Last week I finished the book Do The Work! by Steven Pressfield. This is a book a friend loaned me a while ago, but I didn't get around to reading it until just last week. It is a very quick read, entertaining, and definitely motivational. It was written to coach you through a project, and the author made several points that really resonated with me. For example, he says to start a project before you're ready and go on a research diet. Or, in other words, don't spend forever researching an idea and just go for it. He says that you can research more later, and even spend your evenings researching- but during prime working time you should be working on your project.
This is something that I definitely struggle with. I am a reader and a planner, and it is easy for me to spend all my time preparing for something rather than actually doing it. I think my husband and I balance each other pretty well in this regard. He definitely goes for it when he decides he's going to do something. Just in the past year or two he has: changed careers, put up a fence, built a front walkway for our house, started two different businesses, sold his car twice to buy another one, started taking classes again... I could have easily spent a year just planning for one of those things. With the fence, for instance, I wanted one for a while, but I was busy comparing options (privacy/wood/metal), prices (pay someone else vs. do it myself, prefab fence panels vs. shipping pallets vs. starting with posts and going from there), watching youtube videos of how to put up a fence... Once I mentioned my idea to Steven, he went to Lowes and Tractor Supply to compare prices, rented a U-Haul to get the supplies back to our house, bought some materials and started digging fence post holes. Our fence was completely built about two weeks after he began working on it.
In his book Steven Pressfield also writes about how to overcome resistance and how to not get discouraged by the problems that will inevitably arise (because a problem is just a problem, and problems can be solved). Finally, he says it is important to finish your project. Resistance is often the strongest once you get close to the end, but once you finish- whether you succeed or fail- at least you've done what you set out to do! He writes that when his first movie tanked, "That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure." Failing is sometimes "the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines" (93).
My favorite paragraph in the book, though, is when he quotes Marianne Williamson on page 89:
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
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