I recently read a book titled ‘Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work’ by Steven Pressfield. It’s the next in the series that started with ‘The War of Art‘. Though I would rate it a notch lower than ‘The War of Art‘, it is, nevertheless, a wonderful, inspiring book for artists. It is largely about what constitutes ‘Turning Pro’, how it is mostly in the mind (and then leads to a practice), and what happens once one decides to turn pro.
Here are some lines from the book that spoke to me. Excerpts below:
Turning pro is free, but it’s not easy. You don’t need to take a course or buy a product. All you have to do is change your mind
When we turn pro, we give up a life with which we may have become extremely comfortable.
What we get when we turn pro is, we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect.
The shadow life is the life of the amateur. In the shadow life we pursue false objects and act upon inverted ambitions.
We can never free ourselves from habits. The human being is a creature of habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones. We can trade in the habits of the amateur and the addict for the practice of the professional and the committed artist or entrepreneur.
When you turn pro, your life gets very simple. The Zen monk, the artist, the entrepreneur often lead lives so plain they’re practically invisible.
Turning pro is an act of self-abnegation. Not Self with a capital-S, but little-s self. Ego. Distraction. Displacement. Addiction.
The pain of being human is that we’re all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.
If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can. This pursuit produces, for the artist, peace of mind.
The amateur fears that if he turns pro and lives out his calling, he will have to live up to who he really is and what he is truly capable of.
The amateur allows his worth and identity to be defined by others. The amateur craves third-party validation.
The amateur is tyrannized by his imagined conception of what is expected of him.
When we truly understand that the tribe doesn’t give a damn, we’re free. There is no tribe, and there never was. Our lives are entirely up to us.
Sometimes it’s easier to be a professional in a shadow career than it is to turn pro in our real calling.
When we turn pro, we will be compelled to make painful choices. There will be people who in the past had been colleagues and associates, even friends, whom we will no longer be able to spend time with if our intention is to grow and to evolve. We will have to choose between the life we want for our future and the life we have left behind.
Each day, the professional understands, he will wake up facing the same demons, the same Resistance, the same self-sabotage, the same tendencies to shadow activities and amateurism that he has always faced. The difference is that now he will not yield to those temptations.
The essence of epiphanies is the stripping away of self delusion.
Why is shame good? Because shame can produce the final element we need to change our lives: will.
The professional knows when he has fallen short of his own standards.
Never train your horse to exhaustion. Leave him wanting more.
The professional does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it. He knows that when the Muse sees his butt in the chair, she will deliver.
The amateur is an acolyte, a groupie. The professional may seek instruction or wisdom from one who is further along in mastery than he, but he does so without surrendering his self sovereignty.
It seems counterintuitive, but it’s true: in order to achieve “flow,” magic, “the zone,” we start by being common and ordinary and workmanlike.
When we do the work for itself alone, our pursuit of a career (or a living or fame or wealth or notoriety) turns into something else, something loftier and nobler, which we may never even have thought about or aspired to at the beginning. It turns into a practice.
A practice implies engagement in a ritual. A practice may be defined as the dedicated, daily exercise of commitment, will, and focused intention aimed, on one level, at the achievement of mastery in a field but, on a loftier level, intended to produce a communion with a power greater than ourselves—call it whatever you like: God, mind, soul, Self, the Muse, the superconscious.
When we convene day upon day in the same space at the same time, a powerful energy builds up around us. This is the energy of our intention, of our dedication, of our commitment.
The space of the practice is sacred. It belongs to the goddess. We take our shoes off before we enter. We press our palms together and we bow.
Once we turn pro, we’re like sharks who have tasted blood, or renunciants who have glimpsed the face of God. For us, there is no finish line.
That place that we write from (or paint from or compose from or innovate from) is far deeper than our petty personal egos. That place is beyond intellect.
The best pages I’ve ever written are pages I can’t remember writing.
Our role on tough-nut days is to maintain our composure and keep chipping away. We’re pros. We’re not amateurs. We have patience. We can handle adversity. Tomorrow the defense will give us more, and tomorrow we’ll take it.
The professional knows that, in the course of her pursuit, she will inevitably experience moments of terror, even panic. She knows she can’t choke that panic back or wish it away. It’s there, and it’s for real.
Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the lower realm to the upper, from the ego to the Self. Art (or, more exactly, the struggle to produce art) teaches us that.
When you and I struggle against Resistance (or seek to love or endure or give or sacrifice), we are engaged in a contest not only on the material, mental, and emotional planes, but on the spiritual as well.
The clash is epic and internal, between the ego and the Self, and the stakes are our lives.
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