The Resistance Is Real

Guys. The resistance. It's real.

Two days ago I parted ways with my business that I've been running for about 10 years now. The moments and days that have followed have me realizing that my options are infinite. That feeling is equal parts motivating and crippling. 

If you can do anything you want, how do you decide what is and isn't valuable? How do you define "value" in the first place? Why seek "something of value" at all?

After the crippling thoughts came the crippling guilt . "What if the thing I want to do isn't big enough? Isn't valuable enough? Doesn't provide value to the "right" people? Or provides more value to me than it does to others?

What if what I'm "supposed" to be doing is much, much bigger than what I'm considering doing?

If you're looking for answers to these questions as well, I'm sorry. This isn't that kind of a post. 

The thing I realized today is that all these issues do one thing well: prevent you from creating anything at all. 

Questions like these are ones that I'll never be able to answer. They only serve "the resistance", as Steven Pressfield calls it.

They prevent you from writing, from creating, from putting your art into the world.

To divert a little bit, I love Seth Godin's definition of "art", that it's the idea that a human puts out into the world. Whether it's received or not is irrelevant.

So, after two days of crippling questions and expectations and fighting the resistance, I opened wordpress and started typing. This is what came out.

There's no such thing as "writer's block". I stand by that. Because I didn't have anything to write about, that is, until I started writing. That's what I'm going to try and do when the resistance shows up again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.

When the resistance comes, (figuratively) get out your pen, and write.