Steven Pressfield
Appearances
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
Um, I'm, I'm a great believer that work is everything, you know, um, particularly for, for a writer because your writer has a, has a long career, you know, you can be 70 years old, 80 years old, still working, you know? Um, and, uh, uh, You know, I've said this before, that like for 30 years, well, now people tell me that I have talent. But for 30 years, they told me I was a bum.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
And I was a bum because I hadn't learned how to do it. You know, I didn't have the confidence. I hadn't found a voice or anything like that. So work, I think, is you have to have, obviously, you have to have some talent. But Work is 90% of it, I think. You can get better. That's the good news. No matter how bad a first draft is, the ninth draft can be really good.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
Or no matter how bad you were when you're 26, when you're 46, you can be really good. When you look back at what you wrote at 26, you go, this is dog shit. But I'm not doing that anymore. I've learned. And I can do better. So the good news for anybody that's struggling, I think, is that work does pay off. You can get better. You can learn more. You can improve.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
Well, you know, like the whole subject matter of The War of Art, my book, The War of Art, is about what I call resistance with a capital R, which is that... that voice in our head that tells us we're not good enough, our idea isn't good enough, we're too old, we're too young, we're too fat, we're too thin, we went to school, blah, blah, blah. And the other aspect of that is procrastination,
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
the susceptibility to distraction going down rabbit holes and, you know, click bait and stuff like that. And other things like perfectionism, where we'll spend all day working on one paragraph instead of moving forward. And there's a million ways that our, our, our, our ego will sabotage us, you know? And to me,
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
job one of any creative person is to is to acknowledge that that is you know there is an enemy and the enemy is you you know the enemy is me it's in it's in us it's there the minute we wake up in the morning it's a dragon we have to slay every morning before we even sit down to work work is that's easy compared with uh like in the war of art it says something like
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't know. And the secret is this. It's the writing is not the hard part. What's hard is sitting down to write. And I believe that completely. And what we all have to do in our own way, and everybody does it differently, is find some way to slay this dragon every morning. To be able to work.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
Obviously, if you can't work, you can't do anything. But... The first step to that, in my opinion, is recognizing that there is this negative force. You know, you sit down at the blank page and it radiates off that blank page, right? You know, let's go to the beach, you know, let's smoke a joint, let's whatever, right? Something that the resistance is always trying to stop us from doing our work.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So if we can believe that, accept it, feel it inside us, then we can overcome it. We can dismiss it and just say, well, bullshit, I'm just going to sit down and do my work. And to me, it's like jumping into a cold pool.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
It's hard when you're standing on the edge, but once you're in the water, in other words, once you start writing or dancing or doing whatever it is you're going to do, then that fear goes away. And fear is a huge part of it too, Andre, right? It's like fear of success, fear of failure, fear of destitution, fear of embarrassing yourself, fear of looking like an idiot.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
And somehow we all have to get past that. You know, that I don't give a shit, I'm gonna do it anyway. The pain, when the pain of not doing the work becomes worse than the pain of doing the work, then we'll actually sit down and do it. But the good news is once we start to do it immediately, everything is okay.