Steven Pressfield

I was joined by an absolute legend for episode 199 of Open Book: the great, inspiring, and wise Steven Pressfield joined us on the podcast. @SPressfield Watch this episode on X, YouTube, Spotify, or listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I promise you won't want to miss this one!! Timestamps 0:00 Steven Pressfield Introduction 1:20 Who is Steven Pressfield? 2:08 Early Wilderness Years to Future Success 4:38 The Muse, Consciousness & Where Creativity Comes From 5:42 The War of Art: Understanding Resistance 8:01 Loneliness of the Artist & Following Your Calling 12:46 The Bhagavad Gita & The Legend of Bagger Vance 17:16 Ego, Creativity & Why Nothing Good Comes From Ego 21:02 The “Daimon”: Genius, Demons & Alexander the Great 31:20 Five Words

The payoff for the prisoner is release from the agonizing imperative of identifying, embracing and bringing into material existence the dreams and visions of his own deepest, noblest, and most honorable heart.

Why is trouble so intoxicating? Because it's payoff is incapacity.

What you and I are really seeking is our own voice, our own truth, our own authenticity.

Is money how we keep score? Is it magic? Is wealth a currency that opens doors, realizes possibilities, produces transcendence?

The real utility of money is its convenience as a medium of exchange. But when we're addicted to money, we become hooked on the metaphor.

Resistance wants to keep us shallow and unfocused. So it makes the superficial and the vain intoxicating. Speaking of, have you checked your email in the last half hour?

Resistance hates two qualities above all others: concentration and depth. Why? Because when we work with focus and we work deep, we succeed.

There's a glamour to failure that has been mined for centuries by starving poets, romantic suicides, and other self-defined doomed souls. This glamour inverts failure and turns it into "success".

There's a difference between failing (which is a natural and normal part of life) and being addicted to failure. When we're addicted to failure, we enjoy it. Each time we fail, we are secretly relieved.

"We'll figure it out. It's our job." stevenpressfield.com/2025/02/with-t…

But lives go down the tubes one repetition at a time, one deflection at a time, one hundred and forty characters at a time.

Distraction and displacement seem innocent on the surface. How can we be harming ourselves by having fun, or seeking romance, or enjoying the fruits of this big, beautiful world?

All addictions share, among others, two primary qualities: 1. They embody repetition without progress. 2. They produce incapacity as a payoff.

The repetitive nature of the shadow life and of addiction is what makes both so tedious. No traction is ever gained. No progress is made. We're stuck in the same endlessly-repeating loop. That's what makes addiction like hell.

Something that's boring goes nowhere. It travels in a circle. It never arrives at its destination.

Addictions are not "bad." They are simply the shadow forms of a more noble and exalted calling. Our addictions are our callings themselves, only encrypted and incognito. The are a metaphor for our best selves, the coded version of our higher aspirations.

The hero must possess the passion and the will to push the story to the limits of human experience in order to achieve their goal.

The work of art or service that might have been produced is replaced by the drama, conflict, and suffering of the addict's crazy, haunted, shattered life.

When we can't stand the fear, the shame and the self-reproach that we feel, we obliterate it with an addiction. The addiction becomes the shadow version, the evil twin of our calling to service or to art.