46 Steven Puri: flow state coach

Steven Puri is the founder and CEO of The Sukha Company, with the mission to help millions of people find their focus, achieve more, and have a healthy work life. 

Steven is one of the few people on earth who has been a senior executive at two motion picture studios and also raised over $20MM in venture capital. He’s produced the digital effects for Independence Day, which won the Oscar for Visual Effects and in addition to his film work, he’s founded three startups: one successful exit and two failures. He lectures now on the lessons in sustainable high-performance he learned working alongside some of the world’s more productive people. 

Steven's career started as a newscaster/interviewer for the #1 youth news show in the DC/Baltimore market (on WTTG-TV) and then as a junior software engineer and Thomas J. Watson Scholar at IBM. After attending USC in Los Angeles, he began working in film production.

The Sukha Company - ‘sukha’ means ‘happiness from self-fulfillment’ in Sanskrit. Sukha is a focus app that bundles all the tools necessary to enter into a flow state and a have healthy, productive workday. 

https://www.thesukha.co

Kathie's note: Steven is in his get-on-podcast season, so when he reached out via email one day, I said sure! We had a lovely conversation, and I must say, I'm a sucker for big words. You'll hear 'germane' and 'bifurcate' in this interview, among others. I had to edit out 'empirical' due to a glitchy glitch, but just pretend it's in there somewhere.

Writers Rotation intro/outro recorded at Dynamix Productions in Lexington, Kentucky.

Transcript

Steven [00:00:00 - 00:00:07]
I'm Steven Puri. I'm the founder of Sukha, a flow state app. And I believe writing is how we explain to each other how life works.

INTRO [00:00:07 - 00:00:28]
Hi, welcome to the Writers Rotation podcast. I'm your host, Kathie Stamps. I love words and writing and people and talking. So I'm talking to people who write all kinds of things in different professions. It's a Writers Rotation. 

Kathie [00:00:25 – 00:00:27]
Steven, how is everything in the world of entrepreneurship?

Steven [00:00:28 - 00:00:34]
Fun. We help people do something, often writers to write the thing that they. They need to be writing and should be writing right now.

Kathie [00:00:35 - 00:00:38]
And pronounce the name of your company and define it.

Steven [00:00:38 - 00:00:48]
Sukha is a Sanskrit word that means happiness, a specific kind of happiness. The self-fulfillment you feel when you're in your lane, like doing the thing you're meant to do.

Kathie [00:00:48 - 00:00:49]
I love it.

Steven [00:00:49 - 00:01:20]
Yeah. And that's really what our goal is. You know, I think here at Sukha we operate from a thesis, which is everyone has something great inside them. And the question of this lifetime is, are you going to get it out or not? You know, are you going to write the book? Are you going to create the company? Are you going to start the restaurant? Are you going to do the thing you have that's great. Is it going to be there in the graveyard with you? Or will you have released it? And we help people to actually do the thing and that makes me really happy.

Kathie [00:01:20 - 00:01:25]
Yes. What kinds of things or what types of people do you work with?

Steven [00:01:25 - 00:01:48]
You know what, most of our membership is writers. What we do is really based around flow states. And I know there's probably some subset of the listeners are like, I'm a flow master. I'm in flow right now, I’m floating above my seat. And there are probably some that are like, I've heard of flow states, I'm not really sure what it is. I can define it if that's helpful, if you want.

Kathie [00:01:48 - 00:01:49]
Please do. Yes.

Steven [00:01:49 - 00:02:32]
Okay, so, and let me preface anything smart I say in this episode is because so many smart people have done a ton of research and I'm just here to try and make it accessible and concise. Okay, so this is not me being smart. This is me telling you. Like I did a lot of reading. So a guy, this Hungarian American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, had a thesis also, he said when you talk to really high performers about the concentrated states they go into when they do the thing that makes them famous, you know, the thing we know them for, it's weird the way they can be athletes or artists, they can be scientists, inventors, whatever. But they talk about those states in very similar ways, even though they're doing different things. There's some commonality between that.

Steven [00:02:32 - 00:03:14]
So he did the research and interviews. At the end of it, he wrote a book called Flow. It is the seminal work on this. It is from whence we get the term flow state. And he said the most beautiful thing. He said, many of the people with whom I spoke have their own name. Being in the zone, being in the thrall of the muses, whatever, right? He said, I chose this word flow because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found, which is, we are all on the river paddling to move ourselves forward, but if you align your boat with the current, it carries you, it magnifies your efforts, and that is what these high performers have figured out how to do and to do it repeatably.

Steven [00:03:15 - 00:04:08]
Now, obviously, in the intervening 40 years since he wrote the work on this, there have been really smart people, the Nirs and the Cal Newports and the Cutlers, that have done research on some area of this, like, how does music help us get into this magical flow state? How does, you know, how do you block distractions? How do you monotask one thing? But the fundamental thing that he said still stands. He said, when you talk to these higher performers who write the great works, they talk about getting into this state where they become one with the work. They often do their best work faster than they thought possible. Distractions fall away at the end of it. They feel a sense of uplift as opposed to a sense of depletion. It's not like, oh God, that was hard, I'm glad I got it done. But it's like it returns energy to you and there's more to it.

Steven [00:04:08 - 00:04:33]
I'm being very reductive, of course, but this flow state. I was on a flight. I live in Austin now. I was going to San Francisco, and the next day I was going to meet with my team, and I wanted to mock up an idea that I had for a feature, in my own hacky kind of way. Just sort of like, here's a little get on the flight. Alaska runs that nonstop. Captain announces, hey kids, sorry, Wi-Fi is out. See you in SF.

Steven [00:04:34 - 00:04:52]
So I started working my little laptop. About 15 minutes after takeoff, we start descending, and I think, oh, we're landing in Dallas. Like, something's wrong with the aircraft. They're going to tell us we're on the ground, like, we have a new aircraft for you, whatever. I looked down, two hours and 40 minutes had gone by. I didn't know if the drink cart had come by.

Steven [00:04:52 - 00:05:20]
I couldn't tell you the name of the guy in the seat next to me. But as we landed, my designs were done, and it felt amazing to be ahead of my day for a change, as opposed to kind of chasing my day. I didn't know the term flow state at the time, but my partner did, and he said, oh, you were in a flow state. Probably aided by the fact that there was no Wi-Fi on the plane. So you weren't getting emails and text messages. You couldn't open YouTube, you couldn't be on social. You were sort of in this beautiful bubble. And he's like, that's a thing. It's repeatable.

Kathie [00:05:22 - 00:05:35]
Also, being on a plane, you knew consciously and subconsciously that it was not going to fly forever, that there was an exact time it would stop and you didn't have to control that.

Steven [00:05:35 - 00:05:36]
True.

Kathie [00:05:36 - 00:05:43]
It was kind of being controlled for you. So you could let go and just... But how do we do that on Earth?

Steven [00:05:46 - 00:06:31]
It's funny you should ask. So I'll tell you, the thing that really inspired me is there are two problems that I have, and this is not unique to me, but one my wife calls the cold start problem, which is in the morning, I will say, I'm going to start at 9 a.m. doing whatever it is I need to do, right? And at 9:15, I'm still kind of checking emails. 9:30, I'm, you know, returning stuff. And it's sort of like this weird procrastination problem on how to get started. And that was an issue for me where the pain of that problem, the price I would pay for that, wouldn't show up right then. It would show up at the end of the day. Where I'd be like, man, I was busy all day, but I didn't get this thing done.

Steven [00:06:31 - 00:07:15]
And now Laura and I are going to dinner and, oh, maybe after dinner I'll try and finish, or tomorrow morning I'll finish today's work. Like this sort of frustration around why didn't I do the thing I needed to do? And it was largely why, what I do for Sukha now, which is there are some really smart people who have said, hey, here's some little tips and tools. If you put them together into one package, they can help you. And some of them are around music, so it's nonvocal. And certain key signatures are more conducive to getting into flow. And when we were putting together Sukha, I said, you know what? All this research, what if we just made one website that kind of helped you with all of it? Here are the best pieces with one button.

Steven [00:07:15 - 00:07:58]
I, as you know, worked in the film business for a number of years. I have a number of friends who are film composers. I was like, hey, here are the guidelines for flow music. Scientifically, it should be in this box. Could you write some original, cool music? Thousand hours of flow music. Some more up tempos, some down tempo, some lo-fi, some of this, right? So when we started Sukha, it's like, here's a thousand hours of music organizing to playlists that are sort of different, right? Here's a funny thing I learned, where Steven thought he knew more than he knew, a buddy of mine who does the sound for a lot of the LucasArts games, the Star Wars games, called me up. He said, hey man, I just got back from Nepal. He said, one day in Kathmandu, it rained so hard we couldn't leave.

Steven [00:07:58 - 00:08:45]
And it was this lush, warm summer rain, right? He said, I had some of my recording gear with me. I recorded like two hours of this rain in Kathmandu. And I got back and I don't really know what to do with it, but I think it's cool. Do you want it for your flow state app? So I was like, sure. So we quietly made a playlist that is just a loop of two hours of this rain in the Himalayas. It became the third most popular playlist in our platform. I emailed some people, I'd love to understand why you're listening to rain as opposed to this expensive music that we custom commissioned. And I'll tell you, if you were to reduce down everyone who spoke to me to one sentence, they said, oh, this brings me back to a period of time in my life when I had to focus.

Steven [00:08:46 - 00:09:14]
My grandmother raised me in Georgia, and it would always pour rain; when the spring finals happens, we'd be inside this rain. My family had a lake house in Michigan; it would rain when I had to dadada. And it was so interesting that they had a mental association between rain and I'm inside and I'm studying. And I was like, didn't see that coming. Made some mistakes. I thought, oh, what if we put up a playlist of like, surf sounds or a stream or, you know, birds or whatever.

Steven [00:09:16 - 00:09:54]
They went nowhere. Those playlists, no one listened to them, it was kind of a stupid errand on my part. But a woman who's a blogger in the UK, pretty well known blogger, she reached out to me and she said, hey, I saw you put up this rain in the middle of all the music playlists, suddenly this rain appeared. She said, I write my blog from a coffee shop. It's kind of my vibe. I had a baby during the pandemic and I can't really go with like a two-year-old to the coffee shop and be the cool writer. She said, would you ever consider putting up a playlist that's just like the sound of a coffee shop? Found a guy in Vienna, Austria, who had recorded his local coffee shop. The espresso machines and you know, people crowded in the place.

Steven [00:09:58 - 00:10:06]
Put it up there. Became super popular. And I realized that it's a writer thing of like, I'm in the coffee shop and we're all here at our laptops, you know, writing.

Kathie [00:10:06 - 00:10:07]
Yep.

Steven [00:10:07 - 00:10:37]
And there have been a number of things I've discovered along the way around how our brains have these like triggers into I'm going to do the thing. And for me, hearing music at 9 a.m. When I hit play in the morning at 9, there's a little bell and it has the music that I know is good for me. It helps me get in and I'm not as lured in with, “I should check my email real quick. Oh, I should check my text message or WhatsApp.” I actually do the thing. And that leads to a happier end of the day when. Yeah, I need a little more time, you know, sort of thing which is always a source of friction.

Kathie [00:10:41 - 00:10:49]
And it's a great reminder, I'm sure I heard this a long time ago. Do I do it? No. To have that ritual and boom, it is time to start.

Steven [00:10:49 - 00:10:49]
Big one. Yeah. Rituals are really… If it's get the coffee every day at 8:55. So at night, whatever that thing is that like triggers you in. I can't tell you how many writers I work with that have like elaborate, not elaborate. They have deeply ingrained habits that get them there. And it's about their environment, it's about understanding their chronotype, you know, the time of day you might be more adept at doing certain kinds of things. Like this is exactly what I do.

Kathie [00:11:16 - 00:11:20]
Yeah. If you don't know what that is for you practice different things.

Steven [00:11:20 - 00:11:23]
True. Yep. Experimentation is fantastic.

Kathie [00:11:23 - 00:11:28]
Or do all of them. This is my Monday, this is my Thursday.

Steven [00:11:28 - 00:12:08]
And this is my environment. Like, I'll tell you another thing that I noticed is when, I was coming up, I got into film in a really odd way, in that I was a software, a junior software engineer at IBM, and I happened to fall into film because film became digital, right? Suddenly you could make digital visual effects in the computer. You know, you could do sound in the computer. All this happened in the ‘90s. I was coming up, so I. I was working on the digital effects for Independence Day and became close with Roland Emmerich, Dean Devlin, who are the director, producer, writer of Independence Day and Godzilla, bunch of stuff. And I remember there was a conversation about Roland.

Steven [00:12:09 - 00:12:28]
Roland and Dean would write at this villa. It's like a vacation rental villa down in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. What they would do is they would just go rent that place for a month or two and write. So Roland told his assistant Joey, hey, you know, go rent the villa. And Joey came back that day and said, oh, it's already rented. It's a rental. Like an Airbnb.

Steven [00:12:28 - 00:12:48]
Someone got to it first, right? Roland called that Friday, his entertainment attorney, this guy John Deamer, and said, John, buy the villa. By Monday, Roland owned a villa in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It was that important to him and Dean about this. And I asked Dean about it. I was like, you know, I'm not a millionaire. I'm not off to buy a villa in Puerto Vallarta on a whim.

Steven [00:12:49 - 00:13:16]
Can you explain to me? Because it’s pretty extreme, to go buy the house. And Dean said this. He said, you know, there's a room there where in the morning the light comes in. It's like a white marble sort of villa. Said the light comes in over the pool in that room, and something inspires us where we never think about, like, what will our agent say? What studio notes will we get? What actor will be available? He's like, we just think of what's the movie we would want to see? And then we write that. He said, that's why it's worth it to us. There's something about that room that just gets us there.

Kathie [00:13:22 - 00:13:26]
I think that's a perfect example of it's simple, but it's not easy.

Steven [00:13:27 - 00:13:28]
Yeah, It's a good way to put it.

Kathie [00:13:28 - 00:13:40]
The simple thing is, we just need this and this and then all we just do our thing. But how easy is it to get that and make that happen? But that's very cool.

Steven [00:13:40 - 00:14:05]
We were talking about your episode with Sam Bennett. And there's some of the advice. That's a fantastic episode for anyone who has not listened to that, they should go back and listen to that. But there's some great advice in what she talks about that is that same thing of like, it's not easy, but it's simple to say it's not easy, but the reward is there. You know, the 15-minute thing and how you do certain things. Like that's. That was a really good episode.

Kathie [00:14:05 - 00:14:07]
Yes, she's big on that. 15 minutes a day. On what matters most to you.

Steven [00:14:09 - 00:14:44]
I'm telling you, you know, I speak the past 10 years, I've spoken probably 300, 400 times at colleges, universities, podcasts, this and that. And I'll tell you very frequently at the end, they're like, okay, if you have just one bit of advice for everyone here in the audience, what I almost always say is: When you wake up tomorrow and every day after, before you touch your phone, think of what is the one thing you could do that would move your life forward today? And by that I mean it has to be something you can do today. It's not like I'm going to go write a trio of novels. No. What is the one thing you do today? It's not three things. Not 10 things. One thing, it'll move your life forward.

Steven [00:14:44 - 00:14:55]
If it meets those criteria: I can do it today. It's one thing. It'll move my life forward. If you do that before you touch your phone tomorrow and every day from here forward, your life will change in 30 days.

Kathie [00:14:56 - 00:15:00]
That's very cool. Okay, what have you done? What are some examples that you've done?

Steven [00:15:01 - 00:15:15]
Some examples. I'll take a very germane, honest example right now. Today I woke up and I thought to myself, Tony and I run the Sukha, which we do for free. We don't collect a paycheck for this, right? But we just think it's cool. Here's a flow state website. You can hit play and it helps you.

Steven [00:15:15 - 00:15:34]
And I was thinking, okay, I would like for this to grow and I'd like to understand, like, what are the other tools that people are using to help them with the problem that we address, which is you get distracted. Social media is beautifully designed. Billionaires, trillionaires are designing these platforms so you waste your life. Which I think is criminal. If you think about it, if you're an engineer or designer or behavioral economist right now, the best paycheck you can get is from a company whose business model is steal everyone's lives. Straight up.

Steven [00:15:51 - 00:16:41]
Ten years ago, when Zuckerberg would be called to Congress to testify, he was sort of like aw shucks, Facebook is just here so grandmas can see videos of their grandkids, that’s what we do. You know, if you listen to the earnings calls now, there is no aw shucks about it. It is, these are the techniques we deployed this last quarter to steal people's lives. And these are new techniques we're going to deploy next quarter to steal more, because we call that shareholder value. The more we stop people from doing what they're capable of and instead just scrolling and double tapping, the sooner I get my next 450 foot yacht, which Mark Zuckerberg needs, 10 of them, I'm sure, right? And there are some people who are just going to wake up at 80 years old on the sofa scrolling and double tapping. And they're the ones who want to tell you about the novel they could have written, the company they could have started.

Steven [00:16:41 - 00:17:32]
Oh, they had the idea for that restaurant like, you know what I mean? They've given their lives away. We can't help them. You have to want to do something. But if you have that novel or that screenplay or whatever in you and you're like, I refuse to go to my grave with it, then you find the allies. It's just like, you know, in a typical three-act structure, the first act, the world changes, it's got to be fixed, right? Top of the second act, a little hobbit, whatever, has to go assemble the allies to go on the quest to repair the world. And so you need to find those tools. So to answer your question, I woke up this morning, I thought, you know, the best thing I could do is I should today go look at the websites of all the tools that are in some ways competitive to ours and understand, like, how are they solving it for people. And maybe that’ll inspire me to know how to express what we're doing.

Steven [00:17:33 - 00:17:46]
So that was my one thing today before I touched my phone and I love my phone. It's how I see photos of my child when he's at school and all the cute things. But it was that, just to say I should get a sense of the landscape, what is being offered out there.

Kathie [00:17:47 - 00:17:50]
And so you keep a notebook or you write it in your phone?

Steven [00:17:50 - 00:18:14]
You know what, I actually drop it in Sukha. You can capture your tasks. So for this session, whatever, you know, session you do today, you can have three tasks, tops. We don't allow you to have 17 things. You're not going to do 17 things. Generally, people’s sessions are two to three hours, so you can do more than one thing. I drop it in there, and there's a little progress bar that goes across.

Steven [00:18:14 - 00:18:28]
So you say, I'm going to spend an hour and a half looking at competitive websites and getting inspired or whatever. And as I'm doing that, the music plays. Sukha blocks me from going into YouTube or Facebook or something, you know, distracting.


Steven [00:18:30 - 00:18:47]
Keeps me off my phone. If I pick up my phone, my little coach in Sukha is like, Steven, you're on your phone. Is that helping you? I'm like, no, it's not. And, yeah, you see the little progress bar go green. And then when it gets almost to the hour and a half that I budgeted for that, it turns yellow. And then it goes red. So I can look up and go, oh, I need to wrap this up. So, yes, that's where I usually drop it. 

Kathie [00:18:50 - 00:18:53]
Interesting. So it's a productivity app.

Steven [00:18:53 - 00:18:54]
It's a flow state app.

Kathie [00:18:54 - 00:18:56]
Is that, if you just had to put, like, a word or two?

Steven [00:18:56 - 00:18:58]
Yeah, it's a flow state app. If you want to go read. You know, Cszentmihalyi’s book on flow and understand what he said about, like, hey, music can influence you. These things can influence you. Blocking distractions. You want to feel energized at the end. We basically just said, no one's built a unique site that just puts it all together. There's a lot of disparate things you can use. Like, there's some great music apps. There are some great distraction blockers, but they're all like this patchwork quilt of stuff, and we're like, what if you just had one play button? Because I'm lazy. I just want one button.

Kathie [00:19:29 - 00:19:33]
You know, I'm a member of Caveday. Are you familiar with that one?

Steven [00:19:33 - 00:19:40]
Caveday, Flown, Flow Club. There are a ton that are basically just, they took Zoom and they charge you, like, $40 a month to be in a Zoom room.

Kathie [00:19:40 - 00:19:42]
With a community, which I love.

Steven [00:19:42 - 00:19:44]
Yep. That's cool.

Kathie [00:19:44 - 00:19:48]
What do you know about this: rejection. Is that a topic you can talk about?

Steven [00:19:48 - 00:20:11]
Okay, I'll tell you something. Yeah. When I got into film, into film development. As an apprentice, you're an assistant, and then you become a creative executive, then a director, then, you know, vice president, senior vice president. Executive vice president. So you work your way up. So I started out as an assistant, ended up executive vice president at DreamWorks for Kurtzman Orsi, vice president production at Fox.

Steven [00:20:11 - 00:20:36]
So I've worked on a lot of action movies. Now, the answer to your question is if you had asked me early in my career, like, creative executive level, where me and my 400 friends from the agencies and the other production companies, other studios, who are like the writers and the directors and the filmmakers that are going to make it, we would have guessed wrong. And I'll tell you why. We would have used talent as the criterion. And the razor is not talent. It is tenacity.

Kathie [00:20:37 - 00:20:38]
Oh, okay.

Steven [00:20:38 - 00:21:04]
It was the Austin Film Festival not that long ago. The ones now that come, because I've been out over 10 years, are not the ones that we thought were the most talented. They're the ones who could take no. They heard no. And they just heard, well, not yet or not today. And they would go and ask someone else if they want to make it. And the ones that were actually super talented often took no as this rejection. They're like, I'm actually not that talented. I'm not that good, bro.

Kathie [00:21:04 - 00:21:06]
“I'm a terrible person.”

Steven [00:21:06 - 00:21:32]
Right? And the reality is that no is sometimes about your material is bad. Like, let's be honest, there is some stuff just like, dude, you need to practice your craft. But sometimes it is, that morning they bought another script that was super like yours, and they just can't buy two on this, you know? We just bought an alien movie this morning. I can't ask my boss to buy another. And it has nothing to do with you. And the tenacious ones who were like, let me take this “No,” process it. Do I use this to get smarter, better, faster? Yes. And they're the ones who are still in the game. They're the ones who are making films right now.

Kathie [00:21:42 - 00:21:51]
Why is that skill not taught? See, when you first said tenacity, my brain went, but I don't want to be mean. I don't want to be a mean person.

Steven [00:21:51 - 00:22:07]
Well, you know, it's like, my dad is an electrical engineer. He understands circuits. This gate is open or closed. This is zero or a one. It will influence the next gate behind it, which we can open or close. Zero, one, right? 

Kathie [00:22:07 - 00:22:08]
Left brain, boom.

Steven [00:22:08 - 00:22:19]
And it's awesome to live in a world where you're like, it works, period. No qualification. It's just zero, one. It works. When you're talking about something subjective, like, do you like this poem, Kathie, you like it? I hated it.

Steven [00:22:20 - 00:22:53]
You know, that's the thing. It's like, you have to accept I'm going to be in this field that is subjective, and I need to be able to hold on to my identity, my belief in myself, like, oh, I am a good poet, but also push yourself to be greater. Very few, I'm going to say, or nobody is born a great novelist, a great screenwriter, great poet. You learn the craft and hopefully you push the boundaries as you become great at it. So you have to be willing to say, I believe in myself and I believe tomorrow will be better because I continue to work the craft. It's not zero or one. There is no oh, yeah, I have the right answer, the answer is 14. 

Kathie [00:22:57 - 00:23:00]
And how can we get rid of this all-or-nothing thinking, oh my goodness.

Steven [00:23:01 - 00:23:12]
It's hard because sometimes these things are subjective. They're very gray. But there is a binary value. My script was made into a movie or my script was not made into a movie. It's a binary. Like, okay, you can go see my movie. Or, hey, you want to read my script that didn't sell? So there's a binary outcome or value assigned to it, but it's a very subjective, squishy, artistic medium. I can't remember who it was, had a very nice way of bifurcating creativity and artistic talent. And they said, you know what? We really should understand, everyone can create. Like you can create words. My child can create with finger paints. Like creativity is something you have. Now, artistic talent? Maybe. Are you a great dancer? You might not be. Like my son might not be able to dance, right?

Kathie [00:23:48 - 00:23:51]
That was Sam Bennett. Sam said that.

Steven [00:23:51 - 00:23:51]
Was it Sam?

Kathie [00:23:51 - 00:23:59]
Yes. She said everyone is creative or can be creative. Not everyone is artistic with an art form.

Steven [00:24:00 - 00:24:05]
Yes. Thank you very much. It was your episode. Yes. I thought it was beautifully, the way she, like, bifurcated that.

Kathie [00:24:05 - 00:24:07]
She has said that many times. Yes.

Steven [00:24:08 - 00:24:08]
Love that.

Kathie [00:24:08 - 00:24:13]
Have you written a screenplay or anything else? Are you a writer?

Steven [00:24:13 - 00:24:42]
I have not written a finished screenplay. I did with friends. Friends had an idea and they asked me to work on it with them. Did work on it with them, but it was not a finished screenplay. But I do have a desire at some point to learn how to write because I will tell you this, I've done coverage. I've worked on a ton of movies, a lot of scripts, a lot of notes, a lot of stuff like that. So I have, I believe, critical skills from having worked with some very talented people. But it is different than be able to create from whole cloth.

Kathie [00:24:42 - 00:24:43]
Yes.

Steven [00:24:43 - 00:24:44]
Different disciplines.

Kathie [00:24:44 - 00:24:48]
I mean, writing and editing are two very different things.

Steven [00:24:48 - 00:24:49]
I agree.

Kathie [00:24:49 - 00:24:54]
Writing and publishing are two very different topics of conversation.

Steven [00:24:54 - 00:25:04]
Not to be trivialized. Like people sometimes are like, well, I can write, therefore I'm a writer. Okay, great. Polish your craft. Keep working, working your craft. Get better.

Kathie [00:25:05 - 00:25:08]
Steven, this has been so much fun. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Steven [00:25:08 - 00:25:10]
I hope it's a good episode. I can't wait to hear it.

Kathie [00:25:10 - 00:25:12]
Yes, keep in touch.
Steven [00:25:12 - 00:25:12]

You too.
Kathie [00:25:12 - 00:25:25]
See ya. 

OUTRO [:00:25:26]
Thanks for listening to this episode of Writer's Rotation like and subscribe for more. And remember, writing is a marketable skill. Smiling is a remarkable skill.