Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn’t angry; I knew Moe, I knew he was head-strong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen.

If you recognize this speech from The Godfather II, you know it was spoken by Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) to Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino. Roth delivers it with barely restrained fury, sensing that he is about to be betrayed by Michael and aiming to deliver a hardball point to his rival, who is a generation younger and who, as Roth clearly knows (though he doesn’t say it), is the man “who gave the order.”

Here’s the passage in full (written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola): 

There was this kid I grew up with; he was younger than me. Sorta looked up to me, you know? We did our first work together, worked our way out of the street. Things were good, we made the most of it. During Prohibition, we ran molasses into Canada… made a fortune, your father, too. As much as anyone, I loved him and trusted him. Later on he had an idea to build a city out of a desert stop-over for GI’s on the way to the West Coast. That kid’s name was Moe Greene, and the city he invented was Las Vegas. This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn’t even a plaque, or a signpost or a statue of him in that town! Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn’t angry; I knew Moe, I knew he was head-strong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen; I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!

When you and I set out to follow our artistic or entrepreneurial dreams, we embark on an enterprise whose outcome is unknowable and whose passage is dangerous, cruel, capricious, massively difficult and almost totally without justice in terms of reward-for-risk-and-sacrifice. This racket of ours is life and death, take no prisoners. 

But always remember: Nobody dragooned us. No one put a gun to our head. We entered the arena of our own free will, and we must deal with every aspect of it—the parts we hate as well as the parts we love. 

This is the business we’ve chosen.

I once joined Fear of Success Anonymous, aka FOSA. This was in Los Angeles, so almost all the group members were actors or screenwriters.

The group got so popular it had to disband.

I remember driving home from the final meeting, thinking, “I’ve gotta solve this issue on my own. Fear of Success by definition can never succeed!”

I gave the obvious answer: 426.

“No,” said Bart. “It’s zero.”

He was speaking about pages in a novel.

If the completed book is 427 and you’ve written 426, you haven’t got 426/427ths. You’ve got nothing.

Bart didn’t need to say any more. I went home and got back to work.

I couldn’t sell it. Couldn’t find a buyer. In fact, it would be twenty-one more years before a novel of mine actually saw the light of publication.

But finishing that first manuscript meant everything. 

We talked in an earlier chapter about Resistance being the strongest at the finish line. It is. Resistance knows we’re about to defeat it. It summons all its genius and all its power to stop us. 

How do we break through? 

There’s a legend about Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, many more) that as he got close to the end on a novel, he would start getting up earlier and earlier to work on it. First it was six o’clock, then five, then four. Finally, he’d have to move out of the house, check into a hotel, just to keep from driving his wife crazy.

Michael Crichton was smart. He knew that as he approached the finish line, his inner Resistance would ramp up its intensity, trying to keep him from reaching THE END.

So Michael Crichton upped his own intensity. 

Finish it. Don’t chicken out! FINISH THE DAMN THING!

That was how it worked for me in that first book, the one I could never sell, but that changed everything for me. And here’s the even better news, which I pass on to all of us struggling to get a make-or-break project across the finish line:

Once you finish—even one time, even on a project that ultimately fails—you will never have trouble finishing again.

He’s the author of the mega-best-seller THE CREATIVE ACT … and also “the Godfather of Hip-Hop” and facilitator of many, many hits, working out of his Shangri-la Studios in Southern California.

He has also become a great friend (both of us lost houses … Rick lost two … in the SoCal fires), who has been very kind to Diana and me through the post-apocalypse ups-and-downs.

But I’m burying the lead, which is that Rick and I had an hour-and-a quarter audio conversation a couple of weeks ago for his podcast, Tetragrammaton. It’s live on his YouTube channel now, but you can also listen to it at the link below.

I normally would not mention a podcast, but I’m making an exception just because this one came out so good. It’s loaded with stuff that (I hope) will be helpful to all us writers and artists. The podcast turned out to be more of a conversation than an interview. I wound up asking Rick as many questions as he asked me.

The interview is audio only. 

It’s an hour and fifteen minutes long.

Two guys talking about creativity and the creative process.

I think you’ll like it.

This is when we sit down quietly with a cup of tea and explain to ourselves that our lizard-brain fears are not rational.

Our husband will not abandon us if we begin writing poetry. The process of self-publishing is not beyond our intellectual capacity. The comet will not strike Brooklyn obliterating our apartment (and if it does, we’ve got insurance.) 

Rationality, however, can only carry us so far.

My book Gates of Fire has sold over a million copies and is still going strong. Yet when I began it—and all through the writing—I had zero confidence in its commercial prospects. I had no deal in place, no editor, no publisher. I had never attempted a work even remotely like it (it was only my second book) nor were there any books like it on the market.

How did I self-reinforce in this case? I told myself,

All those negatives may be absolutely true. I don’t care. I know this idea is miles out of the mainstream. I know it’s a hundred-to-one shot to find a publisher. I don’t care. I LOVE this story. I believe in it. I’m going forward and even if nobody buys it but my mother and my cat, I don’t care.

This second type of self-reinforcement is not as irrational as it sounds. Because what was really going on with Gates of Fire was that, on the level of the zeitgeist it did make sense. There was an audience, even if I—and conventional thinking—couldn’t see it.

Self-belief is a crazy thing. It can come from an appreciation of reality-as-it-exists (in which case objective self-reinforcement is the answer to our fears). Or it can come from reality-as-it-will-exist, even if we ourselves can’t yet perceive it. 

Sometimes you have to be a little crazy to believe in yourself and your dream.

How does the pro acquire professional habits? 

By training.

(The amateur by contrast either trains like an amateur or doesn’t train at all.)

The passage below comes from Rosanne Cash’s wonderful 2011 memoir, Composed.

From that moment I changed the way I approached songwriting, I changed how I sang, I changed my work ethic, and I changed my life.  I sought out Marge Rivingston in New York to work on my voice and I started training, as if I were a runner, in both technique and stamina. I started paying attention to everything, both in the studio and out. If I found myself drifting off into daydreams–an old, entrenched habit–I pulled myself awake and back into the present moment. Instead of toying with ideas, I examined them, and I tested the authenticity of my instincts musically. I stretched my attention span consciously. I read books on writing by Natalie Goldberg and Carolyn Heilbrun and began to self-edit and refine more. I went deeper into every process involved with writing and musicianship. I realized I had earlier been working only within my known range–never pushing far outside the comfort zone to take any real risks. I started painting, so I could learn about the absence of words and sound, and why I needed them.  I took painting lessons from Sharon Orr, who had a series of classes at a studio called Art and Soul.

There’s a term for the changes Rosanne incorporated into her life.

Training.

Self-training.

And another one: Turning pro.

I remained completely humbled by the dream [that had precipitated these external changes] and it stayed with me through every waking hour of completing [my album] “King’s Record Shop” … I vowed the next record would reflect my new commitment. Rodney [Crowell, Rosanne’s then-husband] was at the top of his game as a record producer, but I had come to feel curiously like a neophyte in the studio after the dream. Everything seemed new, frightening, and tremendously exciting. I had awakened from the morphine sleep of success into the life of an artist.

That’s reinforcement.

The problem for you and me is this kind of validation is dependent on others. It comes from our bosses or supervisors or coaches … and we don’t have bosses and supervisors and coaches.

The answer for us can only be self-reinforcement.

Can you come out of a meeting at Twentieth-century Fox and take a moment—in your car in the parking lot—to say to yourself, 

“Good job, Janet. You looked great, you pitched your new show clearly and powerfully. Even though you might not have made a sale today, you did a tremendous job and gave it all you had. I’m taking you out to lunch to celebrate!”

Sounds dumb, I know. But this sort of practice is the difference between being an amateur and being a pro. It’s the difference between failure and success. It’s the difference between dropping out of the chase and hanging in for the long haul.

And I add three more:

Self-preparation, meaning our interior rehearsals for various emergencies. Self-belief, meaning confidence born either of an objective assessment of our talent or a wholly subjective conception of the force of our dream. And self-command, which arises from the prior five practices.

What form does this self-training take?

It’s talk. Self-talk. Interior conversations between you-and-me and ourselves.

An example: I’m in a situation right now where, for reasons I can’t talk about, I’m not able to publish stuff I’ve already written. I’ve got two books ready to go. But I can’t do anything with them, at least for the moment.

Here’s my self-talk addressing this situation (which covers all six of the categories above):

Steve, an external event beyond your control has broken your normal rhythm of production. The temptation now is to slack off. The voice of Resistance in your head will tell you to “take it easy” or “explore new possibilities.” You will feel like, “Hey, I’ve done my bit, let me back off for a minute until we can get on track again with our normal work rhythm.”

In other words, I’m assessing the situation—internal as well as external—for myself the same way a professional coach or trainer would do it if I had one.

What you must do now, Steve, is the opposite of what Resistance wants you to do. You must elevate your intensity. Pick the next project and plunge in with the same level of concentration (or higher) as if there had been no external interruption. 

Instead of relaxing, even a little, increase your level of exertion. Put your head down and work. 

Things now are NOT normal. They are harder. They are an insidious form of emergency. Treat this moment that way.

That’s training. That’s self-training.

They can work with a coach. 

They have a sergeant or a manager to instruct them and praise them, encourage them when they falter or hold their feet to the fire when they slack off. The football player and the Navy SEAL can literally be trained by professionals. Some athletes have entire entourages of coaches and instructors and counselors.

You and I are alone.

We can’t train. We have to self-train.