Steven Pressfield: The Hero’s Journey, Resistance, and Becoming the Artist You’re Meant to Be [From the Archive]

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This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

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Presenting The Archive, classic episodes that remain timeless, the raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up.

**James Altucher** (1:06)
So one of my favorite all-time guests, Steven Pressfield, I don't even know how to begin with you, I'll just say you've written like a gazillion books. What's the number, like 20, 15?

**Steven Pressfield** (1:17)
I think it's up to 20 now.

**James Altucher** (1:18)
Yeah, I'm right about there with you, although your books have had great success. The Legend of Bagger Vance was also a movie. And then what was brilliant about The Legend of Bagger Vance is described in your other book, The Authentic Swing, where, and I describe these two books to everybody.
The Authentic Swing is about how you use the ancient Hindu story of the Bhagavad Gita, the most famous story in Hinduism, the most important story of Hinduism, I should say, and you use that almost beat by beat to write The Legend of Bagger Vance.

**Steven Pressfield** (1:51)
I stole it, in other words.

**James Altucher** (1:53)
Right. I'm going to get to that because it's very interesting. So The Legend of Bagger Vance, if I remember correctly, I read it several years ago, it was a 1920s golf tournament in Georgia. And essentially, it's amazing how, again, you read that, it's the Bhagavad Gita, but set in a 1920s golf setting in Georgia. It was so brilliant. And the caddy is like Krishna and the main young golfer was like Arjuna.
Yeah. And it was just beautiful. And then the reason I like that is because when I started blogging around 2009, 2010, and telling my story, at first I was writing a lot about finance, but then I stopped all that and I was then writing my story, and I realized something very interesting, which is that if you look at a lot of these ancient texts, not only great storytelling, but great wisdom, and if you apply it to another avenue, I'll give you an example. I took the Yoga Sutras, it's written in 300 or 400 BC, and I took one line which is kind of impediments to enlightenment in yoga, and there's nine of them.
And so I wrote a blog post, the nine things that will prevent you from being an entrepreneur. And I didn't give any credit to the Yoga Sutras, but word for word, I took those nine things and then described how apply, and it became like my most popular article of the year.

**Steven Pressfield** (3:16)
No kidding, yeah.

**James Altucher** (3:16)
Because when, and what's amazing is, and this is what you did for the Bhagavad Gita, if a story's been focus grouped by 3000 years of history and a billion people, it's probably a pretty good story structure. And so you just took that story structure and did The Legend of Bagger Vance with it.

**Steven Pressfield** (3:32)
Yeah.
And it's great that you don't need to cite it either. Right. Yeah. Like one person in a thousand gets it, you know?

**James Altucher** (3:38)
And not only do you not need to cite it, you could then later, like 15, 20 years later, write an entire book about how you did it. So you get like two books for the price of one.

**Steven Pressfield** (3:48)
And it's been done more times than we think. I mean, you remember the movie The Warriors? Yeah. That was about the gangs in New York? Yeah.
So that's taken straight from Xenophon's Anabasis. Totally ripped off, including the name Cyrus and the whole thing.

**James Altucher** (4:03)
You know, it's kind of almost a cliché to say Star Wars follows the beats of The Archive, The Hero. Like that's kind of well known. So what I want to talk about is you have collected four mini books, which I think are brilliant. The first one's called How Does a Story Start? The second one's called What Is Your Story About? And then the other two I have, these two I have right in front of me, the other two I have in PDF. So I want to talk about those.