Collect Yourself

Transcript

Hey, this is the moment. I'm Brian Koppelman. Thanks for listening. I'm really excited about this. My guest today is Steve Westfield, a great novelist and screenwriter and really a guy who has written some nonfiction books that are among the most important books for creative people that I've ever read. The War of Art, which I've mentioned on this show many times, is a book I wish I had when I was starting out. And for me, it's one of the two best books ever written, along with the artist's way about what you have to do in order to figure out how to create the work you were meant to create. And I've gotten to know Steve over the last 10 or 15 years. I forgot I wrote him somehow and we got in touch and had a few breakfasts, and so he knows the regard that I have for him, and I'm going to try to make the most of this interview time with impressed feel. Thanks for being here, man. Hey, thanks, Brian. Great to see you again. Yeah, it really is. I've been thinking about this conversation a lot. I guess I want to start here when you were writing War of Art, when you started thinking about. Why it's so scary to do this work. Did you have any idea the impact that it was going to have? None whatsoever. You know, I sort of had. And in fact, the war of our didn't have any impact for a long time. You know, my I was my partner, Sean Coyne. Some of you guys may know he had his own independent publishing company at the time called Rugged Land, and he brought it out because we couldn't sell it. I couldn't sell it to anybody else. And he thought he thought it was really great, and he went to great lengths with the advance readers copy. I don't know if you've ever seen that Brian and has like a silver cover. It's really like hard. It's a hardback and we thought, Oh, this is going to make a splash, you know? And it just sort of I won't say it sank without a trace, but it didn't make any very much of it of a splash. And then just sort of took a long time word of mouth bumper because it came out in 2002. And so it's been reduced hard to find that it became sort of this thing like that. People would pass one to another. Maybe in the last seven or eight years or something like that, and then I was on Oprah a few years ago, and that really put it into orbit, you know, such as it is in orbit, you know? That was that was the big the big inflection point. I guess I I found you before I found your work, before you were on Oprah, I guess. How did you find it, if I may ask? You know, I was trying to remember who I heard. Mention it. I've always been so taken with this idea because my own story is being a blocked writer and I want to get to your story. I actually don't want you don't do that many interviews, so I don't want to talk about myself. But you're gifted at taking the spotlight off of you and putting it into someone else. I'm not going to do it, but I needed it. I found it because I've always wanted to put up bulwarks against falling back into being blocked and unable to do the work. And someone said, Oh, there's a great book, and I remember just loving it. But can you talk about because you don't do that many interviews? Can you kind of set the stage for who you were before you started actually being able to become, as you call it, a professional, which doesn't mean getting paid in the way you used the expression? Yeah. Can you just talk about where you were in your life and the way in which not doing the work was causing you pain? That's a great question, Brian. I mean, I could go on for hours that we're here and we throw in, you know, divorce, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you say in the new book your new book, which is called The Artist Journey, you say that you were driving a cab. You were writing a novel. You say I was so scared that and I didn't know this then that I blew up the novel in the last chapter and blew up my marriage and my whole life as well. But talk about that a bit. Well, let's see. Or I'll probably get into maybe some stuff that's a little boring, but we'll go for it. I my first job was in advertising here in New York, and I became like a junior copywriter, making, you know, $200 a week or something like that. And I had a boss named Hannibal who quit and wrote a novel, and it was a hit, you know? And I'm like 22 or 23 years old at this time. So I thought, Well, s**t, I'll just do that too, you know? So, you know, cut it to two and a half years later. I'm ready to add, you know, Page know, two hundred and ninety nine of a three hundred page novel, and I panic and I can't finish it. And, you know, not that it was any good anyway. So bottom line, you know, the devil came out, the devil made me do it. I blew up my marriage, et cetera, et cetera. And I got on a kind of a my what I think of now as kind of a hero's journey. I got on. But it was sort of, you know, I wound up just working jobs all around the country and sort of running away from from writing in from time to time. I would come back to New York, get another job in advertising, save up money, write another book that nobody would want. Nobody would buy. And again and again, I did that with. I mean, there were times when I started out from one coast to the other in my old van with like 40 bucks in my pocket, that kind of thing, you know? So I was really an odyssey of what did it feel like to like, live in your skin then? Well, I mean, it was quite adventurous in that you were sort of at the absolute edge of everything all the time. Or, you know, I'll tell you one little story from whatever this is worth. I was in New Orleans. At one point I'm living in the back of my van and I have no money and no job and nothing. And I and I pulled in just to find a place to park for the night in some lot that had shells on, you know, the way they do down there. And I woke up the next morning and it was a banana company. It was a banana importing company. The Sun has just come up and they had a gorilla in a cage outside the back of the banana company, you know? And so I opened up the side doors of my van and a guy comes out from the banana company and he has two bananas. He gives one to the gorilla. And to me, that's awesome. Without saying a word, right? Well, it's on your way. Nice day. So anyway, that's so that's kind of what it was like. Eugene O'Neill, the great ape was suddenly your face to face with with this ape. But you're speaking, you're telling a jovially now, but in both books, in both the new book and the war art. You do talk about this sort of desperation that you felt also. Oh yeah. And the the it's important, you know, a lot of people ask me before who listens to the show and many people who listen to the show are at some kind of a precipice there. I bet. And they're at an inflection point. And I think some kind of self-loathing and the desire not to give in to it is at the heart of what you write of what you were writing about in these books. So that and I had this feeling this that inchoate desire to do the work and being unable to and then turning bitter and and so can you just talk a little bit about? So there was the adventure and the spirit, but also the cost of running? Yeah, that's right. But it's a great one, and you're absolutely right. I mean, everybody that's listening to this, that's feeling that right now, they know exactly what it is. I mean, it's it's uh, you know, in movies, you have scenes where the detective gets beaten up right and they just break his ribs and kick them and throw them in the gutter. And I think the reason we all can relate to that is that that's what we're doing to ourselves at these moments because we know our Damon is in there. That's telling us we got to do X Y Z, and maybe we've tried it a bunch of times. And but we also know we haven't really yet committed. We're sort of like people are drunks, but haven't yet admitted that we're alcoholics, that we have a problem, that we're being beaten by this force that I call resistance in the war of art. So you're absolutely right, Bryan self-loathing is is the term. And you even hate yourself for hating yourself. Yes, right? It's like, What's wrong with you? I can't. I just, you know? But it seems in some crazy way that that's necessary. You know, that kind of suffering is necessary to push us so far down that we finally do hit bottom. You know, you were I was listening to your podcast with Seth Godin and you were talking about Bob Dylan. I think one of the things that I sort of envy and hate about Bob Dylan is that you kind of found his métier so young, you know, and he didn't. It seems at least like he at least he was doing his thing and he knew it. You know, he was. He'd found his groove. Yeah, I mean, I've clearly thought about the Dylan thing a great deal. Because the the myth of Dylan and as Seth and I were talking about of this, this level of gift that he had. Almost makes it seem like the rest of us are frauds and fakers, no matter what. Right, if an artist like him or miles exists and of course, Seth's view on this is different. But the other way you can do it is find they're the outliers, but then the rest of us can just punch it out, right? We can just try our best if we get in there. But why do you think? It's and I know you've thought about this a lot. Why was it so hard for you? You said you wrote a couple of books, but you weren't really doing it. Like what's the difference? What is what is this sort of difference in the level of commitment you're talking about since when you say amateur and professional, you're not talking about getting paid. What is the difference between a sort of dilettantes approach or a casual approach and a committed approach? What is the charge? What has to happen inside of you to make the approach different? Oh, by the way, Brian, these are great questions that you're asking. I'm so glad that we're talking about this or not other stuff that we could be talking about. Good. I think if you think about people, you say to somebody, Well, would you like to be a brain surgeon? And they say, Yeah, that sounds great to me. And then you think, Well, what am I going to do to be a brain surgeon suddenly real? Or what do I got to do to be a concert pianist? Everybody can sort of really, holy cow, do I have to mentally, I've got to commit, I've got to spend hours. I've I've got to basically banish everything else from my life, except maybe a marriage and children. And but somehow everybody thinks they can write and everybody thinks that a novel is an easy or whatever is easy to do, particularly screenwriting. Everybody thinks that's easy because there's a lot of white space on the pages, right? Or writing, you know, for billions or so, it can't be that hard. It's just a TV show, right? But so that's the level of commitment. I think if you want to be a brain surgeon, if you want to be the ambassador to Moscow, what does it take to do that well? Do you think that Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison? Is there any lower level than those people, you know, or Bob Dylan? They're not so. I think for me, that sort of awareness unfolded over years and years and years where I thought, Well, if I only work this hard, maybe I'll do it. You know, and so I work that hard. I didn't. Nothing happened, you know? Holy s**t. I better work like twice as hard or be twice as committed. But I do think at some point it, it truly becomes like a life and death thing where you just say to yourself, If I can't do this, I have to kill myself or I'm going to have to do something desperate. But it's well, you know, you just unlock something about the Dylan thing for me, which is he did this right. We can say the talent or the sound. But he got in his car and he left Minneapolis and he didn't leave himself any other option. Yes, true. He fully did it right. He went to that hospital to talk to Woody Guthrie. Yeah, yeah, he came to Washington. That was at a time when nobody was doing that. It wasn't like this was a thing he couldn't do. He invented it. Right, right. Yeah. But I mean, he just decided, I'm going to make up who I am. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to wheel myself to be this other human being. Yeah. In order to become the artist I want to become, you know, there there's a classic scene. I can't remember whatever this is from some ancient thing. I'm sure it's happened many times through history, the concept of burning the boats. Sure, you know where the army lands on the shore and the general says, Burn the friggin boats. You know, there's no way we're going back. What did that look like to, you know, you tell in the new book The Story of when you finally did this, this this two hours of riding on an old typewriter and how in doing it, you realized, OK, I actually did something here you were. Where were you in your life at that moment at 40 bucks in your pocket? And you know, the non romantic version of that is you were a smart due to only ended up without a marriage, without a job with just forty dollars in your pocket, right? What happened inside you, you felt like it was life or death. Where you finally got the courage, because one thing you mentioned over and over in these books is that the incredible fear we have of being of revealing our specialness. And that if we reveal our specialness, we might we might get crushed somehow. Talking talk a little bit about that now. Which which question are we talking about? Where? Well, here's what. Here's what they tell you. Your your own struggle. With revealing first to yourself and then the world. The beautiful part of yourself, Tiger, it's a great question, but I must say I don't really feel like there's a a beautiful part, you know, or I certainly don't feel like or never felt like, Oh, I've got this beautiful part. Well, it's important to say that I'm off. I'm afraid of revealing, right? That wasn't a conscious thought. Never. But you talk about the super conscious all the time in your work, right? Yeah. But at that time, struggling to kind of come up from the bottom or even get to the bottom, I just wanted to write one sentence, you know, or just get out of this one hour that I was in and the idea of producing anything that was good or that anybody cared about was like, so far beyond what I was thinking about, you know, I was just in pain. And this was the only way, having tried everything else, that the pain would stop was to to try just to try what I'm talking about, writing stuff right, putting in an hour or whatever it was. And but how is this trying different than the prior trying? That's that's what I'm trying to get to. OK for pizza. Great question. Because, well, the moment you're talking about, I read about it in the war of Art and I was in a sublet that was not very far from here where we are right now as when he was on the east side. And that was it was a night and I was all by myself, and all I did was sit down at the typewriter and wrote for like an hour or two hours. And that that was sort of a critical moment for me. Everything turned around for me in that moment, but I had already written like two books at that point, all the way through, I'd done all kinds of writing, but for some. Well, I think that I had been I had stopped writing, I'd kind of given up for maybe I don't even know how long a year, two years, three years or something before this moment when I sat down and said, This is going to kill me, I can't do it. It's there's no point I hate it. So finally, in this moment and in my sublet where I sort of thought, I remember the night, I thought, Well, who can I do? What woman can I call? You know, what drug could I take? Well, where could I go to distract myself? Be out of myself to not have to live in this head in this hole? Can I go see my friend over on whatever it is, right? And I just thought, I just cannot do this one more time. I've done it a million times, you know? She said, Let me just pull out this freakin typewriter and let me, and I had no hope that this was going to make any difference. You know, I didn't even know why I was doing it. I was just the dumbest thing in the world. Never worked for me before. I'd only tortured me. Yeah. So I sat down and wrote something for like two hours. I don't even know what it was, know I was trying to write a story or something. It was just terrible and I knew it or whatever it was. It was nothing. It wasn't anything worth anything, you know? But when I finished, as I tell the story in the book, I went in to wash the dishes in the kitchen and I suddenly realized that I was whistling. And I just sort of took a little immature myself and I felt s**t. I'm OK, you know, I felt calm for like the self-loathing went away and I sort of said to the work and I said to myself, You know what? I must have turned some corner. I must have hit bottom here because this thing that didn't work before writing now seems to work. And I also thought, Well, I can keep going on this, you know, I mean, as bad as today was in terms of quality, you know, I've got years ahead. Let me try tomorrow and I'll try tomorrow. And I really it was just a tremendous load came off of my back because I felt like, Oh, finally, something works for me. It didn't work before. I've done it before and it didn't work. So I think what must have happened on some level was I hit some kind of bottom at some point, you know, I just run away so many times into so many distractions that I just wore them out. I couldn't do them anymore. I was so bored by them when you were writing earlier. Was some part of you because you in the new book, The Way You Talk about blowing up the that book, you almost make it like it was willful, like you weren't ready yet to grab in the hero's journey. You weren't ready to answer the call yet. I think that's true, even though I didn't know that, of course. Of course, we don't know it at the time. Yeah. By the way, Brian is a great questions. Thank you for asking them a great. Well, I know you write the book. So first of all, I you know, I asked you some of the stuff we had when we had those breakfasts. I was, you know, I'm always dancing with this because whatever works I was trying to do. Taking the risk to do your best work is always frightening, but it's the only I have found other than the love of your family, which it all ties together for me. It is the only thing that can shift your state that radically. And so that's why I always want to help people get their right. I have this theory that I talk about it a decent amount on here, which is. When you don't. Find a way. To access the best version of yourself, the most creative part of yourself, something in you dies and when something in you dies, it's like any other kind of death. There's a toxicity that flows from that and it would have toxicity will leach out of you onto those you love and through bitterness, spreads through and. And for me, when I was 30 and I was feeling all those things. Unlike you, I was in a good job. I had money, but I was miserable and I was married to the right girl and I had just had my kid who I love more than anything in the world. You might have two kids, but the same. And but I was miserable until I committed to showing up every morning and and prior to that, whenever I would write, I would stop. I would couldn't finish anything. Uh huh.. That was that was my thing, too, by the way. How so? How would that happen? I would get to the end and I would blow something up, you know, and you would just stop. Or I would, you know, I would what they say in psychology, act out, right? You know, I would do something, sleep with somebody and, you know, just distract your whole take your whole life, basically. You would do something to take your head out of the thing that made you feel good. Yeah. The work, you know, someone tells me about any time you're in an accident like a car accident. Yeah, that's what it is. You know, you're trying to break your leg. Oh, now I can't play basketball. You know that that sort of thing, you just self-destruct. And in some way and in a in a movie, if you write that scene in a movie, everybody can relate to it, right? They, Oh, look at this guy, you know, or this gal. But the wonderful thing that you have done is that you sort of codified this process. You've codified the the remedy. And, you know, can you define for us this idea of resistance and talk a bit about the forms that it takes, the way it sneaks up on you? And then what you feel and talk for a minute here, like talk for a while and what it what you have found is the only way to keep it at bay. Just in case people can't read the whole book. Well, you know, you obviously know this by and you sit down to, you're sitting right now in front of your laptop. Yes. So if you were to be sitting down to to write, to do another a show or movie or book whatever it is, radiating off that laptop into your face is going to be this negative force that's trying to say to you have a drink, go somewhere else. Don't do this. It's too hard. You suck. You're never going to do anything good. Nothing, no idea you've had as original. It's all been done before. You're a loser. We hate you, you said. Right? So that is, I mean, in Jewish terms of mysticism, that's the it's a hurrah. That's this negative force between us and our soul, our initial mob that is trying to communicate good things to us. So for me, when I sort of realized that there was this force, which I call resistance with a capital R, that was tremendously liberating because I never I always thought, well, between me and the object. I want to write a good book or to do something. There's really nothing. I just have to do it, you know? But in fact, there's this giant, you know, devil monsters of the ID from Forbidden Planet, you know, trying to to stop us. And and it's a seductive thing, right? So it's not just it's not just pushing against you, it's tempting you. It's tempting you distractions. I mean, the reason I always say, if you want to make a billion dollars, come up with some idea that reinforces resistance and like the internet, is the greatest invention in the world. Twitter and Facebook and all this stuff, I hate them because they're just, you know, distraction. In fact, its entire industry built on distracting you clickbait and all this kind of crap that's out there, you know? So anyway, just recognizing that there is this force and again, another couple of car alarms here. The more your soul needs to do some great work or whatever it is, the project you have in mind, the book you want to write a movie, whatever. The more resistance you will feel to it. So in a way, when you feel massive resistance to something, it's a good sign because it shows that it's like resistance is this devil. And it can look into your soul and say, Oh, Brian, I can see he's got this book in mind. And this is going to save his soul. If he can do, this book will let me. I'll rally everything and work on him. You know, I'll throw women at him. I'll throw money and distract anything at all to bring it. So to move on to that. When you were saying, Well, how does how can you possibly defeat this? I mean, to me, the concept that work for me was the idea of turning pro that an amateur who thinks with amateur habits and acts like an amateur will be defeated by this negative force by resistance. But a pro, if you think of a pro athlete, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, you know, go on down the list. Tom Brady, these guys play hurt. They know that they've got to be at their best. You know, day they accept no excuses for themselves. They they have an incredibly high level of aspiration. Bob Dylan, you name it, right. They're aiming really, really high. And they won't let themselves fall short of it and they'll do the work in the face of adversity. You know, that's why I sure wish somebody should do a documentary that really shows you what Tom Brady does on a day or Julian Edelman or whatever. You know, I'm sure these guys keep naming patriots. I'm going to kick you in the studio. Let me just say that right now, OK, I'm not a Patriots fan either, but you know, yes, they are pros they're pros, right? You got to give them that. And oh yeah, top flight. Yes, it's incredible. The resistance I want. So just to put it more of face on it. Resist, I'm asking you resistance is you're about to sit down to work and suddenly you realize I haven't called my dad right? It's exactly exactly. It's not just I haven't had a drink. It's not just, Hey, I want to get f**ked up. Right, right. It can take it sort of anything. It's very diabolical. Shuttle devious. It really will fool you. You know, the word I use as protean. Yeah. You know, it'll assume any kind of shape to to freak you out. And it's unbelievably creative in the way that it can seduce you. You know, David O. Russell's movies are really all about self-sabotage and the sabotage of others to you and that that. You talk about the. The plane, whatever is on the highest plane versus the lower plane, so even something that seems noble to do might be the resistance. If it's keeping you from the even more sacred yes task, and I also have my own little motto that I say to myself, when in doubt, it's a resistance. What I mean is if some, if you have a thought, well, maybe I really should go to Mother Teresa's in India. And you know, that's a you no doubt it. It is resistance. Let me say one other thing we do while we're at it that because I know you've been saying Brian, something things about working at your highest level and bringing your most beautiful. I think that what works is just doing the most mundane stuff, like if you wanted to be a concert pianist sitting down and just doing scales for an hour, and that will, that's enough. You know that that the muse likes that the muse approves of that, you know? In other words, it doesn't you don't have to be operating at the highest level immediately. The lowest level is just fine. Yeah. When I say that, of course, you're a hundred percent correct when when I say the highest level, I'm not talking about the work you're producing. I'm saying I'm talking about the secret thing that you think is your best, the best part of you, which is if you think, man, the secret voice tells me, I'm a really a writer or I'm really a piano player, then yeah, start playing scales. Yes, start playing scales, start doing the thing. You know, when I did standup, I was terrified of it my whole life. I knew I was going to suck at first, but I had to go suck. I had to go get him. And could that work for you? It was great, of course. Work wonderfully well. Yeah, because a year and a half later, I could do five minutes of work and it was fine. I had to get through sucking at it and just showing, you know, you have to just show show up. I take my hat off you for doing that to me, is like the bravest thing in the world to get out there. I could never do that. Yeah, but it's the same thing. I realized I was running from it, so I had to. I had I was blocked writing something and I tried to figure out why, and I was like, I'm blocked because there's this other thing that I've wanted it. And through that, I got unblocked block to get the other thing going because it was another way. Talk about the fear. What? What are the things this ties in? What do you what have you found as you, as you've examined it yourself and then talked to people who've come up to you to talk about this work? What's so scary? Why is it so scary to try to do something like this? That is a great question, and I'm not even sure I know the answer, except that it's it's on a soul level some way. Yeah. You know. I guess I still have never I've said this, but I don't know if I've even really grasped the idea of we're more afraid of being our the best version of ourselves, of really coming into that element because it's like if we have that power, you know, then tremendous responsibility comes with it and we can fall and fail. But I think, you know, on the soul level, some way, like before we're born, somebody an angel must put like a little gold token in our hand and said, This is the Brian that's that was meant to be is born to be right. And then we get in this on this, this level of life and we forget that. But we kind of know it and some deepest level, and we know that we are capable of x y z and that if we don't go for it, you know, it's going to be the consequences. You know, we're on the next life, we're going to be, you know, come back the user next to Buddhism and the kabbalistic together. It's all and all the same thing. Yes, I think it is, too, but I think it is a fear of being our best version of ourselves. I can't imagine why that is, except that, you know, the devil and there is a devil. That's what he hates the most. He doesn't want us to do that. Well, if we show the best version of ourselves. A scary facet of that is if I somehow find a way to get to that place and it's not good enough. Maybe that's it behind me and made, you know, that's not good enough. What if I do that? Uh huh.. And I present this. Beautiful, perfect thing. And you don't want it. You know, I remember when it's very Talmudic, when I was younger at this stuff, I remember the feeling you would I would want someone to when I was working on records back in the days when I was record executive and you would work with an artist to get the song right. You play for somebody. I would. I would play for somebody. I would want them to hear it once, look at me and say and wordlessly, just jump out a window. They never had to hear anything else again. All right. And there's some part of this, I think that we in exposing our in exposing ourselves that way. Where we feel very naked. Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking, as you're saying this, Brian May, maybe it's even beyond that. Maybe it's we have this idea that we have to be great in order for God to love us or for or for our lives. And maybe that I mean, the bottom line is we really don't have to, you know? But somehow, yeah, you know, I mean, if we get to the highest point like the Dalai Lama, I would imagine is or whatever you can just, you know, be and everything is everything is fine, you know? But maybe we're in an earlier stage where we feel like, Oh, I've got to hit a home run. Yes, you can substitute God for a certain kind of parental love. Yeah, right. Yeah. This idea that you have to. And the reason is important is these are the things that stop us because if we don't try, if we just live in this mundanity, then we've sentenced ourselves in a way. But if we try and fail, it's and we try and we're still not loved by whoever we put up. This is what Cameron's book is so good, I think because she makes you look at, OK, well, who have I given power to in my mind, who's still a figure who's going to judge me? Yeah. And if I do this work and it's not good enough, how are they going to strike me down? You know? Yeah. And I find your books to be an incredible antidote to an incredible antidote to that, because it's all about protecting a routine of work, right? So can you talk a little bit about the power of rigidity? OK, well, it's it is a sort of paradox that you ask yourself, Well, how does Bob Dylan get to the highest level or whoever we think we want to think about? Right? And the answer is they do it in the most mundane way. It's the scales who are doing the musical scales, and I'm sure this is the way you write. You only you can write one word at a time writing one sentence at a time. It's, you know, I am wearing right now these this pair of work boots that I this. This is not the actual pair that I wear each day, but I always put on my skirt lucky boots that are with work boots, you know, blue collar stuff. And that's the way I kind of look at it. And it's the act of showing up each day. It's like having a practice. This is another thing I have to talk about is when you have a yoga practice or a martial arts practice, you do it every day you enter the dojo, you have you take your shoes off, you bow to the sacred space bumper bar and you just do the best you can that day. And and there was magic in that. There's real magic in that. That's kind of how I think at some point on a day, maybe you'll get into the flow and great stuff will come. But you know, to to do it day by day by day. Energy does concentrate around you as you as you do that. I'm again, I'm a big believer in the muse. I think the muse floats over our head, comes by each day, looks down on us, sees Brian there at the keyboard. And each day that that she sees you and she sees you really working hard and you really care. She lets her gifts come to you. I think after after love it as a metaphor, because what I mean for me as an atheist, I I don't find it necessary to put it on something special, but I do find that if. If we can get into the flow of doing the work, it allows the inner voice to come out, it allows. That's why I'm warning pages are so helpful to me because it it by doing the work. Suddenly, the thing inside you can crack open just a little bit and you know, and and come out onto the page. And I agree with you that this ritualized thing of every day doing it is is key because it's if you're showing up and doing it every day. The resistance at a certain point knows it's it's going to lose the battle. That's right. Yeah, yeah, because it keeps you keep showing up, you're getting it. It's in its face. Yeah. Did you become like, did did the rest of you start changing fairly quickly after you committed to doing this? In other words, did this self-loathing continue to abate? Did were you able to build better relationships and all that stuff? Yes. And but the also the other thing with kind of the important thing when I talk about that moment when I went to wash the dishes, it was like another 30 years before I sold the novel, you know? So it wasn't like before your first screenplay. Another thing was my screenplays came in there. Yeah, but it still is still another 10, but didn't like it was over 10 years before I to sell this guy a dollar bill from anybody, or I actually had done it, but it didn't matter to, you know, it didn't matter because I was on on the road. My feet were on solid ground. I felt like, you know, I had been swimming in the in the ocean and suddenly my feet touch the bottom and I was OK, you know? So definitely I relate to it. So hard. Yeah. Because even in a career that goes on when you have downturns like you and I have both written movies that were, you wrote a book came a movie that was famously disastrous. Yeah, right. And I've had many, many, many I know, but I've had that too. And. And I talked about this on Twitter recently, I've been using Twitter to try to do a little war of art stuff for people just to sort of tell my story in ways that aha. And one thing I talk about is that the the the mere act after I got fired by Martin Scorsese, you from working on a TV show. And then they basically that same month, runner runner was a huge bomb and an agent said no one would hire us for what David me? And I remember having a really bad day, but then getting up and walking across Central Park to go to my office to start writing the next thing, and that each day I started to walk and then got down to my desk and started writing. And it just so happened we were writing billions. Then that was when we wrote the pilot. That's back. The mere thing of knowing that I'd sat down there, and two hours later, I'd written some pages and as you say, quality be damned that they couldn't stop me. Uh huh.. Yes. From doing the work that I'm supposed to do. I felt all better long before anything, long before billion sold or anyone wanted to have my life changed again. And so I'm wondering, have you how you're smiling? And it seems to me in recognition. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, what you just said, the you know, the you talk about a heroic act, you walk in across the park, that's it. If I was writing a movie about that, that would be the final beat right there. If the guy starts to rock across the park and it's it seems totally un heroic. But in fact, it's like it's the most heroic thing of all. It's like a dad taking care of his kid, you know, or going to work at driving a cab or whatever it is. It's really was a dad doesn't care if his kid, because I mean, that's how I earn my living. But what has so little to unpack it a little bit? What really it sort of happened with you if I get this right is you stopped allowing other people to judge what was good and what wasn't good. You saw I'm just going over my office and I'm just going to do my page today. Well, I mean, 500 words or whatever it is, and only I am going to be the judge of that. And that's incredibly liberating. That really is like taking the shackles and the chains off. Right? You're in so many movies and like that where the hero kind of goes off in that state, they're broke. They don't know where they're going, but they've turned the corner. No, but this is brilliant, Steve. What you just said, because if you can learn to define a successful day on your own terms? Yeah, very well put. You've won, right? So if if you decided Steve Crossfield decided a successful day means I wrote, I exercised and I wrote, Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, was kind to my family members. But here's the weird thing I think Brian is someone might be listening to this and say to themselves as they're torturing themselves with self-loathing. Well, s**t, I will. Why can't I do that? I can do. I think in some crazy way. You have to sort of really hit bottom first. You know, Martin Scorsese fires you. You know, things, those things are blows. Those are real blows, you know? And I don't know if you can sort of manufacture that moment just by willpower and just say, OK, I'm going to do the equivalent of walking across the park. I'd like to think you could. But I don't know. I think if we if the analogy is getting somebody stopping drinking or realizing I have a problem with alcohol, sometimes they really, really, really have to hit bottom before they make that turn out of your control. But Victor Frankel would say, you can. You can, you know, there are things you can't control. But then the one of the tricks and I think you have something in common with Frankel and in your outlook, which is the thing you can learn to control, is how you process the events, right? You can learn to control the way you. Yes. But I mean, if we're writing a movie and one of our characters is doing this or we get it for screenplays 120 pages long, we might be on page 48. We say, Well, s**t, why can't the guy just kind of, you know, but he can't. He's got to face the Terminator, and then the Terminator has to come back. So what should she do? What should the person listening do if she feels like I can't? It's too hard right now to do this, or I'm not quite at bottom. What? What should she? What steps are you recommending she takes just to keep plugging away? Just keep trying, keep trying. And maybe hearing something like this at least will tell you other people are going through the same thing. Everybody has gone through it. Except maybe Bob Dylan. He was the only guy, but. And if sure, if he were here, he'd say, No, that's not true. I went through it back when I was 11 years. That's right. Sure. You know, Minnesota, yes. But and also, by the way, you go read the book on the making of blood on the tracks. And you know, it's a constant battle for Bob Dylan. Yeah, yeah. Even with the extraordinarily talented greater than any or yeah, getting it to match the idea in his head. Yeah, he's just as hard as it is for all of us. Yeah, right. That level of talent demands that level of rigor. Right? Yeah. Because, well, that's the thing, right? Your books, you talk about this professionalism. I translated my head into rigor into attacking this stuff in a rigorous, in a rigorous way. Yeah, I would say that same thing. Yeah, I did that come easily to you or not? I do think once I sort of turned that corner, yes, once you decided you once, I once I decided I didn't even really just it just sort of the idea finally clicked for me. I never even thought of the idea before. You know that, oh, now I'm a pro. You know, I wasn't trying to do that and failing. I never even thought of it. And so, yeah, once that corner was turned, uh, you know, I felt like I was in kindergarten, but that I was at least in school, you know? But so for me, there was this battle, the real sort of artist or anything you talk about in your book happened at 30 before I wrote the Dave and I wrote our first screenplay. But what surprised me was that it could happen again. It could happen again, right where you're doing the work, when you have this other moment. Because if you're living in a life where you're. Trying to do the best work, as you said, it's hard, and then sometimes you can get knocked off course by various kinds of resistance, right by the desire by people offering your money to do other kinds of right in success or success. I think because you know, you can be knocked off course. Yeah. And then you have to go back to these. Yeah, it's like in the movie and Iraqi movie, when Rocky throws away all the fancy equipment and decides to just take out the free weights again. Yeah, right. And go back to the beginning. Yeah, that's a great that's a great example. You know, ideas of train. It always goes back to the basics, right? I mean, you're a golfer, Brian. You know, the story that like, I've been finding it in the internet, all might well know like that. Supposedly, Jack Nicklaus, you know, who lived in Ohio. So in the winter, he would there would be downtime, and every spring he would start to and he would go back to his old project Grout, and they would start with alignment. They would just go, Absolutely. This is a guy's already won 14 majors or something. They're going back to the absolute basics of what your grip, what's the alignment? You know, let's just start with little pitches. And I think there was a lot of wisdom to that. So how did the six commercial successes or failures in you've had great commercial successes and real you know about that had no you know, you had a long career of being able to do this work. When something like Bagger Vance happens and the movie, the book is beloved, and then the movie gets these huge stars attached to it and is considered a commercial critical disaster, it sucked. But what happens to Steve Press field? Like what happens? How what did you do in the week following that movie's release and in the month following it? That really it didn't. I hate to say it didn't bother me at all. This is good to know. I want to know, but mainly because I had so many failures before I'd failed on so many levels. You know, it's such, you know, low, horrible, embarrassing levels that, you know, I can't say it didn't bother me because I had high hopes. Everybody has hopes, right? Although I had seen the movie, you know, I'd seen scenes in the movie before it came out. So I already knew that. I knew that's what happened to me and runner runner. I knew runner runner was a disaster, so I wasn't surprised by what happened. But it still hurt. Yeah. But the other thing, and I'm sure this is absolutely true for you, Brian, is by that the point the time that movie comes out, I'm already on to the next. I'm like eight hundred pages into the next book, but that's crucial. And that's crucial. Yes. That's why I always say, when you finish one thing, the one thing you absolutely cannot do is stop and like, wait and see if it's good. You have to, like, immediately start the next thing and forget the first thing. That's why it's it is interesting in a movie crew like actors, you know, movie axes went up for an Oscar. The actor or actress is already four movies down the line. I can't even remember the tournament. What did I do in the movie? You know, so to keep got so continuing to do the work, and it's a process too that we're serving the muse. And but still, I mean, your ego is attached to something. It does hurt, but you still just showed up every day and just did your work. Oh yeah, by that time, because I also remember you insulated you. If I didn't do that, I'd have to kill myself, you know, because I'd already been sort of scared straight. I knew what it was like to to fail and to, you know, to not do the work, you know, and you still do that absolutely today every minute. What do you do every day that I keep working every day, you know, because I know if that voice says, Oh, you know, why don't you have, you know, sloughed off or, you know, not I don't mean literally I have to actually work every every single day, but in my mind, I don't drop the ball, you know? Right? You're doing the thing no matter what. What's a typical day like when you're working in your home and you're not here on the on the road? How do you organize your day? How do you protect your writing time? OK? Can I tell the truth? Yes, the real true. Think I'm completely insane? No. Tell the real truth. I mean, I get up ridiculously early. I'm up at like three 15. Awesome. Like Jocko Willink, the navy seal. Yeah, I I go to the gym and I, you know, I I workout. I have, you know, partners that I work with a trainer. I work out, I go, I have breakfast, you know, at the same place. Every morning I come home. Finally, by maybe 11:30, do correspondence, answer emails first. You do that. I do it for you. Get all that stuff out of the way you've worked out at 4:30 in the morning or 4:00 in the morning. Yeah, I do. Do you meditate when you wake up? I don't. But that's the gym is kind of my form of meditation, you know? Now I don't get you probably get 100 times more emails and I do. I get, you know, a few, you know, penis enlargement emails and things like that, you know, but there are very few people that I need to answer, you know, about Sean or whatever. So I get it out of the way pretty quick. And then, you know, I used to be able to work for four hours a day. I really can't do that anymore. You know, two and a half, three hours, this is it. But that is it. You know, as you know, it's like, that's real work. That's like a cool of crossing Antarctica, you know? So I do I do my work, and then I just totally close the office. Mentally, I switch my brain off completely. And you know, I go on to, you know, whatever might be fun in in the evening. You know, you're not drinking, though a lot. No, not saying, Oh no, you're not partying like that because no, no, no, no. You might have in a younger days, but but not now. You know, now I watch Rachel Maddow and you know, you're just yelling at the idea of yelling at the screen. I did yelling with stuff like, Oh yeah, sure. But. And that stuff, the Jim and the writing, nothing can take you away from those things, right? Right. That's sacrosanct. Injected time like Twyla Tharp. You know, if you've read her book, you know, she goes to the gym. I'm sure a lot of people do, but what I do and the one feeds on the other, you know, at least for me, you know, because they call weight training resistance training. Yes. And so there it is, right? I'm trying to prep myself and rehearse myself. Do you think it matters whether? Do you think someone has to know? Let me break in just for one second here. A lot of my days works. Aren't worth diddly. You know, there's a lot of really mediocre, crappy days, I just get to the end of the day and I say that I accomplish anything at all today, you know, and the only thing I can say is I kind of rolled the p, you know, a few more inches across the table, but that's enough, you know? Yeah. Then you've done the thing I've done. Oh, no, that's exactly what I was about to ask. Perfect. What I was going to say is, do you because it ties into this? Do you think it matters whether somebody thinks they're talented or knows whether they're nuts or not about this? Like, did you whatever you say, you never thought to yourself, Well, I'm talented or, well, I never did. In fact, I don't think I am talented. I think that if I the only thing I give myself credit for is I'm a hard worker and I'm an arm, a knucklehead capable of beating my head into the wall that I'll go up against anybody. You became that though, right? You decided right? That's true. That was the total opposite of that, right? You've made a conscious decision that, OK, what can I control? I can control the effort. Yes. And also, I found, like I was saying before Brian, I thought, Well, let me, I'll just do a sort of a half lazy day. You know, I'll work to like level three today. And and then the day would not go. That didn't work. You know, I'm not getting anywhere and I don't feel good. So so the sort of process itself taught me that I have to go to a higher level and I'm constantly I'm sure it's the same way with you trying to take my push myself farther and have a higher level of aspiration. Of course. I'm trying to just earn. Those few moments for me, the thing is those few moments where I feel like I'm floating. Like, you know, the. There are these moments when we're writing. Or shooting, you know, there are these moments when we're in the pursuit of this work. That we are in that magical alpha place where we're tethered to the Earth, but somehow floating in the ether and hyper present, but also worlds away. And it doesn't come easily and you can't, as you say you, this is what you would say when the muse comes over your head. But those moments are so restorative for me, they're so rejuvenating that it's it's why and they only show they only come through diligence. Yes. So unfortunately, I'm stuck showing up every day, so I'm not thinking is conscious. Yes, you always want to push the work forward and get better and better and better to do the work. But like the other day, I was on set and we had to write it. We realized, Oh, we have to write something for these two people. And Dave and I looked at each other. I was like, Oh, I'll do the first pass this, and I went down into the bowels of this place we were in and it was the set had 500 extras on and it was this giant scene. And then there was this little part and I went down into this little room that we had and I took my laptop out. And again, it was a small scene. It's a half a page of dialogue or a page dialogue. But I because of the I know it's only because of the practice, I just wrote it and I was flying for a sec. hUh.. And those and it's only comes because now the pressure on me to do that if I hadn't been working every day and hadn't been in the flow. I know my hands would have been frozen above the keyboard, 500 people upstairs, two people sitting at a thing that are expecting you to hand them these pages. It's an incredible thing that you did. I mean, if I'm a young person working on that set and I see Brian go down and do that, I go, all the hell, did he ever do that? But it's not. But you know, it's not magic. Yeah. You know what that is is the same reason that Ted tomorrow Lou Ferrigno could curl 200 pounds in each arm. Uh huh.. Because the day before he curled 190 pounds. Right? Yeah, I mean, that's the that's kind of what you're talking about. OK, have a few more things for you. Let me tell you, when we pull in one story, I can, uh, I have a friend whose name is Armées Melissa needed, she won the Gold Medal in at the 96 Olympic Games in Atlanta in the floor, exercise and gymnastics. And he's from Greece, obviously. And he told me this story that after that, you know, obviously it's a big event. Everybody's cheering, they're going crazy. You know, he just won. He did a whatever a perfect. I don't think it was a perfect, but it's close enough. And this reporter, a female reporter, asked him, you know, came up. She was all excited, put the mic in his face and said, How does it feel to do the greatest performance of your life under the under the most excruciating pressure? And he said, he said I wanted to like slap across the face, he said. He said I rein myself in because I didn't want to, you know, be cruel or anything. But he said the real proof was he'd done that you routine 5000 times. This was not the greatest performance he'd ever done. You know, he didn't rise out of anything. He just delivered on that target habit, habit and diligence. We were. We were. A few years ago, I had to have surgery, I had to get my gallbladder taking out, taken out, and I knew someone who knew the surgeon who was going to do it and this person who knew the surgeon was the sort of an influential person. And they said, I'll call and I'll tell them, there's the doctor. I know what you're going to say and you are to me and all this stuff. And I said, Do not do that. It's not because I'm not because I'm noble, by the way. Next, I didn't want special treatment. I. I was happy to get a good room and I was happy to have the important person set me up. No, I wanted it to be like a shortstop fielding a routine grounder. A professional who's fielded thousands of grounders. Yeah, let him just field the grounder and throw it to first base. Not to know that they're in the World Series at the bottom of the ninth. Like, you just might as well change. You know, he knows how to do it. We were we were at the onset the other day, and Chris Bosh, the professional baseball player, came by and my son and I often have this conversation about if you could choose somebody to shoot a foul shot, if you could choose one person to shoot a foul shot to save your life and your whole life was on the line. Who would it be? And Bosh said, probably Ray Allen. And I asked the question, or Sam? Actually, my son asked the question, my son said. But the better question is, would you tell him that it was for your life? There's a great question about that. Yeah, yeah. And Chris Bosh said, Yes, I just know. He said, I just say, make a foul shot. Oh, uh huh. Just make a foul shot because he's in the practice of making foul shots are a great answer. Yeah, you're in the practice of making foul shots. Just get up there and shoot foul. Well, we orange it up. All of us are. Yeah, so a couple more things. What did the response to war of art? Show you or teach you one thing is when I wrote this, I think you'll relate to this completely, Brian, I thought only right writers all relate to this the blank page, they'll understand, but nobody else is going to going to care. But I was amazed that actors and which I still don't understand, I still don't understand how how actors have is, but they sure do, because I've talked to a few classes and they're just, you know, they anyone a. So that was the sort of the lesson that everybody seems to feel this phenomenon. Well, founders of entrepreneurs and founders, really? Yeah, I guess that's true, too. Yeah, entrepreneurs. Yeah, they realize they're going out on a limb completely. They're risking everything. They're, you know, walking the plank. Yeah. How do you decide not to just go bowling in the morning? Yeah, right? Yeah. Instead of trying to make those scary phone calls? Yeah. So I think they relate to it, too. But. You know, you really teach about. How we don't need these external voices, you validation, you become the guru of sorts. And I wonder how you process because I know it's not your aim at all. No, and I really I'm sort of embarrassed even to hear that. But yeah, how do you answer the people who look to you, you know, when they give you the look with the look in their eyes of wanting some sort of Buddha's kiss? I don't know what to say. I mean, now, I mean, it's easy for me to talk to you here because we're fellow soldiers and we know what we're talking about. But I certainly I don't want anybody to look to me in that way because they're giving away their power to me and they're not helping themselves. You know, that's really crucial. Yes. Yeah, because they don't need to anybody, you know, it's all. I'm happy to have produced this sort of stuff in book form where someone privately and in their own silence of their own head can read it and they don't have to. Nobody's laying it on them. You know, there's no benediction we can give them. You can't give them a benediction, right? Absolutely. You can't touch them. And yeah, yeah. And give it to the all assets, the most thankless thing in the world to try because, you know, say more about that. Yes, because you're going to be a swing the f**kin sledgehammer. Right? That's why it's hard. But also, like I said, I think you have to hit a certain point. You have to hit bottom in your own way, whatever that means to you before you're ready to hear. It's like that old thing of when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. But if the student isn't ready, the greatest teacher in the world can be there. And Siddharth is one of my favorite books. And, you know, as fascinating as Siddharth, the story is that's the perfected man. It's it's less interesting than Govinda story because Govinda is going through the thing and is the acolyte who's not ready until the very, very end when they cross the river and he can finally get just the kiss on the forehead that. And he's finally ready to just understand, right? As I'm embarrassed to say hello, I'm sorry, the Buddha. It's the It's the Buddha story by Hermann Hesse. I actually read it, believe it or not, but I don't remember. I read it when you were. Yeah, right before. But it's it is this sort of start story. Do you find it hard to live up to the version of of you in print? The don't because I don't even think about it. You know, you don't care. I mean, I'm really in. It's so hard. Just doing it. Day to day is, you know, it takes all your resources and all your energy. I'm just trying to do that. I'm just a soldier in the trenches like you. We are our fellow soldiers in the trenches. You can't really find Steve Press field on social media, though he does have a blog. Yes, I do. I have a blog. What's your website? It's just WW w Stephen Press field dot com so you can go there if you want to interact in some way with his work on an ongoing basis, although I probably won't answer. And that's fine. What you unless the guys, unless they send you the penis enlargement, then know as I always ask. Sure. But but also read these books, and I'm talking a lot about the nonfiction because he did just write this this new book, but his novels are all of the spirit through characters of mythic power and force trying to enact this stuff in in their lives and in those worlds. So I recommend the novels. And I have to say that these books, the War of Art and now the artist journey are crucial for people trying to find, trying to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other and do the work they feel they were born to do so. Steve Men, thank you for coming here. Thank you for writing these books. Thanks for doing the thing that you do. Well, thanks for the kind words, Bryan. I knew this was going to be a good experience because I knew you would ask, you know, really interesting stuff that would make me think and that I haven't been asked before and it was even better than I thought it was. And you're terrific at doing this, you know? And my hat's off to you for not only your work on billions and all the other stuff you're doing, but this this stuff is great on the moment. Thank you, man. Yeah, no, I this feels kind of sacred to me to do this. Hey, everybody, you can find me on Twitter because I will waste my time there constantly at Brian Koppelman, and you can email me the moment gmail.com. But don't send me screenplay ideas pitches. Don't ask me to connect you with press field because I won't. Hey, have fun with Seth Godin tomorrow ! OK, that's great. I'll say hi for you. Good bye, everybody.