Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

by Steven Pressfield

When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best?

Tremendous power lies in the simple, physical act of stationing our body at the epicenter of our dream.

Leave the town or city where you live and move to the hub of the creative or entrepreneurial world where your dreams are most likely to come true.

And these will not be friends like your buds back home, whose only contribution to your calling was to distract you and waste your time. These new friends share your dream. They’ll make space for you in their fourth-floor walkup in Williamsburg. They’ll share Ubers with you, and they’ll help you get a job at the Shake Shack. They’ll run lines with you before auditions. In other words, these new friends are your true spiritual companions. They too have a dream—the same dream you have. They too have left home to pursue it. Like you, they are on the Yellow Brick Road.

Glenn Frey was the founding member of the Eagles along with Don Henley. He tells this story (I’m paraphrasing) in the documentary, History of the Eagles. I had moved to LA from Detroit. I was sharing a super-low-rent apartment in Silver Lake with J.D. Souther. We were struggling to establish ourselves as singers and songwriters. The apartment directly below us was Jackson Browne’s. He was as broke and unknown as we were. Frey describes how sound came up through the floor from Jackson Browne’s place to his. All day he could hear Jackson Browne working on songs. Browne would play a song on the piano once, twice, thirty times. He’d stop to make himself a cup of tea (Glenn could hear the whistling teapot), and then he’d go back to the piano and work on the song for another thirty passes, tweaking it and revising it little by little. I realized, This is how you write a song! Not

in one crazed pass, not scribbling notes and losing them in your jacket pockets or your glove compartment . . . but sitting down like a pro and working with the material, changing and improving the song over and over, until you had it exactly the way you wanted it. I love this story because it illustrates how we all really learn. Friends. Role models. People we watch and copy. But the key takeaway is that if Glenn Frey had not moved his ass from Detroit to Los Angeles, he would never have had the chance to cross paths with Jackson Browne—not to mention J.D. Souther and Don Henley and Linda Ronstadt and David Geffen and every one of the dozens of people whose friendship and wisdom helped take him to where his heart wanted to be.

Magic happens when we put our ass in the same space with other dreamers who have already put their asses there.

When you move your material ass to the geographic site of your dream, your peers and potential mentors think at once, This person is serious. She has committed. She has burned the boats. She is one of us.

Questions for ourselves: “How much do we want it?” “What sacrifices are we willing to make to see this project succeed?” “Have we ‘moved’—lock, stock, and barrel—to our inner Paris?”

Commitment = exposure. That’s why people don’t commit. They’re not stupid. They don’t want to risk falling off the mountain.

Don’t try to overcome your fear. Fear cannot be overcome. Instead simply move your body into the physical space you fear . . . and see what happens.

When we shoulder our seabag and stride up the gangplank of the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria, something changes inside us. We might not feel it in the moment because our knees are knocking too violently. But somewhere deep in our DNA, a chemical transformation is taking place.

Work—day-in, day-out exertion and concentration—produces progress and order. That’s a law of the universe.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

The Muse does not count hours. She counts commitment. It is possible to be one hundred percent committed ten percent of the time. The goddess understands.

The goddess doesn’t just want to know where we are. She wants to know what time we start and at what hour we finish. How can she come to our aid if she doesn’t know where and when to find us?

Leave your ego, leave your greed, leave your competitiveness with your comrades, leave your lust for glory and your fear and your self-doubt and your lack of belief in yourself. Leave everything but your will to victory.

It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they’re not aware of time or solitude while they’re chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing type both look up blinking when Mom calls, “Suppertime!”

What fascinates me about the character of Alexander the Great is that he seemed to see the future with such clarity and such intensity as to make it virtually impossible that it would not come true—and that he would be the one to make it so.

THE UNCONSCIOUS IS THE ORGAN OF SELF-REINFORCEMENT You and I have a mentor in our heads. This mentor is our Self, in the Jungian sense. It is the Greater Psyche—the Unconscious—from which come dreams, intuitions, and inspiration. The dream above reinforced me and gave me courage as powerfully as if Gandalf and Merlin and Obi-Wan Kenobi had appeared in my driveway and delivered the same positive message. The Unconscious is the organ of self-reinforcement.

The Warrior Archetype.

Ithaca was in sight. The ship was so close to shore that Odysseus’s men could see the cookfires burning on the hillsides. Their skipper, alas, had chosen this moment to lie down for a snooze. The men knew he had a hide-covered sack that he would let no one touch. They decided to plunder it. What Odysseus’s men didn’t know was that the sack contained the Adverse Winds, gifted to their commander by King Aeolus. When the men opened the bag, the winds rushed out in one furious blow, driving the ship back across every league she had traversed on her long voyage home.

The ego is that part of ourselves that we call “I.” The ego is the part that has a driver’s license, that pays taxes, that worries about its kids’ futures. The ego is rational. The ego thinks. The ego makes plans. The ego worries. The ego fears. The ego perceives reality through the prism of its own “I”-ness. When we try to sing or write or dance from the ego, we fall on our face. It is impossible to sing or write or dance from the ego.

The ego believes that the Material Plane, upon which it exists, is the only reality. The ego believes that time and space are real. The ego believes it is housed within a physical body. The ego believes/knows that it will die. The ego believes/knows that it can be hurt, maimed, mutilated. Because of these, the ego experiences fear. The ego believes it is separate from every other ego. The ego believes it can take an action that harms another person and it—the ego—will be immune from that harm. The primary emotion of the ego is fear.

Dreams come from the Self. Intuition comes from the Self. Ideas come from the Self. Inspiration comes from the Self. War and Peace came from the Self. The Ninth Symphony came from the Self. The Eiffel Tower came from the Self.

Seat your identity not in the ego, but in the Self.

Our priorities change when we make the shift from the ego to the Self. Our field of consciousness broadens. We see ourselves no longer as an isolated element in a random or meaningless universe. Instead, our passage through this material dimension acquires significance, even if we can’t articulate what that significance is. We sense ourselves as part of a greater cosmos, extending without limit into the past and projecting infinitely into the future.