Title The War of Art

Author Steven Pressfield

Year Published 2003

Kind of Book Creative Process/Motivational

How strongly I recommend it 7/10 

My Impressions This is a book about the resistance artists face when the create. Even though this is the Pressfield book everyone talks about, I thought "Do the Work" was his best.

Date Read Dec 2020

Practical Takeaways

  • Stop writing for the day when you start making typos

  • Put the time in and hit it with all you've got

  • Be weary of Resistance when the finish line is in sight

  • Serve as an example and inspiration to others

  • Once you break away from resistance don't "turn around for your buddy who catches his trouser leg on the barbed wire…get over the wall and keep motivating." pg20

  • Come up with a disease so you can sell them the cure-Sales Tactic

  • Stop casting yourself as a victim

  • Stop criticizing others

  • The more you are scared of a work or calling, the more sure you can be that you have to do it (Rule of Thumb)

  • Take on the assignment that will bear you into uncharted waters

  • Play hurt

  • Stop thinking you need to complete your healing before you can do your work

  • When your deeper self delivers a dream, don't talk about it. Don't dilute it's power. Shut up and use it.

  • Play for keeps not for fun

  • Sit down to write every morning at 9am-Somerset Maugham

  • Do your work before anything else, no matter how 'important' it might seem

  • Set one foot in front of the other and keep climbing

  • Know how to be miserable and love it

  • Show up every day

  • Show up no matter what

  • Stay on the job all day

  • Do not overidentify with you job

  • Have a sense of humor about your job

  • Receive praise and blame in the real world

  • Expose yourself to the judgement of the real world

  • Stop complaining about the blows you are dealt and be grateful A: that's the price you pay for living in the arena

  • Be the tortoise not the hare

  • Conserve your energy

  • Prepare you mind for the long haul

  • Don't wait for inspiration, act in anticipation of it

  • Don't think too much about art being this holy mystical thing

  • Shut up and do your work

  • Don't wait to overcome your fear before starting

  • Make your writing style serve the material, not draw the attention away from it to yourself

  • Respect your craft

  • Don't consider yourself superior to your craft

  • Dedicate yourself to mastering technique

  • Apprentice yourself to the masters who have come before you

  • Seek out the most knowledgeable teacher and listen with both ears

  • Do not identify with your instrument

  • Don't take criticism personally

  • Don't view editors and critics as the enemy

  • Don't forgot that your work is not you

  • Keep your eye on the doughnut and not on the hole

  • Get an agent

  • Get a lawyer

  • Get an accountant

  • Only be a professional at one thing

  • Go over what assignment you are responsible for in the coming week

  • Have a meeting with yourself every Monday

  • Have different credit cards for yourself and your "corporation" aka art

  • Think of yourself as a corporation

  • Sit down every day and try

  • Say a prayer to the Muse before sitting down to write

  • Have the guts to finish your book

  • Start the next novel as soon as you finish one

  • Get out there in the world

  • "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.-Goethe couplet

  • When you finish a day of writing head up into the hills for a hike

  • Take a tape recorder with you when you walk to record your ideas

  • Find out who you really are and become it

  • Of any activity you do ask yourself 'If I were the last person on earth would I still do it?'

  • Acquire modesty

  • Be a warrior

  • Don't cheat the world of your contribution A: if you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, you hurt everyone else and destroy the planet

  • Do it or don't do it

Big Ideas

  • Crazy procrastination of organizing and reorganizing clothes =writers block

  • Resistance is anything that favors short term gratification over long term health, growth, and integrity

  • The more important a call or action is to our souls evolution, the more Resistance we will feel towards pursuing it

  • People around you might start acting strange when you actually start writing/creating. It is their projection of their own untapped potential that you're reflecting back to them

  • We're good at fooling ourselves into thinking we're not procrastinating

  • People create unnecessary drama as a way of procrastinating

  • The more we fear something the more likely it is that that is what we need to do for growth of our soul

  • True artists are humble because they know that some external force (unconscious) is doing the creation and they are merely writing it down

  • The reason slang words for being drunk/intoxication are so demolition-oriented (stoned, smashed, hammered)…is because it’s the ego that gets blasted, waxed, plastered.

  • It was easier for Hitler to start world war II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

  • We do just about anything to squirm out of doing difficult creative work

  • When people see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it them crazy if they have not lived out their own.

  • Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others.pg38

  • The most important part of doing creative work is sitting down every day an trying