Do the Work

by Steven Pressfield

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 fallible, mortal self—but came to him instead from some source that he could neither command nor control, only invoke. When an artist says “Trust the soup,” she means let go of the need to control (which we can’t do anyway) and put your faith instead in the Source, the Mystery, the Quantum Soup. The deeper the source we work from, the better our stuff will be—and the more transformative it will be for us and for those we share it with.

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. W. H. Murray said: Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can,

begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now.

Outline it fast. Now. On instinct. Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.

Fill in the gaps. David Lean famously declared that a feature film should have seven or eight major sequences. That’s a pretty good guideline for our play, our album, our State of the Union address. A video game should have seven or eight major movements; so should the newest high-tech gadget, or the latest fighter plane. Our new house should have seven or eight major spaces. A football game, a prize fight, a tennis match—if they’re going to be entertaining—should have seven or eight major swings of momentum. That’s what we need now. We need to fill in the gaps with a series of great entertaining and enlightening scenes, sequences,

Do research early or late. Don’t stop working. Never do research in prime working time. Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance. Soak up what you need to fill in the gaps. Keep working.

One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP.

There is an enemy. There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us.

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.

Then inevitably … Everything crashes. If our project is a movie, the star checks into rehab. If it’s a business venture, the bank pulls our financing. If it’s a rodeo, our star bull runs away with a heifer. The Big Crash is so predictable, across all fields of enterprise, that we can practically set our watches by it.

Crashes Are Good Crashes are hell, but in the end they’re good for us. A crash means we have failed. We gave it everything we had and we came up short. A crash does not mean we are losers. A crash means we have to grow. 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 crash compels us to figure out what works and what doesn’t work—and to understand the difference. We got ourselves into this mess by mistakes we made at the start. How? Were we lazy? Inattentive? Did we mean well but forget to factor in human nature? Did we assess reality incorrectly? Whatever the cause, the Big Crash compels us to go back now and solve the problem that we either created directly or set into motion unwittingly at the outset.

Our greatest fear is fear of success.