Do the Work

by Steven Pressfield

The following is a list of the forces arrayed against us as artists and entrepreneurs: Resistance (i.e., fear, self-doubt, procrastination, addiction, distraction, timidity, ego and narcissism, self-loathing, perfectionism, etc.) Rational thought Friends and family

The following is a list, in no particular order, of those activities that most commonly elicit Resistance: The pursuit of any calling in writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, however marginal or unconventional. The launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise, for profit or otherwise. Any diet or health regimen. Any program of spiritual advancement. Any activity whose aim is the acquisition of chiseled abdominals. Any course or program designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction. Education of every kind. Any act of political, moral, or ethical courage, including the decision to change for the better some unworthy pattern of thought or conduct in ourselves. The undertaking of any enterprise or endeavor whose aim is to help others. Any act that entails commitment of the heart—the decision to get married, to have a child, to weather a rocky patch in a relationship. The taking of any principled stand in the face of adversity.

Resistance Is Invisible Resistance cannot be seen, heard, touched, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential.

Resistance Is Insidious Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean. It will assume any form, if that’s what it takes to deceive you. Resistance will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

Resistance Is Impersonal Resistance is not out to get you personally. It doesn’t know who you are and doesn’t care. Resistance is a force of nature. It acts objectively. Though it feels malevolent, Resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same laws as stars. When we marshal our forces to combat Resistance, we must remember this.

Resistance Is Infallible Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or purpose that we must follow before all others. Rule of thumb: The more import...

Resistance Is Universal We’re wrong if we think we’re the only ones struggling with Resistance. Everyone who ha...

Resistance Never Sleeps Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five. In other words, fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, w...

Resistance Plays for Keeps Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on this earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resi...

Rational Thought Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneur’s worst enemy. Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious. Homer began both The Iliad and The Odyssey with a prayer to the Muse. The Greeks’ greatest poet understood that genius did not reside within his fal...

Friends and Family The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are. They are invested in maintaining us as we are. The last thing we want is to remain as we are. If you’re reading this book, it’s because you sense inside you a second self, an unlived you. With some exceptions (God bless them), friends and family are the enemy of this unmanifested you, this unborn self, this future being.

Our Allies Enough for now about the antagonists arrayed against us. Let’s consider the champions on our side: Stupidity Stubbornness Blind faith Passion Assistance (the opposite of Resistance) Friends and family

Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

Don’t think. Act.

We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish...

Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.

When we’re stubborn, there’s no quit in us. We’re mean. We’re mulish. We’re ornery. We’re in till the finish.

Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel. Resistance wants to rattle that faith. Resistance wants to destroy it.

There’s an exercise that Patricia Ryan Madson describes in her wonderful book, Improv Wisdom. (Ms. Madson taught improvisational theater at Stanford to standing-room only classes for twenty years.) Here’s the exercise: Imagine a box with a lid. Hold the box in your hand. Now open it. What’s inside? It might be a frog, a silk scarf, a gold coin of Persia. But here’s the trick: no matter how many times you open the box, there is always something in it. Ask me my religion. That’s it.

You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true. Fear saps passion. When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.

When art and inspiration and success and fame and money have come and gone, who still loves us—and whom do we love? Only two things will remain with us across the river: our inhering genius and the hearts we love. In other words, what we do and whom we do it for.

Start before you’re ready. Good things happen when we start before we’re ready. For one thing, we show huevos. Our blood heats up. Courage begets more courage. The gods, witnessing our boldness, look on in approval.

Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.

That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with. The hospital room may be spotless and sterile, but birth itself will always take place amid chaos, pain, and blood.

Start playing from power. We can always dial it back later. If we don’t swing for the seats from the start, we’ll never be able to drive a fastball into the upper deck.

He meant don’t overthink. Don’t overprepare. Don’t let research become Resistance. Don’t spend six months compiling a thousand-page tome detailing the emotional matrix and family history of every character in your book. Outline it fast. Now. On instinct. Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.

Ready to roll? We need only to remember our three mantras: Stay primitive. Trust the soup. Swing for the seats. And our final-final precept: 4. Be ready for Resistance.

They all preached that human nature was perfectible and that, thereby, evil could be overcome. It can’t. When you and I set out to create anything—art, commerce, science, love—or to advance in the direction of a higher, nobler version of ourselves, we uncork from the universe, ineluctably, an equal and opposite reaction. That reaction is Resistance. Resistance is an active, intelligent, protean, malign force—tireless, relentless, and inextinguishable—whose sole object is to stop us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals.

The universe is not indifferent. It is actively hostile.

Do research early or late. Don’t stop working. Never do research in prime working time.

One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP. Don’t worry about quality. Act, don’t reflect. Momentum is everything. Get to THE END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with his pitchfork. Believe me, he is.

Our job is not to control our idea; our job is to figure out what our idea is (and wants to be)—and then bring it into being.

I said a few chapters ago that the universe is not indifferent; it is actively hostile. This is true. But behind every law of nature stands an equal and opposite law. The universe is also actively benevolent. You should be feeling this now. You should be feeling a tailwind. The opposite of Resistance is Assistance.

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.

I ask myself, again, of the project: “What is this damn thing about?” Keep refining your understanding of the theme; keep narrowing it down. This is the thorniest nut of any creative endeavor—and the one that evokes the fiercest Resistance. It is pure hell to answer this question.

Have that meeting twice a week. Pause and reflect. “What is this project about?” “What is its theme?” “Is every element serving that theme?”

Principle Number One: There Is an Enemy The first principle of Resistance is that there is an enemy.

There is an enemy. There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us. Step one is to recognize this. This recognition alone is enormously powerful. It saved my life, and it will save yours.

Principle Number Two: This Enemy Is Implacable The hostile, malicious force that we’re experiencing now is not a joke. It is not to be trifled with or taken lightly. It is for real. In the words of my dear friend Rabbi Mordecai Finley: “It will kill you. It will kill you like cancer.” This enemy is intelligent, protean, implacable, inextinguishable, and utterly ruthless and destructive. Its aim is not to obstruct or to hamper or to impede. Its aim is to kill.

Principle Number Three: This Enemy Is Inside You Pat Riley, when he was coach of the Lakers, had a term for all those off-court forces, like fame and ego (not to mention crazed fans, the press, agents, sponsors, and ex-wives), that worked against the players’ chances for on-court success. He called these forces “peripheral opponents.” Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. It does not arise from rivals, bosses, spouses, children, terrorists, lobbyists, or political adversaries. It comes from us. You can board a spaceship to Pluto and settle, all by yourself, into a perfect artist’s cottage ten zillion miles from Earth. Resistance will still be with you. The enemy is inside you.

Principle Number Four: The Enemy Is Inside You, But It Is Not You The fourth axiom of Resistance is that the enemy is inside you, but it is not you. What does that mean? It means you are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head. They are not your “fault.” You have done nothing “wrong.” You have committed no “sin.” I have that same voice in my head. So did Picasso and Einstein. So do Sarah Palin and Lady Gaga and Donald Trump. If you’ve got a head, you’ve got a voice of Resistance inside it. The enemy is in you, but it is not you. No moral judgment attaches to the possession of it. You “have” Resistance the same way you “have” a heartbeat. You are blameless. You retain free will and the capacity to act.

Principle Number Five: The “Real You” Must Duel the “Resistance You” On the field of the Self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon. There is no way to be nice to the dragon, or to reason with it or negotiate with it or beam a white light around it and make it your friend. The dragon belches fire and lives only to block you from reaching the gold of wisdom and freedom, which it has been charged to guard to its final breath. The only intercourse possi...

Principle Number Six: Resistance Arises Second The sixth principle of Resistance (and the key to overcoming it) is that Resistance arises second. What comes first is the idea, the passion, the dream of the work we are so excited to create that it scares the hell out of us. Resistance is the response of the frightened, petty, small-time ego to the brave, generous, magnificent impulse of the creative self. Resistance is the shadow cast by the innovative self’s sun. What does this mean to us—the artists and entrepreneurs in the trenches? It means that before the dragon of Resistance reared its ugly head and breathed fire into our faces, there existed within us a force so potent and life-affirming that it summoned this beast into being, perversely, to combat it. It means that, at bottom, Resistance is not the towering, all-powerful monster before whom we are compelled to quake in terror. Resistance is more like the pain-in-the-ass schoolteacher who won’t let us climb that tree in the playground. But the urge to climb came first. That urge is love. Love for the material, love for the work, love for our brothers and sisters to whom we will offer our work as a gift. In Greek, the word is eros. Life force. Dynamis, creative drive. That mischievous tree-climbing scamp is our friend. She’s us, she’s our higher nature, our Self. In the face of Resistance, we have to remember her and hang onto her and draw strength from her. The opposite of fear is love—love of the challenge, love of ...

Principle Number Seven: The Opposite of Resistance Is Assistance In myths and legends, the knight is always aided in his quest to slay the dragon. Providence brings forth a champion whose role is to assist the hero. Theseus had Ariadne when he fought the Minotaur. Jason had Medea when he went after the Golden Fleece. Odysseus had the goddess Athena to guide him home. In Native American myths, our totemic ally is often an animal—a magic raven, say, or a talking coyote. In Norse myths, an old crone sometimes assists the hero; in African legends, it’s often a bird. The three Wise Men were guided by a star. All of these characters or forces represent Assistance. They are symbols for the unmanifested. They stand for a dream. The dream is your project, your vision, your symphony, your startup. The love is the passion and enthusiasm that fill your heart when you envision your project’s completion.