Quotes

"The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his self-mastery while those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them." - Socrates

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Rule of Thumb

• The sustenance you get should come from the act itself not from the impression it makes on the others.
• Fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.
• Rationalization is resistance's right-hand man. Its job is to keep us from feeling the shame we would feel if we truly faced what cowards we are for not doing our work.
• The Bhagavad Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor. All a warrior can give is his life. All the athlete can do is leave everything on the field.
• The professional learns to criticize envy driven criticism and to take it for what it is. The supreme compliment.

Observations

• There is a secret that real writers or anyone in any creative industry ever 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.
• Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long term growth, health or integrity will elicit resistance. Or expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower.
• Resistance is fueled by fear. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we concur resistance.
• The more scared we are of a work or calling the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
• The degree of fear equates to the strength of resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and the growth of our soul. That's why feel so much resistance, if it meant nothing to us there would be no resistance.
• If you are paralyzed with fear it's a good sign. It shows you what you have to do.
• The artist or entrepreneur committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejections, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
• The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.
• We are all pros in one area, our jobs. Are there principles we can take from what we are already successfully doing in our workday life and apply to our artistic or entrepreneurial aspirations?

Qualities of a Professional

What exactly are qualities that define us as professionals:

• We show up every day
• We show up no matter what
• We stay on the job all day. Our minds may wander but our bodies remain at the wheel.
• We are committed over the long haul.
• The stakes for us are high and real. This is about survival.
• We accept remuneration for our labor. We are not here for fun, we work for money.
• We do not over-identify with our jobs. We may take pride in our work, we may stay late and come in on weekends but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. The amateur on the other hand over identifies with his avocation. The amateur takes it so seriously (about success and failure) that it paralyzes him which resistance knows about.
• We master the techniques of our jobs.
• We have a sense of humor about our jobs.
• We receive praise or blame in the real world.
• The payoff for playing the game for money is not the money which you may never see anyway even after you turn pro. The payoff is that playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude. It inculcates the lunge pale mentality, the hard core hard head hard hat state of mind that shows up for work despite rain or snow or dark of night and slugs it out day after day.
• The payoff for playing the game for money is not the money which you may never see anyway even after you turn pro. The payoff is that playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude. It inculcates the lunge pale mentality, the hardcore hard head hard hat state of mind that shows up for work despite rain or snow or dark of night and slugs it out day after day.
• Professionals cannot tolerate disorder. They eliminate chaos from the world to banish it from their mind.
• A professional does not take failure or success personally.
• The professional cannot allow the actions of others to defining his reality. Tomorrow morning the critique will be gone but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keeps working.

The 2 Orientation

Hierarchical Orientation: You define yourself by your place within a pecking order. You look to others to validate your efforts or calling.

Territorial Orientation: You do the work for its own sake.

• A territory is a closed feedback loop. Our role is to put in effort and love, the territory absorbs this and gives it back to us in the form of well being.
• A territory can only be claimed by work. It doesn't give - it gives back. It returns exactly what you put in.
• The act of creation is by definition territorial.
• The artist and the mothers are vehicles, not originators. They don't create new life they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the new miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.

Here are some examples of “territory”:

• Arnold Schwarzenegger’s territory is the gym
• Stevie Wonder’s territory is the piano
• a writer’s territory is the word processor or the typewriter.

Ask Yourself

• Is your creative work orientated towards hierarchy or territory?
• Do you really care what people think? Or are you doing the work for its own sake?
• Are you chasing validation in the form of money or fame? Or are you seeking to serve the muse (your creative inspiration)? Are you showing up to get better every single day?
• Will you show up in your territory to work whether people know it or not?

Or, as Pressfield suggests,

“Ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?”

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