Quote

These are not easy questions. Who am I? Why am I here? They're not easy because the human being isn't wired to function as an individual.

Steven Pressfield

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Steven Pressfield
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 1
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Port-of-Spain
Humans
Wired
Questions
Function
Individual
Easy
Human

More quotes by Steven Pressfield

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Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt.
Steven Pressfield
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Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
Steven Pressfield
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Be too dumb to quit and too stubborn to back off.
Steven Pressfield
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The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones.
Steven Pressfield
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Turning pro is a mindset. If we are struggling with fear, self-sabotage, procrastination, self-doubt, etc., the problem is, we’re thinking like amateurs. Amateurs don’t show up. Amateurs crap out. Amateurs let adversity defeat them. The pro thinks differently. He shows up, he does his work, he keeps on truckin’, no matter what.
Steven Pressfield
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We feed it [Resistance] with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
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Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.
Steven Pressfield
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When we turn pro we stop running from our fears. We turn around and face them.
Steven Pressfield
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I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.
Steven Pressfield
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Resistance in my experience always kicks in when you're trying to move from a lower level to a higher level or to identify with a braver part of yourself or your higher nature. So it's that negative repelling force. It's kind of the dragon that we have to slay every day if we're artists or entrepreneurs.
Steven Pressfield
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Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long. You may think you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.
Steven Pressfield
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F@*# self-doubt. I despise it. I hold it in contempt, along with the hell-spawned ooze-pit of Resistance from which it crawled. I will NEVER back off. I will NEVER give the work anything less than 100%. If I go down in flames, so be it. I'll be back.
Steven Pressfield
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It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, 'Suppertime!'
Steven Pressfield
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The Kabbalah describes angels as bundles of light, meaning intelligence, consciousness. Kabbalists believe that above every blade of grass is an angel crying Grow! Grow! ... I believe that above the entire human race is one super-angel, crying Evolve! Evolve!
Steven Pressfield
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Resistance is experienced as fear the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
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When a novelist or screenwriter is looking for a subject, the element he's seeking is conflict. Conflict makes drama. Conflict produces great characters and memorable scenes. So war is a natural topic.
Steven Pressfield
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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.
Steven Pressfield
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In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term grown, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our high nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
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Our greatest battle is to become ourselves, in the face of adversity.
Steven Pressfield
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Making a judgment, taking a stand and then acting against an injustice or acting to support excellence is the stuff of the everyman hero. If you are an aspiring artist and you wish to avoid “judgments,” you'll find that you have nothing to say.
Steven Pressfield