This is The Ember Studios Podcast #4 with Mike Brown and we go over The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield.
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A.I. Generated Transcription:
Hey, it is episode number four of the Ember studios podcast, the war of art by Steven Pressfield, identifying and overcoming resistance.
Hey, before we actually get started with this, I just wanted to pop in and say, I recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it. I read some stuff online about the book and it is very polarizing. This book is not for everyone, the stuff I didn't like. I just kind of rolled my eyes and moved on some people aren't going to be able to do that.
There's just a lot of stuff that either isn't going to jive with you or. Maybe some of this stuff even makes you feel angry. I'm not sure. I tried to extract some of the important stuff while leaving the other stuff behind. There's a lot of religious themes and a lot of shame and guilt in this book. And if you've ever seen me live, you know, that I have an entire section of, one of my presentations dedicated to how shame and guilt are garbage and they don't want.
Yeah. So I just wanted to come out ahead and say that, listen to this show, decide if you want to read the book, but I'm going to try my hardest to get the most important stuff into this episode, so that if you're not the kind of person who this book is for that, you could still get the ideas from it without having to sift through all of the stuff that you're really not vibing with.
Yeah, that's just my little disclaimer. I'm still gonna release the episode. I still got a lot of help from the book, but I will admit maybe the execution. Isn't great, but it's a self-help book. It's a motivational book. A lot of people in that space, like to make you feel like garbage in order to do what you say you want to do.
So that's not me. So I just wanted you guys to know that that if you do pick up the book, I'm not going to do any of those parts of the book. So. Check it out. And, uh, I'll see you in the main episode. All right. So a few years ago I wrote a book on the recommendation of a content creator that I was following called the war of art by Steven Pressfield.
I got it on audio book. It is a super quick listen. I'm used to hearing things faster than normal. And so the book is less than two hours on audible. For me. I listen at 1.5 speed, which is not that bad. Once you get your. And I want it to just talk about it a little bit, because I think this book has really shaped the way I think about a lot of things in terms of creation and creativity and inspiration and stuff like that.
So before we get started, I do just want to say, I don't agree with every word in the book. There's some stuff that I just don't really buy into. Some of the stuff can be kind of polarizing, but as Graham Cochran says, if you're not offending anyone, you're not saying anything. Graham Cochrane author of how to get paid for what you know, and we to have the recording revolution and the grand Cochran show.
Great dude, follow him. But today we're talking about the war of art. You should read this book. You, you should not consider this to be a whole entire compendium of the information in this book. Again, like I said, it's less than two hours. If you listen to 1.5, meaning it's a little under three, if you listen to normally.
So you should listen to it. I would find a good price on it. I blew a whole audible credit on it. And when I found out, I mean, great content, great content. But when I found out it was only like three hours long, I was like, could have gotten something bigger for this, but yeah, very important. I don't regret it, but if you can find it for a lower price than an entire audible credit, grab it like that, I'll be including links to the audible and the Amazon version for you in the show notes to check there.
If you are interested in picking this up in a. So in this book, Steven Pressfield starts out by talking about the fears we have of becoming an outcast when we succeed. And basically he's just talking about the idea that honestly, the really true idea, that the more you become successful, the more people see your success as an affront to their complacency.
They're offended by your success because they're angry. It's not that. They're offended by your success because your success Buck's the norm. Right. So that's just how he kind of frames this entire book. And I think that's a really good framing to have as you're going into this listen or read. Right. So he also uses.
Some of the most dramatic language I've ever heard in a nonfiction book. I mean, it's flowery, it's fire and brimstone. The dude wants to get his point across and he's willing to use any words in the English language to do so. So just be prepared for that. It's interesting. So the book in general, Is about something.
He calls resistance. Now this is, I call it capital R resistance, which just to me means the idea of the resistance that he's speaking about. It's not generic, it's resistance, the idea, and he calls it the most toxic force on the planet. And he'll go on to define it in a second, but he also says a professional writer knows it's not the writing.
That's hard. It's sitting down to write. And what keeps us from sitting down is resistance. So let's break into what resistance really is. The book is separated into parts, but part one starts out with resistance, defining the enemy again, back to that dramatic language. He's not playing around. The beginning of this section talks about, he calls it resistance, his greatest hits, but he's just talking about the types of activities that most commonly elicit resistance.
I'm just going to say them out loud for you really quickly. And those are the pursuit of any calling in writing, painting, just artsy stuff. Any creative art, also the launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise for profit or otherwise, any diet or health or regimen, any program of spiritual advancement, any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals by that?
I think he means working out and stuff. Any course or program designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction education in any kind, any act of political, moral, or ethical code. The undertaking of any enterprise or endeavor whose aim is to help others, any acts that entails the commitment of the heart and the taking of any principle to stand in the face of adversity.
So those are the things that Steven Pressfield says will usually elicit a response from resistance. He also says resistance is never satisfied and it's nondiscriminatory it's for everyone and no amount of giving. Is enough until you give in completely resistance is infallible. And by that, what he's saying is resistance shows you where you need to go.
You don't get resistance when you're thinking about doing the easy thing, the easy thing is almost, always not the best thing for you. He says resistance is universal. It's eternal. It's fueled by fear resistance. However, Only opposes you in one direction. If you have resistance, it's only opposing you in one direction.
You can move any number of ways. Resistance is keeping you from moving up. Okay. Lateral moves. Fine. Downgrades. Fine. Resistance wants to stop you from moving up in the. And it recruits allies. Again, those people where you're talking about at the beginning, who see your successes in a front to their complacency, those people are going to make you feel like you are wrong for trying this.
One's really hard to get over either. You're going to have to let go of these people, or you're going to have to convince. It's a come along for the ride. And that doesn't mean, you know, bring them in on your business or your podcast or whatever it just means. You're going to need to convince them to just let you do your thing.
And they will seek resistance will make you choose between the instant gratification and the longterm improvement. For example, let's talk about diet. You know, when you're dieting, what you're supposed to do and you know, you want the results, but it's hard because the result is far in the future and it's a long term improvement.
The cheesecake is instant gratification, right? So you grab that cheesecake. You feel better. You're you're back on the diet tomorrow. You knew the whole time what you wanted to do, how you want it to accomplish it when you want it to accomplish it. But resistance. Got you. Had you eat that cheesecake. So in essence, resistance is just going to get in your way.
And then another big thing about resistance is that it ramps it up right before the finish line. The closer you are to finishing something the heavier, the resistance gets. And I know, I know some of you out there have, let's put this in the frame of podcasting. I know some of you have gotten. Gotten everything you needed, you sat down, you recorded an episode, you opened up an account on Libsyn, you uploaded your episode.
And when it says release date, you kinda, you kind of freeze and you just leave it in your drafts and be like, ah, I don't know if it's ready yet. Let me sleep. Great. That's resistance giving one last push at the very end, because you are so close because once you upload and distribute that episode, now you've done it and it's easier to do the next one.
And it just gets easier and easier, but resistance wants to stop you from doing it in the first place because they don't want it to be. Because resistance doesn't want it to be easier. I'm saying the word resistance a lot. I'm just trying to use the terminology that Steven Pressfield uses in his book at the very end resistance.
It's just going to push harder. Now I want to back up zoom out from the book a little bit and just talk about some real life applications of this stuff. So this morning I woke up, I knew I had some podcasts to edit and I opened up my email and. These people were not ready to send me their shows. So they didn't.
Now I'm staring down few hours of choice time, I guess you would call it. If we were in fourth grade where I could choose what I'm going to work on. Now I know that I'm going to work on my business, but I don't know what exactly I'm going to do. I have a list of things that I need to accomplish in the next four or five months that I've been chipping away at daily, but I decided, you know what, I'm going to record an episode.
That's kind of like a book report on the war. And so I get everything ready. I go to my audible account and I fired up and I'm listening to it. And about halfway through, I'm just thinking maybe I'll do this another time. I don't think I'm going to do this. And I caught myself. I'm like, this is exactly what we're reading about in this book.
Right. It's just for no reason, all of a sudden I decided I got to put a pause on this that's resistance. It's creeping in. It's saying no, no, no, this isn't going to be that good. You don't know what you're talking about. But it is. And I do, and I know that, but I let resistance get to me. Here's another one.
I have an interview later today. I kind of forgot about it. And then I remembered it by, uh, an email came through and I have an interview with a film company out in Seattle. And I haven't heard from them in a couple of days. And I woke up this morning and when I got that email, I was just like, oh. And when I realized the interview today, You know what I don't, I don't really want to do that.
It's going to be too much work. I barely have time as it is. I don't even think I'd like to gig anyway, but this is the gig I sought after. I'm not applying for jobs. I'm not looking for jobs. I'm doing fine. I saw this and I wanted to do this extra. This was something that I sought out and I said, that's the thing I want to be a part of.
And I applied. I didn't think I'd even get considered. Next thing I know they're looking for a interview. And I'm trying to cancel it. So what happened resistance happened because I'm afraid of succeeding. I'm afraid of doing well at this interview. And then what's next. I don't know. And resistance loves to take the unknown and turn it into something you don't want listening back.
It is actually, you know, I read this book a few years ago and I kind of picked it up, read it, put it down. And I said, yeah, That was all really good. I'm going to try to keep as much in my head as I can, but you know, it didn't change my life. Now let's move on. Listening back today. Amazed at how much of this stuff I subconsciously, incorporated into my everyday life.
Like so much of what I was listening back is just stuff I do now. And I'm realizing it came right from this book and it helped me reframe the way I think about working, help me reframe the way I think about entrepreneurship and creativity and inspiration. It was just really interesting to me that I could have such a lukewarm memory of something, to be honest and go back and realize it changed my life.
So the next section is talking about symptoms of resistance and he breaks them down into a few different kinds. We're going to go over a few. First one is procrastination. Now, if you're anything like me, you heard this word a lot during your public schooling. And I think Steven Pressfield nails it procrastination is just a fear of not being good enough.
Right. You're going to finish something and then you're going to look back at it and you get to judge whether it was good or not. And if you can't separate what you do from who you are, that if, what you do is not good, it's you who's that good. Right. And so that leads us to procrastinate. If you never finished, you can't be judged on it.
Oh, I'm still working on. And then what happens is you start to procrastinate all the time. And next thing you know, you got 30 things cooking, but you haven't worked on them in 18 months. And everyone's like, so what's, when's that big announcement you tease on Facebook coming. Procrastination is really hard to get past, but you just got to take advantage of a moment of strength and start.
Because again, once you start, you're good. You can keep going. Once you start starting. Another symptom of resistance is getting into trouble. He talks about how, for some people it's easier to get in trouble than to actually finish what you're supposed to do. What do I mean by getting into trouble? I mean the extreme, I mean, uh, yeah, I had that interview tomorrow, but I got a DUI last night
That's the kind of trouble we're talking about. Yeah, I know. I said I'd have the project to you by Monday morning, but Friday I ended up in the hospital with alcohol points. These things suck, but they're easier than finishing the work that you have been procrastinating on because they're not scary, you know, what's going to happen.
It's all a matter of the unknown, right? Another one is self dramatization. I can speak to this one firsthand. If there's a lot of quote, unquote drama, then everyone's so busy being enveloped in the drunk. That they're too tired to break out of that cycle. Self drama. The second, everything starts being normal.
Someone picks up the torch and creates more quote unquote drama creates more strife, whatever it is to guarantee everyone in that group, family, whatever you want to call. To guarantee they all have the excuse of being too exhausted because they're just dealing with X, Y, or Z. And when that's done, they can focus on themselves.
Right. I'm sure we all know people like this and they find other people like this and they take the load off of each other and they just pass the drama around and nobody gets anything done. And everyone gets to have an interesting day today instead of setting themselves up for financial success or something else down the road.
There's also self-medication. Now this is one part where I kind of deviate from Steven Pressfield's beliefs. And again, who am I, but also who is he? My interpretation of this is alcoholism, drug addiction, these kinds of things that help us numb ourselves of the reality of failure, because if you're failing all the time, but you don't feel anything that's easier than succeeding because then you got to you can't, you can't get drunk every night.
If you're succeeding or you won't be succeeding for very long. And so self-medication just kind of get it. It gives you a way to. With not necessarily doing what you quote unquote want to do. And at the end of the day, all of these are things that keep us from breaking the trend and breaking away from what we see when we look around.
'cause you'll learn eventually, I guess this is a good time to start it out. But I, I think a lot about, uh, evolutionary advantages because I'm a freaking weirdo. But if you think about evolution being individuals, doing something different from the. Oh, that's not something we got through evolution that flies in the face of evolution.
Evolution wants us to be in a group, wants us to stick with that group, protect to that group and never leave that group. Why? Because for millions of years, that's how we stayed safe. That's how we stayed alive long enough to finish the next step in the process. So just remember when you're bucking the system, it's hard because your body is screaming that you're doing the wrong thing.
The whole. So you're going to have to get comfortable with that, but you can do it. Resistance can be beaten. Okay. And how do you start? You don't start by going, huh? I'm going to defeat resistance and finish that giant project. I have. No, no, no, no, no. You beat resistance by getting in doing the work. You get in, you finished something small, you move on because 30 small things start to add up pretty fast.
But if you're looking at the final product and going well, got to finish that by this date, it's never happening. And that's resistance helping you fail, right. You beat resistance by getting in and you do small stuff every single day. And you might think, well, I'm a creator. What if I'm not in. And that leads us to part two of the book, which is overcoming resistance.
And it talks about the amateur versus the professional. I'm going to share a quote with you from Andrea's mom, somebody asked Andreas, do you write on a schedule or do you write when you're inspired? And he said, I write only when inspiration strikes, consequently, it strikes every day at 9:00 AM. Now what's he saying, he's saying I sit down and I write and I get it done every single day.
I don't wait around for inspiration to strike. Cause once I've decided I'm writing now it's happening. Words are just going to come out of my pen or my keyboard or whatever. It's about sitting down and starting. And then you're good to go. If you're sitting around waiting for something to pop in your head.
You're going to finish maybe two things in your whole life. I don't know if any of you have seen the Beatles documentary on Disney plus called get back. It's very good. It's about the few weeks before their final concerts and they're doing a lot of songwriting. They get in there, they have to write a whole album and they're staring down a date.
That they're doing this concert. Now. I know they had to change the date. George, quit the band, whatever, everything, everything worked out in the end, but they were still working on a deadline that they had to meet. That is another way that you can overcome resistance is by meeting deadlines, setting and meeting deadlines.
Even if they're manufactured. But they got in there. If you watch this documentary, this was when they were recording the album, let it be, they wrote, get back, let it be. They wrote dig a pony, the long and winding road. They wrote some of their best stuff because they were under pressure under a deadline.
I was watching another interview with Paul McCartney and he said, John, and I never had a dry session. We always got it. And what he's talking about is they never sat down to write a song and didn't write a song and they sat down to write a lot of songs. They didn't just wait around. Until the song came to them.
Now, again, you've probably heard some stories about Paul McCartney waking up with the melody to yesterday in his head. He only had the melody of the beginning. He finished writing that whole song. He wouldn't have done that if you waited for the rest of us hung to come to him, right. He got a little bit, he jumped on it and he made it work because that's what professionals do they know.
They're not supposed to wait for inspiration. This isn't because they're geniuses it's because they are hard workers in the book. Steven Pressfield also talks about how the amateur seeks validation, not honest critique. So when the amateur shows something to his buddy and that buddy says, uh, yeah, well, you know, chapter two, I thought this, this and this and chapter three, blah, blah, blah, the amateurs eyes glaze over.
He stopped listening. He wasn't looking for advice. The amateur hand something to. And what they say out loud is, Hey, what do you think? Do you have any suggestions? But what they're saying in their head is, Hey, tell me how great this is, please. It's true. I've been there. Validation is important, especially when you're younger.
You're like, Hey, check this out. Isn't this the greatest thing? But when you turn pro you gotta find criticism, you gotta act on that criticism. You can't let the criticism turn into resistance, but you gotta just leave by the wayside. Everyone who, you know is just going to suck up or tell you how great it is because they already know that's what you're looking for.
Right. Cause you've, you've asked them for advice before and you've kind of shrugged it off. So they know they see something like, oh, great. And hand it back to. And near the end of this part, it's just about how the professional knows they must be a student part three of this book talks about ego. Their professional knows to leave the ego because the professional knows they have to be the student, or they'll never improve.
Personally, I've only ever learned from people who are doing what I'm doing at a higher level. And I aligned myself with them and I follow them. I'm not worried about whether or not I look good or bad next to them because I'm learning everything they have to teach me. And I know I'm not as good as them.
I'm just trying to be as good as I can be with the help they can give. And when they're done, I'll find somebody else. It doesn't mean I'm dumping them at the curb, but when I've learned everything, I can roam a person I'm onto a new person. That person could be a friend. They're no longer a teacher. You have to learn to become a student.
And you could be a student of people who have done what you're doing already. Or you can be a student of your peers. This is why people talk about diversity of thought and how different people approach different things, different ways. So if you're approaching your business in one way, it might be helpful to be in a peer group or a mastermind group of five others, six others who are all doing it too, who might've done it slightly differently, and you can pick and choose what you like, and you can incorporate it into your own workflow.
And then, boom, you just got so much more than you brought to the table. Right. You share yours, you're giving a hundred percent of what you have. If five other people are giving you a hundred percent of what they have, you're getting back 500%. Right? So the math seems janky, but it's legit. Part three is called beyond resistance, the higher realm.
And I'm not going to go over it today, but it's a lot of stuff about the ego and it kind of wraps the whole book up with, if you have a calling, you're doing everyone around you, a disservice by not answering. Because somebody needs your help. And just because you're going to charge them for that help doesn't mean you're not helping somebody needs your help and the stuff that's in your head.
I don't know if you know this. We're not there yet. Nobody can get it unless you share it. It's all just your. Kind of the only stuff that you own. That's also why you have to give it away. But if you don't share what you have, your knowledge, your expertise, somebody else who needs it, isn't going to get it.
And then while two of you could be rising instead, just want to use rising. And you're not raising any faster. This is not a zero sum game. I don't believe in competition in the business or podcasting space. There's no such thing as competition there's peers, there's, uh, idols maybe, but there is no such thing as competition.
So I want to wrap up by talking about just a topic I kind of thought of as I was relistening this morning, and it's about stacking resistance and basically. As I'm reading this book, I'm realizing that resistance does have a cap. There's a cap there's only so much resistance can throw at you. And if you decide to take everything that resistance has been going at and hitting it at the same time, you're going to overload your resistance.
And then when you bust through it, you don't bust through it for one thing, you bust through it for five things. For example, here's. The real life situation for me, I'm building a podcast service business. I'm creating a content creation business. Hence this podcast, I am giving live presentations, something I've never done before all is as an arm of that business.
What else am I doing? I gave up eating meat a few months ago. I'm trying to lose weight. I'm starting to run. I'm doing all of these things at the same time and I'm having more success than when I try them individually. And that's because. I just am busting through the resistance all at once instead of five or six different times.
So I would challenge you to stack your resistances. If you've got three things that you're getting hit by just try to hit them all at the same time. Don't tackle one while you have the energy. And then once you're well, rested tackle the next one. No, no, no, no, no, no. Get up and try to tackle them all at the same time.
Thank you for listening again, I'm going to have links to this book, the print copy on Amazon and the audio book version audible, depending on the air date of this, those might be affiliate links, just so you know. So I'll get a piece of that. If you use that link, if you want to get a free PDF version of my book, the pro podcast episode planner, head to Ember studios, creative.com/podcast.
And while you're there, you can check out more episodes of this. Or if you'd prefer to buy a print copy, which is much cheaper than printing a year's worth of these on your own jump over to Ember studios, creative.com/planner. This'll take you to Amazon. Again, might be an affiliate link. It's a $6 book.
It'll help you plan your show. For a year. Okay. There's going to be an official review of that up on my YouTube channel. So just check that out. Also link in the show notes. You'll just be able to check it out, see me holding a copy, flipping through it and showing you what's in there at the end of the day, it'll also just help you support this podcast, which I will be really thankful for.
So don't forget to subscribe to the show and yeah. Five-star review so we can keep chatting for a long, long time. Thank you again. And don't wait to share your voice with the world by.
