Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

by Steven Pressfield

When we say, “Put your ass where your heart wants to be,” we mean station your physical body in the spot where your dream-work will and must happen.

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?

There’s no substitute for your physical presence at Ground Zero of your dream.

this sense, we mean, “Commit emotionally, psychologically, spiritually to your dream.”

If we just keep plugging away at it, the Law of Self-Ordering comes to our aid.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

You too have a body of work. It exists inside you, on the Plane of Potentiality.

They are that which can be . . . and should be . . . and want to be. But they are not that which is guaranteed to be.

The Muse does not count hours. She counts commitment.

One hour a day is seven hours a week, thirty hours a month, 365 hours a year. Three hundred and sixty hours is nine forty-hour weeks. Nine forty-hour weeks is a novel. It’s two screenplays, maybe three. In ten years, that’s ten novels or twenty movie scripts. You can be a full-time writer, one hour a day.

When we put our ass where our heart wants to be, we simultaneously exclude everything that is not about our work and our heart.

This is the job. There is no other job. This is the job.

Barring a nuclear attack or a family emergency, I will not turn my attention to anything that’s not happening inside my own demented brain.

For writers and artists, the ability to self-reinforce is more important than talent.

Putting your ass where your heart wants to be means putting it out there where the world can judge it—and doing it in the smartest and most appealing way possible.