Do you think creation comes easy for some people?
By now we should all be somewhat familiar with Steven Pressfield‘s concept of the Resistance: the sneaky, remorseless force that keeps us from planting our asses and working.
This is the voice that tells you you can’t write with a headache, or that you should really declutter your desk and get yourself a coffee first – anything that delays you from pressing keys and rattling out a string of words. It’s also the friend who calls on a workday and suggests a trip to the beach or a round of golf.
In The War of Art, Steven doesn’t bother much with identifying the underlying causes of the Resistance.
His point: Resistance happens. It’s real.
And it doesn’t necessarily get any easier with time.
As Steven himself put it, “this shit is hard.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, prolific author of several books including the noteworthy Everything Is Illuminated, put it this way:
“The idea of enjoying writing something is foreign to me. I enjoy having written things. Someone once said that writing is like pulling teeth… out of your penis.”
Resistance often stems from fear – the fear of failure, of proving once and for all you’re a hack and can’t hang with the real talent.
Ditch the notion of superiority
It’s a trap to define your own success against standards set by others. A-listers are visible by definition.
Copyblogger‘s subscriber count has taken on its own gravity – over 100k and growing daily.
And then there’s you hovering around 65 subscribers and 50 visitors (on a good day).
Drawing this comparison doesn’t exactly give you a motivational boost. It just sends the morbid “I’m not good enough” parade once more around the block.
And it’s complete BS, because that’s the fixed mindset talking.
Growth is everything
In Mindset, Carol Dweck demonstrates the difference between people who think talent is something we’re born with and can’t change much and people who believe the mind is a muscle to be trained.
Case in point: Dweck and her colleagues separated a class of 7th graders into two groups. One group got the growth mindset training along with solid study habit instruction, the other group just got the study habits.
The growth-oriented kids improved. The other kids didn’t.
So that’s it, right? Now that you know, you’ll change your mind and start writing a post a day without hesitation. No?
The truth: we already knew this. That’s why we have tired cliches like the joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall (“practice!”).
Try this: go back through your blog archives and start reading a post from a few months ago. My guarantee: you’ll find stuff you’d write differently today. You’ll think to yourself, “ah, I can say that better. I can come up with a better metaphor than chopping wood on a hot August afternoon.”
Of course you can, because the you that wrote that post and the you that’s reading it today are two different people.
Since then you’ve probably written hundreds of thousands of words and read even more. You’ve failed a bunch – written posts that got zero comments, zero links and a trickle of traffic. You wrote some true garbage that you simply let die on the vine rather than air the stench out in public. And you’ve learned from all that.
And that’s kind of the point. You get better as you go, so keep going.
You don’t need permission
A few months back, after wrapping up one significant web project, I found myself with a few months worth of cash in the bank and no major projects on my plate.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity to explore and launch something new into the world, doesn’t it? Instead I found myself mired in the abundance of options.
The thing about too many options is that every direction becomes a potential way forward – and also a path to possible failure. So as long as you’ve got enough food in your pack it seems the safe thing is to set up camp where you are.
Deciding you’re stuck is a perfect way to sabotage your own creativity. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy; it means you’re afraid to fail. Doesn’t much matter – the net result is the same (you don’t move forward).
That’s what makes creation so hard and so valuable at once. Maps and guidelines can’t get you there. Ingenuity isn’t a commodity, and the act of asking permission gives up your sovereignty over the creation. The fruits of your labor, once you’ve asked permission to proceed, are, in a small but significant way, no longer your own.
Without that permission, creative choices can only come from you. In that way the act of choosing exposes you. That’s scary for most of us. Exposure gives the stone throwers a target. It gives the crowd something to mock if you don’t pull it off.
Living with that reality is the prerequisite to doing meaningful work.
I love your post as well as the authors you mentioned. I just finished reading The War of Art this weekend and it left me unbelievably motivated and have loved Carol Dweck’s work for years. I think it’s so important to share their work with others because the biggest obstacle to achieving anything is generally yourself.
You might also enjoy Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and Writing Alone and in Groups by Pat Schneider if you haven’t read them already. Those were the first books that taught me how to write without resistance.
Thanks Christine – I appreciate the kind words. I’ll also check out those books – have you read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott? Always loved that one too.
Bird by Bird is also one of my favorites! There are so many great books on writing but the bottom line really is sitting down in a chair and getting to work.
You should check out some of the work a friend of mine does – her website is languageofyoga.com and she teaches mindful writing workshops and classes where she teaches you how to turn off the inner critic/editor while you write. She used to be an English prof at the university where I live and was always a favorite instructor while she worked there (she’s having a lot of fun helping writers in the community now).
Yeah, pretty much they all tell us to “just do the work, damn it.” But it’s reassuring in ways to read from writers you admire who can tell you, “yeah, it’s hard for all of us.”
Yoga + Writing – interesting concept. I’m about as flexible as a two-by-four.
Thank you very much for sharing this. I have subscribed to your RSS feed. Please keep up the good work.
Hey Mike,
Fantastic piece! I always have so many ideas for a post or story or what-have-you, but the thought of sitting down and writing it is what kills me! I mean, I do it because I both want to and have to, but it just sucks. The analogy cracked me up!
Thanks for this!
Hi Mike – I enjoyed reading this post! Nothing is ever easy… we start small and eventually get bigger as we go ie: growth (in simple terms)
Keep up with such motivating and inspiring posts!
G