Do the Work

by Steven Pressfield

that it is better to be primitive

Rowling was primitive then turned smart. Killed the magic.

better to be stupid than to be smart.

That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with.

Not -there yet

but birth itself will always take place amid chaos, pain, and blood.

Hmmm

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.

This. Its why I need my legs better.

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

Can I start now

When we think, “This notion is completely off the wall … should I even take the time to work on this?” … the answer is yes.

Two at once. Do I have the courage?

Your work-in-progress produces its own gravitational field,

The un-indifferent universe has stepped in to counter Resistance. It has introduced a positive opposing force.

How do I do this when my body is falling down.

Assistance is the universal, immutable

force of creative manifestation, whose role since the Big Bang has been to translate potential into being, ...

day. Fourth of July, his birthday, Christmas.

Hmm.

“thrashing” (a very evocative term)—momentum is everything.

Keep refining your understanding of the theme; keep narrowing it down.

This is the thorniest nut of any creative endeavor—

the one that evokes the fiercest...

More books, movies, new businesses, etc. get screwed up (or rather, screw themselves up) due to failure to confront and solve this issue than for any other reason.

More questions-

“As soon as I figure out the theme of my play, I write it down on a thin strip of paper and Scotch-tape it to the front of my typewriter. After that, nothing goes into that play that isn’t on-theme.”

Cool idea

Have that meeting twice a week. Pause and

reflect. “What is this project about?” “What is its theme?” “Is every element serving that theme?”

I need to start having staff meeting.

But in that one moment, we, the audience, see the character’s entire life.

Reread.

That “You suck” voice is back, howling in our head.

We have turned round Cape Horn and the gales

are shrieking; ice encases the masts; sails and sheets are frozen. The storm howls dead in our faces. There’s no way back and no way forward.

is that there is an enemy.

which can be dispelled by the proper care, the proper love, the proper education, and the proper funding.

There is an enemy. There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us.

You can name it a million things. Devil, Leviathon, darma, the beasr. Whatever. Procrastimation. Name doesn't chsnge it.

aim

is to kill.

Resistance is not a peripheral opponent.

You can board a spaceship to Pluto and settle, all by yourself, into a perfect artist’s cottage ten zillion miles from Earth. Resistance will still be with you.

Think of all the people who do this. Even before the internet writers had distractions, writers block, you name it.

They are not your “fault.” You have done

nothing “wrong.” You have committed no “sin.”

If you’ve got a head, you’ve got a voice of Resistance inside it.

You “have” Resistance the same way you “have” a heartbeat.

You are blameless. You retain free will and the capacity to act.

The dragon belches fire and lives only to block you from reaching the gold of wisdom and freedom, which it has been charged to guard to its final breath.

She’s us, she’s our higher nature, our Self. In the face of Resistance, we have to remember her and hang onto her and draw strength from her.

So hard to do. Resistence is so loud and omnipresent.

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.

All of these characters or forces represent Assistance. They are symbols for the unmanifested. They stand for a dream.

The love is the passion and enthusiasm that fill your heart when you envision your project’s completion.

As I lay here with my stiff and nearly dysfinctional legs I recall last night the illness Jacques Lucerne had. It was a fire to clarify. Is this my fire. Do the next projects need this fire? Does this first project also need it. Can I find it?

Sometimes when Resistance is kicking my butt (which it does, all the time),

Thank you.

It can only have been the dream. Love of the idea.

Resistance is that we can align ourselves with these universal forces of Assistance—this dream, this passion to make the unmanifest manifest—and ride them into battle against the dragon.

I wonder if you talked to resistance the same way you acknowledge a person.

“How bad do you want it?”

The only items you get to keep

are love for the work, will to finish, and passion to serve the ethical, creative Muse.

I just have to brave up.

The Big Crash is so predictable, across all fields of enterprise, that we can practically set our watches by

Bank on it. It’s gonna happen.