Do the Work

by Steven Pressfield

Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.

Here’s a trick that screenwriters use: work backwards. Begin at the finish.

We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is.

Set forth without fear and without self-censorship.

Suspending self-judgment doesn’t just mean blowing off the “You suck” voice in our heads. It also means liberating ourselves from conventional expectations—from what we think our work “ought” to be or “should” look like.

Forget rational thought. Play. Play like a child.

A work-in-progress generates its own energy field.

Assistance is the universal, immutable force of creative manifestation, whose role since the Big Bang has been to translate potential into being, to convert dreams into reality.

It means you are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head.

Resistance is the shadow cast by the innovative self’s sun.

align ourselves with these universal forces of Assistance—this dream, this passion to make the unmanifest manifest—and ride them into battle against the dragon.

We have no objective milestones or points of validation.

A crash means we’re at the threshold of learning something, which means we’re getting better, we’re acquiring the wisdom of our craft. A

In the belly of the beast, we remind ourselves of two axioms: The problem is not us. The problem is the problem. Work the problem.

Because finishing is the critical part of any project. If we can’t finish, all our work is for nothing.

asking if I was going to quit. Hell, no! “Then be happy,” he said. “You’re where you wanted to be, aren’t you? So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.”

Slay that dragon once, and he will never have power over you again.