Steven Pressfield's Blog

Who will teach us? Who will be our guide and mentor on this monumental passage from the Old World of working for someone else to the New World of being the “rightful sovereign of our own person?”

Fortunately, we’ve got a great mentor, the best we could possibly ask for.

Our own Resistance.

The dragon that guards the gold will be our instructor.

“The enemy,” as the Dalai Lama said, “is a great teacher.”

Let’s ask ourselves, then,

How will this enemy come at us? Where and when will he strike?

When you and I quit a job—literally or metaphorically—we’re like that fish that first crawled up on dry land. We’re like Rambo or Wonder Woman or Dorothy on the road to Oz.

We have left the Known. 

We have entered the Unknown.

In this new world, we must change, not just superficially (in the sense of constructing our home office or setting up a Zoom studio and our own LLC) but on the deepest possible level, the level of the soul.

What exactly is keeping you and me from being “the rightful lords of our own persons?”

It’s not enemies and competitors in the real world, however potent or formidable they may be. It’s not political adversaries or invading armies or any of the other totally real and fully legitimate forces that may oppose us in the external world.

We can beat those. They’re visible. We see them. We can rally our forces and overcome them.

What’s really stopping us is inside our heads.

Resistance = fear, self-doubt, procrastination, hesitation, susceptibility to distraction, to pleasure, to vice; inability to defer gratification; fear of failure, fear of success; arrogance, complacency, self-infatuation, perfectionism. Do I need to keep going?

All these come from our cave-brain, our fear-brain, our ego-brain. (Seth Godin would say our lizard-brain, the amygdala.)

What you and I are trying to teach ourselves as artists and as human beings, whether we realize it or not, is to evolve from a primitive, tribal, fear-driven, other-directed and other-governed, clueless organism into a conscious, self-aware, self-organizing, self-directed free and independent individual.

We’re like the fish in the comic strip that first crawled up on dry land. We’re trying to breathe and all we’ve got are girls, struggling to stand when all we have are fins.

Can we change?

Can we evolve?

We can if we can identify the enemy and confront it.

One of the great works of world literature is Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the comprehensive account, compiled in the moment, of the twenty-seven-year “civil war” between Athens and Sparta.

The intellectual centerpiece of this work is Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Have you read it? In many ways, it’s our own⎯yours and mine⎯Magna Carta. It’s the first great statement of the ideals to which we aspire.

Pericles was the foremost figure of the Athenian Golden Age. During the second year of the war with Sparta, he was selected to give the speech at a yearly event like our Memorial Day in praise of those men of Athens who had given their lives in the military defense of the city. Everyone⎯women and children, and even slaves, as well as men—turned out for this occasion. 

Pericles took the moment to praise not just the fallen heroes of Athens, but Athens herself, the city and all her citizens. 

He contrasted the people of Athens, whose polity was free and open to the world, to their antagonists of Sparta who, great as they were and admirable as they may have been in many ways, lived by a code of exclusion, in a society closed off to the outside world and built around intensive and relentless discipline, where the individual male (and female as well, in her own way) was as much a soldier in an army as a citizen of a state.

Here’s how Pericles described the free citizens of his city:

I declare that Athens is the school of Greece. Moreover, I declare that each and every one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of his life, can be truly called the rightful lord of his own person and to act in this way, moreover, with unsurpassed quality and grace.

The rightful lord of his own person. 

That idea, and that phrase, had never before in history been uttered, or even thought. Not in Egypt or Persia or Babylonia or Sumeria or Assyria, or among the wild tribes or the seafaring conquerors or the great horse warriors of the steppes.

The rightful lord of his own person.

That’s what you and I need to become. Beyond whatever gift or talent we may bring to the world, our job is to school ourselves and train ourselves so that no force, other than our own genius and our own ethical sense of community and responsibility to heaven, governs our thoughts, our actions, or our works.

We spoke in the previous post about mankind’s evolution over hundreds of thousands of years from savage to barbarian to slave and helot, serf and peasant to courtier, conscript, subject of a king or queen. In other words, some form of pawnship in which the capacity to think and act for ourselves was either limited or proscribed completely.

When did this change? What was the first glimmer? To me, it was with the ancient Greeks and it achieved its apotheosis in Athens during the Age of Pericles. Athens was the first great democracy. 

Demos = people. Kratia = rule. 

In Athens and the other democratic poleis (city-states) of ancient Greece, a type of human being appeared for the first time.

The citizen. 

The free citizen of a free state.

Why am I talking about this? Because this totally new incarnation of homo sapiens is the precursor to the contemporary artist⎯to everything you and I aspire to be. 

And because this new type of human began to understand, for the first time in history, the burden and responsibility of self-rule.

What about today? Remember John Lennon’s song, Working Class Hero?

And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still f**king peasants as far as I can see

In the most profound psychological sense, we are still cave men and women.

Our psyches, down to the very foundations of the Unconscious, were formed in the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution when we lived and depended for our survival upon the tribal band or its equivalent to which we belonged. The virtues we lived by—and had to, to survive—were obedience, reverence for elders, adherence to the old ways. 

The capacity for self-discipline is not innate. How many possess it even today? Independence of thought? That’s a phenomenon as recent as the cheeseburger and the S-class Tesla.

We’re cave men and women now, you and I, and we must face that reality if we aspire to transcend that state and become independent artists and creators.

Did our circumstances improve with the rise of civilization? 

Flash back to the nascent days of cultivation of the land, domestication of animals. Now our lot is to be a serf or a peasant, in Babylonia or Sumeria, Egypt or Assyria, to serve a monarch or pharaoh, to be his property. Or if we’re freebooting raiders and plunderers of Asia or Africa, then we’re tribesmen still, imprisoned within the pitiless hierarchical demands of the clan and the pillaging band. 

Or perhaps we have evolved more highly, to take up a sword and serve in the armed forces of some prince’s ambition. What are we now? We’re “subjects.” We’re disposable instruments of war. 

If we work the land, we’re chattel. We’re the property of some princeling or potentate. Or if we have ascended beyond such mean station, we’re courtiers, dependent for our livelihood and prosperity on maintaining our station within the good graces of an all-powerful sovereign. Think we were free, even in the days of the Magna Carta and the Rights of Man? Michelangelo served the Pope, as Leonardo did the Medicis.

In other words, we’re still cave men and women.

We started this series of posts with the thought that …

ARTIST = ENTREPRENEUR

By which we meant: If you’re a writer, a dancer, an actor, a photographer … you are a solo venturer. You’re in business for yourself and you must develop a tough-as-nails attitude to sustain you in the solitary pursuit of your dream. 

Let’s look at that position from the long perspective. Start with our deep past as savages, as members of the tribe and the primitive hunting band. Our concerns within this tight, blood-ordered universe were: 

1) Who’s the Alpha Dog? 

2) How can we remain in his or her good graces? 

3) How must we conduct ourselves to keep from being expelled from the tribe?

For without the tribe, we’re dead.

But Resistance doesn’t stop there (see last week’s post). It attacks us with distractions like the web and social media. It seduces us with sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. It diverts us into vices like abuse of ourselves or others, addiction, self-dramatization.

It scatters our focus and dissipates it within a thousand conflicting enthusiasms, none of which we seem to be able to settle upon and actually commit ourselves to. When we do succeed in sitting down to do our work, Resistance paralyzes us with the fear of failure and the terror of success; it freezes us with self-doubt. It relentlessly undermines our self-belief. 

Resistance is not just brutal and pitiless, it is clever and protean and ever-evolving. It is an active, intelligent, diabolical force that will shape-shift, allure, seduce, intimidate, terrorize. It will use reason against us. It will offer excuses that seem legitimate (and may even be) to stop us from doing our work. It will entice us into arrogance and complacency. It will paralyze us with dread of the judgment and disapproval of others.

Is this ringing a bell? I know it is because that voice is in my head, just like it’s in yours, and it never goes away, never diminishes, and never cuts us a moment of slack.

Why do we need self-awareness and self-discipline, you and I? Why do we need to learn self-motivation, self-validation, self-reinforcement?

“That second self … will kill you. It will kill you like cancer. It will kill you to achieve its agenda, which is to prevent you from actualizing your Self, from becoming who you truly are.”

The enemy inside our heads will tell us—and I mean all of us, including Shakespeare and Dante and the Dalai Lama—that we are worthless, without talent, too old, too young, too fat, too thin, too smart, too dumb to achieve our dreams.

“Who do you think are,” the voice of Resistance will ask us, “to dream that you can write a book, start a company, achieve a breakthrough in science or technology or politics? You? Every idea you have has been done a thousand times before—and by men and women ten times more deserving than you. Forget it! You’re a bum and a loser and if you dare set your work before the eyes of the world, you’ll only prove yourself the fool and laughingstock you’ve always known you truly are.”

That’s the enemy.

That’s your head and mine.

Trust me, I’ve read and responded to thousands of notes and emails from creative people of all kinds.

The voice in our heads is exactly the same.

It’s not us. It’s Resistance.