[00:00] Steven Pressfield: Some people these days, on a, let’s say on a day they’re going to work out or they’re going to train or they’re going to do whatever it is, and they don’t feel like it, right? I’m not in the mood, I feel lousy, I feel sick, I feel injured or whatever it is. What Tosche would say, you don’t have a right to those feelings.

[00:19] Steven Pressfield: It doesn’t matter what you feel, get out there and do what you have to do.

[00:26] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man. Real talk on harnessing your athletic drive. For clarity, focus, and consistency in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harsha Jr. And today I bring you Steve Pressfield.

[00:45] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Steve has written a ton of books. He is a pro he’s one of the best writers out there, but if you knew him earlier in his life, you would never know that this is where he was going because he struggled, he labored, he toiled through decades of failure, doubts, setbacks, obstacles, most of those obstacles.

[01:06] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Internal before he finally wrote a book to be turned into a, you know, big screen movie with Matt Damon and Will Smith called the legend of bagger Vance, but he’s since gone on to write books about not only historical fiction, but also. Personal and professional development books primarily targeted actually at writers, but just like you and I like to read and listen to books about Kobe Bryant or Tom Brady or these amazing athletes and see how they live their lives and how that relates to how you and I can live a life of success and excellence.

[01:45] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s the same with Steve. He’s written books. One’s called the war of art break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles. It’s a great book. I don’t care if you’re not a writer, it is such a good book about performance, about showing up and doing the hard thing. He wrote another book called turning pro the subtitle.

[02:03] Jim Harshaw Jr.: That one is. Tap your inner power and create your life’s work. He wrote another book called the artist’s journey and another one called the warrior ethos, the warrior ethos. It is so good. Steven has so much wisdom about doing the hard thing, showing up every day, facing down your demons, your fears, and your doubts to bring your best version of yourself.

[02:29] Jim Harshaw Jr.: To the world. I’ve interviewed him on my old podcast success through failure. And I wanted to bring him back again, because he has another book that he sent me the gift box of this, and it’s a really, really cool gift box. If they’re still available on the website, I highly, highly recommend it, whether it’s for yourself or a gift for somebody else.

[02:46] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s the daily press field. If you like the daily stoic, if you like, you know, Tim bears tools of Titans, these shorter books where you’re getting sort of a daily dose of something very short, very consumable, this is the book for you. There’s a lot of stoic philosophy in there. There’s a lot of just kick yourself in the ass and get going.

[03:06] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Philosophy in there as well. So here we go. My good friend, he’s become a good friend over the years. We’ve had a lot of great conversations on the podcast and otherwise, and I consider him somewhat of a mentor even these days. So Steven is an incredible human being putting out incredible work into the world, and he’s going to inspire you to do the same.

[03:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Okay. Here we go. My interview with Steven. Pressfield. Let’s start with this. Why did you want to become a

[03:31] Steven Pressfield: writer? It was sort of by accident in a way. I don’t know if I’ve told you this, the whole story of how I started in this, but I’ll, I’ll give you the long version of this. My first job out of college was as a junior copywriter at an ad agency in New York city.

[03:48] Steven Pressfield: And I had a boss named Ed Hannibal, who wrote a novel and first novel right out of the box. And it was a hit and he quit and became like a star. And so I said to myself at 22 years old, why don’t I do that? So I quit and then the tried to write a novel and the bottom of my life dropped out at that point.

[04:11] Steven Pressfield: And it took me another like 30 years of struggle to finally sort of get back to finally actually have a book published. So I sort of. Got myself into a paper bag, and the only way I could get out of it was to write my way out. So I sort of backed in as the dumbest move I could ever make. So

[04:31] Jim Harshaw Jr.: your memoir, Government Cheese, which I think came out last year, you go into some pretty deeply personal experiences.

[04:38] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I’m going to paraphrase, this is from your book description on Amazon. Again, paraphrase, you said, People who have read my books have a vague idea of my odyssey racked with guilt, riven by self doubt as I struggled toward my destiny as a writer, but they have only the scantest conception of the particulars of that journey.

[04:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Can you share with us a little bit about the particulars? Obviously there’s a whole book on this, but is there a particular moment from that journey that in retrospect became a defining moment in your evolution as a writer and as a

[05:10] Steven Pressfield: human being? There was a lot of moments. I’m, I’m definitely a believer that in our real life, there’s no real one moment.

[05:17] Steven Pressfield: I think there’s many, but kind of the short version of it, I sort of, I got to the last, like the last page of this book that I was trying to write when I was 22 years old and I just choked. And blew my marriage up and blew everything up and kind of, well, I sort of fell out of the bottom of the middle class is one of the things I say, I couldn’t get back into a kind of any kind of white collar college educated type of job and I didn’t have any training in any kind of real blue collar work.

[05:45] Steven Pressfield: So I wound up working the kind of jobs that all you need to do is sort of show up and be breathing, you know? Like a roustabout in oil fields, uh, in Louisiana or, uh, an attendant in a mental hospital, or, uh, I’m on a picking fruit as a migrant laborer. Then I went to a truck driving school and drove trucks for a while, all sort of running away from writing.

[06:08] Steven Pressfield: And if there was a turning point to make it kind of quick, Jim, there was sort of a moment like here. I don’t know, this is my typewriter behind me here. I carried this typewriter with me for, for years and never touched it, you know, because I thought writing is, is this thing that’s going to destroy me.

[06:24] Steven Pressfield: And one day I finally sort of hit the wall in terms of being able to distract myself or run away from stuff. And I sat down for like two hours at that, at that typewriter. And when I finished, even though I hadn’t written anything was, you know, I just would throw it away right on the spot. I felt calm.

[06:41] Steven Pressfield: And I felt like I’d find, I’d found. Something that would work for me, it didn’t work before, but it did now, and that was just to sit down and write. And so that was sort of a turning point for me. And it was like another 20 years or so before I actually had anything published. But that was a moment when I felt like, okay.

[07:00] Steven Pressfield: I’m going to commit to this thing. I’m going to do it. What kept

[07:03] Jim Harshaw Jr.: you going during those tough times? Cause there’s a lot of listeners right now who, you know, they’re going through their own challenging times, whether it’s in their profession or their, their marriage or, you know, trying to start that side hustle or keep their business going.

[07:18] Jim Harshaw Jr.: What kept you going during those tough times? I

[07:20] Steven Pressfield: mean, there were many times, Jim, in this period where I sort of tried to go straight in a way, you know, I tried to get a regular job and I even did get a few regular jobs, but. I would be so depressed at the end of the day and the only thing that would sort of cure me was sitting down and trying to bang out a few pages or something.

[07:38] Steven Pressfield: So I, it was like, I just didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t go back. It was so depressing to me. So I just, you know, had no choice, but kind of keep going forward, trying to keep writing.

[07:50] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Tell me about some of those jobs. You were, you were a truck driver. Yeah. I think you may be a taxi driver at some point. You were a migrant fruit.

[07:56] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Picker

[07:56] Steven Pressfield: labor. Yeah. I drove a cab in New York a couple of times too. Yeah. Yeah.

[08:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You had your typewriter with you everywhere you traveled to.

[08:02] Steven Pressfield: And yeah, but until that moment that I talked about, I would never touch it. I just, I couldn’t make myself throw it away, which I probably should have done, but yeah, I carried it with me all the time.

[08:13] Steven Pressfield: I mean, I can tell you about the jobs. I don’t know if they’re, I don’t know how interesting that is. I mean, what would you

[08:18] Jim Harshaw Jr.: tell us a story? Give me a story of laboring in the sun as a. Fruit picker or, uh, driving a truck and going, what the hell am I

[08:26] Steven Pressfield: doing here? Here’s one story, Jim, that it may make some sense after, I don’t know how many years I finally saved up enough money.

[08:34] Steven Pressfield: And I said to myself, I’m going to go to a, you know, an affordable part of the country, get a rent, a little house, and I’m finally going to actually finish a novel, right? Whether I sell it or not, I’m finally going to do it. And, uh, because my demon was that I couldn’t finish something. I’d quit at the end.

[08:50] Steven Pressfield: I’d blow it up at the end, you know? So at one point I ran out of money and I decided to somehow I wound up picking fruit. I’ve done the, it was apples in Washington state. And the way the season worked in that kind of work, it was an eight week season, and what the orchard, the owners would do, was they would hold back a quarter of your pay until the very end, because they wanted you to stay all the way to the end, they didn’t want you to quit halfway through, and if you stayed all the way to the end, they would give you that pay as a bonus.

[09:23] Steven Pressfield: So that was a motivation. So that was sort of a metaphor for me. I’ve, I was like nine tenths of the way through this book and now I stopped, you know, making a little money so I could continue. So most of the guys who were picking fruit in those days were guys that rode the rails, you know, fruit tramps, hobos, that kind of guy.

[09:41] Steven Pressfield: And there was a phrase that they use. What’s called pulling the pin, and you know this from the book from government cheese, and pulling the pin meant quitting. And it came from railroad jargon that like if a trainman wanted to uncouple one car from another, they would pull out this steel pin. So on the orchard.

[09:59] Steven Pressfield: Every morning, he’d wake up and more guys would have quit. They would have left, you know, and they would say, well, what happened to Joe? They say, oh, he pulled the pin. So that became kind of a metaphor for me that I was just not going to pull the pin this time. I was going to stay all the way through. And I had a friend and a mentor.

[10:16] Steven Pressfield: Another fruit picker, the fastest fruit picker, a guy named John from Seattle, and he kind of knew my story, and each time I would try to flake out, he would stop me, and so that was a sort of a life lesson. I stayed through the end, I got my bonus, I didn’t pull a pin, and then I went back to the little house I had where I was writing the book, and I finished the book.

[10:39] Steven Pressfield: It never was sold, but I’d finish it. That was the big thing, and so That was sort of a real life lesson that had nothing to do with writing, nothing to do with anything creative, but that has stuck with me forever. I’ve never, since then, ever had any trouble finishing anything. Whereas before that, I couldn’t finish anything at

[10:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: all.

[10:59] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And it’s interesting for the athletic minded man, who’s listening, you know, we’ve had coaches in our lives. We’ve had mentors in our lives who didn’t let us pull the pin and we need that person in our lives now. And we know that we’ll get more out of ourselves when we have that accountability, when we have that person in our lives.

[11:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And so the stakes are greater back for me, I was wrestling. What was at stake was winning or losing a wrestling match. But what’s at stake now is my life and my livelihood. And for you, it was. Sticking around and getting your paycheck at the end, which made, eventually made get your novel out into the world possible years down the road.

[11:32] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So curious, have you stayed in touch with anybody? Do you have any contact with anybody that you’ve worked with from your fruit picking days or truck driving days?

[11:40] Steven Pressfield: Not from the fruit picking days because people just scattered, you know, you didn’t even know people’s last name. And oddly enough. A couple of years ago when government cheese, when my memoir about this stuff was about to come out, I took a trip with my girlfriend, Diana, back to the places where I’d been back to where the trucking company was, which is Durham, North Carolina, and everything you can.

[12:02] Steven Pressfield: I’m sure you can totally relate to this. Everything was gone. The place was gone. People had died. I made contact with like the son of my former boss, you know, but yeah, pretty much, no, I, I’m not in touch with those people. Interesting question. I wish I was. And in those days, you know, you didn’t have, uh, these things, you know, so I don’t even have photos, you know, just a few here and there.

[12:28] Steven Pressfield: Yeah, yeah,

[12:29] Jim Harshaw Jr.: different times. Yeah. You couldn’t stay in touch with people and friends them on Facebook and stay in touch over the years. It’s just a different world then. And it’s interesting to think about where those people are now and what they’re doing and if they, they know what you went on to do. So quick interruption.

[12:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Hey, if you like what you’re hearing, be sure to get the notes, quotes and links in the action plan from this episode. Just go to Jim Herschel, jr. com slash action. That’s Jim Harsha, jr. com slash action to get your free copy of the action plan. Now, back to the show. There was another mentor in your life, your literary agent, Marty Fabricants, and he had some pretty straightforward advice for you around talent and the importance of appreciating the hard and challenging days.

[13:12] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Can you share that advice?

[13:14] Steven Pressfield: Yeah, his real name was Bart Fless. I, Marty Fabricant was kind of a fictional name that I did in another book, but he was like in his seventies and I was in my twenties. So he was a real mentor to me. And one of the things, one of his mantras was talent is bullshit. And I believe this completely now, his whole thing was that work is everything, that he had seen a million people with talent and he’d watch them flame out and self destruct and, you know, do things like that.

[13:44] Steven Pressfield: But he said, if you can just keep grinding and keep working, even if you’re not good in 1974. By 1984, you’re going to be pretty good, and by 1994, you might even be really good. So, his theory was, work is everything, sticking to it was everything, and I believe that completely.

[14:05] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You were a Marine, are a Marine, I should say.

[14:08] Jim Harshaw Jr.: How does your experience in the Marines

[14:10] Steven Pressfield: shape you? One of the things that the Marine Corps teaches you, as opposed to certain other areas, is how to be miserable. You know, it sounds silly, but the one thing about the Marines is that they always want to be given the shittiest worst jobs, right? With the most casualties, with the least support.

[14:31] Steven Pressfield: And if anybody else, any other unit gets that job, Marines are really pissed off. It’s like, that was our job. Why did we get that? And I think being, probably being an athlete or certainly being a writer. You’re going to be served on a diet of rejection and diminishment and all that sort of stuff for the duration.

[14:50] Steven Pressfield: So, in order to be a writer or an artist of any kind, you got to be able to love, you know, to embrace the suck, as they say, right? To be able to get into the grind, to get into adversity. Same with an athlete. A long season, where you’re in the middle of the season, right? It’s nowhere near the playoffs, right?

[15:08] Steven Pressfield: In the middle, it’s just a grind to be able to just keep going and to get off on it. To enjoy it, to embrace that adversity. So that was like a really big thing that it taught me. And I know it’s taught friends of mine. It’s taught them that too. And in hard times in their life, they’ve called on that.

[15:26] Jim Harshaw Jr.: There’s a story that you’ve shared about when you were in the Marines, you had a commanding officer and I think he had a nickname. Can you remind me, Steve?

[15:36] Steven Pressfield: Oh yeah, watashi, yeah. This is another great lesson. Watashi actually is the uh, Japanese word for eye, for me. This particular marine he was, he was actually a sergeant or staff sergeant, he wasn’t an officer.

[15:50] Steven Pressfield: This was infantry training. And, uh, he used to insist that we call him Watashi. And I never knew his real name. I had no clue what it is to this day. And, but one of the things that Watashi used to say was as a Marine, you were not entitled to have feelings. He said, if the Marine Corps had wanted you to have feelings, they would have issued them to you.

[16:13] Steven Pressfield: Again, this applies to athletics too. It’s like some people these days. On a, let’s say on a day they’re going to work out or they’re going to train or they’re going to do whatever it is and they don’t feel like it, right? I’m not in the mood. I feel lousy. I feel sick. I feel injured or whatever it is. What Tashi would say, you don’t have a right to those feelings.

[16:32] Steven Pressfield: It doesn’t matter what you feel. Get out there and do what you have to do. So that’s another great lesson. And I feel that too. Like whenever I say to myself, you know, I just don’t feel like it. I just dismiss that out of hand. You know, it doesn’t matter how you feel. Yeah,

[16:47] Jim Harshaw Jr.: that’s hard because there’s a lot of guys listening who want to be more consistent.

[16:51] Jim Harshaw Jr.: They want to get up and do their morning workout. They want to make the 10 more sales calls, five more sales calls a day. They want to be more consistent and that’s hard, right? They hit the snooze button or get distracted by social media and they’re not consistent. And you’re saying.

[17:10] Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I mean, like if you watch anything David Goggins ever talks about, he’s great on the subject of, I don’t care how you feel or talking to himself.

[17:19] Steven Pressfield: Many mornings he says he’ll get up and look at his running shoes, you know, be still in bed and say, I can’t stand to put these things on yet again and run another 50 miles. Then he says to himself. It doesn’t matter how you feel, David, feel doesn’t count. Get up and do it. That’s a great habit. If you can inculcate that, or if a coach or mentor can inculcate that in you, that’s a real superpower, I think.

[17:43] Steven Pressfield: Is that

[17:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: what helped you get your books out of you and into the world?

[17:46] Steven Pressfield: Yeah. It just doesn’t matter how you feel. You just got to do it. And again, it goes back to my agent, Marty or Bart, who said that talent is bullshit. It’s putting in the work, the grind day after day is what counts in the end.

[18:02] Jim Harshaw Jr.: The idea behind the Daily Pressfield.

[18:05] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I love it. I love the book. I got the whole special gift box and everything that you sent me, which is just really cool. There’s some clever note cards in there and it comes with all kinds of cool little bells and whistles. So I encourage the listeners to go to stephenpressfield. com and buy the book. I don’t know if.

[18:21] Jim Harshaw Jr.: By the time this publishes, there’ll be the gift edition boxes still available, but it’s a fantastic book. What made you want to bring this to the world?

[18:29] Steven Pressfield: The Daily Pressfield. First, let me kind of explain a little bit, Jim. It’s like a 365 day book. It’s a big thick book that people have come to me lately.

[18:39] Steven Pressfield: I don’t know why last couple years and said to me, I’ve got a book in me and I don’t know how to do, how to write it. I don’t know from, how do you start? So I thought this kind of 365 day devotional type of calendar book is a great way. To kind of help people or mentor people through any kind of long term project and it’d be athletic project too You know getting ready to run a triathlon or a marathon or something like that Where are you going to be training for nine months or something like that?

[19:08] Steven Pressfield: So because with a 365 day book we can start on day one with what you’re going to face mentally Like day one of the daily press field the chapter head is Resistance wakes up with me, and it talks about the first day of the year when you open your eyes, the negative force that’s going to tell you to take the day off, you know, whatever, blah, blah, blah, you know, that you have to overcome that.

[19:34] Steven Pressfield: So from day one, I’m sort of trying to prime the reader that they’re going to have to face their own laziness, their own fear, their own self doubt, whatever it is to stop them. And so I think that 365 day Medium is a great way to take somebody from day one of a project all the way through the year to the completion of it.

[19:56] Steven Pressfield: So that was kind of the concept behind it, Jim.

[19:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah, I love it. It’s a lot of your wisdom in bite size, consumable pieces that you can carry with you and, and, and read a little bit every day and get a dose of Steve, which is really great. I love it. That goes back to consistency. Like this is a challenge that so many of my clients have for the athletic minded man out there.

[20:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You were a competitor at one point in your life. Now you’re in the real world as a professional and you have to be consistent here, just like you were when you were an athlete and we know that in order to, to be the best at whatever it is you’re trying to be the best at. You have to have consistency.

[20:30] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And this book is a tool to help you do the hard thing and be consistent. Yeah,

[20:36] Steven Pressfield: that was the idea behind it. And particularly like, although the book is sort of aimed at writers, it really applies across the board to entrepreneurs, athletes, anything like that. And like, just as one example, like writers know that in the middle of a work, there’s this thing called the act two horrors.

[20:52] Steven Pressfield: And we were just talking about it a few minutes ago, like in the middle of a season of sports comes that point where you no longer have the excitement of starting the season and you no longer have the anticipation of getting to the playoffs or getting to the big event or actually. But you’re in the middle of like, say, preparing for an Ironman or something, and it just becomes a grind, right?

[21:14] Steven Pressfield: And it’s a grind for writers too. So the middle of this book is about that. So as you hit that middle, it’s trying to kind of coach you through those dog days when there’s no glamour left and there’s nothing left, but just banging it out, you know, one hard day at a time.

[21:31] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah, that is real. That is for the listener.

[21:34] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You know, you’re listening to this while I published this early in the new year, and it’s great. You have goals and a new fresh year in front of you. And 2023 is behind you. And there’s maybe a freshness and an excitement about the new year. Well, guess what? February and March and April and may are going to be here.

[21:54] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And then there’s going to be summer where everybody slows down and then there’s the restart in the fall. And, and guess what? There’s going to be a December coming again, where you’re going to have to answer, what did I accomplish over the past year? Was I consistent? Did I wake up and do the hard thing, whether it’s the workout or the sales calls or the whatever, you name it, whatever that thing is that you have to do.

[22:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be ugly. There’s going to be the, the second act core. I mean, it just is part of it. It was part of it for Steve. It’s part of it for me. And it’s part of it for you. We have to understand that’s normal. That’s how we get there. This is the path. There’s not an easy path.

[22:33] Jim Harshaw Jr.: This is the path.

[22:35] Steven Pressfield: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And the other thing about those moments, Jim, are, first of all, they don’t teach you about this in school. Maybe a coach does, but nobody else does. And the other thing is that those moments of adversity are overcome only in your own head. And almost always there’s nobody there to see it.

[22:54] Steven Pressfield: You know, there’s no glamor to it at all. At the end of the day, if you’re not reinforcing yourself or validating yourself and giving yourself a pat on the back, there’s nobody else to do that. And that’s why people fall out. I can understand it. You know, I’ve done it for years. And.

[23:09] Jim Harshaw Jr.: The other big challenge that people come to me with Steve is, well, one of them is consistency.

[23:15] Jim Harshaw Jr.: The other one’s clarity. It’s what’s next for me, particularly for, for the guy listening, the athletic minded man, he’s maybe been an athlete in high school or college. Maybe he’s a weekend warrior now, but now he’s in the real world, family, job, degrees, cars, whatever it might be. He’s checked a bunch of the boxes.

[23:35] Jim Harshaw Jr.: But he’s sitting there thinking, what’s next? They struggle with the clarity on what’s next for me. They feel like they have another gear inside of them. They feel like there may be a leaving too much on the table. What do you say to

[23:49] Steven Pressfield: that listener? You know, I was just going to ask you, I was going to say, Jim, how do you counsel somebody in that moment?

[23:54] Steven Pressfield: What do you tell

[23:55] Jim Harshaw Jr.: them? I tell them that there’s this concept that underlies all of my coaching, my entire philosophy, Steven, and for the listener, you may have heard me talk about this before, but the most valuable thing that you can do is not actually doing the thing, but it’s the pause that becomes before it.

[24:13] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Okay. So I’ve asked you, Steve, and so many others on my prior podcast, success through failure over the years. What’s the single habit that you most credit for your success. And it’s always some version of. Creating a plan, creating a system, stepping back, asking the hard questions so that I can engage in the work that I know that I need to do.

[24:33] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And to get clarity, you have to step back and ask yourself the hard questions. Okay. You know, what’s my purpose or what do I want to accomplish? Or how do I win the day? Or what do I really want my life to look like? Or what actually is my calling? I know I’m doing this job right now, but maybe, maybe I’m a writer at the core.

[24:51] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And asking yourself that question and saying, okay, what’s next for me? What do I do? What can I do tomorrow to get started? And it’s probably waking up and doing the thing, like doing the thing. Even like Steve said, write the page, type it out on your typewriter and throw it away. But do the thing, get started.

[25:09] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Figured out by getting started by moving forward. Like the analogy that I use, Steve is you can’t see 10 steps down the path from the beginning of the trail. You can only see two or three, maybe four if you’re lucky, but once you get two or three or four steps in, you can now see step 10 down the path a little bit, but you might also see there’s an option to the left and an option to the right, you couldn’t see those.

[25:32] Jim Harshaw Jr.: From the beginning, but now that you’re moving forward, you’re just taking action. Now you can see your options moving forward. You can’t stumble into something unless you’re moving forward. And that’s how I get people to get clarity. Does that make sense? I’m curious to your reflection on

[25:44] Steven Pressfield: that. Well, let me tell you a story here, please.

[25:47] Steven Pressfield: I have a friend, this is actually a story about his son. So he graduated from high school, he joined the Marine Corps and he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is on the subject of kind of finding your calling. He came back from there and he said, you know, I just, this isn’t for me, the Marine Corps is not for me.

[26:05] Steven Pressfield: It’s, I don’t want to participate in destruction and stuff like that. And he said, well, I want to help people want to heal people. And so his family is a family that really values education. So he went back to graduate school and he got a degree in hospital administration and he became an administrator and he worked in that in five or six years or so.

[26:26] Steven Pressfield: And he realized, you know, I’m not happy doing this either. Something’s wrong. And then one day he just had the thought of where this, wherever this came from, I want to be a nurse. And he dropped out of, uh, of hospital administration, went to nursing school, didn’t say he wanted to be a doctor. He wanted to be a nurse.

[26:44] Steven Pressfield: And that was his calling. And he realized that what he really wanted was to be in the room with the person that was suffering, with the person that was afraid, and that he could somehow bring comfort to that person in need. So the point of it, sort of the story kind of is. Just like you say, you can’t see from the start of the trail.

[27:05] Steven Pressfield: You can’t see that far down the trail. But yet each choice that he made was kind of a metaphor for what was coming. For instance, when he joined the Marine Corps, it showed that money wasn’t important for him. It was service. That was his kind of a thing. He realized he wanted to help people that were sick and that were in need, but it still wasn’t right because he wasn’t hands on.

[27:25] Steven Pressfield: He wasn’t really able to do it. So for instance, if you had stopped him at the moment that he was enlisting in the Marine Corps and said, you know, Joe, you should be a nurse, he would have laughed in your face, right? He wasn’t, he hadn’t gone far enough down the trail to see it. But when he had finally, Been in, you know, 10 or 12 years metaphorically getting closer to it.

[27:46] Steven Pressfield: All of a sudden it became very clear. This is what I want to do. This is what I need to do. I would agree with you, Jim. Sometimes it takes time and you have to sort of miss the target a little bit, you know, or almost get there, but not quite, and then readjust, recalibrate, try again, but eventually like, it’s a great story.

[28:04] Steven Pressfield: I think that he finally found what he really was born to do and would never have known it at the beginning. Yeah, that is

[28:11] Jim Harshaw Jr.: the path, you know, Steve Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots, move looking forward in your life, only looking backward. And when you look backward, you know, your journey, Steve, I mean, all the different jobs that you’ve done is fascinating.

[28:24] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And that has uniquely positioned you to do what you’re doing in the world and to share the message in the way that you share your message. And it was a hard, long struggle for you. Before, you know, age 55, when you publish a novel and it becomes this big time movie and the legend of beggar Vance with Matt Damon and Will Smith.

[28:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And that’s great. But like, man, there was this journey that you have to share with the world and you can relate to a lot more people. And then I think my journey is somewhat similar in the sense that I only got here because of struggles and failures and setbacks, and I did a lot of. Similar type jobs. I poured concrete, worked in a concrete plant, worked on a framing crew and handyman, painter.

[29:05] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I mean, you name it. I did all of that stuff while my friends were out doing, you know, internships at Goldman Sachs. It took me a long time to get to where I’m at and to be positioned. I’ve had business successes and business failures and. All of that positions me well to host a podcast like this and to, to do the coaching that I do and for the listener, embrace your journey.

[29:27] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I mean, this is your story. Your movie is being made right now, as you sit there listening to this, hopefully having epiphanies from listening to Steve and I have this conversation, having this conversation and you’re seeing your next step in front of you.

[29:42] Steven Pressfield: Yeah, it’s too bad we can’t see in reverse, you know, while we’re right in the middle of it, when you look back, it always seems to make sense.

[29:50] Steven Pressfield: But when you’re looking, when you’re in the middle of it, you’re just lost, you know, there’s no, no substitute for just keeping going, you know, no matter what.

[29:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Steve, for the sake of the listener who is struggling right now with maybe a lack of progress, maybe they feel stuck, you know, maybe they face setback after setback.

[30:06] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I’m curious, What words would you use to yourself if you could go back, I don’t know, 20, 30 years more and say a few words to yourself, what would you say to yourself to Steve back

[30:19] Steven Pressfield: then? I think the concept of, of the hero’s journey, you know, Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey is if. Anybody that’s listening, if they’re not familiar with that, look up Joseph Campbell and read, you know, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, or familiarize yourself with what The Hero’s Journey is, because it, sort of the bottom line is, we all have a journey that goes just like what you were describing, Jim, and while you’re in the middle of it, you’re always lost, because you’re in that forest, you can’t see far enough ahead, but the thing to remember, and it is really true, is there is meaning.

[30:54] Steven Pressfield: To that journey. It isn’t random. It may feel like it’s random, but believe it or not, you’re actually stumbling from one, you know, level to a higher level, to a higher level. And there is a moment when you come out of the forest and you do see the sunshine. So I would say to anybody, and I’d say to myself, you know, be patient with yourself.

[31:16] Steven Pressfield: Be. Compassionate with yourself and keep plugging, keep the faith, keep your eyes open and just keep moving forward.

[31:24] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Steve, where can people find you, follow you by your, your latest book, the daily press field, or any

[31:30] Steven Pressfield: of your other books? The daily press field is on Amazon as a, uh, as a regular sort of standalone book, but on my website.

[31:39] Steven Pressfield: Which is just my name, stephenpressfield. com. You can get it in two other really cool forms. One is just a signed book from me in a really nice package. The other is the thing we sent to you, Jim, the special gift package. It’s got a bunch of extras like a companion journal and some of the note cards that you showed earlier.

[32:01] Steven Pressfield: And it’s a great gift to anybody that’s kind of struggling in any kind of creative field or athletic field that needs a little Kind of a mentorship over a year type of thing, or for yourself, if you’re in that position, uh, and that you can get on stephenpressfield. com.

[32:18] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Excellent for the listener. Steve is also on all the social media outlets.

[32:23] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You can find them there. We’ll have the links to everything he just shared as well as his social media and the action plan. So you can always grab that. Steve, once again, great talking to you. Thanks for

[32:33] Steven Pressfield: coming on the show. Hey, thanks, Jim. It’s always great to be talking to you. We’ll do it again anytime you want.

[32:37] Steven Pressfield: That

[32:38] Jim Harshaw Jr.: sounds great.

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