222: How to Overcome Resistance Around Creativity and Finding Your Muse with War of Art Author, Steven Pressfield

In this week’s episode of The Light Watkins Show, Light Watkins sits down with bestselling author Steven Pressfield, known for his influential book The War of Art and his latest release, The Daily Pressfield. Steven shares profound insights into the creative process, discussing the ever-present struggle with resistance and the importance of showing up consistently to overcome it.

Steven offers a unique perspective on creativity, likening it to an improv exercise where there's always something in the box waiting to be discovered. He emphasizes the concept of the muse, a creative force that consistently provides ideas, and how crucial it is to invite this muse into our lives through disciplined practice.

Steven also shares personal anecdotes, including how carrying the Bhagavad Gita on flights led him to a breakthrough book idea. Light and Steven explore the importance of mindset in the creative journey, with Steven offering practical tips for writers and creators on how to entice the muse and defeat resistance.

The episode is packed with actionable advice for aspiring writers and creatives. Steven discusses the necessity of consistency, the significance of not judging your work too harshly, and the benefits of embracing imposter syndrome as a sign of stretching one's potential. He also shares fascinating stories from his career, including a strange writing circumstance that involved a medical condition and standing up to write.

Listeners will also learn about Steven’s upcoming intimate writer's workshop in California, where attendees can gain his personal instruction. This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone looking to deepen their creative practice and overcome the blocks that hinder their progress. Don’t miss this engaging conversation with one of the most insightful voices in the creative world.

Transcript

SP: “Imagine that you're on stage, you're doing improv and you're holding a little white box. And what the exercise is, you open the lid of the box and you, and you tell everybody what's in it. And sometimes you'll open the lid and there'll be a tarantula in it, and you'll open it up the next time and there'll be a ham sandwich. But the trick is there's always something in the box. So that's kind of like the muse in a way. It's like when you sat down each time you open it, there's something there and you ask yourself, well, where does it come from? But it's always there. For whatever that means, there's this creative force that's always there.”

[INTRODUCTION]

Hello there friend, welcome back to The Light Watkins Show. I'm Light Watkins and I have conversations with ordinary folks just like you and me who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path, their purpose, or what they've identified as their mission in life. And in doing so, they've been able to positively impact and inspire the lives of many other people who've either heard about their story or are who've witnessed them in action or people who've directly benefited from their work.

And the goal of these podcast episodes is to expose you to as many people as possible who found their path and to humanize them and their story. And after hearing story after story after story, hopefully eventually you give yourself even more permission to move further in the direction of whatever feels like your path and purpose because what you'll see is that. Anyone who's done that has had to overcome many of the same obstacles and blocks and challenges that you might be dealing with right now. 

And this week I'm back in conversation with The War of Art author Steven Pressfield, who recently published his 23rd book titled The Daily Pressfield. And he's also making a rare guest appearance at a very intimate writer's workshop this fall in California, which you are invited to join. 

I've written several times throughout the past years about how The War of Art helped me personally when I was trying to self publish my first book and struggling and stopping and starting. And that book really got me into shape and I started showing up as a professional instead of as an amateur, which I didn't even realize that I was doing, but I've been a hardcore Steven Pressfield fan ever since. He's been on the podcast a few times before, and I always love when I have an opportunity to speak with him about resistance with a capital R, which is his sort of buzz phrase.

And he describes resistance as anything that's keeping us from showing up on a consistent basis to whatever we perceive to be our calling at this stage in our life. And I've covered Steven's backstory extensively in our first conversation, which you can, find in episode 42. So I'm dedicating this episode to unpacking many of the mindset principles of writing, which is what Steven is going to be teaching at his upcoming workshop. And he writes about every week in his Wednesday writing newsletter. And so we went in depth into tips for overcoming resistance. We talk about the relationship that the creative has with the muse and how to entice the muse to show up and feed you ideas. 

We also discussed how a weird habit that Steven had of bringing the Bhagavad Gita onto his airline flights led him to one of his first book deals. And we talked about the strangest circumstance that he's ever written in. He reveals when the best time is to do research for your project. Hint, it's not at the beginning and how professional writers aren't actually writing to express themselves. They're writing for a very different reason, and we talk about why that is. Of course, we go into several personal stories from Steven's decades long journey of attempting to become a successful writer. And we go over the details of his upcoming writer's workshop and how you can receive personal instruction from Steven this fall in Southern California. This conversation was jam packed with actionable insights and anecdotes and nuggets of wisdom, especially if you are a creator or an aspiring creator. And so without further ado, here is my conversation with the best selling author, Steven Pressfield. 

[00:04:41] LW: Steven Pressfield. Good to see you back on the podcast. 

[00:04:44] SP: Likewise. It's great to see you. Everything okay with you? 

[00:04:47] LW: Everything is great. Yeah. You know, always dealing with resistance. I'm in the process of writing a new keynote speech. And I'm noticing a lot of resistance around that. It's something that I've never really done before. I have given a lot of talks, but I usually speak extemporaneously and I've never really sat down and written a whole talk out from beginning to end. And I've been posting about how I feel this imposter syndrome, which I consider to be a good thing because it means you're stretching into your potential. I've been navigating that and it's been great. I had to go back and reread the War of Art. it's also a part of The Daily Pressfield, which I want to talk about your 23rd book. And yeah, so this conversation is coming at a great time for me and very relevant topic.

[00:05:38] SP: Yeah, I saw that thing that you were writing about imposter syndrome, you know, and I was thinking about that. And I think, to me, we're talking about resistance with the capital R, imposter syndrome is just that's it. It's just a natural state of I wake up with it every morning. And I'm sure that everybody does, so it's really nothing to get exercised about. Everybody always doubts that they're good enough for something, but what's the keynote thing for a big event you're putting on? 

[00:06:09] LW: No, I've been wanting to speak on bigger stages and I've been putting myself in a position to be hired to do that by corporations and organizations and stuff.

And so over the last couple of years, I've joined this speakers community. So I've learned a lot about the ins and outs of people who've been doing this for decades. And how methodical the process is. And what I've discovered, and this is something that was new for me, is that the art of delivering a keynote is really, it's a performance. It's like a one man show or one person show. And so the act of writing it is kind of like creating your own Hamilton or some, you know, it's a production. And so that's the opportunity is to really kind of dial in on the messaging, but also on the emotion and a little bit of the drama, because you want it to be interesting.

An average keynote is an hour long. It's a long time to talk and to listen to somebody talk. And if you want to kind of get momentum in that world, it has to be a product that people want to see again and again and again. 

[00:07:22] SP: Yeah. A

[00:07:22] LW: So, yeah. 

[00:07:23] SP: I mean, I'm always amazed when I watch like a great comedian put on a show. Like Chris Rock or somebody that's out there for 90 minutes or something. It always sounds like they are just doing it off the cuff. They're just winging it. But in fact, they're not, right? Because when you see a show twice, the same pauses come at the same place and the same jokes follow each other. So it's sort of amazing how they look so natural and like they're thinking about, Oh, what am I going to say next? So I guess it's part of it. I've never done a keynote. I wouldn't know but I'd be really terrified to do that. 

[00:07:58] LW: Well, that's because they've obviously written it out and they've put in the reps and they've gone back and they edit it. And so once they sort of lock it in, just like if you go see Hamilton 10 times, it's going to be the exact same performance each of those 10 times. 

But you're doing a workshop. And I want to talk about, I want to talk about that near the end of the conversation. But just leading up to the workshop for those people who aren't familiar with who Steven Pressfield is, which is ridiculous because of course everybody should be. We've covered a lot in our last few conversations on this podcast, but I always like to just give a little bit of a refresher for those people. 

Obviously you're the author of the War of Art, but you're also, I think you're more passionate about writing fiction as opposed to nonfiction. And that really was a by product of just a conversation you had with people. So you're a business partner. And so let's talk a little bit about how you sort of introduce yourself these days. 

[00:08:50] SP: Oh, it's a good question. I'm not sure how I introduce myself. I mean, I started out, I mean, I've wanted to be a writer ever since I was, in my twenties. And it took a long time, to get any success and what I really think of myself as is, a storyteller, as a writer of fiction.

But the sort of the weird thing was I've kind of banged out this one little book about 20 years ago called the War of Art. And that's really about the creative process, nothing to do with fiction or anything. And that's the one that I've sort of, that people kind of know me for, which is kind of frustrating to me because you can never get anybody interested in fiction that you wrote unless they find it themselves. So then kind of followed up the War of Art with a bunch of other stuff that's kind of in that same vein. And I'm trying to sort of balancing between the two worlds and the never, the twain shall meet.

[00:09:47] LW: How many copies of the War of Art have sold? I've heard you mentioned millions, but do you have a specific like range? 

[00:09:53] SP: I don't have a specific, but I know it passed a million, like a couple of years ago. And so I don't know, it's somewhere. 

[00:09:59] LW: It puts you in a very elite group of storytellers, having a book out there that's over the last however many decades has sold a million copies.

[00:10:08] SP: Well, you know, it's sort of a devil. The one thing that really put it over the top was I got invited on to Oprah Winfrey show and that sort of got it into escape velocity. And it's been knock wood. It's been kind of flying by itself since then. 

[00:10:23] LW: So, what was the Joe Rogan effect like? Because you've been on there.

[00:10:26] SP: That was a big too. But you know how it is like with Amazon or something like that. You can't really tell how many copies you're selling. You have no idea. I have no idea if you sell 20 a week or if you sell 2000, I have no idea. 

[00:10:39] LW: Well, in the creative community, you're kind of known as like the David Goggins of creativity or more specifically of writing in the sense that you take a pretty unrelenting attitude towards showing up for the craft and obviously you talk a lot about resistance with a capital R, but on the other side of that, you talk a lot about consistency as well. So is consistency so important? 

[00:11:07] SP: I mean, you think like that it's true of everything's true of meditation, right? I mean, you would definitely say to anybody that you were teaching, right? You do it every day, do it twice, three times, whatever. And I certainly I'm a real believer. I mean, if we were training for the Olympics as runners, let's say, you're not going to take a week off. You can't take off three days. You can't even take part of a day off. It's all got to be focused. And I'm a believer, as you know, in the muse and the goddess, that mysterious element that sort of looking down each day as you're meditating or as you're doing your work or whatever, the meditation gods, and every day that they see you there doing your thing that strengthens the bond and strengthens the flow. So we're not amateurs at this. We're not here to fuck around. We're here to do something. So just like an athlete or, anybody, you know, it's, an everyday thing. No data. I mean, Steven King writes on his birthday, Christmas, every day of the year.

[00:12:11] LW: Yeah. I had an experience with this that really kind of got me to the pointwhere I started to rely on this muse that you're referring to. I didn't call it that when it first happened to me, but you’ve got this email called Writing Wednesdays, obviously comes out every Wednesday. I've got an email called the Daily Dose of Inspiration, which I started in 2016. And I remember being so afraid of taking on that commitment that I was going to run out of content within, I don't know, three weeks because how many stories does any person know that have a clear beginning, middle and end that's inspiring. That's a clever anecdote. Probably, I thought I had at least three weeks worth, but then I was going to run out. And so I was very afraid to take on this commitment, but I took it on anyway. And sure enough, within three weeks, I ran out of content. And the next night, I just, it was 11:45. The email had to go out at six o'clock. I had nothing because I have this very high standard for myself. It's gotta be the right message. I decided I'm just going to sit on the couch and close my eyes until something comes through. And I did that. I sat and I inadvertently meditated. I wasn't really intending to meditate, but I just closed my eyes.

And because I've been meditating for so many years, I just dropped into this meditative state and. Sure enough, within about 25 minutes or so, an idea bubbled up and I'll go, that's it. And then that started happening and it reminded me of this Maya Angelou quote, where she says, you'll never use up creativity because creativity generates creativity.

And I think she's referring to, we're all referring to the same concept of this muse or this wave of inspiration that's sort of feeding us. And I realized at that point, and this was like 2, 500 emails ago, because I'm doing this now for seven years that I didn't have to be responsible for what to write. I just had to show up. then the muse was going to give me exactly what to write. And you had an experience where you wrote in your, most recent book that you would take the Bhagavad Gita on airplanes and reading and then led to an idea.

Talk a little bit about that and talk a little bit about the battle of Thermopylae and how that also led to an idea. So these are just such random. 

[00:14:34] SP: Let me say one thing first, Light on that subject you were just talking about. There's a wonderful book I want to recommend called Improv Wisdom by Patricia Madsen. It's a little book kind of like the War of Art. And Patricia Madsen taught improv at Stanford for years. And it was like the class that everybody lined up around the block to get to see. What'd he get to take? 

[00:15:03] LW: And what's her last name? Patricia… 

[00:15:04] SP: Madsen. M A D S E N. Improv Wisdom.

And one of the exercises that she does was she would say, imagine that you're on stage, you're doing improv and you're holding a little white box. And what the exercise is, you open the lid of the box and you tell everybody what's in it. And sometimes you'll open the lid and there'll be a tarantula in it and you'll open it up the next time and there'll be a ham sandwich, but the trick is there's always something in the box. And so that's kind of like the muse in a way. It's like, when you sat downeach time you open it, there's something there and you ask yourself, well, where does it come from? But it's always there. So for whatever that means, there's this creative force that's always there.

So I just was going to say about the Bhagavad Gita they sometimes call it the Hindu Bible. And it's the equivalent for Hinduism and it's scripture, but it's short, you can read it in an hour and it's kind of poetry. And I've just sort of, it's something I kind of fell in love with and as a young person and I always used to read it on airplanes because I thought if the plane crashes, I want to be reading something spiritual.

The idea for the book and the movie, The Legend of Bagger Vance came from that book from the Bhagavad Gita. I just sort of stole the structure of that book and put a little bit of a twist on it. So the muse works in mysterious directions that way, too. Watching a movie that's about nothing that you even think about.

And suddenly you have an idea for something. So, I know that's kind of the way, you tap into stuff, and it's always there. It's like Rick Rubin says, it's like a trade winds coming across from Hawaii. There's always something. There's always a breeze coming in and there's always something on it.

[00:17:06] LW: Do you also subscribe to the idea that Elizabeth Gilbert talks about, which is if you don't follow through on that inspiration, that it's gonna move on to someone else. 

[00:17:13] SP: Yeah. Well, I won't say that, but that may be true, but I thought what you were going to say was if you don't do it you get sick. It goes into your body. If you don't do it, that energy doesn't just dissipate, it goes into a darker channel. And the next thing you know, I mean, I know if I were to like, stop for three days, five days, 20 days or something, I'd be into some bad stuff. I'd be going out looking for trouble and good things would stop happening. 

[00:17:51] LW: Yeah. I've, actually equated it to your real health insurance. Like following through on these internal urges from your heart voice I call it is your real health insurance. And it reminds me of a conversation I heard you have with some other guy. I can't remember who the guy was, but this was maybe a few years ago. You were on somebody's podcast and he was talking about how. He started this or he either he did it or he knew someone who started an organization that helps late stage cancer patients to fill dreams that they had their whole life. And then once, they enrolled in the painting class or the horse riding class or the gardening class or whatever, a lot of times they went into remission and they ended up living, you know, much longer than their prognosis and he theorized because they were finally doing the thing that their heart had been urging them to do for sometimes decades. 

[00:18:52] SP: Yeah, that's actually I forgot where I was talking about that, but right up the hill behind me, the house right behind me used to belong to Tom Laughlin, the actor. If you remember Billy Jack, it probably was before your time, but shall I tell the whole story here? 

[00:19:08] LW: Yeah, go for it. 

[00:19:09] SP: So Tom Laughlin was in his non-movie world became a kind of a renegade Jungian therapist. He had no accreditation or whatever the word is. And he became this kind of a guy that people would go to after they tried everything else, right? Nothing was working, right? Cancer was killing them. And this was his absolute theory. He felt like he would ask them, he would say, let's say a lady came in there and she had cancer or something, and she's 75 years old. And he'd say, was there ever a dream that you had when you were a young woman that you didn't follow through on and a woman might say something like, I always wanted to be a classical pianist, I played until I was 18 or 20 and I got married and I stopped. 

And so what he would say to her, start again immediately. Rent a grand piano, take classes, go back for that dream like you say cancers would go into remission. And so his theory was that the reason you got the cancer in the first place was because you didn't live out that dream. And that energy, that creative energy was really like a child that wanted to be born inside you. And you hadn't allowed it to be born for whatever reasons. You were afraid or whatever. Life overtook you. You had children. Blah, blah, blah. And so he said, okay, let's cure this by letting that creativity come through again. And I'm sure this wasn't scientific and God knows how, if it worked for everybody, but apparently it worked for some people. And I certainly believe that in my own body.

[00:20:52] LW: You referred to the voices that kind of talk us out of doing these things initially as these diabolical tricks that resistance. 

[00:21:02] SP: Yeah. And that's the imposter syndrome. That's all that sort of stuff. And by the way, I follow you, you know, I follow your daily stuff. You're one of three people that I follow every day. 

[00:21:15] LW: How does one distinguish between the diabolical voice and the actual voice of inspiration or the muse voice? 

[00:21:24] SP: You know when it's inspiration because it's good. It's something positive.

[00:21:29] LW: But it's tricky too, because you could be focusing, like I'm focusing on the keynote, but then back my mind, I could make the argument that, oh, I should post something on social media because that's going to be that part of my thing. And then another voice is saying you know, you should go out for a walk because walking is great. And so like, how do you, when you have a lot of these? 

[00:21:53] SP: I mean resistance is so diabolical that like it will latch on to legitimate things like it is good to take a walk, it is good to maybe to post on social media. And if you do take a walk, some great ideas might come to you. But resistance is the devil and it's really trying to get you to take a walk so that you won't sit down and do your work. How long have you been working on this keynote thing? 

[00:22:16] LW: Embarrassingly I've kind of been starting and stopping and stuff for about a year, and a half.

[00:22:23] SP: Let me ask you another thing, if you don't mind, you've said that you're sort of trying to get on bigger stages and kind of expand your footprint out there. What's behind that and where do you see that going over the next three or four years? 

[00:22:38] LW: Well, I've given a lot of talks on comparably smaller stages and I've seen the impact that it can have on people. And I just, I have this urge to scale my message to get so that it can reach more people. It's the same reason why I write books now, because historically I have been in these rooms with like 20 people. And having these amazing experiences with these 20 people, but it's only impacting 20 people. I just feel like I could be of more use. It's kind of like when I was modeling, I really enjoyed modeling back in my early days, early twenties. And then I started kind of researching and studying Eastern philosophy. And I just felt like, you know what? I could be using my voice and my talents a little bit more than I am right now, standing in front of a camera.

And so it's that same kind of feeling where I feel like I've graduated from this thing that I was doing. It doesn't mean it was a waste of time. It doesn't mean that I wasn't great at it and all of this, but I just feeling this pull towards something a little bit bigger. And I know it, and it scares me. And that's another telltale sign that this is a direction that I need to go in because I'm very comfortable in that room with 20 people, but I'm a little bit nervous, you know, getting up in front of 2,000 people. So, yeah, I just, I've done that so many times throughout my life that I, recognized the pulling effect.

[00:24:07] SP: Ah, very interesting. Ah, okay. 

[00:24:11] LW: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like again, what you talked about. We didn't talk about the battle of Thermopolis, but that's another one of these sort of quotes, random ideas like you never set out to make a bestselling book. You just kind of were following through step by step on these on this pulling that you felt inside. Let's keep exploring. Let's go a little bit deeper. And then maybe at some point, you have to take out that legal pad and write out the outline, right? Yeah. And then once you did that, you had to do something with it. 

[00:24:41] SP: Yeah. 

[00:24:41] LW: So I feel like we all kind of have our version of that, whether we show up to it or not, whether we say yes to it or not. But the blueprint is pretty much the same, getting the call and then at some point you have to become a professional about it.

[00:24:57] SP: Yeah, you do. I mean, I'm constantly on the lookout for whatever the next idea is. As I'm working on one book I'm sort of got my antenna up for whatever the next idea is. And you know, I look at it in a kind of a professional way. I think most people have a lot of ideas, in other words, sometimes people say, oh, you creative people, you have a lot of ideas, but I think everybody has a lot of ideas in the shower while you're driving, whatever, when it's in the subway. I think what most people do is they dismiss them right away. They'll say, ah, that's a dumb idea or, oh, I could never do that. And it just sort of goes in one ear and out the other. Whereas I think a songwriter will catch just three notes or just a little riff or a little thing, and they'll go, oh, that's something, and they'll hang onto it and see if they can build a song around it, you know, they'll see it as kind of a germ of an idea.

And I think it's the same with writers. You'll have a character will come to you or a scene will come to you or just some small thing that then you will build on a lot of analogy that I sometimes use is like, writing a book to me is like unearthing a dinosaur, you're out on a hike and you're looking at the ground and you see a little something peeking up from the ground and it's going to scrape the dirt away and you go, holy cow, this is a bone, but underneath that, dirt is an entire dinosaur. It's like a hundred feet in every direction and the process is sort of to just get out your little paintbrush and little by little by little expose it until you see the whole thing.

[00:26:35] LW: You have something in your book. It says writers do not write to express themselves. They write to discover themselves, which is pretty juicy. So what do you mean by that? Is that more of a spiritual process?

[00:26:49] SP: Yeah. This was maybe this will plug into what you think about, Light, But one thing that was sort of amazing to me as I started writing books, which was like from 1995 or something like that, was that each book surprised me. The idea surprised me like we were talking about the Battle of Thermopylae. That was my second book, a book called Gates of Fire. And I just happen to be reading Herodotus. And I came to this one paragraph and I just was hit like by a bolt of lightning that, ah, this is a story, the dinosaur bone, you know, this is something I could take and run with it, but at the time I never thought in a million years, I would write on that subject.

I knew nothing about it. I didn't even believe that it was going to be commercial, but I was just kind of seized by that idea to take it. But the big point of that and other books since then is they come as surprises. So when I say people write to discover who they are, they don't write to express themselves. They write to discover themselves. It's like when I said, finished that book. I looked at it and I go, wow that's me in some way, or that's a part of me that I never knew existed. And that's the way it's sort of gone from then on. And the War of Art, when that kind of came to me, when that was done, I never expected to do it. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. But when it was done, I said, that's another part of me. And so I do think that we write to discover ourselves and even Socrates, there's some passage in Socrates where he talks about that the artist at work doesn't know what he or she is doing. And I think that's absolutely true. I think the sculptor maybe has a general idea of what they're going to uncover when they work in the marble or whatever it is, but it just kind of evolves and it surprises them. And I think that's the way it should be. Does that ring any bell with, with you in your evolution or in the world of meditation?

[00:29:02] LW: Yeah, a hundred percent. I keep going back since you're a student of the Gita maybe you could help break this down, but I keep going back to that quote from the Gita, which I think refers to this, which is you have a right to perform your duties. But you're not entitled to the fruits of your actions.

[00:29:21] SP: Yeah, you have a right to your labor, but not to the fruits of your labor, which I think is absolutely true and very, very deep. 

[00:29:29] LW: I think a blurry line that a lot of creatives have is. In creating for the sake of creating versus creating for recognition, creating to raise your platform and your status.

Because those thoughts are there, man. We can't deny those thoughts are there. I want this to be a bestseller. I want people to like this. I want to feel like I have some sort of idea of what's good and what's not good, but it's based on external validation. So how do you navigate that? 

[00:29:58] SP: It's another great question. But another thing that I've found is that the things I've done that have succeeded the most were the ones that I thought had no chance of succeeding at all, that I thought were not commercial at all. Like, Gates of Fire, for example, that's sold about a million copies, over a million copies. And I thought, this is a story about a battle that happened 2,500 years ago that practically nobody's heard of can't pronounce it. Can't spell it. It's another country. It's not America. You know how Americans, they only want to read about America. So I thought, who's going to be interested in this? I mean, nobody's going to be interested in this except me. I'm interested in it. 

And I knew that I wasn't going to make any money off of it because it, a, when you write fiction, you have to write the whole book before you can, you know, sell it. You can't just make a, write a proposal or something like, so I thought this is going to take me two years and nothing's going to come of it, but I just loved the idea.

And it worked. It just happened to work. So on the other hand, when I've had an idea that I thought, Ah, this is a sure fire success. Those are the ones that completely bomb and, you know, nobody even So for me, I just sort of ask myself, do I love it? And that's the only criterion I go on. And Rick Rubin says the same thing. He says, you know, if a band gets into the studio, and they're just trying to make a hit, that's not the attitude that brings the help from above. The goddess doesn't like that attitude whereas if they go in there to just make music that they love without again, being attached to the fruits of your labor those are the things that do well. And if they don't, at least you've done something for your soul. You were true to yourself which is what you always say. And I think it's true. 

[00:31:53] LW: Yeah. You have one of my favorite anecdotes from the War of Art is the King Kong lives that you wrote with your partner and had organized and nobody showed up and it was a horrible I totally understand that. And I think it's interesting to navigate the thoughts, those sort of egoic thoughts around what you want the results to be. But what I take away from what you just said is just don't be attached to those thoughts that they can be there. That's fine. But you're not doing it for that and you're not attached to that.

As you're sitting down every day and showing up and work. But you know, it took me three and a half years to write my first book, which was a self published book. So I didn't have any real like professional guidance. And how do you know when a project is done? How do you know when it's ready for the public?

[00:32:41] SP: I think you just know, I don't know. I mean, I'm a believer. I do a lot of drafts. I'll do like 15 drafts. And at some point you just say to yourself, I can't stand doing another one of these things. It's time to let it go. And also, I had an agent years ago. His name was Bart Fless. I was like in my late twenties and he was in the seventies or something. So he seemed older than God, but he used to say when I come towards the end of something, and by the way, he never sold anything. I never sold anything and never made a dime. But he would say, you know, how close are you? How close?

And I would say, I'm close. I'm close. And he would say, give it to me. Close is good enough. And I think there's a lot to that. 

Perfectionism is definitely a form of resistance and you wanting to do it over and over and over until, because you're afraid of getting it out there and afraid of being judged.

[00:33:37] LW: Yeah. 

[00:33:38] SP: So yeah, to me, it's pretty obvious when it's ready to go. 

[00:33:43] LW: Can we talk about your very first book, the first one you finished. So you were 31 years old, you finished this book, right. And you wrote that you couldn't find a buyer for it. And this is, I guess, I don't know what year this was, but it was way before Amazon. Nowadays, you can self publish a book on Amazon. And I'm wondering for those people who are, who are out there, who wrote something and they can't find a buyer for it. Do you recommend, is there value to just putting something out there? If you couldn't find a buyer or how do you sort of, interpret that kind of situation?

[00:34:14] SP: I never thought about that before. I mean, certainly in the old days when there were gatekeepers, i. e. publishing houses and editors who would tell you, hey, this sucks. This isn't good enough. You just accepted that it's not good enough to be published. So I think there is something to self publishing something like that. At least you got it out there. But it also can be a negative because like I'm thinking about this book of mine that I did finish that time. It's a good thing I didn't publish it because it just wasn't good enough. So I'm sort of two minds. I mean, I think that somebody could write a book, their first book and it would be good enough to share with the world. That's a long shot, you know? I mean, you did it, but I certainly didn't. it's like anything else. It takes a while. If you're playing a musical instrument, how long do you have to play the piano before you can actually perform on a stage?

And that also, I think the idea of self publishing is a little bit of an insecurity thing and a little bit of an ego thing, I think as long as you just sort of put it out there and just said, okay, I'm not attached to the result, let it go. I'll just put it out there. then I think maybe that's okay.

But if you put it out there and it's like, oh man, I hope this is great. I hope people buy it. Then, you know, that's not best place to be coming from. 

[00:35:41] LW: Yeah, I was saying that my first book which took me three and a half years when I look back at the first couple of drafts the reason it took me so long is because I would take these long breaks. That book led me to the War of Art. That's how I finished the book is a friend of mine suggested the War of Art and I read it.

And then after that I realized, oh, I've been an amateur with this endeavor. I need to become a professional. And I started showing up and I even put some money on the line. I sent my friend of mine a check for $4,000 and said, hey, if I don't finish by this date, which was three months from that point then you can cash this check. 

So of course, once I put some skin in the game and had stakes and everything I was able to finish the book no problem.

[00:36:36] SP: That's a great way to do it. I never thought about that. Yeah, that's great. 

[00:36:40] LW: Yeah, but you know, something you talked about with your friend, Randall Wallace, who wrote what was my favorite movie for many years, Braveheart. You asked him about his research for the movie. And he said, I don't do any research, which was interesting because that's such a historical film. But the deeper answer is you can do research, but you don't do research until draft seven, eight, until the later drafts, you don't start because doing research. 

[00:37:11] SP: Research is a form of resistance, which is completely counterintuitive. But it's exactly true, right? If you, as long as you're doing research, you think you're actually working, you're working on the book. But in fact, you're avoiding writing it. And I'll tell you one little story. I might even have told you this life, but I wrote a book called The Lion's Gate a few years ago, and it involved a lot of research in Israel.

It was about the six day war, the 1967 war. I interviewed like 75 fighter pilots and tankers and stuff like that. And I came back with like 400 hours on tape. So I thought to myself, well, I got to be a historian about this. I got to do this right. So let me transcribe every interview and then I'll boil it all down just like a professor would do.

And this went on for about three months and I was getting absolutely nowhere, and one day I just said to myself, you know, just write the fucking thing. And that immediately cured everything. I just kind of plunged in and just startedI was so familiar with the interviews that I had them all in my head. I didn't really need to like. 

Anyway, that was research versus writing and just doing the writing. And then you can go back and check the research. I'd write a chapter about a certain pilot and I'd go, did I get that right? And then I'd read over what, you know, the interview wasn't like, oh, okay, I'll fix this and fix that.

But as Randy Wallace says when he said he didn't do research, he says get the story first, like the story of Braveheart, he sort of blocked it out. Okay, it's going to start here at the middle here. The end is going to be here. Okay, that's the story I want to tell. And then, you know, you can start look up the real William Wallace and what really happened. And if you're really doing it right, when history clashes with your own story. Dump the history, you know, stick with the story that you're going to tell. 

[00:39:01] LW: I was watching the Aaron Sorkin masterclass on that platform. MasterClass. And he was talking about Social Network. And obviously it wasn't exactly how things went, but he was focusing on the human aspects of the story. And you can nail those, you can always fill in the facts and the details as you see them and bring the story to life. But if you're just reading fact after fact, after fact, after fact, then it's not that interesting of a story. 

[00:39:28] SP: Then it becomes an academic treatise and there's value to that too. But I mean, I think when someone sees a movie like the social network, they realize it's not what exactly happened. You know, we just want a good story, you know, and in some way, Maybe Aaron Sorkin's version of that is truer what really happened, you know? So to anybody that's writing fiction out there, don't be too wedded to the real story of the facts.

[00:39:58] LW: What's your approach with fiction versus nonfiction? Because you mentioned with the gates of fire that you had these, two lines that came to you and you knew that's how I'm going to start the book. Is that something you do with, nonfiction as well? You kind of have a concept or an anecdote that you start with? Or do you start with an outline that was the legal paper anecdote? 

[00:40:20] SP: It's a good question. I mean, I haven't… Oh, yeah, that's actually was a different book of Virtues of War. But the only real long nonfiction I've done is this lines, the Lions Gate that where I did all that tons of research in Israel.

But then if you want the kind of the long answer, I'll give you the long answer here. Like this is so I have all this sort of raw material that I've been working on through interviews for this book. And it's true. And because people have died, real people have died, you know, this is, I can't just wing it. I can't make up shit. I've got to be true to the reality of the thing. So I asked myself the kind of the questions that you ask yourself of a work of fiction. Like if we were writing the Godfather, that's totally fiction. So you ask yourself first, what's the theme? What is this about? and you try to go deep. It's not just about a surface story. It's like what's really underneath it. Like for me the story of the Six Day War in Israel was about a return from exile. So just like you would do in a piece of fiction and then I kind of ask myself who's the hero of this story? Just like you would do. Who's the hero? Who's the villain? And then what's the climax? Is there some scene? And that scene might come at the start, chronologically, of the real stuff. 

And once I knew those, then I said, okay, I'll just use this raw material and, tell the story, You know, with an inciting incident, an act two midpoint, and a climax, just like I would do with a piece of fiction even though the characters were real, and the events were real.

And by the way if we had a hundred other writers who had done this exact same research, they would have written a hundred different books, and each one is valid. It's just a question sort of of what struck your soul, what you saw out of the raw material.

[00:42:25] LW: We're kind of veering into a writing workshop zone, which, you have a writing workshop coming up.

So I wanted to ask you, when it comes to writing, particularly fiction, if there's someone out there who's thinking of an idea that they want to put on paper and they get inspired by this conversation to overcome their resistance, just in terms of thinking of heroes and villains, right? 

What triggered this question is I saw a video the other day where this I forget what author it was, but he was saying that what makes a good hero is someone who's got a flaw. And I think that's something that's a little counterintuitive. Like the hero has to have a flaw and there's gotta be something in the plot that allows the hero to confront. And I was curious to hear your perspective on heroes and villains and what makes a good hero and what makes a good villain. 

[00:43:15] SP: Ah, well, I'm, not necessarily a believer in that flaw thing. I think hero, villain, and theme are all the same. Absolutely together, right? To me, what I got this from Robert McKee, and I think it's absolutely true, what really makes a hero is a hero is willing to sacrifice himself or herself for the sake of a greater cause. Whereas a villain will never do that. 

That's why Trump is such a classic villain because he will never sacrifice himself for anything other than his own self. And if you think about the great James Bond villains and or anything like that, or even a villain like the shark and jaws or the, alien. The only thing they care about is themselves, right? They only want to eat, keep feeding, conquer, whatever it is. So I think that's one thing that the, hero is willing to sacrifice him or herself or their chance of happiness or whatever it is for a greater cause. And the other thing about a hero to me is that a hero is willing to go through this. I got from Robert McKee as well. And it's absolutely true, willing to go to the absolute end of the line to give everything that they possibly can, which is why so many stories are life and death stories. 

So if you think about it as a movie like Casablanca, I'm sure probably 99% of our audience here has never heard of Casablanca, but I hope they have. But if you think about hero, villain, and theme, the theme of Casablanca is. It's better to expend yourself in a greater cause than to seek a life of selfish fulfillment. 

So the hero of the movie is Humphrey Bogart and the villain is the Nazis. And the question is, can This really good couple, Ilsa Lund and her husband played by Paul Enreid, the resistance, the brave French resistance fighter, can they escape from Casablanca and continue their good work fighting the war? And how they're going to get out is through these letters of transit that Humphrey Bogart holds in his hand. And then, and he's in love with, Ingrid Bergen, with Ilsa. So in the end of the movie, He sacrifices his love for her and he puts her on the plane to Lisbon to freedom with her husband.

So he's giving up. his own personal happiness, letting go the girl he loves for the greater good. And that is a kind of a classic hero, villain, and theme all working together.

[00:46:04] LW: Well, let me ask you this. I've been following you since 2014. You've become very prolific with your social media shares over the last several years, and you've got a weekly newsletter called Writing Wednesdays. You promote books that have inspired you on your social media and in your most recent book, The Daily Pressfield, you are referring to all the books you've written, but you also refer to Writing Wednesdays and you refer to this retreat that you've done before. And you've got another retreat that's coming up where you're going to be a guest presenter.

It's going to be in Malibu. It's going to be in September of 2024. And you said you're not going to be talking about the craft. You can be talking about the mindset. Is that because you feel like mindset is more important than craft? 

[00:46:51] SP: It's because I think there are a lot of people who could be, who are a lot more articulate and know a lot more about the craft of writing than I do. But I do think that I understand the mindset as well as anybody. And when I'm talking about the mindset and you know about this exactly. If you're sitting down to write a novel, let's say, or a long form non fiction piece, or a long form TV, or record album, or something that's going to take two years, and you're basically alone, going into a room every day to face your demons every day, you have to have a very specific, no bullshit mindset, to keep you going.

I think people and this is certainly was true of me when I started out, start out with the best of intentions with all kinds of passion, but they can't make it to the end of the line because there's so many pitfalls out there that they're not aware of emotional pitfalls, your own demons, your own self sabotage, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what this etreat is about want to try to in my mind. It's sort of like if we had an audience of people who wanted to try out for the Navy SEALs. And I was a Navy SEAL. I'd have to tell them, you better get your head and ass wired together right now, and I want to make it clear to people how hard it's going to be and what exactly the pitfalls are so that when they come up against them, they don't freak out and they don't quit so that they go in with a realistic mindset of how hard it's going to be. And even right down to like what Robert Green likes to talk about is the tedium of a long piece of work. You’re not excited. You're not fired up every day. There's a period in there that's like the middle of the NFL season, you know, where you're going from game seven to game 14, right? And you're just grinding it out through the middle of the season. That's why I wanted to talk about the mindset, because I think that's what I do understand and what I can. 

[00:49:06] LW: How did you link up with is it Rodha, Rodha Ahmed? 

[00:49:09] SP: Yeah, Rodha Ahmed. Yeah. It's her idea. She's the one who sort of said, let's do this together. I could never do it myself. She's the sort of the the genius behind making it all happen, finding a place to do it and all the organizational stuff. And she has a whole concept about that it's silent. You're not allowed to ask me questions until the very end of the thing. And when you do there are little breaks where you write, where you have a take. It was an hour to write and you're not allowed to talk and nobody's allowed to talk to you. And that's her idea. 

[00:49:47] LW: IS this your first one with her or have you done it before?

[00:49:49] SP: I've only done this once before, and that was in a real half assed way. So I've never done it in a real serious way. And I may never do it again, but this is the first one I'm kind of like you, Light. I'm sort of expanding to a slightly higher level of self exposure. 

[00:50:07] LW: Does it feel being as prolific on social media and podcasts and stuff over these last couple of years? Do you like the way that feels?

[00:50:14] SP: Yeah, it's fun. It's fun. Actually, I'm really doing it in partnership with my girlfriend, Diana, and she's right out that window right there and in her own little cabin working and she's the one who films everything and edits everything and cracks the whip over me and that kind of thing. So without her, it's a group effort, her and me, and we've kind of found a voice. It's not making very much money, but it's fun. So I think how many of these have I got in me before I totally run out of ideas, but the box is always something in the box, right? So there's always another thing to say. 

[00:50:53] LW: Okay. So you're, the retreat's going to be on September the 7th. I'm just looking at the schedule. Looks like you're going to be giving presentations for a couple of hours and then breaks and another couple of hour presentation and then break. And then writing immersion. Who's the ideal participant in this, if someone is listening to this? 

[00:51:11] SP: Ah, that's a great question. I Don't know if I should, I could name somebody, but okay, I'm not going to actually use this person's name, but this guy has written a book that was actually a hit. He's been very successful in other fields. But maybe a couple of years ago, he's a friend of mine. He told me he had this idea for a book and I could tell he was terrified to write this thing. It was very important to him. It was one of those things that like, oh my God, if I fail at this, my whole life goes down in flames.

So he's been sort of defeated by his own resistance over the last couple of years. Anyway, he's the perfect person because he's already a pro. He's given the right mindset and the right inspiration, which he's already done at once, then maybe he'll come out of this. One day session. I'll go all right. God damn it. If Pressfield can do it, I could do it too. Sit down and do it. So. this is definitely not for dilettantes. It's not for somebody that's just kind of, you know, playing around or sightseeing. This is for somebody that, is capable of putting in this long term effort, but is somehow still fighting their own imposter syndrome and distraction and all that sort of stuff, and this hopefully would be like a kick in the ass to get them rolling. 

[00:52:28] LW: Yeah. And you talk about, you write about how resistance never goes away. You're still experiencing it all these decades later. And so considering the fact that you understand that and you are good at showing up, what's the next level, what's layer two of, okay, I'm showing up, I understand there's resistance, what's the next level of creation that one needs to be aware of? 

[00:52:54] SP: I think showing up is 99% of it, right? I mean, there's, really two parts to it. I think any, creative person would say this, a dancer, a photographer, a filmmaker. The one part is, the goddess, is the inspiration of being open to you know, when a song comes into your head that you pull over to the side of the freeway and you write it down and you're open to it. You don't just blow it off and say, oh, that's just something. And then the other half is the professionalism half of just simply showing up every day. And you know, it's sort of like, as a meditation, my trainer, T. R. Goodman, who I think he's quite a spiritual dude who is definitely meditates at a really deep level every day for hours.

And one of the things he talks about, and I know you believe this too, is that as you get to a higher level of inspiration, the frequency of the vibrations that are coming into you get higher and higher and higher, right? You're getting better stuff from the universe. And you need to sort of train your body to your instrument, your radio to be able to take that voltage. And I think that's the other half of the professionalism as a writer or as a creative person is that when the ideas do start coming that you can handle, you know how to hit the keyboard and make it happen or hit the piano keys and get it down there. 

So it's a two part thing beyond the showing up, but showing up is 99% of it. I think if you show up, help comes to you. Just being there wins the favor of the goddess. She gives you a lot of points for that. 

[00:54:33] LW: I would also, just from my own experience, I would add that, and I know you're, probably familiar with this as well as, just the practice of not judging it too much. You know, like you could be there, you could be writing and you could be thinking this is not great and that's fine, but still keep writing and still keep showing up.

[00:54:51] SP: And that's a great one. I'm really glad you brought that up. That's absolutely true. Not judging it, turning off the self censor because that again is another form of resistance. That sort of perfectionism of and get that comma in the right place. 

[00:55:09] LW: So people have asked me in my meditation work, where's the strangest place that I have ever meditated. And I've got this whole story about meditating in a New York City, dry cleaner in the changing room and it's really funny and all that. 

And I've heard you talk about speaking of showing up, I've heard you talk about one of the strangest circumstances that you've experienced is you had some medical condition where you couldn't wear pants or underwear, and you're literally standing up writing naked with a fan blowing on your balls. Would you say that that's one of your most bizarre showing up? 

[00:55:46] SP: That's the most bizarre. Yeah, exactly true. I had two infections simultaneously. I had a staph infection and a yeast infection. Right down where the sun don't shine, and they had the treatment for it was that you had to have circulation of air, you know, but I wasn't going to stop working. So I just worked standing up and for a couple of weeks, wrote some good stuff. 

[00:56:12] LW: Which project do you remember which project you were working on? So we can appreciate them.

[00:56:16] SP: I don't remember which project. No, I don't. Yeah. It's just supposed to show you there's a new trolley coming down the track every day.

[00:56:24] LW: Yeah, and something else you've said that I think it's really good to remind the listener of is that the intensity of the resistance. Someone experiences is in direct correlation to the importance of the dream or calling that they're experiencing to be brought into the material being.

[00:56:47] SP: Yeah, that is a great, a true principle. To me, it's a principle just like Newton's third law of thermodynamics, you know, it's a law of nature. and we can use that to our advantage in that when we're inspired by an idea, that's really important to the evolution of our soul. Forget about whether it's commercial or not, a piece of music or a dance or whatever it is. If it's really important to us, we will feel tremendous resistance, tremendous fear, tremendous imposter syndrome, all that sort of stuff. So we can use that fear to encourage ourselves because if we didn't have that big fear or that big fear is an indication of a big dream. So it means we absolutely have to do it. Big dream equals big resistance. 

[00:57:36] LW: What's the best way for someone to find out more about this writing retreat, the Silent Writers Retreat? 

[00:57:43] SP: There's a website and it's called silentwritingretreat.com. And that's how you sign up for it or you put your name on the list. Actually Rhoda and I were kind of going over. We've got like about 500 applicants for 50 places so far. So of course people don't know how much it costs. So when they find out how much it costs, that may self select a lot of people out. But that address that I just gave you, that link is how to sign up.

[00:58:15] LW: How do you think about cost? I think about the idea of exchange when it comes to creativity and maybe you can even say a calling. Do you think that there's a correlation there? 

[00:58:28] SP: This is kind of a new one for me. I'm sure you've thought about this a lot, right? Because you gotta know what do you charge for your workshops and people have to fly?

Most creative people, I think, and I'm one of them, tend to undercharge, right? You tend to undervalue your stuff, right? Recently for me, I've kind of flipped over and I've come to think that you know, this stuff is worth a lot. And so, I don't think it's, out of line to charge what you think it's worth.

[00:58:57] LW: I also imagine you probably get hit up for consultations for people who are experiencing resistance. Is that, true? Do you get, do people reach out to you a lot? 

[00:59:05] SP: That's true. And I help maybe a couple opf people. Because as you know, you can't do that. There's only so many hours in a day. I won't charge for that, but I know that people that do charge will charge really a lot of money. And I don't want to do that. So the bottom line is I basically say no. That's not what I'm here for. I'm a writer. I'm not here to coach people. 

[00:59:32] LW: Well, you do, coach people through your Wednesday newsletter. And I love the way that you even frame the messages. You always write as if we're all right on the same level of creative as you are. You say, you know, we need to show up and be okay being alone. And, you know, as you and I, as writers, and, you know, I think that's really beautiful and special. So it feels kind of like you're being inadvertently coached by you. If you just subscribe to your newsletter, which is completely free. And then what's also cool about your newsletter is that it has a comment section below, because it links to a blog post so people can actually leave feedback and, exchange ,messages with one another and support one another in that way.

[01:00:18] SP: Yeah, but I do believe really that we're all soldiers in the trenches, you know, and maybe somebody's at the start of their journey and somebody's, 30 years into it. But like just as you were saying before, resistance never diminishes and never goes away. And I'm sure that Aaron Sorkin fights it every day.

In fact, you know, the story about him that he takes like eight showers a day and he apparently, when he gets kind of stuck. On his writing, he feels like, okay, let me rinse myself off and he literally will go take a shower and then come back and sit down. And sometimes he'll take like eight showers a day in a writing day. So apparently resistance strikes even Aaron Sorkin. 

[01:01:02] LW: Do you have your version of that? Is there a thing that you do to kind of get things flowing again?

[01:01:08] SP: I do laundry. That's my thing. I take a break and you'll do a little, you know, I'll fold the laundry or whatever. 

[01:01:17] LW: Wonderful. Well, look I'm excited that you are making yourself available for people to come and be in the same room with you, which I think it's a pretty big deal to be in the room with the David Goggins of writing, Steven Freakin Pressfield. 

[01:01:31] SP: This retreat is actually outdoors, Light, where it's outdoors. 

[01:01:35] LW: It’ll be in a space with you and to be able to hear you in the flesh. 

For those people who, are inspired to sign up, you got 500 people ahead of you for 50 slots. So don't let resistance make you procrastinate too much. You definitely want to be a person of action. 

[01:01:51] SP: Well, I hope that you'll be there, Light.

[01:01:55] LW: I don't plan on being in September at that time. I've actually got a gig around that time, but I don't know. We'll see, I’m open to it. 

[01:02:03] SP: Well, maybe you'll come, maybe I'll do more.

[01:02:04] LW: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:02:05] SP: Well, thank you.

[01:02:06] LW: Thank you so much for making the time to come back on to the podcast. Is there a book in the pipeline as well that's coming out soon, or are you still in process of finishing? 

[01:02:25] SP: There's one that's novel that's with my agent now that we'll see if can find a publisher. This book here came out a couple of years ago called The Man at Arms. And it's set in the ancient world, and the hero is my favorite character, Telamon, the one man killing machine of the ancient world. And the, book that's coming out soon, if we hope, is a follow up to this book. 

[01:02:48] LW: Don't you have your own publishing company?

[01:02:50] SP: Yeah, but I think for, like, a serious novel, I want to do it with you know, a mainstream publisher. it's too hard to, get to that fiction audience as a kind of a self published thing. 

[01:03:01] LW: Okay. Beautiful. 

[01:03:02] SP: Yeah. 

[01:03:02] LW: Well, thank you. Wishing you the best of luck with all of that. And you're still one of my biggest inspirations.

[01:03:09] SP: Hey, you are for me, Light. Thank you for your preparation on this. And for taking the time to really try to dig in deep here and hope I see you in person before too long. 

[01:03:19] LW: Absolutely.

[END]

Thank you for tuning into today's episode with Steven Pressfield. You can grab a copy of The Daily Pressfield everywhere books are sold. I also recommend grabbing a copy of The War of Art, which you can read in a day, as well as subscribing to Steven's weekly newsletter, Writing Wednesdays.

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Also, don't forget, you can watch these interviews on my YouTube channel if you prefer a visual element to the conversation and don't forget to subscribe there as well, because that also helps. 

And for those who crave a bit more, I post my raw unedited version of every podcast and audio. in my Happiness Insiders Online Community a day early. So every Tuesday you can access the unedited version, which is where we keep in all of the false starts and the mistakes and the chit chat at the beginning and throughout the episode. And you will also get access to my 108-Day Meditation Challenge as well as various challenges and masterclasses for becoming the best version of yourself. 

And finally, if you've noticed, we are now releasing a bite sized plot twist episode each Friday. That's a shorter clip from a past episode where the guest shares the story of the pivotal moment in their life trajectory. So we usually cut out the first part where we talk about childhood and we get right to that high tense edge of your seat moment where they are taking that leap of faith and that's why it's called the plot twist because that's the moment when their life shifts away from the conventional thing that they were doing towards that greater sense of purpose. So look out for those every Friday. 

And otherwise I hope to see you back here next week for another long form episode about someone who's just a regular person doing extraordinary things. And until then, keep trusting your intuition. Keep following your heart. Keep taking those leaps of faith, super important. And if no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you so much. Sending you lots of love. Have a fantastic day and see you for the next plot twist this Friday.