The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning
Steven Pressfieldamazon.com
The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning
ON THE ARTIST'S JOURNEY, ALL ENEMIES ARE MENTAL * * * Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of the new, of pain, of loneliness, of exertion, of intensity. Need for external (third-party) validation. Self-doubt. Arrogance. Impatience. Inability to defer gratification. Predisposition to distraction. Shallowness of thought and purpose. Conventionalit
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Note please, as we delineate these skills, that their absence is the sign of the amateur. An amateur can't start, can't keep going, can't finish, can't work alone, can't work with others. We ourselves were amateurs before our hero's journey. That ordeal has chastened us. We have peered into the abyss and it has slapped us back into reality. We migh
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My long-held belief is that an artist's identity is revealed by the work she or he produces.
Steven Pressfield • The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning
You too possess an artist's journey. Even if you have never yet written a song or completed a short story, that body of work lies dormant inside you. It is percolating. It is exerting pressure—whether you feel it or not, whether you believe it or not. Like the hero's journey, the artist's journey demands to be lived out. It demands to be expressed.
Steven Pressfield • The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning
The artist on her journey will make everything up, including herself. Her creations will be fictional, apparitional, chimerical. And yet the artist is neither a fabulist nor a charlatan. She is not lying. She is not deceiving. Rather she sees, with the vision of imagination, what lies beneath the box scores and the market quotes. She sees what is r
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You and I, each morning (and ten thousand more times that day), must create our own "meeting with the mentor." There, acting as our own Obi-wan Kenobi, we kick our reluctant butts across the Threshold and shuttle off to Level #2.
Steven Pressfield • The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning
Even if you have never yet written a song or completed a short story, that body of work lies dormant inside you. It is percolating. It is exerting pressure—whether you feel it or not, whether you believe it or not.
Steven Pressfield • The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning
None of it will do a damn bit of good if you can't sit down and open the pipeline to your Muse. The artist's journey is about that. Nothing else matters. Nothing else counts.
Steven Pressfield • The Artist's Journey: The Wake of the Hero's Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning
No matter what a writer or artist may tell you, they have no clue what they're doing before they do it—and, for the most part, while they're doing it.