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Turning Pro: The Switch in Your Mind
Q: Can you take us back to the very first time when you realized you were no longer an amateur?
A: What made the difference between getting nowhere as a writer and actually finally starting to break through was just looking to switch in my head from thinking of myself as just a wannabe or an aspiring writer or an amateur to being a professional.
This involves all the habit changes that go with that. I always say that if amateurs have amateur habits, professionals have professional habits, and that's all the difference in the world. I'm not sure about a specific moment, but that was the thing that made the difference.
Q: For readers who are asking themselves, "Am I an amateur or am I a pro?" How would you go about separating the difference between the two?
A: Great question. An amateur often quits or holds back when they encounter adversity. A professional digs in and keeps going. A professional shows up every day, no matter what. A professional stays on the job for the full length of the day. They don't let anything distract or hurt them.
A professional plays hurt. Think of Michael Jordan, or Tom Brady, or any athlete. There's never a day they're a hundred percent, right? There's always something. Your hamstring is tweaked, you've got something in your knee, a little bit of a concussion, whatever it is. You've got to play through adversity. If something goes wrong, if they have any kind of issue, it's not a valid excuse to fade or not show up.
Another thing: amateurs sometimes go by their mood. They'll say something like, "I don't feel like doing it. I don't feel like getting out of bed," for whatever reason. The professional doesn't listen to that voice at all. The professional doesn't really care how they feel. They are there to do their job no matter what. It doesn't matter what's going on. You show up and do the work.
A professional also does not take failure or success personally. They look at the whole thing—the entire career—as a practice and as a profession to show up every day. If a book or a movie that comes out is a disaster, it hurts, but the professional keeps going. It's just part of the process.
The great thing about turning pro is it doesn't cost money. It's all a matter of flipping a switch in your mind. You don't have to take a course or get certified. You can change your mind right now and be on the road to being a pro in your mind. It's a hard road, but it's simple. It means you're going to have to really stick in the trenches when other people quit. But it makes all the difference in the world.
Q: An amateur is always looking for third-party validation, right?
A: Yes, I think that's another aspect of the difference between the amateur and the professional. It really comes down to which part of your head you're in. Are you in your ego? Or are you in your higher self? If you're in your ego, then you are looking for that validation.
The professional is in it for the love of the game itself. And that's what makes all the difference. Again, that's the divide between the amateur and the professional.
Q: Tell us about how you defined the idea of Resistance in your book The War of Art.
A: The War of Art, which came out in 2002, wasn't really about the craft of writing or any art, but about the mindset that we all need—that professional mindset. It acknowledged the fact that a field is not passive, and a blank page is not neutral. When we sit down in front of a creative challenge, there is a negative force working against us. It is a force of our own self-sabotage, and it shows itself as:
All of those things are going to stop us. The "War Of Art," meaning the war inside your head as you're trying to do it, is that before you can get into the craft of making a film, being a dancer, or being a writer, you have to come to grips with this negative force. After receiving tens of thousands of emails over the years, I realized that everyone hears the same voice in their head that I hear.
I gave that force a name: Resistance.
It resists, right? When I sit down in front of a keyboard, I feel a negative force radiating off of it, resisting me, trying to distract me. It's a voice in our head that says something like, "Who do you think you are to sit down and try to write this thing or launch this big business product? You? You're too old, too young, too smart, too dumb," or whatever excuse it can find. The other half of it will try to distract you.
As I said before, a professional doesn't care how they feel; they do the work. That was what The War of Art was all about: shining a light on that negative force and letting the reader realize that they, too, are not alone in having this. If you're not going to be able to keep up with it, you're going to lose.
Q: Many listeners are emerging leaders stepping into roles where they face self-doubt. What advice do you have for conquering that internal voice that questions their credibility?
A: As a writer, one of the things that you deal with constantly, particularly on a new project, is self-doubt. That self-doubt that we feel is almost always invalid, and here's why: it's a form of Resistance with a capital 'R'.
One of the principles of Resistance is that the more resistance we feel in a certain course of action, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Why? Because Resistance, in its own deepest way, knows what course of action is the best for us, and its sole goal is to stop us from doing it.
So when we feel a wave—a big wave—of Resistance and self-doubt, that self-perception is almost always not valid. It's not our voice saying that; it's the voice of Resistance. It's our own self-sabotage. So, if we're feeling self-doubt, it's a good sign. It shows that we're on the right track.
I remember watching a TV show called Inside The Actors Studio. The host, James Lipton, would interview famous actors and ask them: "How do you decide which role you're going to take? Let's say you've been offered three roles. How do you decide which one you're going to take?"
Almost always, the actor or actress would answer: "I take the role that scares me most. I take the role that's going to make me stretch the most." If there's one role where they've played that kind of person before, they don't want to do that. It's just repeating.
This plays to the fact that when we feel self-doubt—in other words, Can we do this work? Can we pull it off? Are we good enough?—that's a good sign. It's a sign that Resistance is trying to get us not to take the role. The only thing to do is override that feeling. Take the place. Self-doubt is a good thing.
Q: Following the realization that self-doubt is just Resistance, is the key to conquering it relying on innate talent or simply showing up and doing the work and learning from failure?
A: I think it’s just showing up to do it again, being a professional. What kills you is when you take that self-doubt really seriously. When we think that voice in our head that says, "I'm new, I'm not good, I shouldn't work here," is our voice objectively assessing the situation, it’s not.
It's the voice of our own self-sabotage trying to undermine us. The only thing we can do is just dismiss it and get to work. Just go in, do the work, and you’ll learn.
Failure is just something you learn, and you can't let it crush you. If you're an amateur, you will let it crush you. You’ll say, "Oh my God, I'm a loser," and go home and get crushed. But a professional would just say, "Okay, I lost this one." One good thing about the movie business, and the book business too, is that by the time a book or movie comes out, you're already working on two or three projects beyond that. So you can always say, "Okay, this one bombed, but I have hopes for those."
A professional understands that failure is just part of the process. You can only get a hit one out of three times and still have the highest batting average in the league. So, you just have to keep moving.
Q: You also talk about 'shadow careers' in your work. Can you explain what that term means and how Resistance leads people to pursue a job that's only adjacent to their true calling?
A: There are things like this in the movie business. There is a type of lawyer called the entertainment lawyer. Basically, these are the people you use for actors, directors, writers, and all creative people in the business. The thing is, a lot of these entertainment lawyers would really love to be writers or producers themselves, and a few of them have actually gone on to do that. They switched careers.
So, what’s happening there is being an entertainment lawyer is a kind of shadow career. It’s adjacent to the career that they really want. They really want to write or produce movies, but they thought, "That's too risky, I’m not going to do that. Let me get a law degree, and then I'll get into law."
I think a lot of us are in shadow careers without realizing it. Sometimes people sign up as an assistant to somebody who is creative, and they really want to be that person themselves. That’s another kind of shadow career, and it’s Resistance at work. You adopt a persona that is adjacent to where you want to be, but it's really not the answer. The real answer is to take a big jump and move over to what you really are called to do.
Q: Once people realize they are in a shadow career, how should they proceed? What are the two paths for making the leap toward what they really want to do?
A: There are sort of two ways to go about it.
One is to take the leap and just say, "I'm quitting this thing," diving into the deep end of the pool. That's something that I did, and I definitely do not recommend it.
The other way to do it is to compartmentalize. Let's say you're an entertainment lawyer. You can get up at 4:30 in the morning and find the first two hours of your day to start writing. Then you go into the office, and that's it. Over time, over a year, two years, three years, you've created a few projects, and you get them out on the side. This works a lot. Suddenly, they've got enough traction that they can actually make the move and say, "Okay, I'm done with the law, and I'm going to become a writer or producer."
Those are the two ways to do it. If you have a family, if you have children, you're probably a lot smarter to not make the dramatic move.
Q: Given that solo artists and entrepreneurs lack the team support system that athletes have, why is self-validation so incredibly important?
A: The thing about being a solo artist or a creative person or an entrepreneur—and we all are, even within any organization, we really are a single membership—is that we don't have that support system. If you're a baseball player, you've got a batting coach, you've got a pitching coach, you've got a manager. You've got the training that's going to keep you fit, keep you from getting injured, and all that sort of thing. But if you're a solitary artist, you're on your own.
And so, what becomes incredibly important is self-validation and self-reinforcement. We have to be our own managers, our own medics, our own coaches. We have to be the medical staff and the pitching coaches. And at the end of the day, when you fail, you have to save yourself and acknowledge, "At least I tried."
It's not easy because these are skills we haven't been taught. There's no course in this. To validate yourself and believe, what do you do? You stop and you say to yourself, "Great work going in there. Even if they threw you out on your ass, at least you did it." That's basically what you have to do. You have to get to some sort of place of deep center where you can talk to yourself and be your own coach and say, "You did it, you failed, okay, try again." It's all part of the process.
We have to do that self-validation and self-reinforcement. It's really, really important.
Q: Can anyone become a professional, or are there certain individuals who just can’t make that jump? Do you have any stories of underdogs who were able to flip that switch in their mind?
A: It's a great question. If you look at almost anybody's success story and dig into it deeply enough, you'll find that they struggled and struggled. We only see the success when it finally comes out; we don't see the years of setbacks and hard work.
Take the story of a college football player I know. He spent years as a junior college guy because he was overlooked and wasn't drafted. Partway along the way, he started getting interest from some of the bigger schools as a running back. He said to his coach, "Not yet. I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait for the big ones."
If you had only seen him scoring touchdowns last Saturday, you'd go, "Wow, what a talent." But if you dig a little deeper, you see he was smart, and he knew how to manage his own self-doubt. He was willing to be in junior college for years. So yeah, I think you'll find struggle under the surface of any successful person.
As his coach said, he bet on himself, and he won.
Q: Steve, as we wrap up here, what piece of advice do you have for somebody who may be stepping into a new role or afraid to step into a new role because of this self-doubt and resistance that they deal with quite often?
A: The ultimate lesson is to understand the depth of our own innate self-sabotage. Those voices of doubt are always lying; they are always trying to stop us. But if we can understand that that's their role—to stop us—and kind of do exactly the opposite of what they're telling us to do, that could really pull us ahead.
I've had plenty of instances of self-doubt. It takes me maybe two and a half years to write a book. For the first nine months or a year at least, I am a rack of self-doubt. "It's just dumb ideas. Who cares about this subject?" It feels like a real threat. I've come to realize that that's a good sign, because that's Resistance with a capital 'R'. It knows that this is something good, and it's trying to stop me from doing it.
It's the same thing when you're taking a new job. If you feel those headwinds, the trick is to realize that all you have to do is accept that they're not real. That fear is not real. It's like the Wizard of Oz. Take away the curtain. It's just some little guy there pulling the strings. The one thing I would say is: buy The War of Art and Turning Pro.
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