Our beloved sanctuary—where I wrote The War of Art and Gates of Fire—was destroyed. If you can help, it would mean the world to us. (Link below 👇)
Joined April 2009
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The real utility of money is its convenience as a medium of exchange.
But when we're addicted to money, we become hooked on the metaphor.
Resistance wants to keep us shallow and unfocused. So it makes the superficial and the vain intoxicating.
Speaking of, have you checked your email in the last half hour?
Resistance hates two qualities above all others: concentration and depth.
Why? Because when we work with focus and we work deep, we succeed.
There's a glamour to failure that has been mined for centuries by starving poets, romantic suicides, and other self-defined doomed souls.
This glamour inverts failure and turns it into "success".
There's a difference between failing (which is a natural and normal part of life) and being addicted to failure.
When we're addicted to failure, we enjoy it. Each time we fail, we are secretly relieved.
Distraction and displacement seem innocent on the surface.
How can we be harming ourselves by having fun, or seeking romance, or enjoying the fruits of this big, beautiful world?
All addictions share, among others, two primary qualities:
1. They embody repetition without progress.
2. They produce incapacity as a payoff.
Addictions are not "bad." They are simply the shadow forms of a more noble and exalted calling.
Our addictions are our callings themselves, only encrypted and incognito. The are a metaphor for our best selves, the coded version of our higher aspirations.
The hero must possess the passion and the will to push the story to the limits of human experience in order to achieve their goal.
When we can't stand the fear, the shame and the self-reproach that we feel, we obliterate it with an addiction.
The addiction becomes the shadow version, the evil twin of our calling to service or to art.
When we turn pro, the energy that once went into the Shadow Novel goes into the real novel.
What we once thought was real—"the world"—turns out to be only a shadow.
And what had seemed to be only a dream becomes, now, the reality of our lives.
Turning pro is an act of self-abnegation.
Not Self with a capital-S, but little-s self.
Ego
Distraction
Displacement
Addiction
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The amateur is an egotist.
He takes the material of his personal pain and uses it to draw attention to himself.
He creates a "life," a "character," a "personality."
When you turn pro, your life gets very simple.
The Zen monk, the artist, the entrepreneur often leads lives so plain they're practically invisible.
Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling
Why?
Because to follow a calling requires work. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure.