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Book Review: Do the Work

April 25, 2011 by Rosa Say

Do the WorkDo the Work by Steven Pressfield

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Short Review

Do the Work is one of those short, “Here’s a helpful kick in the behind, so you won’t feel you’re all alone” kind of books. You can breeze through it in one sitting to know what it’s about (as I did one evening), and then keep it on your Kindle to go back to whenever you do need that kick instead of wallowing in any “Woe is me” waste of time. Lord knows we all need that kick sometimes.

This particular kick focuses on giving the reader a how-to, one with pushing through their own resistance and any lack of confidence when facing a work project.

From the Publisher’s Synopsis:

Could you be getting in your way of producing great work? Have you started a project but never finished? Would you like to do work that matters, but don’t know where to start?

The answer is Do the Work, a manifesto by bestselling author Steven Pressfield, that will show you that it’s not about better ideas, it’s about actually doing the work.

Do the Work is a weapon against Resistance ”“ a tool that will help you take action and successfully ship projects out the door.

“There is an enemy. There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us. Step one is to recognize this. This recognition alone is enormously powerful. It saved my life, and it will save yours.”

Short books can be the hardest ones to write well, and I think Pressfield did a great job with this one.

He says his coaching can be applied to much more than writing (his area of expertise as a novelist), and I would agree that it can, however Do the Work will really resonate with anyone who writes as their work of choice; it is perfect for the work of writing in the way it matches writing content with work project movement in his “Three Act Structure.”

Very timely reading for me, since I’m currently within “the belly of the beast” with a writing project of my own.

The Domino Project Incentive

Do the Work has already gotten quick distribution thanks to Seth Godin’s Domino Project, and the “Read it now!” incentive is that a GE sponsorship has resulted in it being offered on Kindle for free: Advertising has come to the ebook. It’s nice to save the cash, however after reading it, I think having it on your Kindle library is the best placement for it anyway – even if you don’t have an actual Kindle, but read via the app on your smart phone (which an amazing amount of people do these days.) More to think about within this particular Talking Story project sharing: Qualify the Automatics.

The Domino Project itself is an interesting new business model. Their first book was Seth Godin’s Poke the Box ~ here is my book review on that one: Are you the box needing a poke? ~ and Pressfield is their follow up act, with Do the Work as book 2 in their publishing queue (and their proof-in-the-pudding that they are a true publisher playing in the new game, and not just more packaging for Seth Godin.)

Pressfield is not an unknown in need of their help, and he brings them much creative credibility in his own right. Here is an exceptional interview hosted by Mark McGuinness on Lateral Action in May of 2010; The War of Art: An Interview with Steven Pressfield, in which he explains why he chose the subject of Resistance for his only two non-fiction books:

The most important mental breakthrough in my career was simply the recognition that there is such a thing as Resistance. Once I realized that those lazy, whiny, insidious voices in my head were not “me,” but Resistance masquerading as “me” ” I could dismiss them and overcome them. I could turn pro.
~ Steven Pressfield

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

Why Goodreads? They have become an App Smart choice for me in 2011 for I want to return to more book reading, and have set a goal to read at least 36 books this year (this was book 14 for me). Read more about the Goodreads mission here, and let’s connect there if you decide to try it too! You can also follow them on Twitter.

Previous review: The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People by Carol Eikleberry

More Do the Work Resources

1. Visit Pressfield’s website, where he is currently hosting a category feature he calls Do The Work Wednesdays with posts which expand on his manifesto (which is more of what Do the Work actually is.) He’s written 3 posts so far, all which allude to the fact that there is much more to his short book than first appears to the reader:

  • The Foolscap Method
  • Three Act Structure
  • How Screenwriters Pitch

2. A book excerpt shared by Amber Rae on The Domino Project:

The enemy is Resistance”“our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.

What are Resistance’s greatest hits? An excerpt from Do the Work, here are the activities that most commonly elicit Resistance:

1. The pursuit of any calling in writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, however marginal or unconventional.

2. The launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise, for profit or otherwise.

3. Any diet or health regimen.

4. Any program of spiritual advancement.

5. Any activity whose aim is the acquisition of chiseled abdominals.

6. Any course or program designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction.

7. Education of every kind.

8. Any act of political, moral, or ethical courage, including the decision to change for the better some unworthy pattern of thought or conduct in ourselves.

9. The undertaking of any enterprise or endeavor whose aim is to help others.

10. Any act that entails commitment of the heart—the decision to get married, to have a child, to weather a rocky patch in a relationship.

11. The taking of any principled stand in the face of adversity.

In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.

Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower. Any of these acts will elicit Resistance.

When Learning Gets Overwhelming

March 9, 2010 by Rosa Say

I’ll be the first one to admit that I get a bit over-zealous about the virtues of ‘Ike loa (the Hawaiian value of learning), believing that learning is all peaches and cream. This isn’t the first time I’ve been wrong, and it won’t be the last.

Our conversation started with wanting Focus

A manager said to me in his coaching call (shared with his gracious permission):

“It’s so hard for me to focus on learning the right things about my job. I know my boss wants me to learn more about this financial stuff, but I keep getting distracted by wanting to teach it, and not by wanting to learn more of it.”

Me: “I’m not sure I got that. Can you say it again?”

Manager: “My boss and I agree on the value of learning. I don’t think we agree on what I should be learning right now, or if I should be learning more about this at all. Our priorities are different. She wants me to learn more about our financial picture than I know now, but I’m still working on what I already know, and I want to teach it to the rest of my staff before I jump into new learning.”

Me: “Have you explained that to your boss yet?”

Manager: “Yeah. Um, well, I think so. Maybe not exactly in that way. I don’t think she’ll want to hear it.”

Me: “We can’t know that. We might need to give her the benefit of the doubt on what she wants, or doesn’t want to hear. We’ll get back to that” Tell me more about what you want to teach your staff first.”

It was an interesting conversation. We continued to talk a bit about needing to bring his boss back into the conversation to better understand this subject of learning relevance, and to be sure they each understood each other clearly. We also started to talk about how learning and teaching differ, and how learning can be pretty stressful for him. When you learn more, that comfortable place where “ignorance is still bliss” slips away. Suddenly, you have to handle what you have newly learned about!

However here is the tough thing about saying “No, not now” to new learning: You don’t know what you don’t know yet. It didn’t dawn on him that his boss may want him to learn more to help him and not overwhelm him. There was the very real possibility that he was refusing to learn something which would lessen his stress and not add to it.

That said, it became increasingly clear to me, that he may really need to say, “No, not now” and have his boss be okay with that. Turns out he was “getting distracted” by one of his strengths!

Are we talking about the same thing?

It got a little more complicated” and interesting! This might turn out to be more than one conversation he will have with his boss, and should.

For this manager, learning more than he was ready to deal with wasn’t just overwhelming him, he thought it was pure mission creep, and not at all conducive to him helping his team better their performance. Before we spoke, he had decided he needed to talk to his boss about that instead: That mission creep was the real issue he grappled with in his day-to-day juggling act, and that “more learning on mission creep” wasn’t going to help anyone. Not her, not him, not his team.

I agreed that he needed to speak with her again for true clarity, and to unload some of his stress about it, for he feared (but he wasn’t quite sure) that she would still expect him to handle his existing learning and new learning simultaneously, and sort them out afterwards.

My response was, “Well, if she does feel that way, you’ll discover that you don’t agree on what mission creep is.”

We had to separate the two issues, and not call overwhelming learning ‘mission creep’ or “different priorities” when it was simply learning that he couldn’t handle yet. However for him, fessing up to not being able to handle it was a little risky: His boss preached about the merit of continual learning all the time. (Sound familiar?) As he blurted out in his coaching call,

“Aw come on Rosa, who in their right mind is gonna tell their boss they just can’t handle learning?”

There are times we ALL can’t handle learning

To be okay with that, you need to define when you love it (or when it helps you feel strong) and when you hate it. Put a name and a description on your distaste for learning when it begins to happen, so you can correctly identify your resistance.

Then once you define it, sharing that knowledge of self-awareness with your own boss is a really great idea! For that’s what it actually is: Resistance you can identify and work with as your own self-awareness of when work (or learning) is working for you, and when it’s  not. It’s not a refusal (a won’t disguised as a can’t —and yeah, bosses hate those. Don’t we all?)

‘Learning’ is as cool and sexy a buzz word as ‘leadership’ is, yet similar to leadership, learning fits in a very BIG bucket: A lot of different learning efforts can be in that bucket, coming in a multitude of colors and stripes —some of it highly relevant and mission-critical, some of it distracting, and possibly mission-creep.

In this particular case, I think there is a fascinating, and mutually beneficial conversation which needs to happen between my manager client and his boss, where he explains to her how teaching his staff

  • helps him lighten his work load in a good way, as he practices his innate talent as a teacher. He is truly the Alaka‘i Manager who wants to work with his people, and not with the systems and processes he can coach them into learning better.
  • helps him feel fantastic about sharing his knowledge with others, simultaneously adding to their skill sets in a very exponential way.
  • lowers both his stress level and his resistance to new learning for himself, so he too can achieve stress-free high-performance.

We named his resistance this way: For him, learning is an input which simply needs teaching someone else as his learning output, and when you’re a manager, that is actually a great thing. Not all managers love to teach, and not as much as he does! I bet his boss would love to know more about his love of teaching if she isn’t fully aware of it, especially given the way his teaching aligns with workplace need: It is highly relevant.

He happens to be a teacher who needs a workplace to receive his teaching, not a classroom.

Let’s talk story

Interesting discussion, don’t you think?

When else can learning be overwhelming?

Can you separate whatever is within your learning bucket, so it is more manageable for you?

How would you name your own learning resistance when it appears?

Photo Credits: 236/365 doing the sums by obo-bobolina
and The Joys of Homework by Cayusa, both found on FlickrCC.

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