My first agent was a gentleman named Barthold Fles. He was seventy-six; I was twenty-nine. One day over coffee Bart asked me, “How much is 427 minus one?”

It took me seven years to finish my first book. (I wrote about this in The War of Art.)

Do you know who Rick Rubin is? 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.

The first kind of self-reinforcement is objective.

The sergeant waves you over and says, “Good job, Humperdinck. I’m putting you in for a promotion.” Or the head nurse calls you up before the meeting. “Jayne, explain to the group how the new system works.” 

I break it down into three areas in my own work. Self-motivation. Self-discipline. Self-reinforcement.

We said in the previous post that athletes train and soldiers train, and that you and I as artists and entrepreneurs have to train as well. But the athlete and the soldier have an advantage over us.