Our greatest fear is fear of success. When we are succeeding – that is, when we have begun to overcome our self-doubt and self-sabotage, when we are advancing in our craft and evolving to a higher level – that’s when panic strikes.
The pro keeps coming on. He beats Resistance at its own game by being even more resolute and even more implacable than it is.
What factors make you decide to take a particular role?” The actor always answers: “Because I’m afraid of it.
All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion. The initial fear is that one has lost something. A cherished self-conception must be given up, and one feels diminished by it. This is mistaken, however. A person discovers that he has been made stronger by the jettisoning of this sham and disadvantageous baggage. In fact, he has become more “himself,” by aligning his self-concept more closely with fact.
The hill is a sonofabitch but what can you do? Set one foot in front of another and keep climbing.
Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they’re better friends, truer friends. And we’re better and truer to them.
He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.
The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.
The enemy is a very good teacher. – the Dalai Lama.
You imagined we had entered unknown country, my friend, when we voyaged across the sea to Amazonia. Yet that was nothing beside the frontier I cross each evening with this woman who is my equal. Each dawn new continents are sighted; each night one alights on shores where no man’s sole has trod.” He.
The professional is prepared at a deeper level. He is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage.
Now it’s 1967. Nasser and the Arabs are saying to themselves: The Jews have beaten us in Round One and Round Two, but we will wipe them out for good in Round Three.
Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.
A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman.
The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time. That’s what I mean when I say turning pro. Resistance hates it when we turn pro.
Remember, they hate us as no other nation, for we are to them that which they fear beyond all: women unmastered by men.
The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands, while we are doing it, to the exclusion of all else. The ancient Spartans schooled themselves to regard the enemy, any enemy, as nameless and faceless. In other words, they believed that if they did their work, no force on earth could stand against them.
Our very existence makes them abominate us, for it calls their own wives and daughters to aspire to freedom.
Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We’re doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.
I can procrastinate thinking about my procrastination problem. I can procrastinate dealing with my problem of procrastinating thinking about my procrastination problem.