book-notes

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

by Steven Pressfield

The Unlived Life

• Most of us have two lives: The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.
• To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.

Book One: Resistance

Resistance’s Greatest Hits

• Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity elicits Resistance.

Resistance is Invisible

• Resistance is only felt – as a repelling force, shoving us away, distracting us, preventing us from doing our work.

Resistance is Internal

• Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. It does not come from outside ourselves.

Resistance is Implacable

• Resistance is an engine of destruction, programmed with only one objective: To prevent us from doing our work.

Resistance is Infallible

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

Resistance is Universal

• Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.

Resistance Never Sleeps

• The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.

Resistance Plays for Keeps

• Resistance targets our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us.

Resistance is Fueled by Fear

• Resistance has no strength of its own. Instead we feed it with power by our fear of it.

Resistance Only Opposes in One Direction

• Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher one.

Resistance is Most Powerful at the Finish Line

• The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got.

Resistance Recruits Allies

• Overcoming resistance encourages sabotage by others. They struggle with their own resistance, and the awakening writer’s success becomes a reproach to them.
• The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration.

Resistance and Procrastination

• Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize.

Resistance and Procrastination, Part Two

• The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become habit, and we put off our lives until our deathbed.
• There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.

Resistance and Sex

• Sex provides immediate and powerful gratification. Resistance has distracted us from doing our work with a cheap, easy fix.
• The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation for sex was not love or even lust but resistance.

Resistance and Trouble

• Trouble is a faux form of fame, and we get into trouble because it’s a cheap way to get attention.
• The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.

Resistance and Self-Dramatization

• When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers.
• Instead of consuming a product, we should apply self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work.

Resistance and Victimhood

• A victim act is a form of passive aggression, seeking to achieve gratification not by honest work, but by the manipulation of others through silent or not-so-silent threat.

Resistance and the Choice of a Mate

• Picking someone who has or is successfully overcoming Resistance is how Resistance disfigures love.
• The supporting partner should face the failure to pursue his unlived life, and not merely ride the other’s coattails.
• The supported partner should step out from the glow of her partner’s adoration, and instead encourage him to let his own light shine.

Resistance and Unhappiness

• Resistance creates intense unhappiness, and we live in a consumer culture that has massed all its profit-seeking artillery to exploit it.
• Our obligation is to enact an internal revolution, where in this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture.

Resistance and Fundamentalism

• Answering “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” is not easy because we are wired tribally, to act as part of a group, and not as an individual.
• The artist has a faith that humankind is advancing, however haltingly and imperfectly, toward a better world.
• The fundamentalist, by contrast, sees humanity as fallen from a higher state. It is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed.
• The fundamentalist cannot find his way to the future, so he retreats to the past, returning in imagination to the glory days.
• Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. The creativity for a fundamentalist is inverted, for he creates destruction.
• Socrates observed that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

Resistance and Criticism

• When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.
• Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others.

Resistance and Self-Doubt

• Self-doubt can be an ally because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love of something you dream of doing, and desire to do it.
• The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

Resistance and Fear

• Fear tell us what we have to do: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
• The professional tackles the project that will make him stretch, that will compel him to explore unconscious parts of himself.
• The professional turns down roles that he’s done before – he’s not afraid of them anymore, so why waste his time?

Resistance and Love

• 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.

Resistance and Being a Star

• Grandiose fantasies are the sign of an amateur. A professional knows that success, like happiness, is a by-product of work.
• The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

Resistance and Isolation

• We’re never alone when embarking on an enterprise: The act of courage calls forth infallibly that deeper part of ourselves that supports and sustains us.

Resistance and Isolation, Part Two

• Avoid loneliness when writing by imagining the reader, to whom you hope to impart inspiration and wisdom.

Resistance and Healing

• The idea that you must complete your healing before you are ready to do your work is a myth.
• 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. The more troubles you have, the better and richer that part becomes.
• The part that needs healing is our personal life. But personal life has nothing to do with work.
• 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.

Resistance and Support

• Seeking support from friends and family is like having people gathered around your deathbed: It’s nice, but when the ship sails, all they can do is stand on the dock waving goodbye.
• The more energy we spend stoking up on support from colleagues and loved ones, the weaker we become and the less capable of handling our business.

Resistance and Rationalization

• The job of rationalization is to keep us from feeling the shame we would feel if we truly faced what cowards we are for not doing our work.
• It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.

Resistance and Rationalization, Part Two

• Instead of showing us fear, which might shame us and impel us to do our work, Resistance brings in rationalization as a spin doctor.
• What’s insidious about the rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true – they’re legitimate.
• What Resistance leaves out is that all this means nothing. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace.

Resistance Can Be Beaten

• Defeating Resistance is like giving birth – it seems impossible until you remember that women have been doing it successfully, with and without support, for fifty million years.

Book Two: Combating Resistance

Professionals and Amateurs

• Aspiring artists defeated by Resistance all think like amateurs; they have not yet turned pro.
• The professional loves the game so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time.
• Resistance hates it when we turn pro.

A Professional

• Performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work sets in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that will produce inspiration.

What a Writer’s Day Feels Like

• The Principle of Priority states a) you must know the difference between what’s urgent and what’s important; and b) you must do what’s important first.
• What’s important is the work – that’s the game you have to suit up for.

How to Be Miserable

• An artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not.
• An artist has to know how to be miserable, and to love being miserable. Because this is war, and war is hell.

We’re All Pros Already

• All of us are pros in one area: Our jobs.
• Principles we can take from our workday lives and apply to our artistic aspirations:
  • We accept remuneration for our labor: We’re not here for fun.
  • We don’t over-identify with our jobs: We are not our job descriptions. But the amateur defines himself by his avocation, and takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.
• The amateur has not mastered the technique of his art, nor does he expose himself to judgment in the real world.
• Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it’s for failure.
• Taking a few blows is the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.

For Love of the Game

• The seeming detachment of the professional is a compensating device to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes in action.
• Playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude. It inculcates the hard-core, hard-head, hard-hat state of mind that always shows up for work and slugs it out.
• Remember, the muse favors working stiffs. She hates prima donnas.
• Thinking of yourself as a mercenary implants the proper humanity, purging pride and preciousness.

A Professional is Patient

• Resistance gets amateurs to plunge into projects with an overambitious and unrealistic timeline for completion, knowing we can’t sustain the intensity and will burn out.
• Do not be seduced and believe that you can pull off the big score without pain and without persistence.
• The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work.

A Professional Seeks Order

• A professional will not tolerate disorder. He will eliminate chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind.

A Professional Demystifies

• A pro views her work as craft, not an art.
• She doesn’t dwell on how holy her creative endeavor is, because that will paralyze her. So she concentrates on the technique.
• The sign of the amateur is over-glorification of and preoccupation with the mystery.

A Professional Acts in the Face of Fear

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

A Professional Accepts No Excuses

• The professional knows if he caves into procrastinating today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he will be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow.
• Resistance is like a telemarketer: If you so much as say hello, you’re finished. The professional doesn’t even pick up the phone – he stays at work.

A Professional Plays It as It Lays

• The professional conducts his business in the real world, with adversity, injustice, and bad breaks. The field is level only in heaven.

A Professional is Prepared

• Resistance will throw at you stuff that you’ve never seen before.
• The goal of the professional is not victory but to handle himself, his insides, as sturdily and steadily as he can.

A Professional Dedicates Himself to Mastering Technique

• The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes it is a substitute for inspiration, but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration comes.

A Professional Does Not Hesitate to Ask for Help

• An amateur assumes he knows everything, or assumes that he can figure everything out on his own.
• The professional seeks out the most knowledgeable teacher and listens with both ears.

The Professional Distances Herself from Her Instrument

• The professional assesses her instrument – that is the physical, mental, emotional, and psychological being she uses in her work – coolly, impersonally, and objectively.

A Professional Does Not Take Failure (Or Success) Personally

• When people say an artist has thick skin, they mean the artist has seated his professional consciousness in a place other than his personal ego.
• Fear of rejection isn’t just psychological, it’s biological: Tribes wielded the threat of expulsion to enforce obedience.
• Taking rejection personally reinforces Resistance. We cannot let external criticism, even if it’s true, fortify our internal foe.
• The professional loves her work, and invests in it wholeheartedly, but she does not forget that the work is not her.

A Professional Endures Adversity

• The professional cannot let himself take humiliation personally. The professional must endure adversity.
• The professional 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.

A Professional Self-Validates

• An amateur lets the negative opinion of others unman him, allowing external criticism to trump his own belief in himself and his work.
• The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality.
• Resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others – to stake our self-worth, our identity, or reason-for-being, on the response of others to our work.
• The professional recognizes envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment.

A Professional Recognizes Her Limitations

• A professional knows she can only be a pro at one thing, and brings in other pros and treats them with respect.

A Professional Reinvents Himself

• The professional does not permit himself to become hidebound within one incarnation, however comfortable or successful. He continues his journey.

You, Inc.

• Thinking of yourself as a corporation reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist-doing-the-work from the will-and-consciousness-running-the-show.
• With success, you-the-writer may get a swelled head, but you-the-boss remember how to take yourself down a peg.
• Thinking of yourself as a corporation creates a healthy distance on yourself. You’re more cold-blooded.

A Critter That Keeps Coming

• Resistance yields to turning pro because Resistance has no strength of its own; its power derives entirely from our fear of it.
• The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands, while we are doing it, to the exclusion of all else.

No Mystery

• Turning pro is a decision brought about by an act of will. We make up our minds to view ourselves as pros and we do it.

Book Three: Beyond Resistance

Angels in the Abstract

• As Resistance works to keep us from becoming who we were born to be, our “angels” are equal and opposite powers counterpoised against it.

Approaching the Mystery

• Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. When we sit down and work, ideas come and insights accrete.

Invoking the Muse, Part Two

• A poet proficient in technique will produce sane compositions; but a poet touched by the madness of the Muses will create performances that utterly eclipse them.
• The Greeks believed the universe was not indifferent, and that the gods take an interest in human affairs, interceding for good or ill in our designs.

Testament of a Visionary

• William Blake said “Eternity is in love with the creations of time.” Pressfield thinks this means creatures of a higher sphere take joy in what us time-bound beings bring into physical existence, and may also nudge us to produce them.

Invoking the Muse, Part Three

• There is magic to effacing our human arrogance and humbly entreating help from a source we cannot see, hear, touch, or smell.

The Magic of Making a Start

• One of Goethe’s couplets is: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.”
• When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, angel midwives congregate around us, and assist us as we give birth to that person we were born to be.

The Magic of Keeping Going

• The process of self-revision and self-correction is so often that we don’t even notice. It goes to work and it seems to enjoy it.

Life and Death

• Faced with imminent extinction, all assumptions are called into question: What does our life mean? Have we lived it right? What’s left undone or unspoken?
• Jung says that:
  • The Ego is the part of the psyche that we think of as “I,” our conscious intelligence.
  • The Self is the greater entity, which includes the Ego and the Personal and Collective Unconsciousness. It is the sphere of the soul.
• When we learn that we may soon die, our consciousness shifts from the Ego to the Self, and our new world view shows us what’s really important.

The Ego and the Self

• The Self wishes to create and evolve, while the Ego likes things just the way they are. The two fight.

Experiencing the Self

• Dreams come from the Self. Ideas come from the Self. When we deliberately alter our consciousness in any way, we’re trying to find the Self.
• The Self is our deepest being, united to God, incapable of falsehood. It is ever-growing and ever-evolving, and speaks for the future.
• The Ego hates this instinct that pulls us toward art – the impulse to evolve, to learn, to heighten and elevate our consciousness.
• Such evolution is life-threatening to the Ego, which produces Resistance and attacks the awakening artist.

Fear

• Our great fear is that we succeed – we access the powers we secretly know we possess, and become the person we sense in our hearts we truly are.
• This is the most terrifying prospect a person can face, because he imagines it ejects him from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for.
• We fear this because it estranges us from all we know. But we are not alone, because we tap into an inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, and companionship.

The Authentic Self

• None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. We are born with a highly refined and individuated soul.
• 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.

Territory Versus Hierarchy

• Individuals define themselves in one of two ways: by their rank within a hierarchy, or by their connection to a territory.

The Hierarchical Orientation

• School, advertising, and the entire materialist culture drills into us to define ourselves by others’ opinions. This creates hierarchy.
• The hierarchical orientation breaks down when the numbers get too big. We thrash about, flashing our badges of status and wondering why no one gives a shit.

The Artist and the Hierarchy

• Those with a hierarchical orientation evaluate their happiness by their rank, act hostile toward others based on their rank, and evaluate every move based on its effect on others.
• The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. He must operate territorially, and do his work for its own sake.

The Definition of a Hack

• A hack is a writer who second-guesses his audience. He doesn’t ask what’s in his own heart, but what the market is looking for.
• The hack writes hierarchically.
• Even if you succeed as a hack commercially, you’ve lost, because you’ve sold out your – the best part of yourself, where your fines and only true work comes from.

The Territorial Orientation

• We humans have territories: they provide sustenance, they sustain us without any external input, they can only be claimed alone, they can only be claimed by work, and they return exactly what you put in.

The Artist and the Territory

• The act of creation is by definition territorial.
• Ask what you feel growing inside you. Then bring that forth for its own sake, and not for what it can do for you or advance your standing.

The Difference Between Territory and Hierarchy

• To tell if your orientation is territorial or not, ask: If you were feeling really anxious, what would you do? Would you seek the opinion of others or not?
• Or of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it? If you’d still do it, you’re acting territorially.

The Supreme Virtue

• Contempt for failure is the cardinal virtue of an artist.

The Fruits of Our Labor

• You have the right to your labor but not to the fruits of your labor. This orients you to act territorially, not hierarchically.
• We must do our work for its own sake, not for the fortune or attention or applause.

The Artist’s Life

• Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it.
• Don’t cheat the world of your contribution. Give it what you’ve got.