TEM89: Do The Work by Steven Pressfield (Book Report)

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TEM89: Do The Work by Steven Pressfield (Book Report)

A Book Report on the incredible kick in the pants that is Do The Work by Steven Pressfield. This book will fire you up!

Show Notes:

5:34 - Overview of Do The Work by Steven Pressfield

8:26 - Our Enemies

1. Resistance
2. Rational Thought
3. Friends and Family

13:17 - Our Allies

1. Stay Stupid
2. Stubbornness
3. Blind Faith
4. Passion
5. Assistance (The Opposite of Resistance)
6. Friends and Family

19:32 - The Creative Process Broken Down Into Three Sections

1. Beginning
2. The Middle
3. End

Favorite Quotes from Do The Work:

"A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius for the madman. It's only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate."

"Don't think. Act."

"Start before you're ready. Don't prepare. Begin. Remember, our enemy is not lack of preparation: it's not the difficulty of the project or the state of the market place or the emptiness of our bank account. The enemy has a resistance. The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nano second, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and 1 million reasons why we can't/shouldn't/won't do what we know we need to do."

"In this book, when I say “Don’t think,” what I mean is: don’t listen to the chatter. Pay no attention to those rambling, disjointed images and notions that drift across the movie screen of your mind. Those are not your thoughts. They are chatter. Chatter is resistance."

"We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is."

"Do research early or late. Don’t stop working. Never do research in prime working time."

"Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance. Soak up what you need to fill in the gaps. Keep working."

"Suspend all self-judgment. Unless you’re building a sailboat or the Taj Mahal, I give you a free pass to screw up as much as you like. The inner critic? His ass is not permitted in the building. Set forth without fear and without self-censorship. When you hear that voice in your head, blow it off. This draft is not being graded. There will be no pop quiz. Only one thing matters in this initial draft: get SOMETHING done, however flawed or imperfect. You are not allowed to judge yourself."

"Let’s talk about the actual process—the writing/composing/ idea generation process. It progresses in two stages: action and reflection. Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time."

"When Michael Crichton approached the end of a novel (so I’ve read), he used to start getting up earlier and earlier in the morning. He was desperate to keep his mojo going. He’d get up at six, then five, then three-thirty and two-thirty, till he was driving his wife insane. Finally he had to move out of the house. He checked into a hotel (the Kona Village, which ain’t so bad) and worked around the clock till he’d finished the book. Michael Crichton was a pro. He knew that Resistance was strongest at the finish. He did what he had to do, no matter how nutty or unorthodox, to finish and be ready to ship."

"Start again (before you are ready!)"

Links:

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
John Beder: Episode 83
Dana Fonteneau: Episode 85
Ranaan Meyer: Episode 1

There are three ways you can support TEM!

You can help me reach two specific goals I've set for TEM:

1. Help me get to $25 per episode on Patreon by pledging as little as $1 per episode to support the show:  https://www.patreon.com/tempodcast

2. Help me get to my goal of 50 ratings at iTunes by leaving a rating and review.

And finally, a huge thank you to Parker Mouthpieces for providing the hosting for TEM.

Produced by Joey Santillo

Start before you are ready

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Did you know you can now follow TEM on Instagram? The handle is @TEMPodcast (same as Twitter.)

Here's a short Instagram video I made about my favorite quote from the wonderful Steven Pressfield book, "Do the Work", which is the subject of my next TEM Book Report.

Don't research during prime working time

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"Never do research in prime working time." 

—Steven Pressfield

Well this quote sure was a kick in the pants for me. Actually, the entire book it comes from, Do The Work, has been one giant kick in the pants.

(Note: In the very near future, an upcoming episode of TEM will be a "Book Report" about this book. It's awesome.)

In his book, Pressfield warns about researching too much. To break down his argument to its simplest form, doing too much research is a crutch for not actually doing the work you are avoiding. He warns that it can become resistance.

We are all guilty of that from time to time. Some people are guilty of that all the time!

What I really love about this quoteis how he warns about doing research in the prime working hours of a day rather than doing actual work. This immediately led to me examining my working habits and making sure I'm utilizing my time and my brainpower to the best of my abilities.

As a side note that doesn't pertain directly to research, I have stopped cleaning up my inbox when I first sit down to work in the morning after my shower and coffee. This is prime mental capacity time for me (which I've only recently put my finger on since I'm finally paying attention to such things) and that is wasted by returning simple emails or deleting others.

The corollary to that is that I am pretty much braindead every single day at 4 pm. I don't know why but I am. If I try to pump out another 500 words for my next book at 4 pm it will take me four times as long as it would at 9 am. And it will suck!

So the combination of really paying attention to the data of when I work best (in terms of time of day, how much sleep I've gotten, what I've eaten and many other factors) and Pressfield's advice of not doing research in prime working hours has been a boon to my productivity.