Resistance

from Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be by Steven Pressfield

I quoted this in my latest newsletter because of a recent experience:

What is Resistance? It’s our own tendency-yours and mine and everyone’s-to yield to procrastination, self-doubt, fear, impatience, self-inflation, self-denigration, distraction, laziness, arrogance, complacency, and perfectionism. It’s our inability to focus, our incapacity to press on through adversity. It’s our ter­ror of finishing and exposing our work to the judgment of the marketplace. It’s fear of failure. It’s fear of success. Fear of hu­miliation. Fear of destitution. It’s our inability to defer gratifica­tion, to acquire and act with self-discipline, self-validation, and self-reinforcement. Resistance is our tendency to self-sabotage, fail to start, and fail to finish. In its most extreme forms, Resistance expresses it­self as vice and even crime—abuse of ourselves or others, cruel­ty, addiction to substances, diva-ism, compulsive self-dramatiza­tion, self-aggrandizement and self-diminishment.