How to Become a Professional at Your Craft | Steven Pressfield & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | Talk about turning pro and the concept of being a professional.

00:00:08.860 | If we accept the idea of resistance with a capital R, that's our own internal tendency

00:00:14.940 | to sabotage ourselves when we try to set out to write our book or do our movie or follow

00:00:21.500 | our calling, whatever it is, then the question becomes, well, how do you overcome this thing?

00:00:26.800 | And what worked for me was the idea of turning pro.

00:00:32.660 | For years when I was struggling and could never get it together, I realized that at one point

00:00:38.220 | that I was just thinking like an amateur and that if I could flip a switch in my mind and

00:00:43.380 | think like a professional, that I could overcome some of the things.

00:00:47.720 | Like when I think of a great pro, I think of Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or Tom Brady

00:00:55.600 | or somebody like that.

00:00:56.620 | And so like a professional, some of the characteristics of a professional as opposed to an amateur.

00:01:03.340 | A professional shows up every day.

00:01:07.300 | A professional stays on the job all day or the equivalent of all day.

00:01:13.720 | I mean, a lot of us who have jobs, our professionals in our jobs.

00:01:17.960 | But when we come home at night and we try to, you know, start our band or, you know, our fiddle band,

00:01:23.720 | we flame out on that because we can't sort of carry over that professional attitude.

00:01:28.860 | A professional, as I said this before, does not take success or failure personally.

00:01:35.560 | An amateur will, right?

00:01:37.200 | An amateur gets a bad review, bad response of this and they just crap out.

00:01:40.480 | I don't want to do this anymore, right?

00:01:42.380 | A professional plays hurt.

00:01:44.580 | Like if Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, you know, if they've tweaked the hamstring, they're out

00:01:50.360 | there, you know.

00:01:51.160 | They'll die before they'll be taken off the court, you know.

00:01:54.180 | Whereas an amateur, when he or she confronts adversity, will fold.

00:02:00.200 | Oh, it's too cold out, you know.

00:02:02.920 | I've got a, you know, I've got the flu, that kind of thing.

00:02:07.640 | Another thing, an amateur worries about how they feel.

00:02:13.260 | Like, oh, I don't feel like getting out of bed this morning.

00:02:16.480 | I don't feel like really doing my work today.

00:02:19.080 | A professional doesn't care how they feel, they do it, right?

00:02:23.200 | So an amateur has amateur habits and a professional has professional habits.

00:02:29.000 | And my book, Turning Pro, is about that, flipping that switch in your head that costs no money.

00:02:35.300 | You don't have to take a course.

00:02:37.460 | You don't have to get certified.

00:02:38.700 | All you have to do is sort of say to yourself, if you can do it, and it ain't easy, okay, I'm

00:02:44.680 | going to attack this thing, whatever it is now, as if I were Kobe Bryant.

00:02:48.740 | You know, would he quit, you know, when he didn't feel like doing it?

00:02:53.380 | Absolutely not.

00:02:54.320 | So, and, oh, here's another aspect of Turning Pro that worked for me.

00:02:59.660 | I had like about a 10-year career as a screenwriter, as we talked about with King Kong Lives.

00:03:05.220 | And one of the things you learn is that screenwriters, a lot of times, will have their one-man corporations.

00:03:14.700 | And they will not sign a contract as themselves.

00:03:18.640 | You know, it won't be Andrew Huberman on the contract.

00:03:22.560 | It'll be your corporation, Huberman Lab, FSO, for services of, Andrew Huberman.

00:03:29.060 | And I really love that idea of thinking of yourself as a two-part thing.

00:03:35.320 | You're the CEO of this thing, and then you're also the guy that does the work.

00:03:40.080 | And I would find that if I was just thinking of myself as the guy that's doing the work,

00:03:46.000 | I have a hard time pitching my ideas.

00:03:49.620 | I'm sort of too shy.

00:03:52.020 | But if I'm the CEO of my company, of my corporation, I'm a pro.

00:03:56.440 | I can go in there and pimp the hell out of it, you know?

00:03:59.360 | So that idea of looking at yourself as a professional kind of takes all judgment out of any failures that we've had.

00:04:07.640 | We don't blame ourselves anymore for procrastinating or being perfectionists or giving in to fear or self-doubt or anything.

00:04:14.560 | We just say, well, okay, I did that when I was thinking like an amateur.

00:04:18.360 | But now I'm going to think like a pro.

00:04:20.340 | And a pro just doesn't yield to that stuff.

00:04:25.260 | So that's a mind shift, a mindset shift that really helped me a lot.

00:04:31.520 | I love that.

00:04:32.900 | I mean, so much of that feels is nested in taking oneself seriously.

00:04:37.560 | Yeah.

00:04:38.100 | You know, I think when people hear the words taking oneself seriously, they think, oh, well, someone's going to be heavy.

00:04:43.040 | They're never going to joke.

00:04:44.060 | No sense of humor.

00:04:45.040 | But that's not what I'm referring to.

00:04:46.460 | I wish people would take themselves more seriously, including their creative sparks inside of them.

00:04:54.060 | You said there's no cost to turning pro.

00:04:57.860 | I agree there's no monetary cost.

00:05:01.060 | You can decide to flip that switch.

00:05:02.620 | I would argue, and I'm not arguing against, because I don't think that...

00:05:06.720 | No, I know what you're going to say.

00:05:07.840 | I agree with you.

00:05:08.800 | I think there's a huge cost.

00:05:10.440 | And the huge cost I'm referring to is the one of how people around you react when you start taking yourself seriously.

00:05:18.620 | I mean, I don't need to go into the story.

00:05:21.140 | I've done it elsewhere.

00:05:21.840 | But I was an unimpressive high school student.

00:05:24.760 | Thank God for my high school girlfriend going off to college and discovering that.

00:05:29.260 | And then thank God for the biology teacher that turned me on to biology.

00:05:32.280 | Thank God for Harry Carlyle.

00:05:34.360 | But I had the drive, but certainly it wasn't organized in the right ways.

00:05:39.100 | But when I switched from being a fun guy to be around in a lot of context to the guy that is absolutely going to ace the exam,

00:05:50.480 | no matter how much work I have to put into it, that's absolutely going to be in the gym three days a week,

00:05:55.520 | that's absolutely going to get my sleep.

00:05:57.860 | And, you know, you get a lot of flack, especially in your early 20s, late teens, early 20s.

00:06:03.220 | Now, I did go out and party then.

00:06:04.620 | I was, I didn't, never drank a lot, but I went to parties.

00:06:07.200 | But across the years, I did fewer and fewer social things.

00:06:11.060 | Even as a, as a graduate student, postdoc and junior professor, you know, at meetings, everyone go to happy hour.

00:06:17.520 | I would go work out if I hadn't done it that morning.

00:06:20.720 | And I would go to sleep at night instead of staying up late talking in the bar because great interactions would happen in those bars,

00:06:28.840 | scientific discussions and so forth.

00:06:30.740 | But the next morning, I wanted to be on point during the seminar and be able to learn and be able to contribute.

00:06:36.600 | And so the big cost is not everybody likes that because they feel it as pressure.

00:06:42.380 | It's sort of like if you're eating well, you're eating healthy, people pay more attention to the ways they are not eating healthy.

00:06:50.580 | And they will do everything they can to try and make you feel bad about that.

00:06:53.860 | We see this in mass.

00:06:55.660 | We see this in culture.

00:06:56.960 | You know, it, you know, even there are extremes of, you know, body dysmorphia and people taking fitness to extremes that aren't healthy or anything.

00:07:06.320 | But we see people being basically not shamed, but ridiculed for being serious about their health.

00:07:17.900 | It's nuts, but it's all about them.

00:07:20.420 | It's very clear.

00:07:21.140 | It's all about their own unwillingness to give up the second chocolate croissant.

00:07:24.860 | Yeah.

00:07:25.400 | You know, or to feel like maybe they're not as fit as the people around them.

00:07:29.740 | I mean, when standards around you are at risk of rising, that can be really scary to people.

00:07:36.700 | Yeah.

00:07:36.960 | We were talking about that earlier, Andrew, when I was saying that, like, it becomes when you start eating healthy and sleeping and getting up early and stuff, it becomes a reproach to your friends who know that they're not doing that, know they should be doing that.

00:07:52.020 | And they say, who is this guy to do that?

00:07:53.940 | You know, and then they will try to sabotage you and undermine you and ridicule you.

00:07:58.760 | And so you're right.

00:07:59.820 | Turning pro does have a cost.

00:08:01.840 | A lot of times, you know, if you take that course, you have to leave people behind.

00:08:07.260 | You know, people who were your friends, you can't be friends with them anymore, you know, because a lot of times groups of friends will have an unspoken kind of compact among them that we're all going to stay mediocre.

00:08:20.120 | That's the deal.

00:08:22.200 | Right.

00:08:22.600 | And in fact, Good Will Hunting, that was what that movie was about.

00:08:28.200 | That the Matt Damon character was this mathematical genius, right?

00:08:35.840 | And his buddies, all of his, you know, fist fighting Boston Southie guys were had this compact.

00:08:43.180 | They were all going to stay, you know, kind of blue collar guys and we're all going to be buddies and we're going to have a wonderful time, you know.

00:08:48.900 | And then there's that great scene at the end of the movie where Ben Affleck, his best friend, says to him, you know, if I come back 20 years from now and you're still here, I'm going to kill you because you won the lottery.

00:09:00.800 | You got this thing and this gift and you got to use it.

00:09:04.460 | So there are those kind of pacts that people make.

00:09:07.740 | We're all going to stay mediocre right here where we are.

00:09:10.600 | And if you, Andrew, try to rise above, you be the tall poppy, somebody's going to, you know, cut you off.

00:09:16.860 | So sometimes we do have to leave people behind.

00:09:19.060 | We'll see you next time.

00:09:23.260 | Music by Ben Thede

How to Become a Professional at Your Craft | Steven Pressfield & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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