On today’s episode Steven Pressfield shares the power of resistance and how creatives can overcome self-doubt. Listen in as Steven and I discuss the barriers we create for ourselves by giving into resistance, the excavating process of writing, and how continuing to write after success is an ongoing process of following your own compass.
Steven Pressfield is the author of The War of Art which has sold over a million copies globally and been translated into multiple languages. He is a master of historical fiction with Gates of Fire being on the required reading list at West Point and the recommended reading list of the Joint Chiefs. His other books include A Man at Arms, Turning Pro, Do the Work, The Artist’s Journey, Tides of War, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Last of the Amazons, Virtues of War, The Afghan Campaign, Killing Rommel, The Profession, The Lion’s Gate, The Warrior Ethos, The Authentic Swing, An American Jew, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, and The Knowledge.
His debut novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance was over 30 years in the making. He hasn’t stopped writing since.
Steve lives and writes in California. You can follow him on IG @steven_pressfield. Sign up for his weekly writing newsletter at stevenpressfield.com
Episode Transcript
Steven Pressfield is a former Marine and graduate of Duke University. He became an overnight success as a writer after nearly 30 years of doing the work. He’s written bestseller after bestseller in both fiction and nonfiction, including The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and A Man at Arms, which is his most recent fiction endeavor, which is fantastic. It came out last year. He also identified the omnipresence of resistance, the interior force of self-sabotage that he described in The War of Art. That book alone has saved many artistic lives and has helped millions that are struggling to find their
01:31
and purpose. His novels of the ancient world, including the nonfiction, The Warrior’s Ethos, are required reading at West Point, Annapolis, and the Marine Corps. His new book is nonfiction in the same vein as The War of Art describing how to become who you want to be by doing as it says in the title, putting your ass where your heart wants to be. Listen, it took Steve 27 years to get his first book published and he was 54 at the time. It’s never too late. Steve, always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for being here today, my friend.
02:01
Hey, thanks, Marcus. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be back with you again. It’s so great. And it feels like it was just yesterday that the book was coming out that you were working on a man at arms, which is fantastic. And it absolutely crushed the chart. So you’re continuing to do the work with this nonfiction. I’ve had a lot of questions from people that were asking, when we’re writing, I understand that there’s a process and you talk about your process in the war of art. And of course, we have to have an outline, we have to have ideas. Is there a difference for you when you approach nonfiction and fiction?
02:31
Yeah, very much so. I think with nonfiction, at least the stuff that I’ve done, which is about the creative process, rather than say a biography of Harry Truman or something like that, I sort of already know what I wanna say. And it’s just a matter of kind of organizing it like you might organize a legal brief or something like that, you know? What’s part one, what’s part two, what’s part three? But with fiction, a lot of times you, at least at the start, you really don’t know where the story’s going.
03:00
You know, you might start with a colonel that’s in the middle of the story or single character or something. So I sort of liken it to entering some giant cave like the Carlsbad Caverns with like a little miner’s light, you know, and you’re just trying to find what’s on this wall over here, what’s on that wall over there. And the other thing with the fiction for me, maybe I’m getting into too much detail. No, no, no, we want the detail. But.
03:27
For me with fiction, there’s a tremendous amount of self-doubt at the very beginning. And it goes on for a long time in the sort of vein of, is anybody going to be interested in this other than me? This crazy story about whatever, right? A dog in Iceland, you know? So I have to sort of continue through that period of self-doubt as if I didn’t have self-doubt. So it takes that other skill that, you know, of just
03:56
blundering forward each day. And then little by little, it sort of starts to take shape and you see what the cave is like, you know, and then it’s just fun at that point. CB Because you’ve already kind of know the lay of the land, finally, you’ve fallen and tripped a few times and now you’re like, actually, this would be interesting if I did this or if I took a turn here. So it’s- RL It’s like the work already exists and you’re excavating it, you know, it’s not your idea.
04:24
it was already there. So I think it’s the same way. I’m not a musician, but I think it’s the same way with a song. People, they start maybe with a beat or the first whatever they call the verses. And then they’ve got to come up with the bridge. And the bridge sort of exists, but they have to find it, you know. And so it’s that sort of cave analogy, you know, you’re groping. And finally, you find it. And I think it’s also incredible because
04:51
Because you’ve lived such an interesting life with a lot of experience, it gives the voice and the addictions and the cadence of the people that you are putting into these, the words that you put into these fictitious characters’ mouths, it gives them a lot of depth, a lot of texture, as opposed to just, he said this, he said this. It’s like, no, you can practically feel the energy about what they’re doing and what the intention is, the tension in the air, you can almost cut it with a knife.
05:15
Ah, well, thank you. No, it’s the truth. But that’s what the great writing is. Like it makes us feel like we’re there. We can feel the cold. We can feel the heat in a man at arms. Again, the fight scenes in the desert, I was just like, you can almost feel the sand blowing into your face and the process, which is what we should be doing. So, but even with the nonfiction, would you say that either one of them come easily or is it just that excavating process irrespective of what the medium is? Yeah. It never comes easily for me anyway. I mean, and particularly.
05:43
at the beginning when you’re struggling with the self-doubt and all that kind of thing. But the nonfiction comes more easily. I think it’s just because, like I say, I already know what I want to say, more or less. It’s really for my stuff, which is basically just, I’m just shooting my mouth off about my own theories about writing or creativity or whatever it is. So I just sort of open my mouth and just fire away. But it’s never easy on either side.
06:13
So if you’re listening right now, again, if you’re facing resistance, people that are listening to us, even for Steven Pressfield, it’s not easy. Even for Steven Pressfield, he has to get up and do the work. And some days are better than others, but we just try to do as best we can. And some days it’s garbage and other days it’s not as bad as we think it is. I read a quote from Philip Roth, the great novelist, you know, Portnoy’s Complaint and all those things. And somebody asked him,
06:40
know, you’ve done like 25 books already, does it get any easier? And he had a great answer. He said, no, it never gets easier because each book is a different problem, and it has to be solved in a different way. And when you’re starting it, you don’t know how to solve it, which I’m sure is the same for a song or a dance or a movie or anything like that. It’s a different problem, and you got to solve it. So you’re back to square one each time you start, which is the way it should be.
07:08
I agree. I think there are some artists that are or authors that are formulaic that, you know, have sort of a cookie cutter idea. But the type of material that you’re writing, I think because there’s so much depth and breadth within it, it would just seem hollow if you were to do that. So as you’re writing, you’re like, this doesn’t feel real or true to me. Or I’m thinking as we’re talking like about the campaigns of Alexander the Great, just as an example, or I could say Marcus Aurelius, you know, each one is different because there’s a different landscape, a different enemy. It’s a different season.
07:38
army’s mentality is in a different place than it was. Maybe they’re really tired. They want to go home. They’ve been on campaign forever, or maybe they’re fresh and they’re too arrogant, but each campaign is different and presents different problems. I don’t care how many you won in the past. It’s still a fresh challenge this time in the present. Trey Lockerbie Yeah. What worked today will not work tomorrow sometimes. So I love that. And you made a comment in this new book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be.
08:05
about the Stoics and how the Stoics kind of have this idea that things are going to happen as they’re going to happen. But you have an interesting, which I actually agree with you because I feel the same way. A lot of people think that if you’re a Taoist or Zen or Buddhist or study Stoicism, that you just allow everything to fall on you and you don’t try to do anything to influence it. But you made a fantastic comment about the muse and how you feel that it influences Fortuna, so to speak, in Latin.
08:34
Yeah, this sort of comes from my readings of the ancient world of the ancient texts. And we were just talking about Alexander two seconds ago. Let me see if I can rephrase this here. Like the Stoics believe, as I understand it, and basically all I know is from Ryan Holiday and reading his stuff, that fortune, like fate, destiny, chance, whatever it is, is completely out of our control. We may think that we’re flying high, we just won an Oscar, whatever, next thing you know.
09:03
some calamity happens, right? Or vice versa, something really good could happen. And that the stoic point of view, as I understand it, is whatever comes your way, work with whatever you can change, but whatever you can’t change, you just have to accept it and embrace it and believe that it’s good for you. But the overall concept is that you have no control over fortune. Whatever’s going to happen to you is going to happen to you. And I’m not sure that I believe that. And I don’t think
09:32
that someone like Alexander the Great believed that either. I think he felt in a kind of a mystical way that he could make the gods intercede for him. And the example that I use in the book is that in any great set piece battle, he would always lead off the battle, or at least very close to leading it off by charging himself on his great war horse Bucephalus
10:02
armored horseman straight at the foe, wearing really distinctive armor so that everybody on the field, a double-plumed helmet, would know that’s Alexander. So all the enemy, of course, would concentrate all their fire on him, right? Every arrow would be coming at him. And the reason he did that was he believed like that phrase, fortune favors the bold. He felt that by a really
10:31
fortune, which the Stoics say you can’t control it. But he would say, somehow the gods watching that cannot watch it unmoved. Now, who knows whether that’s true or not. But I certainly and certainly for Alexander, charging at the foe leading from the front would certainly influence his men. Watching him charge, they had to say, wow, our king is out there. He’s the first guy we got to follow. But when I think about it in terms of
11:01
being a writer or being an artist or whatever it is. I think that if you pick the bold move, the bold subject, whatever it is, that you can invoke heaven in a way, and that ideas will come to you, that there’s something in the muse’s mentality that when she sees you working hard and working bold, she can’t look on unmoved, and she’ll help you somehow.
11:30
ideas will come to you, the next scene will come to you. That’s my belief anyway. So when I say in the book, put your ass where your heart wants to be, that’s really what I’m saying. Put your, like Alexander the Great, risk. Put your physical ass in a place where you can lose, where you can fail. You know, do something bold, something you’re not sure is going to work. That’s why I say what I was talking before about, I’m sorry about blathering on here, but oh, you’re
11:59
When I say that periods of self-doubt when you first start something, that’s kind of what it’s about. The ability to kind of keep charging on your warhorse through that. I mean, I’m sure Alexander, as he was charging across some field of a quarter mile or half mile, he must have said to himself, what the fuck am I doing? This is a horrible decision. I immediately regret this. Why did I ever do this? So I think that being bold, fortune does favor the bold, I think.
12:28
I couldn’t agree more. And I absolutely would the same way that it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where if we put that skin in the game and we have no other choice, then the choice is simple. We either give everything that we have, and even if we fail, we’ve done everything that we can, especially today, especially with doubt, especially with resistance, it’s very easy for us to stay kind of complacent and pacified artificially, hoping that tomorrow I’ll start this next manuscript or tomorrow I’ll try to that business or…
12:55
tomorrow I’ll try to step out and ask that person out or whatever the case may be. Yeah. I mean, let me ask you, when you started podcasting, how did you get into it? Was there a moment when you had the idea? Tell me how that started for you. I had a person that I was on their podcast and I speak a lot, I give keynotes, and he said, at the end of the interview, he said, you say that you wanna help as many people as you possibly can. Is that true? And I said, yeah, that’s why I write books, that’s why I do what I do. And he said,
13:23
When I touched this button and he points to the mic, he said, a million people listen to what I have to say. And he says, I don’t have to leave my home. They listen to me every week. And he says, why don’t you have a podcast? And I was like, oh, it’s too much trouble. It’s too busy. I’d have to hire a team. And so he called me on my bullshit and actually pushed back and said, if you really claim that you want to help people and you’re not utilizing this, then I don’t believe you’re telling the truth. And he was right. It was again, the whole idea of.
13:51
is going to take time, it’s going to take an investment, all this other stuff. But again, once I committed, once I put my, asked where my heart wanted to be, and actually reached out to that first person who, luckily I have, like you, I organically had some natural people that I knew in person that were more than willing to step on there and allowed me to learn on the job, so to speak. And then luckily I was in a position where when I was able to get you on the show, hopefully I wasn’t fumbling over my words or sounding nervous or anything. But the goal is,
14:21
That’s why I want to ask people questions that are really valuable to them, because it’s always valuable to the listener. They’re always going to get insight. So just like what you were talking about, self-doubt, about that being an indication. You mentioned in the War of Art that resistance is our compass, but I would say that it’s actually the needle in the compass that really makes us even more clear about where we need to go, no matter how difficult that resistance may be. And you were saying that, for those of you that are not following him on Instagram, he has incredible stuff.
14:50
there was one that you put out recently in preparation for this book, where you made this analogy about the tree and the shadow. Can you give us that analogy too? Cause I think it’s beautifully said. Okay. Well, let me ask you one question first, Marcus. After that original podcast host kind of called you on your bullshit. Did you go home right away and do this or was there like a period of, where it took you to get it together? How did that work out? It took me a period of getting together. Cause I was like, you know, he’s really, really right. And I’m really, really excited about that.
15:20
I wrote it down and then I put it away and kept doing what I was doing before. Then somebody else would ask me to be on a podcast and I was like, shit, I need to do that. Then finally, I realized that I need to hire it. Once you hire the team, once you put your money in there, now all of a sudden it’s like, okay, you better start figuring out what do you want to call this? What do you want the subject matter to be? Do you have graphics? Do you have pictures? Again, we have to begin before we’re prepared, but that creates that moment of that self-fulfilling
15:48
So for me, that’s in a good way. And that’s what I had to do. And then it forces you to elevate. It forces you to ask a question that’s really worth being asked. You’ve been interviewed hundreds of times and I’ve been interviewed a fair number of times where if it’s the same sort of boring questions, we’re still going to answer to the best of our capacity and put everything that we have into it. But if they can ask something even a little bit oblique to that, to give a different perspective, I feel that there’s a lot of uncharted territory there. Even what you were saying when you were talking to Tim Ferriss, you’re talking about being bold.
16:17
when Tim was saying, I’m thinking about writing something in fiction. And you said, make it the bigger, the better. It has to be out of this world. It has to be whatever you’re thinking of multiply it times 10. And again, that’s what we have to do with all these things. We have to attack this thing with that bigger, with that intensity, just to be able to get the momentum started in the first place, you know, to get traction. Well, I’m glad to hear that it took you a while to actually do it because it takes me a while to do this too. But back to the tree and the shadow that we were talking about.
16:47
This is kind of an analogy when I use the word resistance, as in the war of arts, with a capital R, and just briefly for people who aren’t familiar with this concept, it’s that negative force of self-doubt, of fear, of lack of belief, and also a perfectionism of procrastination, all those things in our heads that stop us from following our dreams, starting a podcast, writing a book, doing a movie, whatever. And the point of
17:14
The analogy that I was using was if you imagine a tree in the middle of a sunny meadow and the tree is your dream, the tree is the thing that you want to do. As soon as that tree appears, a shadow appears, right? And with the sun, it’s just natural, right? And that shadow is resistance. That’s the negative force of self-sabotage. But the lesson here is that resistance always comes second. The tree comes first. There would be no shadow if there was no tree. So if you’re feeling
17:44
tremendous resistance to something, be encouraged by that. Because the bigger the resistance, the bigger the tree. And the more important the dream is to you. So that the more resistance you feel, and I’m sure you felt plenty when you were debating, should I start this podcast? What’s the concept? Am I gonna fall on my ass, et cetera, et cetera. That when you feel that resistance, it’s a good sign. Because it shows that it’s really important to you. This dream is really important to you.
18:12
The bigger the dream, the bigger the resistance. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And what happens is we eventually get to that point where, at least for me, we just make peace with the fact that we are gonna fall on our ass, that it’s not gonna be perfect. And we fall down enough times to start saying, we dust ourself off and say, “‘Wow, I’m not made out of porcelain. Like, I’m okay with this. Like, I can get up and do this again tomorrow.'” And then we just keep going forward, progressing and continuing to do the reps. And you have a mailing…
18:41
you send out on Wednesdays, writing Wednesdays, where you go through a lot of these incredible processes talking about part one, part two, part three, when you’re writing. And I love how you do that because what we’re talking about, some of it may seem theoretical to people that are listening, but you really get into a lot of the specifics. And that’s why I was asking you about the process a little bit between fiction and nonfiction before, because a lot of people that are listening now, especially now because they can self-publish or whatever, they can truly write whatever they want and publish whatever they want. But reading your books or seeing something
19:09
your writing gives them a good indication of what they would like to at least mimic to try to put something out there that’s worthy of being assumed and that they’ll feel proud of in the process. So it is part of all of that. And I think it’s so important. And if you’re wanting to read more of those things again, and all the nonfiction, do the work turning pro, the artist’s journey is beautiful as well, I believe. When you were writing Bagger Vance, that was your first published big published novel.
19:35
you were writing it, did it feel different? Did you think, okay, this one’s different. I know that this is going to be the one. No, no. Bagger Vance came kind of at the end of like about a 10-year screenwriting career for me. You know, and my sort of original dream when I first started was to write a novel. And I wrote like three of them that never came close to being published. It took like, you know, about six or seven years all told. So total failure and…
20:02
I sort of stumbled into screenwriting just because it was either that or murder myself. And then at some point when just when my career started kind of getting a little traction, I had the idea to do The Legend of Bagger Vance, but it came to me as a book, not as a movie. And at the time I thought, this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever had, you know? I mean, a novel about golf, a mystical novel about what could be dumber than that, you know? I was inspired by a great book called Golf and the Kingdom by Michael Murphy.
20:31
which I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but it’s a wonderful book. But I thought this thing that I’m doing, nobody’s gonna like this at all or be interested in this. Plus I have no contacts. I don’t have any way of getting it out there. Plus my agent, my movie agent, like fired me over this. He said, I’ve been working to get your career going and now you’re gonna bail on me and take a year to write some stupid book, which I don’t blame him. He was right. But I was just seized by this. I just had to do it.
20:59
So I, again, self doubt, I had no confidence in it whatsoever, but I just, I loved it and I just, good to stop doing it. So I definitely felt, to answer your question a little more, Marcus, I really felt like I was writing in my own voice for the first time, really in my own voice. Even though in the book, I’m writing in the voice of a 78 year old doctor. So not me at all, but the way it was coming out, the story.
21:26
and the tone of voice, I thought, ah, I finally tapped into something that’s unique to me, that I’m not, you know, in movies I could write a Western, I could write a detective story, I could write something in a genre, but it wasn’t really me, you know, it wasn’t something that no one else in the world could do other than me. But in this book, in The Legend of Bagger Vance, I thought, ah, no one else in the world is dumb enough to write this.
21:52
nobody’s going to be able to write it the way I’m writing it. So in that sense, it was very liberating. I thought, I don’t really care what happens. You know, I just have to do it. And so I don’t want to say ironic, but it went full circle. It actually did become a screenplay. It actually became a movie immediately. You know, they fired me from that too. This is a great book. You’re not going to screenwrite it. I’m sorry. We’re going to send it out to someone. Yeah. Oh my goodness. And then so your second book after that was gates of fire,
22:22
Yeah. So to a lot of people that are looking at that, that’s a complete departure from Bagger Vance. Yes. So that was another thing. Gates of Fire is about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. It’s not the movie 300. That came from a Frank Millographic novel, but it’s the same subject matter. And so the story there, I’ll give it very briefly, is, you know, when you write one book, your agent immediately says, well, what’s the next one? You know, and I had no idea.
22:50
never even thought about what the next one was. And I knew I couldn’t do anything more in the same vein as the first one, but I sort of had always loved ancient Greek stuff. So this story, the story of the 300 at Thermopylae is a great, great story. But again, I thought, and again, there was no movie 300, there was no Frank Miller graphic novel. So again, I thought this is the dumbest idea next to Bagger Vance because, you know, Americans only like to read about America, right?
23:19
this is a subject at a place that nobody’s ever heard of. 2500 years ago, no one can pronounce it, no one can spell it, and the people that are fighting it are not Americans. There’s going to be whole other crazy names that nobody can pronounce or spell, and who’s going to be interested in it aside from me. But at the same time, just like I said before, Marcus with Bagger Vance, I thought, I’m just seized by this. I’ve just got to do it. So it took about two years, I did it completely on spec.
23:47
And the only person that would buy it became my business partner, Sean Coyne, who was an editor at Double Day. He was the only person that wanted it and that went to bat for it and championed it. So the lesson I guess is, you never know when your crazy ideas are gonna work. Sometimes like you were saying that this was something that you couldn’t not write, like you had to write this. This had to be exercised from you in some capacity. And again, self-doubt was like intense all the way through that. So again,
24:16
that ability, which I didn’t even know I had at that time. And I wish that everybody listening has this ability is to persevere through that fog and through the fear and through the self doubt. And just however you can tell yourself, keep going, just keep going, keep going. And at some point the fog does clear and you start to have confidence in what you’ve got. And one of the questions from our listeners and I’m sure you’ve gotten this one before, but.
24:43
They say, what happens when you are knocked down by resistance? What happens when you’ve just been knocked on your ass and you feel like you don’t want to get up again and you feel like you don’t want to try to battle this thing or you feel like that’s telling you, no, this is not what you should be doing. Do you have any advice for them? And I know that you talk about this in the books, but I’m going to be a little hardcore on this. There’s no excuse for that attitude. You just can’t have that attitude. Might as well just kill yourself, you know, because remember, the greater the resistance, the greater the dream.
25:10
the greater the actual project. If you’re feeling massive resistance that’s knocking you, you can’t even get out of bed, that’s a good sign. Because it really shows you that whatever this project is or whatever your dream is, that it’s transformational for you on the soul level. Forget about money, forget about success. It’s just something that you need to do. So my only answer to that is a hardcore answer. There’s no excuse for that attitude. It’s like David Goggins.
25:39
You’ve run 190 miles across the desert. You got 10 more to go. You just gotta keep going. That’s all there is to it. That’s absolutely it. When I was running his four by four by 48 challenge, running four miles every four hours for 48 hours. Oh, you did that, huh? Wow, God bless you. I’ve done it two years in a row and I’ll do it again. I raised money for charity to stop human trafficking and child sex slavery with it. So it gives me that skin in the game. It gives me something to push. But at two in the morning, when you’ve been running for 28 hours straight.
26:06
you’re like, why am I doing this? It’s freezing drizzle outside. It’s like, stop making this bigger than what it is. Just put on your shoes, put on your clothes, get your ass out the door and run. It’s just a run. It’s just one step. It’s just the run. And when we make it bigger than what it needs to be, when we make resistance bigger than what it needs to be, when we face adversity, and like you said, if we have this attitude, because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, even with that, if we believe that it’s going to make us stronger and make us better, it shall.
26:34
But if we believe that we can’t do it, even when we are strong enough, we’ll subconsciously hold back and we will never go beyond that place, right? Yeah, absolutely. And let me throw in a recommendation of a book for your people if they haven’t read this. Finding Ultra by Rich Roll. Yes, yes, yes. Is a great book. It’s about his, he decided to run, I guess, or do five Ironmans on the five different islands of Hawaii back to back. And that’s among all other things, fighting.
27:03
alcoholism and so on and so forth. And it’s a great book in terms of like David Goggins of putting as you read it, getting in his head as he’s going through exactly what you’re talking about Marcus about. Why am I doing this? I must be insane. I’m killing my, you know, that kind of thing. But if you want to get anywhere, there’s sort of no way to get there without doing something like that. You have to and there’s everybody talks about balance, but
27:30
Honestly, it’s mostly about being able, in my opinion, to find this understanding of when you need to be able to adapt. So, if I have to defend myself, there’s no balance at that point. I’m putting all of my effort into stopping this person from hurting me or somebody else. I don’t care about my bank account or my investments or my book or my house or anything else. I care about this singular moment. And that’s almost what we have to do when we’re writing in that process for that four hours, like you say, when you’re trying to invoke the muse and you’re trying to be worthy of that attention.
28:00
That’s what we have to do. But so many times and I’m 50 years old, so I blessed that I kind of grew up with one foot out of technology and one foot in, but I still remember what it was like to not have a cell phone and just write down on paper, analog with a pen on paper, right? I don’t know if people know what this stuff is anymore, but you can write that down and it just means so much to have that. When you wrote, you wrote me a note.
28:26
And for those that can’t read it, it says the final will look even better, Steve, from in his personal stationary. But you talk about that in this new book about how you got that from a writer. And that was what inspired you. That’s what became sort of your, you can call it a routine or a ritual, but I think of it as like, that’s that thing that you do as a warrior, almost like when you put on your armor, or when you’re getting ready to go to the gym. It’s like, these are the things that prep us to be ready to be primed to give our best effort in whatever it is.
28:55
I keep that by my computer. I’m working on my second book right now. And there are many days where I write what feels like trash and I don’t even know why I’m doing it. But then you get to that one paragraph or that one statement, like even Hemingway, when he said, you know, I’m trying to get to a certain amount of words a day. And then if, and if it’s one statement, that means that he’s won that part of the battle. And now he’s adding another brick to the wall. Yeah. That I think I don’t mean I wonder if I have it here. I don’t, I don’t think I do have it here. But
29:24
I’ll tell that story for whatever that, you know, please know this is kind of on the subject of we were talking about fortune favors the bold and the, and the idea that the idea under put your ass where your heart wants to be is the idea that once you really commit to something, once you really put your ass out there, right? You’re going to do the David Goggins challenge or whatever it is that a certain magic is triggered, you know, and that you become a different person.
29:52
And the world sees you differently too. And in this case, I’ll give you the long version of this. Please. I was writing Gates of Fire and the manuscript was done. I had sent it to my agent in New York and it was 800 pages long and it was that thick. And my agent said to me, I can’t sell this. You gotta cut 300 pages out of this. And I said, 300 pages? And I was just totally daunted and overcome by resistance. And I got this note in the mail. I wish I had it here, somewhere here.
30:22
from Tom Ginsberg, who I didn’t know, who was the head of Viking Press at the time, also one of the founders of the Paris Review and also a Purple Heart winner from the Marine Corps on Iwo Jima. Oh my gosh. Which is really like the top thing to me. But in any event, he wrote me a handwritten note. He had read the manuscript, the 800 page, and he just wrote, there’s a great novel in here or a really good novel and I know you’re gonna bring it. And just like you, you know, I pinned it up to my computer screen.
30:51
And that really got me through those cutting of 300 pages. But the point of the story is that once we really commit, like I had to this 800 page thing, the world sees us differently and helps us. And things like that happen. People will come to you out of nowhere. Like this, Tom Ginsburg didn’t know me from Adam other than having read the book, but he reached out and that made all the difference in the world. So there is a kind of a magic.
31:19
to putting your ass where your heart wants to be. The universe does respond. Yeah, I think Paulo Coelho says it in the alchemist that once we commit, the universe conspires in our favor for it to happen. God bless him, he’s right. He says something similar to it, but the main thing is, like you said, we just have to continue with that same level of commitment. And here’s the thing, our level of commitment, like our energy levels from day to day will fluctuate, but whatever we have, whatever that 100% is,
31:48
we can give it, you mentioned something and a lot of people say, oh, I don’t have the luxury of writing for four or five hours a day. I don’t have the luxury of making this my profession. But you made a statement in retort saying essentially, can you do an hour? Can you do the work for one hour? Right. And then can you elaborate kind of on how that goes forward as well? Yeah, I think, I mean, so many people when they’re starting, they have a full-time job, they have a family, they have obligations, they just don’t have time, you know? But
32:18
that was me for years and years and it’s been many other people who have been successful have done like that. If you think about an hour a day is seven hours a week. Anyway, it all comes out to like, I forgot what, like six 40-hour weeks in a year or something like that. That’s a lot of time, you know, you can do a lot of work in that time. But the other thought that is really true is like, right now I’m a full-time writer, right? And I have been for quite a few years. But in reality, my day…
32:48
between all the stuff I have to do, you know, and all the things, it really comes down to maybe two hours that I’ve got that I can actually use to actually hit the blank page. So even if you’ve got a job and kids and a mortgage and da da da da da, you can find an hour somewhere. And that’s not that much less than what I’ve got. My friend Jack Carr, you know him, the thriller writer, you know. I know who he is. Yeah, I love his work. His stuff just came out on Amazon. Yeah.
33:18
Now he’s got, this is his fifth book, I think, In the Blood, and his life is so busy. It’s like every time I see where he is, he’s in Germany, he’s shooting, he’s doing this, whatever. He can only find maybe an hour a day, and he winds up writing like in Starbucks or on airplanes, or in a waiting room in an airplane. So in other words, he seems like a full-time writer, but really he’s facing the same challenge as you or I, if we had a full-time job.
33:47
and kids and a mortgage and the whole thing. So it can be done. An hour a day equals a lot of hours in a year. Yeah, and I think that, like you said, we learn to channel that attention intently in that hour or two or whatever we have, and we can get a lot more done there than if we say, I’ve heard people say, oh, I have all Saturday, I’m gonna write. And then they sleep in, and then they kind of lounge around, and they have their coffee. I do that too, yeah. And that’s okay, but I guess it comes down to Parkinson’s Law, the idea that…
34:14
amount of time that we allow ourselves is how long it will take for us to do something. And if you say, listen, I have an hour, I better bang this thing out and I need to be as present as I possibly can, that urgency of putting your ass where your heart wants to be right now, knowing that there’s a great intention that you have in the book, and I’m going to quote it, you say, this is the day there is no other day. This is the job, there is no other job. This is the day there is no other day. And I love that kind of focus because that’s almost this mantra that keeps you.
34:41
driving forwards, Stephen King writes in on writing, he says, never come to the blank page lightly. And that was one of the quotes in there. And that just, it sets the intention, it sets the tone of everything you do. If you approach it with that sort of gravity, what you write is going to have gravity. But if you write like a bunch of vanilla, empty, vapid bullshit, only people that are going to read that are vanilla, empty, vapid people that are going to take the same level of commitment towards whatever you’re writing. So why would you do that?
35:09
I mean, it’s true for everything, isn’t it, Marcus? Like if you’re training to do, you know, the four day hour, I think, challenge, or if you’re going to the gym, if you have a martial arts practice, you know, when you walk through the dojo, you know, and you put your hands together and you bow, you got to say, this is a war. I’m bringing the whole horse and the wagon to this thing. And it’s true for anything you do. Another book I always recommend is Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative
35:37
She’s a choreographer who’s done a million things. She talks about how her day starts at like 5.30 in the morning. She lives in New York and she gets stressed. She goes down, she hails a cab, she goes to the gym for two hours of working out and stretching. And then she goes to her studio to work. And the process of going to the gym in a way for her is a ritual that psychs her up because what she’s really saying to herself is, this is a war that I’m going to in my choreography thing.
36:07
I’m up against the force of resistance, right? My own tendency to be lazy, right? And I’ve got to rally myself. And this is the day, there is no other day. Because if you don’t have that attitude, then you’re procrastinating, then you’re saying, oh, tomorrow I’ll do it. And what happens is tomorrow you say, oh, I’ll do it the next day. And then the bottom line is then you never do it. But it is a war and we’re all in it. That’s why I call it the war of art, which it is. And that’s kind of the…
36:34
hardcore David Goggins attitude that you have to have, I think. It’s the truth. I always told the people I work with without a deadline, time means nothing. So we have to value that. And everybody talks about how valuable time is, but we just keep thinking that. And it’s one of those things where we feel that the end of whatever time is, is so far away that it’s not approaching close enough with any sort of urgency. But yet, if we take it seriously enough and say, how many hours can I write in my lifetime?
37:01
maybe that will give them a little bit of perspective or maybe how much time do I get to see a sunset or spend time with my wife or my girlfriend or whomever, that gives that much more value and true meaning to that as opposed to just, oh, it’s the same as watching an episode of something on TV, right? I mean, you would think, wouldn’t you, that this sort of thinking would be taught in school or that you would get it from the time you were four years old. And I think certain people, they get it from their mom and dad, you know? They’re taught that from…
37:30
day one, I’m sure Tom Brady, I don’t know what his family was like, but I’m sure, you know, a lot of people that really do succeed, they get this from an early age, right? It’s just sort of in the blood. And others, people which are like me, I really didn’t get it at an early age. And I had to sort of learn it. But one way or another, you got to learn it. There’s no getting around it. Now, and you’ve had a lot of different many paths, the top of the mountain for yourself when you were doing those things with all these different jobs that you held to give you the luxury of writing.
37:59
Again, it means a lot to you now you’re doing so much with it and it’s this kind of sacred opportunity and it keeps us very honest, especially if it’s on our… Well, I would imagine even with what you’re describing, even with fiction, like you said, it’s just this diametrically opposed ideas in your mind and you’re doubting and you’re trying to stumble through the darkness and helps to find this sort of a handhold. But once you’re done and once you kind of get through with it, what I’ve noticed is once we’re done with it and we look back over it in perspective…
38:28
It was tough, but not as tough as we had made it out to be from the beginning, right? That’s the thing. And then you look back and you, I’m sure this is true of everything, physical activities, you look back and you say, you know, I could have done it a little better. It wasn’t quite, you know, I didn’t give you, I thought I was giving 110%, but you know, I could have given more, but in any event, to get it, try to get to a hundred percent is definitely a way to do it. And.
38:53
One other point I want to make, this is for whatever this is worth, I just did a little Instagram thing about this the other day, that when we have a dream, we have a movie we want to make or a novel or something like that, it’s not a luxury that we get to do that, that we could put it off or not do it. It’s an imperative. Because if we don’t do it, that thing that’s inside us, that wants to be born, if we don’t let it be born, it kind of inverts itself.
39:22
and starts to work against us. It starts to eat away at our guts and we don’t know it. And if we do it enough, we do it one time and another time and another time, we’re on our way to a bad place, you know? So, and vice versa, if we do do it, even if it’s not a quote unquote success and we don’t make money on the soul level, we’re paying our dues, we’re evolving. We’re doing kind of what we should be doing. And we’re getting healthier on that soul dimension.
39:52
I’ve met so many people that say that they trust the process, but they need to work the process. They need to believe in that as they’re doing the work, as opposed to just sitting on their ass with their hands under their hips and saying, oh, you know, I trust the process. You know, it’s like, you’re just kind of, you got to do the work. That’s for sure. You have to do it for sure. And you also make a great comment in the new book, put your ass where your heart wants to be. You were saying how that you do things where you’re you’re out of the office, so to speak, but yet.
40:20
sometimes the muse still finds you and you have found to be receptive and respectful to that because if we don’t do that, then eventually, and like you said, it could be waking up in the middle of the night and having that idea or jotting something down or speaking it into a recorder. I have this beside me, you know. Beautiful, yeah. And that’s it because we never know when that one thing is going to go out and it could be something that we use in a book six months from now, right? Yeah. Do you know who Rick Rubin is? Oh, of course, the producer. Yeah, he’s amazing.
40:49
And he lives not too far from here and he’s working on a book called A Creative Act. He’s been working actually for quite a while. He asked me to read it a little while ago. And I don’t know what he’s doing with it. I don’t know if it’s coming out or anything. I hope he’s not in the throes of resistance and not doing it. But it’s a wonderful book. But his attitude is that creativity is like a river that’s flowing through all of us constantly.
41:16
It’s not like his attitude, like for me, sometimes I think it’s like coming to a little peephole. And if I get the tiniest little thing, that’s great. But he sees it as like the trade winds in Hawaii, that it’s just coming constantly. And it’s not just songs or anything like that. It’s everything, you know, how you live your life and all that stuff. But his whole thing is about being receptive to that and having, you know, tuning your radio into the, you know, the cosmic radio station.
41:45
He calls it, this is interesting, I never heard this before. He calls it, what I would call the muse, he calls source with a capital S. And he basically says, source is broadcasting constantly and we have to learn to receive it. And like what a lot of, he’s sort of the godfather of hip hop, you know, in terms of helping bands get off and the beastie boys are, I’m not even into that, I don’t know what it is. He’s worked with all kinds of legendary acts, yeah.
42:12
Part of what he does, he has studios not far from here, just Shangri-La Studios, a band will wanna come to him to do an album and they haven’t even got it yet, right? They’re gonna write it there in his studios. And so his kind of thing is he’ll prepare this environment for them. And then like one of the things he’ll do is he’ll really repaint the walls, take everything to make it completely new for these people of the band. And then he himself remains there sort of like Obi-Wan Kenobi, he’s barefoot.
42:40
got a beard, he’s got long hair, he’s kind of this godfather of whatever and his whole thing is giving them permission to take a chance and it’s like here’s a safe place, I’m going to protect you, I’m going to put you in this safe place where you can just be yourselves and it works because band after band comes in there and does great stuff. So the point I’m trying to make here is that you and I
43:08
We don’t have the luxury of having Rick Rubin to take care of us. So we sort of have to create that space ourselves and also be confident that that source, what he calls source, that that’s trade winds or keep blowing, you know, they’re there. Like you say, you know, you go to sleep and you bring this beside you because, you know, the muse is going to give you ideas while you’re, when you come awake at two in the morning. And the more you accustom yourself to that and believe in it, the more you’ll pick up.
43:38
And you’ll realize, wow, ideas are coming through, like one trolley car after another, and I’ve been missing them for the last 30 years, but they’re there. And that’s so true, right? It’s a skill just like anything else. And as we grow up, the source is there all the time, but as we get older, we have other frequencies that are overlapping it. And I’ve heard similar things where it’s like, our voice, our true voice, it speaks as loud as it can. Yeah, yeah.
44:06
but it’s not very loud compared to all the other crap. Right, and then everything in our today society is vying for our attention. So if we don’t respect that self or ourselves or the source or what the muse is trying to do or how to lean in towards resistance, then it will be easy for us to just be sort of tossed around. And I have found that in this life, you either choose what you want for your life or the choice will be made by somebody else for you.
44:30
they’re always trying to take your money. Always. Exactly. Always trying to do that, which allows them to have more control over you in some capacity. It’s about this understanding of just taking your power back by taking control of what really matters to you. And for some people, they may not even know what that is yet because there are so many other things going on, but this is where that excavation, that digging down deep, that’s why I love adversity because it doesn’t tell us who we are, it strips away what we’re not and gets down to those real brass
44:59
computer in the first place. And if we can even have an inkling of that, we have the chance to actually uncover something beautiful. Yes. And the whole thing that I was saying before about self-doubt is when these ideas come through, resistance with a capital R will immediately say, oh, that’s bullshit. That’s a bad idea. Why don’t you forget it? And again, we have to sort of get past that self-doubt and realize that that’s this force that’s trying to stop us.
45:28
and say, wait a minute, that idea that just came through, that’s a pretty good idea. Maybe I should follow that up a little bit. And I think the more you do that, the better you get at it. And the better you are at able to tune into that radio station. I think also when we are receptive to the source and we get these ideas, we do, eventually they start combining in creative ways too. So like you were describing with Bagger Vance, you’re like, what the hell? First of all, I’ve been doing screenplays this entire, now I want to do a completely different medium, right?
45:56
And I want it to be about this mystical golfer, who the hell cares about that? That doesn’t make any sense, but yet that’s what gave you something that was so unique and written in a way that was so profound that had so much depth and actual like quality. It was undeniable once people were able to read it. It was amazing. You know, that’s true for everybody. As the ideas come through, you say to yourself, this is really dumb, you know? But yet it was solid gold in that case for me.
46:25
And it is, you know, for you, your podcasting thing and other things that you do. It’s almost like we wish we had a Rick Rubin or Obi-Wan Kenobi there to say, Hey, that’s the one. That’s the one. Don’t, you know, don’t throw that away. Hang on to that. And also in your book, the newest book that you have, you mentioned, we talked about martial arts also about how we have this kind of sacred space and we set that up because like Rick Rubin studio, it’s conducive, it’s like this womb where we’re safe and protected to fall down. And.
46:53
all these dumb ideas, but when we throw enough things at the wall, eventually something does stick, and now we’re able to create something from that. When you were talking about the martial arts, what martial art did you do? You know, I never really did it seriously, but I did karate, you know, but enough to get the concept. You know, going back to like Twyla Tharp, the choreographer, that she has a studio, right? And that studio becomes a sacred space to her, you know, and I’m
47:23
she’s going to throw you out the door in a flash, right? And this right where I am, this is my office, you know, right here, stuff on the wall and I’m working on and things like that. And so I think it’s great to have a space. I’m sure you’ve got it where because the muse knows where to find you. But there is something about a space, I think that again, it’s like put your ass where your heart wants to be when you have a space that you go to every day and you.
47:51
work hard and you leave your problems outside the door and you focus. Energy concentrates in that space and like if we were in Hemingway’s office we would like feel the vibes, right? And we build up energy and it’s juju, you know, it’s mojo. I don’t know what it is, you can’t measure it, but it’s true and it’s all to the good because we have to rally every force we can in this war that we’re fighting.
48:19
Yeah, you can never have too many allies when you’re going to war, right? Never. And they hopefully show up when we need them or even if they can combine this even better and to your point, I was lucky, my wife and I went down to Florida, I was doing business down there and we got to go to Hemingway’s house. Oh, tell me about it. What is it like? It was pretty large, but for me, like everybody’s looking at everything is like, look at this and look at where he was in Africa and here’s the Smith Corellia, we was doing a lot of this work. But for me, I was like, when do I get to go to see?
48:49
study. When do I get to see where he was doing this? And like you said, I mean, it was a nice area, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a desk, it’s still just the typewriter, and it’s just him facing towards the window for him. He would want to try to do it as the sun was coming up. And then once the sun was sort of gone, it gave him an idea that he’s been there for a little while and he should be getting something hopefully that’s worthwhile. But I think that’s where he was doing three or four of his primary works to really create that place. So it’s neat
49:18
that history, but it’s also need to, it’s mystical, but yet it kind of demystifies the process so that it forces us to say, see, but it’s a sacred room, you know? I mean, the photos I’ve seen was he was right standing up and I’ve got a photo here somewhere on my desktop. Even it was a bedroom, but at least I’m sure he had an office too, but it was his bedroom and on the bed was like a million three by five index cards. And he was, I guess he had a bad back at that point and he couldn’t sit down.
49:47
and he was standing up and it was like a dresser, like that you would have drawers with your clothes in and that was his writing surface and whatever, whatever works. But that seemed to be the place. Yeah, the three by five cards is something that Robert Greene kind of took. He got that idea. He would write things down. He would have his researcher write down. When Ryan Holiday was doing the research for him, he would have those ideas. Do you use cards like that or do you just kind of bang it out and say, this is where I’m at?
50:14
I do use cards like here’s something here, you know, this is not like a, can you see that? I can see what it is. I can’t see what it says, but I can see that you’ve got the process in there. Movie writers, screenwriters use that thing. They’ll all have like a movie will be like what I just showed you on the wall, you know, they’ll each card will be a scene. They’re like 60 scenes usually, and you’ll have act one, act two, act three, and there’s a lot to be said for that. And I do that for novels as well, you know, and the key thing.
50:44
is the last one, the climax, to have that first. Where’s this movie gonna end and then work backwards from there. But yeah, that’s a great way to break something down in a good way of constructing it. Yeah, and in our last interview, you said something great. Well, many things that were great, but you made that comment that you were saying that when we talk about the hero in that journey, it’s about adversity, adversity, adversity. And then there’s the climax, and then eventually they either are able to overcome it and reach that place.
51:14
And oftentimes before we get there, we, we feel mentally like we want to capitulate or maybe we even do. We, we have this feeling of, you know what, it’s done. I’m walking away from it. And then that’s when the breakthrough occurs. Like you said, by stepping away from it, giving everything you can and then saying, okay, I’m going to step away from this for a moment now. And then all of a sudden we get that realization where the source actually really kind of hits us. Maybe we talked about this before. I can’t remember, but there’s a, I don’t know what the, what the word is, but in the movie business, it’s called.
51:43
the all is lost moment. And the all is lost moment is usually a scene that comes about two thirds of the way through the movie. Like the end of act two, the character will come up to a moment where they say, I can’t win. The monsters are too big or whatever it is. And then just like you say, in a way they’ll sort of give up, but they’re really sort of shifting their focus a little bit and then they find a breakthrough.
52:10
And then they go to act three and then the big climax happens. But I think we all in our in the wars that we’re fighting in our head, you know, having all his lost moment, like when you’re running and it’s David Goggins thing and you have that moment, I got to stop that, which is why finding Ultra Rich Rolls book is so great because he really gets to those moments and talks about that’s when we change, right? That’s when we kind of find the gold inside ourselves. That seems to be part of the hero’s journey.
52:39
Part of the equation happens to everybody on every challenge that we do. And it’s a good thing. It always produces a breakthrough. And the thing is many people never get to that place, but many people never reach their second wind because they never pushed far enough beyond their first. But when we give everything we have in as to that place where we don’t have anything else, we were talking the last time how for me, being paralyzed and being told this is what I was left with, and then just being angry and then finally coming to this place of
53:07
Okay, listen, if this is what’s going on and this is real, what do I do moving forward? I gave up that hope. I had that all moments was lost. And then eventually a little bit of feeling came back. And then as we spoke, when I got hubris, when I got arrogant, it’s like, oh, the victory is assured. That’s when I stumbled. That’s when I took my eye off the ball. I lost the gratitude and I slipped back to where I started from. And I eventually had to, again, that moment was lost. Come back to that place of…
53:37
This is not about me. This is about being grateful that nobody else was hurt. If I am alive, what am I gonna do with this opportunity? And I’ve just never turned back once I started recovering from that component. Let me ask you, what do you think is a difficult question? That moment for you, you know, when what do you think was going on on the soul level for you? What was the change? Can you answer that? Yeah, so…
54:03
Being in a bed where you can’t move and they’re just playing Netflix for you, what I did was, for martial arts, we understand that the opponent gives us energy. And if I can learn to redirect it or avoid it and then put energy with it, I can channel it to my advantage. But lots of times we’re just getting hit or we’re afraid to move, we’re afraid to commit. For me, I was just unlocking, there was an adversity I’m facing. It made me unlock and unpack.
54:32
every adversity that I went through from my injury to my grand uncle’s death, my own divorce all the way back to when I was a little boy and my parents were divorced. And try to unpack all those things and see what I was potentially missing, see what I was potentially losing. And eventually I got to that place where it’s not because I’m a bad person, this is not karma, this is not punishment. There are things that just happened. And once I took that kind of emotion out of it, once I stopped feeling like it was happening to me.
55:02
I just accepted it for what it was and I was like, so what, now what? There was that capitulation, there was that all moment was lost and I gave up expectation, but that’s when I was able to actually begin to lead into that. There’s a lot of people that have talked about this. Dr. Joe Dispenza talked about visualization, all these things, but for me, I didn’t try to visualize overcoming or winning. I just tried to remove my desire for anything other than with the present moment, and that allowed me to really live. So.
55:30
You know, really, I would say maybe I’m wrong, but listening to you, I would say that what you did was you got out of your ego. Absolutely. Yes, that’s true. That the pain was sort of being caused by you being in your ego, right? This is fucking me. God damn it. Why is this always happening to me? And then somehow you move to some other place, huh? Yeah, those Kuber Ross, she talks about those five steps. You go through denial, anger, bargaining, discipline. I mean, finally you get to the place of depression and then acceptance.
55:58
many times in our lives, we don’t go through it neatly. We go through denial and then anger, and then we may stay in anger. And then we go back to denial, and then we go denial, anger, bargaining. Why is this happening? I’m a good person. What if I do this? What if I do that? Maybe it’ll change. And again, we’re never committing. We’re never putting our ass where our heart needs to be. We’re hoping that we’ll be in this place that will solve it for us. Nick Huberty And for me, I feel just very much like a victim. And that’s not a good place to be in if you’re trying to do
56:28
something that’s really important to you, in my opinion. Now if you looked at this on a completely spiritual level and you said that we’re spiritual beings who happen to be in a body, we could say that this sort of all is lost moment, whatever it is, like what happened to you, what happens to anybody else, is the universe or whatever trying to tell us, get into that spiritual part of yourself, get into that part that’s not your ego, you know?
56:57
And until you do that, you’re going to be in fucking pain. And I think that might be a way to look at it. You know, I’m not a philosopher or anything, but that might be a way to look at it. You are a philosopher because you live it. And that is the truth of my opinion, because there are a lot of people that go through tremendous adversity at 25 and they never go beyond that. So they just kind of exist until they pass away because they never get out of their ego and it’s probably not the most fulfilling life, but for me, it was like.
57:26
I have to, like you said, it’s not about me, let my ego go. I’m not that special. I’m just this being the spiritual ideal here. Now what am I going to do now that I’ve taken all of my expectations away? What am I missing? Because what do we do if we’re holding onto a bunch of stuff that’s not important to us? It’s important for us to pick up anything that actually is. So once you drop all that and just kind of, like you said, clench yourself and you’re just this empty vessel, like an empty cup, now we can fill it with something that’s actually worthwhile.
57:56
we can recognize it in the process as opposed to just reacting or going from one thing to the next stimulus to the next. And the amazing thing like in your case was it wasn’t just spiritual, it turned out to be physical. It turned out that your body changed, right? And that’s amazing too. It is and I’ve had people to say, you know, what do you think it was? Were you false diagnosed? You know, neurology says this, it’s like, you know, I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t have to know. I just know that I’m never going to allow myself to get back into that place again where I’m just sitting here.
58:26
either with a lot of hubris or a lot of… I’ve noticed that hubris works against us, but it also makes us have hubris towards other things around us. So if you’re facing resistance and you look at a great entrepreneur or a great writer and you’re like, well, it must be easy for them and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, like you said, you’re bringing that towards you and you’re not really… You’re kind of telling the source that you don’t want that success, that you don’t want those things, that you’re happy or it’s okay, I can be humble.
58:53
you’re just justifying your own mediocrity when in this life we have to lean into the things because we don’t know how much time we have to work on the stuff that really matters. How are we going to top that Marcus? I don’t know. I don’t know. I think you probably ought to put a bow on it here. I could talk to you forever obviously, but in this book you’ve said so many kind of lessons out there and you’ve talked a lot about it. If there was one piece of advice, I guess it would be just to truly commit to what you’re wanting to do. Don’t hold back and don’t allow that resistance to dictate.
59:23
your actions in a negative capacity. I think that it’s, how can I say, if I was going to boil it down, the phrase of put your ass where your heart wants to be assumes that that phrase where your heart wants to be is it’s something on the soul level. It’s something on the level above the material plane. It’s your higher self. It’s the book you want to write. It’s the person you want to be. It’s the contribution you want to make to the world. It’s your best self, right? And
59:52
It’s not an option to go there. You gotta go there. And the way to go there is to put your ass there, you know? I say in the book, your ass equals commitment. That’s what I mean. It’s something when you put your ass on the line, you can lose, right? You can fail, you can fall on your face. So again, it’s sort of like fortune favors the bold, you know, put your butt there. And the reality is that when you do that, other forces come to your aid, forces you can’t explain.
01:00:20
from another from the higher dimension come to your aid. So I guess that’s what the book is about. I love it. Steve Pressfield, it’s always great to talk to you. Everyone, his newest book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be is available now for pre-order. Go out and get your copies. Get it anywhere that you get books. It’s available on Audible now too, correct? And ebook and Audible, yeah. So what I would recommend is getting the book physically and then listening to the audio book as well, because to me, hearing it in the writer’s voice,
01:00:49
really sends it home. And then when you get back, you can actually go through and just highlight the hell out of it and dog-eat it and beat it up. So Steve, it’s always an honor, my friend. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing for helping us overcome resistance and understand that the thing that we’re fighting for is truly worth it. And that’s why it’s guarded by resistance in the first place. Thanks, Marcus. Thanks for having me. It’s great to see you. It’s great to talk to you. I’ll do it anytime. Put me on your whatever list you have there. And I’m happy to talk to you anytime. It’s great. I can’t wait. Thank you.
