Do the work

About This Book

This book is designed to coach you through a project (a book, a ballet, a new business venture, a philanthropic enterprise) from conception to finished product, seeing it from the point of view of Resistance.

Where butts need to be kicked, we shall kick them. Where kinder, gentler methods are called for, we’ll get out the kid gloves the principles can be applied with equal effectiveness to any form of creative endeavor, including such seemingly far-afield enterprises as the acquisition of physical fitness, the recovery from a broken heart, or the pursuit of any objective—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—that involves moving from a lower or less conscious plane to a higher one.

ORIENTATION: ENEMIES AND ALLIES

Our Enemies

The following is a list of the forces arrayed against us as artists and entrepreneurs:

1. Resistance (i.e., fear, self-doubt, procrastination, addiction, distraction, timidity, ego and narcissism, self-loathing, perfectionism, etc.)
2. Rational thought
3. Friends and family

Enemy 1: Resistence

Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower. Any of these acts will elicit Resistance.

Resistence is Invisible

Resistance is a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.

Resistence is Insidious

Resistance will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man.

Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

Resistence is Impersonal

Resistance is not out to get you personally. It doesn’t know who you are and doesn’t care. Resistance is a force of nature. It acts objectively.

Resistence is Infallible

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.

Resistance is Universal

We’re wrong if we think we’re the only ones struggling with Resistance.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's goal is not wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill.

Enemy 2: Rational Thought

Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego.

Homer began both The Iliad and The Odyssey with a prayer to the Muse. He understood that Genius did not reside within his fallible, mortal self—but came to him instead from some source that he could neither command nor control, only invoke.

When an artist says “Trust the soup,” she means let go of the need to control (which we can’t do anyway) and put your faith instead in the Source, the Mystery, the Quantum Soup.

Enemy 3: Friends & Family

The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are . They are invested in maintaining us as we are.

If you’re reading this book, it’s because you sense inside you a second self, an unlived you. With some exceptions (God bless them), friends and family are the enemy of this unmanifested you, this unborn self, this future being.

Our Allies

1. Stupidity
2. Stubbornness
3. Blind faith
4. Passion
5. Assistance (the opposite of Resistance)
6. Friends and family

Ally 1: Stay Stupid

Ally 2: Be Stubborn

Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.

Ally 3: Blind Faith

Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.

I believe with unshakeable faith that there will always be something in the box.

Ally 4: Passion

You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.

When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.

Ally 5: Assistance

that as Resistance is the shadow, its opposite—Assistance—is the sun.

Ally 6: Friends & Family

When art and inspiration and success and fame and money have come and gone, who still loves us—and whom do we love?

In other words, what we do and whom we do it for.

BEGINNING

Start Before You’re Ready

Don’t prepare. Begin.

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now.

A Research Diet

Before we begin, you wanna do research? Uh-unh. I’m putting you on a diet.

Let the unconscious do its work.

Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.

Stay Primitive

It is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart.

Swing for the Seats

If you and I want to do great stuff, we can’t let ourselves work small. A home-run swing that results in a strikeout is better than a successful bunt or even a line-drive single.

Insitinctive Outline

God made a single sheet of yellow foolscap exactly the right length to hold the outline of an entire novel.

He meant don’t overthink. Don’t overprepare. Don’t let research become Resistance. Don’t spend six months compiling a thousand-page tome detailing the emotional matrix and family history of every character in your book.

Three-Act Structure

Break the sheet of foolscap into three parts:

1. Beginning
2. Middle
3. End

How Da Vinci Did?

Here’s the Last Supper in three acts on a single sheet of foolscap:

1. Supper table stretching across the width of the canvas.
2. Jesus standing in the center, apostles arrayed in various postures left and right.
3. Perspective and background tailing off behind.

The rest is details.

That's why they call it rewriting

The old saw says there’s no such thing as writing, only rewriting. This is true.

Start at the End

Here’s a trick that screenwriters use: work backwards. Begin at the finish.

“But how do I know where I want to go?”

Your movie, your album, your new startup … what is it about? When you know that, you’ll know the end state. And when you know the end state, you’ll know the steps to take to get there.

End first, then beginning and middle. That’s your startup, that’s your plan for competing in a triathlon, that’s your ballet.

Thoughts & Chatter

Have you ever meditated? Then you know what it feels like to shift your consciousness to a witnessing mode and to watch thoughts arise, float across your awareness, and then drift away, to be replaced by the next thought and the thought after that.

Chatter is your mother and father’s well-intentioned expressions of caution, seeking to shield you from hurting yourself. Chatter is your teachers’ equally well-meaning attempts at socialization, training you to follow the rules. Chatter is your friends’ regular-Joe buddy-talk, trying to make you like them and follow the rules of the pack.

Its aim is to reconcile you to “the way it is,” to make you exactly like everyone else, to render you amenable to societal order and discipline.

We’ve got our concept, we’ve got our theme. We know our start. We know where we want to finish. We’ve got our project in three acts on a single sheet of foolscap.

Ready to roll? We need only to remember our three mantras:

• Stay primitive.
• Trust the soup.
• Swing for the seats.

And our final-final precept:

• Be ready for Resistance.

MIDDLE

The Universe is Not Indifferent

That reaction is Resistance. Resistance is an active, intelligent, protean, malign force—tireless, relentless, and inextinguishable—whose sole object is to stop us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals. The universe is not indifferent. It is actively hostile.

We must respect Resistance, like Sigourney Weaver respected the Alien, or St. George respected the dragon.

Fill in the Gaps

A video game should have seven or eight major movements; so should the newest high-tech gadget, or the latest fighter plane. Our new house should have seven or eight major spaces.

We need to fill in the gaps with a series of great entertaining and enlightening scenes, sequences, or spaces.

Do Research Now

Do research early or late. 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.

If we’re inventing Twitter, we start with What Are You Doing Now?, the 140-character limit, and the Following. We fill in the gaps: the hashtag, the tiny URL, the re-tweet.

If we’re writing The Hangover , we kick off with Losing Doug, Searching for Doug, Finding Doug. Fill in the blanks: Stu marries a stripper, Mike Tyson comes after his tiger, Mister Chow brings the muscle.

Cover the Canvas

One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP.

Get to THE END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with his pitchfork.

Don’t stop. Don’t look down. Don’t think.

Suspend All self-judgement

The inner critic? His ass is not permitted in the building.

This draft is not being graded. There will be no pop quiz.

You are not allowed to judge yourself.

The Crzier the Better

Suspending self-judgment doesn’t just mean blowing off the “You suck” voice in our heads. It also means liberating ourselves from conventional expectations—from what we think our work “ought” to be or “should” look like.

Ideas Do not come Linearly

Ideas come according to their own logic. That logic is not rational. It’s not linear. We may get the middle before we get the end. We may get the end before we get the beginning. Be ready for this. Don’t resist it.

Nothing is more fun than turning on the recorder and hearing your own voice telling you a fantastic idea that you had completely forgotten you had.

The Process: Act & Reflect

It progresses in two stages: action and reflection. Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time.

In writing, “action” means putting words on paper. “Reflection” means evaluating what we have on paper. For this first draft, we’ll go light on reflection and heavy on action.

Forget rational thought. Play. Play like a child.

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 into being.

He does it all by instinct. Fearless, child-like, primitive instinct.

The Answer is Always Yes

When an idea pops into our head and we think, “No, this is too crazy,” … that’s the idea we want.

The universe is also actively benevolent. You should be feeling this now. You should be feeling a tailwind.

Your work-in-progress produces its own gravitational field, created by your will and your attention. This field attracts like-spirited entities into its orbit. What entities? Ideas

Keep Working

Stephen King has confessed that he works every day. Fourth of July, his birthday, Christmas. I love that. Particularly at this stage—what Seth Godin calls “thrashing” (a very evocative term)—momentum is everything. Keep it going. How much time can you spare each day? For that interval, close the door and—short of a family emergency or the outbreak of World War III—don’t let ANYBODY in.

Now that we’re rolling, we can start engaging the left brain as well as the right. Act, then reflect. Act, then reflect.

Fill in the Gaps - II

Ask yourself, “What’s missing?” Then fill that gap.

Ask yourself what’s missing. Then fill that void.

Ideas are flowing. Our movie, our new business, our passage to freedom from addiction has acquired gravitational mass; it possesses energy; its field produces attraction. The law of self-ordering has kicked in. Despite all our self-doubt, the project is rounding into shape. It’s

becoming itself. People are responding to us differently. We’re making new friends. Our feet are under us; we’re starting to feel professional. We’re beginning to feel as if we know a secret that nobody else does. Or rather, that we’ve somehow become part of a select society. Other members recognize us and encourage us; unsolicited, they proffer assistance—and their aid, unfailingly, is exactly what we’ve needed. Best of all, we’re having fun. The dread that had hamstrung us for years seems miraculously to have fallen away. The fog has lifted. It’s almost too good to be true.

The Wall

And then... we hit the wall. Out of nowhere, terror strikes. Our fragile confidence collapses. Nighttime: we wake in a sweat.

That “You suck” voice is back, howling in our head

We’re poised at the brink of a creative breakthrough and we can’t stand it. The prospect of success looms. We freak. Why did we start this project? We must have been insane. Who encouraged us? We want to wring their necks. Where are they now? Why can’t they help us?

Welcome to Hell

Now you’re in the shit. The next ten chapters are the most important in this book. What follows is what you need to know to get to the other side.

Principle #1: There Is an Enemy

We have been conditioned to imagine that the darkness that we see in the world and feel in our own hearts is only an illusion, which can be dispelled by the proper care, the proper love, the proper education, and the proper funding.

It can’t.

Principle #2: This Enemy Is Implacable

Its aim is not to obstruct or to hamper or to impede. Its aim is to kill.

Principle #3: This Enemy Is Inside You

Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. It does not arise from rivals, bosses, spouses, children, terrorists, lobbyists, or political adversaries.

It comes from us.

You can board a spaceship to Pluto and settle, all by yourself, into a perfect artist’s cottage ten zillion miles from Earth. Resistance will still be with you.

The enemy is inside you.

Principle #4: The Enemy Is Inside You, But It Is Not You

If you’ve got a head, you’ve got a voice of Resistance inside it.

The enemy is in you, but it is not you. No moral judgment attaches to the possession of it. You “have” Resistance the same way you “have” a heartbeat. You are blameless. You retain free will and the capacity to act.

Principle #5: The “Real You” Must Duel the “Resistance You”

You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.

There is no way to be nice to the dragon, or to reason with it or negotiate with it or beam a white light around it and make it your friend.

Principle #6: Resistance Arises Second

The key to overcoming resistance is that it arises second. What comes first is the idea, the passion, the dream of the work we are so excited to create that it scares the hell out of us.

Resistance is the response of the frightened, petty, small-time ego to the brave, generous, magnificent impulse of the creative self.

It means that, at bottom, Resistance is not the towering, all-powerful monster before whom we are compelled to quake in terror. Resistance is more like the pain-in-the-ass schoolteacher who won’t let us climb that tree in the playground.

But the urge to climb came first. That urge is love.

The opposite of fear is love—love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.

Principle #7: The Opposite of Resistance Is Assistance

Sometimes when Resistance is kicking my butt (which it does, all the time), I flash on Charles Lindbergh. What symphony of Resistance must have been playing in his head when he was struggling to raise the funding for his attempt to fly across the Atlantic solo?

Resistance’s Two Tests

Resistance puts two questions to each and all of us. Each question has only one correct answer.

Test #1: How bad do you want it?

This is Resistance’s first question. The scale below will help you answer. Mark the selection that corresponds to how you feel about your book/movie/ballet/new business/whatever.

Dabbling • Interested • Intrigued but Uncertain • Passionate • Totally Committed

If your answer is not the one on the far right, put this book down and throw it away.

Test #2: Why do you want it?

• 1.For the babes (or the dudes)
• 2.The money
• 3.For fame
• 4.Because I deserve it
• 5.For power
• 6.To prove my old man (or ex-spouse, mother, teacher, coach) wrong
• 7.To serve my vision of how life/mankind ought to be
• 8.For fun or beauty
• 9.Because I have no choice

If you checked 8 or 9, you get to stay on the island. (I know I said there was only one correct answer. But 8 and 9 are really one.)

If you checked any of the first seven, you can stay, too—but you must immediately check yourself into the Attitude Adjustment Chamber.

The Attitude Adjustment Chamber

You don’t get to keep anything when you enter this space. You must check at the door:

• Your ego
• Your sense of entitlement
• Your impatience
• Your fear
• Your hope
• Your anger

You must also leave behind:

1. All grievances related to aspects of yourself dependent on the accident of birth, e.g., how neglected/abused/ mistreated/unloved/poor/ill-favored etc. you were when you were born.
2. All sense of personal exceptionalness dependent on the accident of birth, e.g., how rich/cute/tall/thin/smart/ charming/loveable you were when you were born.
3. All of the previous two, based on any subsequent (i.e., post-birth) acquisition of any of these qualities, however honorably or meritoriously earned.

MIDDLE - Again

The Big Crash We were doing so great. Our project was in high gear, we were almost finished (maybe we actually were finished).

My books was done and then I showed it to people I trusted. They HATED it.

I’d love to report that I rallied at once and whipped that sucker into shape in a matter of days. Unfortunately, what happened was that I crashed just like the book. I went into an emotional tailspin. I was lost. I was floundering.

Ringing the Bell

Navy SEAL training puts its candidates through probably the most intense physical ordeal in the U.S. military. The reason is they’re trying to break you.

When he’s had enough and he’s ready to quit, he walks up and rings the bell. That’s it. It’s over. He has dropped out. You and I have a bell hanging over us, too, here in the belly of the beast. Will we ring it? There’s a difference between Navy SEAL training and what you and I are facing now. Our ordeal is harder. Because we’re alone.

We’ve got no trainers over us, shouting in our ears or kicking our butts to keep us going. We’ve got no friends, no fellow sufferers, no externally imposed structure. No one’s feeding us, housing us, or clothing us. We have no objective milestones or points of validation. We can’t tell whether we’re doing great or falling on our faces. When we finish, if we do, no one will be waiting to congratulate us. We’ll get no champagne, no beach party, no diploma, no insignia. The battle we’re fighting, we can’t explain to anybody or share with anybody or call in anybody to help.

The only thing we have in common with the SEAL candidates is the bell. Will we ring it or won’t we?

Crashes are Good

A crash means we’re at the threshold of learning something, which means we’re getting better, we’re acquiring the wisdom of our craft. A crash compels us to figure out what works and what doesn’t work—and to understand the difference.

We got ourselves into this mess by mistakes we made at the start. How? Were we lazy? Inattentive? Did we mean well but forget to factor in human nature? Did we assess reality incorrectly? Whatever the cause, the Big Crash compels us to go back now and solve the problem that we either created directly or set into motion unwittingly at the outset.

Panic Is Good

When we experience panic, it means that we’re about to cross a threshold. We’re poised on the doorstep of a higher plane.

Have you ever watched a small child take a few bold steps away from its mother? The little boy or girl shows great courage. She ventures forth, feels exhilaration, and then … she realizes what she has done. She freaks. She bolts back to Mommy. That’s you and me when we’re growing.

Her panic was momentary, a natural part of the process of growth.

Panic is good. It’s a sign that we’re growing.

Back to Square One

In the belly of the beast, we go back to our allies:

• Stupidity
• Stubbornness
• Blind faith

In the belly of the beast, we remind ourselves of two axioms:

• The problem is not us.
• The problem is the problem. Work the problem.

The problem is the problem

A professional does not take success or failure personally. That’s Priority Number One for us now.

That our project has crashed is not a reflection of our worth as human beings. It’s just a mistake. It’s a problem—and a problem can be solved.

Where did we go wrong? Where did this train go off the tracks?

We went wrong at the start because the problem was so hard (and the act of solving it was so painful) that we ducked and dodged and bypassed. We hoped it would go away. We hoped it would solve itself. A little voice warned us then, but we were too smart to listen.

It’s not us. We are not worthless or evil or crazy. We’re just us, facing a problem.

Work the Problem

Remember what we said before about friends and family?

They wouldn’t see the full solution, but the ideas that they stir up would help you see it.

The solution was mechanical. It was like saying “Get the drive-wheel back on the pavement; then the car will come out of the ditch.” Or “put the ship-date off one month to give us time to repair the glitches first.” It worked. It took an extra year, but it solved the problem.

And yes, the book did crash a second time after that, requiring a second trip back to Square One. What else is new?

That’s Why They Call It Rewriting - Part II

No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That’s why they call it rewriting. The Point for Us The point for you and me is that we have passed through hell. We have worked our problem. We have solved it. We have escaped from the belly of the beast.

No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That’s why they call it rewriting.

The Point for Us The point for you and me is that we have passed through hell. We have worked our problem. We have solved it

END

Killer Instinct

Why does Seth Godin place so much emphasis on “shipping”?

Shipping is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. It requires killer instinct. We’ve got the monster down; now we have to drive a stake through its heart.

When Michael Crichton approached the end of a novel (so I’ve read), he used to start getting up earlier and earlier in the morning. He was desperate to keep his mojo going. He’d get up at six, then five, then three-thirty and two-thirty, till he was driving his wife insane. Finally he had to move out of the house. He checked into a hotel (the Kona Village, which ain’t so bad) and worked around the clock till he’d finished the book. Michael Crichton was a pro.

He knew that Resistance was strongest at the finish. He did what he had to do, no matter how nutty or unorthodox, to finish and be ready to ship

Heaven & Books About Heaven

A perplexed person stands before two doors. One door says HEAVEN. The other says BOOKS ABOUT HEAVEN. What makes us laugh, I suspect, is that all of us feel the pull to pick BOOKS ABOUT HEAVEN. Are we that timid? Are our huevos that pocito? When we’re offered a chance at heaven, what diabolically craven force makes us want to back off—just for now, we promise ourselves—and choose instead heaven’s pale reflection? Fear of success is the essence of Resistance

In the belly of the beast, you and I chose HEAVEN. We’ve learned and we’re stronger. Now we face the final test

Exposure

My friend Tony Keppelman snapped me out of it by asking if I was going to quit. Hell, no! “Then be happy,” he said. “You’re where you wanted to be, aren’t you? So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.”

That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure

When we ship, we open ourselves to judgment in the real world. Nothing is more empowering, because it plants us solidly on Planet Earth and gets us out of our self-devouring, navel-centered fantasies and self-delusions. Ship it

One Thing I Can Promise You

My personal bête noire of Resistance was shipping.

Yeah, he’ll still be there. Yeah, you’ll still have to duel him every morning. And yeah, he’ll still fight just as hard and use just as many nasty tricks as he ever did. But you will have beaten him once, and you’ll know you can beat him again. That’s a game-changer. That will transform your life.

I always deliver. I always ship.

Be Careful

Just because you’ve shipped doesn’t mean Resistance is finished. Like the Terminator, it’s morphing into an even crueler and more diabolical form. It’ll be back.

Kudos to You

I stand in awe of anyone who hatches a dream and who shows the guts to hang tough, all alone, and see it through to reality.

I tip my hat to you for what you’ve done—for losing forty pounds, for kicking crack cocaine, for surviving the loss of someone you love, for facing any kind of adversity—internal or external—and slogging through. I come to attention when you walk past. I stand up for you like the spectators in the gallery stood up for Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird .

You have joined an elite fraternity, whether you realize it or not.

You can be proud of yourself. You’ve done something that millions talk about but only a handful actually perform. And if you can do it once, you can do it again.

I don’t care if you fail with this project. I don’t care if you fail a thousand times.

About the Cover

In 1885, Vincent Van Gogh created this cover drawing, Man with a Hoe , as a part of his life-long pursuit to give happiness by creating beauty.

It represents the quiet strength of a person who actually does the work, regardless of glamour or crowds or the resistance. The drawing is also a reminder that there’s an artist within each of us, and we must encourage that artist to do the work, to make something that matters, regardless of anything else that is going on.

Perhaps he was talking about you.