Resistance Is How You Know the Work Matters

After the ads, Lex Fridman opens at altitude. Modern society dreams of universal peace, he says, and yet war has molded civilization as we know it. He puts the question to Steven Pressfield, the novelist of Thermopylae, Alexander, and the 1967 Six-Day War: if you could imagine a world without war, how would it be different? What purpose has war served, and why do we fight?

Pressfield does not reach for a grand theory of states. He says we are still the creatures we were in the cave. The mind still runs on an us-versus-them dynamic in which our tribe is "the people" and everyone else is other, and he does not think that has changed "one iota" over the centuries. The live question is how a person might sublimate the urge to compete rather than abolish it.

Martial arts already know the pattern: a great part of the day is spent reaching total commitment in the face of adversity. Pressfield's hope, if he has one — he does not think the human race will be around very long — is that sports and other contests can hold that need for conquest while still letting opponents embrace when the game is over. Left to itself, he says, a plant on the hillside would take over the whole slope. In Alexander's day every prince dreamed of swallowing the next kingdom. War, on this view, is simply that imperative made real, at least in the male of the species.

Asked which war transformed the world most, he wishes he knew more about the Mongols, then offers Rome and Alexander's brief joining of East and West. Fridman keeps pressing the difference between holding a border and building an empire. Pressfield finally breaks the frame. "What are you trying to get at with these questions?"

Fridman answers with a line from Eric Weinstein: everything is great about war except the killing. There is a romance to the warrior, and a romance to war itself, a sense that fighting is a creative force from which culture, music, and art can come. You cannot get that from four people or a hundred. You need thousands agreeing so deeply that they will risk their lives — something, Fridman says, other animals do not do. He wanted to know whether we fight for more than anger, hate, and land.

Pressfield takes the question from a completely different side. He does not think he is writing about war, and he is not really that interested in war per se. What he writes about is his own internal war: the fight against himself, against Resistance, against his own negativity, against everything that spirituality would be the opposite of. He is not Jim Mattis or Victor Davis Hanson. "We are spiritual beings in a physical envelope," he says, and that structure creates a terrible tension, which creates a war inside.

The outer wars become metaphors for that inner one. The Israeli army standing up against long odds is the fight a person fights inside the self. The Six-Day War, for him, was a return from exile, the completion of a state whose holiest places had been in enemy hands. Alexander is a different metaphor: Philip built the first real nation-army and gave Macedonian mountain men a way of rising out of themselves, not just as individuals but as a people. That, he grants, has a kind of creativity in it. It is still not what interests him most.

Thermopylae is another kind of metaphor entirely: a willing walk toward one's own death for a greater cause. The three hundred Spartans, in his telling, enacted as a group what Jesus Christ enacted as an individual. He gets invited to speak to Marine Corps groups and declines, because he does not feel like a spokesman for the warrior class. The warrior archetype matters — it kicks in around fifteen or twenty, when young men want football, martial arts, special forces, the bond of testing themselves — but it is one stage, not the whole of a life. In *The Virtues of War*, a character with Alexander's army in India looks at the yogis and says those men are warriors beyond what the army is, even though they do nothing, because the fight is inside.

Fridman asks how much the fact that this thing ends — killing in war being the sharpest reminder — matters to the creative process. Pressfield, who is seventy-five, had breakfast in New York with a friend his own age and asked whether he ever thinks about mortality. The friend said every minute of every day. Pressfield was relieved, because he does too, and always has. The fact of death, he says, is what gives life meaning. That is why people want to create and leave a mark.

He believes in previous lives, and he has never been able to answer why we are here in the flesh at all. The ground rules of animal life still strike him as demented: you cannot live from one day to the next without killing and eating some other form of life. Why not a solar panel on the head, and friendship with everybody? He agrees that the fear of death is a primary driver of what we do, including the urge to make things. Kids arrive with personalities already in place. Three children in a family are three different people, and the person they are does not really change.

In *The Artist's Journey* he lined up bodies of work in order: every Bruce Springsteen album, every Philip Roth book, over thirty or fifty years. A theme runs through that nobody else could have written. You can even see a destiny in it. He asks where that came from, because it does not look like a start from scratch. It looks like a continuation of something that happened before, and like a calling that will lead to something else. That question, he says, is already the muse.

Pressed to describe the muse, Pressfield will not reduce her to a figure of speech. The Greeks made gods in human form. Kabbalistic Jewish mysticism would call it the *neshama*, the soul, sitting on a higher plane and trying to reach down while we try to reach up. When a writer sits at the keyboard, he says, that is a kind of prayer: an altered state, a pipeline opening, a radio tuned to the cosmic station.

He believes the image in *City of Angels*: Nicolas Cage in a long duster appearing beside Meg Ryan in an operating room, invisible to everyone except the patient about to die. Beings like that, or a force, or a consciousness, are "right here right now," trying to get through a membrane, tapping on the window. They carry the future. They are everything that is in potential — every work Fridman will do, every startup. "It's not really you that's coming up with those ideas." Somebody knocks on the door and puts them in. Homer already knew the pattern: gods and goddesses stepping onto the battlefield, Aphrodite appearing to Paris in a dream in the form of his brother.

Are there many possible futures, or one? There are degrees of alternative, he says, but look at Springsteen's albums. How differently could he really have done it? Maybe *The River* could have had another name, but he was called to certain issues, and nothing was going to shake him off that line. Creation is a partnership: the impulse comes from somewhere else, or from deep within, the way an acorn becomes an oak, and the conscious artist applies a mind to it. Songwriters have said for a million years that a song just arrived. Then you look at Keats's notes for "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" and the page is a wreck of crossings-out. The conscious mind is working. It is still a partnership.

When Pressfield started out, he was in advertising, trying to write novels, and he could not tune the station. He beat his brains out because he was trying too hard, like a monk whose thoughts will not stop. It took him about thirty years to let go of the part that strains, so the angels can speak more easily through the membrane. There is no hack. He pictures the goddess watching a Marine on an obstacle course, or a martial artist grinding a four-inch punch, and saying she will come back in a few months to see if he is still there. Finally she says he has paid his dues, and she gives it to him. Drill is the right word: you write, you look at what you wrote, you hit flow and you hit walls, and you ask, from the walls, where your mind was. Over and over, until it gets a little easier. He did not always know what was good. He thinks he does now.

The painful part, Pressfield says, is not the first putting of words on a page. It is looking at the whole thing the way an editor does. His editor is Shawn Coyne, the man who bought *Gates of Fire* at Doubleday. When Pressfield finishes a book he hands it over. Editing, in this sense, is not crossing out commas. It is asking whether the work works, and if it does not, why. If you were building the Golden Gate Bridge and one span was out of whack, a skilled editor would see it. Coyne still has the perspective Pressfield loses by being too close.

Coyne does not sit above the book and say you could do better in some vague way. A lot of the work is genre. On one supernatural thriller — Rosemary's Baby, *The Exorcist* territory — Coyne tore the manuscript down and made him start from scratch, because Pressfield had violated conventions you simply cannot violate. You have to do it the right way. Coyne, he says, was born for the job and studied what makes a story tick from his first days in publishing.

Any really successful writer, unless they are utterly brilliant on their own, needs a great editor behind them. Pressfield is constantly trying to learn Coyne's rules so he will not be dependent, because the mistakes are so painful. Fridman recognizes the pattern from research: two or three people on a paper, then the brutal pass where colleagues attack not only the sentences but the method, and tell you that you asked the wrong questions. Painful and helpful. You have to keep a little ego, Pressfield says, and also mute it every once in a while. There is a balance.

Fridman brings the talk back to *The War of Art*. Where does Resistance come from, that capital-R force that finds a way to stop you with laziness and excuses? In Jewish mysticism Pressfield calls it the *yetzer hara*, a negative force standing between the soul above and the person below. His own answer is that a human being can seat identity in two places. One is the conscious ego. The other is the greater self in the Jungian sense, the self that includes the unconscious and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground — what Pressfield calls the muse or the goddess. The ego is a little dot inside that larger self, and it has a completely different metaphysics.

The ego believes death is real, time and space are real, and each of us is separate. You can punch someone in the face and it only hurts them. In the ego's world the dominant emotion is fear, because we are flesh and can die, be hurt, be ruined. Even the desire to create, he says, comes out of that fear of death. The greater self believes death is not real, time and space are not real, and there is no difference between you and me: if I hurt you, I hurt myself. In that world the dominant emotion is love. When Jesus died on the cross, or when the three hundred Spartans went willingly to Thermopylae, they were living by the self's rules. Resistance is the ego's frightened voice, trying to keep control, because if you move your consciousness over to the self — as an artist or a scientist opening to the cosmic dimension — the ego is no longer needed.

He offers what he calls a bad example and then lets it stand: Trump is the ego, a zero-sum world. The opposite is Martin Luther King or Gandhi, which is why they end up assassinated. The ego hangs on and feels existentially threatened. In stories, he says, the villain is almost always Resistance, almost always the ego. The alien on the spaceship keeps changing form — a face-hugger, then something bursting from a chest — but it has one monomaniacal job, to destroy, which is how ego and Resistance behave. He likes *Casablanca* better. Humphrey Bogart's Rick has to give up the selfish dream of leaving with Ingrid Bergman, put her on the plane to Lisbon, and go off to fight the Nazis. That is the self defeating the ego. The hero is the person willing to sacrifice to help others. Letting go of fear is what leads to the work.

Is there an evolutionary advantage to Resistance? He thinks Resistance, like death, gives life meaning. Without it we would be in the Garden of Eden, picking fruit, happy and stupid. Adam and Eve take knowledge into their own hands, get cast out, and have to live in the world of fear that is the human condition. Meaning comes from the struggle to overcome it. And Resistance is not even a real force. It is all here. You surrender to it, or you turn on the light and it is gone — but not quite, because it comes back in the morning. You have to keep changing light bulbs every day. For him the source is always the same: writing, and evolving inside his own body of work. It never goes away and never gets less. It only gets more subtle as you rise, trying to fake you out.

Fridman asks whether the daily battle is simply sitting down in front of a blank page for a certain number of hours. Pressfield is a believer that even though the fight is on the highest spiritual level, the way you fight it is the most mundane. He goes to the gym first thing in the morning. The gym is called resistance training. He does not want to go, does not want to get out of bed, hates it, and is fortifying himself for the day. Over the years the mindset has gotten easier. The real Resistance, for him and he thinks for anybody, is the question of what is next: the next idea, the next book, the next project.

When he asks that question he is asking the muse, or his unconscious. Springsteen's albums pose the same riddle. Now the man is on Broadway — where did that idea come from? — and then what comes after that? The body of work is already alive inside, "kind of like a woman's biological clock," and it has to be served or it takes revenge. He is not sure what he will do when the book on the desk is finished. He does not know if the next thing is predetermined, but he likes to believe there is something like quantum mechanics in it: once you observe, once you talk to the muse, it becomes the one thing it was always going to be. In reality it is a distribution. Springsteen is not going to write a Joni Mitchell song. Broadway did not look like a Springsteen move until he pulled it off, and then in retrospect it was the next evolution.

Fridman asks whether Pressfield visualizes the finished work the way Olympic athletes visualize the podium years out. He does not. Writing happens in the moment, and it is too much of a mystery. There is no gold medal. He would rather think that the day you finish one book you are already on the next, maybe a hundred pages in. It is a journey and a process. Imagining that you are going to win the Oscar is, he says, very dangerous, because you are giving yourself over to the ego. He keeps telling himself: "I'm a servant of the muse. I'm there to do what she tells me to do." The minute he thinks he is really something, and wants this or that, it is over.

Fridman tries to save the athletic version. Visualizing success can be a meditation that strips everything else away so you can face one battle, and in sports the ego may do more useful work than it does in writing. Pressfield knows what he means. Watch Steph Curry: an obviously decent man with tremendous self-confidence that does not quite become ego, because he has worked so hard for it. What Curry has visualized is less the trophy than himself at his best, in the flow, doing the thing he knows he can do.

There is a version of that in the creative world. A choreographer or a filmmaker may say internally, I can make an Oscar-winning movie, I can direct this, I can edit it and score it, and in saying so they are banishing the thought that they are not good enough. That, Pressfield thinks, is not really ego. It is part of the process, the way an athlete does it. Can a writer have that extreme confidence? He thinks so. John Lennon sitting down to write a song must have felt he could do this — and also not been sure. Great artists are haunted by self-doubt. That is Resistance. Above the doubt, in the bigger picture, is the knowledge that you can. You are freaking out, and you still know you can do it.

Is the writing process fundamentally lonely? Pressfield says no, because you are with your characters. You put yourself in that world. His desk used to face a wall, and people would ask why he did not want the window. He was already inside. He was seeing the Spartans. The cast on the page is not an accident; the figures come out of some deep issue in the writer, whether he knows it or not, and he may not know it for twenty years until somebody explains it. The characters fascinate him. Their dilemmas fascinate him. He sees them through a glass darkly and wants to see them more clearly. That is not loneliness. He is sometimes lonelier later, out at dinner, actually talking to people.

When a book is over he has affection for them, like children gone to college that you see at Thanksgiving. Even the bad guys. Maybe especially the bad guys. Fridman reminds him of his own line that writers, even successful ones, are often not tough-minded enough: you have to handle your emotions professionally; you have to be a bit of a warrior to be a writer. Pressfield thinks the gift is partly born, the way a martial artist might have a gift, but training is the big thing — ninety percent training, ten percent genetics.

He reaches for another analogy besides the warrior: the mother. If you are a writer or any kind of maker, you are giving birth to something. You are carrying a new life. If a two-year-old is in the street and a car is coming, a mother will stop a Buick with her bare hands. That, he says, is how a creative person has to think about the new thing they are bringing forth.

Fridman has just talked with Arianna Huffington, who built the Huffington Post on something like twenty-hour days until she fainted and had health trouble, then wrote in favor of a life that does not sacrifice sleep. She has criticized Elon Musk for working too hard and becoming less effective. Fridman is torn. The Russian in him, he says, feels that madness and obsession do not care about health, sleep, or diet. Hard work is hard work, and everything else can go to hell. If you are really writing a book, should the rest of life be damned? Where does Pressfield stand?

He stands on the health side. There was a period with no obligations, a little house, work without stopping — and even then he ate liver and eggs for breakfast and did his exercise, though he was still going about eighteen hours a day. He thinks like an athlete. Steph Curry is committed to winning championships and still has a family, eats well, sleeps, and has people looking after his knees and ankles. Kobe Bryant, anyone operating at a high level, same pattern. The good thing about being a writer is you cannot work that many hours anyway. Four hours is about the maximum he can do. He has never been able to do more, and he does not know how people do. That leaves a lot of day to train, because the work burns through B vitamins.

Fridman wonders if the twenty-hour dream is youth, or a Russian habit. Pressfield thinks it is also the career. Writing, from everything he has heard, is almost impossible to do well for more than a few hours. Engineering has a lot of non-muse time, so the crazy hours actually have to get done. There are still two or three hours of muse time in which the real ideas arrive. Fridman says he hears him on the health.

A perfect day, for Pressfield, starts ridiculously early. It did not always. Now he is in bed before his three- and four-year-old nephews. He goes to the gym with a trainer and a couple of partners: a little more than an hour, warmup, work, stretch, shower, breakfast with friends. It is intense, he does not want to do it, and it is the first accomplishment of the day, without leaving him wrecked. Home, correspondence, then maybe three hours of work. Then he crashes. The office is closed. He turns the switch. He does not think about the work at all.

He has rituals he will not describe, because talking about them jinxes them. One thing he will say: when he sits down, he gets into it immediately. No fussing. The first draft is when you are most with the muse, facing the blank page. Right now he is on a fifth or sixth or seventh draft, rereading pages already written, bouncing between right brain and left, evaluating and then going in to change a little. The night before, he knows the starting point. He always tries to stop when he knows what is coming next — a trick he learned from Hemingway or Steinbeck, or maybe both — so he is not facing a chasm in the morning.

When he is done, the office is closed and he lets the muse take care of it. Worrying about the creative process, he thinks, is unhealthy. Later he takes a long walk and keeps the mind open without obsessing. Things pop in; he thinks, I should change that; that is not the ego doing it, it is the deeper level. The rest of the day is whatever: dinner, nothing heavy to read, bed early. The gym is a big thing. The night before, like a martial artist, he visualizes what he has to do the next day and gets himself psyched. Then he cons out like a light and wakes at dawn.

Fridman asks what the muse has in store this year and the next few. Pressfield says you can never know. He does not believe in the exercise where you visualize yourself five years out and write a letter back to the present. There is a line in *Out of Africa*: God made the world round so that we could not see too far ahead. As a writer you just do not know.

He never knew his first book would be a legend with a big advance. Before it arrived he had no clue he would write anything on that subject. When it was done, people said he had to write another one. He had no idea what that would be. It was *Gates of Fire*. If someone had sat him down at the start of that stretch and asked the question, he would have been crazy to answer. He just hopes, as the future unfolds, that he stays open to it.

The conversation that began with war ends in that ordinary posture: you do not know what is next, so you sit down anyway. Fridman leaves the listener with Pressfield's own words. "Are you paralyzed by fear? That's a good sign." Fear is an indicator. It tells you what you have to do. The rule of thumb is simple. The more scared you are of a work or calling, the more sure you can be that you have to do it.