You’ll Never Find Peace Until You Fight This Battle - Steven Pressfield

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1:26Steven Pressfield:Terms and conditions apply. It's the nature of life. When we're cast out of Eden and God said to us, henceforth shalt thou eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face. It's the nature of life, I think, to confront obstacles, which is what every story is about, the hero encountering obstacles, and that it is the nature of life. It's why adversity, as you've said many times, is transformative. We hate it for mistakes in our life that produce adversity. Resistance, again, like war, is the nature of life, unfortunately.

1:58Anthony Scaramucci:You know this as an author. I've experienced this as an entrepreneur. You've got to go through the Shawshank redemption sometimes. It just sucks, but it is what it is. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is a legend, Steven Pressfield. He's a world-renowned author. He's the author of War of Art, Gates of Fire, the legend of bagger vance and since i read the bagavita i got that one by the way turning pro among many others uh but listen i've been a fan of yours for almost 30 years steven uh it's truly an honor to have you on the show uh just for people your background you're born in trinidad raised in a military household went to duke university and then the u.s marine corps of course that's not a straight line path but uh to becoming one of the legendary writers of all time but take us back and how did you get so excited about writing i uh well first of all

2:58Steven Pressfield:anthony it's really a pleasure to be on here with you you know i'm a big i've been a fan of yours for as long as you've been out there and so god bless you for everything you're doing um i think uh you know i my first job was in new york probably not very far from where you are right now as in advertising and i had a boss who wrote a novel and it became a hit overnight and he quit left the job you know we'll have to become a writer and i thought well hell why don't i do that so 30 years later i finally got published that's how it started i never dreamed about it as a kid

3:33Anthony Scaramucci:well you've written candidly about all of this and about how long it took you to get that first paycheck as a writer uh i was will say one of your interviews you said 17 years and you talked about all these different jobs but i'm curious looking back now how necessary were those what i guess winston churchill would call the the wilderness years in terms of fortifying your

3:57Steven Pressfield:writing i think they were you know absolutely necessary for me you know i came from uh i grew up on long island and then in westchester county in a kind of a leave it to beaver type of family and I think that I was much too sheltered in terms of being able to know, you know, anything about how the world worked or how my own head worked. So I really did need those kind of wilderness years. Absolutely, you know, the hero's journey type of thing.

4:24Anthony Scaramucci:What impresses me about your writing is it's historical fiction, but there's a lot of truth in what's going on. And also the human emotion is so real. So where are we getting that from? You know, you described leaving Parris Island as an example. At least no one could ever send me back here again. And then years later when you were working as a soldier, I feel like that helped you in Gates of Fire. Tell us about some of the things in your background that helped to frame the vivid writing. uh the you know you you possess such a an amazing skill for capturing the moment with your

5:08Steven Pressfield:fictional character i think it's it's a great question but i think it's not i don't know if it's true of any other writer or other writers as well that i'm not sure you draw directly from your experience at all i think the uh the sort of um breaking yourself down type of thing that happens to you when you go from, you know, one bad job to another one to another one does put you in touch with, you know, I'm a believer of the goddess or the muse in that inspiration coming from some other place. And I do think it's sort of, it helps you to be, to trust your own imagination and to sort of let go of the reins and let stuff come to you.

5:53Steven Pressfield:You know, a lot of times I really don't feel like I'm responsible for what's on the page at all. I feel like I'm just sort of letting it come through and letting it come out.

6:05Anthony Scaramucci:No, you know, it's interesting because Dan Brown just wrote a book, I think I have it here, called The Secret of Secrets. He says that our consciousness may not be in between our ears and behind our eyes. We may be drawing it from the universe. Is that more of what I'm hearing? I've certainly heard that too.

6:25Steven Pressfield:And I believe that, you know, I think when they finally figure out what the human brain is about, it's more about shrinking things down to a level that we can handle than it is about being the center of consciousness. I don't believe that the center of consciousness is our brain. I can't, I don't base that on anything, Anthony, I really don't know. But it does feel like, you know, we're receptors at the center of a much larger field and that uh you know we're tuned trying to tune our radio to the cosmic radio station if we're artists of any kind or anybody that depends on um creating a world of one kind or another whether it's dance or music or writing or whatever yeah it's it's a good segue into the

7:11Anthony Scaramucci:war of art because you know that in that we're fighting ourselves right we're fighting our inner enemy. Tell us about the inner enemy. Tell us about some of our embedded survivor's instinct for cynicism and negativity that the artist has to overcome to really shape their identity, shape their dreams, et cetera.

7:34Steven Pressfield:Well, one of the, I think one of the things, if you're a writer at all or any other thing, when you sit down in front of one of these things, you can feel a force, a negative force radiating off that, resisting you, right? It's going to make you say, well, maybe not today. Let's do this tomorrow. Let's go to the beach. Let's, you know, whatever, distracting ourselves. And that force, that negative force that I call resistance with a capital R, because it resists us, is like the first thing I think that any kind of creative person has to overcome. Forget about any story you want to tell, any music you want to write.

8:15Steven Pressfield:If you can't overcome that force of self-sabotage, you're not going to get anywhere at all. So The War of Art, that book of mine, is really about the war between your ears, you know. And in fact, let me ask you, do you experience this yourself in your work, in your podcasting, and your stuff that you do, do you feel that negative force of resistance?

8:39Anthony Scaramucci:Well, I would say not only do I experience that, I think it's ancestral. I think my whole family has experienced that. You have to remember, I come from a family of rural farmers, coal miners. These are people that were working in low-level day jobs in Italy. They got themselves to the United States to become coal miners or masons. And so I think that there's always that level of can't-do-ism that you have to hit this override switch of can-do-ism and you have to build a consistent habit. I could very easily, Stephen, be a cash potato. Let's put it that way. Yeah, couldn't we all? Or I could very easily take it on less ambitious enterprises.

9:25Anthony Scaramucci:But I think what I got out of that book, The War of Art, was that everybody feels that way. I think it was a comforting book, by the way. I think it was therapeutic. I have two children that are in the arts. One is a performance singer and actress. She's been on tour with Andrea Bocelli. She played Christine in Phantom of the Opera. My son is a 26-year-old aspiring film director. and both of them have been plagued with the self-doubt, the self-talk going in the wrong direction. And I gave them copies of your book. I think what happens when you read your book, you find comfort. There's a loneliness to being an artist.

10:10Anthony Scaramucci:There's a loneliness to being an entrepreneur and a creative. And I think what you share in the book is that there is a journey, as you say. There's a hero. We're going to get to Bagger Vance in a second, but there's a hero's journey in all of us. And if we follow the signs and follow the calling, it's just going to be a much more interesting life. You know, and we won't, we won't have a lot of regrets, even if we've made a lot of mistakes. Why would I follow you?

10:37Steven Pressfield:I could relate so much to the, your story that you, you know, of your life and everything like that.

10:43Anthony Scaramucci:A lot of, a lot of mistakes, Steven, but you know, and somebody asked me this morning, why you made two very big mistakes. How do you live with it? I said, well, you left out the 98 things that I got right. I mean, we're going to make a lot of mistakes, you know. But how is your view of humans, you know, how they confront or avoid resistance? How has that changed over the years from your perspective? And how do you think it will continue to evolve?

11:09Steven Pressfield:I'm not sure about other people. I can only talk about myself, you know. But one thing I can say, when I originally wrote The War of Art, and they kind of put out the idea of resistance as an internal battle. I thought like, I'm the only one who's experiencing this, or maybe it's only writers. And to my amazement, of course, it was just across the field, you know, comedians, dancers, photographers, and particularly entrepreneurs, because they're, you know, as you know, you're alone in a room trying to figure out how you're going to sell something or make something. But for myself, resistance hasn't changed at all in like 50 years.

11:46Steven Pressfield:You know, it still hits me first thing in the morning. It's still something I have to overcome from the minute I open my eyes. And the only change really is it's gotten a little more diabolical and a little more nuanced in terms of faking me out, you know, but it never goes away. You have to slay the dragon every morning. I'm sure you would agree with that.

12:07Anthony Scaramucci:No, no question. Listen, I, I, there's a, there's a snooze button in all of us. I mean that metaphorically, right? You're just going to hit the snooze button, worry about it tomorrow. But, you know, there's a, you know, I don't know. When I step back and I look at all of the things that I've read from you, there's something in there about the ancient battlefield. And there's something in there about the modern inner struggles. And there's a warrior code in there, you possess. And so again, let's make it specific to you. Tell us about the warrior code. And if you had to distill it, what is it?

12:48Steven Pressfield:Well, first I would say that, I mean, a bunch of my fiction stuff is about actual war, particularly in the ancient world. But then the war of art, which is really about the war between your ears. So I definitely see life as a battle, life as a war we wake up in the morning and there's an enemy right across from us and it never lets us go and we the virtues of a warrior i think are the same virtues of an artist or an entrepreneur or anybody that's on their own um you know patience courage um the willing embrace of adversity uh love of one's brothers love of the enemy all of those things are are the same whether you're a warrior fighting with a sword or somebody that's trying to make an album or make a movie or sing like your daughter, you know, it's a dog-eat-dog struggle inside our heads, you know, day after day.

13:49Steven Pressfield:That's just the way it is. That's life, I think. Marcus Aurelius said, I know you're a fan of him, you know, he said, life is warfare and a journey far from home.

14:00Anthony Scaramucci:and i couldn't agree more with it and also you know the joseph campbell stories about the trials and tribulations of being the hero and what comes with being the hero is the setbacks and how you how you deal with it i want to i want to go to the legend of bagger vance because and i want you to tell me about the baga dita if i'm pronouncing it right you know i read it i read it a long time ago uh one of my professors at tufts gave it to me told me i needed to read it and so i read it and then the legend of bagger vance came out i was like oh my god this is so clever uh so tell me about your first reading of the historical hindu text and tell me your idea about converting it into a golf story uh and did you and i want to learn about robert redford too before this is over but go ahead let let's start with those bhagavad-gita is the story of the great

14:56Steven Pressfield:warrior arjuna and the eve of a of a battle where uh and his um charioteer is krishna in other words god in human form and the whole story of the bhagavad-gita is kind of a mentor protege story where where uh um arjunas charioteer kind of gives him spiritual instruction throughout the course of the story and he talks about such things as duality and non-duality karma yoga previous lives etc etc in other words really getting right down to the most primal level of stuff like that. So as I'm reading that, if you're a writer, you're always looking for stories you could rip off, right? You're always looking for structures that you could steal from.

15:46Steven Pressfield:And so when I thought, what really appealed to me about Bhagavad Gita and that whole story was that God, i.e. Krishna, appears to us and to Arjuna as a servant, right? He's the charioteer. He's working for Arjuna, which is much like the Christ story, right? It's a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and so on and so forth. So I thought, having grown up in a little bit of a golfy environment, I thought, why not tell a story about a great golf champion and his caddy is God or is, you know, another servant, right? The guy who carries his bag. So that's, so that was how I sort of figured, Let me just steal the structure and I'll flip it over into a different story.

16:32Steven Pressfield:And by the way, when I had this idea, Anthony, I thought this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life. It's completely uncommercial. Who's going to care about this? But I was just seized by it and just had to do it.

16:44Anthony Scaramucci:Look, I'm not a golfer, but I love the book and I love the movie because of the trials and tribulations. So when they call you up and they tell you they want to make a movie of the book, what say you?

16:57Steven Pressfield:Well, the first thing, the first phone call I got was me getting fired. And this was by Robert Redford's producing partner, Jake Ebert. It's a wonderful guy who did Gandhi, Chariots of Fire. And after he fired me, he was Robert Redford wanted to make the movie himself, wanted his movie, not me. um i i had to thank jake because it was the first time i'd ever been fired where they actually told me i was fired and i didn't have to read about it in the paper you know a few days later so but so they were passive aggressive no not at all but did you like the movie did you like the

17:36Anthony Scaramucci:interpretation no i didn't book in the movie um yeah most authors don't by the way so i'm not

17:41Steven Pressfield:I think once you cash the check, you're not entitled to bitch about it. So I won't say anything. I'm very happy that they made the movie and grateful to everybody that did it. I, you know, like every other writer, I think I wish it had been a little bit different.

17:56Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah, listen, I respect that. The only person that I have found that liked the movie adaptation was Mario Puzo, primarily because he wrote the screenplay and he was so involved in the movie. Well, that was a great one. Right. so do you find that writing about a slower sport like golf versus war required more patience

18:17Steven Pressfield:no not i mean writing is its whole other world you know it's um it always requires patience and it also requires kind of uh uh letting go of of your own expectations and kind of plunging in and just sort of letting it rip you know but no so the slowness of it didn't didn't make any it really is a war story. You know, that's, you know, it doesn't seem like it, but it is.

18:42Anthony Scaramucci:When you talk about ego and you talk about controlling ego, which is true in sports, war, professional development, uh, and people, when you, you're out there speaking, sir, people say, okay, Steven, what have you learned in your life about ego and hubris? And how would you educate me?

19:02Steven Pressfield:Well, first of all, I, I have heard you talk about this a lot and I, and it's, it always rings a bell, I'm really, you know, really proud of you that you can speak about it so candidly and honestly. But certainly from the artist's point of view, when you're sitting down trying to write something, whether it's music or whatever, you got to get rid of the ego because nothing good comes out of the ego. You know, it just has to go away completely. That's in many ways.

19:30Anthony Scaramucci:Not to interrupt you, but why, and I agree with you, by the way, and I talk about this all the time, but why does nothing good come out of the ego? Tell us.

19:38Steven Pressfield:you know, it's, it's sort of a, it's kind of a mystery, you know? Um, if you think about Beethoven, there's no way he sits down and goes, Oh, that's what I'm going to do. That has to come to him from somewhere, right? He hears it in some mysterious way. And the more he would try to do that with the ego, right? I'm going to write a great freaking symphony, the harder it gets. I saw an interview with Bob Dylan and he was talking about what I forget what the lyrics were masters of war or something like that but he kind of rattled them off and there's these fantastic lyrics and he says he says there's no way you can write that that just has to you just have to hear that and so even he was impressed with the stuff that he put down so the ego has to go away one And in fact, I would say that's the real artist skill that takes so many years to develop, which is sort of similar to the skill of a monk that's meditating or something of making the ego go away.

20:43Steven Pressfield:Easier said than done. Really hard.