Write the Book You Can’t Write

I know (from letters and e-mails sent in) that many readers of this blog are published writers, even multiply-published writers, as well as successful artists and entrepreneurs of all kinds.

Seth Godin, post-Yoyodyne

If you’re one of them (and even if you aren’t), for sure you can look back on certain successes you’ve had and say to yourself,

“How did I ever do that?”

How did I write Braveheart? Where did I find the guts to launch Yoyodyne?

Two answers come to mind.

“I was so desperate I had no other choice”

Or

“I was too dumb to know I couldn’t do it.”

Either one of those is a fabulous place for an artist to be. (It might not feel like it at the time, but it is.)

Consider what it means when we stand on the threshold of a new project and think to ourselves, “This is way too big for me. I can never pull this off. It’s so far out of my league it’s ridiculous.”

Whose voice is that?

It’s not our voice.

It’s the voice of Resistance.

Recall one of the Cardinal Truths of Resistance:

The greater a new project’s importance to the positive evolution of our soul, the more Resistance we will experience to attempting it.

In other words, when the voice in our heads tells us we can never achieve such a bold aspirational venture, what it really means is:

Yes, we can.

If the dream were not possible for us, Resistance would never feel the need to bomb us with megatons of negativity.

Resistance, remember, understands our capacities far better than we do.

It knows we can fly the Atlantic solo. It knows we can reach the South Pole by dog sled. It knows we can make it to the moon and back.

That’s why it feels the need to marshal all its resources to convince us we can’t.

I wrote in The War of Art,

The counterfeit artist is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

Take Resistance’s word for it.

When it tells us we can’t, it means we can.

Write the book you can’t write.