Stephen Pressfield is your favorite author's favorite author.

No one describes the emotional struggle of the creative process and the terror of presenting your work to the world

in as much detail in depth as Stephen has.

If I had to guess his seminal book, The War of Art, is on more

bookshelves of writers, musicians, producers, and artists than almost any other book.

Stephen has a long and storied career with many winding and twisting paths.

When he was young, Pressfield was an advertising copywriter, a school teacher, a tractor-trailer driver, a bartender,

an oil field rost about, a mental hospital attendant, and a fruit picker.

He wrote tirelessly during this period for over 20 years before he got his first break with some

screenwriting jobs in Hollywood in the 80s. But after working on a bunch of

scripts for B and C movies to pay the bills, he broke through with his first novel, The Legend of

Bagger Vance, at the age of 50. It was only then after nearly three decades of struggle that his career finally took off.

In today's episode you're going to learn from Stephen about how persistence isn't actually about persistence.

We discuss how the skill of something is usually not actually the skill of something,

i.e. the thing that makes a writer or singer or artist great usually isn't simply how they write

paint or sing. It is the skills around how they write paint or sing. It is the skills around how they write paint or sing.

We talk about career longevity and suffering for your creativity and whether that's a myth or not.

We talk about how turning pro is such an important concept, not just for

for aspiring artists but for people who have big goals around anything in life

in general and of course we talk about the capital R resistance, that mental and emotional barrier that we all create for ourselves

and stands between us and our deepest desires. The resistance rears its head in all of us,

particularly when we're on the cusp of some important breakthrough or

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