“What ails you and me has nothing to do with being sick or being wrong.  What ails us is that we are living our lives as amateurs” Steven Pressfield

I have often reread the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  When you create real art, you will face “The Resistance“.  Any creation of something important will bring up your inner resistance.  If there is no resistance, then you are probably not creating something meaningful to you.

The following 10 point manifesto comes from Steven.  He calls it the “Lunch Pail Manifesto” (for reasons you can discover here on his blog).

The Lunch Pail Manifesto

1. We must find the work that brings our lives meaning.
2. We must strive to make our work purposeful, truthful, and authentic, a pure offering to our Muse and fellow human beings.
3. We must wage a lifelong war with Resistance and accept that instant gratification is an oxymoron.
4. We must not speak of our work with false modesty or braggadocio.
5. We must not debase our work for short term gain nor elevate it above its rightful station to inflate our ego.
6. We must not covet the fruits of our work, or the fruits of others’ work.
7. We must respect others’ work and offer aid to fellow professional laborers.
8. We must accept that our work will never be perfect.
9. We must accept that our work will never be without merit.
10. We must accept that our work will never cease.

Where are you?

Have you found the work that brings meaning into your life?

It is the quality of your labour that counts, not the quality of your recognition for that labour.  We can have pride in the quality of our labour, not in the fruits of our labour. Vincent Van Gogh was a madman to his contemporaries, a genius only in hindsight.  Fame has little correlation with creative effort.