Insight Editions · No. 221
Turning Pro
Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work
Steven Pressfield
Steven Pressfield contrasts amateur and professional ways of living, describing how people confront distraction, build a disciplined practice, and commit to meaningful creative work.
A study guide to Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
| # | Section | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| : | Foreword · Before and After | Coyne frames the how of turning pro |
| 1 | The Third Model | Addiction / distraction / pro |
| 2 | The House in the Country | Shadow life that looks like success |
| 3 | Shadow Careers | Almost-the-calling as Resistance |
| 4 | Habits, Addiction, and the Shadow Symphony | Habit architecture of flight |
| 5 | Resistance and the Addiction Cluster | How Resistance recruits addiction |
| 6 | My Year of Turning Pro | Pressfield's dated hinge |
| 7 | Defining the Amateur | Amateur as identity, not skill |
| 8 | Traits of the Amateur | Checklist of amateur patterns |
| 9 | The Tribe and Turning Pro | Leave the tribe; keep the work |
| 10 | Moments of Turning Pro | Epiphanies that force the seat |
| 11 | Qualities of the Professional | Habits, courage, two salaries |
| 12 | The Professional Practice | Space, time, intention, lifelong |
| 13 | Working Over Your Head | Mystery axioms; sit chilly |
| 14 | The Professional and the Primitive | Shaman, yetzer hara, Mussar, gift |
| : | Synthesis · Three Books, One Threshold | Amateur → Turn → Practice |
Before and After
The epigraph is Pressfield's own sentence: he can divide his life neatly into two parts, before turning pro and after. The whole book unpacks that hinge. Turning pro is presented as an event you can date, the way you remember where you were on 9/11.
Shawn Coyne edited Pressfield's novels Gates of Fire, Tides of War, and Last of the Amazons, then published The War of Art through his boutique house Rugged Land Books. He told the sales reps it would become an evergreen backlist bestseller; ten years and hundreds of thousands of copies later, it sits in studios and on bedside tables as a working artist's reference.
Craft everywhere, and the voice that stops it
Coyne points to a public garbage can in Paris, a paving stone in Rio de Janeiro, a doorway in Dublin: someone made each with craft, dedication, and professionalism, and the result can approach immortality. Making things is not the hard part. Sitting down to do the work is. Writer's block, artistic agita, general malaise: whatever you call it, a malignant internal critic waylays painting, writing, a new venture, charity work, or full effort in the job you already have.
- The name. In The War of Art Pressfield called that voice Resistance: the force that stops us committing to the important work of our lives, and stops us fighting to finish it.
- The strategy. The War of Art proposed "turning pro": leaving amateur ways behind and declaring, if only inwardly, that we have earned our scars and now brand ourselves professionals.
- The open question. For a decade readers asked how you actually do it and what professionals do that others do not.
- Three years. Pressfield worked three years on this book, seeking an approach both deeper and more practical. In the meantime he published The Warrior Ethos and Do the Work (with Seth Godin's Domino Project).
The Third Model
The book opens with a joke. The Daily Show reported that Japanese scientists built a robot that recognizes its own reflection. Jon Stewart: "When the robot learns to hate what it sees, it will have achieved full humanity." Self-loathing is the starting condition Pressfield assumes in his reader.
Two models of salvation, and a third
When we hate our lives and ourselves, two frames offer rescue. Each uses its own vocabulary, which Pressfield puts in scare quotes to show how much the words do the work.
| Model | Diagnosis | Remedy | Promised end |
|---|---|---|---|
| Therapeutic | We are "sick"; we have a "condition" or "disease" | "Treatment" | We become "well," happy, functional |
| Moralistic | We did "wrong," a "crime" or "sin"; in some versions we were born wrong | Punishment and penance; "serve our sentence," "atone" | "Pardoned" and "released," happy, functional |
| Amateur / Professional | We are living as amateurs | Turn pro: change your mind | We find our power, will, voice, self-respect |
The thesis is stated flatly: what ails you and me has nothing to do with being sick or being wrong. The fix is a change of operating mode, and it requires no course and no product. "All you have to do is change your mind."
The price list
Pressfield repeats "turning pro is free, but…" three times, each time adding a charge.
- Free, but not easy. No purchase needed; only a decision.
- Free, but not without cost. You give up a life you may have grown comfortable in and a self you identify with. You may lose friends, lovers, even spouses.
- Free, but it demands sacrifice. The passage is an interior odyssey survived at emotional, psychological, and spiritual cost. "We pass through a membrane." It hurts, it is messy, and "we tread in blood."
- Not for everyone. You have to be a little crazy to want it. Often the passage chooses us; we have no alternative.
- The payoff. We find our power, our will, our voice, our self-respect, and become who we always were but feared to live out.
The three models differ most in who holds the power to change you.
The House in the Country
The halfway house
In his twenties Pressfield spent a winter in a Durham, North Carolina boarding house that served as a halfway station for patients leaving state mental hospitals. He was not a patient, but "the law of metaphor" had placed him there as surely as if he had been. The residents were not "crazy"; they were among the most interesting people he had met, and he found friends and a home. Evenings meant coffee in the communal kitchen and talk of books, politics, and whether aliens came from the future or from God.
- The only job in the house. Pressfield earned $1.75 an hour in the body shop of a trucking company, training to be an over-the-road trucker. Everyone else drew a state check and saw social workers who assessed their progress.
- The question. Why did he feel so at home there? Was this his destiny?
- The dominant emotion. Unspoken fear filled the house. Everyone had experienced the disintegration of their personality, fallen far, hard, and alone, and looked their own annihilation in the face.
The cinderblock cabin
He left and rented a cinderblock cabin on a country highway for fifteen dollars a week. No electricity, no toilet, no running water, no heat, no windows, no furniture, a front door and no back door. He slept on a mattress pushed into the corner the rain did not reach and cooked over pine kindling out back. Once he began hauling loads, he mostly slept in the truck's sleeper berth and ate at truck stops.
He still keeps a photo of that house, because moving into it was "my first act, as an adult, that embraced the idea of ambition."
The redheaded cat
A battle-scarred redheaded tom from the woods would appear on nights Pressfield cooked outside. The geography never changed: Pressfield on the cinderblock back step, fire in a ring of stones, the woods ten feet off, the cat sitting upright at the tree line, front paws tucked, facing him. He refused every scrap: nobody's pet. His look sat "somewhere between condescension and disdain." Neither of them doubted which one had self-command and self-sovereignty, or which one "had his shit together." Pressfield admired him, missed him when he stayed away, and took each visit as an omen that he might be on the right path.
The Smith-Corona in the van
What was really happening in the house? He was hiding. Under junk and rusting parts in the back of his Chevy van sat his old Smith-Corona typewriter. He never used it and never threw it away. Fear and shame filled the cabin as they had filled the halfway house: terror of sitting down to write, and shame at knowing he was terrified yet still not acting. The ambition to write surfaced only in dreams and brief flashes of insight. Everything in his outer life was a consequence and an expression of that terror and that shame.
Shadow Careers
The definition
A shadow career is a metaphor for the real career. Its shape is similar and its contours feel tantalizingly the same, but it entails no real risk. If we fail at it, the consequences mean nothing to us. Pressfield's diagnostic questions:
- The scholar. Are you getting a Ph.D. in Elizabethan studies because you fear writing the tragedies and comedies inside you?
- The scene. Are you living the drugs-and-booze half of the musician's life without writing the music?
- The support role. Are you working for an innovator because you fear risking innovation yourself?
Pressfield's shadow career: driving trucks
In his late twenties and early thirties he drove tractor-trailers, first up and down the East Coast out of Durham, North Carolina, later cross-country from Seaside, California. He was "in deadly earnest," committed 100%. What he was really doing was running away from writing.
| What trucking gave him | Why it shadowed writing |
|---|---|
| Power and manliness | Matched how he imagined a writer's life |
| Never boring, a source of pride | Felt like a calling without the exposure of one |
| Honest labor: a dollar's work for a dollar | Stand-up, salt-of-the-earth company he aspired to |
| Courage: night runs over the mountains into West Virginia | Real danger, but not the danger he needed to face |
| The romance of "the road": always free, never stuck | Motion substituting for progress |
The mountain runs were genuinely hard: unlit, unmarked curves, wicked climbs after drop-dead descents, and you had to keep your foot nailed to the floor with 60,000 pounds of truck and load plunging downhill, or the next grade would drop you into creeper gear with every trucker behind you cursing. At each delivery he could shoot the breeze with locals, knowing they were trapped and he was free.
Kerouac and Sterling Lord
In high school Pressfield read Jack Kerouac's On the Road and it "blew my brains out." Many kids loved the beat, bohemian life; very few were "dumb enough to actually try to live it." He was confusing the writer's life with real life. Trucking was an attempt to professionalize life on the road, and it beat his earlier years of aimless drifting coast to coast, wondering why his life fell short of Kerouac's.
Three cheers for the amateur life
Before "ruthlessly deconstructing" amateurism, Pressfield toasts it. The amateur life is our youth and our hero's journey; no one is born a pro, and the fall before bottom "can be a hell of a ride." His toast: to blackouts and divorces, lost jobs, lost cash, lost self-respect, time on the street, years we cannot remember, bad friends and cheating spouses, "and to us, too, for being guilty of both."
"Becoming a pro, in the end, is nothing grander than growing up."
He then sets the agenda for the rest of Book One: what are shadow careers, what is the amateur life, what are addictions, obsessions, and displacement activities, and how do we profit from them once we leave the street behind.
The shadow life
In the shadow life we live in denial and act by addiction. We pursue callings that go nowhere and obey compulsions we do not understand or do not see, whose outcomes keep us caged, unconscious, and going nowhere. It is the life of the amateur: false objects and inverted ambitions. It is not benign. The longer we cling to it, the farther we drift from our purpose and the harder it is to rally the courage to return.
A shadow career casts the outline of the real one; asking what it is a metaphor for points across the gap.
Habits, Addiction, and the Shadow Symphony
Addicted to love
Pressfield has a lifelong friend addicted to love (he admits he can relate). She moves from one consuming affair to the next, in agony throughout and agony at the end. She is one of the most gifted people he knows: a piano prodigy, a prize-winning photographer, a near-world-class athlete who has swum the Maui to Big Island open-ocean crossing half a dozen times. Over the years she built a philosophy, almost a religion, of pursuing the sublime through love, persuasive enough to convince listeners too. Watching each drama run to the same cadence and the same dead end is "bone-numbingly tedious." She knows it is Resistance and that she is running from her gifts; they have discussed it a hundred times. But the habit is too strong: she has become identified with it.
This book is about habits
- The core distinction. An amateur has amateur habits; a professional has professional habits.
- No escape from habit. Humans are creatures of habit; we cannot be free of habits, only replace bad ones with good ones.
- The trade. Exchange the habits of the amateur and the addict for the practice of the professional and committed artist or entrepreneur.
- The jumping-off point. Study the most passionate and tragic creature of habit: the addict.
Beautiful losers
Addicts are often extremely interesting people; addiction itself is excruciatingly boring because it is predictable: the lies, evasions, transparent self-justifications. The addict's story reads like a novel. Alcohol stories run to job loss, domestic abuse, divorce, abandoned children, bankruptcy; Class One narcotics add the law, crime, prison, violence, death. And the objects of addiction are wide: love, sex, worship of our children or parents, dominance, submission, even ourselves (Pressfield cites Charlie Sheen and Donald Trump). Such people are fascinating and "boring as hell" at once.
Art and addiction
Pressfield's weekly "Writing Wednesdays" post at stevenpressfield.com drew its biggest audience for the "Artist and Addict" series. Its point: there is not that big a difference between the two. Many artists are addicts and vice versa; many are both in alternate breaths.
| Addict / amateur | Artist / professional | |
|---|---|---|
| Relation to calling | Runs from it; addiction is a surrogate | Embraces it and does the work |
| What they build | A "shadow symphony": he is orchestra, conductor, composer, audience | The real symphony, novel, company |
| Use of personal pain | Draws attention to himself; builds a "life," "character," "personality" | Steps back, handles it like a HazMat tech with weapons-grade plutonium |
| For whom | Himself | Others |
| Where the drama lives | Outside, in the life | Inside, in the work |
| Time | Past or future | Present |
"Addiction" here is broad: not only alcoholism, drug dependence, and domestic abuse, but web-surfing, compulsive texting, sexting, twittering, Facebooking. Distractions. Displacement activities. We enact the addiction instead of the calling because the calling demands work and entry into "the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure." So life becomes a shadow drama, a shadow start-up, a shadow philanthropic venture.
- Southern "characters." In New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, the old lady with 39 cats or the purple-haired man whose apartment is a shrine to James Dean has elevated shadow enactment to folklore, almost art.
- Pressfield's shadow novel. His life once had plot, characters, sex and action scenes, mood, texture. His friends lived shadow movies and shadow industries. None wrote a real novel, painted a real painting, or started a real business; they lived in the past or dreamed of the future and failed to work in the present.
- Simplicity. When you turn pro, life gets very simple. Zen monks, artists, entrepreneurs often live almost invisibly. Miyamoto Musashi's dojo was smaller than Pressfield's living room; in the end he did not even need a sword.
Artist and addict start from identical material; the fork is whether the drama is lived out or worked in.
Resistance and the Addiction Cluster
Resistance and addiction
The pre-addictive person (you and I when young) experiences a calling: to art, to service, to honorable sacrifice. A vision of a higher self. The intimation is followed immediately by the apparition of Resistance: fear, self-doubt, self-sabotage.
What makes the moment precarious is that most of us are unconscious of both the aspiration and the Resistance. We are asleep. We know something is wrong and do not know how to fix it. Restless, bored, angry. We burn to accomplish something great, but we do not know where to begin, and even if we did we would still be too terrified to take a step.
Enter: a drink, a lover, a habit.
Addiction replaces aspiration. The quick fix wins out over the long, slow haul.
Addiction and shadow careers
When we cannot stand the fear, shame, and self-reproach, we obliterate them with an addiction. The addiction becomes the shadow version, the evil twin of our calling to service or art.
That is why addicts are interesting and boring at once:
- Interesting, because they are called to something new and unique, something watchers cannot wait to see brought into manifestation.
- Boring, because they never do the work.
Instead, the addict enacts aspiration in shadow form. The addiction becomes the novel, the adventure, the great love. The work of art or service that might have been produced is replaced by the drama, conflict, and suffering of a crazy, haunted, shattered life.
The addict as dramatic hero
Robert McKee, in his story seminars, says the essential quality in a fictional protagonist is passion and will to push the story to the limits of human experience in order to achieve the goal. Without that, there is no story.
That heroic monomania is also the definition of the addict. The lush or the junkie will sell her own mother to score the substance she is jonesing for. Same monomania, wrong object.
Why Pressfield does not knock addiction
Addictions, in his frame, are not "bad." They are shadow forms of a more noble calling: the calling itself, encrypted and incognito. A metaphor for our best selves. A coded version of higher aspiration.
Addictions and shadow careers are messages in a bottle from the unconscious. The Jungian Self is trying to get our attention, to hold an intervention. The question to ask of a shadow career or addiction is the same question a psychotherapist asks of a dream: what is the unconscious trying to tell us?
Aspiration meets Resistance; the quick fix becomes the shadow twin of the calling.
Pulling the pin
At twenty-nine, Pressfield spent a season picking apples in Chelan, Washington: migrant labor, not idyll. Six weeks of Romes, then Deliciouses; when the cold came, Winesaps, which cut the flesh of your hands with barbed spurs, worse before dawn with frost on the stems and frozen fingers.
One of the top pickers was Dave, a former infantryman with the 1st Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea (November-December 1950): temperatures to thirty below, Americans surrounded by about 67,000 soldiers of the Chinese Ninth Army. Asked how he picked Winesaps: "With a great deal of pain."
Dave was smart, funny, kind, generous, and living "on the fritz," as the Wobblies used to say. A drinker who spent most of the year in an SRO on Skid Row in Seattle (he had the etymology: "Skid Row" from the original "Skid Road" where lumbermen slid timber to the harbor). He came out on the tramp at harvest for apples in Washington and cherries in Marysville, California. He drew a veteran's disability check and still put away winter cash because he was that good a picker.
Pay was by the bin (about 4' by 4' by 3' deep): Pressfield did two a day at first, never more than three; Dave routinely knocked off six, seven, eight. About $4 a bin (maybe six; Pressfield cannot remember), plus a dollar-a-bin end-of-season bonus if you stuck. Dave stuck. So did Pressfield. Most of the tramps "pulled the pin."
Dave's taxonomy:
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Tramp | Itinerant worker |
| Hobo | Itinerant non-worker |
| Bum | Non-itinerant non-worker |
"Pulling the pin" comes from riding the rails: uncouple cars by pulling the heavy steel pin from the coupling. In migrant lingo it meant quitting. Wake up; the bunk next to you is empty. "What happened to Jim?" "He pulled the pin."
Pressfield could relate. He had pulled the pin on his first book 99.9% of the way through. He had pulled the pin on his marriage. In Chelan he was determined not to.
On wine versus other drinks, Dave was practical: hard liquor destroys the liver; good whisky is expensive and cheap stuff is poison; beer needs a case minimum and you cannot carry it without a car, plus you piss all night. Wine: a decent buzz on a bottle or two, made at least partly from grapes; "who knows, there might even be a tad of nutrition in there."
Pressfield was the only person in the bunkhouse with a vehicle, so he drove people into town. Most stayed on the orchard. Work at first light; by day's end they wanted a bottle or two and a blanket. He did not drink. He talked to everybody.
Jack was the coolest of the "fruit tramps": looked like Steve McQueen, ace car mechanic, almost as fast a picker as Dave. He coughed up blood in quantities that ruined pillows; they had to throw them away. Pressfield asked why he did not get a real job. Jack had tried: sister's husband took him in, back in Enid, Oklahoma; job, apartment, girlfriend. One morning he woke up, could not take it, pulled the pin.
Pulling the pin, part two
Two things struck Pressfield about the migrants:
- They were wonderful guys. Not crazy, not stupid. They taught and helped; they would share down to the last dollar. Funny and smart. Many were readers; a good portion kept up with politics with more insight than paid pundits.
- They had the peace of having already fallen so far that they did not have to worry about falling farther. Worst case, Dave or Jack could sleep on the ground and forage. If the Bomb went off tomorrow, they would survive.
There was something natural about life following the seasons; the human race did that for millions of years. When Washington finished, California cherries came in. "You coming for the cherries?" Dave asked. Pressfield wanted to. He had a book to finish (so he could stop pulling the pin) and his cat Mo to look after. He gave Dave a ride to the highway and watched him in the rearview, thumb out, heading south as Pressfield went west.
The life we call "normal," Pressfield says, is not normal at all: spouse, kids, mortgage, 9-to-5. Artists and entrepreneurs live closer to natural: they migrate too, following the Muse instead of the sun. When one crop is picked, they hit the road for the next. Lonely, tough, not for everyone; it has its compensations.
Dave may have been a drinker who was not going to quit, but that was the life he had chosen. Would his parents, sisters, ex-wife have picked it? Would he have elected it? He was willing to pay the price: hard work, hard times, the looks people gave him on the street. They did not know Dave. He was a top hand and a good guy. He would never pull the pin.
He was a pro.
The definition of boring
Something boring goes nowhere. It travels in a circle. It never arrives.
The repetitive nature of the shadow life and of addiction is what makes both tedious. No traction. No progress. The same endlessly repeating loop. That is what makes addiction like hell.
All addictions share, among others, two primary qualities:
- They embody repetition without progress.
- They produce incapacity as a payoff.
The payoff of incapacity
Return to the friend addicted to love. Charming, interesting, beautiful, adventurous, intelligent. A Vanity Fair profile might make a reader envy the drama and glamour. Pressfield loves her and still says she has wasted her life, as he has wasted vast tracts of his own.
She has used the pursuit of love to produce incapacity, and it has worked for decades. Multiple talents unexplored, untried, unrealized. A shadow version of herself: inverted, crippled. Miserable, and she cannot or will not change. You might disagree and call it a great life; he grants you might be right.
Distraction and displacement seem innocent on the surface. Fun, romance, or enjoying the world can still harm us. Lives go down the tubes one repetition at a time, one deflection at a time, one hundred and forty characters at a time.
What follows is his sampling of garden-variety addictions short of hard-core chemical dependency, still potent enough to cripple, malform, and destroy.
Addicted to failure
Failing is a natural part of life. Being addicted to failure is different: we enjoy it. Each failure is a secret relief.
There is a glamour to failure mined for centuries by starving poets, romantic suicides, and other self-defined doomed souls. The glamour inverts failure into "success." Pressfield has had a romance with that goddess; the lure can be as intoxicating as hard-core narcotics.
The payoff is incapacity. When we fail, we are off the hook: a Get Out Of Jail Free card. We no longer have to ask and answer Stanislavsky's three questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want?
Addicted to sex
If addictions and shadow careers are metaphors, sex is the richest and hardest to decode. Obsession can look like conquest or surrender; oblivion of orgasm or transcendence beyond ego; union, domination, humiliation; love, a parent-figure, or God. A comedian reduces it to friction.
Pressfield's own theory: the obsessive pursuit of sex is an attempt to obliterate the ego, the monkey-mind of restlessness, fear, anger, and self-centeredness. We are trying to reach the level above that. The entity we seek union with is ourselves: true being, soul, Self.
Addicted to distraction
When we work with focus and we work deep, we succeed. That is how Tom Brady mastered the forward pass, how Picasso painted, how Yo-Yo Ma learned the cello.
Resistance wants us shallow and unfocused, so it makes the superficial and the vain intoxicating. Checking e-mail every half hour. Leaving the web connection on when you sit down to work. Keeping up with the Kardashians can be fatal to the work.
Addicted to money
The real utility of money is convenience as a medium of exchange. You need not carry a goat from Smyrna to Aleppo for a carpet; sell the goat, pocket a silver daric, buy the carpet.
When we are addicted to money, we get hooked on the metaphor: scorekeeping, magic, a currency that opens doors and produces transcendence. Money is second only to sex in metaphoric richness. As with carnality, the real object is the currency of our own hearts. The same premise applies to power, fame, and other external expressions of potency. What we are really seeking is voice, truth, authenticity.
Addicted to trouble
More than two million people behind bars in the United States, and another five million on probation or parole. Millions more self-imprisoned in cycles of abuse (of others or of themselves) or habituated to vice, corruption, and depravity.
Trouble is intoxicating because its payoff is incapacity. The scars and tattoos of the convict are his shadow symphony, his displaced epic, his unpainted masterpiece. The person addicted to trouble will not stay free: he is safer behind bars than out in the world, and each release finds a way back.
The payoff for the prisoner is release from the agonizing imperative of identifying, embracing, and bringing into material existence the dreams and visions of his deepest, noblest heart.
My Year of Turning Pro
My year of turning pro
He was 31. He had saved $2,700 and left New York City for a little town in northern California. Rent: $105 a month for a house behind another house. Assets: old Chevy van, Smith-Corona, cat Mo.
Every Monday he walked into the village to the Bank of America and took out $25. That sum lasted seven days.
He did not talk to anybody during the year of turning pro. He did not hang out. He worked. He had a book in mind and had decided he would finish it or kill himself. He could not run away again, or let people down again, or let himself down again. Do or die.
No TV, no radio, no music. No sex, no sports. No newspaper. Breakfast: liver and eggs. "I was like Rocky."
Early mornings he walked down River Road to his friend Paul Rink's place: a camper-shell on a pickup. Paul was a writer, a friend of Henry Miller's in Big Sur. Paul taught him what books to read and which writers to pay attention to. At night Pressfield read what you are supposed to read in college but never do, or do without attention: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Knut Hamsun, and every American except Faulkner.
He wrote on the ancient Smith-Corona with the heavy carriage that shuttled as he typed. Mo curled on the desk to the left so the carriage passed over his head, back and forth. The cat did not seem to mind.
When the money ran out, he went to pick apples in Washington and met Dave and Jack (Chapter 5). After the season he had cleared $250 after rent, gas, and engine repairs. He drove south and got back to work on the book.
One day he typed THE END. That is the moment, also told in The War of Art, when he knew he had beaten Resistance. He had finished something.
The manuscript did not find a publisher and should not have. It was not good enough. He went back to a real job in advertising in New York, saved again, quit again, wrote another book that also failed to find a publisher because it also was not good enough. Neither were the nine screenplays over the next stretch of years (he cannot remember how many) before the first check for $3,500, after which he went back to writing more screenplays he also could not sell.
During that first year he sometimes thought: you have it lucky now, no distractions, full-time focus; what will you do when life gets complicated again? In the end it did not matter. That year made him a pro. It gave him, for the first time, an uninterrupted stretch of month after month that was his alone, that nobody knew about but him, when he was truly productive, truly facing his demons, truly working.
That year has stuck with him.
- $2,700 saved → leave NYC for northern California
- $105/month house behind a house; $25/week from Bank of America
- Silent year: liver and eggs, Paul Rink's reading list, Smith-Corona + Mo
- Money gone → Chelan apples → $250 cleared → back to the book
- THE END typed; manuscript unpublishable; return to advertising
- Another book fails; nine screenplays; first check $3,500; more unsold scripts
- Verdict: the year still made him a pro
The pain of being human
The Gnostics believed exile was the essential condition of man. Pressfield agrees.
Artist and addict both wrestle with that exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, transcend it, or at least make the pain go away.
The pain of being human is the condition of being suspended between two worlds and unable to fully enter either.
- As mortal flesh, we cannot ascend to the upper sphere; that sphere belongs to the gods. We also cannot put it out of our minds. We keep intimations and half-memories of some prior sojourn, before birth perhaps, among the immortals or the stars.
- Our lot is the lower sphere: temporal, material, time-bound instincts and animal passions, hate and desire, aspiration and fear.
- We are called to the upper sphere (and it is calling to us), and we are sometimes having a pretty good time in the sphere of the senses. Bottom line: marooned in the middle. Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.
Jewish despair and Irish despair
Pressfield quotes his own novel Killing Rommel: the poet and Oxford tutor Zachary Stein distinguishes two types of despair.
| Type | Source of the complaint | What "cures" it (in the fiction) |
|---|---|---|
| Jewish despair | Want | Surfeit: give a penniless Jew fifty quid and he perks right up |
| Irish despair | Injustice of existence itself (death; a cruel term on a gifted life) | Nothing: money cannot help; love fades; fame is fleeting; only booze and sentiment |
Irish despair, in Stein's riff, is why the Irish are "noble drunks and glorious poets": angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh. Pressfield then widens the joke: the pattern is not limited to the Irish. The pain of being human is that we are all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.
The pain of being human, part two
The addict seeks to escape the pain of being human in one of two ways: by transcending it or by anesthetizing it. Borne aloft by powerful enough chemicals, we can almost glimpse the face of the Infinite. If that fails, we can pass out. Both ways work. The pain goes away.
The artist takes a different tack. She tries to reach the upper sphere not by chemicals but by labor and love.
When Pressfield says "artist," he also means the lover, the holy man, the engineer, the mother, the warrior, the inventor, the singer, the sage, and the voyager. Addict and artist can be one and the same, moment to moment.
If the upper sphere is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of that world and to create, by labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that she can.
That pursuit produces, for the artist, peace of mind.
Same exile; two exits. Chemicals remove the pain; labor and love seek the upper sphere and leave peace of mind.
- Year of turning pro: deprivation chosen as a container for finishing.
- Addiction cluster: deprivation (or excess) that produces incapacity so finishing never arrives.
- Artist: stays inside the pain and works.
- Addict: escapes the pain and stalls.
Defining the Amateur
Accidental incapacitation
In WWI trench warfare, soldiers sometimes took their rifles and literally shot themselves in the foot, then claimed accident, hoping for hospital and escape from the order to go "over the top" into machine-gun fire across no-man's land.
In the military, deliberately injuring yourself to avoid service is malingering: a court-martial offense, in some armies punishable by death.
The habits and addictions of the amateur are conscious or unconscious self-inflicted wounds. Their payoff is incapacity. Blow a hole in your foot with the M1903 Springfield and you no longer have to face the real fight: becoming who you are and realizing your destiny and calling.
A definition of the amateur
The amateur is young and dumb. Innocent, good-hearted, well-intentioned. Brave. Inventive and resourceful. Willing to take a chance.
Like Luke Skywalker, the amateur harbors noble aspirations, dreams, a wish for liberation and enlightenment, and a hope of being willing to pay the price.
The amateur is not evil, crazy, deluded, or demented. The amateur is trying to learn.
The amateur is you and me.
The amateur is terrified
Fear is the primary color of the amateur's interior world: fear of failure, of success, of looking foolish, of under-achieving and over-achieving, of poverty, loneliness, death.
Mostly what amateurs fear is being excluded from the tribe: the gang, the posse, mother and father, family, nation, race, religion.
The amateur fears that if he turns pro and lives out his calling, he will have to live up to who he really is and what he is truly capable of. He is terrified that if the tribe discovers who he really is, he will be kicked out into the cold to die.
The professional is terrified, too
The professional is just as terrified as the amateur. She may be more terrified, because she is more acutely conscious of herself and of her interior universe.
The difference (Book Three) lies in how the professional acts in the face of fear.
| Amateur | Professional | |
|---|---|---|
| Fear level | Terrified | Terrified (often more consciously) |
| Self-wound | Habits/addictions as malingering | Faces the real fight |
| Tribe | Lives to avoid expulsion | Acts anyway (see later) |
| Identity | Trying to learn; still fleeing | Same fear; different action |
Fear is shared. The fork is malingering versus meeting the spears.
Traits of the Amateur
The amateur is an egotist
The amateur identifies with his own ego. He believes he is "himself." That is why he is terrified.
He is a narcissist who views the world hierarchically, rating himself against others: inflated when fortunes rise, desperately anxious when the star falls. He sees himself as the hero not only of his own movie but of everyone else's, and insists (at least in his mind) that others share the view. He competes and believes he cannot rise unless a competitor falls. If he had the power, he would eat the world, even knowing that would mean his own extinction.
Lives by the opinions of others
Though identity is seated in the ego, that ego is too weak to define itself by its own evaluation. Worth and identity are outsourced. The amateur craves third-party validation. He is tyrannized by an imagined conception of what is expected: what he ought to think, look like, do, and be.
Permits fear to stop him from acting
Paradoxically, self-inflation prevents action. He takes himself and the consequences so seriously that he paralyzes himself. Above all he fears becoming (and being seen and judged as) himself, because that means being different and possibly violating the tribe's expectations, without whose acceptance he believes he cannot survive. By these means he remains inauthentic: someone other than who he really is.
Easily distracted
Near the top of the fear list: solitude and silence. The amateur avoids, at all costs, the voice inside that would point her toward calling and destiny. So she seeks distraction. Twitter and Facebook culture is paradise for the amateur.
Seeks instant gratification
Bumper sticker: Too much ain't enough. Too much ain't enough, and too soon is too late.
Amateur, addict, and obsessive all want what they want now. Corollary: when they get it, it does not work. Restlessness does not abate; pain does not go away; fear returns as soon as the buzz wears off.
Is jealous
Powerfully identified with herself, she finds it hard to view the world through others' eyes. Often unkind or insensitive to others, she saves her most exquisite cruelty for herself. Fear eclipses compassion for others and for herself.
Lacks compassion for himself
In his heart he knows he is hiding. He was meant for better things. He has turned away from his higher nature. If he had empathy for himself, he could look in the mirror and not hate what he sees. Achieving that compassion is the first powerful step from amateur to pro.
Seeks permission
Before she can act, she believes she must receive permission from some Omnipotent Other: lover, spouse, parent, boss, authority. She sits on a stool like Lana Turner at Schwab's, waiting to be discovered.
Lives for the future
Amateur and addict focus exclusively on product and payoff: what is in it for them, how soon, how cheaply. Consumer culture is designed to exploit that. Pressfield's beef with American culture is that almost every aspect, including legislature and judiciary deliberations, has been debased to pander to amateurism. The promise to infant or addict: "I will get you what you want and it will cost you nothing."
Lives in the past
Owning nothing of spirit in the present, she looks forward to a hopeful future or backward to an idyllic past. The past she evokes is make-believe: a highlight reel of events that almost took place or should have. When the re-imagined past is true, it is worse, because then it is really gone.
Payoff of living in past or future: you never have to do your work in the present.
Will be ready tomorrow
Two Hollywood producers: good news, the mansion for the party scene drops from $50K to $10K for the night. Bad news: the guy wants a hundred bucks up front.
The sure sign of an amateur: a million plans, and they all start tomorrow.
Gives his power away to others
Pressfield has followed gurus and mentors; given power away to lovers and spouses; sat by the phone; waited for permission; turned in work and awaited judgment, trembling. He has given power away with a glance no one perceived, and overtly for the world to see.
Exile, failure, and banishment can be good sometimes: they force action from your own center. He applauds hit-bottom stories because at the bottom there is no one there but yourself.
Is asleep
The force that can save the amateur is awareness, especially self-awareness. She understands, however dimly, that if she truly achieved that knowledge she would be compelled to act on it. Acting would mean defining herself, differentiating from the tribe, becoming vulnerable to rejection and expulsion.
Fear of self-definition is what keeps an amateur an amateur and an addict an addict.
| # | Trait | Core move |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Egotist / narcissist | Hierarchy, hero of every movie |
| 2 | Opinion-ruled | Third-party validation |
| 3 | Fear-stopped | Paralysis before selfhood |
| 4 | Distracted | Flee solitude and silence |
| 5 | Instant gratification | Now; buzz fails |
| 6 | Jealous / cruel to self | Fear eclipses compassion |
| 7 | No self-compassion | Mirror-hate; first step out |
| 8 | Permission-seeking | Wait to be discovered |
| 9 | Future-living | Payoff focus; consumer bait |
| 10 | Past-living | Highlight reel; skip present |
| 11 | Ready tomorrow | Million plans, zero deposit |
| 12 | Gives power away | Guru, lover, judge, phone |
| 13 | Asleep | Avoid self-definition |
The Tribe and Turning Pro
The tribe doesn't give a shit
The amateur dreads becoming who she really is because she fears judgment as "different," "weird," "queer," "crazy," and rejection by the tribe.
Here is the truth, in his words: the tribe doesn't give a shit.
There is no tribe. The gang or posse we imagine is sustaining us is a conglomeration of individuals just as fucked up and terrified as we are. Each is so caught up in his own bullshit that he does not have two seconds to worry about yours or mine, or to reject us because of it.
When we truly understand that, we are free. There is no tribe, and there never was. Our lives are entirely up to us.
Part-time pros
Sometimes we are professionals in our shadow careers and amateurs in our true calling.
How many creative directors have unfinished novels in the drawer? How many lawyers and doctors would make sensational essayists or historians but never get past literary first base? Producers who yearn to direct; moms itching to launch start-ups; grad students who could work on climate problems.
Sometimes we choose those careers (consciously or not) to produce incapacity. Resistance harnesses our drive for greatness and our instinct for professionalism and yokes them to a shadow profession whose demands keep us from the true course.
Sometimes it is easier to be a professional in a shadow career than to turn pro in the real calling.
Life gets very simple when you turn pro
What happens: we finally listen to the still, small voice. We find courage to identify the secret dream, love, or bliss we have known all along was passion, calling, destiny.
Ballet. Motorcycle maintenance. Founding a clinic in the slums of Sao Paulo.
This, we acknowledge at last, is what we are most afraid of. This is what we know in our hearts we have to do.
How your life changes
Pressfield can divide his life into before turning pro and after (The War of Art). He did not change as a person. He did not achieve enlightenment. Same weaknesses, same fallibilities. Everything is still different.
Before: life dominated by fear and Resistance; denial of the voice, the calling, who we really are; fleeing into addiction or shadow career.
What changes: we stop fleeing.
Archilochus (poet and mercenary): Be brave, my heart. Plant your feet and square your shoulders to the enemy. Meet him among the man-killing spears. Hold your ground.
When we turn pro, we stop running from our fears. We turn around and face them.
How your day changes
Everything becomes simple. Aim centers on ordering the days so we overcome the fears that paralyzed us. We structure hours not to flee fear but to confront and overcome it. We plan activities to accomplish an aim. We bring will to bear so we stick to the resolution.
That changes get-up time and bedtime; what we do and do not do; activities and attitude; what we read and eat; the shape of our bodies.
As amateurs, life was drama, denial, distraction: days full to bursting and achingly empty. We are not amateurs any more. Everyone in our lives sees it.
How people change
Turning pro changes how we spend time and with whom. It changes friends, spouses, children; who is drawn and who is repelled.
Those still fleeing their own fears will try to sabotage us: say we have changed; undermine further change; induce guilt; entice us back to getting stoned, fucking off, wasting time; then turn against us and talk us down.
At the same time, new people appear: facing their own fears and conquering them. They become new friends.
Painful choices follow. Former colleagues and even friends may no longer fit if the intention is to grow. We choose between the life we want and the life we left behind.
How your mind changes
Turning pro is like kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking: a decision re-committed every day. Twelve-step programs say "One Day at a Time." The professional says the same.
Each day he wakes facing the same demons, Resistance, self-sabotage, shadow tendencies, amateurism. The difference: he will not yield. He will have mastered them, and will continue to master them.
What makes us turn pro
Turning pro is a decision so monumental and life-overturning (usually made only in the face of overwhelming fear) that the moment often comes with powerful drama and emotion. Often it is something avoided for years, faced only when events compel it.
Turning pro, he says, is like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or the assassination of President Kennedy: we never forget where we were when it happened.
Here come two turning-pro moments from female friends, then his own, then the logic of epiphany and shame.
| Layer | Before | After turning pro |
|---|---|---|
| Life | Denial, flee calling | Stop fleeing; face fear |
| Day | Drama / distraction | Order hours to confront fear |
| People | Old crew pulls you back | Saboteurs exit; new allies enter |
| Mind | Yield to same demons | Daily re-commit; do not yield |
From imaginary tribe to daily mind: each layer gets simpler and harder at once.
Moments of Turning Pro
Ms. X in Bakersfield
Ms. X is an attorney in Los Angeles. Driving alone from San Francisco to L.A. on Interstate 5 for speed, she pulled off near Bakersfield around five for gas.
She woke the next morning in a motel room, alone, in the same clothes, with an empty quart of Jim Beam on the bedstand.
Why that time differed from a hundred times before, she does not know. Staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she heard her own voice: "That's enough, darling. This shit has got to stop."
Rosanne Cash's dream
Pressfield excerpts Rosanne Cash's memoir Composed (with thanks). Late in the making of King's Record Shop (1987; four #1 singles), she had a dream that changed her life.
Background: she had met Linda Ronstadt; Heart Like a Wheel had shaped her as a girl beside Joni Mitchell's Blue as a feminine point-of-view concept record. She wanted a similarly unified record, but as a songwriter. She had clipped Ronstadt's line: in committing to artistic growth you had to "refine your skills to support your instincts."
In the dream she sat on a sofa with Linda and an elderly man between them. His name, she knew, was Art. He and Linda talked animatedly. When Rosanne tried to enter, Art looked her up and down with disdain: "We don't respect dilettantes." He turned back to Linda. She woke humiliated, shaken.
Waking context: uneasy in Nashville and the business; thought of herself as a songwriter but had written only three songs on King's; fame felt hollow; falsehoods piling up; pressure to toe a line, start a fan club (she refused), join splashy events, treat the country scene as a religion. She wanted the trenches, not a lofty perch. Carl Jung, she notes, said a person might have five "big" dreams that shift consciousness; this was her first.
From that moment she changed songwriting, singing, work ethic, life. Friendship with John Stewart (who wrote "Runaway Train" for King's) pushed subject matter, language, mind; when songs were too "perfect," he asked, over and over, "but where's the MADNESS, Rose?" She sought Marge Rivingston in New York for voice (oddly, Marge also worked with Linda). She trained technique and stamina like a runner. She pulled out of daydreams into the present; examined ideas instead of toying; tested musical instincts; stretched attention; read Natalie Goldberg and Carolyn Heilbrun; self-edited deeper; painted with Sharon Orr at Art and Soul to learn the absence of words and sound. She saw she had worked only inside known range, never far outside comfort.
She stayed humbled by the dream through finishing King's, vowed the next record would reflect the new commitment, and felt like a neophyte beside Rodney Crowell at the top of his producing game. Everything new, frightening, exciting. She had awakened from the morphine sleep of success into the life of an artist.
My own moment of turning pro
From "Resistance and Healing" in The War of Art: washed up in New York, $20 a night driving a cab, running away full-time from the work. One night alone in a $110-a-month sublet he hit bottom on phony channels. He dragged out the ancient Smith-Corona, dreading it as pointless and painful. For two hours he sat, torturing out trash he chucked immediately. Enough. Machine away. Kitchen: ten days of dishes. He washed them. Warm water, soap, sponge; a pile of clean plates. To his amazement he was whistling.
It hit him: he had turned a corner. He was okay. He would be okay from here on.
He had not written anything good. It might be years before he would, if ever. That did not matter.
The nature of epiphanies
We usually think of breakthroughs as ecstatic lifts from lower to higher. They do elevate. Paradox: in the moment, an epiphany feels like hell. Like Rosanne's dream, it trashes us, exposes us, leaves us naked. We see ourselves plain, and it is not pretty.
Essence: stripping away self-delusion. We thought we were X. Suddenly we are minus-X, X divided by infinity.
Power in the moment: we lose a cherished self-delusion (that hurts). We gain the truth. Bullshit falls away. Scales drop. Two options:
- Reconstitute our bullshit.
- Turn pro.
Shame is good
In the post-epiphany moment we have two allies we lacked ninety seconds earlier: reality and humility.
A third force: shame. Why good? Because shame can produce the final element needed to change a life: will.
Epiphanies hurt. No glory. They only make good stories at AA meetings or late at night among other foot soldiers. Those soldiers each have a story of that ghastly, hideous, excruciating moment when it all turned around.
Epiphany strips the story; shame can fund will; the fork is reconstituting bullshit or turning pro.
Qualities of the Professional
Twenty qualities (from The War of Art)
Pressfield restates habits the professional has that the amateur lacks:
- Shows up every day
- Stays on the job all day
- Committed over the long haul
- Stakes are high and real
- Patient
- Seeks order
- Demystifies
- Acts in the face of fear
- Accepts no excuses
- Plays it as it lays
- Prepared
- Does not show off
- Dedicates himself to mastering technique
- Does not hesitate to ask for help
- Does not take failure or success personally
- Does not identify with his or her instrument
- Endures adversity
- Self-validates
- Reinvents herself
- Is recognized by other professionals
Then he adds higher expressions of the same code.
A professional is courageous
Courage shows not only in scary roles, in sacrifices of time, love, and family, or in enduring criticism, blame, envy, and misunderstanding, but above all in confronting her own doubts and demons.
The linebacker and the Army Ranger go into action as part of a team. The artist and the entrepreneur enter combat alone.
Ruthless with himself
True story: Picasso in his Paris studio shows a gallery owner a new series of portraits, months of labor. The owner is ecstatic. Picasso seizes a palette knife and slashes the first canvas, then marches down the line, reducing each painting to ribbons while the owner cries for him to stop.
The professional knows when he has fallen short of his own standards. He will murder his darlings without hesitation to stay true to the goddess and to his own expectations of excellence.
Compassion for herself
Pressfield once watched a famous trainer work thoroughbreds, expecting Navy SEAL hardness. The sessions were more like play: serious teaching (two-year-olds into the starting gate), but fun. Tired horses left the track. Bored or restive mounts were not forced "through the pain."
The trainer's logic: a horse is a flight animal; even a stallion prefers flight to confrontation. A thoroughbred is a naked nervous system, a child; a three-year-old, big and fast, is still a baby. Horses understand the whip, but he does not want a racer that runs that way. A horse that loves to run beats a horse that is compelled, every day. He wants riders holding them back in the morning from eagerness. Never train to exhaustion. Leave him wanting more.
That is the professional's compassion for herself as instrument: ruthless toward weak work, kind toward the nervous system that must return tomorrow.
Lives in the present
The amateur camps in past and future, permitting fear and hope. The professional banishes those distractions. When Stephen Sondheim makes a hat, he thinks of nothing else: immersed, lost in the work and the moment.
Defers gratification
Inbox-checking is the modern marshmallow test in reverse. The children who waited three minutes with a marshmallow in front of them got two later; we refresh e-mail as if treasure were arriving. Krishna told Arjuna we have the right to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor: the piano is its own reward, as are the canvas, the barre, the movieola. Fuck the marshmallows.
Does not wait for inspiration
We are nothing without the Muse. The pro has learned she prizes labor and dedication over theatrical seeking. He does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it. When the Muse sees his butt in the chair, she delivers.
Does not give his power away
An icon, in the dictionary sense, is a relic that becomes an object of worship. A person can become one. When we iconize someone, we give away power: unconsciously hoping their qualities will rub off through proximity to mentor, sensei, lover, teacher, hero.
In Pressfield's experience, the quality we project onto another is almost always one we already possess but are afraid to embrace and live. The amateur is an acolyte, a groupie. The professional may seek instruction from someone further along, but without surrendering self-sovereignty.
Helps others
When Gates of Fire finished at 800 pages, agent Sterling Lord said cut at least 300 before submission: like amputating two limbs. Tom Guinzburg, long head of Viking Press, still sent a note Pressfield kept: "There's something great in here, Steve. I have confidence that you will find it and bring it out." Thumbprints from dozens of rereadings.
The amateur hoards knowledge and reinforcement, fearing loss if he shares. The professional is happy to teach, lend a hand, or deliver a swift kick, with a caveat: he refuses to be iconized, not from selfishness but because iconization destroys the iconizer. He shares with other professionals, or with amateurs committed to becoming professionals. Like Art in Rosanne Cash's dream, he will not waste time on dilettantes.
What about the magic?
The pro mindset works two ways. First, discipline against Resistance: order, regularity, discipline, striving for excellence against procrastination, self-doubt, distraction, perfectionism, shallowness.
Second, magic, madness, flashes of brilliance. Is the mindset too severe for that? No. The monk glimpses God by sitting still, not by Himalayan peak-bagging. Yoga, meditation, martial arts access the soul by way of the body: physical leads to spiritual; humble produces sublime.
Counterintuitive but true: to achieve flow, magic, the zone, start common, ordinary, workmanlike. Palms against the garden wall, search until fingers find the secret door; then, like a child entering a meadow, forget everything except the butterfly. From that play arise Guernica, The Godfather, the Guggenheim Bilbao.
A Marine gets two salaries
A gunnery sergeant tells young Marines complaining about pay that they get two salaries: financial and psychological. The cash is meager. The psyche salary is pride, honor, belonging to a brotherhood with brave history, membership for life. How much is that worth?
Artists and entrepreneurs get two salaries too. Conventional rewards: money, applause, attention. Fine if you get them; most of us do not. We train and rehearse and nobody shows up. People quit because agony outweighs payoff.
Then the psychological reward. Krishna's fruits meant conventional fruits. Does the monk meditate only for enlightenment that may never come? What does the dancer take from class? Why does the singer sing?
When we do the work for itself alone (easy to say, hard to do), pursuit of career, living, fame, or wealth turns into something loftier we may never have aspired to at the start.
It turns into a practice.
My years in the wilderness
Pressfield calls himself lucky for years of failure. No conventional rewards forced the question: Why am I doing this? Am I crazy? Friends make money and live normal lives.
He answered: no choice. Anything else depressed him past endurance. Unsold novel or screenplay meant write another. He was enjoying himself, learning, getting better, even if nobody else liked the stuff.
The work became, in its own demented way, a practice. It sustained him, and sustains him still.
| Quality cluster | Amateur pattern | Professional move |
|---|---|---|
| Courage | Avoid alone combat | Face doubts/demons solo |
| Standards | Protect darlings | Slash weak work |
| Self | Whip or indulge | Leave wanting more |
| Time | Past/future | Present immersion |
| Payoff | Inbox / marshmallow | Labor as reward |
| Muse | Wait to feel ready | Butt in chair first |
| Power | Iconize others | Keep sovereignty |
| Others | Hoard | Teach pros-in-making |
| Magic | Chase peak experience | Ordinary door to play |
| Salary | Quit without applause | Psyche salary / practice |
Conventional reward is optional. Psychological reward is what turns labor into practice.
The Professional Practice
The professional mindset as a practice
What is a practice? To "have a practice" in yoga, tai chi, or calligraphy is to follow a rigorous, prescribed regimen with the intention of elevating mind and spirit to a higher level.
A practice implies engagement in a ritual. It may be defined as the dedicated, daily exercise of commitment, will, and focused intention aimed, on one level, at mastery in a field and, on a loftier level, at communion with a power greater than ourselves. Call it God, mind, soul, Self, the Muse, the superconscious.
The Marine's two salaries and the wilderness years end here: when conventional rewards fail, the work itself becomes the practice that sustains you.
A practice has a space
A practice has a space, and that space is sacred.
Pressfield points to Where Women Create: a compilation of photos of studios and workshops where female artists work: potters and weavers, quilters and dressmakers, architects and sculptors, painters, filmmakers, editors. The book has good text, but you do not need it. Look at the spaces. What you see, repeated:
Order. Commitment. Passion. Love. Intensity. Beauty. Humility.
Twenty-six artists, twenty-six personal odysseys. Many include divorce, heartbreak, alcoholism, you name it. Every woman in the book has, in her artistic life, transcended those impediments and arrived at the same kind of space. They all serve the Muse. Each has discovered in that service her unique and authentic essence.
Your kitchen table can be that space if it is claimed, cleared, and treated as non-negotiable for the hour you own it.
A practice has a time
Monks in saffron robes mount the steps to the zendo at the same hour each morning. When the abbot strikes the chime, they place their palms together and sit.
You and I may operate in a more chaotic universe. The object remains the same: approach the mystery via order, commitment, and passionate intention.
When we convene day upon day in the same space at the same time, a powerful energy builds around us: the energy of intention, dedication, commitment. The goddess sees this energy and she rewards it.
Miss a day and you do not "lose the streak" as a superstition; you cool the charge that regularity accumulates. Pros protect the hour the way monks protect the chime.
A practice has an intention
When Stevie Wonder sits down in his studio at the piano, he is not there to mess around. Stevie has come to work.
The 10,000 Hour Rule, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, postulates that mastery in any field (brain surgery or a split-finger fastball) requires about 10,000 hours of practice. The key, Gladwell stresses, is that the practice be focused. It must possess intention.
Our intention as artists is to get better, to go deeper, to work closer and closer to the bone. Hours without intention are hobby time with a stopwatch.
We come to a practice as warriors
The sword master stepping onto the fighting floor knows he will face powerful opponents. Not only the physical adversaries (though those serve as stand-ins). The real enemy is inside himself.
The monk in meditation knows this. So does the yogi. So do the film editor, the video-game creator, and the software writer.
Each day we, as professionals, face the same monsters and chimeras as Perseus, Bellerophon, or St. George.
The sword master advancing into ritual combat has inwardly made peace with his own extinction. He is prepared to leave everything, including his life, on the fighting floor. That is the stance: not melodrama, but willingness to spend the self the work requires.
We come to a practice in humility
We may bring intention and intensity (in fact we must), but not ego. Dedication, even ferocity, yes. Arrogance, never.
The space of the practice is sacred. It belongs to the goddess. We take our shoes off before we enter. We press our palms together and we bow.
Do you understand how the mystery can be approached via order? Humility is what keeps order from becoming a vanity project about how disciplined you look.
We come to a practice as students
Even the peerless sword master Miyamoto Musashi entered the fighting square to learn as much as to teach. Rank does not exempt you from beginner's mind. The day you arrive only to demonstrate is the day the practice dies.
A practice is lifelong
The Spartan king Agesilaus was still fighting in armor at eighty-two. Picasso was painting past ninety. Henry Miller was chasing women at eighty-nine (Pressfield is sure Picasso was too).
Once we turn pro, we are like sharks who have tasted blood, or renunciants who have glimpsed the face of God. For us there is no finish line. No bell ends the bout. Life is the pursuit. Life is the hunt. When our hearts burst, then we will go out, and no sooner.
Rosanne Cash's dream, part two
The specific details of acquiring professionalism evolve naturally. They are self-evident. When Rosanne Cash had her dream (the Art-and-the-unfinished-songs vision from Book Two), she got the message.
The epiphany is everything. When we see the gaping holes in our practice (or discover that we have no practice at all), no one has to school us in time management or resource allocation. We know what we have to do.
The other thing about the changes she made after her dream: she did not make them to earn more money, achieve greater fame, or sell more records. She made them out of respect for her craft: to become a better artist and a more powerful musician.
When we raise our game aesthetically, we elevate it morally and spiritually as well.
Working Over Your Head
The professional trusts the mystery
Patricia Ryan Madson taught improv at Stanford for years to standing-room-only classes. Her book Improv Wisdom sits on Pressfield's short list of indispensables. Patricia has an exercise she calls "What's in the Box?"
Imagine a small white box. Imagine a lid on this box. Now lift the lid. What do you find inside?
Sometimes students say a diamond. Sometimes a frog. Sometimes a pomegranate.
The trick: there is always something inside the box.
With this exercise Patricia was addressing her students' seminal terror: that they would get up on stage and draw a blank.
The professional trusts the mystery. He knows the Muse always delivers. She may surprise us. She may give us something we never expected. But she will always put something inside the box.
The following are five axioms, derived from this principle, that Pressfield works by every day.
Work over your head
Writers of fiction learn early that it is possible to write a character who is smarter than they are.
How can that be? The answer lies in the Mystery.
That place we write from (or paint from or compose from or innovate from) is far deeper than our petty personal egos. That place is beyond intellect. It is deeper than rational thought.
It is instinct. It is intuition. It is imagination.
If you cast Meryl Streep as Queen Boudica in your next Hollywood blockbuster, will you doubt she can pull it off even though she has never heard of Boudica? Ms. Streep will go wherever it is that she goes, and she will come back with Queen Boudica. She will have become Queen Boudica.
You and I can do it too. We can work over our heads. Not only can we, but we must.
The best pages Pressfield has ever written are pages he cannot remember writing.
Write what you don't know
Years ago in New York, Pressfield had hit the wall as a failed novelist. His next day's to-do list had been reduced to two options: kill himself by hanging, or kill himself by jumping off the roof. Instead he decided to write a screenplay.
The story he wrote was about prison. He had never been to prison. He did not know the first thing about prison. He was so desperate that he plunged in, slinging bullshit with both hands and not looking back.
More than one tugged him aside and asked in a whisper: "Steve, where did you do time?"
Good things happen when we trust the Mystery. There is always something in the box.
Take what the defense gives you
Every book Pressfield writes has at least one giant section as tough as a knot in a plank of lumber. He cannot crack it head-on. Attacking from the flank does not work. The damn thing is just too stubborn.
When you are up against that kind of Resistance, there is no shame in taking what the defense will give you. In football terms: shut the part of the playbook that contains the deep "go" routes and the 55-yard bombs. Turn instead to the short slants and the three-yard dinks into the flat.
Two key tenets for days when Resistance is really strong:
- Take what you can get and stay patient. The defense may crack late in the game.
- Play for tomorrow.
Our role on tough-nut days is to maintain composure and keep chipping away. We are pros, not amateurs. We have patience. We can handle adversity.
Tomorrow the defense will give us more, and tomorrow we will take it.
A third tenet underlies the first two:
- We're in this for the long haul.
Our work is a practice. One bad day is nothing to us. Ten bad days are nothing. In the scheme of a lifelong practice, twenty-four hours when we cannot gain yardage is only a speed bump. We will forget it by breakfast tomorrow and be back again, ready to hurl our bodies into the fray.
Play hurt
The amateur believes she must have all her ducks in a row before she can launch her start-up or compose her symphony or design her iPhone app. The professional knows better.
Has your husband just walked out on you? Has your El Dorado been repossessed?
Keep writing. Keep composing. Keep shooting film.
Athletes play hurt. Warriors fight scared. The professional takes two aspirin and keeps on truckin'.
Sit chilly
Sue Sally Hale was a famous equestrienne and teacher of horsemanship. She had a phrase she drilled into her students' heads: "Sit chilly."
If you are riding in a steeplechase, you may find yourself at the gallop atop a thousand-pound or twelve-hundred-pound hunter-jumper, approaching a stone wall that looks fifteen feet high. Dire thoughts may enter your head.
Trickier still: the rider's "seat" (the way you sit in the saddle) is how intentions are communicated to the ultra-sensitive mount beneath you. If fear and uncertainty enter your mind, your horse will know instantly. At that point, anything can happen.
Sue Sally said, "Sit chilly."
She meant not only "be cool" or "stay composed." She meant maintain your seat.
The professional knows that in the course of her pursuit she will inevitably experience moments of terror, even panic. She knows she cannot choke that panic back or wish it away. It is there, and it is for real.
The pro sits chilly. She focuses on the horse and the wall. She keeps her seat.
| Axiom | Fear it answers | Move |
|---|---|---|
| Trust the box | Blank stage / blank page | Lift the lid anyway |
| Over your head | "I'm not smart enough" | Let Mystery outrun ego |
| Don't-know | Impostor / research stall | Plunge; authenticity follows |
| Defense gives | Stuck knot section | Short yards; play tomorrow |
| Play hurt | Waiting for perfect life | Two aspirin; continue |
| Sit chilly | Panic in the approach | Keep the seat |
Blank-page terror meets the rule: lift the lid; the Muse put something there.
The Professional and the Primitive
The Masai move
A couple of years ago Pressfield flew into a remote Masai camp (no roads) with two city Masai translating. On landing: commotion. The shaman had determined the campsite was unwholesome. Everyone was packing to move: about five hundred people (warriors, kids, elders) plus livestock. Ceremony required the procession led by white cattle, rounded up from families across the valley. Warriors (tall morans) sang and jumped; maidens answered. Finally the village moved.
About two hundred yards up the hill.
That was it. The shaman had solved the problem. The new site felt better.
Assumptions he later puzzled over:
- Some invisible force threatened the first camp (ghosts, ancestors, free-floating evil).
- Moving a few hundred feet could ward it off (why could evil not follow?).
- One individual, the shaman, could perceive, divine, and remedy.
- The tribe obeyed without murmur: labor, sweat, cheerful participation. (Pressfield himself felt better uphill.)
- These were not "benighted primitives" exploited by a hoo-doo man. Masai are a great warrior culture in East Africa since the 1500s, thriving among strong adversaries; brilliant dress, ritual, social organization; young men who face lions with a spear.
What if the Masai view is correct? What if evil was real, the shaman saw it, the remedy exact? A miscarriage avoided, a fight averted, collective malice escaped?
What this has to do with turning pro: Pressfield's worldview is pretty much the Masai's. He believes in the shaman. He wishes he had one at breakfast to obey. Better: he wishes he were a shaman.
In truth he practices his own shamanism daily. As an artist he seeks unseen powers. Evil forces: Resistance, self-doubt, self-sabotage, and who knows what else over huevos rancheros. Good forces: inspiration, enthusiasm, courage, ideas, breakthroughs, intuitions. Where from? He does not know. How to access? No clue. Yet this is his business and his life.
In lieu of the shaman: a code of professionalism. Virtues to strengthen, vices to eradicate. He serves the goddess; where she tells him to go, he goes.
A model of the universe
Breakfast with friend Rabbi Mordecai Finley (Ohr HaTorah, Los Angeles), asking if Resistance has a parallel in Kabbalistic study. Finley's answer (taped):
There is a second self inside you, an inner shadow Self. It does not care about you or love you. It has its own agenda and will kill you like cancer to prevent you from actualizing your Self, from becoming who you really are. In the Kabbalistic lexicon: the yetzer hara. That, Steve, is what you would call Resistance.
In that view the soul (neshama) is the source of wisdom and goodness, constantly trying to communicate to consciousness on the physical plane: guide, sustain, restore. The yetzer hara is a cunning intelligence whose sole aim is to block us from the neshama and block the neshama from us.
Gnostics and neo-Platonists held something similar: an upper sphere (for Plato, Forms of perfect beauty, justice, truth) and a lower sphere where mortals dwell.
In Jewish mysticism a positive force opposes the yetzer hara. Above every blade of grass, says the Kabbalah, hovers an angel exhorting "Grow! Grow!"
What program did ancients put forward to ally with the positive and overcome the negative? According to Finley: a code called Mussar.
Mussar
Mussar (moo-SAHR) was a code of ethical discipline, not far from twelve-step programs. First tenet: identify the sin. Second: eliminate it. In AA terms: acknowledge alcoholism; stop drinking.
Kabbalists believed the higher sphere could be approached through disciplined, humble, open application of mind and will. They knew they approached a mystery, and that an enemy sought to block them.
What they called mussar, Pressfield calls turning pro.
Our job as souls on this mortal journey: shift the seat of identity from the lower sphere to the upper, from ego to Self. Art (more exactly, the struggle to produce art) teaches that.
When we struggle against Resistance (or seek to love, endure, give, sacrifice), the contest is material, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Not only to write the symphony, raise the child, or lead a Special Forces team in Konar province: the clash is epic and internal, between ego and Self, and the stakes are our lives.
Who is all this for?
In the end the enterprise and the sacrifice are about the audience: readers, moviegoers, site visitors, listeners, concertgoers, gamers, gallerygoers, a group that includes you and me. We are the audience.
In the hero's journey the wanderer returns after years of exile, struggle, and suffering with a gift for the people. The gift is not raw ordeal alone. It is ore refined into gold by skilled and loving hands.
You are that artist.
Pressfield will gladly pay $24.95 or $9.99 or 99 cents on iTunes for the 24-karat treasure refined from your pain, vision, and imagination. He needs it. We all do, struggling in the trenches: beauty, wisdom, thrills, even mindless escape on a rainy October afternoon.
The hero wanders. The hero suffers. The hero returns.
You are that hero.
| Frame | Enemy | Ally / method | End use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Masai day | Unwholesome force | Shaman + move camp | Protect the people |
| Kabbalah | Yetzer hara | Neshama + Mussar | Actualize the Self |
| Turning pro | Resistance | Practice + code | Gift for the audience |
| Hero's journey | Exile / ordeal | Refine the ore | Return with gold |
Book Three's last map: defeat the blocker, serve the higher, bring the refined gift home.
Three Books, One Threshold
Arc (portable)
| Book | Gist |
|---|---|
| One · Amateur | Third model; house in the country; shadow careers; habit/addiction symphony; Resistance cluster; year of turning |
| Two · Turning | Amateur defined; trait checklist; tribe release; moments that force the seat |
| Three · Professional | Qualities and two salaries; practice (space/time/intention); mystery axioms; Primitive / Mussar / audience gift |
Synthesis arc: Amateur named → Turn dated → Professional practiced.
Main Points
- Date the hinge. Before turning pro / after turning pro is a real life split, not a mood.
- Name the shadow career. The house in the country and the almost-calling are Resistance in costume.
- Treat addiction as a cluster. Distraction, habits, and tribe loyalty recruit each other.
- Use the amateur checklist. Traits are diagnostic; they are not a personality sentence.
- Leave the tribe without drama. Sovereignty beats belonging when belonging kills the work.
- Show up before inspiration. The Muse rewards the butt in the chair.
- Build a practice, not a streak superstition. Sacred space, fixed time, focused intention.
- Trust the box; sit chilly. Something is always inside; keep your seat at the wall.
- Two salaries. Cash optional; psyche salary funds the lifelong hunt.
- Return the gift. Ore refined for the audience is why the ordeal mattered.
About this book
Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work by Steven Pressfield, 2012. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions