Turning Pro

by Steven Pressfield

Distractions. Displacement activities. When we're living as amateurs, we're running away from our calling — meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves.

Because to follow a calling requires work. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure.

The pre-addictive individual — i.e., you and I when we're young — experiences a calling. To art, to service, to honorable sacrifice. In other words, we experience positive aspiration. A vision of the higher, realized self we might become. The intimation of this calling is followed immediately by the apparition of Resistance. Fear. Self-doubt. Self-sabotage.

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.

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 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.

THE AMATEUR IS ASLEEP

The force that can save the amateur is awareness, particularly self-awareness. But the amateur understands, however dimly, that if she truly achieved this knowledge, she would be compelled to act upon it.

Resistance is diabolical. It can harness our drive for greatness and our instinct for professionalism and yoke them, instead, to a shadow profession, whose demands will keep us from turning our energies toward their true course.

LIFE GETS VERY SIMPLE WHEN YOU TURN PRO

What happens when we turn pro is, we finally listen to that still, small voice inside our heads. At last we find the courage to identify the secret dream or love or bliss that we have known all along was our passion, our calling, our destiny.

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. We're fleeing from our fear into an addiction or a shadow career. What changes when we turn pro is we stop fleeing. Be

When we turn pro, everything becomes simple. Our aim centers on the ordering of our days in such a way that we overcome the fears that have paralyzed us in the past.

We now structure our hours not to flee from fear, but to confront it and overcome it. We plan our activities in order to accomplish an aim. And we bring our will

THE PROFESSIONAL WILL NOT BE DISTRACTED The amateur tweets. The pro works.

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,

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.

You and I may have to operate in a more chaotic universe. But the object remains the same: to approach the mystery via order, commitment and passionate intention. 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.

In truth, I practice my own form of shamanism every day. As an artist, I seek to access unseen powers. Evil forces are out there — Resistance, self-doubt, self-sabotage. How many other malign entities are hovering each morning

Then there are the good forces. Inspiration, enthusiasm, courage. New ideas, brilliant breakthroughs, insights, intuitions. Where do these come from? I don't know. How can I access them? I have no clue.

"There is a second self inside you — an inner, shadow Self. This self doesn't care about you. It doesn't love you. It has its own agenda, and it will kill you. It will kill you like cancer. It will kill you to achieve its agenda, which is to prevent you from actualizing your Self, from becoming who you really are. This shadow self is called, in the Kabbalistic lexicon, the yetzer hara. The yetzer hara, Steve, is what you would call Resistance."

Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the lower realm to the upper, from the ego to the Self.