Turning Pro

by Steven Pressfield

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.

Fear and shame hung over me and over that house, just as they permeated every crack and cranny of the halfway house back in town. I was terrified of sitting down at that Smith-Corona and trying to write something, and ashamed of myself because I knew I was terrified, but I was still too scared to act. My ambition was to write, but I had buried it so deep that it only peeked out in dreams and moments of insight that appeared at odd instants and then vanished without a trace. Everything I was doing in my outer life was a consequence and an expression of that terror and that shame.

Sometimes, when we're terrified of embracing our true calling, we'll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us. Are you pursuing a shadow career? Are you getting your Ph.D. in Elizabethan studies because you're afraid to write the tragedies and comedies that you know you have inside you? Are you living the drugs-and-booze half of the musician's life, without actually writing the music? Are you working in a support capacity for an innovator because you're afraid to risk becoming an innovator yourself? If you're dissatisfied with your current life, ask yourself what your current life is a metaphor for. That metaphor will point you toward your true calling.

In my late twenties and early thirties, I drove trucks for a living. I drove up and down the East Coast out of Durham, North Carolina, and later cross-country, based out of Seaside, California. I was in deadly earnest and committed 100% to making my life as an over-the-road trucker. What I was really doing was running away from writing. Driving trucks was for me a shadow version of writing, because being a truck driver was, in my imagination, powerful and manly (just as I imagined being a writer would be). It was interesting; it was never boring. It was a career I could take pride in, an occupation that felt right to me.

No one is born a pro. You've got to fall before you hit bottom, and sometimes that fall can be a hell of a ride. So here's to blackouts and divorces, to lost jobs and lost cash and lost self-respect. Here's to time on the street. Here's to years we can't remember. Here's to bad friends and cheating spouses — and to us, too, for being guilty of both. Becoming a pro, in the end, is nothing grander than growing up. What exactly are shadow careers? What is the amateur life? What are addictions and obsessions and displacement activities? How can we learn from them, and profit from them, when we finally put our days on the street behind us and begin to live our real lives?

In the shadow life, we live in denial and we act by addiction. We pursue callings that take us nowhere and permit ourselves to be controlled by compulsions that we cannot understand (or are not aware of) and whose outcomes serve only to keep us caged, unconscious and going nowhere. The shadow life is the life of the amateur. In the shadow life we pursue false objects and act upon inverted ambitions. 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.

The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habits. The human being is a creature of habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones. We can trade in the habits of the amateur and the addict for the practice of the professional and the committed artist or entrepreneur. It may help, as a jumping-off place, to consider the interior world of the most passionate and tragic creature of habit — the addict.

Many artists are addicts, and vice versa. Many are artists in one breath and addicts in another. What's the difference? The addict is the amateur; the artist is the professional. Both addict and artist are dealing with the same material, which is the pain of being human and the struggle against self-sabotage. But the addict/amateur and the artist/professional deal with these elements in fundamentally different ways. (When I say "addiction," by the way, I'm not referring only to the serious, clinical maladies of alcoholism, drug dependence, domestic abuse and so forth. Web-surfing counts too. So do compulsive texting, sexting, twittering and Facebooking.) Distractions. Displacement activities.

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. Miyamoto Musashi's dojo was smaller than my living room. Things became superfluous for him. In the end he didn't even need a sword.

The amateur is an egotist. He takes the material of his personal pain and uses it to draw attention to himself. He creates a "life," a "character," a "personality."

The artist and the professional, on the other hand, have turned a corner in their minds. They have succeeded in stepping back from themselves. They have grown so bored with themselves and so sick of their petty bullshit that they can manipulate those elements the way a HazMat technician handles weapons-grade plutonium. They manipulate them for the good of others. What were once their ...

What makes this moment so soul-precarious is that most of us are unconscious, in the event, of both our aspirations and our Resistance. We're asleep. We know only that something is wrong and we don't know how to fix it. We're restless. We're bored. We're angry. We burn to accomplish something great, but we don't know where to begin and, even if we did, we 'd be so terrified that we still couldn't take a step. Enter: a drink, a lover, a habit. Addiction replaces aspiration. The quick fix wins out over the long, slow haul.

Something that's boring goes nowhere. It travels in a circle. It never arrives at its destination. The repetitive nature of the shadow life and of addiction is what makes both so tedious. No traction is ever gained. No progress is made. We're stuck in the same endlessly-repeating loop. That's what makes addiction like hell. All addictions share, among others, two primary qualities. 1. They embody repetition without progress. 2. They produce incapacity as a payoff.

There's a difference between failing (which is a natural and normal part of life) and being addicted to failure. When we're addicted to failure, we enjoy it. Each time we fail, we are secretly relieved. There's a glamour to failure that has been mined for centuries by starving poets, romantic suicides, and other self-defined doomed souls. This glamour inverts failure and turns it into "success." I've had a romance with this goddess myself. Have you? The lure of failure can be as intoxicating as the hardest of hard-core narcotics. Its payoff is incapacity. When we fail, we are off the hook. We have given ourselves a Get Out Of Jail Free card. We no longer have to ask and answer Stanislavsky's famous three questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want?

Resistance hates two qualities above all others: concentration and depth. Why? Because when we work with focus and we work deep, we succeed. How did Tom Brady master the art of the forward pass? How did Picasso paint? How did Yo-Yo Ma learn the cello? Resistance wants to keep us shallow and unfocused. So it makes the superficial and the vain intoxicating. Have you checked your e-mail in the last half hour? When you sit down to do your work, do you leave your web connection on? It can be fatal, keeping up with the Kardashians.

was 31. I had saved up $2,700 and moved from New York City to a little town in northern California. I rented a house behind another house for $105 a month. I had my old Chevy van, my Smith-Corona typewriter, and my cat, Mo. Every Monday morning I walked into the village to the Bank of America and took out $25. That sum lasted me for the next seven days. I didn't talk to anybody during my year of turning pro. I didn't hang out. I just worked. I had a book in mind and I had decided I would finish it or kill myself. I could not run away again, or let people down again, or let myself down again. This was it, do or die. I had no TV, no radio, no music. No sex, no sports. I didn't read the newspaper. For breakfast I had liver and eggs. I was like Rocky. In the early mornings, I'd walk down River Road to my friend Paul Rink's house, which was actually a camper-shell mounted on a pickup. Paul was a writer. He had been a friend of Henry Miller's in Big Sur. Paul taught me what books to read and what writers to pay attention to. That was what I did at night. I read all the stuff that you're supposed to read in college but never do, or if you do, you're not paying attention. I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Turgenev. I read Cervantes and Flaubert and Stendhal and Knut Hamsun, and I read every American except Faulkner. I was writing on my ancient Smith-Corona, which had a heavy carriage that physically shuttled back and forth as I typed. My cat Mo would curl up on the desk, on the le...

In the military, to deliberately inflict injury upon oneself so as to avoid service is called malingering. It's a court-martial offense that is punishable, in some armies, by death. The habits and addictions of the amateur are conscious or unconscious self-inflicted wounds. Their payoff is incapacity. When we take our M1903 Springfield and blow a hole in our foot, we no longer have to face the real fight of our lives, which is to become who we are and to realize our destiny and our calling.

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. But mostly what we all fear as amateurs is being excluded from the tribe, i.e., the gang, the posse, mother and father, family, nation, race, religion. The amateur fears that if he turns pro and lives out his calling, he will have to live up to who he really is and what he is truly capable of. The amateur is terrified that if the tribe should discover who he really is, he will be kicked out into the cold to die.

The professional, by the way, is just as terrified as the amateur. In fact the professional may be more terrified because she is more acutely conscious of herself and of her interior universe. The difference — see Part Three — lies in the way the professional acts in the face of fear.

The amateur is a narcissist. He views the world hierarchically. He continuously rates himself in relation to others, becoming self-inflated if his fortunes rise, and desperately anxious if his star should fall. The amateur sees himself as the hero, not only of his own movie, but of the movies of others. He insists (in his mind, if nowhere else) that others share this view. The amateur competes with others and believes that he cannot rise unless a competitor falls. If he had the power, the amateur would eat the world — even knowing that to do so would mean his own extinction.

Though the amateur's identity is seated in his own ego, that ego is so weak that it cannot define itself based on its own self-evaluation. The amateur allows his worth and identity to be defined by others. The amateur craves third-party validation. The amateur is tyrannized by his imagined conception of what is expected of him. He is imprisoned by what he believes he ought to think, how he ought to look, what he ought to do, and who he ought to be.

Paradoxically, the amateur's self-inflation prevents him from acting. He takes himself and the consequences of his actions so seriously that he paralyzes himself. The amateur fears, above all else, becoming (and being seen and judged as) himself. Becoming himself means being different from others and thus, possibly, violating the expectations of the tribe, without whose acceptance and approval, he believes, he cannot survive. By these means, the amateur remains inauthentic. He remains someone other than who he really is.

The amateur has a long list of fears. Near the top are two: Solitude and silence. The amateur fears solitude and silence because she needs to avoid, at all costs, the voice inside her head that would point her toward her calling and her destiny. So she seeks distraction. The amateur prizes shallowness and shuns depth. The culture of Twitter and Facebook is paradise for the amateur.

There was a popular bumper sticker a few years ago: Too much ain't enough. Too much ain't enough, and too soon is too late. The amateur, the addict and the obsessive all want what they want now. The corollary is that, when they get it, it doesn't work. The restlessness doesn't abate, the pain doesn't go away, the fear comes back as soon as the buzz wears off.

Because the amateur is so powerfully identified with herself, she finds it extremely difficult to view the world through the eyes of others. The amateur is often unkind or insensitive to others, but she saves her most exquisite cruelty for herself. The amateur's fear eclipses her compassion for others and for herself.