Ship It
I set a deadline to publish my book on May 1st and my entire system has been in revolt ever since.
I’m not talking about writer’s block. The book is written. The cover is designed (about a dozen versions of it). The framework is solid, I believe in it and I’ve tested it on my own life for the better part of thirty years. There is nothing left to do except the thing I said I was going to do, which is publish it. And instead of doing that, I’ve been waking up at 3am to worry about the font on the back cover and a bunch of other shit that I have no control over and don’t want to, for that matter.
Steven Pressfield wrote a book in 2002 called The War of Art that changed how I understand what’s going on with me right now. According to Pressfield, there’s a force that he calls Resistance, with a capital R, that stands between you and the work you’re meant to do in the world. He sees it as an opponent, an opponent with intelligence and strategy and an almost supernatural ability to determine exactly where you’re weakest.
Resistance doesn’t fight fair. It doesn’t show up as a big dramatic crisis that you can rally against. It shows up as procrastination, self-doubt, hyper-focusing on other people’s problems, reorganizing your office, questioning decisions you already made, picking fights, staying up late scrolling through other people’s content and wondering why theirs looks so much more polished than yours. Resistance is the voice that says “maybe one more round of edits” when you’ve already done twelve rounds of edits and the book is as done as it’s going to get.
Pressfield says Resistance gets strongest at the finish line. It gets louder and sneakier the closer you get to shipping the thing, because shipping the thing is the moment you can’t take it back. You can revise forever. You can ask ten more people to read it. You can redesign the cover, again, and tweak the subtitle, again, and wonder whether Chapter 6 needs one more pass, again. All of that feels like diligence and professionalism, but it’s really just Resistance wearing its work ethic costume.
That’s what’s been kicking my ass for about a week now. Truth be told, that’s what’s been kicking my ass for about 25 years now. I have a friend (you know who you are), equally as familiar with The War of Art as she is with my journey, that once said she thought I had the worse case of Resistance in the history of man. Based on what’s been going on over the last several days, I think she might be right.
“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”
So what I’m afraid of?
The book is the beginning, not the end. I don’t have a large enough platform to simply release the book and watch it climb any Best Sellers list. That’s not me being humble. Between all of my social media accounts, I have about 1100 followers, which isn’t just pathetic, it’s woefully inadequate for what I’m trying to do. That means I had to come up with a different strategy for getting my work out in the world. I made the decision a couple of months ago to use the book as the means to the end, instead of the end. I decided I was going to publish it and then use it as a way to get myself in front of people… like real people, in real life, in the real world.
That necessarily means that once I publish it, I have to start reaching out to those real people and asking them to read my book and leave reviews. I have to ask other people if I can be on their podcasts. I have to pitch myself to local organizations and ask if I can come speak to their group. And if those people say yes, I have to walk into rooms full of strangers and say “I wrote a book about why creative action is the mechanism for change that most self-help gets backwards, and I think it could help you get your agency back and make your life feel like it’s more in line with who you really are.” I have to do all of that in my actual life, with my actual face, using my actual name, where I can’t blame the algorithm if nobody’s interested.
That’s what I’m Resisting, but only in every way there is to Resist it.
There’s a set of questions I wrote for the book that are designed to catch your Default Position (oldest, strongest, most debilitating belief you’ve got) in the act. I’ve been asking them to myself all week and the answers have been painfully clear. Am I pulling back because I truly want to, or because I’m trying to protect myself from finding out what happens if I go for it? Protect. Obviously. Am I building another stepping stone right now, or am I doing the thing? Stepping stone after stepping stone after stepping stone. If I didn’t care what people thought, what would I do right now?
Honestly? I’d probably just publish it and keep doing the same things I’ve always done.
That answer surprised me when I heard it in my head. I expected something more dramatic, like “I’d quit” or “I’d burn it all down and look for a job.” The honest answer, albeit a bit anticlimactic, told me everything I needed to know about where I am: I’m not trying to make the book better. I’m trying to delay the moment when I find out if anyone cares.And the thing is, most people don’t. I’m not saying that from a woe-is-me perspective. I’m saying it because it’s true and it’s actually kind of liberating when you accept it.
The people in my life who I’ve been imagining watching and judging and evaluating whether I’ve earned the right to do this, they’re not watching what I’m doing, not to the extent I think they are, anyway. They’re dealing with their own stuff, and that includes the people who are closest to me and care about me the most. My adult kids have their own lives. My husband loves me and is rooting for me and is also managing his own career and his own stress. My friends are busy. The strangers on the internet whose opinions I’ve been preemptively defending myself against don’t know I exist.
I spent years with “nobody cares about me” running like a ticker tape in the back of my mind, and I’ve written about it plenty. The thing I’m seeing now, the thing that feels newer, is that the statement is actually sort of true if you take the pain out of it and read it differently… Nobody is sitting around thinking about what Andrea Maurer is doing with her life. They’re thinking about their own lives, their own fears, their own 3am spirals. The amount of free rental space I’ve given other people’s hypothetical opinions of me in my head is staggering when I think about it honestly. I’ve been performing for an audience that was never in the room.
Pressfield talks about the difference between the amateur and the professional. “The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.” The professional doesn’t wait for fear to leave. They sit down at the desk while fear is sitting right there next to them and they do the work anyway. There’s no promises in that. It doesn’t say the fear goes away. It doesn’t say you’ll feel confident or ready or sure. It says you do it anyway and that’s what makes you a professional.
I am bone-tired right now. I can’t put two coherent thoughts together most days and the ones I do manage to assemble tend to be about whether my subtitle is too long or whether anyone outside of my immediate family will ever read this book. That’s Resistance doing its job. It’s doing its job really well, actually, and I’d be impressed if I weren’t so annoyed.
But I’ve been here before. I’ve been in the rut enough times to know that the way out isn’t through thinking about the rut. It’s through doing something. Anything. Writing this essay is something. Sending one pitch email is something. Finishing the formatting on Chapter 8 is something. None of those things will fix the 3am wake-ups or the self-doubt or the fear of being seen doing the thing I’ve been saying I want to do. They’ll just move me forward, one ridiculously small step at a time, until the book is out in the world and I have to start taking the next set of necessary steps.
Pressfield’s word for it is ship (which he talks about in Do the Work, written in collaboration with Seth Godin): Finish the work and ship it. Don’t polish it into oblivion. Don’t wait until you feel ready. Don’t let Resistance convince you that one more revision is the responsible thing to do. The responsible thing to do is to stop hiding behind the process and let the work do what it was made to do.
May 1st.
I’m shipping it.
And then I’m going to put myself and my life’s work out there in whatever way I have to in order for it to do the most good it can for as many people as it can. Because that’s the point.
“Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”
Copy that, Steven. Copy that.