Fighting Resistance
Resistance is negative force. It’s our own tendency to yield procrastination, self-doubt, self-inflation, laziness, arrogance, complacency and perfectionism. It’s a fear of failure. It’s also a fear of success.
It’s our tendency to self-sabotage. The simplest answer to breaking resistance is to put your ass where your heart wants to be. It’s to wake up every morning and do your work. And lie down at night feeling at peace with ourselves, knowing that we have defeated our demons and moved twenty-four hours closer to our dream life.
Moving Your Ass
Put your physical body at the station where your work will and must happen. If you want to write, sit at the keyboard. Want to read? Be at the library.
Moving it a step further, you can change the city you live in and move to the location where your dream work will happen. Move to the location where your dreams are most likely to come true.
There are two reasons you need to pack up and move to new location: One is because you get access to resources that will help you achieve a dream life.
Another is people. Your friends from your hometown, whose only contribution in your life is distracting you and wasting your time won’t help you in achieving your dream life.
The friends who share the same dream as you do are the spiritual companions. They will be your friends forever. And they won’t be found at your location. You will have to move out of the comfort of your home to find them.
If you are serious about your dream, there’s no substitute for packing up. You need to be at the heart of action.
Magic happens in life when you are in the same space with other dreamers who have already put their asses there. It’s not enough for your heart to be in the right place, your ass has to be there too.
Moving your ass shows others that you are serious about this stuff. It shows your commitment to other people.
Success happens when people work together. Your friends and mentor will help you succeed. But before they can help you, you should be there showing how serious and committed about the stuff you do. You have to do the work.
Show Your Commitment
Ass means commitment. It means to commit emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually to your dream. You have to show commitment even in the face of adversity. Show how much you want it. What are you willing to sacrifice to succeed?
Showing commitment also means exposing yourself to risk. You have to be okay with the probability of failing in life. Most people don’t commit because they are afraid to fail. When you move towards your dream, you are moving from the known to unknown. From certainty to uncertainty. Thats why showing commitment in scary.
Don’t be afraid of the chaos. Order emerges. The process will unfold infallibly. Just do the work, day-in and day-out. It will produce progress and order in your project.
Until you are committed, you have hesitancy. You have the chance to draw back. This leads to ineffectiveness. But when you commit, it can make a profound impact on your life.
Make the pain of not doing something a lot greater than the imagined pain of doing it.
We may not be 100% committed 100% of the time. But it is possible to be 100% committed 10% of the time. Block few hours of your day and do the work. You can be a full-time writer with one hour a day.
It’s not a habit. It’s your life.
Committing to Work
Create a sacred space for you to work. The space only you have access to. That you will not use for any other purpose than doing work. It will generate enormous effect while working on your craft.
Commit to a certain time when you will start and end your work. Avoid distractions. No phone, no e-mail, no social media, no interactions. Only work and work till the whistle blows. As soon as you are tired, stop. Our game is the long game. Stop your work with a little fuel left in the tank. It helps to start your next day with a momentum.
Keeping your ass there
The ability to self-reinforce is more important that talent for writers and artists. Self-reinforcement is about telling yourself that you are doing good and you will succeed if you keep doing what you do. It helps you to keep going and staying committed over the long haul. Self-reinforcement is a superpower.
Feelings have no meaning in war. And life is a war. All that matters in life is that you do your job- on time and to the best of your ability- whether you feel like it or not.
Nobody gives a shit about how you feel. Therefore, shut up and get to work.
Your work already exists in the other world. In your imagination. Your job now is to work to bring it forth in this one.
Create a deadline and make a simple commitment to never miss a deadline. You don’t have to make it perfect. But ship it when you said you would.
A Model of Psyche
Most people in this world are full of ego. Ego is the part of ourselves that we call ‘I’. Everything that is attached with ‘I’ is ego. Its ego that thinks rationally. It worries and fears. I perceives the reality through the ‘I-ness’.
No good work can ever be done with from ego. You have to transcend beyond your ego to the self. Ego is the small dot. The self is the greater circle surrounding it. The ego is your ass. And the self is where your heart wants to be. Blow off your ego and move to your self.
The self contains ego but is many times greater. It doesn’t think of itself as ‘I’. It inhibits the physical body but is not bound to it. The self believes that all beings are connected. The self separates you from the suffering of ego.
Your goal is to set your identity in the self and not in the ego.
To be a greater version of yourself, you have to operate from the self.
