The Daily Stoic - Habits and Addictions — Excerpt 2 from Steven Pressfield’s “Turning Pro”

Episode Date: December 25, 2022

Back in October, Ryan presented the first of four audiobook excerpts from Steven Pressfield’s “Turning Pro.” In this excerpt Steven talks about identifying and battling the habits and addictions that hold us back, the fears of the amateur, the simplicity of life once one turns pro, and his own story of turning pro. Published by Recorded Books on Brilliance Audio.📕 Grab a copy of “Turning Pro” at the Painted Porch Bookshop and on Audible✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, from the Stoic texts, audio books that you like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to actual life. Thank you for listening. of life. Thank you for listening. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. When I sat down to start, discipline is destiny. I followed a routine I do with all of my books, which is I read something from Stephen Pressfield. Actually, I think for discipline, I read Turning Pro, for justice, I read, put your ass where your heart wants to be. Whenever I am starting a project, I read something from Stephen Pressfield because he's maybe the greatest writer on how to be a professional, how to be great at winning these inner creative battles.

So when I saw him last, I asked if we could excerpt a couple pieces from his wonderful audio books and he's been kind enough to let us do that. And so today's episode is part two in some excerpts from the wonderful turning pro. And this one he talks about some things very, very much connected to the idea of discipline. He talks about habits and addictions, failure, success, distraction, money, and trouble, and how these habits and addictions for amateurs hold this back, that they're self-inflicted wounds. He talks about the fears of the amateur, talks about the path of turning pro, and the simplicity of life that happens when you turn pro.

A great line. It says the hero wonders, the hero suffers, the hero returns. You are that hero. So here is part two of our excerpt of Stephen Presfield's Turning Pro. You can grab that in the painted porch. I think we actually have some signed copies. So I'll link to that. And you can get the audio book, which was produced by recorded books on Brilliant's audio.

I will link to that in today's show notes, but you can get it anywhere. Audio books are sold. Thank you, Stephen, for this wonderful excerpt. 20. Pulling the pin Part 2. Two things struck me about the migrants in that bunkhouse. First, they were wonderful guys. They weren't crazy, they weren't stupid, they would teach you and help you that share anything down to their last dollar. They were funny and smart. Most of them were readers. The good portion of them kept up with politics and had more insight to contribute than the paid pundits on the airwaves. Second, they had achieved the kind of peace

that comes when you've already fallen so far that you don't have to worry about falling any farther. Worse come to worse, Dave or Jack had slept on the ground, foraged for grub. If the bomb went off tomorrow, they'd survive just fine. There was something very natural I thought about a life following the seasons. The human race did that for millions of years.

When I finished the season in Washington, the next crop was coming into Harvestown in California. You coming for the cherries, Dave, ask me? I wanted to. If I hadn't had a book, I had to finish so I could stop pulling the pin and my cat mode a look after I'd have done it. I gave Dave a ride out to the highway. I could see him in my rear view with his thumb out heading south as I was going west.

The life we call normal isn't normal at all. A spouse and kids, a mortgage, a nine to five job, who said that was life? What's so great about working in a factory or a cubicle? You and I, who are artists and entrepreneurs, live a life that's closer to natural if you ask me. We migrate to. We follow the muse instead of the sun. When one crop is picked, we hit the road and move on to the next.

It's not a bad life. It's lonely, it's tough and ain't for everyone. But like the life of a migrant on the road, it has its compensations. Dave may have been a drinker, and he certainly wasn't going to quit. But that was the life he had chosen. Would his mother and father, his sisters and his ex-wife have picked that kind of life for him? Would he himself have elected it? But Dave was willing to pay the price for the choices he had made. He paid it in hard work and hard times and the looks people gave him when they passed him on a street.

They didn't know Dave. He was a top hand and a good guy. He would never pull the pin. He was a pro. 21, the definition of boring. Something that's boring goes nowhere. It travels in a circle. It never arrives at its destination. The repetitive nature of the shadow life and of addiction is what makes both

subtidious. 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. All addiction share, among others, two primary qualities. One, they embody repetition without progress. Two, they produce incapacity as a payoff. Twenty-two, the payoff of incapacity. Remember my friend who is addicted to love? She's charming, she's interesting, she's beautiful, and adventurous, and intelligent.

If you saw a story about her in vanity fair, you might think, wow, what a brilliant life this woman leads, full of drama and romance and glamour, I wish I had that life. I love my friend, but she has wasted her life. I know because I've wasted vast tracts of my own. My friend has used the pursuit of love to produce incapacity, and it has worked for her for decades. Her multiple talents have gone unexplored, untried, and unrealized. She has become a version of herself, but it is a shadow version, an inverted version,

a crippled version. She is miserable and she cannot or will not change. You might disagree with me. You might say my friend as a great life. You might be right. 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? But lives go down the tubes, one repetition at a time, one deflection at a time, 140 characters at a time. The following is a sampling in no particular order of garden variety addictions that fall short of hardcore chemical dependency, but are still more than potent enough to cripple,

malform, and destroy our lives. 23. Addicted to failure. There's a difference between failing, which is a natural, a 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. 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 quote-unquote success. I've had a romance with this goddess myself. Have you? The lure of failure can be as intoxicating as the hardest of hard-core narcotics. Its payoff is incapacity. When we fail, we are off the hook. We have given ourselves a get out of jail free card. We no longer have to ask and answer Stana Slavsky's famous three questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want? 24. Addicted to sex.

If addictions and shadow careers are metaphors, sex is the richest one of all and the most difficult to decode. Why are we obsessed with sex? To sex represent conquest or surrender. Are we seeking the oblivion of orgasm or the transcendence of escaping the ego? Is union with another our goal, or are we seeking to dominate or humiliate our partner? Is sex about love? Are we seeking a soulmate, a mother slash father?

Are we trying to reach God? I don't see what all of us about sex is said the comedian, it's only friction. My own theory is that the obsessive pursuit of sex is an attempt to obliterate the ego, i.e. normal consciousness, the monkey mind that tortures us with restlessness, fear, anger, and self-centeredness. We're trying to get to the level above that. The entity we're seeking union with is ourselves. We're trying to connect with our true being, our soul, our self. 25. Addicted to distraction. Resistance hates two qualities above all others. Concentration and depth. Why? Because when we work with focus and we work deep,

we succeed. How did Tom Brady master the art of the forward pass? How did Picasso paint? How did Yoyo Ma learn the cello? Resistance wants to keep a shallow and unfocused. So it makes the superficial and the vein intoxicating. Have you checked your email in the last half hour? When you sit down to do your work,

do you leave your web connection on? It can be fatal keeping up with the Kardashians. 26, addicted to money. 26. Addicted to money. The real utility of money is its convenience as a medium of exchange. If you and I have a goat in Smirna, we don't have to carry the poor beast in our arms all the way to Aleppo to trade it for a carpet. We can sell the goat in Smirna, stash a silver derrick in our pocket, and take the derrick to Aleppo to buy the carpet.

But when we're addicted to money, we become hooked on the metaphor. Is money how we keep score? Is it magic? Is wealth a currency that opens doors, realizes possibilities, produces transcendence? Money is second only to sex in the richness of its metaphor. But as in the case of carnality, our real object is the currency of our own hearts. The same premise applies to power, fame, and all other external expressions of potency. What you and I are really seeking is our own voice, our own truth, our own authenticity.

27. Addicted to trouble. There are more than two million people behind bars in the United States, and another 5 million on probation or parole. How many millions more are self-imprisoned in cycles of abuse, of others or of themselves, or habituated to other forms of vice, of others or of themselves, or habituated other forms of vice-corruption and depravity. Why is trouble so intoxicating? Because its payoff is incapacity.

The scars and tattoos of the convict are his shadow symphony, his displaced epic, his unpainted masterpiece. The individual addicted to trouble will never get out of jail, because he is safer behind bars than free out in the world. Each time he is released, he will find a way to get sent back. The payoff for the prisoner is released 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. 28. My Year of Turning Crow.

I was 31. I had saved up $2,700 and moved from New York City to a little town in northern California. I rented a house behind another house for $105 a month. I had my old Chevy van, my Smith Corona typewriter, and my catmau. Every Monday morning I walked into the village to the Bank of America and took out $25. That sum lasted me for the next seven days. I didn't talk to anybody during my year of turning pro. I didn't hang out, I just worked. I had a book in mind and I had decided

I would finish it or kill myself. I could not run away again or let people down again or let myself down again. This was it, do or die. I had no TV, no radio, no music, no sex, no sports, I didn't read the newspaper. For breakfast I had liver and eggs, I was like rocky. In the early mornings I'd walk down River Road to my friend Paul Ringshouse, which was actually a camper-chail mounted on a pickup. Paul was a writer. He'd been a friend of Henry Miller's and Big Sur.

Paul taught me what books to read and what writers to pay attention to. That was what I did at night. I read all the stuff that you're supposed to read in college, but never do, or if you do, you're not paying attention. I read Tolstoy, Industaevsky, and Targenyev. I read Cervantes and Flobar andsky, and Targenyev, I read Servantes and Flobar and Stendoll and Knoot-Homson, and I read every American except Faulkner.

I was writing on my ancient Smith-Corona, which had a heavy carriage that physically shuttled back and forth as you typed. My catmo would curl up on the desk on the left side of the typewriter so that the carriage would pass over his head back and forth as I typed. It didn't seem to bother him. When I ran out of money at the end of my time, I went to pick apples in Washington State. That was when I met Dave and Jack. When the season was over, I had cleared 250 bucks after paying rent, gas, and engine repairs.

I drove south and got back to work on the book. One day I typed the end. That's the moment in the war of art when I knew I had beaten resistance. I had finished something. The manuscript didn't find a publisher and it shouldn't have. It wasn't good enough. I had to go back to a real job in advertising in New York and save up again and quit again and write another book that also didn't find a publisher because it also wasn't good

enough. Neither were the nine screenplays I wrote over the next X years. I can't even remember how many. Before I finally got my first check for $3,500 and promptly went back to writing more screenplays that I also couldn't sell. During that first year, I sometimes sought to myself, Steve, you've got it lucky now, no distractions, you can focus full time. What are you going to do when life gets complicated again?

In the end, it didn't matter. That year made me a pro. It gave me for the first time in my life an uninterrupted stretch of month after month that was mine alone. That nobody knew about but me when I was truly productive, truly facing my demons and truly working my shit. That ear has stuck with me.

29, the pain of being human. The nostics believe that exile was the essential condition of man. Do you agree? I do. The artist and the addict both wrestle with this experience of exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the state of separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, to transcend it, or at least to make the pain go away. What is the pain of being human? It's the condition of being suspended between two worlds and being unable to fully enter into either. As mortal flesh, you and I cannot ascend to the upper realm.

That sphere belongs to the gods. But we can't put it out of our minds either. We can't escape intimations and half memories of what? Some prior sojourn before birth, perhaps, among the immortals or the stars. Our lot instead is to dwell here in the lower realm, the sphere of the temporal and the material, the time-bound dimension of instincts and animal passions, of hate and desire, aspiration and fear.

You and I are called to the up-around, and it is calling to us, but we're having a pretty good time sometimes down here in the sphere of the senses. Bottom line, where we're ruined in the middle, stuck inside of Mobile, with the Memphis Blues again. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. There y'all! I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, two, one, two. There y'all! I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo. Just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki

Kiki Pabag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag, love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's

only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcasts. Hey, Prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. 30. Jewish Despair and Irish Despair. If you'll forgive me for quoting myself, here's a passage from Killing Rommel. In the story, a poet and Oxford tutor Zachary Stein makes the distinction between two types of despair.

Jewish Despair arises from want and can be cured by surfeit. Give a penniless Jew 50 quid and he perks right up. Irish despair is different. Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstances, which might be rendered brilliant by labor or luck, but with the injustice of existence itself. Death. How could a benevolent deity gift us with life only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Money can't help. Love fades.

Famous fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh. It's not just the Irish. The pain of being human is that we're all angels imprisoned in vessels and flesh. 31. A pain of being human, part 2. The attic seeks to escape the pain of being human in one of two ways, by transcending it, or by anesthetizing it. Born aloft by powerful enough chemicals, we can almost, if we're lucky,

glimpse the face of the infinite. If that doesn't work, we can always pass out. Both ways work, the pain goes away. The artist takes a different tack. She tries to reach the up-around, not by chemicals, but by labor and love. When I say artist, I mean as well the lover, the holy man, the engineer, the mother, the warrior, the inventor, the singer, the sage, and the voyager. And remember, addict and artist can be one and the same in often are moment to moment. If the upper realm, as Plato suggested, is the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down

the magic of this world and to create by dint of labor and luck the closest to sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can. This pursuit produces, for the artist, peace of mind. Book Two Self-inflicted wounds. 32 accidental incapacitation. During the trench warfare in World War I, it was a not uncommon phenomenon for soldiers to take their rifles and literally shoot themselves in the foot. The troopers would claim that the shooting was accidental. They were hoping to get sent to the hospital and thus excused from duty. They did this

to avoid the carnage that was waiting for them when the order came to go over the top, i.e. to mount out of the trenches and charge across no man's land into the machine gun fire of the enemy. In the military, to deliberately inflict injury upon oneself, so as to avoid service is called malingering. It's a court-martial offense that is punishable in some armies by death. The habits and addictions of the amateur are conscious or unconscious self-inflicted wounds.

Their payoff is incapacity. When we take our M1903 Springfield and blow a hole in our foot, we no longer have to face the real fight of our lives, which is to become who we are and to realize our destiny and our calling. 33, a definition of the amateur. The amateur is young and dumb. He's innocent, he's good-hearted, he's well-intentioned. The amateur is brave, he's inventive and resourceful, he's willing to take a chance. Like Luke Skywalker, the amateur harbors noble aspirations. He has dreams.

He seeks liberation and enlightenment. And he's willing, he hopes, to pay the price. The Amateur is not evil or crazy. He's not deluded. He's not demented. The Amateur is trying to learn. The Amateur is you and me. What exactly is an Amateur? How does an Amateur view himself and the world?

What qualities characterize the amateur? 34. The amateur is terrified. Fear is the primary color of the amateur's interior world. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of looking foolish, fear of underachieving and fear of underachieving, and fear of overachieving, fear of poverty, fear of loneliness, fear of death. But mostly, what we all fear as amateurs is being excluded from the tribe, i.e. the gang, the posse, mother and father, family, nation, race, religion.

The amateur fears that if he turns pro and lives out his calling, he will have to live up to who he really is and what he is truly capable of. The amateur is terrified that if the tribe should discover who he really is, he will be kicked out into the cold to die. 35, the professional is terrified too. The professional, by the way, is just as terrified as the amateur. In fact, the professional may be more terrified because she is more acutely conscious of herself and of her interior universe. The difference lies in the way the professional acts in the face of fear.

36, the amateur is an egotist. The amateur identifies with his own ego. He believes he is himself. That's why he's terrified. The amateur is a narcissist. He views the world hierarchically. He continuously rates himself in relation to others, becoming self-inflated if his fortunes rise, and desperately anxious if his star should fall. The amateur sees himself as the hero, not only of his own movie, but of the movies of others. He insists in his own mind, if nowhere else, that others share this view. The amateur competes with others and believes that he cannot rise unless a competitor falls. If he had the power, the amateur would eat the world, even knowing that to do so would mean his

own extinction. 37. The amateur lives by the opinions of others. Though the amateur's identity is seated in his own ego, that ego is so weak that it cannot define itself based on its own self-evaluation, the amateur allows his worth and identity to be defined by others. The amateur craves third-party validation. The amateur is tyrannized by his imagined conception of what is expected of him. He is imprisoned by what he believes he ought to think, how he ought to look, what he ought to do, and who he ought to be. 38. The amateur permits fear to stop him from acting. Paradoxically, the amateur's self-inflation prevents him from acting. He takes himself and the consequences of his actions so seriously that he paralyzes himself.

The amateur fears above all else becoming and being seen and judged as himself. Becoming himself means being different from others and thus possibly violating the expectations of the tribe without whose acceptance and approval he believes he cannot survive. By these means the amateur remains inauthentic. He remains someone other than who he really is. 46. The amateur will be ready tomorrow. Two Hollywood producers were talking. I've got good news, said one, and I've got bad news. Give me the good news. Remember that mansion we were trying to rent for

the big party scene, but we couldn't get because it cost $50,000 for the night? Well, I just talked to the guy and he'll give it to us for $10,000. What's the bad news? He wants a hundred bucks up front. The sure sign of an amateur is that he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow. is that he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow. 51, life gets very simple when you turn pro. What happens when we turn pro is we finally listen to that still small voice inside our heads. At last, we find the courage to identify the secret dream or love or bliss

that we have known all along was our passion, our calling, our destiny. Ballet, motorcycle maintenance, founding a clinic in the slums of São Paulo. This we acknowledge at last is what we are most afraid of. This is what we know in our hearts we have to do. 86. Write what you don't know. Years ago, a New York I'd hit the wall as a failed novelist. My next days to do list had been reduced to two options. Kill myself by hanging, kill myself by jumping off the roof. Instead, I decided to write a screenplay.

The story I wrote was about prison. I have never been to prison. I didn't know the first thing about prison, but I was so desperate that I plunged in, slaying bullshit with both hands and not looking back. When I was done, I showed the script to a few writers I knew. More than one tugged me aside and asked in a whisper, Steve, where did you do time? Good things happened when we trust the mystery.

There was always something in the box. 91, a model of the universe. I was having breakfast with my friend Rabbi Mordekai Finley of Orhatura congregation in Los Angeles. I wanted to ask him about the subject of resistance. Is there a parallel and probabilistic studies or Jewish mysticism? Here's part, I tape recorded it, of what he said. There is a second self inside you, an inner shadow self. This self doesn't care about you. It doesn't love you. It has its own agenda and it will kill you. It will kill you like cancer. It will kill you to achieve its agenda, which is to prevent you from

actualizing yourself, from becoming who you really are. This shadow self is called in the Kabbalistic lexicon, the Yetzur Hara. The Yetzur Hara, Steve, is what you would call resistance. In the Kabbalistic view of the world, the soul, Neshama in Hebrew, is the source of all wisdom and goodness. The Neshama seeks constantly to communicate to us, to our consciousness on the physical plane. The soul is trying to guide us, sustain us, restore us. But there is a force operating in opposition to the Neshama. This entity, the Yetsar Hara,

is a self-sustaining and cunning intelligence whose sole aim is to block us from accessing the Neshama and to block the Neshama from communicating to us. The Nostics and the Neo-Platonists believe something very much like this. In both models of the universe there was an upper realm, in Plato's conception the realm of the forms, of perfect beauty, justice, truth, and so forth, and a lower sphere where we mortals dwelt. In Jewish mysticism there's a positive force that opposes the yetzer hurrah above every blade of grass as the Kabbalah, however is an angel exhorting, grow, grow.

What program did these ancients put forward as a means of allying with the positive forces and overcoming the negative? According to Rabbi Finley, it was a code called Musaar. 92 Musaar. Musaar was a code of ethical discipline. It was not far from what we see today in 12-step programs. Its first tenet was, identify the sin. The second was, eliminate it. In AA terms, that would mean one, acknowledge the condition of being an alcoholic,

two, stop drinking. The cobalists believe that the higher-round could be approached through a disciplined, humble, and open application of the mind and will. They recognized that they were approaching a mystery. They knew that an enemy was seeking to block them. What they called Musar, I call Turning Pro. Our job, as souls on this mortal journey,

is to shift the seat of our identity from the lower realm to the upper, from the ego to the self. Art, or more exactly the struggle to produce art, teaches us that. When you and I struggle against resistance, or seek to love, or endure, or give, or sacrifice, we are engaged in a contest not only on the material, mental, and emotional planes, but on the spiritual as well.

The struggle is not only to write our symphony, or to raise our child, or to lead our special forces team against the Taliban in Konar province. The clash is epic and internal, between the ego and the self, and the stakes are our lives. 93, who is all this for?

In the end, the enterprise and the sacrifice are all about the audience. They're about the readers, the moviegoers, the sight visitors, the listeners, the concert goers, the gamers, the gallery goers, a group which by the way includes you and me. We're the audience. In the hero's journey, the wanderer returns home after years of exile, struggle, and suffering. He brings a gift for the people. That gift arises from what the hero has seen, what he has endured, what he has learned. But the gift is not that raw material alone.

It is the ore refined into gold by the hero, wanderer, artist, skilled, and loving hands. You are that artist. I will gladly shell out 24.95 or 9.99 or 99 cents on iTunes to read or see or listen to the 24-carat treasure that you have refined from your pain and your vision and your imagination. I need it. We all do. We're struggling here in the trenches. That beauty, that wisdom, those thrills and chills, even that mindless escape on a rainy

October afternoon, I want it. Put me down for it. The hero wanders, the hero suffers, the hero returns. You are that hero. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.

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