Our unlived life is living inside us at the same time that we’re living our regular life. And um, we may be a lawyer working for a firm that specializes in, um, making movies and we want to make movies ourselves, but we find ourselves as a lawyer working for that, for that firm. Steven Pressfield: Let’s say we’re working in a cubicle, Shawn, somewhere, and we have a novel that we want to write, a movie that we want to make, or a startup that we want to, um, inaugurate. Between the two stands Resistance.” What do you mean by that? The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Shawn Coyne: So Steve, in The War of Art, at the very beginning of the book, you wrote this: “Most of us have two lives. Now, number three: Oprah Winfrey is a very big fan of the book and she had Steven Pressfield on her “ Super Soul Sunday” show to discuss how we came up with the central idea of the book-and the central idea of the book is the notion that there is an evil force in the universe called Resistance. Many of those weeks have been spent at number one. What that means is that The War of Art has been in the top five books on creativity at for 14 straight years and counting. Number two: The War of Art is that rare kind of book that has been both what publishers like to call frontlist bestseller-and that means it’s been on all the traditional bestseller lists like the New York Times Bestseller List and the Wall Street Journal Bestseller List-but it’s also what they like to call a perennial backlist best seller. Number one: To date, The War of Art has sold 613,752 copies in the United States alone.

Now, before I bring Steve in to discuss the big ideas behind the book, I’d love to give you some context. My name is Shawn Coyne and I am the longtime publisher of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Shawn Coyne: Hi and welcome to The War of Art Mini-Course.