Lower Your Standards and Keep Going

The second-best advice I ever heard about writer’s block came from a quote in last month’s Atlantic Monthly, where Sandra Tsing Loh said, “When faced with writer’s block, lower your standards and keep going.”

The best advice I ever heard is to pretend it doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as “plumber’s block,” right? Just sit down and do what you need to do.

Both of these ideas owe much of their genesis to the work of Steven Pressfield, whose War of Art is one of my favorite books of all time. (I’m not alone in this, of course—it’s on a lot of “favorite book” lists, and for good reason.)

Today Steven released the sequel, Do the Work!, available exclusively through Amazon.com and Seth Godin’s Domino Project. If you’re not interested in overcoming resistance, you shouldn’t read this book. If you want to do some kind of creative work but often get stuck, however, this means two things:

1. You are human.

2. You can learn from Pressfield’s worthy example, so you should check it out.

Congratulations to Steven, Seth, and the whole Domino team on the release of another great resource. Keep ’em coming!

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A quick note on site performance: we experienced massive outages yesterday due to no fault of our own or our great readers. We expect to return to full strength soon, but you may notice some hiccups for a while. Rest assured our Jedi mind ninjas are working on it.

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Photo by Suzy