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This book proposes a third model. The model this book proposes is the model of the amateur and the professional. The thesis of this book is that what ails you and me has nothing to do with being sick or being wrong. What ails us is that we are living our lives as amateurs. The solution, this book suggests, is that we turn pro.
Turning pro is free, but it demands sacrifice. The passage is often accompanied by an interior odyssey whose trials are survived only at great cost, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. We pass through a membrane when we turn pro. It hurts. It's messy and it's scary. We tread in blood when we turn pro.
What we get when we turn pro is, we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and to live out.
Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.
Of course this was all self-delusion. The road was taking me nowhere. I wasn't writing books. I wasn't facing my demons.
Becoming a pro, in the end, is nothing grander than growing up.
In the shadow life, we live in denial and we act by addiction.
The shadow life, the life of the amateur and the addict, is not benign. The longer we cleave to this life, the farther we drift from our true purpose, and the harder it becomes for us to rally the courage to get back.
My friend knows this is Resistance. We've talked about it a hundred times. She's running away from her gifts and she knows it. But the habit is too strong. She has become identified with it. It's who she is.
The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits.
Many artists are addicts, and vice versa. Many are artists in one breath and addicts in another.
Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure.
When you turn pro, your life gets very simple. The Zen monk, the artist, the entrepreneur often lead lives so plain they're practically invisible.
When we turn pro, the energy that once went into the Shadow Novel goes into the real novel. What we once thought was real — "the world," including its epicenter, ourselves — turns out to be only a shadow. And what had seemed to be only a dream becomes, now, the reality of our lives.
The question we need to ask of a shadow career or an addiction is the same question the psychotherapist asks of a dream. "What is our unconscious trying to tell us?"
The entity we're seeking union with is ourselves. We're trying to connect with our true being, our soul, our Self.
Resistance hates two qualities above all others: concentration and depth. Why? Because when we work with focus and we work deep, we succeed.
What you and I are really seeking is our own voice, our own truth, our own authenticity.
Why is trouble so intoxicating? Because its payoff is incapacity.
The payoff for the prisoner is release from the agonizing imperative of identifying, embracing and bringing into material existence the dreams and visions of his own deepest, noblest, and most honorable heart.
The pain of being human is that we're all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.
If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can. This pursuit produces, for the artist, peace of mind.
The amateur is young and dumb. He's innocent, he's good-hearted, he's well-intentioned. The amateur is brave.
He's inventive and resourceful. He's willing to take a chance.
Fear is the primary color of the amateur's interior world. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of looking foolish, fear of under-achieving and fear of over-achieving, fear of poverty, fear of loneliness, fear of death.
The amateur fears, above all else, becoming (and being seen and judged as) himself.
By these means, the amateur remains inauthentic. He remains someone other than who he really is.
The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your work in the present.
The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.
I applaud your story of how you hit bottom, because at the bottom there's no one there but yourself.
Fear of self-definition is what keeps an amateur an amateur and what keeps an addict an addict.
Before we turn pro, our life is dominated by fear and Resistance. We live in a state of denial. We're denying the voice in our heads. We're denying our calling. We're denying who we really are.
When we turn pro, we stop running from our fears. We turn around and face them.
QUALITIES OF THE PROFESSIONAL In The War of Art, I listed the following as habits and qualities that the professional possesses that the amateur doesn't: 1. The professional shows up every day 2. The professional stays on the job all day 3. The professional is committed over the long haul 4. For the professional, the stakes are high and real Further: 5. The professional is patient 6. The professional seeks order 7. The professional demystifies 8. The professional acts in the face of fear 9. The professional accepts no excuses 10. The professional plays it as it lays 11. The professional is
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The amateur hoards his knowledge and his reinforcement. He believes that if he shares what he possesses with others, he will lose it.
The professional is happy to teach. He will gladly lend a hand or deliver a swift kick. But there's a caveat.
First, the pro mindset is a discipline that we use to overcome Resistance. To defeat the self-sabotaging habits of procrastination, self-doubt, susceptibility to distraction, perfectionism, and shallowness, we enlist the self-strengthening habits of order, regularity, discipline, and a constant striving after excellence. That's not hard to understand.
The monk glimpses the face of God not by scaling a peak in the Himalayas, but by sitting still in silence.
Yoga, meditation, and the martial arts access the soul by way of the body. The physical leads to the spiritual. The humble produces the sublime.
It turns into a practice.
When we convene day upon day in the same space at the same time, a powerful energy builds up around us. This is the energy of our intention, of our dedication, of our commitment.
