Turning Pro

by Steven Pressfield

The life we call "normal" isn't normal at all. A spouse and kids, a mortgage, a 9-to-5 job...who said that was life? What's so great about working in a factory or a cubicle?

When we're addicted to failure, we enjoy it. Each time we fail, we are secretly relieved.

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.

But when we're addicted to money, we become hooked on the metaphor. Is money how we keep score? Is it magic? Is wealth a currency that opens doors, realizes possibilities, produces transcendence?

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.

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.

What is the pain of being human? It's the condition of being suspended between two worlds and being unable to fully enter into either.

The pain of being human is that we're all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.

I need this tattooed on my body.

The artist takes a different tack. She tries to reach the upper realm not by chemicals but by labor and love.

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.

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 professional may be more terrified because she is more acutely conscious of herself and of her interior universe.

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 competes with others and believes that he cannot rise unless a competitor falls.

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.

By these means, the amateur remains inauthentic. He remains someone other than who he really is.

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 IS JEALOUS 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.

In his heart, the amateur knows he's hiding. He knows he was meant for better things. He knows he has turned away from his higher nature. If the amateur had empathy for himself, he could look in the mirror and not hate what he sees. Achieving this compassion is the first powerful step toward moving from being an amateur to being a pro.

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've waited for permission. I've turned in work and awaited, trembling, the judgment of others.

Exile, failure, and banishment can be good things sometimes, because they force us to act from our own center and not from someone else's. I applaud your story of how you hit bottom, because at the bottom there's no one there but yourself.

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. To act upon this self-awareness would mean defining herself, i.e., differentiating herself from the tribe and thus making herself vulnerable to rejection, expulsion, and all the other fears that self-definition elicits.

Here's the truth: the tribe doesn't give a shit. There is no tribe.

Our lives are entirely up to us.

Sometimes the reason we choose these careers (consciously or unconsciously) is to produce incapacity.

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.

This, we acknowledge at last, is what we are most afraid of. This is what we know in our hearts we have to do.

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.

When we turn pro, we stop running from our fears. We turn around and face them.

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.

Turning pro is like kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking. It's a decision, a decision to which we must re-commit every day.

Each day, the professional understands, he will wake up facing the same demons, the same Resistance, the same self-sabotage, the same tendencies to shadow activities and amateurism that he has always faced. The difference is that now he will not yield to those temptations. He will have mastered them, and he will continue to master them.

It hit me that I had turned a corner. I was okay. I would be okay from here on. Do you understand? I hadn't written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn't matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat down and done my work.

The professional self-validates

The professional reinvents herself

The amateur spends his time in the past and the future. He permits himself to fear and to hope. The professional has taught himself to banish these distractions.

The professional does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it. He knows that when the Muse sees his butt in the chair, she will deliver.

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.

The goddess sees this energy and she rewards it.

That place that we write from (or paint from or compose from or innovate from) is far deeper than our petty personal egos. That place is beyond intellect. It is deeper than rational thought. It is instinct. It is intuition. It is imagination.

You and I can do it, too. We can work over our heads. Not only can we, but we must. The best pages I've ever written are pages I can't remember writing.

Good things happen when we trust the Mystery.

We're in this for the long haul. Our work is a practice. One bad day is nothing to us. Ten bad days are nothing. In the scheme of our lifelong practice, twenty-four hours when we can't gain yardage is only a speed bump. We'll forget it by breakfast tomorrow and be back again, ready to hurl our bodies into the fray.

As an artist, I seek to access unseen powers. Evil forces are out there — Resistance, self-doubt, self-sabotage.

Does he serve the gods like I do? Does he regard his gifts as a blessing or a curse?