Do the Work

Thought
     
    Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneur’s worst enemy.
     
    Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego.
     
    Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.
     
    Homer began both The Iliad and The Odyssey with a prayer to the Muse. The Greeks’ greatest poet understood that genius did not reside within his fallible, mortal self—but came to him instead from some source that he could neither command nor control, only invoke.
     
    When an artist says “Trust the soup,” she means let go of the need to control (which we can’t do anyway) and put your faith instead in the Source, the Mystery, the Quantum Soup.
     
    The deeper the source we work from, the better our stuff will be—and the more transformative it will be for us and for those we share it with.
     
    Friends and Family
     
    The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are . They are invested in maintaining us as we are.
     
    The last thing we want is to remain as we are.
     
    If you’re reading this book, it’s because you sense inside you a second self, an unlived you.
     
    With some exceptions (God bless them), friends and family are the enemy of this unmanifested you, this unborn self, this future being.
     
    Prepare yourself to make new friends. They will appear, trust me.
     
    Our Allies
     
    Enough for now about the antagonists arrayed against us. Let’s consider the champions on our side:
     
     
Stupidity
     
Stubbornness
     
Blind faith
     
Passion
     
Assistance (the opposite of Resistance)
     
Friends and family
     
     
    Stay Stupid
     
    The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.
     
    Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.
     
    How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think.
     
    A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.
     
    Don’t think. Act.
     
    We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.
     
    Be Stubborn
     
    Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.
     
    What will keep us from stopping? Plain old stubbornness.
     
    I like the idea of stubbornness because it’s less lofty than “tenacity” or “perseverance.” We don’t have to be heroes to be stubborn. We can just be pains in the butt.
     
    When we’re stubborn, there’s no quit in us. We’re mean. We’re mulish. We’re ornery.
     
    We’re in till the finish.
     
    We will sink our junkyard-dog teeth into Resistance’s ass and not let go, no matter how hard he kicks.
     
    Blind Faith
     
    Is there a spiritual element to creativity? Hell, yes.
     
    Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.
     
    Resistance wants to rattle that faith. Resistance wants to destroy it.
     
    There’s an exercise that Patricia Ryan Madson describes in her wonderful book, Improv Wisdom . (Ms. Madson taught improvisational theater at Stanford to standing-room only classes for twenty years.) Here’s the exercise:
     
    Imagine a box with a lid. Hold the box in your hand. Now open it.
     
    What’s inside?
     
    It might be a frog, a silk scarf, a gold coin of Persia. But here’s the trick: no matter how many times you open the box, there is always something in it.
     
    Ask me my religion. That’s it.
     
    I believe with unshakeable faith that there will always be something in the box.
     
    Passion
     
    Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long.
     
    You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.
     
    Fear saps passion.
     
    When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.
     
    Assistance
     
    We’ll come back to