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Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.
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Steven Pressfield |
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The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy but where are they. --Plutarch Sayings of the Spartans
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Steven Pressfield |
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the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery.
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Steven Pressfield |
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No one is born with the Warrior Ethos, though many of its tenets appear naturally in young men and women of all cultures. The Warrior Ethos is taught. On the football field in Topeka, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, on the lion-infested plains of Kenya and Tanzania. Courage is modeled for the youth by fathers and older brothers, by mentors and elders. It is inculcated, in almost all cultures, by a regimen of training and discipline. Thi..
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Steven Pressfield |
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The professional keeps his eye on the doughnut and not on the hole. He reminds himself it's better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.
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Steven Pressfield |
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In my view, the amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a sideline, distinct from his "real" vocation."
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Steven Pressfield |
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The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle.' They
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Steven Pressfield |
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There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
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Steven Pressfield |
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The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the rim of the bucket.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Now it's 1967. Nasser and the Arabs are saying to themselves: The Jews have beaten us in Round One and Round Two, but we will wipe them out for good in Round Three.
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Steven Pressfield |
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A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder. These aren't diseases, they're marketing ploys. Doctors didn't discover them, copywriters did.
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Steven Pressfield |
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ce70f01
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What does Resistance feel like? First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We're bored, we're restless. We can't get no satisfaction. There's guilt but we can't put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We're disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product.
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Steven Pressfield |
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That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.
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Steven Pressfield |
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When Krishna instructed Arjuna that we have a right to our labor but not to the fruits of our labor, he was counseling the warrior to act territorially, not hierarchically. We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Like our IQ, talent is a gift from our ancestors. If we're lucky, we inherit it. In the fortunate talented few, the dark dimension of their natures will first resist the labor that creativity demands, but once they commit to the task, their talented side stirs to action and rewards them with astonishing feats. These flashes of creative genius seem to arrive from out of the blue for the obvious reason: They come from the unconscious mind. In..
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Steven Pressfield |
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Once we turn pro, we're 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'll go out, and no sooner.
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Steven Pressfield |
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We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It's easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.
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Steven Pressfield |
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As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contr..
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Steven Pressfield |
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Are you paralyzed with fear? That's a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the lower realm to the upper, from the ego to the Self. Art
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Steven Pressfield |
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The hero wanders. The hero suffers. The hero returns. You are that hero.
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Steven Pressfield |
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You're where you wanted to be, aren't you? So you're taking a few blows. That's the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.
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Steven Pressfield |
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And they knew that when battle came, he would take his place not safely in the rear, but in the front rank, at the hottest and most perilous spot on the field.
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Steven Pressfield |
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The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps.
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Steven Pressfield |
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On the field of the Self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Our greatest fear is fear of success. When we are succeeding--that is, when we have begun to overcome our self-doubt and self-sabotage, when we are advancing in our craft and evolving to a higher level--that's when panic strikes.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they're better friends, truer friends. And we're better and truer to them.
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Steven Pressfield |
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The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time. That's what I mean when I say turning pro. Resistance hates it when we turn pro.
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Steven Pressfield |
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I'm keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first. What's important is the work. That's the game I have to suit up for. That's the field on which I have to leave everything I've got.
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Steven Pressfield |
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I can procrastinate thinking about my procrastination problem. I can procrastinate dealing with my problem of procrastinating thinking about my procrastination problem.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what Freud called the Death Wish -- that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that's actually good.
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Steven Pressfield |
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When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us . . . we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.
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Steven Pressfield |
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We can always revise and revisit once we've acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Like the statue of David, our Authentic Swing already exists, concealed within the stone, so to speak." Keeler broke in with excitement. "Then our task as golfers, according to this line of thought..." "...is simply to chip away all that is inauthentic, allowing our Authentic Swing to emerge in its purity."
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Steven Pressfield |
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Making yourself a corporation (or just thinking of yourself in that way) reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist-doing-the-work from the will-and-consciousness-running-the-show.
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inspirational
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Steven Pressfield |
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0592023
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The professional knows when he has fallen short of his own standards. He will murder his darlings without hesitation, if that's what it takes to stay true to the goddess and to his own expectations of excellence.
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Steven Pressfield |
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Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck. A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the j..
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Steven Pressfield |
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He looks upon sky and steppe and sees that which God has created. I look and see God Himself.
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Steven Pressfield |
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it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are."
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Steven Pressfield |
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It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.
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Steven Pressfield |