Book of the Year Award

Book Review
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Published in 2003 by Warner Books

My girlfriend has been trying to get me read this book for a while. It's really too bad I didn't read it earlier--it's the best inspirational book I've ever read. Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire and The Afghan Campaign, writes a non-fiction about the inner struggle to follow one's artistic dreams.

"Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Look in your own heart. Unless I’m crazy, right now a still small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And unless I’m crazy, you’re no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you."

"Resistance", Pressfield writes, is the force that tells us to stick with the status-quo; to focus on short-term gratification; and to avoid following our true calling and higher purpose.

"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.

Unalleviated, Resistance mounts to a pitch that becomes unendurable. At this point vices kick in. Dope, adultery, web surfing.

Beyond that, Resistance becomes clinical. Depression, aggression, dysfunction. Then actual crime and physical self-destruction.

Sounds like life, I know. It isn’t. It’s Resistance."

Pressfield is acutely aware that overcoming "Resistance" is ever so more difficult in today's consumer-driven culture:

"What makes it tricky is that we live in a consumer culture that’s acutely aware of this unhappiness and has massed all its profit-seeking artillery to exploit it. By selling us a product, a drug, a distraction. John Lennon once wrote:

Well, you think you’re so clever
And classless and free
But you’re all fucking peasants
As far as I can see

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 contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work."

The good news is that it's not that difficult to overcome the negative forces that prevent us from accomplishing our dreams. According to Pressfield, one has to become a professional, the most important aspect of which is to sit down and work, and to do it all the time. Once the work starts, and it is done day after day, the unique creativity in each of us will flow.

"Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he worked on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. ‘I write only when inspiration strikes,’ he replied. ‘Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.’

That’s a pro.

In terms of Resistance, Maugham was saying, ‘I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work.’

Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.
He knew if he built it, she would come."

While the book may appear to be pertinent to writers and artists only, the advice the author gives is applicable to anyone who wants to do something their heart has been telling them to do, but has been held back (Resistance). Bravo, Steven Pressfield, this is my book of the year.

Here are a few additional interesting passages:

"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. No matter how much abuse is heaped on the head of the former, the latter takes it in stride and keeps on trucking. Conversely with success: You-the-writer may get a swelled head, but you-the-boss remember to take yourself down a peg."

"A professional does not hesitate to ask for help [Pressfield lists Tiger Woods as example]."

"I learned this from Robert McKee. A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for.

It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from."