Winning the War of Art: Overcoming Resistance with Steven Pressfield

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What's up, everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast, which is soon, maybe it already is.
We're in the process of rebranding it to the Selling Online podcast on where you are right now welcome back to the podcast pumped to have you here uh and if you haven't been paying attention to the youtube channel lately we have been crushing it doing a lot of really fun things and so uh this episode is going to be based partially on a youtube uh on a youtube video we published recently youtube video was about one of my favorite books of all time called the war of art by steven pressfield and so um you have chance, first off, if you haven't read that book yet, it's all about how to overcome resistance. So what I'm going to do is first part of the podcast, you have a chance to listen to the audio from the YouTube video because it's going to help you guys to see just the highlights from that book, War of Art.
And then after that, I actually had a chance to interview Steven Pressfield for over an hour. And so after that, we'll jump over to the actual live interview and have a chance to hear some brilliance from the man himself.
So with that said, we're going to jump right in directly to the YouTube video, the audio version of it at least to learn about resistance, how to overcome resistance. And then I'll jump back here with you guys and then we'll set up the interview with Steven Pressfield.
All right, that said, let's overcome resistance right now. In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over a billion dollars in my own products and services online.
This show is going to show you how to start, grow, and scale a business online. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast.
99% of people in this world fail because they can't conquer one thing. This book right here is one of my favorite books of all time.
They teach you how to overcome resistance. Every single one of us feels resistance every single day.
Most of us multiple times throughout the day. Every time the alarm clock goes off, you feel resistance.
Like, I want to turn it off, right? You want to check your phone. You want to scroll one more time.
You want to watch one more episode on Netflix. There's these things that keep holding us back.
They think it's some external force.

I don't have the time, the money, the energy,

but the reality is all of us have the same resources.

The thing that keeps you from being successful

is learning how to control resistance.

When you can control the internal resistance you're having,

then externally you can achieve the things you want in life.

This book, if you haven't read before,

is called The War of R by Steven Pressfield,

one of my favorite authors of all time.

I'm going to walk through four different steps to help you to overcome resistance so you can get your goals, accomplish your dreams, and change the world. All right, with that said, I'm going to walk you guys through the four steps that you need to learn to be able to overcome resistance in your life.
And over here, we got them. So these are the four steps to actually beat resistance.
If it's been holding you back for any amount of time, today is the day. It's going to be gone forever.
I'm so excited for you to learn these things. All right.
So step number one is called expose the enemy. The first thing you need to do is understand exactly what resistance is.
Okay. A lot of people don't even know this, that internal force is the thing that's keeping them from success.
It's happening every single day over and over and over and over again. So what is resistance? Well, inside of the book, The War of Art, in here he's talking about people who are creating some type of art, right? So everyone's got different art.
Some of you guys are writers, or you're designers, or you're content creators, or you're an athlete, but everyone's got a different art, right? And so The War of Art is this internal war we're having as we're trying to create our art. And obviously, Stephen is a writer, so he's using a lot of these metaphors in terms of someone who's an author who's writing, but it's true for anybody, right? So this is what he says.
He says, there's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't. And the secret is this.
It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.
What keeps us from sitting down is called resistance. I could replace this with any type of art.
Let's say, for example, you are a bodybuilder. You're trying to get in shape, right? Or maybe not a bodybuilder.
You're just out of shape and you want to get in shape. So I might say the same sentence like, the secret that people who are in shape know that the people who aren't in shape don't know is this.
It's not the working out that's hard, right? It's the getting to the gym that's the hard part. What keeps you from getting to the gym is resistance.
So I want you to think about this inside your life. Like, what are all of the times that resistance is hitting you? Now, I had some of my clients do this one time.
We sat down and said, for an entire 24-hour period of time, let's map out every time resistance hits. Okay, and I did the exercise with them.
The craziest thing is my alarm goes off every morning at 4.50. Alarm goes off 4.50.
First thing is I turn it off, and instantly, within a half a second of waking up, resistance hits me and goes, roll back over, go back to bed. So I grab my pad of paper.
I'm like, 4.50 a.m. Resistance wanted me to go back to bed, right? Then I get out of bed.
It's cold. And my resistance is like, get back in bed.
It's cold. Hit it again.
By the time it was like five o'clock in the morning, resistance already tried to stop me at 10 times. And what's crazy for me, as soon as I became aware of the enemy, as soon as I was able to understand this is who it is, then I was able to address it and figure out ways to protect myself from the enemy, okay? That's why step number one is exposing the enemy.
One thing that Preston Phil talks about here inside the book, he talks about what he calls the unlived life. He says it's the athlete who doesn't compete, or it's the writer who never writes, or it's the painter who never paints, or the entrepreneur who never actually starts his own business, right? And for most of us in parts of our life, like we're not doing that.
We're not living the life that we were called to actually live. So that is the very first thing to understand is to understand the enemy is, because when you're aware of it, now we can actually beat it.
Which now brings me to step number two in beating resistance. Step number two is this.
Is ready for this? It's understanding the lies of resistance, okay? Now resistance is going to give you a whole bunch of lies to keep you from being successful. Now I'm going to walk you through a couple of these lies that most of us hit every single day.
So the first lie is the lie of procrastination. Now this is one of the worst lies that resistance uses because resistance is not going to tell you, oh, don't go to the gym, right? It's going to say, go to the gym tomorrow.
Resistance is not going to say, don't write the book. It's going to say, I'm going to write the book tomorrow, right? It's trying to get us to procrastinate the thing.
And this is what's fascinating for most people don't know about you. Um, but if we procrastinate something until tomorrow, till manana, when manana comes, right? What happens? They get procrastinate the next day and the next day till we never actually get things done, right? Happens for all of us in every single area of our life, right? So understand that the very first lie that resistance is going to tell to you is procrastination.
Not that you're not going to do the thing, but you're going to do it later. When you understand that, right? And I know my enemy, I know when procrastination is coming, I'm saying, that's resistance.
I got to stop that. I cannot procrastinate.
I got to take action today. The second lie is what's called the shadow calling.
This is where resistance will allow you to do a version of what you're called to do, but not actually the thing that you were called to do. Okay.
For example, uh, with Steven Pressfield in this book, he talks about for a long time, he wanted to be a writer. He wanted to write books.
He wanted to write screenplays for movies, all sorts of stuff. And eventually he actually did.
If you had, if you know this, he's the one that wrote the screenplay for the movie Bagger Vance, right? With Will Smith, like one of the best movies of all time. He wrote that, but it took him like 40 years of writing before he redid this.
Okay. First he was doing writing copy for advertising companies.
Then he was writing scripts for these projects. He didn't like that.
He never actually did the thing he wanted. He was doing a shadow version of it.
His calling was to write books, to write screenplays, and he was doing a version of it, right? He was writing copy for her clients. He was doing things, these other projects where he was writing, but he wasn't pulling into his calling.
Now, shadow calling is a metaphor for your real calling, okay? It looks very, very similar. The difference is there's no risk if you fail inside the shadow calling.
That's why resistance allows you to do that, right?

If you're writing for somebody else

and it doesn't work, it doesn't really matter.

For you to put yourself out there

and to write something and put it out into the world,

right, there's consequences if it doesn't work.

It's scary, it's fearful,

so resistance is always trying to push you

to a shadow calling.

So that's lie number two,

is that the shadow calling is your actual real calling.

Lie number three is what we call

pleasure not fulfillment, okay?

Resistance is always trying to get you a cheaper form of the thing you actually desire the most. It's trying to give you the dopamine hit.
We get the reward without the actual effort. Nothing good comes in life when you're getting just the reward without the effort that goes into it.
And this is true in all sorts of things. A couple examples I wrote down.
Number one is having an actual relationship with somebody you love versus pornography. One, you get the reward without the risk.
Number two, you get actual fulfillment. Reading about something all day long, but not actually doing it, right? How many of us are reading and listening to podcasts and going through the motions, but we're never actually doing the thing that we're called to do, okay? Another one, I have so many friends who get in this trap where they go to school and they keep going to school and they keep going to school and they're so scared to get out of the school system because they don't want to actually do the work.
And then lie number four, this is one step deeper than a shadow calling where you're kind of in the thing. Step number four, lie number four, is literally full sedation.
When you're just sedated, you're trying to not even focus on the dream, you're getting into drugs and alcohol, anything to get your brain away from the pain of knowing that you're not living into your calling. So these are the lies the resistance has given you to keep you from stepping into your actual calling.
All right, you guys ready for step number three on how to beat resistance? This one is one of my favorites of all time. This one is really cool.
It is called the bigger the dream, the bigger the resistance. Now I hear people say all the time, they come to me like, hey Russell, I want to do this thing, but man, there were so many obstacles, so many things that are happening.
They're like, there must be a sign this is not something for me to actually do, right? Like, if I was supposed to do this, it would be easier. And so they step away from their calling because of the trials and the headaches and the heartaches that come when they're trying to pursue the thing, right? And this is the reality.
That's not true. The opposite is actually true.
Now, I was lucky enough after reading this book and freaking out because it's one of my favorites of all time. I messaged the author, Stephen Pressfield.
I said, can I interview you for a few minutes?

I want to find out some more stuff about resistance, how I can beat it inside of my own life.

And luckily for me and for you, he said yes.

And so I actually have a clip over here of Stephen Pressfield from my interview.

And I want to show this clip specifically because he's talking about this concept of the bigger the dream you have, the bigger resistance is going to be.

So with that said, let's check out this clip from the man himself, Stephen Pressfield.

Imagine a tree in the middle of a sunny meadow. The minute the tree appears, a shadow appears.
And the shadow is equal to the tree, right? If it's a big tree, it's a big shadow. So in the terms of resistance, the tree is the dream that you have.
The book you want to write, the venture you want to do, whatever. And resistance is the shadow.
So there would never, there would not, what I want to say is resistance always comes second. There would be no resistance if there wasn't a dream, if there wasn't a calling that was inside you.
So the good news of that is when you're feeling big resistance, that big shadow, that shows that there's a big tree there or something. There's a big dreams because resistance always comes like Newton's third law of motion, equal and opposite reaction.
It's a reaction to an aspiration, to a book you want to write or a movie you want, whatever it is. So don't be freaked out, I would say to anybody, by that dark cloud.
That dark shadow is an indication that the dream is for real and it's big. Okay, so that is the key for you guys to understand, right? The bigger the dream, the bigger the resistance, okay? If you have a big dream, you start pursuing it, it gets hard.
It doesn't mean, oh, it's not meant to be. No, it means that it is meant to be, right? The greatest things in life don't come from simplicity.
It comes through the pain, through the hard work, right? It's getting the, it's going through the effort, the risk, the trials, and from the other side of that is when the greatest things come out. So understanding step number three here is that the bigger the dream, the bigger the resistance, and that's okay, okay, for me now in my life, I'm going after something big.
I'm like, man, the resistance is huge here. Like I get doubled down, like even more excited knowing that it means that this calling, this thing that I'm chasing, the thing I'm pursuing is something that's going to change a lot of people's lives.
And the same thing is true for you. Okay, so when you're in your own personal war of art, when you're trying to create your art, whatever that thing is for you, and you feel the big resistance, don't step away from it, lean into it, knowing that means you're on the right track, okay? That brings me to step number four.
So how do we actually beat this thing, right? Obviously, we gotta become aware of it. Number two, we gotta understand the lies it's using to beat us.
Number three, we have to understand that even if the resistance feels so heavy and so big that we can't pursue it, knowing that that is a sign that you are on the right path, the last step here is then how do we beat it? And this is one of my favorite ones. And the reality is the way we beat it is through action.
And you've heard people talk about this before, but this is the key to actually beating resistance, okay? Now in life, there's different types of motion, right? There's circular motion, okay? And most people get stuck in circular motion where they're just kind of spinning their wheels, they're going around these ruts over and over, and they never progressing. They're never moving forward.
Okay, how many guys feel like that sometimes? Maybe you feel like that right now. Napoleon Hill calls that drifting.
He says we drift into this hypnotic rhythm where we're just like nothing's changing our life. We keep succumbing to resistance and so like nothing ever progresses.
The second type of motion is forward. It's taking action.
You're actually moving forward, right? Now, the problem with direction is when you decide to move forward, there's always a cost, right? Sitting here and drifting, there's no cost, you're just kind of bouncing off the walls, doing the same thing over and over again. When you decide to move forward into momentum and actually take action, there's a cost, which is why it's scary, it's why it's hard, it's why the resistance starts coming every time you decide to move forward, right? When you're creating your art and you decide to move forward, there's always going to be that resistance, okay? And the reason why is that our brains are programmed naturally to do a couple things, okay? One thing our brain is naturally built and hard-coded in our brain to do

is to avoid pain at all costs, right? You feel pain, it's like, I don't want to go there. I don't

want to do that, okay? So our brain tries to avoid pain, number one. Number two, our brain is trained

to seek pleasure. Let me go find the fastest hit of pleasure possible.
How do I get my dopamine hit as quick as possible, right? On my phone, whatever we can do, we try to seek pleasure. Number three is our brain wants us to conserve energy, conserve calories so you don't run out of the calories we need to survive.
And number four is our brain wants to prove itself right. We call this confirmation bias, okay? So those are the four things.
Our brain wants to avoid pain, seek pleasure, conserve energy, and prove itself right. Now, to be successful and to beat resistance, you literally have to do the exact opposite of what your brain has been trained to do, okay? Number one, instead of avoiding pain, we have to move out of our comfort zone over and over and over again, right? Creating art's not gonna be simple.
Writing books is not simple. So not only do we have, we can't avoid pain, we have to step into the pain.
Okay, Number two, instead of seeking pleasure at any cost we can, to be successful in any area of life, you have to actually delay gratification. You have to allow that to build up before you get the reward.
Number three, instead of conserving energy to be successful, you have to take massive action. That's the opposite of conserving energy, right? It's waking up early.
It's working hard, it's doing the things that your brain does not wanna do, okay?

And then number four, to be successful,

you can't just try to prove yourself right.

To be successful in anything like,

you have to question your beliefs,

question your assumptions,

and become teachable in becoming a student.

So those are the steps for how you can be at resistance.

Now, I wanna give you guys one more key

to being successful with this, okay?

Every single time you do something, right?

You start moving forward, you're into a direction, instantly, just like Steven Pressfield talked about. As soon as you do that, resistance is gonna show up, okay? And our default, our brain quickly wants to go back to drifting, to the simpler version of it, right? So what's our job, okay? There's a quote from Viktor Frankl.
It's one of my favorites. He says, between the stimulus and the response, there's a space, and in that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our responses.
In our response lies our growth and freedom. So as soon as resistance hits us, there's a space, right? Most people hit resistance, they give up.
For all of you guys, as soon as you hit resistance, there's this little gap of space where you actually have the ability to choose and say, no, I'm going to move forward. No, I'm not going to believe that lie.
No, I'm not going to procrastinate. And that's where all success and growth and happiness comes.
So that is what resistance is. That's why The War of Art is literally one of my favorite books of all time.
This is one, I say about once a month I read it or listen to the audio book. The nice thing is it's really short.
It is the key to help you to overcome resistance in your life because the reality is like you being successful, not successful is almost never about the external circumstances. It's not about your resource, about the money you don't have, the time you don't have.
It's almost always an internal thing. It's the fight and the battle you're having with your brain every single day, right? Resistance is that thing that's trying to keep you back from being successful.
So if you have art that you know you are called to create, right? To change people's lives. Again, it could be a business you're launching.
It could be a video on YouTube you wanna make. It could be a podcast.
It could be anything. Whatever your art is, if you wanna learn how to win this war of art, right? To beat resistance, to be successful, this book is one of my favorites.
I hope you guys love it. Now, a couple of really cool things.
Number one, I did this entire interview with Steven Pressfield. It is insane.
We had so much fun going deep into this book, talking about resistance, how to beat resistance, how to go pro and a whole bunch of other things. Unfortunately, I'm not going to attach that onto the end of this video because it's about an hour long.
But if you go and search for the podcast, I'm going to have the entire long form versions on the podcast. Just go to your favorite podcast app and search in Russell Brunson or selling online or marketing secrets.
And you'll probably find the Steven Pressfield interview. It'll be the entire thing.
And you are going to love it, so check that out. Number two is if you are enjoying videos like this or I'm going deep into my favorite books, let me know in the comments down below.
I'm really enjoying making these videos, and I hope that you love them, and if you do love them, again, let me know in the comments down below, but on top of that, please share these videos to other people. The more people that watch these videos, the more I know you like them, and the more likely I am to make a whole bunch more of them.
I've got so many that I want to break down and share with you. In the last two years, I've gotten over 18,000 books.
I haven't read them all yet, but I'm trying to. I would love once a week to share my favorite books with you guys.
And that way you don't have to go read all the books. My goal is for me to go take the coolest parts out of them and share them with you.
And then the ones that you're like, I want to go deep on this, you have the ability to do that. So let me know.
And then also down below in the description, we're going to give you some really cool things. We're working on some study guides that go with each of the books, outlines and other things that'll all be in the description down below.
Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. That's how you can find out when the next video is gonna drop as we go deeper into the next book.
With that said, thank you guys so much. Hope you enjoyed this episode.
I love sharing these things with you. And if you haven't yet, go read The War of Art.
There's a link in the description as well. We can get a copy of this book.
And this one of those those books that changed my life, and it'll change your life as well. All right, everyone.
Hope you enjoyed the first half of this podcast. So, by the way, if you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel yet, make sure to go to YouTube.
Search for Russell Brunson. Go subscribe to my channel.
We are dropping bombs every single day, like the one you just heard. I hope you enjoyed it.
But now I want to give you guys some bonus stuff because you guys are my podcast listeners, my faithful few. The ones who I love the most.
Don't tell the YouTube channel that, but you guys are, you're my favorite. So I'm going to give you guys access to, it's an hour long interview I did with Steven Pressfield.
We haven't launched this live yet anywhere else, but I thought you guys want a sneak peek, right? You want to hear my interview with him. I'm not going to lie.
I was so nervous to interview him. Uh, I've looked up to him for such a long time.
I love his work. I love his art.
I love his writing. I love everything.
And so, uh, a little nervous in this one, but I was. I don't know why.
I just – I kind of was, but I had a really fun time interviewing him and going deeper into resistance and turning pro and all the cool things he talks about in his books. So I hope you enjoy the last half of this podcast, which is my interview with Steven Pressfield.
What's fun for me about this is a couple things. Again, I read War of and um in there you talk about resistance we'll go deeper into that here in a little bit but um i read that and it was funny because at the time i was in the middle of trying to write a book and i was like i was feeling that as as an as a writer like i was feeling that as such a big thing but then in my audience like we have you know we have a hundred thousand entrepreneurs that use our I started talking to them all about it.
And it was crazy because a lot of them aren't writers, but they're, they're all sorts of things from, from marketers to copywriters, to designers, to, you know, people being social media, social media people or podcasters. And everyone is just like, as soon as I would, as soon as I would talk about that, I was like, you guys read the war of art.
And I talk about resistance, All of them instantly like, oh my gosh, yes, that is the thing.

Like I feel that all the time. And it gave everyone something very tangible to think about and talk about.
So I'm excited to share some of those things. But before we do, sorry, I'm just so excited.
Your new books came out, Government Cheese, and I had a chance over the last week and a half to read the entire thing. I finished it two days ago, which was fun because it's your whole story.
It was fun for me because it kind of pieced together all of your stories from all the different books into one timeline. And I feel like I know you so much better because of that.
And the thing I want to start with is this book, The Government Cheesebook, which I have right here, is basically it's kind of like your autobiography, right? Going through everything. Yeah, it's really a memoir, you know.
And like you're in Boise, you know. I used to actually drive a truck to pick up potatoes in Boise.
That's not in the book, but there's connections everywhere there. But it's a memoir.
It is kind of my life story. And the reason I wrote it is just like what you're talking about for your entrepreneurs and people that are writers and copywriters and so on and so forth that are struggling, you know, with their own stuff and sometimes feel like, oh, this is taking forever and I'm bouncing around.

I don't know where I am, you know, and I figured if I would tell kind of my story, because it took me such a long time to kind of break through that that might be encouraging to people that, you know, guy can you know live through all that stuff that there's hope for everybody else too for sure so i think before we go into like the resistance side of things like what i think normally happens at least for me it's like i felt i feel like i call it a lot of times a calling i feel called to do something i feel this mission i feel something it was interesting when It was interesting when I was reading this, it was fascinating because the first, I can't remember how many, 10, 20 years, when you were driving and doing all the different things, you talked about your huge typewriter that you literally carried in your car everywhere. And so I'm curious, when did you know that was going to be your calling to be a writer? Because it was a long time before you actually became a writer, but it sounds like at the very beginning, you knew that was something so much so that you were hauling this huge typewriter, you know, from place to place, from apartment to apartment and carrying it everywhere you were going.
Well, I was the sort of longer version of the story. I was working, my first job was as a copywriter in New York City at a big, you know, Madison Avenue ad agency.
And I had a boss named Ed Hannibal, and he wrote a novel, and it was an instant hit. And the guy quit his job and became like a full-time writer.
And I saw this happen. I thought, well, shit, why don't I do the same thing? So I quit, and I tried to write a book for about two years.
And of course, it was like, I had no business doing it. I had no concept of how hard it would be.
I was way too young, etc, etc. And so my life sort of collapsed at that point.
I was, you know, divorced, blah, blah, blah, I wound up kind of on the road. And I felt like the only way I could get out of this thing was to sort of write my way out of it.
You know, it was like, I tried this thing, I failed failed you know um resistance was what defeated me resistance with a capital r but at that time i had no idea that there was such a thing so anyway i just was sort of uh in a position kind of russell of shame you know as i kind of talk about in government cheese where i felt like i've let everybody down i've let myself down. I've somehow got to right the ship.
And so it just took another 27 years or something like that. Had you known it would take 27 years, would you have gone down that journey? If somebody had told me that, it would have been a different story.
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Restrictions apply. Do you still have that original typewriter that you were using back then? This is actually not it.
My original one is in a storage space. But this is kind of a stand-in for the original one.
Well, I'm going to see offline. I'm going to beg you to see if I can buy your original one.
The reason why is, so one of my favorite authors is Napoleon Hill. And recently, the Napoleon Hill Foundation actually gave me Napoleon Hill's typewriter.
He wrote Think and Grow Rich on. So I have that in my collection now.
But it's funny because, again, I was never around during typewriter time, so I never had a chance to actually write on there. I can't even imagine.
I write in Google Docs, and it write in Google docs and it's stressful and I got, you know, me and editors and I'll edit in one spot. I don't know how people wrote just sitting down and writing that way.
You know, I can't imagine like in the book you talked about, you're editing, like actually copying and pasting, like literally cutting and gluing things around to, to make it. It's true.
It's like the reason why they have those phrases, copy and paste is because that's what it really used to be. know you literally would cut it and you literally would paste it you know um but because you didn't know any better there was no such no alternative so you just did it i'm curious back then like when you would write you write a book again because for me it's like i have some rewrites i'm copying and paste huge sections of the book like when you're writing something like that like some of your early novels i know the first I can't remember how many didn't get published but like when you're writing those like was it hard to know like from the beginning to the end like where you were even going on these journey with with the story and then we just retype huge sections or I'm sure I'm trying to visualize what that even would look like because I think nowadays so many like me and other writers complain about stuff versus like I can't imagine what it'd been like back then, you know?

Well, you would wind up kind of with pages that would, that would be scotch taped together.

And it'd be like, you know, three feet long, sprawling across your own, you're just like,

you know, you would do on a computer only actually had to do with real paper.

And it was, it was a kind of a crazy situation. Try to read it over to see if it makes sense.

No. But yeah, that was the way it went.
You know, it was definitely handmade stuff. So I want to go a little deeper with, um, this concept of like this calling that, that people feel right.
Especially we're going to talk about, um, later, I want to ask you about the shadow column, but initially it's the calling. Right.
So for me, it's like, I know the things I pursued in my life. It's like, I felt something that was in it.
I always think, it's like, I feel called to go do this thing. And it doesn't always make sense.
A lot of times it's like, I'm not qualified to do this. I'm not ready, but like, there's something that pulls me towards that.
And, um, I'm curious, kind of two, twofold for you. Like, like, did you feel like that? Like you wanted to be a writer and I don't know if it was like you wanted to write movies or books, like, but do you feel that? If so, like, what did that actually feel like? I want people to be able to identify like when they're feeling something more so than just like, oh, I should go do this thing.
But like, they're feeling something that's bigger than just themselves, like what that feels like, you know? Well, it definitely feels like that's who you really are, right? That's kind of your, it is your calling that you should be doing that. And at least for me, when I would try to do anything else, you know, like if I would get a copywriting job or something like that, I would be so depressed at the end of the day, really, you know, that I would have, the only thing that would save me would be to sit down at this old clunky typewriter and try to write something of my own, you know? But the other thing from a writer's point of view is that you're, you feel a call to a certain story know there's a book you want to write like i'm sure you felt this russell or you're feeling it right now you know that uh there's this story about whatever it is and you just got it and you start it and you're hooked on it and now you've got to finish it and you go through the same sort of things you're talking about where you once you're a few weeks into it, you say to yourself, what am I doing? You know, this is crazy.
This is not going anywhere. I've lost.
Nobody's going to buy this. I'm not good enough.
And all that kind of thing. And those are the sort of resistance points that you have to sort of learn to overcome.
Just like an entrepreneur, right, where you start something and you think, oh shit, what have I done? Right? There's no way this is going to pay off, et cetera, et cetera. But that just seems to be part and parcel of any creative enterprise where you are called, you get this, you do get that feeling, right? You feel like I've got to do this thing.
Nothing else is going to make me happy. I'm curious for you, do you feel like that calling is it, I've heard a lot of people, some people think it's something internal, some people think it's God.
Like, I'm curious for you, like, what do you feel like that? Where do they think that comes from? Well, I'm definitely a believer that life happens on two levels, that there's the material level that we're on, and there's a higher level above that. And we get called from that level.
You know, it's the muse, it's the goddess, that's the way I look at it, that it's sort of, you know, like they say about songwriters, they might be driving along the freeway, and suddenly a song will come into their head completely, you know, from start to finish, right? And they have to like, screech over to the side of the road and write it down before it goes away. So I definitely feel that ideas are coming from someplace else.
And it's our job to, you know, grab a hold of them and bring them into material being on this material plane. So cool.
I always think about that with mine. Like I have some where I feel these things come up and then I feel like there's times where like i take those things i run with them there's times where i don't and then it's weird when you see you don't you don't run something and then later you see somebody else runs with it i feel like god whoever's giving those things it's like he gives it somebody if you're doing something and he gives somebody else he's like someone's going to be a good steward of this idea someone's going to take it and run and so now i'm always like when i have that impression i'm like i want to be be a good steward of this.
I'm going to take it. I'm going to run with it.
Even if it doesn't make any sense. I'm like, I don't want someone else to have this.
And anyway, it's kind of interesting. Let me ask you, Russell, how do you deal with like the self-doubt that hits you when you start something? Like, I mean, when you were first messing around with potato guns, you said to yourself, what am I doing with this thing here? How do you, how do you deal with self-doubt when you're starting something new? First off, the fact that you know, the potato gun story is literally like the coolest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
So, so like, anyway, it's, that's number one. Um, yeah, it's, it's one of the things I think it's interesting because, um, in different areas of my life, it affects me differently, right? Like now in business, I've had success over a year.
So most things come to me now, it's like more easy. But like there's other parts where maybe my relationship where it's like I have way more fear that goes into it.
And I think a lot of times, sometimes the fear wins where it's just like, ah, you know, resistance or fear, like it keeps me. But other times it's like, at least for me, like I'm able to see like, I'm not a vision, but like I see like the calling calling, like where it's supposed to go and I see the benefit of it and like, okay, I'm going to go pursue this.
And, um, and again, sometimes, sometimes you make it far, sometimes you don't, but it's just like the pursuit of it, I think is the, is the key. It's not so much like the attainment as much as the pursuit.
Um, which is interesting. Um, it kind of leads to my next question I had for you because I hear a lot of entrepreneurs sometimes and usually this is after the fact where they're like, Oh, I created this thing because I wanted to help these people over here or whatever.
And which I think is a good, like we create to help other people obviously. But, but I also think when people, when they're trying to create for someone else besides themselves, it typically doesn't work.
And there's a quote you had in government cheese. I wrote down, it says, um, you said the thought of tailoring my output for some market or to please some imagined audiences never enters my mind.
This is for me. I'm writing to save my own life.
And I think that, like, I love your perspective on that. But I think it's like the fact, like, we have to become obsessed with the thing we're doing for ourselves, or else you're not going to have the energy to go through it, right? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Yeah, that's my theory. Actually, I just did a podcast a little while ago with Rick Rubin.
You know, he is the music entrepreneur, the guy that's sort of the godfather of hip hop. And that's absolutely what he believes.
And I believe it completely that when you're trying to imagine some audience and you're going to fill the need for them, you're coming from a place of the ego, I think, and not from a place of the heart. And the other way to look at it is to say, I've got to lead the audience.
They don't know what this story that's in my head or this idea that's in my head. If they did, they'd go for it.
So it's like when Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone, nobody was looking for that, right?

Nobody said, you know, do me a phone that's got apps and stuff on it. They didn't know what it was.

But he believed if I fall in love with this thing, everybody else or other people are going to fall in love with it too.

And I think that's just the way that the world seems to work.

You know, you have to fall in love with it yourself. Believe that if it's fun for you, it'll be fun for somebody else.
Yeah. I'm actually wanting to jump ahead where I was going to go and we'll come back.
But like in government cheese was really cool. Cause like you tell your story in such a way where you see, like, you know, you were driving trying to write and then you were writing books and you wrote, I think three or four novels that failed.
Right. And then you shifted to screenplays and then you were doing that.
And it got a point, like, I feel like in the story, I'm like, you were almost a success. It was like, Oh, you're about to be there.
Like I was like cheering for you. And then you're like, um, I'm going to go write this book.
Nobody wanted you to write this book. And I'm assuming this is where that came from, right? Like you were like, this is the thing I want to write.
And from that came Bagger, the legend of Bagger Vance. I'd love to hear just,

like, what were you thinking in that period where it's like, everything's finally working for me?

And then you're like, I feel called to this thing. I want to create for myself.
I'm going to leave this thing I'm working on for 20 years of my life and to go a whole other direction.

Well, the longer version of this story is that I had had a screenwriting career for

about 10 years, you know, kind of a B or C level, not an A level.

But I was sort of getting there.

And my agent, who was a good friend of mine, had done a lot of work for me,

you know, to get me out to the town and get people to know who I was.

And then suddenly talk about, you know,

I was just seized by this idea for The Legend of Bagger Vance.

But it was as a book, not as a movie. And I just knew that completely.
You know, there was no doubt in my mind. And when I told my agent that, he basically fired me, said, you know, I've been busting my ass for years for you to get you out there.
You go off for a year or something to write this book. People forget you in this town in a week and a half, you know.
But I was just so seized with it that I just absolutely had to do it, you know, come hell or high water. And, you know, not would it worked.
But that sort of goes to what we were talking about before about you, the creator, you, the entrepreneur, have to lead the audience, you know. But I had tremendous self-doubt about that book.
I thought, as I was writing it, I thought, a golf story, you know, that's mystical. I mean, who's going to be interested in that? But again, I was just seized by it.
I just had to do it. So sometimes, you know, that higher dimension takes over and you don't have a chance.
You just got to do it. Yeah.
I've never written a book that's not a how-to book yet. So I'm just curious, just personal, because like when you decided to go down and do the Legend of Agravance, like what did you see first? Was it the golf story? Was it the character? Like what was, how does that work in your mind as these characters start developing? What's the chicken and the egg in that process? I have no idea how that works.
I'm so curious. Well, and this is probably going to bore our listeners completely.
But there's a famous Hindu scripture called the Bhagavad Gita. I don't know if you've heard of this, but it has, you know, it's about the great warrior Arjuna and his charioteer.
And I was a fan of this book. I've read it many times, you know.

And one day I just thought, this is a great structure for a story. I can just put this in

a modern context and it'll work, you know. And so I was kind of seized by that.
I thought,

this is, the structure is great. It's like ripping off Romeo and Juliet or something like that,

you know it's going to work. So then once you're into it, it acquires a momentum of its own and characters appear and scenes start happening and new ideas come in just like an entrepreneurial venture, you know, where you start with one crazy thing, your potato gun, and next thing you know, you got, you know, you got a whole industry.
Yeah. That's so cool.
Oh, so cool. Okay.
I want to jump back then. So what I want to do is I want to talk about this.
So most creators or entrepreneurs or writers, they, they have this, this calling, they feel this thing that keeps pushing them to make them, it creates desire in your mind, right. To put you on the, on motion into, into momentum.
And then as soon as that starts happening, um, and it's funny, um, in the artist journey, you talk about the hero's journey, which is like one of my favorite frameworks. I talk about it in one of my books, but like in the hero's journey, the hero, here's the call to adventure.
And then immediately here's a refusal to call, right? Like, I'm not going to do it. And I feel like in my mind, when you first start talking about resistance, I was like, that's, that's what happens, right? The second you feel this calling, then it's like, Oh, it hits you.
And then it hits you. And then as you're moving through the process, it keeps hitting over and over again.
And so I'd love to start with you just kind of explaining what the resistance with a capital R. What is resistance? Because again, I think everyone feels this, but you made it such a tangible thing in my mind where now it's like, anyway, I'd love for you to kind of talk about resistance with a capital R.
Okay. First, let me just say that for the first,

you know, eight or nine years or longer than that of my career, I was being defeated by this force called resistance, and I never knew it even existed. So let me see if I can define it.
It's like when you sit down in front of one of these things, and you're facing the blank screen, You can feel a force radiating off that screen, a negative force trying to make you get up and leave, you know, right? It's definitely doesn't want you to do that job, whatever it is. And the way resistance appears is as a voice in your head.
And the voice in your head will tell you a couple of things. One of the things it'll tell you is you're not good enough to do this.
Who do you think you are? You're too old. You're too young.
You have no skills. You've never done this before.
This is a dumb idea. If it's been done before by a million people, better than that kind of voice, right? That'll try to force you back and stop you from doing it.
The other half of the voice is it will try to distract you and it will say click bait. You'll go down this, you know, the rabbit hole of whatever it is, or let's get drunk or let's have an affair or let's, you know, go to the beach.
Let's get whatever that kind of thing. And after a while, you recognize that there is an enemy.
The playing field is not level when you sit down to do anything creative or entrepreneurial. There is this negative force out there that I believe is like the force of gravity.
It just exists in the real world. There's nothing you can do about it except you've got to learn to overcome it one way or another.
It's there. It's fighting you.
It's going to fight you every day of your life. I've been in this business now for 50 years and the force of resistance never goes away and never diminishes.
It's the dragon you have to slay every morning anew. So I always say to any artist or any entrepreneur, before you even get into the skill of it, of whatever you're going to do, the first thing you have to do is recognize this negative force and find some way to overcome it one day at a time, day after day after day.
Yeah. So interesting.
When I first read War of Art and you talking about that, I started thinking about other areas of my life as well, not just my business or my writing, but like for me initially was like, uh, as a younger kid, I was a wrestler and that was my thing. And I remember feeling it then.
I didn't know what it was. Obviously you wake up in the morning.
It's like, I gotta go run. I gotta go work out.
And it's like, Oh, and like it would hit. And then you get to the gym, you'd all the work at the gym.
They're like, I don't want to work. You know, in every, like almost every time you do something, you have that choice again.
Like, okay, I can go like super hard and push myself on this set of whatever, or I don't have to, or your practice. Like I can run a hundred percent or like I can go 80% this time.
And it's like, it's just constantly, I just kept hitting over and over and over again. So after I read that, I was, you know, I read it a year ago.
So it was in my life, I'm in my business. And we were working towards one of our big events.
And I wanted to see how often it was hitting me. So I started a little note thing on my phone.
And every time I would feel some version of resistance, I tried to make note of it. And it was crazy.
It was just how often I kept feeling it. It was like sometimes it was four or five times in a minute.
Other times it was like, you know, every 20 minutes, everything, it was like, every time I was moving forward, it was like this thing pushing back, moving forward, pushing back. And I was thinking about, I mean, like the reason why I think most people never have successes is not that they don't, that they don't get past resistance.
It's like they get past it once or twice, but it just keeps going and he just keeps pushing so often that it's, it's, it's, it's a brutal thing. You have to have a lot have a lot of belief in the calling or the thing you're pursuing or else it's easy for that just to collapse you, right? Yeah.
And like you say, because it never stops, it's like you might defeat it for a week or two weeks in training or work that you're trying to do. And then resistance will even use that success against you.
And the voice in your head will say, oh, you've done great for those two weeks. You really got licked, you know, let's take the day off, you know, or it's Sunday or, you know, our wife wants to do that, blah, blah, blah.
And of course you can't be hardcore 24 hours a day, but you do have to sort of think in marathon terms. You know, I think of this absolutely as a lifetime commitment.
You know, when I'm dead, I'll stop worrying about this, but not until then. And so, you know, it is it's so diabolical, the voice in your head, in the nuanced ways, it'll try to fake you out, you know, and get you to stop it.
You're, it's really interesting what interesting what you did russell with your phone where you kept track of it i've never done that but i imagine that i would imagine it would hit me 500 times a day oh yeah it's it's uh it's pretty crazy but i think for me like again the soon like reading your book so big for me because like it became such a tangible thing that now i can like almost call it out like i'm a resistance you're not going to win this time you know like as opposed to like before you like you again you feel guilty or you feel like unworthy or like or um you know these feelings of just like oh man I messed up again or I didn't do it again versus like no it's not me this is an external force I gotta fight I gotta win and it at least for me it made it it made it more fun and more manageable when I was able to be aware of it you know what I know what I mean? Let me throw one thing out here that maybe you're going to ask me something about this. But maybe this, what I want to say now, maybe it'd be very helpful to anybody that's thinking about this stuff.
And that is that if you imagine a tree in the middle of a sunny meadow, The minute the tree appears, a shadow appears. And the shadow is equal to the tree, right? If it's a big tree, it's a big shadow.
So in the terms of resistance, the tree is the dream that you have, the book you want to write, the venture you want to do, whatever. And resistance is the shadow.
So there would not, what I want to say is resistance always comes second. There would be no resistance if there wasn't a dream, if there wasn't a calling that was inside you.
So the good news of that is when you're feeling big resistance, that big shadow, that shows that there's a big tree there or something. There's a big dreams because resistance always comes like Newton's third law of motion, equal and opposite reaction.
It's a reaction to an aspiration, to a book you want to write or a movie you want, whatever it is. So don't be freaked out, I would say to anybody, by that dark cloud.
That dark shadow is an indication that the dream is for real and it's big. Such a cool thing.
I think a lot of people look at it the opposite way where they feel resistance. I guess I'm not supposed to do this.
This is a sign that I'm not supposed to do it versus like the opposite. You just said it's a sign that you are, that the dream is big enough to actually pursue.
That's fascinating. So cool.
Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about, because we're talking about resistance, what it feels like. I think one of the things, I can't remember, again, I've read all these books again in the last month.
So I might mess up which book to reference. But everyone should buy all of them and just get them all because they're amazing.
But I think it was in War of Ars. We about like some of the ways that resistance shows up.
And one of them that was so interesting was you call it the unlived life where, where that's kind of what it's trying to create or trying to get you to do. Is that correct? Will you explain what the unlived life is and how that, how that shows through with, because resistance? I mean, well, it's, it's like, we're talking about a calling or a dream or whatever it is.
We may be working in a cubicle in some office or, you know, we may be at a high end. We may be some, you know, big shot lawyer or something like that.
And that's the life we're living. But there's an unlived life within us.
And resistance's job is to make sure we never live that life out. right there are so so many people who want to be writers, want to be artists, want to start businesses, but they don't for various reasons.
They have kids. They got to take care of the kids, you know, all that sort of stuff.
Practical things got to keep my job. But so it's a very good question to ask oneself, what is my unlived life? What what is the thing that's inside me that wants to be born? And that's the call, right? You're talking about the hero's journey.
That's the call to adventure. And so, yeah, that's what I mean by the unlived life.
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I was writing some notes from the book says you know unlive life um it's like you see the life we live and the unlive life within us the resistance stands between them so like an athlete who doesn't compete a writer who doesn't write a painter who doesn't paint entrepreneur who's never started online business i see that a lot in my community because we have again we have you know i think our email I think our email lists are five or six million people. From there, we have a hundred thousand or so that use our ClickFunnels platform.
You know, so I look at like, again, my whole world's all funnels. So you see this whole thing and it's like most of the people I would, I would say probably identify as like an entrepreneur or a creator yet how, you know, what percentage of them have never created yet or never done anything? Cause they're, you know, they, they, they see it, they believe it, they want it, but they don't act, they never live.
It's the unlived life, the part that they're, that they're missing. Um, and like you said, resistance, what stands between that, it keeps, keeps you from actually living the thing that they're, they're called and supposed to do.
So, yeah, that's like one, you were talking about the refusal of the call, right? And the hero's journey, the concept is that, well, one of the concepts is that immediately when the hero receives the call to adventure, the first thing that pops into their head is, well, I don't want to do that, right? They refuse the call. Like in the movie Rocky, when he gets a chance to fight the champ, people forget this from him.
You watch the movie, first thing he does, he turns it down. Or in the Odyssey, when Odysseus is called to go to the Trojan War, first thing he does is turn it down.
Even in Star Wars, when Luke discovers R2-D2 and gets the message, help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, first thing he does is he turns it down. He says, I got to stay here on Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's evaporator farm.
You know, they need me. And it's not until they are killed by the sand people that he actually answers the call.
So, yeah, that's the unlived life. That's awesome.
Now, the next thing you talked about, and again, I can't remember exactly which book, but this was fascinating to me. You talked about how a lot of people instead, like, it's not so much that they don't do it, but they settle for something different.
You call it the shadow calling where, um, you know, it's not necessarily, they're not pursuing it, but they're picking it an easier option. I'd love to talk about what is the shadow calling.
And I mentioned, by the way, I mentioned somebody in my, my team the other day, and it was one of our writers who's a copywriter, like most amazing copy I've ever had on my team. And when I said that to him, he was like, he writes, he's like, he's like, I'm supposed to be a writer.
And then I was like, Oh no, I need you to be my copywriter. So, but he like, he recognized like, he's like, I'm living in my shadow calling.
I'm not the one I actually wanted. And so I love you talk about that.
Cause I think a lot of people are probably, that's where they're falling and they're thinking they're going the right path versus like understanding like, ah, you're actually not hitting it quite correct. Yeah.
That's a great example of a copywriter. Cause I, you know, I was one myself and you know, like in any big ad agency where there might be 200 copywriters, male and female, if you open the drawer of any of their desks, they've got a half-written novel in there.
They've got a bunch of screenplays in there, you know. So the actual copywriting is kind of a shadow career.
and a lot of times like in the movie business the lawyers in the movie business

are entertainment lawyers

I don't know if you're familiar with this, but they're the people that do the contracts for actors and directors and writers and so on and so forth. And it's kind of a commonplace that many, many of these lawyers want to be writers or directors or producers.
And a lot of them do it, you know, and they're good at it. And you can see that they sort of chose this career as a lawyer in the movie business to be adjacent to a creative enterprise, but in a kind of a safe way.
They're a lawyer. They've, you know, they went to law school.
It's a real job. They're going to be paid money.
But that's their shadow career. Or another time, another example is a lot of times people will take a job maybe as an assistant to somebody, to an entrepreneur, to a creative person, when really they want to be the creative person, but they just haven't raised the courage quite yet to do it.
So it's a real common thing. It's another way that resistance, this diabolicalness fakes us out, you know, and gets us, sidetracks us away from something that we should be doing.
Yeah. I think it'd be an interesting exercise for everyone to kind of sit down and think through that.
Like, what am I currently doing today? Like, is this actually the calling? Like, am I fired up about this or am I settling to kind of like appease that feeling? Like I'm kind of doing it, but I'm in the right industry, but I'm not doing the thing that I actually want. And then if they figured out, they realized they're, they're following a shadow calling.
Like what's, what would you tell them? Like, what's the process? Like, do they just cold turkey quit and start running or say like, what do, what should most people do? You think in that situation? I think that, uh, it's that it's a great question too like um one of the things i've said before you know who steven soderberg is the director he directed he won an oscar for traffic and he's done a million things that you've seen and when he won his oscar as best director for traffic he kind of held up the award and he said this is for everybody who puts in one hour a day pursuing their art. And I would say that you can be a full-time professional artist an hour a day.
You know, you don't have to quit your job. Although hopefully that's, you know, what you will get to do at some point to do it full time.
But another way of looking at that is like I'm a full time professional writer.

But, you know, I don't have to do anything else.

But in my day, with all the bullshit that I have to do, I really wind up with only like about two hours of time to actually do my real writing, you know, so that even if you're a single mom and you've got two jobs, you can carve out a couple of hours for whatever your dream is.

Thank you. my real writing, you know, so that even if you're a single mom and you've got two jobs, you can carve out a couple of hours for whatever your dream is.
And, you know, and I figured it out one time, an hour a day comes out to a lot of hours over the course of a year. And you can get a lot of stuff done in that time if you just stick with it, going for the day when maybe you really can leave that job.
Yeah. Essentially, my very first book I wrote, I've been talking about it for a decade.
And then one of my mentors told me, he's like, if you just write two pages every day, he's like, two pages every day. He's like, if you do that, and you wake up in the morning, two pages, first thing you do is like, that's two books a year.
And I remember him saying that. I was like, I've been for a decade, like kind of writing it and kind of, you know, I changed the table of contents a few times, like feeling good about it.
And then, so I started doing that and I wasn't able to keep the pace constantly with two pages a day. So maybe it was one page, but what happened is within the next, uh, it took me about a year to write my first book within a year, I had a book and I was like, I actually finally did it, you know, but it was, it was like chopping it down to that of just realizing like the, the consistency of putting in the effort over time, not that I'm going to write a book in a weekend.
Like I maybe thought I was going to do, you know, it's great. It's true.
It's just like fitness, right? You know, if you run a certain amount and you just do it every day, you know, by the end of the year, you know, you're a lot fitter than you were when you started. So it's definitely doable in increments.
Yeah. Okay.
So next question. war of art i was like going crazy with us telling everybody like this is resistance i was trying to make everyone aware of this thing that was hitting them in their life and trying to make you know i had all my coaching clients i was like the same thing i'm like get a pad of paper out and start writing down every time this hits you so that they were aware of it and then but i didn't like i didn't have a solution i was just like and now i'm aware sweet and i like these different things I was protecting.
And then that's when I bought every one of your books and I started going through them. And I think the second or third I read was turning pro, which I feel like for you, at least for me, it was like, here's the answer on how to overcome it.
Again, like you said, it's never completely gone, but how do you actually overcome that? And so I'd love you to talk about the premise of going pro or turning pro and like how this is like the antidote to beating out resistance.

That's another great question.

I mean, this is what worked for me.

I mean, it doesn't, you know, I'm a lot of other things that work for a lot of other people.

But I sort of, when I ask myself, why am I constantly being defeated by this force of resistance?

You know, why do I cave in?

Why do I go halfway?

That kind of thing.

And I sort of said to myself, what I'm really doing is I'm acting and operating like an amateur.

Thank you. resistance, you know? Why do I cave in? Why do I go halfway? That kind of thing.
And I sort of said

to myself, what I'm really doing is I'm acting and operating like an amateur and not like a professional. Like, for instance, when an amateur encounters adversity, an amateur folds, you know, but a professional doesn't.
A professional shows up every day, right? Think about Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant or anybody like that, LeBron James or something.

Another thing that a professional does is a professional plays hurt. You know, if you're right, if you're spraying your ankle or something like that, if you're an amateur, you're going to say, okay, this injury is too much.
I can't go through it. But a pro plays through that injury and just knows that you have to play hurt that, you know, nothing's ever going to be perfect.
On the shittiest days are sometimes the days that you do the best work. But the thing is to think of it as a real profession and to think of yourself as a professional and ask yourself when you feel that hit that moment of adversity, what would a pro do in a case like this? And what's great about thinking of yourself as a pro is it doesn't cost anything.
You don't have to go to school. You don't have to take a course.
You don't have to do any, all you have to do is change your mind. And you know, it worked for me.
It's not easy, but it's, it's a great way of thinking of yourself. Yeah.
I think when I was thinking about this, when I was reading your book, I was like, it's, it's a shift in identity. Right.
And I think about myself, like for a long time, like I, I went to wrestling practice, but it wasn't until I was like, I am like, I made a goal and I said, I'm going to be a state champ. I'm going to become a, you know, and I made these things that changed my identity.
Same thing as business. Like I was trying to make money for, for months until I like identify, like I am an entrepreneur.
I am. And when I shifted my identity again, went from like me dabbling, trying to figure something out to like, no, this isn't, this is what I do.
This is who I am. And then it, I was able to push through things because my identity has shifted.
And so I think that's in my mind, how that kind of synced and went together. I think you sort of hit the nail on the head there.
So it's an identity question as much much as it is anything else. You know, when you say, like a lot of people will say to themselves, I'm an aspiring entrepreneur or I'm an aspiring writer or aspiring actor.
You got to get rid of that adjective, you know, even if you're not making money at it now, if you can think of yourself as that's what I am, you know, I'm a wrestler, I'm an actor, I'm a dancer, then it works. Yeah.
So cool. All right.
I want to ask you some questions more just about your timeline. Cause I want people to understand this.
And, um, and my goal is to get everyone addicted to you. Like I've been addicted to all your, all your writing.
So the legend bag advance. So this was, was this the first book that got published or were the other ones prior to this? Yeah.
And how many years into your writing career did that? I think it was like 27. I was like 52 years old.
52 years old. And then that came and it blew up.
And I imagine the book went one way and then did you change, turn into a screenplay? How did it go from becoming a book to becoming the movie and everything else after that? Well, for some reason, as soon as I wrote that first book that got published, you know, I didn't make a lot of money, you know, but you know, it, it, it had a little bit of a splash. I just somehow knew I'm now a book writer.
Talk about identity, you know? Um, and I don't want to do movies anymore. I don't want to be a screenwriter anyway and so um then the next question for me i'm sure you've had the same thing was well what am i going to do now so you have to you know i just waited for the next idea to come and it was a whole other different thing a book called gates of fire that was about the 300 spartans at the battle of thermopylae and then i was sort of off and running and was just a question of what's next, what's next, what's next.
I think I'm up to now like 23 books or something like that, which kind of is amazing to me. I don't know if you see the shot on stage.
I think I have most of them. But, yeah, so you have all the ones you wrote that are story-based, and then you started also doing, obviously, like The War of Art and these other ones that are more how-to-ish.
When did that transition? When did you go from writing stories to actually teaching and training writers and creatives and stuff like that? I think The War of Art came out in 2002. So I'd been – it was maybe seven years into my book writing world.
And I just did that just because people asked me over and over, how do you write a book? I want to got a book in me. I want to write a book, right? And I would kind of sit down with them live, you know, in person, my friends.
And the first thing I would tell them about was resistance, capital R. I would warn them, I don't care how great your idea is, unless you can overcome this thing, you're never going to get anywhere.
And, of course, nobody ever listened to me. Nobody ever wrote their book.
You know, they were all defeated by resistance. But they kept coming.
So I finally just said, let me just write this down. I'll make a little small book.
And then I'll just say, when somebody asked me, I'll just say, here, read this. So that was how The War of Art kind of came about.
And it was not successful at all at the start. It took quite a while for it to kind of catch on.
And then I started to write a few follow-ups, as you know. Yeah.
So you're 53, or 52, 53 when Bagram Bands came out. And then, I mean, I look at, as we were getting all the books and putting on stage today, I was like, you're like one of the most prolific writers ever.
Like it's insane how much you've written. And so I'm curious, like, is it like one a year, two a year? How, like how, how often do you write? What's your writing style? Like how, how are you able to produce this much at this point? That's what I'm trying to understand.
Cause it's, it's really, it's really impressive. Well, I do think that like, we're talking about being a profession, right? And a professional shows up every day, just like, you know, your mentor said to you two pages a day and you've got two books a year.
So, but I think I'm no different from most writers. You know, I write every day.
That's my job. This is what I do.
This is my calling. And so, and I'm also a believer in not stopping.
You know, some people will finish a project and they'll sort of publish it or release it, launch it, and then they'll kind of wait for the response. You know, is this going to be a hit or whatever? I'm definitely from the other school.
I really feel the minute you finish number six, move on to number seven. And so that's how, you know, book follows another before you know it you got a whole shelf are you writing uh fiction non-fiction at the same time or do you take the different seasons one at a time you know i'll you know depending on what has grabbed me and seized me at the moment yeah very cool so of all the stuff you've written what's your's your favorite of the fiction side favor the nonfiction? Well, nonfiction, I would say the war of art, you know, because that was, you know, the second book after the legend of Baggerbranch is a book called gates of fire.
That's probably, that's the one that has sold actually more than the war of but to an audience that is probably not your audience.

It's probably a different audience but that's that would be i think my second favorite very cool and then just like last uh two or three weeks i bought um uh government cheese and then the daily press field it was the daily press field that come come out. Is that brand new as well? Or did I just miss that?

That's brand new.

Just came out like about two months ago.

So,

uh,

yeah,

I would,

uh,

it's really cool. Like even the box and the packaging and everything is super cool.

But like,

anyway,

that's one of my favorites right now.

I'm going through it each day and kind of,

um,

you know,

as a daily,

uh,

a daily thing to go through each day,

which is,

which has been,

um,

really cool.

Give a little pitch for the daily press field.

If you pitch it for your,

for your audience here,

This is the newest one. What do I have? I have it here somewhere.
And this is sort of a book when people come to me and say, how do I write a book or how do I do a long form thing? Whatever it might be, a screenplay, a startup or whatever. I give them this.
This is like a 365 day. I don't know if I'd call it a course.
It's not a course, but it's something that you have started into it. You'll know what I'm talking about.
Something you could put beside your laptop or whatever it is and just pick, take it a day at a time. And it kind of starts for you from day one and kind of works you all the way through a project, hitting all of the resistance points, the predictable resistance points.
So that like when you start to panic halfway through a project and you, Oh my God, I wish I had never started this thing. I really go into great detail of what that's all about and how, you know, resistance is trying to fake you out and to keep you going.
So anyway, I highly recommend this new book, The Daily Pressfield. It's really cool.
It's like, again, it's fun because it's such a simple, like fast thing. Each day you read one little thing and you keep moving through it.
Um, which is, which is awesome. So I guess my last question is that,

what are you working on now? Obviously this is all done.

You probably work on the next project or you gotta tell people,

or is it top secret right now? Uh, no, it's not top secret. I actually just finished, uh, a book,

which is a fiction book, a novel,

which is a followup to this book,

a man at arms that came out about two or three years ago. Um,

Thank you. was a fiction book, a novel, which is a follow-up to this book,

A Man at Arms, that came out about two or three years ago. And so I just finished that.
I haven't given it to my agent yet. I'm not sure exactly.
I'm fixing a few things in it. And then I've started another story, another story set in another period of time, another fiction book.
and just for fun, or just to show you that I'm not immune to the stuff I'm talking about, I am riddled with self-doubt over this new book. Exactly like with The Legend of Agravance and other things where I say to myself, is anybody going to be interested in this? Is it the dumbest idea you've ever come up with yet? You know, et cetera, et cetera.
And again, like what I said before about the tree and the meadow with the sun and the shadow, I take that as a good sign. I say, if I've got this big resistance that's trying to get me to not do this book, then there must be something to it.
There must be something good here. So I'm sort of forcing myself each day, each day just like you know you running or going to the gym or me doing the same thing saying i gotta i gotta do it i gotta do it i gotta in fact i haven't worked yet today on it soon as we finish russell i'm gonna sit down and get on even if i only can do an hour um i was probably resistance for you today then you're like oh russell's here i gotta i kept you from the goal uh so cool um i'm also curious like obviously you've got fiction non-fiction like those audiences merge across are they very separate audiences typically do they know about each other oh that's a great question it's actually one of the big frustrations of my life the audiences don don't cross.
And the people that read my fiction, I can't get them to be interested at all in The War of Art. And the people who like The War of Art, I can't get them to read my fiction.
And I'm actually, I've just, I've given up, you know, they're two completely different audiences. And it's very frustrating to me.
Yeah. But I'm glad I have audiences at all.
Yeah all yeah it's been fun i'm very much more on the war of art and that that style stuff but um my wife and i re-watched we watched bagger vans like a decade ago before i was familiar with who you were or anything so i re-watched it uh the day that i actually sent you a message the first time i was like i didn't watch this my wife and i watched that night and now i'm actually reading the book version because i want to just because i want to understand you and your writing style different and so it's been fun because you write, I didn't watch this. My wife and I watched it that night.
And now I'm actually reading the book version because I want to, just cause I want to understand you and your writing style different. And so it's been fun because you write, I don't know, you write differently.
And it's such a, it's just fascinating. And I'm trying to learn your style, right? And understand your style of writing.
So it's been fun going through Bagger Vance. And then you, you sold me, I was going to, that's why I asked you, I'm going to pick one of the next ones to go with deep into.
So you said the, um, the Gates of Fire is the next best one, right? Yeah. Read Gates of Fire next, yeah.
Okay, so I'm going to be your crossover. I'm going to get both sides.
By the way, I just want to say to anybody listening, the book of Bagger Vance is a lot better than the movie. It's interesting because there are parts in the movie Bagger Vance when I think it was when Will Smith goes and he does his lines where he shifts over and he's giving really good like giving really good feedback and direction.
Um, that felt like you and I was like, he's delivering those lines. I'm assuming those are closer from the book versus the other part.
You know, I'm sure Hollywood does their thing. Yeah.
Well, this has been so fun for me. I'm really grateful for this.
Like, um, Parsley's is going to help me as I'm into my new book and, um, and working through it just to keep the, uh, these principles in mind. But I think also for our audience who everyone here is creators, they're creating different things.
And I just, um, it's been so valuable to me to be able to, to put a name to the things that's holding me back from having success and moving forward, like calling it resistance and being aware of it and, and then figure out ways to overcome it are so powerful. And I'm just grateful for you and your body of work you've created that is helping me now.

And hopefully I can keep all my people, my audience, getting them more addicted because I think it'll help them all create more.

And that's what the world needs is a whole bunch of creators who are trying to change the world in their own little way.

And I think that you're helping so many people like me. And again, most of the people in my world who have read The War of Art, they're all obsessed with you.

And I'm trying to get everyone else obsessed with you as well.

So I appreciate you jumping on to hang out with the entrepreneurs over here and talking about this kind of stuff. Thanks for having me, Russell.
Thanks for inviting me. It's a kick for me to talk to entrepreneurs rather than, you know, writers and artists and stuff like that, because it's the same thing, you know, the same principles apply and the same resistance comes up, which I never even realized when I first started, I thought this is only writers who go through this.
And it was sort of amazing to me to see that, you know, people starting businesses, of course they go through it. It's exactly the same thing.
So thanks for having me. If you want to do this again sometime, I'm, I'm delighted to do it.
That's awesome. I appreciate you.
And everyone who's listening right now, make sure you go buy War of Art initially, start there, and then go through all the rest of them with me. And then if you want to hear Stephen's entire life, a government cheese book, that was really fun.
And I didn't know that book, what it was about at all. You just mentioned it was new, and so I tried to get the whole thing done before.
And it was so fun just to see your life and actually to see these principles. You can read the book War the book war of art and you understand the principles, you see it in your life.
And it was just fascinating to see on your journey, how it affected you and how you overcame it. And then all the different pieces.
And then I look at just the fact that, you know, I think most people would look at this body of work and think, okay, he started when he was 15 years old. And that's how he created this much, but understanding that legend of Bagramance came out in your fifties then from there this is like what's came from on the back side that is really it's really impressive and really amazing so um it should give everybody motivation like wow what's possible what can you create no matter where you are in the in the journey so thank you for being a just a great model of of success and doing this stuff and being a creator and let resistance win and i'm just super grateful for you and taking the time today to hang out with me.

So, all right.

Thanks a lot, Russell.

Yeah, thank you.

We'll talk to you soon.

Go out and buy a potato can tomorrow.

Done.

How about this?

I'll sell you.

I'll give you a potato gun.

You give me your old typewriter.

We'll trade.

We'll talk about that later.

Awesome.

Thanks so much, man.

I appreciate you.

Thanks, Russell.