Summary
Steven Pressfield’s book focuses on the key idea of resistance. According to Pressman, we all face the same enemy every day, we fight the same battle every day: Resistance. Every day you either win or lose your battle with resistance. Resistance comes when we do any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Steven’s book provides a lot of encouragement to delay gratification and get started on your long term goals.
Some key highlights:
– It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
– Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what “Resistance” is. How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell-phone use, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to? Resistance defeats us.
– A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or a contribution made out of one’s experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent (and not-so-silent) threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness/meltdown/mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants.
– We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”
– At a big New York ad agency, our boss used to tell us: Invent a disease. Come up with the disease, he said, and we can sell the cure. Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder. These aren’t diseases, they’re marketing ploys. Doctors didn’t discover them, copywriters did. Marketing departments did. Drug companies did.
– Those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
– Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement.
– What better way of avoiding work than going to a workshop?
– Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?
– If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
– Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.
– We’re not born with unlimited choices. We can’t be anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
– The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
– If we think of ourselves as a corporation, it gives us a healthy distance on ourselves. We’re less subjective. We don’t take blows as personally. Making yourself a corporation (or just thinking of yourself in that way) reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist-doing-the-work from the will-and-consciousness-running-the-show.
The qualities that define us as professionals?
1). We show up every day.
2). We show up no matter what.
3). We stay on the job all day. Our minds may wander, but our bodies remain at the wheel.
4). We accept remuneration for our labor. We’re not here for fun. We work for money.
5). We do not overidentify with our jobs.
6). We master the technique of our jobs.
Now consider the amateur: the aspiring painter, the wannabe playwright. How does he pursue his calling?
1). He doesn’t show up every day.
2). He doesn’t show up no matter what.
3). He doesn’t stay on the job all day.
4). He is not committed over the long haul; the stakes for him are illusory and fake.
5). He does not get money.
6). And he overidentifies with his art.
7). He does not have a sense of humor about failure.
– The pro concentrates on technique. The professional masters how, and leaves what and why to the gods. The professional recognizes his limitations: He gets an agent, gets a lawyer, gets an accountant. He knows she can only be a professional at one thing. He brings in other pros and treats them with respect.
– The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his avocation, his artistic aspiration. He defines himself by it. He is a musician, a painter, a playwright. Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.
– If tomorrow morning, every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse, along with the junk food, cosmetic surgery, and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and the medical profession from top to bottom. Domestic abuse would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity, migraine headaches, and road rage.
– Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.