Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

by Steven Pressfield

What is Resistance? It’s our own tendency—yours and mine and everyone’s—to yield to procrastination, self-doubt, fear, impatience, self-inflation, self-denigration, distraction, laziness, arrogance, complacency, and perfectionism. It’s our inability to focus, our incapacity to press on through adversity. It’s our terror of finishing and exposing our work to the judgment of the marketplace. It’s fear of failure. It’s fear of success. Fear of humiliation. Fear of destitution. It’s our inability to defer gratification, to acquire and act with self-discipline, self-validation, and self-reinforcement.

In its most extreme forms, Resistance expresses itself as vice and even crime—abuse of ourselves or others, cruelty, addiction to substances, diva-ism, compulsive self-dramatization, self-aggrandizement and self-diminishment.

How do we get past this force called Resistance and set ourselves on the path to achieve our dreams? The title of this book, as we said, is Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be. That, in nine words, is my answer. It’s the simplest and most direct way to get up in the morning and do our work . . . and to lie down at night feeling at peace with ourselves, knowing for this one day at least we have defeated our demons and moved twenty-four hours closer to living the True Self and Best Self we were born to be.

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

Someone may ask, “I want to work in country music. Do I have to move to Nashville?” Or “My dream is to act in movies. Do I have to pack up for LA?” Yes and yes.

Want to make a feature film? Go where the cameras are.

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. They are your community. They will be your friends for life.

It’s not enough for your heart to be in the right place. Your ass has to be there too.

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.

The universe comes to the hero’s aid.

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

I didn’t play the piano for ten years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth [etc.]). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven—to be a concert pianist. Admittedly I went a little extreme—no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about thirty-five pounds in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I’d envisaged as I lay in bed aged ten listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall. My life [today] involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghost...

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.

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.

“It’s not habit. It’s your life.”

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?

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

Alexander wore distinctive armor and a double-plumed helmet so that his rush, at the head of his sixteen-hundred-strong Companion Cavalry, would be missed by no one on the field.

Watashi always pronounced the word “feel” as if it had quotation marks around it. In other words, he scorned the word absolutely. In Watashi’s lexicon, feel and feelings had no meaning in war. They had no meaning in competition. They had no meaning in life. “Watashi don’t give a shit how you ‘feel.’ The Marine Corps don’t give a shit how you ‘feel.’ Did the Marine Corps issue you ‘feelings,’ dirtball? Then you ain’t got none.” All that mattered to Watashi was that you do your job—on time and to the best of your ability—whether you “felt” like it or not.

Don’t miss deadlines. The benefit is that once we agree to the deadline, we don’t have to worry about it anymore. We don’t have to negotiate, come up with excuses or even stress about it. It won’t ship when it’s perfect. It will ship because we said it would.

When we put our ass where our heart wants to be, we may change where we live; we may alter what we do to support ourselves. We may rethink the way we dress or wear our hair. We may shave our skull; we may acquire tattoos—or efface them. We may change political parties, invent new ones, or drop out entirely. Our taste in music, books, art, or movies may change. We may discard longstanding habits and addictions. We may acquire new enthusiasms, make new friends. We may marry or divorce. We may change the time we get up in the morning and the hour we go to bed at night. We may rethink the people we choose to associate with. We may make over the way we eat or sleep or decide or act. That which we had previously considered important, even vital or indispensable, we may now shed as lightly as a worn-out coat. We may elect to simplify our life. We many choose to live ten times larger. We may change our religion or drop religion entirely.