Ritual Beats Resistance

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At the end of November, I read a book called “The War of Art” by Stephen Pressfield. The book covers a concept he calls “Resistance”.

Resistance is the voice that tells you not to do things that would be in your best interest to do. Resistance is writer’s block. Resistance is rationalizations.

More than anything else, Resistance is fear. Fear that you will try and fail. Fear that you will try and people will scorn you. Resistance shames you before you ever try and tells you that its pointless because it won’t work out.

Pressfield offers a particularly interesting insight about this thing he calls Resistance - it afflicts everyone, every day, all the time, every where. Great entrepreneurs and artists are not immune. They may suffer more than most. The difference is that they find a way to over come it.

Interestingly, I think this may be why drugs and art are so intertwined. If you’re so blissed out on drugs that you forget who you are, it’s kind of hard to feel shame and embarrassment and fear. The flip side is that many people called to create who succumb to Resistance also use drugs to drown out the fact that they are not creating.

The good news is that he also suggests another route to beating resistance. Commitment. Ritual. Showing up every day to “do your work”. Developing a set of rituals that puts you in the right “mindset”, to habitually get you “in the receptive mode” every single day of your life.

This is what he calls “becoming a professional”.

This book strongly resonated with me. There are many things that I have been working on that required me to go out on a limb and risk being embarrassed. I have drug my feet, kicking and screaming, for years.

And so, on November 30, 2022, I sent out an email to the people I trusted most and committed to a 90-day bootcamp aimed at beating this resistance. Because this bootcamp was aimed at bringing about the highest and best version of myself, to deliver me from Resistance, I considered this bootcamp to be religious in nature. That email was called “Building My Religion”.

In it, I committed to a set of daily rituals that were meant to put me on the path to the happiest version of myself. The list was extensive from the outset, and it included writing and publishing something every day.

In the beginning, my Resistance told me that I was biting off more than I could chew. I would burn out and not be able to stick to it. I did it anyway.

So far, the opposite has happened. I have been picking up steam.

I started the month by writing and sending out an email.

By the beginning of the second week, I launched a website to publish on.

By the beginning of week 3, I launched a Youtube channel.

Me, a Youtube channel. Even I could have never foresaw this one happening at the beginning. I have historically had very strong Resistance to being on camera. In fact, one of my main motivations for publishing to Youtube was simply because my Resistance was so high.

There are philosophies out there that preach the following of “the path of least Resistance”. I do not believe what I am doing is at odds with these philosophies. In fact, I think they are perfectly aligned.

I’m rooting out where Resistance has a hold of me and kicking it out the door. I am decluttering in a spiritual sense. The path I was on was a path guided by and heavily influenced by Resistance.

Don’t worry though, I am not selling out to the algorithm. I am proceeding cautiously down this path. I remain committed to loosening the grips that screens have on our attention. There are good ways to use technology, but there is also AI-driven control of attention to the point where many people spend more time passively staring at a screen watching other people do things than doing things themselves.

My happiness and fulfillment has increased significantly over the years, with a direct correlation to my efforts to collect and direct my attention to the things that are most important to me.

There is a part of me that wants to gather up my family and head straight for the wilderness with the intent of a life committed to being as happy as possible. But there is also a part of me that wants to take our vision of better living and help other people get on a path to better living too.

To do that, I need an audience. To build an audience, I need attention. I know who currently has the attention. The thought behind what we’re doing is to go to where the attention is, capture some of it, and direct it to better ends.

I do not know if this is the right way forward. In fact, I am highly skeptical.

But at least I can look myself in the mirror and know that if it doesn’t work out, it wasn’t because I didn’t try. It wasn’t because I was too scared to make a go of it.

Here’s to trying! Here’s to failing! Here’s to iterating!

Here’s to ritual!

Life is good.