Steven Pressfield

So an amateur has amateur habits, and a professional has professional habits.

Andrew, it's a pleasure to be here.

We're former neighbors, you know, so we've been talking about this for a while.

It's great to be here.

Well, that's absolutely true.

And what I meant by that was that...

When we conceive an idea for something we want to do, a movie we want to make or a book we want to make, it's not like at all like what the fantasy was of, oh, I'm really charged up.

It's going to be great.

What happens is waves of what I call resistance with a capital R start coming off that keyboard or whatever it is to try to stop us from doing it, make us procrastinate, make us go to the beach, make us give in to distractions, so on and so forth.

And

But the weird principle is, and this is why I always say, if you want to know which one of three or four projects that you should do, you should do the one you're most afraid of.

Because that fear is a form of resistance with a capital R. And the more important a project is to your soul's evolution,

not to your commercial success, but to your own evolution as an artist, the more resistance you will feel to it.

So in other words, the thing that you really should be doing is going to be the hardest and is going to punch you in the face the hardest, which is why so many artists have such a hardcore professional attitude because they have to have it to be able to kind of stand up to that resistance that's trying to push them away from doing their project, whatever it is.

Yeah.

Here's an analogy that I use sometimes, Andrew, and you may have heard me say this before.

I think about if you can imagine a tree in the middle of a sunny meadow.

As soon as the tree appears, a shadow is going to appear.

And the shadow is going to be... The tree is your dream, whatever it is, right?

A book, a movie, whatever.