🌊 The War of Art

Ivan Landabaso

Jun 18, 2023

👋 Hello! I’m Ivan. Join 6.3K entrepreneurs surfing startup waves.

Summary

Hello startup riders! This week’s good stuff for your startup brain includes:

🎨 War of Art: how to overcome creative struggle.
🍬 Startup Candy: how to write like an Amazonian.
💵 Iberian Deals: 12 startup deals in Spain (>€100M).

This week my friend Sunny is taking us down the War of Art rabbit hole, buckle up:

🎨 The War of Art

Tim Ferris. James Clear. Brené Brown. Jocko Willink. Seth Godin. Ryan Holiday.

Everyone listed above shares a love of one book: The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield.

I first heard of it on a podcast.

Catchy title, I thought. And only 165 pages?

It can’t be *that* special. I read it, and I was mostly right. Except for this one point in it that knocked me out of my chair. The book is about the creative struggle.

Let me break down Pressfield’s ideas into two categories:

(1) The Not-New Concepts:

1. Resistance is the enemy, and its a universal experience.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you must be a doer of things. You have goals you want to accomplish. Or else, why waste your time here trying to acquire knowledge and get better. Scrolling on TikTok is just more fun.

Procrasti-scrolling is easier because of Resistance. Pressfield personifies all the internal & external obstacles that prevent us from doing our work as "Resistance". This includes fear, self-doubt, procrastination, perfectionism, distractions, and negative self-talk.

Resistance is universal. All doers face Resistance.

OK, so what?

(2) The Holy Sh*t Reframe:

2. Resistance is directly proportional to love.

David Goggins Lifting GIF - David Goggins Lifting They Dont Know Me - Discover & Share GIFs

The more Resistance you feel, the more certain you can be that the task, project, or idea is important and meaningful to you.

I nearly threw the book when I read that portion.

If you’re creatively lost, let Resistance guide you toward your most meaningful work.

Resistance is the signal that you found a challenge worthy of your spirit.

Back to a not-new, but still very powerful concept:

3. Showing up for your Muse.

'Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.' — Pablo Picasso

Pressfield says that inspiration (or the Muse) favors those who show up consistently to do their work. Overcoming Resistance is about showing up every day, no matter what.

Or - inspiration shows up, when you show up for it.

I’ve been wanting to write online forever.

I run a team at Gong that analyzes millions of interactions to generate sales insights. AEs, SDRs, and execs make big strategy decisions from these insights.

I wanted to share. For a whole year, Resistance convinced me that I was *doing it* via a lot of motion, but no action.

It’s easy to confuse motion for action.

Motion = taking courses on copywriting & content generation, gathering all my ideas in Notion.
Action = writing & pushing “Post” on LinkedIn

The War of Art was a real kick in the pants. 6 months later:

I’ve posted 52 posts on LinkedIn about sales insights.
Written 5,892 words (& deleted far more in fits of writer’s block rage).
Generated 692,277 impressions.

👌 Hacks

I’m very early in my journey, but here are 5 hard-earned hacks you can have for free:

Make the “doing” the goal, not the outcome. This makes it easier to show up.
Gamify, gamify, gamify. Your brain loves streaks. Become streak-obsessed.
Start small. Cue overused elephant eating analogy…it is overused for a reason
When it gets hard…and it *will* get hard, remind yourself - if it’s worth your time, it’s *supposed* to be hard

And finally…

99.9% of getting what you want is getting started.

Resistance is a wiley mf. Most of you will quit even before you start.

Why? Because momentum is powerful. Resistance knows that, so it shows up the strongest when your toes are gripping the edge of the diving board for the first time.

Just jump. Gravity is your friend.

If you need a push, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

Someone did that for me. I had crafted my dream first post. I loaded it into LinkedIn. I was ready to hit Post.

Instead, I texted a friend who also writes on LinkedIn in that moment and asked him about the “most algo-optimized time to post.”

That’s Resistance showing up. I was looking for a way out.

He responded simply. “Hey. Post in 5 minutes. I’m about to write mine too.”

And the rest is history. Connect with me. I want to pay it forward.

P.s. I took a little break last week…here’s a picture of me hanging with a big bird in Kazakhstan last week.