I was introduced to Steven Pressfield through his work on historical fiction, specifically “The Gates of Fire”.  Later, I started listening to his podcasts and interviews and realized he was also a late bloomer and credited a lot of his success to hard work.  Someone (like Steven Pressfield) has gone through many of the same challenges you and I are going through and has written a book about it so that we can overcome the same challenges without all the failure.  The War of Art is one of those books, we will all face our own challenges but books like these increase our chance for success.

The Hardest Part of Writing

People believe that the most difficult part of writing or any type of creative work is creating something of quality when realistically the hardest part is just sitting down and doing the work.

“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.”

Steven Pressfield

The Resistance

Most of the book introduces us to a term Pressfield calls “The Resistance”.  It is a supernatural power inside all of us that is constantly trying to sabotage us and get us to quit doing anything hard.  It knows everything about us, so it understands our weaknesses and the perfect thoughts to have to make us quit.  He believes that the ability to overcome the resistance which is an everyday battle that Steven fights to this day is the most important thing creators can do to be successful.  Many times, it takes near-death experiences or a big health scare to get us to start following our passion.  Steven Pressfield explains the power of the Resistance elegantly,

“Is that what it takes? Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance? Does Resistance have to cripple and disfigure our lives before we wake up to its existence? 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? Resistance defeats us. If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse, along with the junk food, cosmetic surgery, and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and the medical profession from top to bottom.

Domestic abuse would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity, migraine headaches, road rage, and dandruff.

Look in your own heart. Unless I’m crazy, right now a still small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And unless I’m crazy, you’re no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.” 

Steven Pressfield

The Professional Keeps Their Workspace Ready

To become great at something we must become a pro at it.  A pro treats it like a job and works at it for a set amount of time regardless of the mood.  Just like the majority of us are professionals at our jobs and we show up when we are supposed to, we may not enjoy it, but we still do it because we are professionals.  We must treat our creative endeavors the same way we treat our real jobs and spend time doing them regardless of how we feel.  Part of being a professional is treating our workspace like a pro by always having it tidy and ready for work.  If you have a home office to write, always have your desk clean and your computer up to date so that when it’s time to work there is no friction to getting into the creative process.  The difference can be monumental from having to throw trash away to get to your keyboard and your computer takes 15 minutes to start up because it’s cluttered with useless programs and neglected updates, to having your desk clean and your computer up and running with the proper programs in seconds instead of minutes. 

“When I lived in the back of my Chevy van, I had to dig my typewriter out from beneath layers of tire tools, dirty laundry, and moldering paperbacks. My truck was a nest, a hive, a hellhole on wheels whose sleeping surface I had to clear each night just to carve out a foxhole to snooze in.

The professional cannot live like that. He is on a mission.

He will not tolerate disorder. He eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind. He wants the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the Muse may enter and not soil her gown.”

Steven Pressfield

What Is Your Passion?

Lives are wasted in thought and procrastination by people trying to figure out what their passion is or what they were meant to do in this world.  They second guess every decision they make because they are not sure if this is what they were meant to do.  In Cal Newport’s book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, he talks about careers and business’ becoming your passion after you have gained mastery over it or built relationships, not on the first day on the job. If you expect a career to be your passion on day one, you’re in for a bad time. 

At the end of the day you just have to do the work, like Steven Pressfield says this question can only be answered by action.

“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.”

Final Thoughts

This book combined with “Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury” has had the greatest impact on my writing journey.  They put things in perspective for me and I realized that we just must fight the battle with the resistance every single day.  Create something every day regardless of how you feel about yourself or about the quality of your work, in the end, persistence will win. 

If you enjoyed this content, please sign up for our newsletter below, share this post with a friend, or read some of our other blog posts.  Thanks for stopping by.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase.