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.

Over the years, my friend has developed a philosophy — you could almost call it a religion — about pursuing the sublime through love. This philosophy is so complex and so convincing that she can not only persuade herself of its reality, but you or me too if we sit still long enough to listen to her. She is mesmerizing. At the same time, the experience is bone-numbingly tedious, watching her transit from one great love to the next, with each drama playing out to exactly the same cadence, and each one culminating in exactly the same dead end. 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. 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.

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 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. 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.

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.

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. As mortal flesh, you and I cannot ascend to the upper realm. That sphere belongs to the gods. But we can't put it out of our minds either. We can't escape intimations and half-memories of...what? Some prior sojourn, before birth perhaps, among the immortals or the stars. Our lot, instead, is to dwell here in the lower realm, the sphere of the temporal and the material — the time-bound dimension of instincts and animal passions, of hate and desire, aspiration and fear. You and I are called to the upper realm (and it is calling to us), but we're having a pretty good time (sometimes) down here in the sphere of the senses. Bottom line: we're marooned in the middle, stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.

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

The artist takes a different tack. She tries to reach the upper realm not by chemicals but by labor and love. (When I say "artist," I mean as well the lover, the holy man, the engineer, the mother, the warrior, the inventor, the singer, the sage, and the voyager. And remember, addict and artist can be one and the same and often are, moment to moment.) 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.

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.

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 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.

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 amateur believes that, before she can act, she must receive permission from some Omnipotent Other — a lover or spouse, a parent, a boss, a figure of authority.

The amateur and the addict focus exclusively on the product and the payoff. Their concern is what's in it for them, and how soon and how cheaply they can get it. Consumer culture is designed to exploit the amateur. If you don't believe me, watch ten minutes of TV or scroll through any magazine or online shopping site.

Because the amateur owns nothing of spirit in the present, she either looks forward to a hopeful future or backward to an idyllic past. But the past evoked by the amateur is make-believe. It never existed. It's a highlight reel that she edited together from events that almost took place or should have occurred. In a way, the amateur's re-imagined past is worse when it's true. Because then it's really gone. 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.

Have you ever followed a guru or a mentor? I have. I've given my power away to lovers and spouses. I've sat by the phone. I've waited for permission. I've turned in work and awaited, trembling, the judgment of others. I've given away my power subtly, with a glance that was perceptible to no one. And I've given it away overtly and shamelessly, for all the world to see. 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.

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. Fear of self-definition is what keeps an amateur an amateur and what keeps an addict an addict.

The amateur dreads becoming who she really is because she fears that this new person will be judged by others as "different." The tribe will declare us "weird" or "queer" or "crazy." The tribe will reject us. Here's the truth: the tribe doesn't give a shit. There is no tribe.

Sometimes the reason we choose these careers (consciously or unconsciously) is to produce incapacity. 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. Sometimes it's easier to be a professional in a shadow career than it is to turn pro in our real calling.

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.

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. 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 to bear so that we stick to this resolution. This changes our days completely. It changes what time we get up and it changes what time we go to bed. It changes what we do and what we don't do. It changes the activities we engage in and with what attitude we engage in them. It changes what we read and what we eat. It changes the shape of our bodies. When we were amateurs, our life was about drama, about denial, and about distraction. Our days were simultaneously full to the bursting point and achingly, heartbreakingly empty. But we are not amateurs any more. We are different, and everyone in our lives sees it.

Twelve-step programs say "One Day at a Time." The professional says the same thing. 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.

In the post-epiphanal moment, we have two things going for us that we didn't have ninety seconds earlier: we have reality and we have humility. These are powerful allies. And we have a third force working in our favor: shame. Why is shame good? Because shame can produce the final element we need to change our lives: will. Epiphanies hurt. There's no glory to them. They only make good stories at AA meetings or late at night among other foot soldiers in the trenches. These soldiers know. Each has his own story, of that ghastly, hideous, excruciating moment when it all turned around for him.

The professional displays courage, not only in the roles she embraces (which invariably scare the hell out of her) or the sacrifices she makes (of time, love, family) or even in the enduring of criticism, blame, envy, and lack of understanding, but above all in the confronting of her own doubts and demons. The linebacker and the Army Ranger go into action as part of a team. But the artist and the entrepreneur enter combat alone. I take my hat off to every man or woman who does this.

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.

We're all nothing without the Muse. But the pro has learned that the goddess prizes labor and dedication beyond any theatrical seeking of her favors. 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.