Welcome to five minutes five ideas. I'm your host Samanvay
Today we're gonna talk about five lessons I've learnt
from the book The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield.
The war of art is the quintessential book for anyone that's
ever tried to start something on their own. It could be a business,
gym membership or even simply just a diet. The book centers around the
resistance which is what pressfield calls the force
that tries to stop us from achieving anything and completing
our plans. In modern terms you could call it procrastination.
So if you've been looking for a book to motivate you to stop procrastinating and
finish that book then this is the one for you.
The first lesson is that danger is the greatest closest to the finish line. What
pressville means by that is that when you're close to finishing that book of
yours and you're just a chapter away, resistance is gonna hit you harder than
ever. You'll hit more writer's blocks than ever before.
Pressfield goes on to tell us more about resistance
in the form of self-sabotage. Just as you're starting to become
comfortable in being able to see the finish line your overconfidence might
actually help resistance get the upper hand. So
Pressfield suggests that we're better off
being at high alert for the resistance or procrastination
to come over us towards the end of our project and never let down our guards.
The second lesson I learnt is that sabotage by others can also act
as a form of resistance. Often the people closest to you such as
your spouse close friends and family might come up
with tactful ways to prevent you from fulfilling your projects and that is
in part because of their own resistance. As they start seeing you succeed
in your artistic or creative domains your success is a bit of a reproach for
them who are battling their own resistance so
that's something to be mindful of and help the ones closest to you be more
aware of. The third lesson i learned is how to
beat resistance by turning pro. Pressfield highlights that the only way
to beat resistance is acting more like a professional towards
your art rather than amateur he points out that amateurs play
for fun whereas professional playful keeps the
amateur plays part time and the professional plays full-time the
amateur is a weekend warrior whereas the professional
works seven days a week it's easy to see that the professional is bound for
success in the long term their progress is not dependent on how
they feel about their art on a given day. The
fourth lesson i learned is how we use labels to cave into the resistance over
the last 50 years we've seen a massive surge in the different types of
psychological conditions they can range from attention deficit
disorder to social anxiety disorder. Now it's all fine to have those types of
disorders the problem is when you start using those
diseases as labels to stop you from completing your artistic tasks and it's
easy to say why we do that because we're constantly
shown those disorders on tv and sometimes
even though we might not have it we might self-diagnose
and start using them as excuses so instead of applying
self-knowledge discipline and hard work in achieving your goals
we start using those labels as an excuse. The final lesson i learnt is what
resistance feels like and how it manifests on an emotional and
physical level so firstly it might start off as a sense
of unhappiness misery and guilt and it might even
become clinical and it can also manifest physically it can manifest in the form
of depression dysfunction or a sort of aggression pressfield
highlights the need to be ready for a self-revolution you need to
be ruthless in the way you analyze your emotions
and dissect the exact reasons for all of the negative feelings that seem to be
inundating your mind we need to be ready to question all the
truths of the society and the media that we're being fed on a
daily basis we need to unplug from the grid and
focus on our art. That wraps up five lessons i learned from the book The
War of Art. If you enjoyed the video be sure to like and subscribe and i'll
see you next time