I’m listening to an audiobook at the moment called The Artist’s Journey by Steven Pressfield.
Pressfield’s famous for talking about what he calls resistance: the thinking that conspires to stop us from producing creative work and sharing it with the world.
He first talked about it in his book The War of Art and it’s something I touched on in Mr Lizard. He’s an excerpt from my book (written for younger teenagers) that helps define resistance, which I think is helpful when trying to build a business or produce creative work you’re proud of and then share it:
It’s that feeling you have when you are trying to get somewhere or achieve something and you’re doing great but then you walk smack bang into a mental barrier.
It might be a little voice in your head telling you that you are no good, or that what you are doing is pointless or too hard.
Or it might be a gut feeling that seems so strong that it could physically stop you in your tracks.
There is a reason for this little voice, and it’s a good one.
A lot of the time, we don’t think as human beings. A lot of the time, we think like an animal thinks in the jungle.
And all that animal wants to do is survive, eat and make little animals.
When that animal is faced with something new or something which is clearly a problem for it, it often does one of two things. It often either fights or takes flight.
In other words, the animal tackles the threat it feels or it runs away.
We have that way of thinking, and the human way of thinking, and they confuse us all and can sometimes even cause us to have arguments with the people around us.
As you get older, mental barriers can stop you from being creative or inventive because being creative and putting what we’ve made out into the public leaves us with a feeling of vulnerability.
We have no idea how the thing we’ve made is going to go down with people.
That little animal’s voice inside our head wants us to stay safe. The older we get, the more it seems to want us to keep our creativity to ourselves so that other people don’t laugh at us or think we’re ridiculous or our boss doesn’t fire us.
This is pretty normal and happens to everyone but if you train your brain to keep thinking things through, then you might just open yourself up to a world of discovery and learning.
In a society where we are taught to think and behave like everyone else, this kind of creative freedom can take a lot of courage, strength and insight.
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