Hey, what’s up, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I am doing another book review.
I’ve got a few of these to catch up on here.
I want to get caught up so that I can review books as I read them.
I go through a lot of books.
I run for like 8 hours a week and I’m listening to audio books at 2.5 to 3x speed depending
on the skill or the speaking speed of the author and whether or not they have an accent.
Sometimes I have to drop it down to 2.5, but I like to run at 3 if I can.
Anyway, I am doing a review on a book that I reread or relistened to that I think is
really good, in fact, it’s called The War of Art.
I highly recommend the audio version of the book because the author or the narrator for
this book he just sounds great.
He does an excellent performance.
In my mind always, I don’t know the name of him now, the gentleman that narrated the
book but he will always be the voice of Steven Pressfield, the author of the book to me,
even though I’ve heard Steven Pressfield on podcasts, I’m like, “That’s not you.
That doesn’t sound like you.”
Anyway, really, really good book.
There’s a reason why I’m doing this book now or I’m doing this review or listening
to this book now, relisten to it is because I’m going through this time, I’m not going
to rehash because I just did a video about this, but where I’m just not feeling motivated
again.
I’ve gone through this enough times to know that I’ve just got to keep on going, keep
my hand on the plow and this is a book that can help you do that.
This is a book that literally changed my life and I’ll tell you how.
I remember back when I was first listening to this book, the very first time and I’ve
listened to this book probably 6 or 7 times to be honest with you.
I was running on a beach in Florida called Sanibel Island.
I could remember I learned an important lesson that day which was that running for 3 miles
in swimming trunks without underwear on not a good idea, right?
That little—lots of chaffing can happen.
I highly recommend not running in your swim wear.
Not a good idea.
Anyway, what I also learned, I remember being at this point in my life where I was doing
the PluralSight courses and I had this goal of getting 36 PluralSight courses done that
year and I was about halfway through.
I was just like—I had enough.
I mean I was just at the end of my rope, I was like, “I don’t want to do any more
of this.
I can’t take this anymore.
I’m only halfway through.
How am I going to get through the rest of the year and keep pumping out these courses
and keep to my crazy schedule and doing everything I’m doing?
How am I going to do this?”
This book really came through.
It is the right time.
The book is about resistance which is this holy evil force that causes you procrastination.
It is a movable nameless faceless unemotional force of the universe that we all face and
we fight against and it stops us from becoming our best, it stops us from doing our creative
work, it stops us from succeeding.
For me, this book at that time when I was struggling it helped me because it showed
me that there’s a lot of other people that are—this is a human condition, this is a
common thing is that we all face this resistance.
Any time we’re trying to improve ourselves in some way, any time we’re trying to do
something creative or complete something that is great or produce our best work to move
from a lower level of consciousness to a higher level of consciousness there’s this resistance
and it fights us.
It fights us with every essence of its being and it is us, it’s internal, it’s our
procrastination, it’s this—whatever it is, but he describes it, he gives it a name,
he gives it emotions, he gives it a description that we can all relate to in this book.
Then he tells us how to conquer it.
He says the only way to conquer it is just to sit down and do the work.
That clicked for me, this idea between an amateur and a professional and what a professional
is.
A professional is someone who just shows up.
They don’t wait for inspiration to strike.
They sit and they put their fingers to the keyboard and they type out their book and
they do it every single day, they show up no matter what, no matter how they feel, no
matter what’s going on and they get it because they have to do it.
That’s the difference.
When I started looking at things like that it really changed things for me.
I feel like that book helped me to get through that point to realize that I just needed to
put my hand on the plow.
I just need to go forward and do it.
I completed those PluralSight courses that year, in fact, I completed them early.
I completed my book.
I wrote Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual using that same—after about
getting 15 or 20 chapters finished in the book I felt that resistance, I didn’t want
to write anymore, but I did it, everyday I wrote a chapter of the book until I finished
all 73 or 74 chapters, 500-paged book.
I got through it.
I owe a lot of that to The War of Art.
You can bet I was reading that book during those struggling times because it’s such
a powerful, powerful book.
It’s a poetic book.
The author, Steven Pressfield, if you’ve read any of his other books I’d highly recommend
the book that’s called Gates of Fire.
It’s a fiction book.
It’s about the battle of Thermopylae, the 300 essentially.
Really good, really good book but this nonfiction work that he’s done called The War of Art
it’s poetic the way that he describes resistance, the way that he describes the—you’ll relate
to it, everyone will and the solution to it.
I highly, highly recommend it.
I feel like if you’re an entrepreneur of any kind, if you’ve ever been blocked, if
you’re—for any person really that’s ever fought with themselves and lost a battle
this is your chance to win the battle.
I’m not going belabor the point.
It’s a really good book.
I highly recommend it, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
You can bet I’ll be reading this book many times again in the future as I always need
to be reminded of the lessons in this book.
I definitely enjoyed it.
I hope that you do too.
If you like this video, if you’d like to get more of these book reviews definitely
check out the playlist that I have going as I’m adding more and more of these book reviews.
You’re going to get to listen about every single book that I read and there’ll be
a lot of them.
I read probably 50-60 books a year.
If you want to make sure that you don’t miss any updates and you want to get other
thoughts and wonderful things that I produce here as I fight the battle of resistance,
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Anyway, I’ll talk to you next time.
Take care.