“Don’t Look Back and Don’t Look Down”

This is a powerful mantra for any of us launching upon a long-form creative or entrepreneurial enterprise, e.g. writing a book, starting a business venture, trying to get our daughter into Harvard.

Don’t look back, and don’t look down.

“Don’t look back,” meaning banish all second thoughts and all self-doubt. Block them out. Do not allow them to find purchase. Once we have cast off from the dock at Tenerife, don’t turn around to gaze back fondly at the shore. 

During my truck driving days in my late twenties, I teamed with a driver named Jim Abbott. When we would have to turn off the interstate into a city to deliver a load—a potentially scary situation with traffic, the possibility of getting lost, etc.—he always used to say, “We’re committed!” With the exclamation point.

“We’re committed!”

That’s how it should be when you and I launch into a new book or other enterprise.

Don’t look back. All systems go. Focus entirely on what’s ahead.

And don’t look down.

Dismiss all thoughts of failure, incompletion, embarrassment, shame. Yeah, those evil outcomes might eventuate. But we can’t let ourselves think about them. Block them out!

In Gates of Fire, the central character is the Spartan captain Dienekes. Instructing his protégé, he speaks of the “house of the mind,” which contains many rooms.

“There are rooms we must never let ourselves enter. Never.”

Looking down is one of those rooms.

We’re talking here about a discipline of the mind. Mental toughness. A choice that you and I make (and hold ourselves to) as professionals … a deliberate proscription of these two actions:

Don’t look back.

And don’t look down.

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