Robert Fritz – The Path of Least Resistance (Author)

Hey, it's David Cherry and welcome to the show. This podcast helps you stay in tune with the new energy around community and brand building, sharing conversations with some of my friends and my favorite online founders and creators about how they built a brand and community around what they do. And as always, if you wanna reach out, just look me up in the show notes, check out the guest links. Thanks for tuning in. All right, today I'm really excited to have on a author that I've read probably three or four of his books in the last maybe four months. So I've just devoured his work. I was turned on to it by Patrick O'Shaughnessy. I think he recommended it as one of the best books he read last year and that book is the path of least resistance. So today on the show I have Robert Fritz. This is a little bit different of an episode, you know, previously I've been talking with brand strategists, I've been talking with founders, I've been talking with community leaders and Robert is a master of helping people identify and achieve their creative vision. So he thinks about it in a very different way. He calls it structural dynamics. So instead of thinking about details and information, Robert is very focused on the structure that companies, individuals set up for themselves to get something done. So I had a really fun time talking with him. I think he's just a master of his craft. He's created so many different things in his life and I felt like it was almost like this tennis match where every time I served something up to him, he kind of would just whack something back at me that I didn't expect or that I thought he would say something different. And so that I think is the mark of a real master. So very excited for you to listen to this conversation. Again, it's a little bit less focused on communities and more focused on creativity. And I think it's a good addition to the mix. So enjoy this episode with author, speaker, director, composer, Robert Fritz. - All right, Robert, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to talk to you. I wish I could show you how many notes I've taken in the path of least resistance and also your life is art. And then your newest book, Identity, they've just been completely marked up. And I found them, I found the path of least resistance, I think in March of this year, through another podcast friend. And it was perfect timing. Everything was kind of like shut down. I had a little bit more space to kind of think about, you know, my life, everybody did, right? And so it was a perfect timing to get that book. And I just really went through a page by page because there's so much information. I think just very relevant and very valuable for creatives like myself. So thank you for writing these books. They've been a great companion to me over the past few months. And I thought, yeah, I thought before we get into kind of, some of your thesis, I suppose, around the creative process, I'm curious, when people ask you what you do, what do you typically say to them? 'Cause I know you do a lot. (laughs) - It's a problem my kids have. Where's your father do? And they go, oh well. Well, depends on the context. I mean, I have a career in the arts, I'm a filmmaker, I'm a composer, I'm a writer. And then I also work with companies, corporations, all over the world. And so I have many interests and I love every one of them. But my original training is as a composer. I have a bachelor's and master's in composition from bus conservatory. And I would have to say that everything I do, one way or the other comes from music. And comes from how music works. - Fascinating. And a lot of people, you know, they feel maybe guilty about having so many different interests. But you just said as you're describing that, that you love every one of them, it sounds like you've developed every one of them. Was there a point in time when you sort of just accepted, hey, there's a lot of different things I wanna do and I can do them all? 'Cause I think people feel, you know, maybe some guilt or tension around that. - I can't relate to that 'cause I never had that. I mean, I can sort of imagine it, but I can't have always, oh, I'm interested in this all I like that. Oh, you know, I'm just interested in what I'm interested in. And so I never had any hesitation about going in the direction that interested me. - Yeah, and do you feel that, you said everything's kind of rooted in music. So do you feel that, you know, that building a foundation in one area like music was critical to then kind of porting over some of those lessons and really almost, so it almost sounds like you still have strong foundation of a certain, you know, interest of yours that really helps kind of permeate everything else you do. And so maybe people still need to go deep. I guess what I'm kind of getting at is sort of going really deep in one area versus feeling like you're kind of spread across many, you know. - No, I understand that it's, do you master something and then have that mastery influence everything else you do. And I think the answer to that is yes. And certainly for me originally it was composition. And I'm still a composer, so it isn't like I've ever lost that. Now, think about what composition is. You're putting together elements in such a way that they really have a beginning of middle and end. They move, there's motivation for the movement. So when I started writing screenplays, for example, which I found at first to be kind of difficult. You know, I really had to learn how to do it. But all of the compositional training I had really helped because in music what you do is you work with, for example, major themes, minor themes, the compliment and so on. And all of those things started to make sense to me when I started writing screenplays that eventually I made into films. So when I started working with organizations, that was an interesting thing. Because at first I didn't know much about organizations. I was more interested in it's a place where people created things and I was very much into helping people create things. But then later I saw that there were certain underlong structures within the companies that made it hard. And the key to that was success did not always succeed. I mean, you can understand why failure didn't succeed. But success didn't always succeed was a real puzzle. And then I discovered very much like looking at a composition that a lot of these organizations were like bad compositions. You know, like if one of my students that when I taught at noon conservatory came in with a composition like that, there would be a lot of work to do to straighten it out. And I began to understand the underlong structural dynamics of not only that, but just about everything. And so, for example, the path of least resistance. The name is not the colloquial easy way out. It's really physics, which is energy moves where it's easy as for it to go. And it's the underlong structure like the riverbed that determines where it goes. And that we can change the underlong structure and by virtue of that, we can sort of change the direction of our lives, our organizations, and just about anything. But it's a simple and substructure that we're not usually aware of. That is so important. People try to change their lives without changing the underlong structure. And there's an oscillating pattern in which things always revert back to where they were after some kind of change. I think that oscillation is something that people definitely can be familiar with. I think we all have an area of our lives where we feel like we make some progress and then we feel like we are off again. And then we make some progress and then we're off again. And it's really interesting to me that you, it sounds like because you weren't as much from the corporate world and you had this lens of composition, as you said, that allowed you to come in. Almost like an observer, you know, I picture you come into the company, almost like it's a zoo and you're kind of observing this animal and you're saying, why is it running up against these same problems? And so you weren't really stuck in the water, I guess, as they say. And you see maybe a failure recur, and like you said, maybe success, which I think I interpret success not always being successes. It might take you in a direction you don't want to or maybe there's some downsides, I suppose, that occur through that success. And so you're able to see, hey, this system keeps playing out with a certain result. And rather than shifting, and I'm jumping ahead of you, I suppose, but rather than shifting the motivations or maybe some of the feelings or the communication even, it was about the underlying structure. And so maybe you can break down just what some different types of structures look like in, I suppose, very like layman's terms. Well, basically there are two. And one is oscillating and the other is advancing. [BLANK_AUDIO] And you're quite right though, about going into organizations and saying, why are people doing what they're doing? I mean, it's a simple question. But when you see somebody rewarded, or one thing, and another person in the company rewarded, for exactly the opposite thing, it begins to say, oh, wait a second, guys, you know, you're rewarded for building quality. And so you want to make the best quality you can. And oh, you're rewarded for volume. So you want to get the things out the doors fast as you can. And it looks like you have a personality conflict, but you don't. You have different marching orders. And then what's really important though, too, is that it shows up in our personal lives, as well, often we're advancing. In an oscillating pattern, the typical patterns that you get to a point of success, and then there's a reversal, and it brings you back to where you were. And you know, typically an American idea, which is not true, by the way. But an American idea is if you change your attitude, everything will be all right. You know, we have the notion of you have the right attitude, you should succeed brilliantly if you're wrong to stuck. Do you know the show Chopped? Yeah, yeah, I've seen that. I'm cookie show. I mean, basically they have four chefs and they all make a starter and one of them chopped and then the untray one of them gets chopped and then there's two left and somebody makes the dessert and one of them is chopped and the other one wins. Well, if you watch that, Joe, what the people all talk about, yeah, I should win because it is the attitude. Now this is a show based on skill. It's not based on attitude. And there was one guy who made it almost to the end, he's doing dessert and he got chopped and he was leading the show and they're interviewing him and he said, well, just the other chef was better. And no, you never hear them say that and this guy was French. He wasn't American. You know, American would say, well, I should have had a better attitude. And it's not the attitude you have. It's the underline structure of your end. There's an example of that. It's a people are working in a position in a company and they're not doing well. And you try everything to improve their performance, but in the end, you have to replace them. Now, when you replace them, maybe six months later, the new person is performing exactly like the person you replaced. And a lot of people have had this experience. Now, why is that? I mean, everything that we say is important about human motivation might be different. You have different, the new person has different DNA, different educational background, maybe different generation, different astrology. You know, whatever you think is important, why people do what they do, it could be completely different. And yet, they'll be behaving, they're performing exactly the same way. And it's the underline structure of the position that's causing the predictable pattern of being, the angel underline structure and the pattern of behavior changes. Now, that's just universally true in every part of our lives. It also is true in the natural world, too, by the way, the underline structure of anything determines its behavior. It's certainly true in the arts. The underline structure will determine, you know, whether you're interested in the film or not, or you shut off, or whether you want to get past page 10 of a book, or you close it up and don't read it. And it's certainly how music works and painting works and it's just universal. That's so interesting. You know, it's actually kind of deepening some of my understanding when you mention how the structure of a book even could sort of pull you through in a certain way, or a song could sort of pull you through in a certain way. And I think, you know, this is maybe a topic for later, but obviously creators are trying to create structures in their work that are, I don't want to say attractive, but, you know, are engaging in a certain way with their audience. And I think that's something that a lot of people are working to do. You know, the other interesting aspect here is that so much of the, a lot of this self-help, I suppose, industry is very focused on habits. And it seems to me that habits, there's some level of willpower related to them. And, you know, one something sort of becomes a habit, it sort of feels like, okay, well, there's maybe less willpower there. But I think what it sounds like you're trying to get out is that underneath the habits, like habits is too superficial almost. And underneath the habits, there's a structure. And the structure makes the habits easy or makes them difficult. Yeah, how do you speak about habits? Because I think that's so, that's something that's so also very media-American. Well, first of all, most of the self-help does a few things that really work against people versus for them. One is that it tends to focus on the person rather than what the person's creating. So when we think about the creative process, there's a creator in a creation. And there should be separation between the creator and the creation. Because that's the way you can evaluate a just and, you know, alter your creation. Painter is from front of a canvas. The painter's not the best. Painter can stand away from the canvas. Look at it. I can't move adjustments based on the difference between the vision of the painting and the current. And self-help tends to say it's something about the way you think. That will determine your success. It's attitude, it's setting, if you love yourself and all of those things, but to drive your focus more and more toward yourself rather than the external creation you're making. It makes it less of an operation. You start to take everything personally. And eventually everything has the wrong standard of measurement. Yeah, I didn't succeed. It must be something about how I thought about it. Versus, you know, maybe I need to learn a few things here because I'm no damn good at this. Now, the second thing about in terms of habits is, I mean, certainly habits are really important in the sense that learning is yourself, first of all, like learning how to drive a car. You first self-consciously have to think about where the pedal is and how you're steering where the brake is and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And after a while you assimilate that learning and it becomes a habit. You don't have to think about it. You just drive where you want to drive. And that's a good thing. But the question really is about not so much about habits, but about when you're breaking new territory, when something, you're doing something new. And in learning then becomes essential to developing something new. Before something's a habit, it's not a habit. All a habit means is you know how to do it and you can do it regularly without thinking that much. It becomes automated only because at one point it wasn't automated. And so learning becomes essential thing. Now, if you got your focus on yourself, then it's harder to learn because you're not meant like to learn, you need to make a lot of mistakes. And when you learn, you can fail a lot because basically you're starting something new. You don't know exactly how it goes and you got to try it out. And from that experience, you learn how to adjust your actions. If you make it about yourself, then when you fail, you see it as a personal problem. Rather than you simply tried something out, it didn't work. And now what do you need to learn that you didn't know? So that next time now, it comes closer to where you want it to be. I know that makes total comments. It sounds like annoying. It's so simple. I don't know if it could be a little bit. So to give you a bit of my background, Robert, so I started a company in 2013, ran out of school actually. And at first, I don't think I had the problem that you were talking about. I was building this business. I was focused on the product. Things were going well. I tried to start companies before and now it was going well. And for a while, you're in a really healthy cycle there. But as all businesses do, you problems start to come up. And I think at some point, what I like to describe is that I do feel like there was a shift where you do start to associate the company as you. The success is as yours, the failures is yours. And you almost become more tightly enmeshed with the art. Let's call it. And that was very detrimental to my mental health because of course when the business was doing well, you feel good. And what was interesting to me was that led to sort of my own, whatever kind of burnout from that because of it. And that's when I started to realize I think some of what you're saying, which was first, it was, okay, I'm not this business. And I had to sort of separate those things out and recognize that they were different. what I think that you used. you know, taking me a step further on through your different books is that you can separate out all types of things in your life. This creation is not your business. Whatever you want to make to get perspective on it to be objective about it, you need some type of separation. And so I think through the hard way I kind of felt the enmeshment almost of me and the business and then I had to learn that separation and I think what you're really trying to get at for people is separate. Continue to separate you know this belief about yourself separate. There's a there's a slight. Just to bring that point into focus a little bit. It's not so much to substitute one concept with another. It is in reality you're actually separate. Right. So the more you're in touch with reality, you are you are separate. You know, right. So a while ago I did a large course for artists. So I was making this point about separation and somebody came up to me. During the break and they said, you know, I am my paintings. And I said, well, I'll tell you what. If your paintings disappear, do you disappear? No. After you after you died, do your paintings disappear? No. If you happen to have a fire in your house and your paintings burn top, would you disappear? No. So how can you be your paintings? If your paintings in fact have a different existence than you have. Now, of course, what the person was doing is trying to over identify with the work. The artistic work that she was doing. And it's a big mistake. I mean, I can't it's a. A forgivable mistake. I mean, you can understand why. Somebody gets so invested in what they're doing that they confuse. And they're not really the reality. But in reality, you're not what you do. Period. So it's not so much to take on the understanding separation. It's to really understand that in reality, no matter how you think about it, you'll never be the business. You'll never be the painting. You'll never be the piece of music. And it's not the the critiques of of those things as something personal, even though it's it's not, you know, us and we exist outside of it. We exist before we created the thing we exist after we created the thing. Now, to take. Let me say that. Let me let me just say though that. In professional life, most professionals don't make that confusion. They can't. If you if you do that, you can't get really good at it. And to be at a level of, you know, mastery and either let's say acting or. Composing or songwriting for forming music. You absolutely cannot confuse. Who you are with what you're doing. Let me, let me give you a quick story about that. So Madonna was doing Dick Tracy. She played a character called breathless Malone and Dick Tracy and she was being interviewed and they said, you know Madonna, are you like a lot like your. Your breathless Malone and Madonna's answer was no, breathless Malone is art to character and I'm a real person. And that's an example of no, you're not what you do. You're you're you got a separation between what you're creating and you as the creator. Right. And that's reality. Yeah. And when you're in tune with that reality, you are in a more much more objective space for evaluating, like you said, the actual quality and quality can be termed however you want, but the actual quality. Also, not just quality, but you are objective, but ironically also you're more able to be subjective as well as objective in a sense of, you know Helen Mirren described it this way. She said it's like the Yin and Yang of creating. This is my term, the Yin and Yang of creating what she said describing that point. Yin and Yang in the sense that you both active and passive simultaneously. So you're both very focused on what you're creating, but you're also open to what might happen. And she said about acting and she's like two tracks on a train. You still want to track. You're completely aware of where the camera is, what your lines are with the blocking is, which is supposed to do what you're wearing. She said on the other track simultaneously, anything can happen. And so not only is it objective in the sense of, you know, you've got a very cool approach toward the moves you need to make. But it opens up a whole avenue of openness in which anything wonderful and magical can happen while you're also being incredibly focused and deliberate. And so it's not even, it's not so much of being a perfectionist. It's, it's having a vision but then working with what sort of comes up along the way, maybe a mistake or something unexpected. And that can lead to a new outcome. And that's maybe part of the joy, I suppose, of creating as well as, you know, being surprised, also being surprised as the creator. Yeah, because it really leads to involvement, you know, but perfection is always a stupid goal anyway. I mean, I only really see the point of perfection. I have one of my composition teachers said, you said, you know, it's the flaw in the crystal that makes a crystal interesting. Yeah. So let's, let's take this to maybe some practical aspects for people who want to create something new. I think we've kind of given a bit of an overview of maybe teasing apart, you know, some of these ideas. But for somebody who is looking to be a professional and be a professional essentially about really every part of their life, whether it's a business they want to create or a piece of art they want to create or, you know, maybe something relationally they want to create. Maybe we could just talk through the general process that you take people through so they can get an understanding a little bit more of how I suppose. Yeah, okay. Well, the major thing to know, first of all, is called structural tension. The structural tension is the relationship between the desired outcome, what you want your vision, the goal you have any and current reality where you are now in relationship to that call. Now, these two points create a very useful tension. And by tangent, I'm not talking about anxiety, pressure, nervousness, you know, neurosis. It's a, an archer stretching a bow, aiming the arrow at the target, its structural tension. And structural tension is a force. It's not a metaphor. It's a force, it's a dynamic. So when you know what you want and you know where you are and you start to take action on behalf of where you want to go. So, the question helps you take those actions and it's a, it's a, and it's a, most important force in the creative process. It's the essence of the creative process. Now, the thing we said about separation is that if you make it about yourself, you no longer have real structural tension, you have a conflict of interest between creating the thing and how you're looking. And then it's off out of it. Then what you've got is this tension resolution system. Whenever you have attention, it always strives for resolution. And we know that for music, dot, dot, dot, um, bomb. Yeah. You know, attention always strives for resolution. And we, um, we create a strategic tension that then motivates action toward the outcome. And you can use it everywhere and everything. I, I like to cook. I use it every night when I cook. I use the one I write books. I use it when I do films. I use it when I work with organizations. There's no place where I really don't use structural tension. Now, what that means is I'm spending my time thinking about outcomes I want to create. I'm spending any time solving problems. And a lot of people think, um, if they solve their problems, uh, everything will be okay. And I want you to observe you can solve all of your problems and still not have what you want. Problem solving is taking action to have something go away. And it does have its place on occasion. But if it's chronic in your life, you know you're doing something wrong. And when you're creating, uh, you're taking action to have something come into being. And when you get into the habit called call it habit in this case or the practice. Of creating. Um, you begin to approach everything that you that you're approaching toward bringing into being something you want to create. And then the process is kind of how I, how I interpret that it's it like you said it's, it's, it's creating something from scratch that you want to see appear and it also feels. Uh, maybe this is getting into the, you know, belief system or something like that, but it also feels like a positive, you know, sort of. of force versus like a negative one which would be sort of you know solving or removing. Well it's just to say it's not about positive as such as in positive thinking. It is generative as you said in a sense that once you've created something you have this energy that then wants to create something else so it's accumulative in that sense. Positive thinking is terrible for you by the way because if we have well this is why if we have current reality reality includes the good the bad and the ugly. If you're positive thinking you're distorting reality. Now the truth of the matter is it doesn't matter what you think. It doesn't matter what your attitude is. Masters of the creative process have thought all kinds of things have had all kinds of beliefs. It doesn't matter what you believe. It's not a belief system. Any more than driving a car is a belief system. There's nothing in particular you have to believe to drive a car. You have to know how to drive a car and creating is exactly the same way. There's nothing in particular that you have to believe and you can be in a completely grumpy mood and create beautifully. You can be in a good mood and create beautifully. You could be completely neutral. This is the thing about path talks and positive thinking for those people who think that's important. What do you do in days that you don't feel good? What do you do in a bad mood? This is the difference between professionals and amateurs. Amateurs can only do it when they feel right. Professionals can do it no matter what they feel. That's why again this thing about these things like very self-help human potential. American kind of is so important. Your attitude and what you think and if you think in a positive way you'll get your you'll be successful. It's total nonsense. And it backfires on you. Yeah it's funny. I'm picturing I think this is probably my elementary school or something but I think there's a poster that said attitude is everything and I think what you're just like it's the complete opposite of that. You used a few interesting phrases. I just wanted to pull out there. The first was this distortion that happens and what I picture when you go into an organization and things aren't going the way that they'd like them to be. It's because there's some level of distortion happening within the communication within the way that the leader is maybe speaking in the team. There's probably something unsaid or there's an unspoken reality that probably everyone has been avoiding. I imagine that's what you find. Then the second phrase that I really liked was strategic tension. This is my guess that the general framework with how you approach an organization. But first it understand what the distortions are. Where people not seeing reality, what's the distortion and then how do I create a strategic tension within the company within the organization to put in motion this process that you've been describing? Is that is that something like what you tend to do at a very high level? Not exactly. There's something causing the distortion. There's an underlying structure causing the distortion. So if you go after the distortion directly, you might make a little bit ahead way but not a whole lot because you haven't changed the underlying structure. So what causes people to think this way or that way? And once we discover any underlying structure, I really want to make it sound mysterious, but the underlying structure includes things like the offering, the market, competitors, reporting relationships, contradictory reward systems, or aligned reward systems, communication for sure. But the communication is not just simply learning how to speak to each other, but having an underlying structure that supports being truthful with each other. If you have an example, like in some organizations, certain norms make it hard for people to tell each other the truth, like never argue with the boss or never discuss things that are uncomplimentary to certain departments and things like that. And if you do, you get punished. And so what happens in that kind of a structure is that over time people learn and look, you don't argue with the boss or you don't criticize marketing, whatever it is. So it's really important first to understand the underlying structures. Do you know my book, Path for Managers, Path of Least Resistance for Managers? I have not read that one yet, but I'll have to make that next on the list. Yeah, that's one that's a really good business book. Get the 2011 version of it because I re wrote it in 2011 updated it. And that's the right version to get. But it really describes all of those elements within organizational life and business life. You can write a business from that book. Yeah, and it's funny, I'm enjoying this conversation because I feel like I'm making my own kind of mistakes along the way almost in terms of, I'm reiterating what I kind of took away from the book, but there is corrections. And that's why it's amazing to be able to speak with you about this. And I think one thing that I just did there maybe was I kind of made it about the people again. Right? I was saying, well, isn't there a communication distortion that's going out of the organization? And I almost shifted back to that model of thinking when really again you're saying, well, there might be something more fundamental about the way the actual business is structured. Let's check it out in reality. You change all the people, you keep the structure, the new people are going to act just like you. Right. And it's true. It's so true. Right. It's unbelievably true. Yeah. And it's kind of it's kind of maddening, I think, for people. And you know, there's also this interesting dynamic that I've noticed as well where the area is. Why do you think it's, excuse me, I gave it. Yeah. Why do you think it's maddening? I think it's maddening because people, people bump into the same problem despite increased effort to solve it. So it's maddening, not the concept you've shared, but yeah. Yeah, but here's where it's hopeful. It's hopeful in that we, if we change the underlying structure, we change the behavior. Now, this is really so important because then it's not just a matter of analyzing how it is and why it creates what it does, but it's engineering, how to change it. In such a way that it really produces the outcomes we want. And that's why the way why structural tension is so important is because by structural tension, we're really looking at the outcomes we want. We're really looking at reality, you know, with the good, the bad and the ugly, you know, all the warts and all. And then from that, we're creating action plans. And then the action plans themselves to become a learning mechanism because it's like a feedback system. Did it get it closer to where we want to go? Did it work? Did it not work? What else do we need to do? Do we have to update? Do we have some assumptions wrong in reality? It gives you such hope and such control over the creative process that I think the only thing it would be, quote unquote, mad name is that people don't know that they actually have total ability to change their conditions, their circumstances, but by changing the underlying structure. Which in many ways is a very mechanical thing. I mean, it's almost like you can't blame people personally for walking up the stairs when the elevator's broken. Yeah, right. It's like the underlying structure is going to produce the behavior. It's nothing personal. It is so not personal that I can take, I can take you out, put somebody all the same structure, they'll be exactly the same. But I can take you and put you in a great structure. And suddenly you're performing brilliantly. Yeah. So the goal really for everybody is to learn to design the structures, to not be subject to them, but instead to be able to sort of step back, design the structure, follow through with that structure towards the different outcomes that people are seeking. And one thing that I think again, just because this is so counter to what most people are believing, acting on, etc. Do you find that people have a difficult time even coming up with what division is? Like when it's your actual opportunity to create, do people know what that is right away? Or is that a skill in itself that maybe people haven't really worked with that much? Well, it could be a skill that they haven't worked with that much. But on the other hand, the best way to train people to do it is to start small. So if you're making little things you know you want, a dinner party, you know, a podcast, running a blog, you know, writing a poem, writing a song, making a table. You know, something small, you begin to get, it's almost like in music learning from little easy to do practices. You begin to develop skill. And then it opens up your imagination of what you might want in three to five years, ten years, twenty years, because you now have the experience of what it's like to create something or many things. What is it like to create many things? Yeah, so sort of develop. Yeah, develop the story. You and I talked a little bit before the broadcast about that a lot of the people that are interested in your podcast are writers and bloggers and things like that. So I was wondering if we might spend a little time talking about writing because then I can show you some the way that I think about it structurally. I love that. Yeah, is that okay? Yeah, yeah, sounds great. Okay, so when I, by the way, I have talent for music and I have no talent for writing, which means I had to learn how to write, which means I have a lot of technique because I, my original writing looked like translations from German and I can still write a sentence that looks like a translation from German, so I have to be really careful. But in terms of writing, so I outlined my first book, Path of East Resistance. I wrote the whole book on a flip chart, all of the points. And then I called up Simon and Schuster and I said, you know, I've got this idea for a book, I've outlined the book. Do you recommend anybody an editor I could work with? And they suggested this guy who'd written over 80 books. And I called up the guy and we agreed to work together. And so the first, you know, that was 1984 is the first version of that book. And I didn't have to write. And what I was doing is I was basically pacing around the room, dictating the book and he was writing it down and then at night he would sort of edit it. And then the morning he came in and lived with us for three months. And the morning, you know, he, he told me what he had the edit and we adjusted. And I'd run around the room, dictating some more and that's, that's the first version of that. And that was pretty good bestseller. I mean, it sold on its own. It sold 80,000 books. So then we got a contract in 89 with Valentine books. And I had a chance to rewrite the book. Now between 84 and 89, I learned how to write because I did all kinds of stuff. I analyze people who's writing I liked. They do this. How do they get that sentence to say so much? And it's like, where's the first? I just completely did a whole diagnostic on good writing. Then I got a chance to do a regular magazine article, which I did once a month. And I was supposed to be a thousand words. And I couldn't get anything said that was worth saying in less than 1500 words, but they would publish it anyway. But I, you know, at that point, I didn't know how to get it down to even a shorter bed. It was easy to write longer than shorter. And I began to get certain ideas about how to do it. So I was getting that under my belt. Now the way I do it now, let's say I'm running a blog. And I want to end up with this point over here. I start over here. So let's say this is the point I want to make, but I'll start in its opposite direction. Or I'll tell a story that's different than this story, but leads into this story. For example, I wrote a, I wrote a blog about Darwin's 100th birthday, or 200, either one, no, 200th birthday. And I started with Galileo. So, okay, so Galileo discovered some things that were contradictory to the Bible. Like that the earth was round, not flat. And the sun was, the earth went around the sun, not the other way around. And the Bible says the other thing, the Bible says that the sun goes around the earth. So Galileo found something that was contradictory to the Bible. And then when I finally get to Darwin, since Darwin is the enemy of a lot of fundamentalists, I made the connection between that Galic, that he had found stuff that was unfortunate in relationship to the belief. And so to Darwin. And that way I made that transition, that connection. So I built the thing. When I'm thinking about writing, I think about the length of the sentences. So I might have a short sentence and that a longer sentence. And a short, I might divide a sentence up to, and this is a really musical thing. The only thing is I write for the ear, I don't write for the eye. So when I started writing books and I started having major publishers edit my stuff, they would always edit for the eye. And they would take away, in music it's called, the anti-sident consequential phrase. And it kind of took away all of the color of the writing. And I would always have to edit it back in and then explain to them what I was doing. Because what I'm doing is creating a little tension resolution systems. Just like in music. So if I have a question, you want to know what the answer is. If I make a comment, you want a statement. You want to know what comment is on the statement. So something leads to something else. Now the first editor I had when I did the book originally, who came and moved in my house, this is what he taught me. He said, when you write a chapter, he said, the readers should feel a win at the end of the chapter. They've accomplished something. This is the point they understand or there's something. And there is a question that motivates them to go on to the next chapter. It's very much like in music. In music there's a tension that goes into a resolution. And when you set up the right tension, it'll motivate the reader to go into the next chapter or keep going. And so I'm always working with the relationship of something to something else. Length of sentence. Verbs to adjectives or ad verbs. The same even I get crazy. I get into the sound of the language. You know, like, well, this word is the right word, but I don't like the sound of it. How much if I put this word in, it's the same means the same thing, but it sounds better in that phrase. So I get into all of that kind of stuff. And for me, given I don't have talent for writing, it gives me a lot to do, tend up writing in a way that I, you know, it gets me where I want to go as a writer. It's so interesting because once again, it's designing on the level of the structure instead of being caught sort of maybe in some of the communication specifically. And when you chart it out like that, it gives you a framework for you to then fill in. Like you were saying, you created in the Galileo story, you kind of created this, these kind of two poles, almost to work with. And you know they want to connect. And now you can explore how are they going to connect. At some point they will, maybe for the reader to the subject, you know, might start with Darwin, but then the first line they read is Galileo and you're like, well, I thought it was, and then that has to resolve. And yeah, I can, I can really see how this translates almost to any different type of, of art really music or, you know, even a painting or something like that that might, you follow your eye and then suddenly it's different or, but again, it's designing the level of the system. And, and also for you as a creator. Excuse me, I'm sorry. You always want to replace the go. If you have a place to go, you have an energy to get there. If you don't have a place to go, if you just go, how many people have written the novel? And they got two chapters, and that's it. You know, like anybody can write about two chapters. But if you don't, if you have a place to go, you can finish it. If you don't have a place to go, you're dead. You know, so it's, it's, these are really important understandings from the creator point of you. Of how do you organize your creative process in such a way that you have momentum and you have a place to go and that you can work? Because otherwise you, that you're sitting around scratching your head. Yeah, you know, I almost picture for the person who wrote two chapters. If they almost had had laid out on their desk or something, eight pieces of paper, and they'd written two of them on two of them for each chapter. But then they saw six blank pages next to the other two. It almost would have reinforced the system that you're talking about. I think that's almost like a visual version, maybe, what we're discussing. I wouldn't do it that way. What I would do is, like when I write a book, the first thing I do is I write down a list. All of the things I want to read are walking away, having now understood or ideas that they now have. And when I start to write, I kind of know what the book is. When I write a screenplay, which is most screenplays are the strictest form I work in. I mean, everything has to fit together. It's even worse than music. I mean, absolutely everything. This can't be any wasted anything. And it took me a while to learn the structure of screenplays. But before I write a screenplay, it's really all structured out. And then the writing becomes fairly easy because I know exactly where it's going, where it's going, and why it's going there, and who are the characters, and what they're doing, and why they're doing it, and setups for okay over here, I'm gonna set this up, because I know an hour later it's gonna go there, and so I'm planting these seeds. And so I would never just lay out blank, I would never start with a blank piece of paper. - Right, I think that's the mistake. - That's the mistake that writing teachers, that English teachers in high school. - Yeah, oh, you have, start with a blank piece of paper. Do not start with a blank piece of paper. What are the points you wanna make? What if you have a story, I always have a contrast. So the contrast creates tension. So if I wanna end here, that's why I said, I'm gonna start here. If I'm starting here, what's the contrast? - Yeah, and that's the story that I give, is a scene, yeah, it's right. Is a scene from the hunchback of notes, "The Notre Dame", the 1939 film with Marino Harrow, and Charles Lotton. And there's a scene where Marino Harrow comes into the church, and she's a Romney girl coming into Catholic church. And there's a priest in white, and she asked him, what are they doing? They said what are they praying? And there's a big statue of Mary, and who is that? And he says it's the mother of God. And she says, can I talk to her? And he says, bend down and pray like the others are doing. So she bends down, this is absolutely in this film. She bends down and she starts to, she said to the statue, the priest said, I could pray. And then they show everybody praying. And it's, give me this, give me this, give me riches, give me beauty, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me. And they cut back to her and she says, take all I have. But help my people, they're in trouble. And then right once she's saying that, a priest in black comes in and says, what are you doing here? You're a heathen, you can't pray in Notre Dame, and kicks her out. Now you have a priest in white, priest in black, everybody's saying, give me, give me her, saying, take all I have. I mean, it is so blatant how consciously position this contrasts are. And yet when we watch it, we don't even notice it. But it creates all of that beautiful dramatic tension that moves the scene. - Yeah, and that's an example. - Yeah, and I think that people also maybe have this romantic idea almost that having those constraints would limit their creativity, let's say, right? If you were to pull a point out what that is, or if you were to use these different techniques that that would limit creativity, but really those constraints probably can also free you because not only you're gonna get that actual work done, but you've got something to fill in, and that's where you can create the dialogue or whatever it might be. - What do you call them? - What do you call them constraints? - That's a good question. I think my assumption was that creating these, I guess like poles to work from gives you an area to kind of fill in. So I guess constraint in terms of like, you can't go completely off in a different direction now. Like if you've outlined this chapter, let's say with these points you wouldn't hit, I can't suddenly start talking about something completely different, but actually maybe that's, maybe you can as long as it just springs back in. - They're really not constraints. You know how a faucet and a hose will focus the water in such a way it has more pressure and more drive. But if it was just open, it just, you know, doesn't have as much pressure. And what happens with when you structure these things, it gives you places to go, but then it's like those two tracks that Helen Marin was talking about. You've got the structure, but then it really opens up this whole world of possibilities. - And energy too, it maybe also increases the energy. - Yeah, I wrote this in this film called Chasing Rainbows. And it's, the film's 136 awards. It's just been quite a successful film. People get it on Prime Amazon if you want to see it. And, but when I was writing the film, I actually had a different ending in mind. And I had an ending where basically the story basically is about a girl finds out she's adopted and goes on search for her mother, who's a nightclub singer in Boston in sort of like the lower life parts of Boston. And she's now, and the mother's now called. And this is based on Orpheus. It's like a great tragedy. Most of my films are not, but this particular one was and I wrote this line between a conversation, a really confrontation between the daughter and the mother. And the mother says, someday I'll drink myself to death and no one will care. And the daughter says, I'll care. And then I wrote this line, but I won't. 'Cause I was so thinking about this character and exactly what her position was at that point, but I won't. And she gets up, she kisses the daughter and she leaves. And when I wrote that line, I said, oh my God, I gotta change the ending. She has to die. And, you know, so I call up, the lead actress is, she's the Thorne Hogg, who's a Swedish actress in Singer, and she was in Sweden, we're bringing into America. I call her up in Sweden and I say, you know, I think your character has to die and she said, great. That's great, 'cause she loved that whole idea. And then my wife came home and I said, you know, I think she has to die and she said, no, no. (laughing) But it was having written that line, even though I had positioned it for kind of more or less a happy ending, you know, a satisfying ending where they, daughter and mother and daughter got to be able to get together. There was, it was not possible anymore because of the way the structure of that scene worked and what motivated that scene. So I don't know how much you're getting out of my story, but it was because I was really working directly with the structure and the structure demanded a change of ending. And I was able to recognize that, that the film ended the way it did. - Yeah, and there's almost a delight in finding that because yeah, 100% because there's a delight in finding that as well. And then because of the change in structure, then it gives you energy to sort of complete it in the new direction. - Yeah, and you know how good film structure is it? There's a feeling of surprise and inevitability. - Yeah, I need to practice my structure building. I think that's part of my takeaways here. And I really love this sort of almost counterintuitive aspect to where when you have a natural talent for something, you're gonna miss learning some of the real techniques, the real structures, because maybe you can kind of skate by on some of that talent, but like you said with writing, it really forced you to analyze and break down, you know, what are these structural elements that I can, that I have to learn to be able to accomplish this work. It almost creates, you know, it's counterintuitive because the lack of skill almost creates an advantage over time. - Yeah, I mean, I'd rather have the talent, be a lot easier, because the talent doesn't prevent the learning, you know, and but some people like, for example, take the difference between Orson, Orson, and Clint Eastwood. Now, Orson Wells is probably one of the most talented people I've ever left. And Clint Eastwood's talent was rather limited, especially as an actor in the beginning. And when you see the first film he directed, play Misty for me, you know, it's a good film, but it's not virtuosic. But you see how over the time, his learning, he just learned and learned and learned and learned, and he just became an absolutely brilliant director. Orson Wells started at the top, and there was no place for him to go, you know, if you see his film career, really his best film was Citizen Kane. And ironically, the other films he made, which some of them are superb, it didn't have that kind of learning thing that Clint Eastwood did. I mean, look at the projection. I mean, he's, I don't know how old he is now, he's 80s, 80s. he's maybe, and he's still making brilliant films. You know, it's just breathtaking. That's what, so talent is only your starting point. It's your ability to learn that's, I think, most important. - Yeah, and make mistakes as well, which you can do when you're not confusing yourself for the work as well. Well, - True, true, true. - Yeah, this has been so fascinating. I love that, you know, like I said, I really, and I'll talk about your books now. Your life is art, the path of least resistance. You've got a new book, "Identity," which I've read, which is amazing. There's creative elements. Sounds like there's path of least resistance for managers. So for people listening, you can really go dig in and read more of your work. And I love that I was able to kind of take some of what I pulled out and then almost test it a little bit in this conversation and get some read direction, which is super helpful for me. So yeah, thank you so much for writing, for sharing your insight here. Yeah, is there anything else that you wanna share? I know you do workshops, your website, or just any other parting words for people who are looking to, you know, design, really design their life more. - A couple of things. One is, I think the work that we've been doing for the last 40 years is really quite important to enable people to create the lives they want around those things that matter most to them. And, you know, I've never been about trying to save the world. I've just been about trying to share a good thing, which the creative process is the most successful process for accomplishment in history. And so mostly we don't learn in in school and we don't understand it enough to apply it to our lives. But when you do, it's fantastic. Website is www.robberfritz.com. I also have a Facebook page where I write blogs often went through twice a week or thereabouts. And that's, and we offer some great workshops. - Amazing. Thank you so much, Robert. I really appreciate the time. - Pleasure, David. - That is it for today's episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. And as always, if I can be of any help, feel free to reach out. My email is daviddavid.com. @deathtoustach.com. D-E-A-T-H-T-O-S-T-O-C-K. You can also find my personal site at davidashary.me. Would love to chat with you. If you found this valuable, please review, subscribe. That means a ton to me. And it just gives me the good vibe to keep going. So I'd really appreciate that as well. And that's it. We'll be back again soon.