How to Overcome Inner Resistance | Steven Pressfield

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Resistance grows with the importance of the work

  Pressfield stands by the line 'The more important to your soul's growth, the stronger the resistance will be.' When you conceive a book, film or business, you don't get a surge of inspiration. You get waves of Resistance with a capital R: procrastination, distraction, the urge to go to the beach. The resistance tracks how much the work matters to your evolution, not its commercial value. If you're torn between three or four projects, he says to do the one you're most afraid of.

• 02

  The tree and its shadow

  His image: a tree appears in a sunny meadow and immediately casts a shadow. The tree is your dream and the shadow is the resistance, and the two are directly proportional. So a massive feeling of 'I'm not good enough, I want to quit' is a good sign: it tells you the tree is big. Choose the big tree, not the little one.

• 03

  Train the body as a rehearsal for the work

  At 82, Pressfield arrives at the gym at 4:45 a.m. To him the gym is less about fitness than about rehearsing resistance. He hates getting up that early, it will hurt, and he's afraid of injury and embarrassment. Facing that first means that by the time he sits at the keyboard, nothing else that day feels as hard. On the Sundays he skips, he notes, he doesn't feel good about himself.

• 04

  Bank 'little successes' and capture ideas immediately

  He cites Braveheart screenwriter Randall Wallace, who stacks small morning wins to build momentum before writing. Both men agree that ideas arriving during workouts vanish 'like a dream'. Pressfield dictates them into his phone right away, and Huberman avoids social media and texting during training so those ideas can surface.

• 05

  Dive straight in, and don't judge the day's pages

  Asked how often his mind drifts to the news in the first ten minutes of writing, Pressfield says never, although it took years to get there. He plunges in, writes about an hour, takes a laundry break, and writes another hour. His inner critic almost never appears now. He never rereads the day's work, telling himself that quality will come in later drafts.

• 06

  Think in multiple drafts

  Top Gun's original writer, Jack Epps, taught him to 'always think in multiple drafts': you can only fix one thing per draft. Pressfield takes a book through 13–15 drafts, the last seven or eight with only slight changes, which frees each day's session from perfectionism.

• 07

  Stop at the point of diminishing returns

  He once wrote four hours a day and now writes about two, which he believes produce as much. When typos and mistakes appear he stops without guilt, as with an extra gym set that will only hurt you. He quotes Steinbeck that squeezing out a little more at the end of a long day is 'the falsest kind of economy' because you pay for it the next day. He also follows Hemingway's habit of stopping when he knows what comes next, which eases the next morning's entry. Huberman adds that resistance-training data favor the intensity of the first one or two hard sets, as the nervous system gets better at recruiting effort.

• 08

  A sealed work environment

  There's no internet, music or phone use beyond dictating a note. Sessions are usually 11 a.m.–1 p.m. and shift by two hours at most. His chair isn't comfortable, and he thinks it shouldn't be. Huberman calls a famous writer's advice to buy a super-comfortable chair 'terrible', arguing that a focus on optimizing comfort is itself a trap, and points out that his podcast started in a closet.

• 09

  Turn pro

  Pressfield's breakthrough was flipping from amateur to professional thinking. A pro shows up every day, stays all day or its equivalent, plays hurt like Jordan or Kobe Bryant, and doesn't take success or failure personally. An amateur folds at adversity and checks how they feel. A professional does it anyway.

• 10

  The people closest to you may resist your calling

  Most people have a calling they aren't pursuing, he says, so your effort can feel like a reproach to them: 'If Andrew can do it, why can't I?' That can lead to undermining framed as concern, such as 'we don't want your children starving.' Huberman adds that people mock those who eat well or sleep early because it highlights their own choices. He also names anger and numbing out, through certain social media, news, alcohol and ultra-palatable food, as resistance sold to us 'for free', paid for with our time.