Empty Your Cup

Steven Barnes
4 min readNov 5, 2024

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A conversation with a stupendously entitled lady who thought she could use me and a friend to leap-frog the Hollywood waiting line triggered the thought that, yeah, the two major approaches to the business life are:

  1. Constant improvement of core skill. CONSTANT. “Masters are always learning, always doing, always sharing” is a pretty solid basic notion. Don’t be a “jack of all trades” unless and until you have a marketable skill that keeps you out of the bottom 20% of your field MINIMUM.
  2. Constant improvement of People skills: Networking. Navigating social webs. Sales and Marketing. Reading body language. Public speaking.

Is it necessary to say that this should all be within the context of being honest, kind, and effective? I sure hope not. This lady tried to womansplain Hollywood to me, and it was painful. I was seriously considering passing a piece of her work to my manager (as a favor to a friend) but what was so unpleasant and presumptive that I knew she wouldn’t listen to them, and would be a pain in the butt to deal with. She thought herself the smartest person in the room, and no matter how many times I tried to explain some simple concepts, she twisted them into her preconceived notions of what I was going to say. Sad, because all she needed to do was LISTEN to the person she was presumably coming to for advice. She didn’t want the advice. Just wanted to use my connections.

She had failed to identify the core skills necessary to make it, wasn’t willing to empty her cup and listen, and saw me as a stepping stone rather than a human being with greater experience in the arena of choice.

That’s a serious flaw in BOTH of her core arenas.

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The “Lifewriting Six Step” process is the most perfect system I’ve developed, and so far has a 100% success rate. What would it take to create something like this for body, mating, and other careers…?

Uncertain. The delightful specificity of the pattern:

  1. Write a sentence a day
  2. Write 1–4 short stories a month
  3. Polish and submit 1 per month
  4. Once submitted, don’t rewrite except to editorial request
  5. Read 10X what you write (audiobooks are fine with me!)
  6. Repeat this pattern 100X

Our “Lifewritingpremium.com” program is built around this, and we are VERY proud of it. If you can see how both those core patterns are either anchored or suggested by this, good for you. It is a program designed to teach EVERYTHING you need to get into the business if you will DO it, not just “think” about it. And after thousands of students, the chances you have a new reason you can’t follow it are very slim.

The general MAGIC Formula is the best I’ve been able to do. It lacks specificity (which is why you need another “Mentor” in your specific arena) but I HAVE seen positive change in everyone who has tried it: just not the photographable goal of “publish a story.”

And this, of course, is where the woman who blew it had a major hole in her heart. Her insecurity created a gigantic ego shield, one that demanded people acknowledge her wonderfulness without actually creating results in the desired arena. THERE IS A PRICE FOR EVERYTHING YOU WANT, AND THE PRICE IS ALWAYS PAID IN ADVANCE.

She was offered two routes to getting what she wanted, plus a meta-route of simply meeting other writers and asking them what they did, and extracting their core strategies. It is VERY possible that I’m not the right teacher for her (I suspect she has an issue with men, based on some things she said). But no, she simply wanted to be acknowledged and handed money.

Sigh. The sad thing is that she had the MIND for it: intelligent, driven, good researcher, a bear for work. But she didn’t have the heart, and genuine self-confidence, to empty her cup.

I will keep working to try to understand why the Lifewriting pattern works so well. Probably because I had enough personal experience, and access to hundreds of successful writers who taught what THEY knew. I sure as hell didn’t “make it up” myself: it is. Combination of thoughts from Larry Niven, Octavia Butler, Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, and many, many others who answered my questions.

Maybe MAGIC is as close as I can come. I’ll keep working on it.

And feel just a little sorry for the lady involved. Either her ego shell will crack so she can expand…or she will end up very bitter, complaining that quality and genius don’t matter.

Its actually a little heart-breaking. But I see it a dozen times a day, and simply have to move on.

But before I do, I thought I’d share these thoughts with you. Somehow…it helps.

Namaste

Steve

www.lifewritingpremium.com

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Steven Barnes
Steven Barnes

Written by Steven Barnes

Steven Barnes is a NY Times bestselling author, ecstatic husband and father, and holder of black belts in three martial arts. www.lifewritingpodcast.com.

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