You can clearly see that it’s almost a year since my last breakdown and urge to squeeze out a blog post out of me. Funny thing is that it’s about the same topic, not being able to get the work done, it’s not that I’m not capable, it’s just I cannot begin, there’s some Resistance! I hate this resistance.

To get past the resistance I resorted to “War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. I had read it half way through about a year ago, I suppose with the same purpose in mind, but this time I managed to get my hands on an audio version of it, took slightly less than 3 hours of my time, but it totally worth it. Some parts feels like they’re written just for me. My issue according to Pressfield is the Resistance, it makes me feel inadequate, incapable of beating the shit out of it and getting the work done. “War of Art” was very good but didn’t stop there, I knew Pressfield has a followup audio program called “Do the work” naturally I wouldn’t stop short and go ahead and listen to that one too! Oh my, it’s really good, it’s like Pressfield, probably with some hints from Seth Godin, knows how the brain works, he tells me stop doing research and get some work done, anything, the ugliest draft, the alphaest (I know the most alpha is probably correct.) version of your project, your software your “whatever” the heck your working on.

In addition to the definition of resistance and how true it is, he mentions another thing, what is that? It’s the fact that we are afraid of exposing ourself, we have potentials that we, ourselves are afraid of tapping into them, we are afraid of taking that interview with that big company that everyone is talking about, or we are afraid of putting our code on Github, or we are scared of opening a pull request for such and such open source project. Why is it so difficult to be exposed? Why do we fear rejection? Are they going to eat us for dinner if we fail? I hope not, that’s very unlikely! For me, I really don’t know, I just like to be good enough, sometimes I am good enough I just don’t want to take any chances, and that’s not good, I must change that. Pressfield has an answer, he points out the difference between an amateur and a pro. An amateur is like me, he’s afraid of being exposed and takes his failures personally, but a pro, goes out there, gets the job done, and doesn’t care about the outcome, he does what he can, if the outcome is failure, it is what it is, he moves on to the next project. I must become a pro, that’s my challenge. Pressfield talks about “You Inc.”, to facilitate becoming a pro, you can get inncorporated! register a company to be the front to your business/professional activities, now if you fail, it the company! if you win, it’s you the owner of the company!

Go out there, slay the Resistance’s dragon, get the work done, ship, get exposed, repeat!