PNTV: Do the Work by Steven Pressfield (#225)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, do the Work. Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. This is an old cover. There's an updated one with his new publishing company, Black Irish, that published it. Steven Pressfield, extraordinary writer in his own right. He's written three books on the creative process, the War of Art, do the Work and Turning Pro. This is the second in that trilogy. It's fantastic. We've covered the War of Art, we've covered Turning Pro. Now ready to do the Work. This book basically walks you through a project, whether that's creating a business or writing a play or whatever it is you're doing. He brings you from the beginning to, to the middle, to the end, which is what we're going to look at quickly today. Philosopher's Note, bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorite ones here. The first big idea is resistance. So all of Pressfield's work revolves around what he calls resistance. Resistance is his word for that. Fear and self doubt and whatever icky feelings you have about what you can't do creatively or in any aspect of your life. That's resistance speaking. And he makes the important point that if you have a body, you have resistance. You don't need to be a professional artist or whatever to experience resistance. We all have resistance in our own way. And embracing the fact that we have a common humanity is what Kristin Neff describes it as in self compassion. You're not alone. And one of the biggest things we can do, experience the ick sauce, is to think two things. One, that we're the only ones who are experiencing fear or doubt or whatever. And two, to think that we're experiencing it because something is wrong with us. So we're the only ones experiencing it, and it's because something's wrong with us. I remember I was having a coaching session with Steve Chandler. I don't know how long it was now, a year or two ago. And I was at my edge and experiencing the fear and stress that comes with that. And he said, look, Brian, you're not experiencing this because you're you. You're experiencing this because you're human. Anyone who puts themselves in a situation is going to experience that sense of fear, that sense of resistance. So remember, it's not because you're you per se, it's because you're human. Simply embracing the common humanity of our own mutual suffering is a huge way to, to get through that pain and do what needs to get done. So that's our first big idea. Second Big idea. I mentioned the fact that we've got start, keep working and ship here, right? So this is the beginning. Every creative project has a beginning, has a middle, and if you keep on going, has an end, right? So the beginning is obviously most important part of the work. You don't begin, you won't have a shot at the middle and the end. And the idea here is start, start before you're ready. Pressfield tells us, ready, fire, aim. We talk about this all the time too often. And the most sensitive and kind of intelligent among us tend to be the most perfectionistic. And we want to think everything through. We want to see the perfect plan from right here to the end. And we want to know every single turn we're going to make. It's like taking a trip. You're going to go take a 500 mile drive and you want to know the turn you're going to take at 127 miles in. Is it a right turn there or is it a. I can't remember. You don't need to know that. You need to start. You have a basic idea of where you want to go, but you need to start. And you need to start before you're ready. Pressfield tells us none of us are ever going to feel completely ready. But we do the work and we gain the competence. Start, ready, fire, aim. Or as John Mackey says, fire, Ready, aim. Sure, there are certain things in our lives where we really need to get prepared. I want my neurosurgeon, if I ever had to have one, or heart surgeon or whatever to prepare. I like the fact that pilots go through a very thorough checklist. They prepare. But for most of the stuff that we do, we can jump in a heck of a lot faster with a lot more courage and fun than we may have thought possible. We talk about in the note, we talk about Patricia Ryan Madsen. Steven Pressfield is the one who introduced me to Patricia Ryan Madsen, who wrote Improv Wisdom, interviewed Patricia and did a note on her great book. She says the same exact thing. Don't prepare, just show up. Where do you need to be to take your project to the next step? Do that and do it again and again and again, which is our next big idea. Keep working so you get some momentum. You're out the gate. That's exciting. Now keep working, keep working, Keep working is what Pressfield tells us. He shares the fact that Stephen King, the great novelist, doesn't take days off. He works on the 4th of July, he works on his birthday, he works on Christmas. He just works, he keeps working. Great creators know that once you've created momentum, once you've gotten going, if you allow time to come in, self doubt can come in. That momentum is lost. So much of the energy is just getting it going. And once you get it going, the trick really is just to sustain it. So we'll all have our own different patterns of work. Some of us may not want to work every single day, but we want to show up consistently, keep the work going, keep the momentum going. That's a huge part of the middle phase. Ton of other ideas we can talk about there, but I'm going to leave it at that for now. The fourth big idea. Now we're approaching the end, beginning to the middle. Now we're at the end. Now the beginning was incredibly important. But if you do all the work and you don't bring it to the market, you don't give it to the world, you don't ship, as Seth Godin says. And it doesn't matter just sitting there gathering dust on your desk. It's really hard for a lot of people, once they've done the work, to put themselves out there. That's, that's torture, right? The fear of can be torture. The fear of what people are going to say and how they're going to respond to all of this work can stop us from actually bringing our work to life. Shipping, it is huge ship, ship, ship. And there's the big ship, right, of launching a play on Broadway or whatever big project you have. But there's all the little micro ships in the process that make that happen. So the little baby steps that you could take, but you don't take, right? There's an email that you need to send. You got a little bit of fear. You don't know how the person's going to respond or you need to reach out to someone, or you need to update your website copy or you need to post this blog that you've been holding on to ship, ship, ship. In the note, I talk about the fact that every single time I do one of these, there are moments where it's obviously not perfect. There's a big part of my perfectionistic self, AKA resistance, that doesn't want to ship. I don't want to do anything that's less than perfect. And my discipline is ship, ship, consistently finish and get it out, finish and get it out. And know that as I embrace that process over time, there's the opportunity to grow and to get better and better and better. Now different things demand different levels of Quality. But we want to discipline ourselves to ship. So check in on your life and see if you are not shipping as often as you can. Is there something in your life that you haven't shipped on that you can go ahead and step into? How can you build your shipping muscles? Make it a practice. Anesthetize yourself from the fear and the pain that comes every time you put yourself out there. You do it and you stretch yourself a little bit past your comfort zone. And. And what used to freak you out doesn't freak you out anymore quite as much. So that's the fourth big idea. The fifth one here is the dream. So this, I think, was actually an idea in the keep working middle phase. Talks about the fact Pressfield does that anytime he finds resistance kicking his butt. And he says parenthetically. And that's all the time. Again, Pressfield isn't immune from this. He's writing about it because he experiences it. We. We all experience it. He mentions Henry Fonda, one of the best actors out there. Right? He threw up before every one of his stage performances. Even when he was 75 years old. 75 years old. Before he takes the stage, he's throwing up. So next time you feel your energy building, keep that in mind. You're not alone. Common humanity. And it's not about you. It's the condition of the game you're playing. But one way to ground ourselves is to focus on the dream. Talks about Charles Lindbergh, 1927. No one has flown solo non stop across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris. There's a big prize out for the first person that can do that. Some great aviators died trying to do it. Charles Lindbergh, this young kid, no one had heard of him. And Pressfield says, what do you think was going through his mind? What resistance do you think he was facing internally and externally as he was thinking about being the first to fly from New York to Paris? And Pressfield does one of his great rants and says the voice had to be. You're an idiot. Are you kidding me? You deserve to die if you go do this. This is just dumb. Who do you think you are? It can't be done. It's impossible. And what sustained Lindbergh? Pressfield says it was the dream. He said, how cool would it be in 1927 to sit there and imagine and to dream about being the first one to take off from New York to land in a field outside of Paris and to celebrate that. Wow. That dream fired them up. When you have a dream that inspires you that much. You can deal with resistance, you can start, you can keep working, you can ship again and again and again. So again, the question for you is, what's your dream? What's firing you up to go out and do great things in the world? If you don't have a dream, if you're not jumping out of bed in the morning with a level of enthusiasm you'd like to see see, check in and see how you can create or rekindle a dream and get fired up again. Dreams are huge. It's going to motivate us to ship, keep working, to start, and to deal with the resistance and ultimately do the work. Hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.