Motivation, inspiration, and creativity are resistance in disguise.
If you wait to be motivated to start going, you won’t get far.
If you wait for inspiration to struck before doing meaningful work, you’ll soon be out of a job.
If creativity is what you seek when sitting down to write, the page will stay empty most of the time.
There is nothing sudden in people’s achievements, no overnight success will surprise you.
Go do what you are supposed to. Every day.
There are two major factors that go against doing.
The first one is perfection. It’s a myth, something everybody aims for and nobody ever achieves. It is the resistance of having all your ducks in a row, and it delays delivering until a day that will never come.
The second one is analysis paralysis. At any time, we have access to a whole lot more information than what we need to make things happen, and this is unsettling to most. For every piece that tells you to do something, there is one that tells you to do the opposite, and so we lose focus, get distracted and, once again, delay delivery.
Habit and practice are the antidotes.
Resistance is a very interesting concept, one I knew I would talk about sooner or later. It is not mine, and it was very well developed by Steven Pressfield in his book The War of Art.
Resistance is a force that works against getting things done. It has different faces (rationalisation, fear, distraction, procrastination, self-criticism just to mention a few), but very generally speaking it is the story we tell ourselves to give us reasons not to do something we want to do.
If somebody offers their help, for example, in a generous and passionate way, the most rational part of us would say: “Thank you, I take it. Here is what you could do”.
But then resistance kicks in. And here is what it says. “They must be busy”, “Just offering their help to be kind”, “Don’t want to bother them”, “There’s no such thing like a free lunch”, “They don’t really care”, “I don’t have time to tell them what they are doing”, “This is not so important after all”, “I don’t even like them and their work”. And so on.
The point is, will you get what you wanted done or not? If the answer is no, be mindful of resistance. It’s the one talking, not you.
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