Hi friends,
I hope you’re all enjoying your week so far. I’m a bit late with this post but I have a confession about it — a totally valid, completely excusable non-excuse excuse: this time I wanted to write some of my own thoughts. And I panicked.
Writing is hard, and sharing your writing is even harder. There’s a great book by Steven Pressfield called the War of Art that talks about this process. It envisions the artist, the writer, the creator as a warrior lost in a battle against a mysterious internal force — an all-consuming, deeply personal energy that does whatever it can to prevent you from doing the work that you have to do the most. He calls it resistance.
To quote Pressfield:
Resistance is Insidious: Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean. It will assume any form, if that’s what it takes to deceive you. It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.
How many of us have used completely valid excuses — other work, personal obligations, the need for self-care, not enough caffeine — to justify our failure to sit down and actually do the work that’s calling us? How many us have lost the battle to resistance over and over again?
Probably all of us. Many times over.
I know that I have.
Except today, after a few days of internal strife, ego-bashing, trash-heap tossing, I decided to break through — just a little bit — to write you this thing. It’s a small thing, and I’m almost certainly still letting resistance win to the bigger projects I have to do, but for today I’m okay with winning a little battle.
And if I can do it, then you definitely can too.
So on this lovely Wednesday I wish you all the resolve, power, and strategic perspective to say ‘fuck you’ to resistance.
Go do that thing you want to do.
Sam
“No resistance” would be a great tattoo