Brief Book Summary: Do The Work – Steven Pressfield
Steven Pressfield’s Do The Work is a book about resistance. He discusses the tactics and strategies to use to overcome it as well as its impact on our work and the choices we make.
Its a short book but I got a lot of value out of reading it. If you also enjoyed this make sure to check out Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist. I found the two books complemented each other well. This will definitely be a book I will revisit later.
Resistance
As Steven Pressfield writes in his book, “Resistance is a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.“
Resistance is the force we feel whenever we try to choose something that is not immediately gratifying when we choose something that’s better for our long term well being instead. Whether it’s getting out of bed to go for a run or trying to stop after work to go to the gym. Resistance is the little voice that says it’s warmer to stay in bed, or that you’ve had a big day and don’t need to go to the gym.
Resistance is not limited to the health and fitness field either. Any creative project can be a source of it. It can even infect your finances, how often do we think of all the better things we could be doing with our money instead of saving it?
Luckily we can also enlist allies to help us against resistance. The support of friends and family, pure stubbornness that we not be stopped, and the belief that we are serving something greater than ourselves.
Start Before Your Ready
None of us know what we dont know. Its the same story regardless of what we are trying to learn or do. Getting started, beginning to move pieces around is the only way to figure out what we actually need or need to know.
Steven Pressfield sums it up well with the following quote from his book:
Don’t think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.
Failure Is Never Final
Winston Churchill is quoted as saying that “success is not final, failure is not fatal.” Anything we try in life we run the risk of failing at.
In his book: What I learned losing a Million Dollars, Author Brendan Moynihan states that success can be built upon repeated failures. The more we fail the more ways we’ve simply found NOT to do something. Just like the famous Thomas Edison quote where he describes finally figuring out the light bulb after thousands of attempts. Instead of branding himself a failure he simply says that he found thousands of ways NOT to invent the light bulb.
Put an optimistic spin on your own failures, see them as a way for you to improve next time. Learn from and be better because of your failures.
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