Do the Work Quotes

“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.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Start before you're ready.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“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.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“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.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“The song we’re composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“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?” Keep refining your understanding of the theme; keep narrowing it down.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional, crazy heart.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Don’t think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That’s why they call it rewriting.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Stay Stupid The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began. Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think. 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. Don’t think. Act.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“The enemy is Resistance.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“The drawing is also a reminder that there’s an artist within each of us, and we must encourage that artist to do the work, to make something that matters, regardless of anything else that is going on.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Don’t prepare. Begin.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“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. Fear saps passion. When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“The last thing we want is to remain as we are.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what Buddhists call “monkey-mind” chatter or the reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap about, hanging around the street corner.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are. They are invested in maintaining us as we are. The last thing we want is to remain as we are.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“The Problem Is the Problem A professional does not take success or failure personally. That’s Priority Number One for us now. That our project has crashed is not a reflection of our worth as human beings. It’s just a mistake. It’s a problem—and a problem can be solved.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“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.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis. 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. The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor. That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with. The hospital room may be spotless and sterile, but birth itself will always take place amid chaos, pain, and blood.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“On the field of the Self stand a knight and a dragon.   You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Assistance is the universal, immutable force of creative manifestation, whose role since the Big Bang has been to translate potential into being, to convert dreams into reality.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Stay stupid. Trust the soup. Start before you’re ready.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

“Sometimes on Wednesday I’ll read something that I wrote on Tuesday and I’ll think, “This is crap. I hate it and I hate myself.” Then I’ll re-read the identical passage on Thursday. To my astonishment, it has become brilliant overnight. Ignore false negatives. Ignore false positives. Both are Resistance. Keep working.”
― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work