Do the Work!
Pressfield, Steven
ORIENTATION: ENEMIES AND ALLIES
Our Enemies The following is a list of the forces arrayed against us as artists and entrepreneurs: Resistance (i.e., fear, self-doubt, procrastination, addiction, distraction, timidity, ego and narcissism, self-loathing, perfectionism, etc.) Rational thought Friends and family
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Our Allies Enough for now about the antagonists arrayed against us. Let’s consider the champions on our side: Stupidity Stubbornness Blind faith Passion Assistance (the opposite of Resistance) Friends and family
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Stay Stupid The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.
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A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate. Don’t think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.
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Be Stubborn Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop. What will keep us from stopping? Plain old stubbornness. I like the idea of stubbornness because it’s less lofty than “tenacity” or “perseverance.” We don’t have to be heroes to be stubborn. We can just be pains in the butt.
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Blind Faith Is there a spiritual element to creativity? Hell, yes. Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel
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You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true. Fear saps passion. When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.
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Friends and Family When art and inspiration and success and fame and money have come and gone, who still loves us—and whom do we love? Only two things will remain with us across the river: our inhering genius and the hearts we love. In other words, what we do and whom we do it for
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1 BEGINNING
Start Before You’re Ready Don’t prepare. Begin.
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A Research Diet Before we begin, you wanna do research? Uh-unh. I’m putting you on a diet. You’re allowed to read three books on your subject. No more. No underlining, no highlighting, no thinking or talking about the documents later. Let the ideas percolate. Let the unconscious do its work. Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.
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Two quick thoughts as we begin: 1. Stay Primitive The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis. Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms. Conception occurs at the primal level. I’m not being facetious when I stress, throughout this book, that it is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart. The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor. That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with
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- Swing for the Seats My first job was in advertising in New York. I used to bring ideas to my boss that were so tiny, they made him apoplectic. “This idea is the size of a postage stamp! If it were any more miniscule, I’d need an electron microscope just to see it! Go back to your cubicle and bring me something BIG!” If you and I want to do great stuff, we can’t let ourselves work small. A home-run swing that results in a strikeout is better than a successful bunt or even a line-drive single. Start playing from power. We can always dial it back later. If we don’t swing for the seats from the start, we’ll never be able to drive a fastball into the upper deck.
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2 MIDDLE
When you and I set out to create anything—art, commerce, science, love—or to advance in the direction of a higher, nobler version of ourselves, we uncork from the universe, ineluctably, an equal and opposite reaction. That reaction is Resistance. Resistance is an active, intelligent, protean, malign force—tireless, relentless, and inextinguishable—whose sole object is to stop us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals. The universe is not indifferent. It is actively hostile. Every principle espoused so far in this volume is predicated upon that truth. The aim of every axiom set forth thus far is to outwit, outflank, outmaneuver Resistance. We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is.
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Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps; then fill in the gaps between the gaps.
Notes:For example, If we’re inventing Twitter, we start with What Are You Doing Now?, the 140-character limit, and the Following. We fill in the gaps: the hashtag, the tiny URL, the re-tweet.
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One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP. Don’t worry about quality. Act, don’t reflect. Momentum is everything. Get to THE END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with his pitchfork. Believe me, he is. Get the serum to Nome. Get the Conestoga wagon to the Oregon Trail. Get the first version of your project done from A to Z as fast as you can. Don’t stop. Don’t look down. Don’t think.
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Suspend All Self-Judgment Unless you’re building a sailboat or the Taj Mahal, I give you a free pass to screw up as much as you like. The inner critic? His ass is not permitted in the building. Set forth without fear and without self-censorship. When you hear that voice in your head, blow it off. This draft is not being graded. There will be no pop quiz. Only one thing matters in this initial draft: get SOMETHING done, however flawed or imperfect. You are not allowed to judge yourself.
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Suspending self-judgment doesn’t just mean blowing off the “You suck” voice in our heads. It also means liberating ourselves from conventional expectations—from what we think our work “ought” to be or “should” look like. Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional, crazy heart. If your notion violates every precept I’ve set forth in these pages, tell me to go to hell. Do what that voice says
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Ideas come according to their own logic. That logic is not rational. It’s not linear. We may get the middle before we get the end. We may get the end before we get the beginning. Be ready for this. Don’t resist it. Do you have a pocket tape recorder? I do. I keep it with me everywhere. (A notepad works, too.) Why do I record ideas the minute they come to me? Because if I don’t, I’ll forget them. You will, too. Nothing is more fun than turning on the recorder and hearing your own voice telling you a fantastic idea that you had completely forgotten you had.
Notes:Ideas do not come linearly
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Let’s talk about the actual process—the writing/composing/ idea generation process. It progresses in two stages: action and reflection. Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time. The Definition of Action and Reflection In writing, “action” means putting words on paper. “Reflection” means evaluating what we have on paper. For this first draft, we’ll go light on reflection and heavy on action.
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The universe is also actively benevolent. You should be feeling this now. You should be feeling a tailwind. The opposite of Resistance is Assistance. A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work; you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope. This is serious juju. The universe responds to this. It has no choice. Your work-in-progress produces its own gravitational field, created by your will and your attention. This field attracts like-spirited entities into its orbit.
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Your will and vision initiated the process, but now the process has acquired a life and momentum of its own. The un-indifferent universe has stepped in to counter Resistance. It has introduced a positive opposing force. Assistance is the universal, immutable force of creative manifestation, whose role since the Big Bang has been to translate potential into being, to convert dreams into reality.
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How much time can you spare each day? For that interval, close the door and—short of a family emergency or the outbreak of World War III—don’t let ANYBODY in. Keep working. Keep working. Keep working
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Keep Working, Part Two Sometimes on Wednesday I’ll read something that I wrote on Tuesday and I’ll think, “This is crap. I hate it and I hate myself.” Then I’ll re-read the identical passage on Thursday. To my astonishment, it has become brilliant overnight. Ignore false negatives. Ignore false positives. Both are Resistance. Keep working
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Now that we’re rolling, we can start engaging the left brain as well as the right. Act, then reflect. Act, then reflect. Here’s how I do it: At least twice a week, I pause in the rush of work and have a meeting with myself. (If I were part of a team, I’d call a team meeting.) I ask myself, again, of the project: “What is this damn thing about?”
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Panic Is Good Creative panic is good. Here’s why: Our greatest fear is fear of success. When we are succeeding—that is, when we have begun to overcome our self-doubt and self-sabotage, when we are advancing in our craft and evolving to a higher level—that’s when panic strikes. It did for me when my book crashed, and it was the best thing that happened to me all year. When we experience panic, it means that we’re about to cross a threshold. We’re poised on the doorstep of a higher plane.
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The Problem Is the Problem A professional does not take success or failure personally. That’s Priority Number One for us now. That our project has crashed is not a reflection of our worth as human beings. It’s just a mistake. It’s a problem—and a problem can be solved. Now we go back to our sheet of yellow foolscap. Where did we go wrong? Where did this train go off the tracks? Somewhere in the three sections on our sheet of foolscap—beginning, middle, and end—and in the final section, the summation of the theme … somewhere in there lies the answer. Why is it so hard to find? It’s hard because it’s hard. I’m not trying to be cryptic or facetious. We went wrong at the start because the problem was so hard (and the act of solving it was so painful) that we ducked and dodged and bypassed. We hoped it would go away. We hoped it would solve itself. A little voice warned us then, but we were too smart to listen. The bad news is, the problem is hell. The good news is it’s just a problem.
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3 END
Killer Instinct Why does Seth Godin place so much emphasis on “shipping”? Because finishing is the critical part of any project. If we can’t finish, all our work is for nothing. When we ship, we declare our stuff ready for prime time. We pack it in a FedEx box and send it out into the world. Our movie hits the screens, our smart phone arrives in the stores, our musical opens on Broadway. It takes balls of steel to ship.
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I had a good friend who had labored for years and had produced an excellent and deeply personal novel. It was done. He had it in its mailing box, complete with cover letter to his agent. But he couldn’t make himself send it off. Fear of rejection unmanned him. Shipping is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. It requires killer instinct. We’ve got the monster down; now we have to drive a stake through its heart.
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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
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I was crushed. I was forty-two years old, having given up everything normal in life to pursue the dream of being a writer; now I’ve finally got my name on a big-time Hollywood production starring Linda Hamilton, and what happens? I’m a loser, a phony; my life is worthless and so am I. My friend Tony Keppelman snapped me out of it by asking if I was going to quit. Hell, no! “Then be happy,” he said. “You’re where you wanted to be, aren’t you? So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.” That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure. When we ship, we open ourselves to judgment in the real world. Nothing is more empowering, because it plants us solidly on Planet Earth and gets us out of our self-devouring, navel-centered fantasies and self-delusions. Ship it.
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Here’s one thing I can tell you—and you can take this to the bank: Slay that dragon once, and he will never have power over you again. Yeah, he’ll still be there. Yeah, you’ll still have to duel him every morning. And yeah, he’ll still fight just as hard and use just as many nasty tricks as he ever did. But you will have beaten him once, and you’ll know you can beat him again. That’s a game-changer. That will transform your life. From the day I finally finished something, I’ve never had trouble finishing anything again. I always deliver. I always ship.
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April 23, 2016
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I stand in awe of anyone who hatches a dream and who shows the guts to hang tough, all alone, and see it through to reality.
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