Becoming A Professional | The War of Art Excerpt

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1:04Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

1:43Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to a Sunday episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. Sometimes when I have the opportunity, I like to take a little break from stoicism and just show you some of my favorite stuff. And one of my all-time favorite books is The War of Art. Now, if you haven't read The War of Art, I don't know if you've been living under a rock or what you've been doing, but you absolutely should. And if you have read The War of Art, well, then this is another opportunity to do something I try to do on a very regular basis, which is dive back into the book. I try to pick it up, flip through it, find something, because I think Stephen is just one of the greatest thinkers on creativity and battling this idea of the resistance, that lower self that prevents us from being what we're capable of being and doing what we know we need to do, that sort of civil war inside all of us.

2:30To him, that's what the War of Art is about. And so in today's episode, I'm bringing you a chunk from book two of The War of Art, which Stephen was nice enough to send over. I carry this in The Painted Porch. It's a classic. It's a favorite. You should absolutely read it. I've had him on the podcast a bunch of times. I'll link to those in the show notes also. But this idea of becoming a professional, being a professional, whether you're paid or not, but being and acting like a professional is, to me, a very stoic idea. You know, Mark Surrealis talks about sort of just showing up, doing what your duty demands, being the person that philosophy tried to make you.

3:07To me, that's what being a pro is really about. It's not about what you're paid. It's not about what level of the league you're in. where it's about showing up, being an adult, being what philosophy, your gifts, your duties, your responsibilities are trying to make you. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. You can grab The War of Art at The Painted Porch. You can listen to the audiobook on Audible and anywhere books are sold. And I'll link to all that in today's show notes.

3:46Now let's consider what are the aspects of the professional.

3:56The first is a professional is patient. Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book. It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an over-ambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can't sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash. The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper, the tortoise, not the hare. Have you heard the legend of Sylvester Stallone staying up three nights straight to churn out the screenplay for Rocky?

4:33I don't know. It may even be true. but it's the most pernicious species of myth to set before the awakening writer or budding entrepreneur because it seduces him into believing he can pull off the big score without pain and without persistence. The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it's a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality. The professional steals himself at the start of his project, reminding himself that it is the Iditarod, not the 60-yard dash.

5:16He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for the long haul. He sustains himself with the knowledge that if he can just keep those huskies mushing, sooner or later the sled will pull into Nome. The Professional Seeks Order When I lived in the back of my Chevy van, I had to dig my typewriter out from beneath layers of tired tools, dirty laundry, and moldering paperbacks. My truck was a nest, a hive, a hellhole on wheels whose sleeping surface I had to clear each night just to carve out a foxhole to snooze in. Professionals cannot live like that. They are on a mission. They will not tolerate disorder.

5:55They eliminate chaos from their world in order to banish it from their minds. They want the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the muse may enter and not soil her gown. A professional demystifies. A pro views her work as craft, not art. Not because she believes art is devoid of a mystical dimension. On the contrary, she understands that all creative endeavor is holy, but she doesn't dwell on it. She knows if she thinks about that too much, it'll paralyze her. So she concentrates on technique. The professional masters how and leaves what and why to the gods. Like Somerset Maugham, she doesn't wait for inspiration.

6:35She acts in the anticipation of its apparition. The professional is acutely aware of the intangibles that go into inspiration. Out of respect for them, she lets them work. She grants them their sphere while she concentrates on hers. The sign of the amateur is over-glorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work. Continuing the characteristics of a professional, the professional acts in the face of fear. The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear, then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.

7:15He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist or entrepreneur. What Henry Fonda does, after puking into the toilet in his dressing room, is to clean up and march out on stage. He's still terrified, but he forces himself forward in spite of his terror. He knows that once he gets out into the action, his fear will recede and he'll be okay. A professional accepts no excuses. The amateur, underestimating resistance is cunning, permits the flu to keep him from his chapters. He believes the serpent's voice in his head that says mailing off that manuscript is more important than doing the day's work.

7:54The professional has learned better. He respects resistance. He knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible a pretext, he'll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow. The professional knows that resistance is like a telemarketer. If you so much as say hello, you're finished. The pro doesn't even pick up the phone. He stays at work. The professional plays it as it lays. My friend the Hawk and I were playing the first hole at Prestwick in Scotland. The wind was howling out of the left. I started an 8-iron 30 yards to windward, but the gale caught it. I watched in dismay as the ball sailed hard right, hit the green going sideways, and bounded off into the cabbage.

8:35Son of a bitch, I turned to our caddy. Did you see the wind take that shot? He gave me that look that only Scottish caddies can give. Well, you've got to play the win now, don't you? The professional conducts his business in the real world. Adversity, injustice, bad hops and rotten calls, even good breaks and lucky bounces, all comprise the ground over which the campaign must be waged. The field is level, the professional understands, only in heaven. A professional is prepared. I'm not talking about craft, that goes without saying. The professional is prepared at a deeper level. He is prepared each day to confront his own self-sabotage.

9:16The professional understands that resistance is fertile and ingenious. It will throw stuff at him that he's never seen before. The professional prepares mentally to absorb blows and to deliver them. His aim is to take what the day gives him. He is prepared to be prudent and prepared to be reckless, to take a beating when he has to and to go for the throat when he can. He understands that the field alters every day. His goal is not victory. Success will come by itself when it wants to, but to handle himself, his insides, as sturdily and as steadily as he can. Next, a professional does not show off.

9:55A professional's work has style. It is distinctively his own, but he doesn't let his signature grandstand for him. His style serves the material. He does not impose it as a means of drawing attention to himself. This doesn't mean that the professional doesn't throw down a 360 tomahawk jam from time to time just to let the boys know he's still in business. Next, a professional dedicates himself to mastering technique. The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them.

10:33The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique, not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration, but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come. The professional is sly. He knows that by toiling beside the front door of technique, he leaves room for genius to enter by the back. A professional does not hesitate to ask for help. Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer in the world. Yet he has teachers. He has worked with Butch Harmon and Hank Haney, and Tiger doesn't endure this instruction or suffer through it. He revels at it.

11:09It's his keenest professional joy to get out there on the practice tee with his teachers to learn more about the game he loves. Tiger Woods is a consummate professional. It would never occur to him, as it would to an amateur, that he knows everything or can figure everything out on his own. On the contrary, he seeks out the most knowledgeable teacher and listens with both ears. The student of the game knows that the levels of revelation that can unfold in golf, as in any art or enterprise, are inexhaustible. A professional distances herself from her instrument. The pro stands at one remove from her instrument, meaning her person, her body, her voice, her talent, the physical, mental, emotional, and psychological being she uses in her work.

11:54She does not identify with this instrument. It is simply what God gave her, what she has to work with. She assesses it coolly, impersonally, objectively. The professional identifies with her consciousness and her will, not with the matter that her consciousness and will manipulate to serve her art or enterprise. Does Madonna walk around the house in cone bras and stainless steel bustiers? She's too busy planning D-Day. Madonna does not identify with Madonna. Madonna employs Madonna. Another aspect of the professional is a professional does not take failure or success personally. When people say an artist or an entrepreneur has a thick skin, what they mean is not that the person is dense or numb, but that he has seeded his professional consciousness in a place other than his personal ego.

12:48It takes tremendous strength of character to do this, because our deepest instincts run counter to it. Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe enforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn't just psychological, it's biological, it's in our cells. Resistance knows this and uses it against us. It uses fear of rejection to paralyze us and prevent us, if not from doing our work, then from exposing it to public evaluation. I had a dear friend who had labored for years on an excellent and deeply personal novel. It was done. He had it in the mailing box, but he couldn't make himself send it off.

13:29Fear of rejection unmanned him. The professional cannot take rejection personally because to do so reinforces resistance. Editors are not the enemy. Critics are not the enemy. Resistance is the enemy. The battle is inside our own heads. We cannot let external criticism, even if it's true, fortify our internal foe. That foe is strong enough already. A professional schools herself to stand apart from her performance, even as she gives herself to it heart and soul. The Bhagavad Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor. All the warrior can give is his life. All the athlete can do is leave everything on the field.

14:12The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly, but she does not forget that the work is not her. Her artistic self contains many works and many performances. Already the next is percolating inside her. The next will be better, and the one after that, better still. The professional self validates. She is tough-minded. In the face of indifference or adulation, she assesses her stuff coldly and objectively. Where it fell short, she'll improve it. Where it triumphed, she'll make it better still. She'll work harder, she'll be back tomorrow. The professional gives an ear to criticism, seeking to learn and grow.

14:52But she never forgets that resistance is using criticism against her on a far more diabolical level. Resistance enlists criticism to reinforce the fifth column of fear already at work inside the artist's or entrepreneur's head, seeking to break her will and crack her dedication. The professional does not fall for this. Her resolution before all others remains, no matter what, I will never let resistance beat me.

15:28You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck. That's the sound of no crowds. No alerts. No distractions. And no telling what you'll find next. You know, like a detour. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota Trucks.

16:00A professional endures adversity. I had been in Tinseltown five years, had finished nine screenplays on spec, none of which had sold. Finally, I got a meeting with a big producer. He kept taking phone calls, even as I pitched my stuff. He had one of those headset things, so he didn't even have to pick up a receiver. The calls came in, and he took them. Finally, one came that was personal. Would you mind, he asked, indicating the door? I need some privacy on this one. I exited. The door closed behind me. Ten minutes passed. I was standing out by the secretaries. Twenty more minutes passed. Finally, the producer's door opened.

16:37He came out pulling on his jacket. oh, I'm so sorry. He had forgotten all about me. I'm human. This hurt. I wasn't a kid either. I was in my 40s with a rap sheet of failure as long as your arm. The professional cannot let himself take humiliation personally. Humiliation, like rejection and criticism, is the external reflection of internal resistance. The professional endures adversity. He lets the bird crap splash down on his slicker, remembering that it comes clean with a heavy-duty hosing. He himself, his creative center, cannot be buried even under a mountain of guano. His core is bulletproof.

17:16Nothing can touch it unless he lets it. I saw a fat, happy old guy once in his Cadillac on the freeway. He had the A.C. going, Pointer Sisters on the C.D. puffing on a stogie. His license plate read, dues paid. The professional keeps his eye on the donut and not on the hole. He reminds himself it's better to be in the arena getting stomped by the bull than it is to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.

17:54A professional self-validates. An amateur lets the negative opinion of others unman him. He takes external criticism to heart, allowing it to trump his own belief in himself and his work. Resistance loves this. Can you stand another Tiger Woods story? With four holes to go on the final day of the 2001 Masters, which Tiger went on to win completing the all four majors at one time slam, some chucklehead in the gallery snapped a camera shutter at the top of Tiger's backswing. Incredibly, Tiger was able to pull up in mid-swing and back off the shot. But that wasn't the amazing part. After looking daggers at the malefactor, Tiger recomposed himself, stepped back to the ball, and striped it 3-10 down the middle.

18:40That's a professional. It is tough-mindedness at a level most of us can't comprehend, let alone emulate. But let's look more closely at what Tiger did, or rather what he didn't do. First, he didn't react reflexively. He didn't allow an act that by all rights should have provoked an automatic response of rage to actually produce that rage. He controlled his reaction. He governed his emotion. Second, he didn't take it personally. He could have perceived this Shutterbug's act as a deliberate blow aimed at him individually with the intention of throwing him off his shot. He could have reacted with outrage or indignation or cast himself as a victim.

19:18He didn't. Third, he didn't take it as a sign of heaven's malevolence. He could have experienced this bolt as the malice of the golfing gods like a bad hop in baseball or a linesman's miss call in tennis. He could have groaned or sulked or surrendered mentally to this injustice, this interference, and used it as an excuse to fail. He didn't. What he did do was maintain his sovereignty over the moment. He understood that no matter what blow had befallen him from an outside agency, he himself still had his job to do, the shot he needed to hit right here, right now, and he knew that it remained within his power to produce that shot.

19:57Nothing stood in his way except whatever emotional upset he himself chose to hold on to. Tiger's mother, Kultita, is a Buddhist. Perhaps from her he had learned compassion to let go of fury at the heedlessness of an overzealous shutter clicker. In any event, Tiger Woods, the ultimate professional, vented his anger quickly with a look, then recomposed himself and returned to the task at hand. The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality. Tomorrow morning, the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.

20:34Short of a family crisis or the outbreak of World War III, the professional shows up ready to serve the gods. Remember, resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others. It wants us to stake our self-worth, our identity, our reason for being on the response of others to our work. Resistance Resistance knows we can't take this. No one can. The professional blows critics off. He doesn't even hear them. Critics, he reminds himself, are the unwitting mouthpieces of resistance, and as such can be truly cunning and pernicious. They can articulate in their reviews the same toxic venom that resistance itself concocts inside our heads.

21:15That's their real evil. Not that we believe them, but that we believe the resistance in our own minds, for which critics serve as unconscious spokespersons. The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is, the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts. A professional recognizes her limitations. She gets an agent. She gets a lawyer. She gets an accountant. She knows she can only be a professional at one thing. She brings in other pros and treats them with respect. A professional reinvents himself.

21:57Goldie Hawn once observed that there are only three ages for an actress in Hollywood, Babe, D.A., and Driving Miss Daisy. She was making a different point, but the truth remains. As artists or entrepreneurs, we serve the muse, and the muse may have more than one job for us over our lifetime. The professional does not permit himself to become hidebound within one incarnation, however comfortable or successful. Like a transmigrating soul, he shucks his outworn body and dons a new one. He continues his journey. A professional is recognized by other professionals. The professional senses who has served his time and who hasn't.

22:39Like Alan Ladd and Jack Palance circling each other in Shane, a gun recognizes another gun. Let's continue our look at aspects of the professional with a concept I call You Incorporated. When I first moved to Los Angeles and made the acquaintance of working screenwriters, I learned that many had their own corporations. They provided their writing services not as themselves, but as loanouts from their one-man businesses. Their writing contracts were FSO, for services of, themselves. I had never seen this before. I thought it was pretty cool. For a writer to incorporate himself has certain tax and financial advantages.

23:19But what I love about it is the metaphor. I like the idea of being myself incorporated. That way I can wear two hats. I can hire myself and fire myself. I can even, as Robin Williams once remarked of writer-producers, blow smoke up my own ass. Making yourself a corporation, or just thinking of yourself that way, reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist doing the work from the will and consciousness running the show. No matter how much abuse is heaped on the head of the former, the latter takes it in stride and keeps on trucking. Conversely, with success, you the writer or you the entrepreneur may get a swelled head, but you the boss remember how to take yourself down a peg.

24:03Have you ever worked in an office? Then you know about Monday morning status meetings. The group assembles in the conference room and the boss goes over what assignments each team member is responsible for in the coming week. When the meeting breaks up, an assistant prepares a worksheet and distributes it. When this hits your desk an hour later, you know exactly what you have to do this week. I have one of those meetings with myself every Monday. I sit down and go over my assignments. Then I type it up and distribute it to myself. I have corporate stationery and corporate business cards and a corporate checkbook.

24:36I write off corporate expenses and pay corporate taxes. I have different credit cards for myself and my corporation. If we think of ourselves as a corporation, it gives us a healthy distance on ourselves. We're less subjective. We don't take blows as personally. We're more cold-blooded. We can price our wares more realistically. Sometimes, as Joe Blow himself, I'm too mild-mannered to go out and sell. But as Joe Blow Incorporated, I can pimp the hell out of myself. I'm not me anymore. I'm me incorporated. I'm a pro. Next, a critter that keeps coming. Why does resistance yield to our turning pro?

25:15Because resistance is a bully. Resistance has no strength of its own. Its power derives entirely from our fear of it. A bully will back down before the runtiest twerp who stands his ground. The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands while we are doing it to the exclusion of all else. The ancient Spartans schooled themselves to regard the enemy, any enemy, as nameless and faceless. In other words, they believed that if they did their work, no force on earth could stand against them. In The Searchers, John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter pursue the war chief Scar, who has kidnapped their young kinswoman played by Natalie Wood.

25:55Winter stops them, but Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, does not slacken his resolve. He'll return to the trail in spring, he declares, and sooner or later, the fugitive's vigilance will slacken. Here's the quote, Ethan. Seems he never learns there's such a thing as a critter that might just keep coming on. So we'll find him in the end, I promise you that, just as sure as the turning of the earth. A pro keeps coming on. He beats resistance at its own game by being even more resolute and even more implacable than it is. Let's conclude our look at aspects of the professional with something I call no mystery.

26:36There's no mystery to turning pro. It's a decision brought about by an act of will. We make up our minds to view ourselves as pros, and we do it. Simple as that.

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