Top 3 Passages That Stood Out to Me From Steven Pressfield’s Turning Pro
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Turning Pro is the sibling book to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.
Check out the lines that stood out to me from his other book here if you haven’t already:
There are three parts to this book: The Amateur Life, Self-Inflicted Wounds, and The Professional Mindset. I’m going to touch on the top passages that stood out to me from each part.
The Amateur Life
“When we can’t stand the fear, the shame, and the self-reproach that we feel, we obliterate it with an addiction. The addiction becomes the shadow version, the evil twin of our calling to service or to art. That’s why addicts are so interesting and so boring at the same time. They’re interesting because they’re called to something — something new, something unique, something that we, watching can’t wait to see them bring forth into manifestation. At the same time, they’re boring because they never do the work. Instead, the addict enacts his aspiration in shadow form. The addiction becomes his novel, his adventure, his great love. The work of art or service that might have been produced is replaced by the drama, conflict, and suffering of the addict’s crazy, haunted, shattered life,” (26).
“All addictions share, among others, two primary qualities: (1) They embody repetition without progress. (2) They produce incapacity as a payoff,” (34).
— Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro
I think this passage is pretty self-explanatory, and it’s an interesting take on addiction. Pressfield touches on what happens…
