Brian Johnson explores Steven Pressfield's concept of Resistance: the internal forces like procrastination, fear, and perfectionism that block your best work. He connects it to Phil Stutz's idea of Part X and suggests a daily practice: put your butt where your heart wants to be.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. Not too long ago we talked about a big idea from Steven Pressfield's latest book, Put yout Butt where your Heart Wants to Be. As you may recall, Pressfield gave us a new way to execute our Cal Newport inspired shutdown Complete ritual via the office is closed wisdom he shares in that book. Today I want to revisit that book for another wisdom gem. This one is on resistance. Pressfield tells us what is resistance? It's our own tendency, yours and mine and everyone's, to yield to procrastination, self doubt, fear, impatience, self inflation, self denigration, distraction, laziness, arrogance, complacency and perfectionism. It's our inability to focus our incapacity, to press on through adversity. It's our terror of finishing and exposing our work to the judgment of the marketplace. It's fear of failure. It's fear of success, fear of humiliation, fear of destitution. It's our inability to defer gratification, to acquire and act with self discipline, self validation and self reinforcement. End quote. Now that's from the note to the reader with which the book begins. Pressfield tells us that we'd be wise to both name our enemy and be honest with ourselves that it exists. He calls that part of us that does all the above mentioned things and more resistance with a capital R. Phil Stutz calls it Part X. We often call it your demon. Remember, the words demon and daimon are related. Demon is the diminutive of daimon. It's the part of each of us that wants to do the vicious thing while the better part of us is whispering in our ears, encouraging us to do the virtuous, noble thing. So how do we deal with our resistance? In the nine words of the book's title, Steve tells us, put your butt where your heart wants to be. We could also say, put your mind and body and spirit where your daimon your soul knows it should be. If we can muster the wisdom and self mastery and love and courage and gratitude and hope and curiosity and zest to get ourselves to more and more consistently close the gap and show up as our best selves, we will win the ultimate game. And as a result, over the long run, we'll win all the other games we want to play. If we don't do that. Well, then it really doesn't matter what else we do. We may win some smaller little games once in a while, but we'll miss out on the real prize. And that's today's plus one Resistance. It will always be there. Pay attention to its presence. Then ignore it as you put your mind and your body where your heart and soul knows it should be. Not someday, not even today. No. All day, every day. Especially right now.
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