The Diamond Hour--getting published, winning life

And greetings, greetings. This is Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live or the Diamond Hour. I'm back from Manila. And what I did not tell people was that I picked up a case of COVID on my way home. I am currently. At the very last stages. My viral count is basically through the floor. So I'm, you know, almost, almost healed, but I'm not. I'm not exposing myself to other people yet. I was in the airport in Taipei for 10 hours and then in a sealed aluminum tube for 14 hours traveling between Taipei and Los Angeles filled with coughing Chinese people. So I knew I was in trouble, but I'm fine and I'm back with you. So I had a piece of good news today. One of my students sold a story. They sold their first story, this is a fantastic thing. And I asked them how many stories had you written and submitted before you sold? And he said it was story number seven and he'd sent it out multiple times. And I told him that this was fantastic. That the average, our average life writing student, that actually, I don't know what the average is, but I do know that no life writing students have had to write more than 24 stories before they started publishing. So this is what we call the machine. It is the path of action that you continue to take over time that will maximize your chances of accomplishing something. And there are such patterns in every arena that I can think of. In relationships, there's a limit to how many times you have to ask ladies out or how many dates you have to go on. If you talk to people who got married and found happiness and you ask them how many dates did you go on, you'll find that it's finite. If you're talking about martial arts or physical things, there is a limit to the number of times you'll get your butt kicked in a row. Before you start kicking butt, there are a limit to the number of different approaches you can try to losing weight before you realize that no matter how complicated certain things get, you have to keep your eyes on the number of calories you're taking in and the calories that are going out. Keep your eyes on that, and then you work with that and you build your foundation on that. And eventually you'll figure out how to lose weight. Because the physics never lie with writing. There is that six step life writing process of writing a story a day, rather a sentence every day, a story, every one to four short stories a month. Finish and complete and submit one story a month. Don't rewrite, accept editorial Request. Once you've reached that point, read 10 times what you write and repeat this process 100 times. The reason I say repeat it 100 times is because you have that voice in your head that says, I wrote this story. It's a great story. I submitted it. And. And they rejected it. And it hurts. It hurts like hell. It feels like getting kicked by a horse in the gut. So you send it out again, and it gets rejected again. And you write another story and you do your best and you send it out there and it gets rejected. And once again, you get kicked. You get kicked, you get kicked. And the thing that works is to understand this is just part of the process, that everybody who you've watched publish got rejections for all practical purposes. And if there's a part of your mind that says, well, I heard about this one writer. They sent out their first story, they sold it, which happened to Robert Heinlein. And so I'm comparing myself to the very best in the field, because I'm not the very best in the field. Why should I bother trying? You're talking about patterns within you that are stopping you from becoming excellent. This is, you know, this broadcast. What we're doing here is about what are the patterns that are predictable, that if you follow them, you will maximize your chances of success. Something like writing a sentence a day or one story a month is not just a performative prescription, but it is a diagnostic. If you can't write that sentence every day, if you can't finish a story every month, and you have committed to that, then you know the problem is not external. The problem is not a matter of how the world is treating you. The problem is how you treat yourself. The problem is how you deal with your emotions. The voices in your head, probably voices from people who demanded that you be perfect or you were inadequate. Once you have identified those voices, it's possible for you to say, okay, I need to change these beliefs. I need to change these approaches. There are three things that we're going to focus on here, and I'm going to try to go deeper and a little faster in some ways. But the core of it is very simple. What everybody considers to be successful comes down to some version of the Mexican toast. Health, love, money, and time to enjoy them. Some version of that. And the number of people who complain about not caring about their bodies or not caring about love or not caring about money, and then also complain about. About the things that love or health or money provide are lying to themselves. And I suggest that you wake up and enter the adult world and admit that you want these things. But what you do is you want to have them in integrity with yourself. You want to have them in integrity with your emotions, with your values, with the way you treat other people. So the magic formula suggests that you have goals in each of these three arenas. But also in the magic formula, if you're modeling, one of the first things to model is the concept of balance. Belly, brain, heart center, head center, and the other is the three gates. Which is it true, Is it kind, is it useful? Those things will protect you and protect other people from you. Because we want to wake up that predatory instinct. We want to wake up the part of you that is committed to survival at all costs. You run into anybody who's feeling depressed or unmotivated, who's dealing with, who's paralyzed with fear, and you're talking about somebody who is not connected with their survival drive. That's just as simple as that. You can take anybody, no matter how upset they are, depressed, they are, broke, they are heartbroken, they are. They could even be suicidal. And you could take their. You take their head and you stick it in a bucket of water and they will fight for their lives. That is the feeling that you want. That's what you want every day. You want to tap into that every single day. The part of you is alive in that sense. The meaning of life is the function of life. The meaning of life is to live, to breathe, to love, to grow, to evolve. Once you can accept that which is so simple, most people miss it. You can go on to the question of how shall we live? How shall we treat each other? How can we best serve the world? In that sense, the ultimate goals are to move away from pain, towards pleasure and then towards service. Repeat that again to eliminate the pain in your life. To have your basic activities. Chop wood, carry water, handle the pain in your life so that you can open your heart to the child that you were or that child is safe because the adult is taking care of business. Too many artists get this backwards. They try to put their children, their child self into the business world. Now the kids should be making them, making the games, should be having the fun, should be writing or whatever. It's the adult part of you that needs to get out there and function, that needs to deal with other adults. Money happens in the adult world. It comes from money. And if you play artist, you're going to need a manager and an agent, executives over your head. That's a spam risk. You're going to need Other people to be adult for you, and they're going to resent you, and they're going to treat you like children, and you're going to fall into the very interesting trap that so many artists fall into of blaming the executives or the agents or whatever for not taking care of you the way Mommy and daddy did. You know, back when you were the genius on the block and everybody thought how clever you were, well, every block has one of those. Every household has one of those. If you want to stand out, you need to both. You need to create a safe place for your kid to learn the tools that will elevate them and keep that kid safe so that it's not the one reading the rejection letters. You know, that kick in the stomach that's letting your kid read the rejection letters, get the adult in there. And I understand this is slightly schizophrenic, and it's not. It's a way to look at it. It's a series of models, not something that's strictly true. It's true in its usefulness. This is so critical to not mistake the psychological and emotional tendencies of a particular position for despoiled people. In other words, when artists become executives, they start acting like executives. When employees get promoted, they start acting like the boss. It's not that power corrupts. It's that power has a particular position. And people without that position and are afraid of assuming that position will basically blame the person with the power for using their authority to get things done. When that's the use of power. Are there corrupt people? Of course there are. Are corrupt people attracted to power? Of course they are, but so are people who simply want to get something done for their communities. I mean, you know, don't you want power in the form of, you know, money in order to pay your bills, to take care of your family? That's where everybody starts. And can it become corruptive? Sure. Just like somebody can go into the gym and get addicted to weight training and drugs until they become beasts. They're just huge. You know, women who go into tone up can fall in love with the feeling of power until they obscure their secondary sexual characteristics. You can see this happen. So it is important to continually ask yourself, what is the healthy expression of this power? What is the healthy expression of this authority? And to understand that there are always going to be people who blame you. In other words, they have not taken responsibility in their own lives, and they want to believe that it is impossible for anyone else to. I've had people claiming that I was talking from an ivory tower. Since I published my second book, they had no idea of the struggles that I was going through, no idea how isolated and alone I was ethnically. But somehow they had the privilege to think that they were being shat upon. It was bizarre. And all I want to say to you is that what my student discovered, that he could publish his seventh story, that he had to go through the fear, go through the discipline, go through the voices in his head that said that he could not or should not, or this wasn't working, or it's not fair. The emotional way you respond to the rejections will determine whether or not you keep going long enough to get through them. It took me 23, 24 years to earn my first black belt because I was dealing with so much fear, so much pain. And I kept going because I knew that if I didn't, I would never be whole. I would always carry the damage from not having had my father in the home and from being told by the culture that if I succeed, if I didn't succeed, I'd be nothing. But if I did succeed too much, I'd be crushed. We all get put in these boxes where it feels like there's no way out, that we can't fulfill the expectations of the world around us. That's just existential stuff. And if you are ignorant, you believe that whoever your group is is the only group that experiences this. And whoever you are, you're the only person who experiences this. You don't realize that everyone is dealing with this stuff. We all have to deal with it. And there are people. If you're born disadvantaged, you have to deal with more of this. You got to shovel more shit. There's no question about it. But it's your family at stake. It's your survival at stake. Are you or are you not willing to do what it takes to survive, for your family to survive, for your children to be able to stand on your shoulders and see further and accomplish more? This is serious stuff. It's a serious conversation. I really only want to have this conversation with people who are serious, who are willing to take responsibility for the most basic aspects of this, which is to breathe five minutes a day, five times a day, you spend 60 seconds, just 60 seconds breathing. You know, at least, you know, maybe like once per hour, have at least an hour in between. It's critical that you break this up. People will constantly try to say, well, I did it all at one time. No, no, no, that's not it. That is not it. It's like eating all the food for the month at one time. No, it doesn't work. You have to space certain things out. That's all I really wanted to say today. Today I have to do a tremendous amount of work on the Star wars project, and then I want to move on to a script. And I'm also starting to write my essay about what Manila did for me and why it was so important and why it was worth everything that I paid to get there. And it was very expensive in terms of energy and time and money, but it was absolutely worth it, and I want to be able to explain that to you. Anyway, you take care. Have a wonderful day. If you enjoy this message, please pass it on. If you didn't and there's something else you'd like me to talk about, send me a personal message. I'm very open to that. I like to talk about how these perspectives affect all three basic areas of your life. Remember, your health, your love, your finances, and of course, time to enjoy them. Take care and I'll talk to you later. Steve Barnes and those of you who are interested in the writing path that we spoke about, go to www.lifewritingpremium.com.