The Difficulty: Creativity, Meaning & the Hard Work of a Life

If you’ve spent any real time with the Enneagram, you’ve probably felt Chris Heuertz’s influence whether you knew his name or not. Chris is the author of seven books, including The Sacred Enneagram (foreword by Richard Rohr) and The Enneagram of Belonging, with an eighth on pilgrimage coming from Simon & Schuster. But the books came out of a life: nearly three decades of humanitarian work across 70 countries, years in the anti-trafficking movement, time serving alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

We recorded this a couple of weeks before his wedding, and I wanted it out in the world before he walks into that new life. We talk about learning to tell stories on a word processor in India, burying 700 of the women and children he served and what that does to a person, the end of a twenty-year marriage and the strange welcome into the human family on the other side of it, rewriting sloth for the Nines, what Eights actually feel under the armor, and why the detours are sacred and the arrival is a myth.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Show-note links:

* Chris’s site: chrisheuertz.com

* The Sacred Enneagram and The Enneagram of Belonging (Bookshop.org)

* Chris’s Substack: Sacred Detours

* Instagram: @chrisheuertz

* Subscribe to The Difficulty: chadprevost.substack.com

* Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

* The press where it all makes sense: crossroadspublishing.group

* Chad’s site: chadprevost.com

You open the app and it seems like every writer you know is having a better year than you are. There’s a name for what’s happening in your head and it isn’t envy. Two psychologists went and read what NFL fans posted when the season schedule came out, and found that every single fanbase was certain their team had drawn the hardest one. Same thing is happening to you on a Tuesday night, and once you see the shape of it, it loses most of its power.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Everyone has a GO button. Mine was a drawer holding seven unpublished choose-your-path books I finally published under my own name. What happened after? On what courage actually is (a heart energy, not a head energy), what it isn’t (recklessness refuses feedback; courage subscribes to it), and why the unlived life is the one certain loss.In this episode:

* The confession: a decade in the drawer, three books shipped, and what the children’s book market taught me the hard way

* David Whyte’s Consolations on courage as “heartfelt participation”

* David Hawkins on courage at level 200 — the threshold where a life stops draining energy and starts giving it back

* Dr. Spalding’s cliff: courage without readiness is just another form of impulse

* Roethke’s permission: “I learn by going where I have to go”

* Readings from my forthcoming nonfiction book, arriving January

Bring us your book. Crossroads publishes serious nonfiction of the inner life—memoir, essay, contemplative work. Six openings remain for fall authors, and founding-author rates hold through September 30: $5,000 for a short book we call a Crossing, up to $7,000 for a full-length book, with the audio edition included in every tier.

→ Book the free 20-minute discovery call · See the engagement ladder · Tell us about your book in writing

The pricing on the site is the pricing.

On the horizon: our reissue of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (September 8) · Mirage and Tar, a numbered first edition of 100 copies, this fall · the book read from in today’s episode, January.

Last week I told you to stick with things. This week I want to tell you about the afternoon Daniel Kahneman sat in a room, was handed the exact information that should have made him quit, and carried on as if nothing had happened. It cost him eight years, and the thing they were building was never used. I try to work out honestly which one of us is right.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball? If you said ten cents, you're in good company, because more than half the students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton said the same thing. It's wrong. This episode is about why the wrong answer arrives so fast and feels so finished, and it starts with a seven-year-old boy in occupied Paris who turned his sweater inside out to hide the yellow star, and the SS officer who stopped him on the street.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

The Anthropic settlement got final approval, Amazon raised its royalty ceiling for the first time since 2007, and the first half sales numbers say something uncomfortable about nonfiction. Three answers to one question, and none of them came from a reader.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. Editorial, design, print, ebook, audio, distribution. Take a look at crossroadspublishing.group and see what you think. If you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a fine one.

I also coach writers toward the harder part, which is hearing yourself into committing to the thing you actually want to do. That’s a conversation, not a purchase.

And I’m taking on a handful of new projects this fall. If you know someone with a book they keep almost writing, or a story you know is worth telling, send them my way or just send me their name.

I spent last week in a cabin outside Ellijay, Georgia, a couple of hours north of here. I’d thought about doing something more epic with my one week away, driving out to Chaco Canyon or somewhere like it, and then realized I’d spend most of the week driving and arrive exhausted. So, a cabin. I went to work on the nonfiction book I’ve been close to finishing and then taking apart again more times than I care to admit.

I brought a lot of music gear with me too, just in case the writing didn’t go. Turns out that having only so much time is its own kind of help. I didn’t play much.

This week’s episode came out of that.

I want to talk to two people. The first has never written a book and can’t get past the question of who am I to do this. No platform. A few hundred people on Facebook, half of them from high school. Write the thing and you’re speaking into the wilderness. The second already wrote the book. It came out, it did fine or it didn’t, and now they’re quietly wondering whether it was worth what they gave it.

Here’s the honest part, and I think the honest version is more useful than the pitch. Books don’t make people famous anymore. Even really good ones. That’s most of the reason the Big Five look for authors who already have an audience, because they aren’t in the platform-building business so much as the fire-to-it business. But a book is still a different form of distribution, and it reaches people who will never find you in a feed. Somebody they trust hands them a copy and says you should read this. That’s a door your other work doesn’t open.

So the question I’ve landed on isn’t whether you should write a book. It’s whether you want to inhabit the identity of someone who writes. If you want somebody to read your one book, shouldn’t they be able to see that you’re a person who writes?

I also get into why three-year and five-year plans have never worked for me, what David Perell’s 250,000 subscribers actually took in years, why a book that doesn’t sell in its first year is the moment most people quit and the wrong moment to do it, and my own fairly fragmented record of sticking with anything.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. Editorial, design, print, ebook, audio, distribution. Take a look at crossroadspublishing.group and see what you think. If you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a fine one.

I also coach writers toward the harder part, which is hearing yourself into committing to the thing you actually want to do. That’s a conversation, not a purchase.

And I’m taking on a handful of new projects this fall. If you know someone with a book they keep almost writing, or a story you know is worth telling, send them my way or just send me their name.

There’s a decision you’ve not made for months. Maybe years.

You know what it is. You knew what it was the moment you read that first sentence, it surfaced on its own, without any effort from you. That’s how you can tell it’s the one. And you know exactly why you haven’t made it.

Here’s what I want to put forth this week: the interesting question is not what the decision is. You already know that. The interesting question is what the avoidance is costing you because it is costing you, every day, in a currency you probably haven’t audited. Either way, something is going to be hard. It’s hard to do the uncomfortable thing now, or it’s hard to live in the regret later. The difference is that regret only gets expensive once it’s too late to spend anything else.

The show is named for a George Moore line: “The difficulty in life is the choice.” Not the outcome. Not the talent. The choice. The difficulty was never that you don’t know what the decision is. It’s exactly that you do.

If the decision you keep not making is about a book whether it’s done, whether it’s worth publishing, whether you need a publisher who’ll actually think alongside you about it, that’s a conversation I have every week. Crossroadspublishing.group is a press built for exactly this kind of decision. Discovery call is on the site. Twenty minutes, free. And I promise you’ll leave with the decision at least named.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

—Chad

I had sixty-thousand words then I had twenty-thousand, and I still did not have a book. This Thursday’s episode is about how I finally learned the difference, and it’s the most useful thing I know about the work.

The manuscript had frameworks. It had seven tidy maps. It had the warm, encouraging, here-are-your-steps voice I’d spent years building. And every time I read it start to finish, something was wrong and I couldn’t name it. That’s not writer’s block. It’s quieter and worse: the slow realization that a pile of genuinely good material is not a book. In Vivian Gornick’s terms, I had a situation. I didn’t have a story.

The way out came from Hemingway, broke and young in a cold Paris garret, who when he couldn’t get started would tell himself, “Write the truest sentence that you know.” Just one. But here’s the part everyone skips: he also cut to it. Whenever he caught himself writing elaborately, presenting something, he’d throw that ornament away, what he called the scrollwork, and start from the first true simple sentence. The truest sentence isn’t something you add. It’s what’s left when you cut the performance off.

So I went hunting through my thirty-seven thousand words for the one place I’d stopped performing and actually said the thing. Then I found the sentence. Everything that served it stayed. All seven maps, the whole coaching voice blog posts, went over the side as ballast, and the book finally floated—well, it’s floating.

You’re allowed to not know your true sentence yet. You almost never do going in. You write the messy draft precisely to find the one true thing hiding in it. You’re allowed to have a pile that isn’t a book yet, that’s just the middle, everyone’s middle looks like a pile. And you’re allowed to cut what you love. In fact you have to.

Listen above. Then, if you want, reply and tell me the one true sentence your project is really about, or the one you suspect you’ve been avoiding.“The truest sentence isn’t something you add to your draft. It’s what’s left when you cut the performance off.”The Difficulty lands Mondays, Thursdays (the working writer), and sometimes Fridays and sometimes Saturdays (from the workshop). If this named something you’ve been circling, subscribe, and forward it to someone with a pile that’s trying to become a book. More at chadprevost.com.

I went out to play disc golf yesterday, and I kept losing focus on the game. My mind wandered off down every side trail in the woods. This Monday’s episode follows a few of those trails.

We start with the poem you think you know. “The Road Not Taken” gets read as an anthem for bold nonconformists, but read the middle again: the two roads “equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.” There was no road less traveled, not really. Frost isn’t describing a choice. He’s describing the story he already knows he’ll tell about it, “with a sigh,” years from now. The difficulty is the choice. But underneath it is a harder thing: knowing where you’re actually standing when you make it.

From there we get lost on purpose. The way some languages orient by north and south instead of left and right, and how our ancestors located their very identity in place. Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and the terror of losing your self coordinates entirely. And the strange argument between Walt Whitman, who blessed the multitudes we contain, and Gurdjieff, who sat with a more accusatory tone toward those same sleepwalking multitudes.

What I carried out of the woods were three questions: What are we actually, consciously choosing? Why do we spend so much energy distracting ourselves from ourselves? And why is it so hard to know who we are?

And one small piece of permission, which is what we do here on Mondays. You don’t have to travel both roads, catch every fleeting thought, or unify the crowd inside you into one tidy self. You only have to remember yourself among them. Be the quiet one who watches the parade without climbing aboard every float. That’s the fixed point. That’s what it means to locate yourself.

Listen above. Then, if you want, reply and tell me your one fixed point, the thing you orient by when everything else is just trees.The Difficulty lands Mondays (the long walk), Thursdays, and Saturdays. If this located something in you, subscribe and forward it to one person who’s feeling turned around. More at chadprevost.com.