Resistance is a Bitch
How Steven Pressfield Changed My Life
I was recently recommended to read a book called “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield.
The book came highly recommended by my former roommate, a talented web developer and writer in his own right — Will Moyer
As I typically do, I placed the suggestion on the back-burner of my mind, as I (of course) had more important and urgent things to attend to — ahem- social media, incessantly checking email, optimizing my webpage and inbox, etc etc.
Over the course of the following 2 weeks, that damned book kept showing up in my life in random conversations with friends, on blogs I frequent, hell — even on my Amazon “hey, you might like this” page.
Whether or not you believe in “signs” or “hints” from the universe, or, if it’s simply our brains advanced homing mechanism, the reticular activating system, I had to acknowledge: This author and his book were trying to show up in my life.
Message received, universe.
Next step? I got down to business and set myself up with an account at audible.com.
If you don’t have an account there, I highly recommend it for its convenience and vast library.
I also noticed that I seem to have more time and bandwidth for audio books than I do reading their physical counterparts. Strange.
Perhaps it’s just a sign of the times, and my attention being drawn to the digital realm over all else, in our increasingly mobile society.
I made sure to download the audio version of the book to my smartphone and set aside a few hours that evening to have a listen to what Mr. Pressfield had to say on all things creation.
He hammered home the point that everyone — even the most successful artists we admire — face the same feelings and inner struggles when we are “staring at the blank page.”
The act of trying to will into existence a new project, idea, book or business venture out of the ether is no slight task. I think our reptilian brain knows this, and fights us tooth and nail when we try to forge into unknown territory.
For those of you who are not familiar with Steven Pressfield (I wasn’t), he is an acclaimed fiction writer, most noted for writing the novel “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” which was loosely inspired by the ancient Hindu text The Baghavad Gita.
Many of Pressfield’s previous works were also made into major motion pictures to varying degrees of commercial success.
The guy has earned his chops, and my attention.
He is not shy about sharing his mistakes, failures, frustrations and other embarassing personal shortcomings during the course of his writing career. I am glad he isn’t — It gives hope to the rest of us that aspire to do bigger things in our lives.
Mostly, the takeaway is that the ability to “forge your own path” is within all of us, but our own worst enemy can be ourselves, and has the ability to stop us before we even get started.
The Resistance Can Beat The Best of Us (Temporarily).
In his book, Mr Pressfield lumps all creative types together.
He states that no matter the creative field — writing, painting, music, web design, or business venture — the “resistance,” his term for our internal critic, has the ability to stop us dead in our tracks.
As creative humans, he argues, we all possess the same inner demons, negative self talk and crippling doubt from time to time. If we want to create anything of value and lasting impact, we have to act in spite of it and NOT just when inspiration strikes.
This is what marks the difference between an amateur and someone who has “gone pro.”
Rain or shine, inspiration or not, good Wi-Fi or spotty — we show up at the blank page and get down to business, whatever that might be.
Yes. Fuck yes.
The most “successful” business people, artists, writers and musicians I know have echoed this sentiment in spades.
I’m as guilty as anyone.
I noticed in the previous month, just how much of my “productive” work time was actually spent avoiding the very creative work I needed to be doing, in order to take things to the next level here at Career Deviant.
Cue kick to the nuts.
My ego did not like this idea one bit. It kept throwing up arguments like:
“I’m productive!”
“I’m in front of my laptop 8 hours a day!”
“Those emails need my immediate response!”
“I’m just not feeling it, today! Tomorrow will be better.”
Bullshit internal scripts. Every last one of ‘em was ready to coax me into giving in.
Gut check: I was simply scared of putting myself out there, letting other people read and judge my work, and my message. What if all I get back is negative response, or worse, crickets?
Deep down, I would wager that my reptilian brain is just trying to prevent me from having to experience failure and rejection. My lizard brain is perfectly happy to tell me to keep my head down, not to make waves and to fall in line — just like everyone else.
Instead of diving deep on writing the next chapter of my first e-book, or even a well written and compelling about page for my coaching services, I found myself constantly going down the rabbit hole of:
- cleaning my room
- cooking a healthy meal
- hitting the gym
Now, the social media time-sucks are an obvious avoidance to work. That’s clear.
But the most insidious of ways that this “resistance” managed to sideline me were with tasks that SEEMED productive on the surface.
While these tasks are indeed necessary to keep a business moving forward, they are more urgent than important. It’s way to damn easy to think that by achieving “inbox zero” that I’m entitled to some cheap form of satisfaction or accomplishment.
Responding to emails, making social media posts and returning calls aren’t the lifeblood of my business and brand — they should simply be a given, and are probably something I should be outsourcing to a talented assistant.
Sooner rather than later.
Super Hero Syndrome Can Kill Ya’.
The resistance is telling me that nobody understands my vision better than me, and that an assistant would just fuck things up, and cause more problems than they’re worth.
When I really look at that, it reeks of bullshit. It’s simply my ego telling me I need to have complete control.
Ahhh — The entrepreneur’s super hero syndrome. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, probably more so.
Nick Reese, an online marketing rockstar, discusses the difference between what is urgent vs what is important at length here, and how becoming more aware of our unconscious desire to feel busy (read: important) can cause feelings of overwhelm, as we seemingly spin our wheels.
Take Your Medicine First
The main thing I want to stress is how important it is to do the HARD stuff first.
I’ve found that when I actually SIT DOWN to write and create, I can get into the flow state fairly quickly. Slap on the headphones, crank some electronica and shut out the outside world.
Boom.
Doesn’t seem so hard, just a matter of starting.
There’s always plenty of time for emails, lunch meet-ups and other non-essential tasks that feel like I’m “playing business” as opposed to actively sitting down at the page and creating content that can change people’s lives.
The hard part is not the creating. It’s the sitting down to create.
Thanks to Steven Pressfield, I am now aware of this harsh mistress called Resistance.
She can be a real bitch, but she won’t beat me.
What is resistance telling you not to start today?
Don’t listen.