Do the Work

by Steven Pressfield

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.

We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or purpose that we must follow before all others.

Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.

Plain old stubbornness. I like the idea of stubbornness because it’s less lofty than “tenacity” or “perseverance.” We don’t have to be heroes to be stubborn. We can just be pains in the butt. When we’re stubborn, there’s no quit in us. We’re mean. We’re mulish. We’re ornery.

The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis.

The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor. That’s the place we inhabit as artists

Better to have written a lousy ballet than to have composed no ballet at all.

I blame Communism. I blame Fascism. I blame psychotherapy. They—and a boatload of other well-intentioned ideologies that evolved during the mass-culture, industrialized, dehumanizing epoch of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—all posited the same fantasy. They all preached that human nature was perfectible and that, thereby, evil could be overcome. It can’t.

One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP. Don’t worry about quality. Act, don’t reflect. Momentum is everything. Get to THE END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with his pitchfork. Believe me, he is.

It progresses in two stages: action and reflection. Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time.

Ignore false negatives. Ignore false positives. Both are Resistance.

Resistance will still be with you. The enemy is inside you.

Then get back to work. Begin the next one tomorrow. Stay stupid. Trust the soup. Start before you’re ready.