Recording - April 2021 - 63

APRIL 2021
TAXI Road Rally 2020

Keynote Interview With Steven Pressfield, Part 3
Best-selling Author of The War of Art
Interviewed by Michael Laskow
Do you have any hobbies, Steve? I'm just curious,
what do you do with your life when you're not
writing or battling Resistance?
I play a little golf; I go out to dinner; I watch
movies. But I'm not down in the basement
doing any woodworking or building a motorcycle. You know, my work is my hobby; my work
is what I do. That's my love, and I think that's a
great thing that what you do to make your living, to be your livelihood is that thing that you
love.
That's exactly what I was telling myself last night
at two o'clock, sitting right here working on the
questions for this interview. Thank God I love what
I do. I've often said that the last person on the
field wins the game. How did you hang in there for
27 years before you started to become successful?
I was hangin' on my fingernails through that
whole time. I very much felt that I was in exile,
that I was on the sea somewhere trying to get
home, trying to come back to that. So yeah, I
felt that very keenly all the time, that I had
fallen from grace, and was just desperate to get
back somehow.
Was financial success a motivator? Would you still
be doing this if you were making 40 grand a year?
No. No, because one of the things that I think
really helped me, Michael, in the sense of failing for so long, was that I had to ask myself, and
really answer it, " Why are you doing this? What
are you doing this for? Are you doing it because
you think you're gonna make money? Are you
doing it because you think you are gonna get
recognition? Are you doing it for women? What
are you doing it for? " And because I wasn't getting any of that, the answer was I'm doing it for
the work itself. I'm doing it just out of love for
doing it myself.
Like when I started on The Lion's Gate, the book
that you were talking about before. Which for
people who have never heard of it, it's about the

Steven Pressfield

Israeli six-day war of 1967. I went over to Israel
and I interviewed 70-something soldiers, airmen, tankers, men and women. At the start of
that book, I knew it was gonna cost me a fortune to do it, and I knew that I had no clue that
anybody would buy it, and I said to myself, " Are
you willing to do this anyway? " It was just like
I've been willing to do anything anyway. And it
turned out I did make a deal, and I did have
enough money to pay for it ... thanks to my
agent, Sean Cohen, at the time.
But, yeah, all I ever wanted to do is just pay the
rent, you know? Just like Butch Cassidy says in
that movie, " As long as we break even, " I think
is what he said. So, money has never been a
motivator for me at all.
I know we touched on it before, but give people
the in-depth view of what Resistance is.
Okay, so when you are a writer, and I'm sure
this is true of musicians at the keyboard. You
can kind of feel it radiating off that keyboard-
at least I can-a powerful, negative force, and

that force is trying to stop you from doing your
work. To stop you from making your music,
stop me from writing whatever it is I want to
do. And the negative force will say things like,
" Well, let's go to the beach, " " Let's have a
drink, " " Let's go call up our friends and sluff
off for the day, " " Let's go have an affair, " " Let's
go... " whatever.
The other thing is the voice in your head-the
voice of Resistance. The other thing the voice
of Resistance will say to you is, " You are a bum.
Who do you think you are trying to write a
symphony? What background do you have?
Every idea in your head has already been done
by Beethoven, by Keith Richards, by Barry
Manilow. They have done it better than you
will ever do it. You are too old, you're too
young, you're too fat, you're too skinny, you
have no training, you have too much training. "
In other words, it will be this negative, negative, negative screen to stop us from doing our
work. Self-sabotage, fear, procrastination and
Continued on page 64
RECORDING April 2021

Recording - April 2021

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