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- This is the Improve and Have Fun Podcast
where I'm improving myself, having fun along the way,
with the hopes of encouraging you to do the same.
In this episode I wanted to talk about Steven Pressfield
and a small storytelling tip.
Last episode I was talking about Anne Lamott
and her book, Bird by Bird a wonderful book,
especially if you want to get into writing.
And I just want stay along these same lines of storytelling
of writing because its something I definitely want
to improve on, and I hope that by sharing these tips
it's something that can help you if you wanted
to get into writing, or are writing.
I'm not an expert or anything like that in writing,
but, definitely, like I said the gist of this podcast
is always to do the same kind of actions
or do repeated actions to go ahead and improve
and get better at whatever it is you're trying to
improve and get better at.
This is what we are encouraging in this podcast.
Let's go ahead and get into it.
An upcoming book takeaway will be
Steven Pressfield's The War of Art.
I was listening to an interview where an interviewee
credited this book as being a big influence on their career.
The key subject in the book is
what Mr. Pressfield calls the resistance.
The resistance prevents productivity.
Procrastination goes hand-in-hand with the resistance.
It can be a mental block.
It can be making excuses to take action.
It prohibits getting things done.
I write the show notes, slash, script for all the podcasts
which later become blog posts and video.
When I began my daily practice late last year,
I committed to writing five to seven days a week.
This coupled with journaling.
The last two weeks I've thought, Hey, if I'm journaling,
that's as good as writing, right?
Not really.
I take journaling as vomiting my ideas,
thoughts, feelings onto paper.
Writing is more organized. More structured.
I think so anyway.
There is a connective thread that I found
between James Altucher, Ryan Holiday,
and Steven Pressfield.
Besides Mr. Holiday and Mr. Pressfield
being on Altucher's podcast.
That thread being the best modern day stories have
similar elements to tales which have been
told and shared for centuries.
And if we don't instinctively get those specific
story beats, we often don't feel that particular story.
Or we may think it may be lacking.
Here are quotes from interviews done by James Altucher
with first Ryan Holiday and then Steven Pressfield.
Check these out.
(chime)
- So, I love that there's that story about
the fisherman in Thailand.
And we think it's so smart and wise.
But really the only reason we thinks it's
profound and wise is because it's 800 years old or whatever.
- Yeah, yeah, well the best stories kind of
have resonated through time.
Steven Pressfield talks about this too
in kind of his least known book, The Authentic Swing.
- Yes.
- How basically, you know, he wrote
The Legend of Bagger Vance,
which is about a golf pro in the 1920s.
And he basically says it's almost word-for-word
the Bhagavad Gita in 2500 years ago in India,
but that's almost like, you take these stories
that are hundreds or thousands of years old,
and it just goes to show you that civilization
has focus-grouped that story
- Yes!
- To basically say, yes, this is a story that
millions or billions of people will love.
So if you can write something that's a mirror of that story
in modern times, people will probably love that as well.
And a great example is when the Fugees,
the rap group, did the song, Staying Alive
from the Bee Gees, it was a big hit.
- Yeah.
- Cause there's no way it could not be a big,
you could do, you could just take Staying Alive
and put a Reggae beat to it and do,
and then auto-tune your voice,
and it's going to be a big hit.
- Well think about my books, right?
My, uh, I could have tried to come up with
some comprehensive philosophy of the universe,
and maybe I would have been right
and maybe it would have worked.
Or I, what I did instead was,
someone introduced me to this 2,000 year old
philosophy called stoicism, which millions
of people and some of the most successful people
in history have used, and I could say I'm gonna
make this more accessible to a wider audience.
(chime)
- I think it is.
In many ways it's every story.
If you think about it.
- Right.
- It really is sort of the hero's journey,
you know, from Joseph Campbell or CG Jung.
You know, where the hero starts out
in the ordinary world, receives the call,
enters the extraordinary world, and then it's all
sort of duals against his own self-created
sabotage, resistance, whatever it is.
Until the hero finally kind of returns home,
having overcome, hopefully or at least gained a perspective
on what that internal enemy has been all the way,
whether it's The Odyssey Odysseus doing that thing.
Or Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, you know that,
it is, it's every story.
The Jesus Christ story is that story.
(chime)
Luke receives the call, which comes
at the end of Act I in any classic story, right?
And, uh, usually a mentor but he's afraid.
Following the call is always the refusal of the call.
I know you know this all, everything, James, but--
- No but you know what though?
It's not always so clear to me,
because with every story there's tweaks.
You have kinda like the framework,
but then the artist improvises the framework.
- Gets expressed in a certain way.
- But yet the framework almost never changes, you know?
The story of Odysseus, when they came to summon him
to go to the Trojan War, he pretended
he was plowing the field and he pretended to sow salt
in the field because he wanted to show he was crazy.
That's like a refusal of the call.
And then whoever it was that was sent for
to bring his baby, Telemachus, in the path of the plow,
and when Odysseus stopped the ox and didn't run over
his little baby, they said, ah, you malingeringer.
You know, and they drafted him for the Trojan War.
But that's so the refusal of the call.
- And so Luke refuses the call when Obi-Wan
says, you must go, come with me and train to be a Jedi.
And he says, no, I have to stay.
- Yeah.
- My aunt--
- Yeah right?
And it's, what, the sand people kill his aunt
and his uncle, right?
So now he has to go.
But usually it's the mentor that gives the young hero
the inspiration and the courage to respond to the call.
And then it's like,
Dorothy and the tornado
and she's gone from Kansas, right?
And she's into the,
into the, um, the extraordinary world or the inverted world.
- Now that's the case though,
The Wizard of Oz is an interesting one.
She's passively brought into this alternative world.
This special world.
You know, because the tornado picks her up.
She didn't make it back.
Somehow or other the people and her family said,
Oh we can't find Dorothy. So they shut the door
and just let her survive in the tornado and that takes her
to this special world.
As opposed to Luke where his aunt and uncle are killed.
He's got no other choice now.
He decides to go with Obi-Wan.
- But that, in a way, is an external event.
- Yeah.
- That he didn't cause.
But in any event, what you were saying about somebody
that's working a job, you know,
and I think maybe the call, quote unquote,
is not necessarily to write a movie or a novel
or to start a business, but it's a call to be
who you really are, right?
That may be finding love.
It may be finding, you know, marrying the person
that you want to marry and having a family.
It maybe, whatever it is.
But we all sort of feel like we were
born to the wrong family.
It's like, we look around, my brother, my sister,
what, what am I here with, you know?
That we're not yet who we are, right?
Who we really are.
And that's kind of the call.
An then resistance is the equal and opposite
force in reality that always resists that.
That always puts into our minds, I'm not good enough,
I'm not smart enough, I haven't got the guts,
Why me?
Do I deserve it?
Why should I write this book?
It's been done a thousand times already.
Better than I'll, You know all those excuses.
And, so the hero's journey is kind of a series
of confronting those obstacles,
but what's also interesting in the hero's journey
is that there are allies that come to you
in every story, right?
Even Conan the Barbarian is like a classic, you know,
the original Arnold Schwarzenegger version.
Where he meets these, you know,
these sort of magical creatures
and magical friends that help him.
And that happens too.
I'm sure it's happened in your life many many times.
You and I here today, in a way, are sort of
magical friends for each other on some sort--
- That is a way to think about it.
- On some sort of journey. You know?
Which might not be clear to us right now.
But what brought you to come out here 3,000 miles
along with other things that you're doing?
You know?
(chime)
- These are both quotes from James Altucher's
podcast, The James Altucher Show which I will
link to in the show notes for this particular episode.
When I watch movies, TV, read comic books,
I feel these old story tropes are tired.
I want to write my own fictional stories
or reinvent the wheel, but after hearing this
I see how important it is to hit
these story-telling memes.
I think this makes my job creating even easier.
Someone recently asked me, What one word do I love?
I said, growth.
Thinking back, I should have said, create.
Thank you so much for listening.
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