Running Down a Dream: Your Road Map to Winning Creative Battles

So taking the experimental mindset, I decided to test out a new theory. First, I would start assuming I was good and had my heart in the right place, instead of a rickety monster that had to be held in check and put on a tight leash. Second, anything I did that was bad or wrong or unhealthy, I would just tell myself it was a layer of plaster on top

Finally, she stopped and asked that question. “What do you want?” This stopped me short. She was obviously asking a bigger question than just “pay off my taxes” or “make more money.” She wanted to know what about this situation was really making me so angry. I took a deep breath. “I’m just ready for this to be easy.” At first Candace didn’t really

Well, I had been paying some of them, but not all of them. Money had been tight for so long and so often that there were months I didn’t have enough to make my payments. To make matters worse, I often ignored the letters the IRS was sending me because I was so scared and ashamed of being so far behind on paying them.

I have since come to believe that the true definition of “procrastination” is “assuming I will be less stupid and lazy tomorrow than I am today.”

“I’ve done this for a lot of people and it takes a lot of time, and all you did was argue with me for most of the hour. This whole thing should have taken thirty minutes and we’re now going into the second hour. If you trust my advice, then take it. If you don’t, find someone you do trust and stop wasting my time.”

You see how Steven Pressfield’s conception of Resistance is starting to build a wall around this “book” idea? Something very pure and good (helping other people) starts to get loaded with a whole bunch of stuff that’s really all about “me.” And that’s good too, don’t get me wrong. Because writing a book is very much about “me” too. If it weren’t, t

But I made a much bigger promise to myself in that moment. The first promise was to only ask advice from experts on things they are experts on. No more trying to find a life coach or a mentor that would help me in all the areas of my life. From now on, when I ran into a problem I needed help on, I would seek out an expert on that subject and only a

got a piece of paper and a pen and I wrote down everything I did in a day. Everything. All the tiny minutia like going to the bathroom, driving to work, and making lunch. I included eating dinner with the family, making client calls, and watching TV before bed. It all went down in one giant list. Then I went straight down the page and started cross

I needed a handful of people who knew me, knew what I was trying to accomplish, and were willing to tell me the bare, unvarnished truth. I decided early on I’d rather hear how bad my book was from friends, privately, before it was published. That way I could fix it rather than hear from strangers, publicly, after it was published.