Quotes About Resistance

The professional blows critics off. He doesn't even hear them. Critics, he reminds himself, are the unwitting mouthpieces of Resistance and as such can be truly cunning and pernicious. They can articulate in their reviews the same toxic venom that Resistance itself concocts inside our heads. That is their real evil.

Here's what I think. I think angels make their home in the Self, while Resistance has its seat in the Ego. The fight is between the two. The Self wishes to create, to evolve. The Ego likes things just the way they are.

Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It's a repelling force. It's negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.

Resistance is like the Alien or the Terminator or the shark in Jaws. It cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction, programmed from the factory with one object only: to prevent us from doing our work. Resistance is implacable, intractable, indefatigable. Reduce it to a single cell and that cell will continue to attack. This is Resistance's nature. It's all it knows.

Fuck the marshmallows.

Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneur's worst enemy. Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.

Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.

overthink. Don't overprepare. Don't let research become Resistance. Don't spend six months compiling a thousand-page tome detailing the emotional matrix and family history of every character in your book. Outline it fast. Now. On instinct. Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic

It's not the writing part that's hard, it's the sitting down to write. What's keeps us from sitting down, is resistance.

Let the unconscious do its work. Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. Have

Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.

Chatter is your mother and father's well-intentioned expressions of caution, seeking to shield you from hurting yourself. Chatter is your teachers' equally well-meaning attempts at socialization, training you to follow the rules. Chatter is your friends' regular-Joe buddy-talk, trying to make you like them and follow the rules of the pack. Chatter is Resistance.

Resistance knows that the more psychic energy we expend dredging and re-dredging the tired, boring injustices of our personal lives, the less juice we have to do our work.

Resistance never sleeps. It never slackens and it never goes away. The dragon must be slain anew every morning. However, as with anything in life, if you've succeeded in the past, at least you know that you can succeed.

Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

Resistance is like an alien or like the shark in jaws, or like the terminator. It cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction programmed with one object only : to prevent us from doing our work.

We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is. One thing we can never, never permit ourselves to do is to take Resistance lightly, to underestimate it or to fail to take it into account.

Do research early or late. Don't stop working. Never do research in prime working time. Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That's its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him.

The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you're finished. The pro doesn't even pick up the phone. He stays at work.

Resistance will unfailingly point to true north. The action it most wants us to stop, we can let resistance use to guide us. The more important, the more resistance.

Resistance only obstructs movement from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts. It won't come in when you work with mother Teresa. It will give you a free pass. It is especially most powerful near the finish line.

Resistance knows we're about to beat it and it hits the panic button. It hits with everything it's got.