M.A.G.I.C. & Mastery: exclusive Interview with author Steven Barnes

I met Steven Barnes while attending the last panel of Friday Night at San Diego Comic Con. That Panel was titled Camera, Culture, and Combat: Unveiling Filipino Martial Arts Legacy in Popular Culture. It featured Arlene Pinpin Stevens, Ron Balicki, Sachi Villareal, Julius Vladimir Francisco, Aiodhan M. Cochrane, Paul Rosales and Steven Barnes. This was the only panel listed in a Jam-Packed schedule of events that used the term Martial Arts. Before the panel began I introduced myself as a correspondent for Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine and discovered Steven was a former columnist for Black Belt magazine. We agreed to reconnect at a later date to have the conversation which you can now read.

PLUGO:  I appreciate your time. 

Steven Barnes: No problem. So, uh, I guess just lay it on me. What can I do for you?

PLUGO: I thought maybe I could, take a couple of minutes to ask you a few short questions from which I might be able to  include in our coverage of the convention.

Steven Barnes: So, well, you start throwing me a question. 

PLUGO: Okay, great. Great. So I’m just going to start with  the classic; who are you? How did we get that start? What is the log line to your secret origin?

Steven Barnes: I’m a guy named Steve, who wanted a few simple things in life. I wanted martial arts mastery. I wanted to master being a writer and I wanted to have a family to love. 

PLUGO: Okay. So how did you find yourself writing about martial arts?

Steven Barnes: Well, I was a writer and I did martial arts and one of the editors at black belt magazine either reached out to me or maybe I wrote an article and submitted it to them. That might’ve been what it was and that might’ve been how that got started. What that article was, I cannot say, but, somehow they connected with me and, and I did a number of articles for them and then they gave me some assignments and those things seemed to work out.

And then they invited me to be Kung Fu columnist for Black Belt magazine. 

PLUGO: So where you an article writer, a journalist transitioning into fiction or a fiction writer first?

Steven Barnes: I’d been a fiction writer for years. You know, I’d probably published at least six novels by the time I was working for Black Belt Magazine, although it’s possible that it was fewer. But there’s no money to be made, in writing articles for Black Belt magazine. You know, making enough money for sushi. I never took it seriously in terms of my income stream. 

PLUGO: I’ve been seeing martial artists and martial arts instructors who are now wanting to pursue a creative dimension in their art. I’ve met several who are pursuing comics on one level or another, illustrating, writing, both.

Steven Barnes: Well, you know, that’s smart. You know, the doorways are open, the discipline of becoming excellent at anything lends itself to being excellent at other things. You know; Musashi Miyamoto, “know one thing, know 10, 000 things.” Also it’s the idea of leveraging your knowledge or visibility in one arena into another. Which is why some rappers are billionaires now because they figured this out.

PLUGO: So then what would be an essential bit of advice that you would give to a young creator? One who’s finding their identity or attempting creative pursuits, writing comics and such. You know, the type of creative that would be at San Diego Comic Con versus, say, the kind of martial artist that would be at San Diego Comic-Con.

Steven Barnes: Well, I mean, there are things that lead to excellence across the board, but if you’re talking about writing, then you’d try to take those notions of excellence and connect them to a specific map that takes your energy and puts it into a particular form. You know, it’s, if I’m doing martial arts or if I’m writing or if I’m being a dad, I’m the same guy.

It’s the same life energy. It’s the same passion. It’s the same heart, mind, and body. But if you were to view that like a liquid that flows up from the center of my being, then I’m putting it into different containers. So, I would say I have something that I call the magic formula, that is M. A. G. I. C. for excellence.

First one is the M you need a map or a mentor. Somebody who can achieve the results that you want. The A is constant action. You have to understand what consistent actions every day, every week, every month will give you the best chance to reach your goal so that you can perform daily experiments. 

Let me try this. Let me see how it works. Did it work? No. Yes. No. It’s like sparring every day. You get knocked to the head – you needed to keep your hands up. You know, it’s important. It’s important to take losses. You know, it’s important to make mistakes and to fail forward as quickly as possible. And that means constant action.

The G is gratitude. You need to have a sense of gratitude. of being blessed, a sense of gratitude for what you already have in life, that gives you the emotional energy to believe that good things could happen tomorrow. If something good happened to me in the past, I can believe that there are going to be good things happening tomorrow.

If I have this belief that nothing good has ever happened to me, why should I have any faith that my actions are going to accomplish anything? So literally finding something, things to feel grateful for in life just makes it a better life and also contributes to success. 

The I is intention. That’s your goal; and it should be a S.M.A.R.T. goal. Specific, Meaningful, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. That would be one way of looking at what a goal is. Or think of that intention as a dream with a deadline. 

Finally the C is for your core. Your feeling needs to be that the actions you are taking are in alignment with your core being, that if you were a billionaire, you’d do this anyway. This is just who you are. You know, this is just who you are. And you love doing it. So every day that I get to write, I win. 

PLUGO: Is this what you’ve been writing about? 

Steven Barnes: You know, I actually just finished my first self help book, uh, it’s called The Magic Formula. You can get that at my website. But the thing about the formula is that considering that the meaning of life, according to the Dalai Lama and according to evolutionary biologists, is to move away from pain, you know, end suffering, embrace joy. And be of service. Okay. So if you are, if the definition of success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal, and you’re doing things, you’re taking one step every day that takes you closer there, and you are happy in the process, then you’re automatically a success. You’re winning regardless of what happens in the external world. 

read the rest of the interview here–