17 Aug 2024

Disclaimer: This post is mainly my reflections from the book (ideas that I found interesting, stuff that I know but need constant reminding etc.).

Check out my Goodreads profile for all my book recommendations (maintained since 2021 Jan).

Book: Do The Work

Author: Steven Pressfield

Rating: 5 star

Don’t think. Act. Start before you think you are ready.

We can always revisit and revise once we have acted. But we can accomplish NOTHING until we act. If you can take away one thing from this book, it is this.

Resistance

Whenever you are being prevented from working on long term growth, health or integrity, and asked to choose the path of immediate gratification, you have met Resistance. Fear, self doubt, procrastination, addiction, ego - all are forms of resistance!

And Resistance has a lot of interesting qualities:

• Resistance is universal, everyone goes through it, every single day. It is not against you personally. It is against EVERYONE who has ever wanted to get something done.
• It is out to kill you - it will tell you anything to keep you from doing the work. It will lie, fabricate, seduce, bully. It will do whatever it takes to deceive you. It is always lying and it is always full of shit.

During meditation, you are told to become a third person and watch your thoughts come and go. You are told to just observe them, and let them float away.

• These are not thoughts, these are chatter. Plain monkey-mind chatter.
• This chatter is resistance.
• Resistance’s aim is to reconcile you to the “way it is supposed to be”. To make you like everyone else.

Resistance is inside you. It comes from inside us. You can be on a spaceship to Pluto, settle down and resistance will still be with you.But, just because it is inside you, does not mean it is you.

• You are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head. They are not your fault. You have done nothing wrong. You have committed no sin. Everyone hears this voice. Picasso, Einstein, everyone.
• You are blameless, you retain free will, you retain the capacity to ACT. The capacity to DO THE WORK.

The work of our life is to get to our true real self thoughts. Get them, access them, and have your own true, authentic speak.

Here comes resistance. When you get out to do something, the universe is not indifferent. It is actually hostile. We can never eliminate resistance, it will never go away. But never take it lightly. Respect it. Never underestimate it.

THE OPPOSITE of RESISTANCE:

• The universe is actively hostile and out to get you. But, it is also actively benevolent.
  • A WIP generates its own energy field. You are pouring love into your work, you have passion and intention. The universe responds to this. It has NO CHOICE.
  • Once this field is generated, it also attracts other entities into its orbit - IDEAS
  • But the precursor to that is to generate this field. Go out. Do the 100 things. Fail. Figure it out.
• This “Assistance” is the universal, immutable force of creative manifestation.
• Resistance actually comes second. What comes first is the idea, the passion, the dream of the work we are so excited to create. Resistance is the shadow cast by the innovative’s self sun.

One quick hack to prevent resistance is to understand how it functions. By default and without fail, Resistance will ALWAYS point to its true north. Which means it is always going to stop us from doing the thing we should be doing.

• But therefore, understand that this is exactly what you should be doing.
• The more important the calling, the more Resistance we will feel in pursuing it.

So how does one really start?

First off, enough with the excuses. You have in your hand the information of the civilisation. Everything that needs to be done is in this one MacBook right in your hand. You are connected to the world, the playing field has never been more level. But, everyone is just waiting for one thing - for you to DO THE WORK!

• Start before you think you are ready
  • Everything else will be handled - lack of preparation, difficulty of project, state of marketplace, emptiness of bank account. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg had any idea of how awesome his life is going to be. NO. He just did something.
  • The enemy is our chattering brain. If we give it so much as a nanosecond, it will start producing excuses, alibis, justifications and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.
  • Research is also the enemy. It can become the resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.
    • Here is what is allowed. Three books on the topic, no highlighting, no underlining - just let the ideas percolate.
    • Do research late or early in the day. Don’t stop working. Never do research in prime working time.
    • Research can be fun, it can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.Soak up what you need to fill in the gaps, but keep working
• Start at the end. Figure out where you want to go. Then work backwards from there. But how do you know where you want to go?
  • Answer: What is this about?
  • Think big. If you want to do great stuff, you can’t be working small. You can always dial it back later, but atleast swing big.
  • Boil your story / plan / action down to one single page. The old saying goes that there is no such thing as writing, only rewriting. Better to have written a lousy ballet than to have composed no ballet at all. Get your idea down on paper, you can always tweak it later.

The process of shipping

HOW TO GET STUFF OUT: The first draft

• One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP
  • Don’t worry about quality. ACT. Don’t reflect. Momentum is everything.
  • Get to the END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt.
  • Get the first version of your project done from A to Z as fast as you can.
  • Don’t stop. Don’t look down. Don’t think
• Suspend all self-judgement
  • You are not building the Taj Mahal.
  • The inner critic? He is not allowed right now. Set forth without fear and without self-censorship
  • The draft is NOT being graded. There will be no pop quiz.
• Only one thing matters in this initial draft: get SOMETHING done, however flawed or imperfect.
  • You are NOT ALLOWED to judge yourself.
• Suspending self-judgement doesn’t just mean ignoring the “you suck” voice. It also means liberating ourselves from the conventional expectations. The crazier the better. Stay stupid. Follow your unconvential, crazy heart.
  • Our job is not to control our idea. Our job is to figure out what our idea is (and wants to be) and then bring it to life

PROCESS: writing/ composing /idea generation

• Action and reflection. Never act and reflect at the same. When you are in the action phase, just freaking ACT.
  • In writing, action means putting words on paper. Reflection means evaluating what we have on paper. For the first drat, we will go light on reflection and heavy on action.
• Keep working. Momentum is everything.
• How much time can you spare each day? 10 mins? 1 hour? 3 hours? For that interval, close the door and don’t led ANYBODY in.
• When you get in the “react” stage, pause and reflect. Keep reflecting and refining your understanding of the theme, keep narrowing it down.
  • The only question to answer - WHAT IS THIS DAMN THING ABOUT?
  • More books, movies, new businesses etc. screw themselves up due to failure to confront or solve this issue. It is MAKE OR BREAK, DO OR DIE.
• You will have momentum, you have started, you are seeing progress and then you will hit THE WALL. Out of nowhere, it will happen. Voices of “you suck”.
  • Step 1 is to recognise this. This enemy working against us. This recognition alone is enormously powerful. Recognising that resistance exists is half the battle.
  • Resistance comes from inside us. You can be on a spaceship to Pluto, settle down and resistance will still be with you.But, it is inside you, does not mean it is you.
  • You are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head. They are not your fault. You have done nothing wrong. You have committed no sin. Everyone hears this voice. Picasso, Einstein, everyone.
  • You are blameless, you retain free will, you retain the capacity to ACT. The capacity to DO THE WORK.
  • This big crash will happen. It is so predictable, across all fields, that we can practically set our watches by it.
    • No matter how great a writer, artist or entrepreneur - they are not saved from resistance. The crash will happen.
    • And when the crash happens - it is the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.
• The most important part of the project is finishing it. If you can’t finish something, all the work is for nothing.
  • When we ship, we open ourselves to judgement in the real world. Nothing is more empowering, because it plants us solidly on planet earth and gets us out of our self-devouring fantasies and self delusions.
  • Once you have slayed the dragon of resistance by shipping, he will never have power over you again.
  • He will still be there, you will still have to duel him every morning and he will fight just as hard. But you will have beaten him once. And that game changer act will transform your life.

• Start before you are ready!

  You have the power to change your life today. Everyone is waiting for you to just Do THE WORK. And then all you can do is try to experience:

the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream & see if we can pull it off.