My Fight with Resistance

It’s been nearly two months at my new job, and it’s been humbling to realize what I don’t know. I’m no longer a government employee experimenting with digital marketing tactics. I am a full-fledged marketer that writes copy with the intent of selling a product for a living.

I could have stayed at my old job, lamenting about how people didn’t know how to work Sharepoint, much less how to build software. I could have spent my days dabbling in email copywriting without getting any real feedback. But I left because I wanted to become a software marketer.

I am still positive that I made the right decision. But there are days where I’m crippled with writer’s block and terrified that someone is going to see my crappy first draft. That my writing won’t convert and the entire company is going to go bankrupt because I screwed up.

It’s irrational. It’s fear. It’s enough to paralyze me and prevent me from being productive.

It’s Resistance, rearing its ugly head.

Lucky for me, I’m not alone in my fight with Resistance. The term comes from Steven Pressfield’s War on Art. Think of Resistance as the devil on your shoulder encouraging bad behavior, except worse. While it may take many forms that you’ll have to read the book for, self-loathing is the one I struggle with the most. The following thoughts roll around in my head daily:

You’re never going to be a real marketer. Your ideas are terrible. You can’t write good headlines, your blog posts suck, and you are better off being a government worker. You will never be as good as Eugene Schwartz.

These thoughts serve me in the following ways. Not being good enough is a a reason to give up. It also gives me a reason to glorify the past. Lastly, it puts other copywriters on a pedestal, making it impossible for me to attain their level of skill.

If I weren’t capable of writing, I wouldn’t have gotten hired. If I were happy at my old job, I probably wouldn’t have left. Lastly, who is stopping me from being as good as the best copywriters in the business but myself?

While I could dig into my childhood about the first time I started loathing myself, it doesn’t change that I have to do my work.

I’m still experimenting with how to overcome this. I know these feelings will always be in the back of my mind, taunting me and telling me I’m not capable. I can only affirm, meditate, and psychoanalyze so many times. At some point, I just have to suck it up and just do it.

Despite my feelings towards Resistance (TL;DR: It totally sucks), I’m comforted by the fact that it exists at all. Supposedly it means that I am on the verge of a career breakthrough.