5 Key Lessons From The Book
- Recognition of Resistance is powerful. It will ease your fight
- You will never act big if you start thinking rationally. Stay stubborn and committed.
- Good things happen to people who start before they are ready. So stop preparing. Do the Task
- Stop being afraid of your higher self
- Finish your project. If you don’t all of your work goes in vain.
Do The Work: Book Summary
This book will help you to understand why you are stuck and kick you in the pants and help you get moving.
Although this book is written for creative individuals, the underlying principles of this book can be applied by anyone in any field. It will help everyone move from a less or lower conscious plane to a higher one.
Who Are Our Enemies?
Resistance
Resistance is a negative force that keeps us from doing the work. Anything or activity that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity will evoke resistance.
Or expressed in another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of lower nature will evoke resistance. The aim of resistance is to distract us and prevent us from doing our work.
Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It aims to kill our genius, our soul, and our purpose
But don’t think you are the only one who suffers resistance. Resistance is a natural force. It is universal.
Rational thought
If you start thinking rationally, you will never act big. Instead, you should act from your intuition and instinct.
Friends are family
Our friends and family know us as we are and they are invested in keeping us as we are. Therefore, if you want to change or do something new, you should prepare yourself to make new friends.
Who are our friends?
Stupidity, stubbornness, blind faith, passion, assistance, and friends and family are our allies.
Stay stupid and don’t allow yourself to think. It’s only you and I, with our stupid brains and our tiny hearts who doubt and overthink and hesitate. So instead of wasting your time thinking, act.
Once you commit to something, the worst thing to do is to stop. Instead of persevering, be stubborn. When you are stubborn, you are mean and mulish, you are in it till the finish.
Start Before You Are Ready
Our enemy is not the lack of preparation or the difficulty of the project, our enemy is the resistance. If you give your brain time to think, it will start producing excuses, justification, and a million reasons why you can’t/ shouldn’t/ won’t do what you need to know.
Preparation is also a form of resistance. Good things only happen to people who begin before they are ready. Because guess what? You are never ready. Therefore, whatever you are supposed to do, start before you are ready.
Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.
Before you begin, if you want to do research, you are only allowed to read three books on your subject. Because research can become resistance. We want to work not prepare for work. Do not underline, highlight, or take notes, just let the ideas percolate. Let the unconscious mind do the work.
Don’t overthink. Don’t overprepare. Don’t spend all of your time planning on how you will finish the work. Don’t work on getting out every detail. Just outline it. On instinct.
How to start your creative endeavor?
The old saying says there’s no such thing as writing, only rewriting. Get your idea on paper. Figure out where you want to go and work your way backward. If you’re writing a movie, solve the climax first. If you’re opening a restaurant, begin with the experience you want the dinner to have when she walks in and enjoys a meal. Answer the question, “What is this about?”
End first, then beginning and middle. That’s your startup, that’s your plan for competing in a triathlon, that’s your ballet.
The Middle
The resistance is an active and inextinguishable force that stops us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals. We can never eliminate resistance but we can outsmart it.
Fill in the gaps
Any project or enterprise can be broken down into the beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps between the gaps.
Create a rough draft
One rule for overcoming resistance is to get the first full working draft as soon as possible.
You don’t have to worry about the quality. Create momentum and get to the end as if the devil himself was behind your back. Don’t think and don’t look down. Just get your first draft as fast as you can.
Don’t let your inner critic judge yourself. Nobody is ever gonna see your first draft. It doesn’t matter however flawed or imperfect your draft is, don’t judge it. It is not being graded anyway.
Capture ideas
Ideas don’t come linearly. Don’t resist ideas. Instead have something to capture them. Don’t control the idea. Your job is to figure out what the idea is and bring it into being.
The opposite of resistance
Resistance is universal and behind every law, there is equal and opposite law. The opposite of resistance is assistance. If you are working, it will generate its own energy field.
The universe responds to this. It helps to translate potential to being and convert dreams into reality.
As Seth Godin said: Momentum is everything. keep it going.
Every day ask yourself how much time can you spare each day. For that time close yourself inside a room and don’t let anybody in. Just work.
Principles of resistance
Resistance is an enemy and its recognition is enormously powerful. It can save your life. The aim of resistance is not to obstruct you or harm you. Its aim is to kill. It will kill you like cancer.
Resistance is not something that’s outside. It’s inside. It comes from within you.
Resistance is inside you but it’s not you. That means you are not to blame for the voices of resistance you hear in your head. If you got your head, you’ve got a voice of resistance.
The real you must fight resistance. You are the knight and resistance is the dragon. The aim of resistance is to keep you away from all wealth, wisdom, and freedom that’s inside you. Its aim is to guard to its final breath.
Resistance arises second after passion. It’s a response to the idea.
Resistance asks you two questions
- How bad do you want it?
- Why do you want it?Failure
We all fail. But they are not the end. They are good for us. It means that we have to grow. It’s a sign that you are getting better and still need to learn more things.
Fear of success
Our greatest fear is the fear of success. When we are succeeding and advancing in our craft, we evolve to a higher level. That’s when panic strikes. And panic is a good sign. It’s a sign that we are growing.
In the words of Marianne Williamson:
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 frighten 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.
The End
Finishing is a critical part of any project. If we don’t finish, all the work that we did means nothing. To finish your project and ship it to the world requires a ball of steel.
Resistance works strongest when you are at the finish. When we ship, we are exposed. That’s why we’re so afraid of it. When we ship, we’ll be judged. We can fail. We can be humiliated.
Beat the dragon once
Slay that dragon once and he will never have the power over you again. He still will be there. You’ll have to fight him every morning. But once you have beaten him, you’ll know that you’ll beat him and that is a game-changer.
