Authors: Steven Pressfield
Do the Work (2 page)
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 marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account.
The enemy is Resistance.
The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.
Start before you’re ready.
Good things happen when we start before we’re ready. For one thing, we show
huevos
. Our blood heats up. Courage begets more courage. The gods, witnessing our boldness, look on in approval. W. H. Murray said:
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now.
A Research Diet
Before we begin, you wanna do research? Uh-unh. I’m putting you on a diet.
You’re allowed to read three books on your subject. No more.
No underlining, no highlighting, no thinking or talking about the documents later. Let the ideas percolate.
Let the unconscious do its work.
Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.
(Later we’ll come back and do serious, heavy-duty research. Later. Not now.)
Two quick thoughts as we begin:
1. Stay Primitive
The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis.
Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms.
Conception occurs at the primal level. I’m not being facetious when I stress, throughout this book, that it is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart.
The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor.
That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with.
The hospital room may be spotless and sterile, but birth itself will always take place amid chaos, pain, and blood.
2. Swing for the Seats
My first job was in advertising in New York. I used to bring ideas to my boss that were so tiny, they made him apoplectic.
“This idea is the size of a postage stamp! If it were any more miniscule, I’d need an electron microscope just to see it! Go back to your cubicle and bring me something BIG!”
If you and I want to do great stuff, we can’t let ourselves work small. A home-run swing that results in a strikeout is better than a successful bunt or even a line-drive single.
Start playing from power. We can always dial it back later. If we don’t swing for the seats from the start, we’ll never be able to drive a fastball into the upper deck.
Lunch with My Mentor
Some years ago I had lunch at Joe Allen’s in Manhattan with my mentor (though he would cringe at that word), the writer and documentary maker Norm Stahl. He was making some notes on a pad of yellow, legal-size foolscap paper. He told me something that has saved my bacon more times than I can count:
Steve, God made a single sheet of yellow foolscap exactly the right length to hold the outline of an entire novel.
What did Norm mean by that?
He meant don’t overthink. Don’t overprepare. Don’t let research become Resistance. Don’t spend six months compiling a thousand-page tome detailing the emotional matrix and family history of every character in your book.
Outline it fast. Now. On instinct.
Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.
Is this easy? Hell, no.
So the next chapter offers a helpful hint:
Three-Act Structure
Break the sheet of foolscap into three parts: beginning, middle, and end.
This is how screenwriters and playwrights work. Act One, Act Two, Act Three.
How Leonardo Did It
Here’s the Last Supper in three acts on a single sheet of foolscap:
- Supper table stretching across the width of the canvas.
- Jesus standing in the center, apostles arrayed in various postures left and right.
- Perspective and background tailing off behind.
That’s all Mr. Da V needed to start. The rest is details.
Positively Fourth Street
in Three Acts
- “You got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend ….
- “ … when you know as well as me, you’d rather see me paralyzed …
- “ … you’d know what a drag it is to see you.”
The Vietnam Memorial
In three acts, on one sheet of foolscap:
- A wall with the names of the fallen in chronological order of the dates of their deaths.
- Wall set below the level of the ground in a “V,” extending from a shallow end to a deep end.
- Visitors descend to view the wall, which has no barrier to prevent them from touching the names of the memorialized or from leaving tokens of love or honor at the base of the wall.
At the conception stage, the artist works by instinct. What feels right?
What does she love?
Is this her pure vision? Does it feel so right to her that she can dedicate the next X years of her life to realizing it?
Those were the only questions, at the start, that Maya Lin needed to ask and answer.
Did she analyze her design intellectually? No doubt. Did she reflect on the utility of negative space and the power of what’s-left-out? Of course. Did she assess with her intellect which aspects of the design would produce emotion and why? I’m sure she did.
But all that is beside the point at this stage. Let the art historians worry about that later.
Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?
Facebook in Three Acts
- A digital commons, upon which anyone who wishes may establish, free, his or her own personal “page.”
- Each page owner determines who is permitted access to his or her page.
- Thus creating a worldwide community of “friends” who can interact with other “friends” and communicate or share virtually anything they want.
That’s Why They Call It Rewriting
The old saw says there’s no such thing as writing, only rewriting. This is true.
Better to have written a lousy ballet than to have composed no ballet at all.
Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.
Next question: How do you get it down?
Start at the End
Here’s a trick that screenwriters use: work backwards. Begin at the finish.
If you’re writing a movie, solve the climax first. If you’re opening a restaurant, begin with the experience you want the diner to have when she walks in and enjoys a meal. If you’re preparing a seduction, determine the state of mind you want the process of romancing to bring your lover to.
Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.
Yes, you say. “But how do I know where I want to go?”
Answer the Question “What Is This About?”
Start with the theme. What is this project about?
What is the Eiffel Tower about? What is the space shuttle about? What is
Nude Descending a Staircase
about?
Your movie, your album, your new startup … what is it about? When you know that, you’ll know the end state. And when you know the end state, you’ll know the steps to take to get there.
Moby Dick
on a Single Sheet, Working Back to Front
What is
Moby Dick
about?
It’s about the clash between human will and the elemental malice of nature, i.e. (in Melville’s dark 19th-century view), the Old Testament God.
So … a monster. A whale. A white whale (because white is even weirder and scarier than whatever color whales normally are).
Next: a mortal to challenge the monster. He must be monstrous himself. Obsessed, arrogant, monomaniacal. Ahab.
Knowing our theme (in other words, what
Moby Dick
is about), we now know the climax: Ahab harpoons the white whale and duels it to the death. No other climax is possible.
Now we have Act Three. We have our end.
Next: beginning and middle. We need to set the climax up and load it with maximum emotion and thematic impact.
We must, in other words, establish both protagonist and antagonist, make clear to the reader what each of them represents and what their conflict means thematically in the broader scheme of the human (and divine) condition.
Beginning: Ishmael. Our point of view. A human-scale witness to the tragedy.
Once we have Ishmael, we have our start and our ultimate finish—after the whale destroys the
Pequod
and all her crew and drags Ahab to his death in the depths, Ishmael pops up amid the wreckage, the lone survivor, to tell the tale.
End first, then beginning and middle. That’s your startup, that’s your plan for competing in a triathlon, that’s your ballet.
“But hey, Steve … I thought you said ‘Don’t think.’”
Let’s pause for a moment then and consider the difference between thinking and “thinking.”
Thoughts and Chatter
Have you ever meditated? Then you know what it feels like to shift your consciousness to a witnessing mode and to watch thoughts arise, float across your awareness, and then drift away, to be replaced by the next thought and the thought after that.
These are not thoughts. They are chatter.
I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what Buddhists call “monkey-mind” chatter or the reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap about, hanging around the street corner.
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.
They are Resistance.
Chatter is your mother and father’s well-intentioned expressions of caution, seeking to shield you from hurting yourself. Chatter is your teachers’ equally well-meaning attempts at socialization, training you to follow the rules. Chatter is your friends’ regular-Joe buddy-talk, trying to make you like them and follow the rules of the pack.
Chatter is Resistance.
Its aim is to reconcile you to “the way it is,” to make you exactly like everyone else, to render you amenable to societal order and discipline.