and slow mo, you know, they can be filming their own and, or working with a teacher, you know, to match those moves, you know, but sooner or later their authentic swing does come out. Have you read my book, the Legend of Agar Rants?

[David Perell]

No.

[Steven Pressfield]

Well, you should read it.

[David Perell]

Okay.

[Steven Pressfield]

You know, it's about golf and it's about this. Exactly. Yeah. You know why, why golf?

[David Perell]

For your first book?

[Steven Pressfield]

I mean, I grew up in the game too. I grew up as a, as a, as a caddy. Is that right? You know, so. But the, the concept of the Legend of Agar Vance, or the core sort of is the idea of the authentic swing. And what, what I mean by that is like a parallel for the authentic self. But the, the question, like, think about somebody here. We're getting so geeky here. Anybody that's listening, it won't. But think about Jim Furyk's swing. Yeah. You know, that big loop swing or Fred couple swing or any of the people that have really distinctive swings. That the idea of the authentic swing is that we're born with a swing, whether we know it or like Jim Fury was born with that swing. Right. And it's a. And that our job in our. Is not to find some perfect swing or perfect self or perfect writing style, but to find the style that we were born with. That's what. For instance, I had two friends when I was growing up in the caddying days. Identical twins, same DNA. Right. So you would think they would swing the same. No. Completely different swings. Radically different. So I remember, I look at them, I go, how can that possibly be? You know, but obviously, you know, we're born with some. Something, you know, and so anyway, that's, you know, you'll like the book, the authentic swing, the Legend of Bagger Vance. Way better than the movie.

[David Perell]

Oh, interesting. Do you feel like the movie missed something?

[Steven Pressfield]

You know, it's. It's very hard to adapt a book to a movie and particularly a book about golf other than Caddyshack. There's never been. Which was like a total farce. There's never been. There's never been a real serious golf movie that was worth a shit, you know. Yeah. And I can understand why. Even whereas in other sports, like there have been great boxing movies, you know.

[David Perell]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Pressfield]

And great skiing movies and other other sports, baseball. So they did the best they could. They had to cut a lot. You have it obviously have to cut. And some. Some of the stuff that got cut was the best stuff.

[David Perell]

Why do you think Coppola was able to do it with the Godfather?

[Steven Pressfield]

Maybe just because that was a real story, you know, it didn't have layers that you could cut off, you know, whereas Bagger Vance does. When you read it, you'll see. Yeah.

[David Perell]

You know what's funny about golf? The game has moved to a more technically perfect series of moves around the sport.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah.

[David Perell]

And I think that it's moving away from that now. I think it's moving back towards a little bit more individualism. But there is. The swings have gotten a little stale. And I do wonder if there's a loss of individuality with golf swings. And I wonder if the Internet is sort of like that with writing. Because part of the reasons that the swing gets stale is there's so much advice out there. There's so many videos that you can watch. You can watch yourself on video, and it's easier to get coaching. And because of that, you don't have that distinctiveness, the Jim Furyk, the Fred couples. And I do feel like with online writers, I don't see the crazy distinctiveness that you get with a Joyce or that you get with a Hunter S. Thompson. And I wonder if these two things are totally different worlds. But actually pulling from the same thread of what's happening in society, you're onto.

[Steven Pressfield]

Something there, you know, because somebody like James Joyce or Hunter S. Thompson or so many other writers sort of marinated in their own and then for so long before they kind of came out of the chrysalis as full grown, you know, writers. And nowadays, you know, like you say, with the sort of the Internet mentality where you're exposed to so much stuff of do this, do that, the other thing, how do you get to who you really are? You know, your real authentic voice? People don't have the. Won't take the time, you know, anymore.

[David Perell]

How are you a better nonfiction writer for having written so much fiction?

[Steven Pressfield]

I'm certainly a believer that the same principles that apply to a story or a narrative apply to non fiction. You know, that every story has to have a hero, everything has to have a villain, everything has to have, has to be about something, has to have a theme, has to have an inciting incident, has to have a climax that you can use those, those principles in, in non fiction as well. And the great non fiction people definitely do.

[David Perell]

How have you studied storytelling?

[Steven Pressfield]

I had. That's another great question. I had about a 10 year career as a bad screenwriter. Okay, about half of that. I worked with an older established writer where I was kind of the junior member of a team. And so there's very definitely in the movie business an idea of what a story is. Act one, act two, act three, act one, curtain, second act, midpoint, all is lost, moment, et cetera, et cetera. There's really beats that you learn as, as you go along. You're embarrassed in a meeting when somebody asks you, what's your second act curtain? You go, what is that? You know, so that was sort of, for me, my apprenticeship in at least what a movie idea of a story is. I buy that completely and I still use that sort of model that's in my brain as a what a story is and what beats have to be hit.

[David Perell]

Tell me about this concept of neshama from Kabbalah. I saw that in the daily press field and I thought that'd be an interesting rabbit hole to go down.

[Steven Pressfield]

Well, as you know, the neshama is the Hebrew word for soul, right? And the Concept of soul. And it's when I was talking before about we live on the material plane, but our inspiration comes from the higher plane, from. And that to me is Taneshama. Like there's a thing in Kabbalah that above every blade of grass is an angel saying, grow, grow. And I'm definitely a believer that the higher level, the neshama, is trying to. Well, let me put it a different way. If we're at the lower level and there's a soul, the higher level above us, when we reach out to that, that is called prayer. And the artist prayer is, give me an idea, give me some. Help me, you know, Homer, invoking the muse goddess, help me tell the story, you know, but at the same time that we reach up to that level, in my view and in the kabbalistic view, the soul, the neshama, is reaching down to us, trying to help us. So I believe that it's not that the world we inhabit as writers or as creative people is not a void at all. That it's a very living thing, and that there are forces that we can't see or measure that as there are forces working against us, what I call resistance, there are forces trying to give us ideas, trying to pull us through something. So, you know, when I first heard the concept of the neshama, it wasn't new to me. It was like I thought, ah, that's what I call something else.

[David Perell]

You know, my prayer has been make it obvious, make it obvious to me. That's what I'm doing. What do you mean by time? Just that it gets revealed and it is handed to me on a silver platter. Exactly what I should do, exactly what the answer is. And there's a clarity and a simplicity to obviousness.

[Steven Pressfield]

And in what form does that take for you when it is made obvious to you?

[David Perell]

It shows up in bullet points for me. And there's like a one liner and bullet points and it just shows up in my mind and the whole thing gets distilled into here's 1, 2, 3. One line. And I can just describe it. So I'll give you an example. I wrote a piece about the investor Peter Thiel. It's called Peter Thiel's Religion. And even in the title it was, here's this Silicon Valley investor, Peter Thiel. But actually, Peter Thiel's religion. There's a religious component to his philosophy. And people had known that he studied under a Stanford professor named Rene Girard. But Rene Girard was deeply Christian. And I said, hold on here, hold on. Peter Thiel wrote zero to One. But if you actually follow the thread, zero to one is a Christian book, specifically the First Commandment and the Tenth commandment applied to business and investing. That was airdropped to me. Super obvious. And I just went one level deeper. Like, it's so simple, but that simplicity is what the obviousness looks like for me. And then I can just be in service of the idea. I can basically be a custodian to bring that into the world.

[Steven Pressfield]

So you agree with me on what we're talking about here?

[David Perell]

Totally.

[Steven Pressfield]

So what. What is your version of prayer when you sort of are asking for, make it obvious. What do you. What. What form does that take?

[David Perell]

So I'm a Christian, so why I'm a Jesus follower. I think the word Christianity has a lot of tricky connotations. I'm a Jesus follower, so I just pray to Jesus and I get on my knees and I just say it out loud and I just speak from the absolute bottom of my heart. And I just try to be as honest and talk to God like I'm talking to a friend and just pray, like in. I always think daily and desperate dependence.

[Steven Pressfield]

Ah, well, that's really interesting, huh?

[David Perell]

Make it obvious.

[Steven Pressfield]

I mean, I do sort of a similar thing when I say the. Before I sit down at work each day, I say out loud the invocation of the muse from Homer's Odyssey that a friend of mine taught me and typed it out for me. And it's a very sort of similar. Similar thing, you know, where I put myself at the service of whatever that unknown higher force is.

[David Perell]

It's nice, right, because you've written that these stories sort of exist before you even write them. So do you see them? And then it's like, I now have to get it out. Like, what is that process like for you?

[Steven Pressfield]

Sort of like an analogy that I use for myself is like, if we were digging up a dinosaur that was buried here, a fossilized dinosaur, that'd be cool. We might start and we'd get kind of the thigh bone, let's say, you know, and we'd take our little paint brushes and, you know, we tell, this is a thigh right here, you know, and then we know there's. There's a whole dinosaur under here, but how big is it? Where is it? You know, and little by little, I think you sort of expose it. You know, you chip away and. And you're excited at first because you, oh, there's a thigh bone. There must be a, you know, whatever it is under here, right? But. And you sort of project in your mind, ah, maybe this is a steak of sore, you know, whatever. And then as you go along, oh, no, it's not. We thought it was a plant eater. This looks like a meat eater, you know. And then you sort of ingest. And finally it eventually reveals itself like the authentic swing.

[David Perell]

Reveals itself in what ways is your mind wandering different and the pull of your imagination different when you're writing fiction versus nonfiction?

[Steven Pressfield]

Nonfiction, I think. I mean, the only stuff I've done that's non fiction. I did the book about the Six Day War that I. Where I interviewed, you know, 75 people. What about stuff like this and, and the war of art and other. Now the war of art and books that are about writing. I sort of have the ideas clear in my mind because I've thought about them for a long time. Yeah. You know, and I'll just sort of sit down almost like you would write an article. And I go, what order do these things need to come in? So on and so forth, so they're clear, you know, Whereas with fiction, for me, a story really evolves as it goes along, and it's so complicated and there's so many different characters and, you know, it's, it's, it's. It's a, you know, a giant machine with a million little parts and they all have to work together like a Ferrari or something like that. So that you're. I'm really more at a loss in fiction where I'm sort of going to the goddess, you know, help me, you know, what comes next? Is this working? I'm not sure. You know, and you're constantly, you know, trying new things and experimenting. Yeah.

[David Perell]

You know, Brian Eno, so the musician guy.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Perell]

So Brian Eno invented ambient music, and at least he was a very early pioneer in it. And one of the things that he says with ambient music is it's slow. And because of that, what he does is he makes the song and then he basically doubles the length of the song as a standard heuristic. And the reason is because he spent so much time with it that he thinks that the consumer who's hearing it for the first, second, third time needs double the length. And I'm wondering when you're editing your writing, once you become familiar with it, if there's like a pacing that needs to change and if it's hard to really edit from the perspective of someone who's just reading it for the first time.

[Steven Pressfield]

You know, I. Each time I sort of go do a new draft. Yeah, I will think of myself. I'll put myself in the reader's point of view completely, you know, and say, if I don't know anything about this story, am I going to be interested in this? Is this going to suck me in at all? And sometimes I'll do another thing where I'll say, I'll imagine a friend of mine, you know, my friend Jim, let's.

[David Perell]

Say who is specific person.

[Steven Pressfield]

Specific person, you know, Or I'll pick two or three different people and I'll say, you know, if Jim was reading this, what would he. You know, he brings a certain attitude to it, you know, would he be bored by this? Would he be interested in this? Is this, you know, And I'll constantly try to do that.

[David Perell]

How does the editing change as you go through more and more cycles? Do you feel like you get almost different knives? Like you start with an axe, you're like, I'm going to get rid of this. And then towards the end, it's like a chisel on specific words or what's it like?

[Steven Pressfield]

Self editing is really tough, you know.

[David Perell]

Without you work with an editor.

[Steven Pressfield]

I mean, I used to. And had a kind of a falling out. So when I really miss that, that help, you know. So now I'm. I've sort of got to do it myself. And it's. It's really. It's really hard. It's funny. I'm just. I'm working on a piece of fiction right now and I just. This happens to me sort of every time. It's like I hit the. I hit this point where I'm on like a fourth or fifth draft. I've already got it already. It's done. It's readable in that sense. But this would be the point where I would give it to my editor who would inevitably come back with something that was a sort of a mind to me, you know, that would send me back to square one in a way. And I just sort of had that moment myself, by myself. I was on a trip, as you know. I was out of the country for like three weeks. And so I wasn't working. I was just doing other stuff. But the thing was still percolating with me. And I had this moment where I'm lying in bed in this hotel room and I'm thinking, oh, this doesn't work at all. This thing that I thought that happens to me all the time where there's. You think you're done and you're not and it's not working. You know, there's got to be there's some problem that you've left that you thought you would solve, but you haven't solved it. And now you have to sort of go address it again. And then I'm sure there's going to be more as I go through it.

[David Perell]

How did Writing Wednesday come about?

[Steven Pressfield]

It actually was an idea of my publicist at the time, Callie Ottinger, where I first started to do a website or I don't even 2007 or something like that, having no idea what it was or what I was trying to do. And it originally was kind of a military website. It originally was about Afghanistan and stuff like that. But I found this was after the War of Art came out that the comments that were coming in were all in the War of Art. Here they were people asking about writing. They didn't give a shit about Afghanistan or anything like the military aspect that I was talking about. And so Callie was my publicist. She said, you know, you should do a day where you just talk about writing on this blog. And she said, call it Writing Wednesdays because it's two W's. And so I sort of resisted that. But then it's, you know, I started doing it and that seems to be the area that people want to reach out to me about. They don't care about other areas of stuff as much as they do about that.

[David Perell]

If you held a one day writing seminar and you had to teach your readers how to write, what are the most important things they need to know?

[Steven Pressfield]

I would not talk about the craft of writing at all. I would only talk about the mindset that you need, the professional mind. I would talk about resistance, about self sabotage and just about the obstacles that you're going to run to and the mindset you need to have to make it all the way from page one to the end. Because people, everybody thinks that they can write, right? You know, they wouldn't think that they could become a concert pianist without putting in 15 years or they wouldn't think that they could become a brain surgeon without going to medical school. But everybody thinks they can write and I would like to kick their ass and tell them, you know, you can't, you know, and even though there are a few people that do it, but the mindset that you need to have the level of mental toughness as you know, is way beyond anything that people think. So I would just, if I were giving a one day thing, I. My main thought that I would try to impress on, on people was this is 10 times hard. Like they say, raising kids as hard as you think it is, it's 10 times harder than that. And it's the same sort of thing here that as hard as you think it might be, it's 10 times harder than that. And be ready for it. Gear your ratchet yourself up. That's what I would do.

[David Perell]

Writing is the simplest thing ever. You show up and you just type and you don't get distracted. And yet that is so hard to actually do. There is. I mean you spend the last 20, 30 years writing about why that's just so brutally difficult. The self sabotage, the doubt, the resistance, all that.

[Steven Pressfield]

Like just the moment that I was just talking about that I'm in now where on this project where I now have to basically go back to square one in certain areas and do it. That's not the kind of thing that a lot of people are able to do to. Because you got to get away from your ego, away from all the sunk costs that you put in. And that's a skill that nobody teaches you. You don't learn that in school. And the skills that you need to get from page one to the end, there's a whole bunch of them and nobody teaches you any of them. If a book takes me two years to write, the first nine months to a year, I am racked with self doubt all the way through. Is this a dumb idea? Am I crazy? Why am I doing et cetera, et cetera. I'm not good enough to do this and still. Oh yeah, all the time. And if you don't feel it, I think it's a really bad sign. So how do you keep going in the face of that? That's a skill that nobody teaches no name for. Keats called it negative capability. The way to advance in the middle of doubt, to keep going. But that's a skill that, that I never knew about when I started. I didn't know about it after I've been doing it for 20 years. And nobody sits you down and says that unless you maybe have a mentor if you're working with Aaron Sorkin or somebody like that. But if you don't have that skill and if you don't have another dozen skills that have no names and nobody ever talks about, you're not going to get. You might get to the end, but it's not going to be any good and it's not going to be you. It's not going to be coming from your heart. I mean, think about just as a. I'm sure you saw the Last Dance, the Michael Jordan thing, right? And if you Think about here. Michael Jordan comes into the league and he's like the best player, right? You know, but along the way, right, they, they were constantly. The. The Bulls would get beat by the Detroit Pistons every time they weren't tough enough to take, you know, that punishment, right? They, the Jordan rules, right? They would get. As soon as he left the floor, they knocked him down, you know, and then he had to go through a number of stages, including how he was going to lead his. His own guys, how he was going to make them better, and how he would he actually let somebody else take the last shot, you know, and all those things. Nobody, nobody teaches you that. You know, maybe Phil Jackson helped him along the way, but he had to, as hard as he thought it was, he had to develop one skill and then another that he didn't. Hadn't thought about at the start. And then another and another and another to make his teammates better, to let somebody else take the last shot, that kind of thing. And finally, you know, even he, you know, the greatest that ever played had to. Had to evolve and evolve and evolve.

[David Perell]

Yeah, well, so I run a company called Rite of Passage, and we probably have 800 to 1,000 students a year. And one of the biggest things that they struggle with is the delta between what I feel like I'm supposed to write about, whatever that is, whatever internal story that they.

[Steven Pressfield]

Example, that's a great example versus what they actually want to write about, that's a great example. Now, who teaches you that? Nobody teaches you that, right? Yeah. That skill could take you 30 years to learn. I mean, that's what Hunter Thompson learned, right? First he thought, well, I got it right. That's Scott Fitzgerald, right? And somewhere along the lines, I don't know if he ever wrote about this. There was a moment when he said, this isn't me, right? And I'm sure if he did, Scott Fitzgerald, he wrote a lot of other people's and a lot of other people's style, too. And he probably thought, you know, I want to write in this crazy style, but nobody writes that way, you know, if I write that way, they're going to laugh me. And finally he said, I'm going to do it. And all of a sudden, there he was, he became Hunter Thompson.

[David Perell]

How do you give someone the courage to actually just do the thing that you innately do rather than trying to contort yourself into these things that these little boxes that you think that you're supposed to be in?

[Steven Pressfield]

I think it's a question sort of. For me, I can only Answer it for me, for my own process. I think you reach a point where you sort of give up. You're trying to do what you think you should do, what writing really is. And at some point you just say, I just can't do this, you know, and let me, let me write this crazy shit that nobody's going to be interested in but me. And then to your amazement, you go, wow, people like this. But I do think you have to sort of hit a wall. Yeah.

[David Perell]

I think of it as a surrender to your nature.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, that's well put. Yeah, but how hard is that to do? Can you just tell somebody that? I don't know. I think, you know, the. The person himself has to kind of have a moment, you know, where they hit bottom, you know.

[David Perell]

You know what I struggle with? It's that the things that come naturally come easily, they're fun. And I. There is just something. I don't know if it's the residue of the Protestant work ethic or something, but I just have an idea that things that you're successful in should be hard, they should be arduous. You need to grind, because that is the price of success. And like actually there when I see people who are in a flow, there's like a joy that comes from it. And even someone like Jordan, there's a little scene in the Last Dance where he's all the bulls are running suicides and he's a mile ahead of everybody else. Like you can just see that those are NBA players at the top of the world in terms of basketball. And yet you could park a four football field or a Walmart between Jordan and the next guy running. And I know that he's gritting his teeth, I know that he's grinding, but a guy like him, a guy like Kobe, there is still a love behind that work and it still pours out of them. They can't even help themselves to work that hard. I think that that has been a real struggle of mine to just actually surrender to those things that come a little bit more easily to me and actually come to appreciate that, hey, I'm actually good at these things.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, I would agree with that. Except within that. Yeah, then it's still arduous, you know.

[David Perell]

Totally.

[Steven Pressfield]

Because you still have to have all those skills and you still have to, you know, you can get into that semi flow state or whatever you want to call it, where you're spewing it out, but you still have to pull back and look at it and with cold eyes and say, you know, is Is this working? You know, and how can I fix it?

[David Perell]

How does the word discipline factor into your work?

[Steven Pressfield]

I mean, it's everything, you know, it's everything. If you're going to write, you know, this is another thing I would say if I had a one day class, think about if you're going to write a novel, if you're going to write something that's going to take two and a half or three years, every day full time, you know, or if not full time, pretty much full time. Like I think it was. I forget who this was. It might have been Lee Child. It was some very successful, you know, thriller writer. And he was just saying that for him a First draft is 400 hours. Which when I heard that I thought that's, that's about right. I would agree with that. That's ten forty hour weeks. And nobody can work a forty hour week as a writer. You know, you can't do that. So it's more like 20, 20 hour weeks for a first draft. When you're going to do 10 drafts or something like that. How are you going to do that without discipline? It's everything. If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have giant talent and no discipline. And the other thing, if you're, if you're a writer or any kind of, not any kind of creative artist, but it's certainly a writer, you also have to do that alone. It's not like you're on the Chicago Bulls and you have Phil Jackson and you have a trainer and you have. Or it's not like you are going to medical school to be a brain surgeon where they actually have classes. You're going to go to this class and that class, you have teachers and at the end of a semester you get a grade and you have a scholarship and you have peers that you can talk to. If you're writing a novel, that's something completely new. And everyone, everyone is. You can't talk to your own wife, you know, it's boring. And you, you know, you can't do it. So you're in that tunnel by yourself, you know, except for the muse.

[David Perell]

Do you map out your novels? Like, do you?

[Steven Pressfield]

I do as much as I can, but of course there's so much that changes. Yeah.

[David Perell]

So how do you externalize your thoughts? Or do you, or is it just all in your head?

[Steven Pressfield]

I mean, I definitely map it. Map things out. I have a whole idea of what a story is for me and the beats that are in a story and, and the Principles that a story needs to adhere to in my mind.

[David Perell]

So what would an example of principles be?

[Steven Pressfield]

I'm. I'm a big believer in three act structure. So I asked myself if I, if I have an idea for a story, what's act one, what's act two, what's act three? And, or maybe it's four acts or something like that. And I'm a big believer in villains that the villain is a huge part of. Who is the villain? Is it a person, is it a thing? Is it something in somebody's mind? Is it a societal.

[David Perell]

So the villain in the War of Art is the resistance.

[Steven Pressfield]

Exactly. Okay, yeah. Even in a non fiction work, there's.

[David Perell]

Still a villain in a nonfiction.

[Steven Pressfield]

There's always a villain in a nonfiction in my opinion.

[David Perell]

So you got the hero, the villain, the axe, what else?

[Steven Pressfield]

I have a whole lot of other stuff there. It would take too long to say. But I'll give you one thing as a thing. I have a principle that I call the female carries the mystery. And if, if you think of a classic example like let's say Chinatown, the movie with Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson. Right? Yeah. Or any detective story, there's always, it's a male detective, always. There's always a kind of a vamp, a femme fatale. And a femme fatale always carries the mystery. Or for instance, in. It doesn't always have to be a woman. In Moby Dick, the sea is the female and the sea carries the mystery. Right? That's the. The whale dives down into the sea. In Lawrence of Arabia, the desert is the female and the movie is, is shot to make the desert absolutely gorgeous. Right. And Lawrence himself falls in love with. And that. It's a theme. If you watch that movie, it's hit again and again and again. You know, the Anthony Quinn character out Abutai says to Lawrence, for you there is only the desert. You know, and even in a story like Seven Samurai, the movie the. Which is like. I don't know, I dare do I dare ask that you haven't seen it. It's, it's the Magnificent Seven in Japan by Akira Kurosawa. And it's the same story of a village that hires gunslinger samurai to defend it from. And the female in that story are the rice fields that produce the rice that the bandits want. And that. And at the very end of Seven Samurai, the final thing when the samurai have won and the bandits have been killed is the villagers planting rice. So that's a principle that I will have. The female carries the mystery and I'll ask myself of any idea that I have, what's the female in this story? And is there a mystery? And why? What is it? What is. What is the mystery? And the mystery is almost always something that cannot be solved. It's like, what is life? What is. That's the myth, you know, what is the sea, the ocean, you know, what is it, you know? And it gets back to God, it gets back to creation, it gets back to life. So that's one. I have like many of those that I'll sort of ask myself those questions of the story. Is this working? Does it have that element?

[David Perell]

You are a master. I have a. I collect videos of experts talking like experts. I'm going to add that, the last two minutes to the video list. What makes a good villain?

[Steven Pressfield]

We're all up against a. A villain in our own life, whatever. Whether it's resistance that's stopping us from writing our novel or creating our sympathy, our symphony, or whatever it is. We're all up against that. The ultimate villain is. Is death. You know, the villain really gives life to the whole story. If there isn't a. If there isn't a great villain, there isn't a great story, right? The greater the villain, the more the hero has to fight it. I'll give you an example of somebody, an internal villain. Have you seen the movie Silver Linings Playbook? No.

[David Perell]

It'll be a joke on how I write moving forward that I haven't seen any of the movies. I just. I just read. I don't really watch movies.

[Steven Pressfield]

Well, I'll. I'll give you the short version of this and maybe it'll explain it. There we go. It stars Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper and It's maybe about 10 years old or something. And. Great movie. And the story is about Bradley Cooper. He's coming out of a mental hospital at the start of this. Of the thing. And he's obviously nutty. He's an OCD crazy guy, right? But he's trying to get his life back together. And the one thing that he. That he has built is his sort of new sanity around is he's going to get his wife back. His wife Nikki has, you know, restraining orders. He's insane. And this is the thing in his head. He's going to get Nikki back. Very early in the movie, he meets Jennifer Lawrence. Another sort of. And as soon as that happens in the story, as we're watching it, we know these two are meant to be together. And we know that's going to be the climax, right Somehow they're going to get together. The villain in that story is Bradley Cooper's obsession with his wife, Nikki. And you know that at some point, if he's going to be happy, he's got to get rid of that. He's got to confront that somehow and say, this is bullshit. I'm driving myself crazy. Here's a beautiful girl in front of me. I love her. I can. You know. So that's a villain. That's not a person, not an animal, but it's. It's in his head. And. And that villain, the way the movie is written by David O. Russell, who also directed it, that villain is in every scene. He makes this obsession. It just plays and plays and plays. And finally, in a very creative way, he overcomes it.

[David Perell]

When you're creating suspense in a story, how do you think about building the suspense without having that suspense build for so long that the story moves too slowly?

[Steven Pressfield]

Another rule that I have is to always start at the end, to start with the climax. This is a screenwriting principle. Like, if you're a young screenwriter, they'll beat this into your head. You know, what's the climax? What's the. You know, So I. I just try to think, how am I going to build to this moment, to this climax, so that it's a surprise, but yet it's huge and it works. It's a payoff, you know, So I don't know if that's suspense or not, but I certainly. You don't want to shoot your wad too soon. Yeah.

[David Perell]

Tell me about Paul Rink.

[Steven Pressfield]

Paul Rink was a great mentor to me when I was. I. Like I told you, I'd failed writing a first novel. I'd run away from it again and again. Finally, after like maybe about 10 or 12 years, I'd saved up money, worked 2,700 bucks that I knew I could live for a year on. And I moved to this little town in Northern California. And Paul Rink was an older, established writer who just happened to live in a camper down the street from me. And every morning I would take a walk and I would stop at his camper. It was called Moby Dick. And we would have coffee together. And he just sort of took me under his wing, told me, like, he would tell me books to read. You got to read this. You got. And give them to me. Read this, read this, read this. And tell me about. And talk to me about the discipline that a writer needed, you know, and he also gave me. I told you that I say this prayer to the muse. He's the guy who showed me that prayer, typed it out for me and gave it to me. So he was a great mentor to me when I needed it.

[David Perell]

When you were struggling for all those years, do you feel like you had more of a, I really might not make it. I'm not going to make it. Oh, my goodness. Or do you feel like you had this internal sense that life will come through for you?

[Steven Pressfield]

I never really thought that I would make it. I wasn't. I was coming from so far back, that back of the pack that I just wanted to. I. I had found this thing, the act of writing that kept me sane, you know, and it gave me some hope. But I knew. Well, I take that back a little bit. I did have certain hope along the way. I kind of thought, oh, maybe this is going to be good. Maybe I'll, you know, break through with this. But it took so long, and I still haven't really broken through. I mean, nobody knows who I am or anything like that. A few people sort of know, but not many, but. But it's enough, you know, for me to feel like I'm okay. I'm okay with it, you know? But no, I didn't really think I was ever gonna break through to anything like that. I just had found something that worked writing, and I just wanted to get better at it, you know, I could see that. I didn't. I. There was so little that I knew, and so many people were so much better than me, and I wasn't able. I wasn't able to find my voice. I wasn't really, you know, I was, like, struggling in the Italian Leagues, you know, trying to get to the NBA.

[David Perell]

You know, when you talk about your struggle, other people being so much better than you, what was the nature of that Delta?

[Steven Pressfield]

The Delta, yeah. That's a split, you mean? Yeah, exactly.

[David Perell]

So what was inside where you were here and they were here? What was that difference?

[Steven Pressfield]

I always felt like. Like I wasn't blessed with any great gift, you know, I didn't have any point of view that I really wanted to get across. I wasn't fluent. To write a sentence was like, you know, took me forever. And I. You know, I'd read other people that were, like, really good writers. I say, oh, man, that's no way I can do that, you know, so. But over the years, I sort of think that talent is overrated, you know, and at least in writing, maybe talent is not overrated if you're Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. But in. But at least in something like Writing if you have a modicum of talent. I think with enough work and enough luck you can at least get to the level that you're capable of.

[David Perell]

What kind of luck are you talking about? I didn't expect you to say that.

[Steven Pressfield]

A lucky break, where you get the right agent at the right time or book a manuscript gets into somebody's hands at the right time, you know, and, you know, something that's completely out of your control. You can do the best you can. And if you don't have luck, you know, an actor that gets cast, you know, that sort of thing.

[David Perell]

You ever go back and read your own books?

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah.

[David Perell]

You do?

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, sometimes when I need to read something good, I go back and do that and do that. But. But, yeah, I do. Yeah.

[David Perell]

Which ones you read the most?

[Steven Pressfield]

It's one that I'm sure you've never heard of called Tides of War. That's a. A long, really ambitious book about the Peloponnesian War. A historical novel about the war between Athens and Sparta, the 27 year war and about a certain character that I know you've never heard of either, but it was a real ambitious book. And it's one of those books for me that sometimes when I read passages over, I go, that's really good. That's really beyond me. I didn't think I could do that.

[David Perell]

I see this a lot. I. I know a lot of creatives who. The work that they interface with the most is not their most popular work.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah. Wouldn't surprise me at all. Yeah.

[David Perell]

Why do you think that is?

[Steven Pressfield]

I mean, sometimes the. The most popular stuff is a fastball right over the plate, you know, and, you know, because people can relate to that. You know, an action story where it's at a big climax, that kind of thing. Where sometimes something that's more ambiguous that has shades of meaning than, you know, it's not. It's not a fastball. It's a. It's some sort. You know, it's a. I don't know.

[David Perell]

What, you know, loopy slide or something.

[Steven Pressfield]

That. That. To appreciate it, if you're a baseball fan, you gotta. Oh, wow. That was a screwball right over the outside. You know, nobody does that since Dizzy Dean. You know, and not many people can appreciate that. So when you are lucky enough to. To do something like that, I think you yourself appreciate it, even if nobody else does.

[David Perell]

What is it about the story of Christ that is so resonant?

[Steven Pressfield]

Where does that question come from?

[David Perell]

That question comes from. You lay out certain stories and then it's one of your pieces. You get to the story of Christ at the end and you say, there's something particularly resonant about this one that.

[Steven Pressfield]

Is like the story, you know, Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted so long. You know, the idea of the interface between the mortal and the divine and the fact that when the divine appears, we nail it to a cross, you know, and then there's the resurrection, which. It's really the story we all live, you know, in a way, a moment of doubt and pain. To quote Mick Jagger, you know, Leonard Cohen, that song. What was it, you know, Jesus was a sailor he walked upon the water he spent a long time, long time watching From a lonely wooden tower Da da da da and when he knew for certain Only drowning men could see him he said, all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them. So that's it, you know, it's. It is the story we all live, man.

[David Perell]

When the divine disappears, we nail it to a cross. That is an unbelievable sentence, but it's.

[Steven Pressfield]

True, you know, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Lincoln, jfk, rfk. When, you know, over and over, that.

[David Perell]

Is a crazy idea.

[Steven Pressfield]

And, you know, in our own life, right. You know, you're asking for. Make it obvious, right? Good for you. That when the obvious appears, you accept it. You know, But a lot of people, most of us, reject that when that happens, you know, it's too scary.

[David Perell]

What's the lesson in the resurrection?

[Steven Pressfield]

That, you know, I mean, this is deep, deep questions. But, I mean, I do think that a lot of stories are about them, and a lot of stories. Are you familiar with the concept of the all is lost moment? Does that ring a bell in there? This is another. You talk about principles of storytelling, and this is another screenwriting thing where they will. If. If you're a screenwriter and you're delivering a script to a company like Jerry Bruckheimer's company, and you're working with executives, they'll ask you, where's the all is lost moment? And the all is lost moment always comes in around the end of the second act or the start of the third act. And it's the moment, like Jesus on the cross, you know, it's the moment when the hero is as far away from achieving his or her goals as possible. And it's also the moment when the hero sort of hits bottom and has to go to another level. Has to go. Can't solve the problem by material means. Can only solve it by kind of spiritual means. And when the hero makes that switch, then it goes into Act 3. And everything starts to happen. But that's sort of the, that's the resurrection moment. And in a way like the typical story of an alcoholic. Yeah, right. Somebody's in denial, they have a drinking problem. And finally the moment comes. You know, they come home at 2 in the morning and the house is. All the locks have been changed, their wife is gone, their kids are gone. At that point, that's sort of the on the cross moment. Right? That's the all is lost moment in the real world, you know, I mean, and if you go to an AA meeting and people get up there and tell their stories, it's all the same thing. It always comes down to a moment like that. And then the resurrection moment is when the person says, I am fucked. I have a problem, I've got to do something about this, you know, Jesus, God help me. Right? And then they go to AA or they go to rehab or whatever it is, and at that point they are resurrected, you know. But again, like we were talking about discipline. It's not a resurrection of smooth sailing from then on. It's like every day is about one day at a time, get through this day, you know, and, but that is, in my opinion, that is the resurrection in our lives, you know. And so for me, like my moment when I was doing the dishes and I sat down and started to write, that was sort of my resurrection moment. But from then on, it's still incredibly hard. Right? You still have to do all the stuff year after year, day after day, week after week. Right.

[David Perell]

I said earlier, desperate daily dependence. Yeah, it's every day.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, but again, as you say, it's fun. At the same time, it's fun.

[David Perell]

There's a weird liberty too. Once you get to the edge of yourself and you've actually gone beyond where you can be self reliance, there's a surrender. There is something very freeing about not having to be completely self reliant and just acknowledging that there's something beyond there, something beyond you that you can just serve.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yes, I would agree completely. I mean, it's the old question of are we material beings having a spiritual experience or are we spiritual beings in a material world? And in some way, I mean, I'm definitely a believer. We're spiritual beings in this material world that isn't our real home. And that when we sort of accept that there's another level, then, you know, everything becomes, you know, workable.

[David Perell]

What is it about writing that has felt so magnetic for you? Is it like a compulsion to write? Is it a need to express Yourself. Is it a desire to tell stories? Is it a love for the craft? Is it a vision that you had as a kid and you were like, I want to be that person. What is it?

[Steven Pressfield]

That's another great question. Thanks. I never. I never wanted to be a writer as a kid. Never was an ideal of me. Never idolized writers or anything like that. I think I sort of fell into it for all the wrong reasons because I thought it was easy. I was like, that's one of those. You know, really. I was one of those idiots who thought, oh, I can do that, you know? And in fact, I was working. My first job was in advertising in New York.

[David Perell]

Copywriter, right?

[Steven Pressfield]

Oh, yeah. I was like a junior copywriter in a group of like eight or nine people. And then a boss named Ed Hannibal, and he wrote a novel. And it was it. And I sort of said at age 22, well, why don't I do that? You know? So I was. So I quit. And I tried and like, you know, 35 years later, I finally did have it. But that I got in for the wrong reasons. I got in because I thought it was easy. I thought, you know, and once I sort of was in it and I had kind of fallen through the bottom of everything, I thought the only way I'm going to get out of this paper bag is ride my way out of it. You know, I've. You know, it was. There was a lot of shame involved in that. So. But I've never felt like I had anything that I wanted to express or I had a concept I wanted to get out, or that it was fun, but it was. It was sort of the only way out of that bag for me. Yeah.

[David Perell]

I have two mantras that I think that you really validate, and I'm really feeling it now. The first is that God doesn't waste suffering. And the second is that anyone who you meet who has an incredible amount of wisdom that is on the flip side of an incredible amount of suffering that they had to go through, that they had to make sense of to actually cultivate that wisdom. And I realized that just now when you said 35 years, like, that's longer than I've been alive, that you struggled with this craft from post Ed Hannibal trying to write a novel to being, what, 52 years old when you finally were able to publish one. That's crazy.

[Steven Pressfield]

I think there's a certain reality to that, you know. You know who Robert Greene is? Of course. Yeah. Laws of power and everything. I mean, his story is very much like mine. You know, where he worked a million crazy jobs, you know, and, and tried to write various things, tried to be a screenwriter, tried to write a novel and, and finally sort of found his authentic voice, his authentic swing. And, and again, it was sort of with luck where somebody came to him and said, hey, I want you to write this book. And the 48 laws of power, I think that's a story. And where it wasn't even his idea, but he did it. And it was like, ah, this is it. I found my voice. You know, this is what everything has built to.

[David Perell]

You feel like the residue of copywriting shows up in your work? Or do you feel like I just did that? That was one job and there's no.

[Steven Pressfield]

I think a lot is still there.

[David Perell]

Is that right?

[Steven Pressfield]

Yes. You know, like you said, you read my book. Nobody wants to read your shit. I love that book, man. So the concept, nobody wants to read your shit is the first idea that you realize in advertising. Nobody wants to read your stupid ad and see your stupid commercial. Right? Right. They want to fast forward through it, turn the page. They hate it. And they should. I hate it. I don't want to hate, I hate ads. Who wants to see this stuff? So you then realize from that that if you want to succeed or do a good job, you got to get around that and you got it. What? You've got to make your message so compelling, so interesting, so sexy, so funny, whatever, that, that it will break through, you know, so. And I think that lesson applies to everything. A one act play, you're going to write a dance, you're going to do a song, you're going to write, you know, nobody wants to hear. Listening to your song. Right. You know, my country song about my heart was broken, you know, so it's got to be so good that people. So in other words, you got to work hard and you got to really try to figure out what works and what doesn't work and what's what works for you, what's your thing? And that is hard.

[David Perell]

Well, the first idea in nobody wants to read your shit is to streamline your message, focus, pare it down to its simplest, clearest, easiest to understand form. Why?

[Steven Pressfield]

Well, that's in advertising, I would not say that applies to say, the 48 laws of power where Robert Greene really, really gave it, you know, a massive amount of stuff. But in advertising, you know, it's an ad that people are going to spend two seconds looking at. So whatever your message is, it has to go over really, really quick. But I would say the Opposite is true too, that you can make it really, really long as long as it's interesting.

[David Perell]

I like this idea. This is from number 167 of the Daily press field, saying yes to A, saying no to B. And I've been thinking a lot about this, which is why I think it resonated. So I think about writing in 90 minute to two hour blocks. So if I go hang out with a friend and it's a 90 minute chunk plus a 15 minute commute every hangout, the price of that hangout is one writing session and I think that's a good way to frame the writing process that you and I were both converging on.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, very definitely. I was just saw a video on Instagram where somebody was saying he called it Vitamin N. It was about on the subject of discipline and N stood for no. The ability to say no to that 90 minute thing. There's actually Tim Ferriss did a thing where I've stolen this from him where somehow he compiled quotations from various writers and scientists saying no and what they said. And one of the best one was for Charles Dickens where he said it was him turning down a friend who wanted to take him to lunch or go to lunch with him. And he says yeah, it's only an hour, but sometimes, you know, it's a half hour to get there, it's a half hour to get back. Worrying about that in the morning when I know I have to meet you, it's going to break up my whole morning. He says I cannot do it, I have to do my work and I hope you understand. And so I'm saying no.

[David Perell]

I read one last night from the CTO at HubSpot. He doesn't do meetings. And I actually he had signed up for Rite of Passage. I was like, hey, you know, we have this CTO of a public company joining the course. I'm like, great. Reach out to him, say hey, can I do a 30 minute onboarding meeting? He goes, I don't do meetings. But he did something that I'd never seen before that totally depersonalized his no. He sent me a link to an article and it's called My Heart says yes, but my Calendar says no. And I was like, boom, nailed it. That is exactly right. And that I think is the challenge is how do you have the tenderness and the grace to just say look, you're important to me, but I'm in service of creative work and not have that land really hard. I know a few people who are really good about saying no, but no one likes them. No one likes them. They're real a holes about it. And I don't think it's cool. I tell them, I say, you, you don't do this. Well, you should change it. But I've been trying to figure out how do I get better about saying no, but in a way that doesn't feel like a right hook.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, I'm. We're all taught to be nice guys and we don't, you know, you don't want people to. To think, you know, you're an asshole saying no. But you got to protect your time, you know, If I say yes to somebody that, that wants to do XYZ and meanwhile I'm saying no to going to my daughter's soccer game, she wants me to go to that game. So am I going to say yes to this guy and no to my daughter? You know, but that doesn't answer the question of how do you do it nicely. But if people don't understand, I mean, they just got to understand, you know, there are people out there that are like, sociopathic, you know, all they know is they want something from you and they don't give a shit, you know, about your time or what it's cost you, you know, in your reputation or something. If you write them a blurb or something like that. And you just have to blow those people off and just say, I don't care what they think of me, you know.

[David Perell]

You know, I just remembered this, and I haven't told this to you, but I probably asked you to do an interview five years ago and you said no. But you know what else you did? You sent me about 30 books that I could share with my readers. And I really appreciated that. That was really nice. Here we are now.

[Steven Pressfield]

So here we are now.

[David Perell]

Tell me about the 60 scenes method.

[Steven Pressfield]

That's again, it's kind of a screenwriting way of doing it. I mean, a movie is about 60 scenes. And so it can be on index cards, three by five cards. And screenwriters do this all the time. Will cover the wall. You know, act one has so many scenes. Act two, act three. And you know, you can start with. I call it kind of the clothesline method, where if you imagine a clothesline and you're hanging, you might only have three scenes. You have like a great ending. Ah, Captain Ahab the whale Duke it out here, you know, or here they. He almost gets to the whale, the whale escapes. And then you sort of ask yourself, well, how do we fill in the Blanks. What has to happen there? What has to happen at the very start? You know, who's that kind of thing? And you can do 60 scenes and just keep changing them as you get better ideas, you know, that's a way to get at it.

[David Perell]

So you're saying you have 60 index cards, and so you get them all out and then you might go change 27, 34, 41. And you're constantly upgrading and revising.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah. And you say, well, these three. This is kind of boring. They're really repeating what I did over here. What do I need in there? And then you'll take out some other index cards.

[David Perell]

In what ways do you think about style in your writing?

[Steven Pressfield]

It's interesting. That's another really good question. Each book, I think, dictates, has its own style, and it dictates that style to you, the writer, and it's your job to find that style. Like the War of Art has a kind of a tough love sort of style. Right. I mean, that's not necessarily me, you know, but that was sort of the style that. That had to be written in. A bunch of my historical novels are set like, in ancient Greece. Like Gates of Fire is about the battle of Thermopylae. So I thought, how am I going to. How am I going to write this? Am I going to write this in a kind of contemporary tone? And what I sort of decided was to pick. I picked a very kind of formal and kind of archaic style. Sort of the way, like a lot of ancient Greek stuff, the good things have been translated by Cambridge and Oxford dons, like in the 1890s and the early 1900s, and they use a very formal style, you know. And so I sort of adopted that to try to make the reader feel like he's, you know, he's. He's reading something from the past, you know, and. And the characters will talk that way too. So I sort of look for that in. In each. In each piece. So it's a different style with each piece.

[David Perell]

What do you make of the way that dictionary definitions have gotten so much less interesting? If you read the dictionary from 70 years ago, 100 years ago, like Webster's 1913 dictionary, read the definition of the word sublime and then Google the same thing now. It's so bland.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, it's certainly when you Google. I haven't really read what's going on now, but you're right. Those old dictionaries are so great, you know, so good. Yeah. I have a friend who has. She has one of those dictionaries it's like so big, it has its own stand. You know, it's like a library. Right. You had to lift the pages that. And it comes to her from her grandfather or something like that, from like you say 1870 or something. And it is fascinating to read that stuff. You're right.

[David Perell]

The definitions are so good. Like there's people like Malcolm X who would read the dictionary.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Perell]

And now you'd be like, that's, that makes no sense. And I felt that way for a long time. And then I picked up an old dictionary and you can just read a great definition and it's beautiful.

[Steven Pressfield]

It is great.

[David Perell]

The depth, the nuance of a word when it's well described.

[Steven Pressfield]

Give you examples of how to use it.

[David Perell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you use the source?

[Steven Pressfield]

I actually, I hate to admit it, but I'll use an online version of it. You know, I'll use whatever Google thing, you know, you wish there were more words in the English language. Sometimes, you know, you're. You have a choice of 20 or 30 and it's not enough. You know, you need something. But I definitely use it. Definitely.

[David Perell]

But you like making up words.

[Steven Pressfield]

I make up words in foreign languages and stuff like that. You know, I used to when I was working on Gates of Fire to make. So it's set in ancient Greece to make it feel real, I thought you need to have a few Greek words in there, you know, that, you know that the reader would go, oh, okay, I get it. You know, and so I had a friend, Dr. Hippocatus Kanzios, and what I used to do was I would, I would make up the word in English and I would send it to him and ask him to give me like to translate this into Greek or make this into a Greek word. Like just one simple word was an exercise, a military exercise that took eight nights and was called an eight nighter. That was my thing. And so he gave me a little thing, you know, and when you put that in the, in the, in the, in the context of the story, it, it helps. It makes the reader go, oh, you know, this guy actually knows what he's talking about. And it's kind of a, it's kind of a. I don't want to say it's a fake, but, but it's a trick to make something seem like it's happening in that era. Yeah.

[David Perell]

You have any words where the etymology you really like? Like, for me, I really like the word inspire. Like spirit is associated with breath.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah.

[David Perell]

And breathing in and out. And I think that there's so much in terms of the way that breath and spirit are actually connected and the inhale and the exhalation of how that then inspires you. I think that there's so much wisdom in that etymology.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah. The one example that comes to mind for me is actually in. I don't know how to write Japanese, but supposedly the word for spirit in Japanese is like three little squiggly lines, or it's part of it, that are like heat or steam rising out of a rice bowl. And so it's a kind of a similar. You know, that's part of the. Of the ideogram or whatever it is. And I thought, that's really cool.

[David Perell]

There's a Chinese word of revenge, bedtime procrastination. It's very specific, but it is for the way that you procrastinate. If during the day, you don't like what you're doing, and then you get home, and then after the stars come out in the night, the moon comes up, there's a procrastination that you do to postpone your sleep, because that's when you have your freedom. And the way that. That time expands and you can sort of just be in that flow.

[Steven Pressfield]

Wow.

[David Perell]

I love that concept.

[Steven Pressfield]

That's great.

[David Perell]

You have storytelling advice. Make it primal. Tell me about that.

[Steven Pressfield]

That's actually from the guy who wrote Save the Cat, Blake Snyder. And what he meant by that was that again, he was talking about screenwriting. He was talking about movies, and he was saying that the ideal movie should be able to communicate to a caveman. Make it primal. That was what he meant. Even without language, it should be. The visual should be able to. To. I don't know if I agree with that, but that's where. Yeah, it didn't come from me. It came from Blake Snyder.

[David Perell]

You might not agree with it. How come?

[Steven Pressfield]

I think a lot of times, you know, words matter, you know, and it. It isn't. All movies aren't an entirely visual medium. I certainly agree that a story should work for a caveman, and most of them do, but sometimes it's. You know, the ideas are pretty subtle and pretty literate. Yeah.

[David Perell]

And why do heroes need to suffer?

[Steven Pressfield]

I think because it's about. Any story is about learning, I think. Right. The hero has to go from point A to point Z, you know, and. And suffering produces learning. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. I mean, that's one of my mantras, is make your hero suffer. And I think when you look at great work, the heroes, the writers put the heroes through hell. And the more they suffer, the better the story is. And I think that actors, if you think about a movie actors love to suffer. My left foot, Tom Hanks in the Cast Away. Because suffering produces, makes the hero overcome it, you know, and makes the hero learn from it, you know, the suffering produces. Like you were saying earlier, David, there is no real learning without suffering.

[David Perell]

What's another example of a story where the hero suffers and you're like, nailed it.

[Steven Pressfield]

I mean, if you think of just about anything. But the one book that, that I learned this from was called the Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sager. Great book. Anybody that's watching this. And it's about, it's supposedly a true story about the German army in World War II on the Russian front when the Russians were kicking the out of them, the tide had turned and they were falling back towards Germany. And the Russians had them outnumbered, you know, a million to one. And it was happening in the worst winter, you know, ever. And these poor guys were just suffering like mad. And the experience of reading it was tremendous fun. And it wasn't because I wanted to see the Nazis suffer or anything. And I realized, I asked myself, why is it so much fun reading about these guys suffering such hell, you know, And I realized that we love to watch heroes suffer. You know, if it's some rocky training, you know, in the meat, you know, we want our guy, you know, swallowing six raw eggs early in the morning. You know, we love to, we love to see that, I think, because we all know if we're ever going to get anywhere, we got to go through that too. And it's inspiring to watch, you know, a hero deal with that stuff. Male or female.

[David Perell]

What is the mantra that you find yourself repeating when you're going about your writing every day?

[Steven Pressfield]

You know, I think it's, I got a lot of them, but this one doesn't even have a specific words, but it's. We were talking about self doubt. Just keep going in the face of, of that, you know, that, that self doubt is a form of resistance. And the more resistance you feel to something, the more certain you can be that you have to do it. So that's what I, you know, because I'm constantly dealing with self doubt and just to keep, keep going through it.

[David Perell]

I was reading about that this morning and I was like, man, that is, that concept is a one move checkmate. That the more that you love something, the more resistance you're going to feel and therefore the more you need to do it. I feel like you just won. I Was going to say the war of creativity. That's what came to mind. You called the book the war of art. But that's the ultimate one move. Checkmate. Well, I want to close by talking about this book, the daily press field. There's a few things that I think are really interesting here. The first is this is a book that you can keep right next to your bed as whenever you're working on a creative project. I think you have 373 lessons or something like that.

[Steven Pressfield]

Yeah, years worth.

[David Perell]

Yeah, years. And I think that this is just a companion that you can keep next to you when you're stuck, when you're feeling blocked. Tell me about this book and why you chose it.

[Steven Pressfield]

I thought that the book is structured. This actually came from an idea. The guy who gave me this idea was Ryan Holiday, who wrote the Daily Stoic. We were going to a political event and he said, you've got so much content. He says, you got to organize this into a 365 day thing that people can use and put on, you know, right beside where they, where they're working. So I thought beyond that, I thought this book is structured. If you're starting a novel, page one, day one. Like the first chapter in this book, day one is titled Resistance Wakes up with Me. And it talks about the first thing on the first day and what you have to do. And the book is really structured about how to deal with your own self sabotage day by day through a project. Like we were talking earlier about certain points that in the writing of a novel or any creative subject where you're going to get hit with self doubt. It happens, you know, at the end of Act 1, in the middle of Act 2, right before the end, after you're finished, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. And so this book is sort of designed for when those moments come that on that day, that week, that month, it'll sort of walk you through it. So that was the idea. I wanted it to be something that somebody could keep with them from, you know, fade in to fade out, you know, from chapter one to the end. And it would walk them through it.

[David Perell]

Thanks, man.

[Steven Pressfield]

Hey, thank you, David.

[David Perell]

That was fun.

[Steven Pressfield]

Okay. It's a pleasure.

[David Perell]

Yes.