- The blank screen, the empty page, the unfilmed video. Whenever we sit down to start writing or creating anything, we're often paralysed by a force stopping us from starting, stopping us from typing that first word, writing that first page, or filming that first video. Now the most common question I get asked on the internet is, "Ali, how are you so cool?" But the second most common question is, "Ali, how do you beat procrastination?" And the answer is in this book, "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. He says that most of us have two lives, the life we live, and the unlived life within us, and between the two is this thing called the resistance, and that is the secret to overcoming procrastination. And this is actually a surprisingly life-changing insight. And I first read this in 2017 and it actually completely changed the way that I approach life and meaningful productivity, and it kinda helped me stop being a chronic procrastinator. And so in this video, we're gonna talk about three key points from the book that have helped me personally
beat procrastination and hopefully they can help do the same for you. Point number one, know thy enemy. So the first question we need to address is what is resistance? Resistance is the negative force that's actively working against us to stop us from doing
the things we want to do. It doesn't stop us from watching Netflix or from playing video games, instead it stops us from doing anything that we know in our hearts is gonna level up our lives. Like resistance isn't really that feeling that we get when we can't be bothered to clean the desk or can't be bothered to... I don't know, wash the dishes, that is resistance with a small R, but resistance with a big R is the resistance that... That force that's holding us back from doing creative or entrepreneurial things or things that require
any level of risk-taking or putting ourselves out there. And whenever we try and do any of this stuff, we always have to go up against this hill of procrastination that's a constant battle. And there's a nice quote from the book where he says, "We don't tell ourselves, 'I'm never going to write my symphony,' instead we say, 'I am going to write my symphony, I'm just going to start tomorrow.'" I've heard this a million times, of people being like, "You know what?" "I wanna start a YouTube
channel at some point." "I'm gonna start a podcast, but you know the timing's
not quite right." "Oh, I haven't quite got the gear, I haven't quite got the kudos, why would anyone care what I have to say?" This is all resistance, it's all that procrastination that's building within us. But what really fuels resistance is fear. Resistance is activated by fear and gains strength whenever we give in to that fear creating a cycle that we fall into and which leads to resistance becoming even stronger as our fear becomes even greater. But as he says in the book, fear is actually a very good thing, because when we feel scared
about doing something, it usually means we
should just do the thing. He writes, "Remember one rule of thumb, the more scared we are
of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it." And in a way, resistance is that compass that points towards the thing in our life that's actually most
important for us to do. Like I never feel any resistance towards sitting down and playing "World of Warcraft," but I do feel resistance
towards sitting down and writing my book, and that tells me that sitting down to write my book is currently the most important thing I need to be working on. And the key rule of thumb here as Steven Pressfield writes, is, "The more resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art or project or enterprise is to you." And since I first read this in 2017, I've actually started using
this as a model for... In a way a model for decision-making. Like if I feel scared
about doing something, then more often than not I will try my very best
to actually do the thing, and so far in my life, I have never doing something that I'm scared of but I've always regretted
not doing something that I was scared of. So now that we've done step one, which is know our enemy and we've defined resistance and figured out what it actually is, it's that source that
makes us procrastinate, we need to figure out some
ways of dealing with it. And the first one is key point number two in this video, which is become a professional. In the book, Pressfield introduces the idea of the professional versus the amateur. An amateur takes action whenever inspiration strikes or when they're in the right mood, they're not committed, and the goals are focused on fun, money and status. A professional shapes their life so that the work is a priority, they are determined and committed to succeed by following their inner drive and creative spirit. Now, our boy Steve says, that the only way we
can deal with resistance is if we become a professional with our work rather than an amateur. And I think... I think it's interesting how he doesn't define professional as being someone who makes
money from the thing, 'cause you can wanna
make money from a thing but still treat it like
a complete amateur. But instead, a professional is someone who does it for the sake of doing the work and takes pride in the work itself. And there's a few other traits that professionals have when it comes to doing their job. Like if you're a professional, then you'll show up every day to your job no matter what, you wouldn't just not go to work because you don't feel like it. If you're a professional, you work through adversity and you're open to criticism because you always wanna improve. Whereas if you're an amateur, then you feel like... If you draw something or make a video and someone gives you bad feedback or you get a bad comment, you get like really kind of woe is me and like it hurts your feelings and it like ruins your life because you're treating
it like an amateur. Whereas if you treat it as a professional, you would be more inclined to actually grow from the feedback. A professional as well will understand that fear is just part of the work. Like if you're a doctor and that's your profession, you know that you're gonna be stepping outside your comfort zone. Whereas if you approach things with an amateur perspective, like starting a YouTube
channel or whatever, as soon as the going gets tough, then you're gonna fold like a cheap suit, as they say. And finally, if you're a
professional with your work, you recognise that facing the resistance is the daily battle. When I'm working as a doctor, when I wake up in the mornings and I think, "Oh, I don't really feel
like going to work," I do it anyway, it's part of the daily battle, it's just what you have to do. When you're a doctor and you... Someone asks you to put an IV or a cannula into a patient who you know has difficult veins, that's resistance, you're like, "Oh, I don't wanna do this," but it's part of the work, it's part of the job, this is what I have to do. And we wanna be kind of taking that sort of attitude towards our other like creative and entrepreneurial stuff. And obviously there is some level in which you can take this too far, like being so focused on like treating your
hobbies as a professional to the point where you're
doing it for eight hours a day is probably a little bit excessive, and there's certainly something to be said for not monetizing
all of your hobbies or at least not trying to make a living from your hobbies, because like for me, a hobby is fun when it
makes a bit of money. Like playing the guitar, if I could get paid a bit of money to play the guitar, that would make it really, really fun. But if I was reliant on playing the guitar for earning a living, I'd be starving on the street and it would also make playing the guitar a lot less fun. So treating our creative and entrepreneurial
stuff as a professional doesn't mean it takes over our life, it just means that we're approaching it with a bit more of a professional mindset rather than the mindset of, "Oh, I'll do my thing
whenever I feel like it," cause that doesn't really work if you're treating something like a pro. Key point number three, is we need to banish the ego. And he said that once we've
become a professional, the next thing we need to do is recognise that the ongoing battle between the self and the ego. And the way I see this is that our ego is more
focused on external events and how other people see us, whereas the self is this inner calm that we have which is about the way that we see ourselves. When we're led by our ego, our main priority is to maintain the status
of the eye in the world, and we're just focused on how external events affect us, and everything is very superficial and surface level. Then we've got the self, which is made up of the individual and collective unconscious
areas of our minds, which includes our dreams, intuition, visions and aspirations. It encompasses the deepest
form of who we are, and when we sit down to create, we're attempting to channel the self because it's through the self that we can beat resistance. Now some of this stuff is a little bit woo-woo for my liking, like Pressfield goes on about like how creative endeavours are like a new plane of existence, and we're all striving for
that plane of existence, and resistance is like the devil that gets in the way, it kind of got a bit woo-woo at times. It's kinda similar to like the growth mindset and fixed mindset stuff in a way. When we have a fixed mindset, and we get like negative
feedback or something, or we do something that
we know is not very good, it really shakes us to the core because it like damages our ego. Whereas when we have a
growth mindset to something, we recognise that if we fail at something, it's just part of the process of improving over time. And another way that I think of this is when it comes to goal setting, so I found that for me, I get a lot more resistance, i.e., procrastination when I've got goals that are based on outcomes that are outside of my control. So for example, if I'm making YouTube videos, which is an easy example, one way of thinking about
my goals for YouTube is to think about, "Okay, I want this video to get this many views," or, "I wanna hit this many subscribers by the end of the year," that's a very outcome goal, and it's very outside of my control. The only thing in my control is making the videos, but if I have a goal that, "I want this video
to be really good," then that's when perfectionism takes hold, that's when I feel the resistance, that's when I procrastinate
so much to the point that I don't even make the video, and I've seen this basically with every student who's been through my part-time YouTuber Academy. Anyone who's doing YouTube or starting YouTube or getting better at YouTube or taking it seriously, if you start thinking that, "This video needs to be good," as defined by what other
people think of it, it makes it really hard to actually make the video. Whereas what I prefer, is to have most of my
goals being input goals, i.e., they are entirely within my control, they're entirely based on inputs that I control. So, "I'm gonna make two videos a week for the rest of my life," is an input goal, it's something that's
broadly within my control. "I'm gonna write the best
book that I can or... And a book that I'm happy with," is an input goal, it's a goal within my control. Whereas, "I'm gonna write a book and I want it to hit the New
York Times Best Seller list, which is what I've been
thinking about recently," that's very much an output goal and it's broadly outside of my control. And I find that when it comes... Again to writing my book, any time I even think
of that outcome goal, I feel the procrastination, I feel the resistance, I feel the pain, whereas when I think, "You know what?" "My job is to is to just write the best book that I can," it becomes a lot easier to do. And now I've realised that for basically whatever I do, if I'm struggling with procrastination, usually it's the resistance
getting in the way, and usually it's because I have some kind of outcome goal associated with the thing which for me personally is bad, it works for some people, but I don't personally like it. Now we've talked about three ways of beating procrastination, number one, name the enemy, i.e., the resistance, number two, become a professional, and number three, banish the ego. There's a lot more really good stuff about this in the book, "The War of Art," which as you can see is quite small. It doesn't take very long to read, and in fact, it only takes two hours to listen to, or one hour if you're going at double speed like I do, and you can do that on Audible who are very
kindly sponsoring this video. Now, whenever Audible sponsor my videos, I always need to pinch myself because basically beyond any other brand I work with, it is the dream one, because I've been evangelising Audible to all of my friends and anyone who listened
to me for the last... I don't know, God knows how long, even when I didn't have
this YouTube channel and when they weren't
sponsoring my videos. And in fact, it's one of the nicest
feedings in the world, when one of my friends
signs up for Audible and starts getting into audiobooks and tells me, "Oh my God, I signed up to Audible because
of your recommendation, and now I'm reading the "Mistborn" series and my mind is blown
because it's just so good." So if you wanna learn more about beating procrastination, then definitely check out "The War of Art" audio book, but if you're looking for
fiction recommendations, which is what I personally prefer to listen to most of the time on Audible, I would, 1000% recommend the "Mistborn" series
by Brandon Sanderson. This series is narrated by a guy called Michael Kramer who is like the best
narrator in the world, in my opinion, and he's narrated the "Mistborn" series and "The Stormlight Archive," and "The Wheel of Time," and these are like amazing fantasy books that I've been listening to on Audible since like 2017. And I basically had Michael's... Michael Kramer's voice
in my head at all times. So if you're new to the
world of audiobooks, a hundred percent, I'd recommend "Mistborn"
series by Brandon Sanderson, the first book of that
is "The Final Empire," and I started listening to that in like... Yeah, 2017, has completely
changed my life, because now Brandon Sanderson
is my favourite author, and I fricking love listening to fantasy books on Audible. Another really good one to try is "Stardust" by Neil Gaiman, you might've seen the film, it's a pretty good film, but the book is even better, and it's a really nice love story, and it's just like narrated very well by Neil Gaiman himself. To get started with a totally free 30 day trial, in which you can get one free audio book to listen to, please head over to audible.com/aliabdaal, and then you can sign up for your 30 day trial, get your free audio book, I'd recommend "The Final
Empire" by Brandon Sanderson, or "Stardust" by Neil Gaiman if you wanna go fiction, or "The War of Art" if you will like the topic in this video and you wanna learn more about how to beat the resistance. And honestly of the hundred plus apps that I subscribe to, I always say, even when they're not
sponsoring my videos, I always say that Audible is the single subscription that I would hold on to above all else. I would even cancel my
Netflix subscription and my "World of Warcraft" subscription if I had to in order to just subscribe to Audible as the only thing, because the amount of value it's added to my life in terms of how little
I pay for it each month, it's just absolutely astronomical and probably the most cost... Like cost effective thing that I own in my life. So if that sounds up your street and you wanna get into
the world of audio books, and join me on this journey of listening to audiobooks forever, then head over to audible.com/aliabdaal, to get your 30 day free trial and a free audio book. Anyway, I wanna end with a quote from the book where he says, "Never forget, this very moment, we can change our lives." "There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny." "This second, we can turn
the tables on resistance." Now this book had a pretty profound effect on my life, and my creative and entrepreneurial journey. And if you liked this video, and you wanna check out
my thoughts on more books that have really impacted my life, then check out this
short playlist over here. The first video in it is about three books that changed my life, and then we've got a few other very short videos summarising some of the other books that I loved and have really helped me in life. So thank you so much for watching, do hit that subscribe button, if you aren't already, and I will see you next time. Good day. (gentle music playing)
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