self-validation

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is a book that I like to crack open to a random page and see what I’m supposed to find at that moment. The chapter I read last night stayed with me throughout the night, and into this morning, so I thought I would share a few of the paragraphs that stood out to me the most.

If you’re not familiar with the book, Pressfield writes to help people break through the barriers, or Resistance as he calls it, to unlock their creative potential. Although the book is written for Creatives, it applies to everyone, even if you aren’t working on a creative project. Resistance shows up everywhere in our lives, and Pressfield’s comparison of the amateur mindset vs. the professional mindset can be applied regardless of whether you’re creative or not.

Here are a few paragraphs from the chapter “A Professional Self-Validates, with my emphasis in bold:
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“An amateur lets the negative opinion of others unman him. He takes external criticism to heart, allowing it to trump his own belief in himself and his work. Resistance loves this.”

"The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality. Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working. Short of a family crisis or the outbreak of World War III, the professional shows up, ready to serve the gods.”

“The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done for himself if he had had the guts.”

See you tomorrow and keep pursuing,

JC