Do the Work

by Steven Pressfield

On the field of the Self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.

other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.

fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.

The last thing we want is to remain as we are.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

We will sink our junkyard-dog teeth into Resistance’s ass and not let go, no matter how hard he kicks.

You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.

Only two things will remain with us across the river: our inhering genius and the hearts we love. In other words, what we do and whom we do it for.

Don’t prepare. Begin. Remember, our enemy is not lack of preparation; it’s not the difficulty of the project or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account. The enemy is Resistance. The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now.

Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.

Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms. Conception occurs at the primal level. I’m not being facetious when I stress, throughout this book, that it is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart.

If you and I want to do great stuff, we can’t let ourselves work small.

Start playing from power. We can always dial it back later. If we don’t swing for the seats from the start, we’ll never be able to drive a fastball into the upper deck.

Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.

Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?

Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.

What is the Eiffel Tower about? What is the space shuttle about? What is Nude Descending a Staircase about? Your movie, your album, your new startup … what is it about? When you know that, you’ll know the end state. And when you know the end state, you’ll know the steps to take to get there.

End first, then beginning and middle. That’s your startup, that’s your plan for competing in a triathlon, that’s your ballet.

Those are not your thoughts. They are chatter. They are Resistance.

Resistance is an active, intelligent, protean, malign force—tireless, relentless, and inextinguishable—whose sole object is to stop us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals. The universe is not indifferent. It is actively hostile.

We must respect Resistance, like Sigourney Weaver respected the Alien, or St. George respected the dragon.

Do research early or late. Don’t stop working. Never do research in prime working time.

Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.

Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps; then fill in the gaps between the gaps.

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.

The inner critic? His ass is not permitted in the building.

You are not allowed to judge yourself.

Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional, crazy heart.

Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time.

Forget rational thought. Play. Play like a child.

A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work; you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope. This is serious juju.

Stephen King has confessed that he works every day. Fourth of July, his birthday, Christmas.

How much time can you spare each day? For that interval, close the door and—short of a family emergency or the outbreak of World War III—don’t let ANYBODY in.

At least twice a week, I pause in the rush of work and have a meeting with myself. (If I were part of a team, I’d call a team meeting.) I ask myself, again, of the project: “What is this damn thing about?”

Have that meeting twice a week. Pause and reflect. “What is this project about?” “What is its theme?” “Is every element serving that theme?”

And then we hit the wall. Out of nowhere, terror strikes. Our fragile confidence collapses. Nighttime: we wake in a sweat. That “You suck” voice is back, howling in our head.

We’re poised at the brink of a creative breakthrough and we can’t stand it. The prospect of success looms. We freak. Why did we start this project? We must have been insane. Who encouraged us? We want to wring their necks.

In our feel-good, social-safety-net, high-self-esteem world, you and I have been brainwashed to believe that there is no such thing as evil, that human nature is perfectible, that everyone and everything can be made nice. We have been conditioned to imagine that the darkness that we see in the world and feel in our own hearts is only an illusion, which can be dispelled by the proper care, the proper love, the proper education, and the proper funding.

What does that mean? It means you are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head.

The enemy is in you, but it is not you. No moral judgment attaches to the possession of it. You “have” Resistance the same way you “have” a heartbeat. You are blameless. You retain free will and the capacity to act.

The opposite of fear is love—love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.

Love of the idea.

“How bad do you want it?”

“Why do you want it?”

You must also leave behind: All grievances related to aspects of yourself dependent on the accident of birth, e.g., how neglected/abused/ mistreated/unloved/poor/ill-favored etc. you were when you were born. All sense of personal exceptionalness dependent on the accident of birth, e.g., how rich/cute/tall/thin/smart/charming/loveable you were when you were born. All of the previous two, based on any subsequent (i.e., post-birth) acquisition of any of these qualities, however honorably or meritoriously earned. The only items you get to keep are love for the work, will to finish, and passion to serve the ethical, creative Muse.

You and I have a bell hanging over us, too, here in the belly of the beast. Will we ring it?

Our greatest fear is fear of success. When we are succeeding—that is, when we have begun to overcome our self-doubt and self-sabotage, when we are advancing in our craft and evolving to a higher level—that’s when panic strikes.

In the belly of the beast, we remind ourselves of two axioms: The problem is not us. The problem is the problem. Work the problem.

Why does Seth Godin place so much emphasis on “shipping”? Because finishing is the critical part of any project. If we can’t finish, all our work is for nothing. When we ship, we declare our stuff ready for prime time. We pack it in a FedEx box and send it out into the world. Our movie hits the screens, our smart phone arrives in the stores, our musical opens on Broadway. It takes balls of steel to ship.