BACK WHEN I LIVED in New York, there was a night when I attended a cocktail party and became fast friends with another guest, a guy who was also trying to become a fiction writer. This happened from time to time. I’d get a sense someone shared similar ambitions, and then, depending on the latent shame each of us felt about those ambitions, we’d either become friends or disgust each other.
He asked me what I was working on, and I told him. In return, I asked him what he was working on. But rather than answer, he asked, “Have you read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art?”
He then told me all about the book and how it helped him fight “resistance.”
At the end of the night, we exchanged information and later hung out a few more times. I sent him a story I wrote, and he gave solid notes on it. Over the course of about eight months, I offered to return the favor several times. But he never sent me anything. Now he works in the comms department at Google, and I have no idea if he’s ever finished a piece of fiction.
What I do know is that in the time since he recommended The War of Art, at least a dozen more people have recommended it to me in similar situations. And very few of these people are still pursuing the ambition that inspired them to read the book.
This seems to be a common pattern among people who aspire to pursue a craft: At an early stage in the process, they grow convinced that they’re broken in some way and must fix themselves in order to really get started.
I can sympathize with this line of thinking because I’ve followed it for long stretches at various points in my career. And I know I’m not alone. The fact that there are so many books like The War of Art suggests lots of people have dealt with similar internal trials.
But the belief that you must be fixed, or that a book will help with that fixing, only makes things worse—both because “fixed” isn’t a tangible state of being and because the people who write these books don’t have a solution. They just present an idea of a solution. And that idea actually makes people feel worse about themselves and farther away from their goal.
Now allow me to present myself as evidence of the contrary: If I had to fix all the ways that I’m broken before I embarked on a project, then I probably wouldn’t even be able to make a cup of coffee most days. But here I am, throwing words on a page in the service of a book that no one might read.
Put another way: I have very little faith I’ll ever be fixed, but what faith I do have is in the belief that whatever fixing is possible will occur while doing the thing I wish I could be fixed for.
The same is true of Pressfield. When you explore his oeuvre, you discover he wrote a King Kong movie, a Steven Seagal movie, an Emilio Estevez movie, and a Dolph Lundgren movie—all films that seem to be more a result of Hollywood’s love of cocaine in the ’80s than of virtuosic talent.
His books include a couple of decent novels about fighting and a lot of self-help books about writing and resistance. Based on the number of reviews, it’s clear the self-help books have been purchased and read three to ten times more than his novels.
Further, if you look at the podcasts he’s appeared on, they often focus on The War of Art and get tagged with lines like “Unleash Your Ambition,” “Unlock Your Creative Potential,” and other various metaphors about helping the intangible things inside you get out.
Recently, a friend gave me a copy of Pressfield’s memoir, Gov’t Cheese, which goes into great detail about his lifelong struggle to become a writer, as well as the personal moments that inspired him to develop the advice he gives in The War of Art. I admire his resilience and perseverance and don’t want to fully dismiss his work. But taken as whole, it becomes clear that Pressfield was a practitioner who sustained himself by selling picks & shovels, largely to people who never struck gold but many of whom went on to create their own online writing courses and build audiences on platforms like Medium.
And now that we’ve circled back to Medium, we can see that more and more of the people on the platform are taking an approach that’s derivative of Pressfield, minus all the years of sincerely trying to be a practitioner. They just skipped straight to the picks & shovels hustle by pretending to have the key to earning $10,000 a month.
The conclusion here isn’t that these people are gross. Some might be. But that’s irrelevant. The conclusion is that the forces at play—the challenges of being a practitioner and the relative ease of building an audience through the false promise of success—have incentivized a greater number of people to sell picks & shovels than to pursue a practice, much the way this occurred during the original gold rush.
And once the number of people selling picks & shovels grows out of proportion with the number of people willing to engage in the pursuit, the whole industry and its parasitic side industry collapse.