Why You Need to Add The War of Art to Your Reading List

Everyone in the world has experienced procrastination, or as Steven Pressfield more accurately calls it, Resistance.

I read The War of Art as part of the Praxis program. It’s not long, and beautifully broken up into tiny sections to make it easy to digest.

Throughout the book, you can really feel Steven’s passion as he explains to us how Resistance comes for us, how to combat it, and what happens after Resistance has been beaten.

Steven covers every single way Resistance can get to us in the first section, speaking about it as if it were a person. He talks about activities that specifically invite Resistance, covering spiritual, physical, and emotional growth. Then he talks about all the forms Resistance can take: fear, criticism, self-doubt.

Steven explains Resistance appears in more forms than we’d initially think. He even goes into mental illnesses like ADHD and says that having dreams of grandeur are tools used by Resistance.

I found his points valid and eye-opening. I hadn’t really considered the little voice in my head telling me I was a fiction writer to be a form of Resistance, but I agree. I almost didn’t write How to Write a Novel because I considered myself primarily a fiction writer. Thankfully, I pushed that aside and wrote it anyway.

In the second section, Steven talks about ways to combat Resistance and become a pro. He explains the stark differences between an amateur and a pro. An amateur plays his sport on the weekend, a pro does it seven days a week. An amateur seeks validation from outside sources, the pro ignores other people’s opinions and continues on.

Steven’s insights in this topic are spot-on. There are people who doodle and call themselves artists, and then there are people who buckle down, practice, and commit themselves to art. He challenges people to really take a second look at whether their artistic work is actually work or just a hobby.

The final section is where Steven started to lose me a little bit. He titled it “Beyond Resistance” and “The Higher Realm.” Here, he started getting into the spiritual aspect of finding inspiration. I am a Christian, so normally I can appreciate this point of view.

He mentioned the Muses quite a bit, and at some point I started to think he wasn’t just using them as a metaphor or to make a point about the ancient Greeks. While I think there are a lot of good points and nuggets of wisdom here, I personally was a little thrown off and sometimes felt like I was getting more of a mythology lesson than solid advice.

Perhaps a second read-through will reveal more, but that was my initial impression.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I was introduced to ideas that I hadn’t really considered before. It was eye-opening and made me question myself.

How has Resistance been trying to stop you? What are you going to accomplish in spite of Resistance?