Your Thursday Three Things for June 4, 2026

Resistance wakes up when you do!

Steven Pressfield was 52 years old when his first novel was published.

Before that: 27 years of trying. 21 jobs. 11 states. At one point he was living out of his car. Writing through all of it. Not because it was going well… by his own admission, for most of those years what he was producing was no good, and he knew it. He kept showing up anyway.

Will and I sat down with him last week on Men Talking Mindfulness… the day his new novel, The Arcadian, came out. He’s the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire… all books a lot of people in our world have read more than once.

Someone once asked Pressfield: when in your day do you first experience Resistance?

His answer: the moment I open my eyes.

Resistance (capital R)

Pressfield defines Resistance as a universal force. It’s faceless, formless, intelligent, and specifically aimed at anything that matters. It’s the force that shows up the moment you sit down to do the work you actually care about. When you open the blank screen. When you decide today’s the day you finally start. When you’re 10 minutes into something good and you suddenly remember six things you should check first.

Here’s what Pressfield figured out that changed everything for him: the more important the work, the stronger Resistance is. It scales with stakes. So if you’re feeling a particularly brutal pull away from something, that might be a signal you’re pointed at something worth doing.

He spent seven years completely defeated by it before he named it. He didn’t know what he was running from. He just knew he was running. The guy who eventually wrote The War of Art … the book that has helped thousands of people understand why their own creative lives feel like a battle … spent seven years not writing anything worth keeping. What shifted wasn’t his talent. It was naming the force. Recognizing it was real, that it wasn’t personal, that every person trying to build or create or change something is up against the exact same thing. The voice that says “who are you to do this?” speaks in everyone’s head. Hearing it doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re aimed at something.

Going pro

The shift Pressfield made was a decision. Not a milestone he earned. A mental switch he flipped.

He stopped thinking of himself as an amateur and started thinking of himself as a professional. And the difference between those two things isn’t talent or output or credentials.

An amateur asks: do I feel like doing this today?

A pro doesn’t ask.

He talked about Kobe Bryant. Michael Jordan. Tom Brady. Not to hero-worship them, but to point at something specific: these people had a relationship with their work that didn’t leave room for “I’m not in the mood.” Kobe was at the gym before anyone else arrived. Jordan never allowed himself only a 12-point game. Brady wouldn’t let himself fall below his own standard even on his worst day. Pressfield’s point wasn’t that you have to be them. His point was that the standard they held themselves to was a choice they made, and you can make the same choice about whatever your work is.

The metric he uses at the end of every day isn’t “was it good?” It’s two questions: Did I put in the time? Did I work as hard as I could? If yes then sleep soundly. That’s the whole ledger. Quality isn’t always in your control. Showing up is.

The Muse

This is the part I wasn’t expecting to spend as much time on as we did. Pressfield is a genuine believer in the Muse … the Greek concept that ideas come not from us but through us, from something beyond the material plane. He doesn’t hold this lightly or hedgingly. He believes Gates of Fire came from somewhere other than his own mind. Same with The War of Art. He received them.

He described it as tuning into a cosmic radio station. The professional’s job is to keep their antenna up, stay consistent enough to be worth transmitting to, and trust that if you do the work, the signal will arrive. It took him 30 years to access it with any consistency.

What I appreciated is that he kept the door open on language: call it the Muse, the quantum field, the unconscious, Jung’s capital-S Self, flow state. The label doesn’t matter. The experience is the same. When you’re in it, you don’t quite know what’s happening, and the work is better than what you thought you were capable of. Most of us have had at least a few moments that fit that description. Pressfield is saying that’s not luck. It’s what’s available when you show up consistently enough for it to find you.

Your authentic swing

Pressfield based The Legend of Bagger Vance on the Bhagavad Gita — the ancient Hindu text in which the warrior Arjuna receives instruction from Krishna, who appears as his charioteer. He transposed it to golf: troubled golfer, wise caddy. But the lesson underneath stays the same. You have an authentic swing. A calling. Work you were made for. And a shadow career is what you end up in when fear keeps you from swinging it.

His example: entertainment lawyers in Hollywood. A lot of them secretly want to be writers, directors, producers. They’re in the orbit of their calling but not in the thing itself. And when they make the jump they almost always succeed. Because the authentic swing was in there the whole time.

The question he kept coming back to, in different ways, over the course of the conversation: what’s your authentic swing? And are you swinging it? Or are you in something adjacent because it felt safer?

What to do about it

1. Name the Resistance. Give it a capital R. Pressfield said naming the force changed everything — not because naming it made it smaller, but because it made it visible. When you sit down to work and feel the pull to do anything else, that’s Resistance. And a named force is a force you can engage with. You stop saying “I’m just lazy” and start saying “there’s a thing here, and I know what to do with a thing.”

2. Flip the switch. At some point Pressfield decided he was a professional. Not because his output had earned it. He just decided. The question “do I feel like doing this?” stops applying once you’re a pro. Make the decision. You can make it today.

3. Ask the right two questions. End each day with: Did I put in the time? Did I work as hard as I could? Those are the measures. Leave quality out of it — that’s not always in your hands. Showing up and effort are.

4. Build the morning ritual. Pressfield cited Arnold Schwarzenegger on this: the moment you open your eyes, don’t think — get up. Because thinking is where Resistance gets its first foothold. Move first. Get some small wins before you sit down to the real work. He considers brushing his teeth a win. He was not kidding about this. The chain of small acts of discipline tells you something about who you are before the hard work even starts.

5. Think long haul. Pressfield’s peers from high school were retired by the time he cashed his first writing check. He could have looked at that gap and stopped. He didn’t, because there was no plan B. He had to keep going. Most of us have a plan B that quietly lets us off the hook. He’s asking you to consider whether that’s actually a feature — or whether it’s Resistance in a business suit.

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This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Will and I sat down with Steven Pressfield — author of The War of Art, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire, and about 20 others — the same day his new novel, The Arcadian, came out. We talked about Resistance, what it means to go pro, the Muse and where ideas actually come from, shame as a useful force, and the Bhagavad Gita connection that most people miss in Bagger Vance. He offered to come back in six months. We told him to put it on his calendar.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

Three resources for fighting Resistance and doing the work

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