I don’t know if you ever sat in a high school locker room at halftime when a coach hurled chalk into the wall, kicked over chairs, and exposed his doubting troops to a vocabulary far removed from English class. Once witnessed, never forgotten. Besides being immensely entertaining and frightening, this ritual of American culture could also be effective. Returning to the arena, the players usually did concentrate better, play harder, and have more confidence.
Once we’re out of school and facing the grind of daily life, pep talks are rare to nonexistent. Which is not to say they wouldn’t come in handy when attempting something where the end is unknown and failure looms. Artists and entrepreneurs come immediately to mind.
You can get this sort of pep talk, minus the flying chalk, from Do the Work, a new book written by successful novelist and screenwriter Steven Pressfield. Short and pithy, the book doesn’t take much longer than a halftime intermission to read. (It’s also affordable, $6.29 on Amazon.) Here Pressfield uses the choppy, imperative style that I’ve come to think of as Twitter-ese, and which social media guru and coach Seth Godin is so fond of (I was not surprised that Godin had a hand in publishing this book). I quickly tire of this style because it can feel superficial and imply that a sentence with more than one clause is too much for the reader. Do the Work is a follow-on to Pressfield’s 2002 book War of Art about overcoming resistance, which I found useful some years back.
Do the Work discourages excessive research. Pressfield suggests limiting to three books background reading for writing a novel and advocates giving more respect to intuition. While I think Pressfield undervalues reason, he does have a point, one allied with Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.
Given that I’m currently struggling with a major rewrite of a play, I found particularly bracing Pressfield’s confession that he discovered that the novel he’s currently writing had major flaws after he thought it was done. This successful veteran author was forced to go back to square one and rethink the entire work. I know that sinking feeling.
I’ll quote just one bit from Do the Work to give you a taste of Pressfield’s style and content (and sentence length): “That our project has crashed is not a reflection of our worth as human beings. It’s just a mistake. It’s a problem – and a problem can be solved. . . The bad news is, the problem is hell. The good news is. it’s just a problem.”
On the subject of overcoming resistance and creating, Pressfield has said, with a dose of halftime-locker room hyperbole: “The question is how much do you want it? This isn’t a game, and it’s not for the faint of heart. If you want it, you’ve got to pay the price. You’ve got to bleed a little. . . You’ve got to be a little crazy to want to do this sort of thing.”
Artists rarely talk, at least publicly, about how they overcome their inevitable obstacles. Pressfield is a welcome exception. If you’re in a place where a pep talk would be welcome, you could do a lot worse than reading this book.
