The War of Art

There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Understanding Resistance

Resistance is the universal force that stops us from doing our work. Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell-phone use, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to?

Pressfield makes a striking claim: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

What Resistance Opposes

Resistance shows up whenever we pursue:

1. Any calling in creative art - writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, however marginal or unconventional
2. Any entrepreneurial venture - for profit or otherwise
3. Any act that entails commitment of the heart - the decision to get married, to have a child, to weather a rocky patch in a relationship

In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.

The Nature of Resistance

Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. Resistance arises from within.

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

How Resistance Manifests

Fear Never Goes Away

Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five. In other words, fear doesn’t go away.

The solution isn’t to eliminate fear—it’s to master that fear and conquer Resistance.

The Final Sprint is Hardest

The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got.

The Crab Bucket Effect

When you succeed, others feel reproached. The awakening writer’s success becomes a reproach to them. If she can beat these demons, why can’t they?

The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the rim of the bucket.

Procrastination

Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance. This second, we can sit down and do our work.

Resistance as Drama

Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of Resistance. Why put in years of work designing a new software interface when you can get just as much attention by bringing home a boyfriend with a prison record?

Sex, drugs, and other addictive behaviors can be manifestations of Resistance. You can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterward. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not love or even lust but Resistance.

Unhappiness as a Signal

The first symptom of Resistance is unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We’re bored, we’re restless.

This unhappiness is actually a compass pointing us toward our true calling.

Fear as Compass

If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.

When asked what makes him decide to take a particular role, an actor always answers: “Because I’m afraid of it.” (Conversely, the professional turns down roles that he’s done before. He’s not afraid of them anymore. Why waste his time?)

If you didn’t love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.

False Healing and Rationalization

The Healing Trap

What are we trying to heal, anyway? The concept in many therapeutic environments seems to be that one needs to complete his healing before he is ready to do his work.

But the athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.

The part of us that we imagine needs healing is not the part we create from; that part is far deeper and stronger.

Resistance knows that the more psychic energy we expend dredging and re-dredging the tired, boring injustices of our personal lives, the less juice we have to do our work.

Workshops and Preparation

What better way of avoiding work than going to a workshop?

Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a series of plausible, rational justifications for why we shouldn’t do our work.

What’s particularly insidious about the rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true.

But circumstances don’t matter: Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace. Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years and counting.

Turning Pro

The term of my life can be divided into two parts: before turning pro, and after.

What does it mean to turn pro? The professional loves the work so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time. That’s what I mean when I say turning pro.

The Professional Shows Up

Somerset Maugham: “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

The Principle of Priority

You must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and you must do what’s important first. What’s important is the work.

Do I really believe that my work is crucial to the planet’s survival? Of course not. But it’s as important to me as catching that mouse is to the hawk circling outside my window. He’s hungry. He needs a kill. So do I.

The Professional Mindset

How the Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable—this is invaluable for an artist.

Now consider the amateur:

• One, he doesn’t show up every day
• Two, he doesn’t show up no matter what
• Three, he doesn’t stay on the job all day
• He is not committed over the long haul
• He does not get money (no real-world validation)
• He overidentifies with his art
• He does not have a sense of humor about failure

You don’t hear the pro bitching, “This fucking trilogy is killing me!” Instead, the amateur doesn’t write his trilogy at all.

Real-World Validation

Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it’s for failure.

Pressfield shares his own story: At forty-two years old, divorced, childless, having given up all normal human pursuits to chase the dream of being a writer, he finally got his name on a big-time Hollywood production. When it flopped, he thought: “I’m a loser, a phony; my life is worthless, and so am I.”

That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.

Professional Practices

Play for Money

Playing for money, or adopting the attitude of one who plays for money, lowers the fever.

The Muse favors working stiffs. She hates prima donnas. To think of yourself as a mercenary, a gun for hire, implants the proper humility. It purges pride and preciousness.

Resistance loves pride and preciousness.

Be Patient

Any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much.

Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion.

Act in the Face of Fear

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.

Accept No Excuses

The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you’re finished.

Master Technique

The professional is prepared at a deeper level—he is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage.

Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer in the world. Yet he has a teacher. It would never occur to him, as it would to an amateur, that he knows everything, or can figure everything out on his own.

Distance Yourself from Your Instrument

The pro stands at one remove from her instrument—meaning her person, her body, her voice, her talent; the physical, mental, emotional, and psychological being she uses in her work.

The professional identifies with her consciousness and her will, not with the matter that her consciousness and will manipulate to serve her art.

Don’t Take It Personally

When people say an artist has a thick skin, what they mean is not that the person is dense or numb, but that he has seated his professional consciousness in a place other than his personal ego.

Editors are not the enemy; critics are not the enemy. Resistance is the enemy.

Endure Adversity

The professional cannot let himself take humiliation personally. Humiliation, like rejection and criticism, is the external reflection of internal Resistance.

He reminds himself it’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.

Think Like a Corporation

Making yourself a corporation (or just thinking of yourself in that way) reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist-doing-the-work from the will-and-consciousness-running-the-show.

Pressfield has meetings with himself every Monday. He sits down, goes over his assignments, types it up, and distributes it to himself.

If we think of ourselves as a corporation, it gives us a healthy distance on ourselves.

Beyond Resistance

The Artist’s Journey

After twenty-six months of straight work, Pressfield typed “THE END” on his manuscript. He never found a buyer for that book. Or the next one.

Nobody knew I was done. Nobody cared. But I knew. I felt like a dragon I’d been fighting all my life had just dropped dead at my feet and gasped out its last sulfuric breath.

Commitment and Providence

From William Blake: “Eternity is in love with the creations of time.”

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred.

When we make a beginning, we get out of our own way and allow the angels to come in and do their job.

Taking Dictation

This is why artists are modest. They know they’re not doing the work; they’re just taking dictation.

Our Specific Destiny

We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny.

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

Hierarchy vs. Territory

The Danger of Hierarchical Thinking

For the artist to define himself hierarchically is fatal. In a hierarchy, you:

1. Compete against others
2. Evaluate your happiness/success/achievement by your rank within the hierarchy

But the artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. Ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.

In the hierarchy, the artist looks up and looks down. The one place he can’t look is that place he must: within.

Territory

I trusted what I wanted, not what I thought would work. I did what I myself thought was interesting, and left its reception to the gods.

We humans have territories too. Ours are psychological. Stevie Wonder’s territory is the piano. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s is the gym.

A territory provides sustenance. Runners know what a territory is. So do rock climbers and kayakers and yogis.

A territory sustains us without any external input. A territory is a closed feedback loop.

The Territory Test

Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?

What would Arnold Schwarzenegger do on a freaky day? He wouldn’t phone his buddies; he’d head for the gym.

The Ultimate Question

Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace?

In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it.

3 Big Takeaways

1. Resistance is the force that keeps you from doing your most important work—the more important the work, the stronger the Resistance.
2. Turn pro by showing up every day, no matter what, and treating your creative work with the same commitment as a paid professional.
3. Fear and self-doubt are compasses pointing toward the work you must do—act in the face of fear rather than waiting for it to disappear.