Steven Pressfield's daily practices to invoke the creative muse

Things have changed a little bit in the COVID era since you can't really go to a gym anymore. But for years and years I'm waiting for that eagerly to open again. And now I sort of work out on my deck or something like that, or just take walks or stuff like that. But for sure, I was like a real early morning gym person and I believe in that absolutely, as a kind of a rehearsal for the work that's to come, the creative work that's to come. I'm sure a lot of your coaches have read Twyla Tharp's book, the Creative Habit, and if they have, and if you haven't, put it on the list. Twyla Tharp is the great choreographer and she talks about how every morning she lives in New York and she goes down at whatever 5:30 in the morning, hails a cab and goes to the Pumping iron gym on 91st street or whatever, and she works out for two hours, even though for the rest of the day she's working out physically too, you know, as a choreographer. But it's a ritual for her and she says that the ritual isn't going to the gym, it's catching the cab and that like, once she's done that, she somehow, you know, put a coin in the, in the, you know, put a, you know, a token in the meter box and. And her day has started. And I know exactly what she's doing. She's doing when she goes to the gym. She's doing something that's hard. She's doing something that she doesn't want to do, she's doing something that she's afraid of and she's setting herself up for the rest of the day because she knows that as she leaves the gym and goes to her studio that nothing she's going to do for the rest of the day is going to be as hard as what you just did. So I'm definitely a believer in kind of a rehearsal, something like that, and getting a momentum going and keeping it going.

I love that. So the daily gym is rehearsal for creative work. And the gym or the physical activity is being kind of representing of something that's challenging, something that you may not want to do, something that's going to, maybe you're a little bit scared of on some level you just don't want to do, and then getting yourself to do that as practice for showing up for doing the work, doing the creative work, going through this creative struggle, fighting the resistance, the psychological resistance versus a physical type of resistance that you might need In a workout, direct parallels. And then you can feast on that momentum, feel the joy of having shown up and done this. Not to mention all the physiological benefits which optimize. Coaches will be very Familiar with the 12 hour mood and endorphin, boost the focus, focus, boost the creativity boost, et cetera. But you've got this momentum of having dumbs engaged in the battle, showing up to the battle, showing up to do the work. And then you can bring that energy, that enthusiasm to this creative project, whatever creative project is currently sitting in.

I couldn't have said it better myself. That's exactly how I feel about it.

Yeah, that's so good. Any other daily, just like guiding principles or things that you kind of use to guide yourself?

Well, one thing is when I'm sitting down to work, I turn off all distractions. No email, no nothing, whatever. Nobody comes in the room. I'm just, you know, I just, I'm just there to work. And the other thing is that as soon as the day is over, I always stop when I start making mistakes, when I start making typos and I know I'm tired. And I'm definitely a believer that this comes from Steinbeck. He was, I don't know if you've ever read Journal of a Novel, it's another book I highly recommend. Steinbeck was, I think he was writing east of Eden at the time. Maybe I'm wrong, might have been something else. And each morning he would journal. He would take like 20 minutes and just kind of sit down and talk about what happened last night and how he was feeling and, and he thought of it as a kind of a little warm up for writing. And he kept those pages and then he published it as this book called Journal of a Novel. And one of the things that he said was to keep working after you're tired is the falsest kind of economy. And that really stuck with me because I felt like you may get another few paragraphs or another few sentences, but you're going to be wear yourself out so much that, that the next day you're not going to get it going. So definitely an aspect of my daily routine is that once I'm done, the office is closed, I turn my brain off completely and I don't obsess about it. If I can say to myself, okay, that was a good day's work. I shoveled 16 tons of coal today. I don't know if it's good coal, but I got it in the wagon and I got out of there. That's enough. The day's over, I'm going home. And from the point of view of the muse, if you want to calculate the muse in there, I'm kind of saying I'm going to let the muse work on this overnight or my unconscious or myself or whatever you want to say. And she does.

I'd love to hear more about that. So to quickly go back and emphasize zero distractions when you're working, there's nothing else but what's in front of you. And this use of fatigue so noticing when you're starting to make mistakes, typos, et cetera, not the kind of fatigue of like, oh, this is a struggle, but the kind of fatigue of, oh, I noticed that I'm just not performing at the level here and it's been a long day. I mean that's a signal for perfect stop and it's a full shutdown. I'm not going to pop back in later to revisit this.

Exactly. Yeah.