Steven Pressfield felt like a fraud. For years, when asked what he did for a living, he told people he was an author. But in truth, he had never finished a book.
It’s not like he hadn’t tried. He had, several times in his life, in fact. But he could never finish what he started. His inner critic, or Resistance as he called it, had held him back from what he knew, deep down, he could one day become: an author.
At 31, he had had enough. With his cat in tow, he packed his old Smith-Corona typewriter and moved to Carmel Valley, California, to write. It was, for all intents and purposes, a decision to eliminate all decisions.
Pressfield recounts his experience in his book Turning Pro,
I didn’t talk to anybody […] I didn’t hang out. I just worked. I had a book in mind and I had decided I would finish it or kill myself. I could not run away again, or let people down again, or let myself down again. This was it, do or die.
Twenty-six months later, Pressfield got to the last page of his book and typed out two words: THE END. He had finished his book. Pressfield’s labor of love never did found a publisher, sadly. (Pressfield himself said his book “wasn’t good enough.”) Nor did he for his second or even third book. But it didn’t matter. He was an author. And in his words, he “never had trouble finishing anything again.” [1]
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We’ve talked before about Derek Siver’s “Hell Yeah or No” decision-making framework. If you’re not feeling “Hell yeah, that would be awesome !” about something, say no. But there’s a simpler, more serious framework that Sivers proposes in his new book: the decision to stop deciding.
“It’s one decision, in advance, that the answer to all future distractions is ‘no’ until you finish what you started,” writes Sivers in Hell Yeah or No. “It’s saying yes to one thing, and no to absolutely everything else.”
Tim Ferriss doesn’t read books published in the current year to avoid moderation. Author Cal Newport doesn’t have a Facebook account or even an email, so he can focus on deep work. Even Sivers himself says no to all speaking requests. The reason? He doesn’t need one.
Decisions like the above aren’t limited to the Ferrisses or the Newports of the world—we too can decide to end decisions that don’t further our cause. Everything is a trade-off. If you can learn to say no indefinitely to the things that don’t matter, you can say yes to the few things that do, the things that matter.
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