Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be
This is our sixth note on one of Steven Pressfield's books. Steven Pressfield is one of my favorite writers and human beings. His books, including this one, are both inspiring and beautifully pithy. If you’re a fan of his work, you’ll love this book. I’m excited to share a handful of my favorite Big Ideas, so let’s jump straight in!
Big Ideas
- Resistance With a Capital RWith a capital R.
- Did I Show Up? Did I Try My Best?Did I try my best?
- Ass = CommitmentTattoos also = commitment.
- Until One is Committed...Get your butt on the boat.
- The Spiritual PlaneIs the ultimate destination.
“We all know how hard it is to write a book, make a movie, or create a new business. Powerful forces line up against us—obstacles to entry, rivals, competitors, finances, funding, the difficulty of the craft itself.
But the most formidable antagonist of all resides inside each of our own skulls. I’m talking about that negative force I call Resistance with a capital R.
How do we defeat this monster that lives inside all of us and never tires, never loses strength, never takes a day off, and is endlessly ruthless and protean and subtle and clever and diabolical in the ways it can set snares for us and bring our most noble and brilliant aspirations to nothing? How do we get past this force called Resistance and set ourselves on the path to achieve our dreams?
The title of this book, as we said, is Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be.
That, in nine words, is my answer. It’s the simplest and most direct way to get up in the morning and do our work . . . and to lie down at night feeling at peace with ourselves, knowing for this one day at least we have defeated our demons and moved twenty-four hours closer to living the True Self and Best Self we were born to be.
Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be may sound glib and superficial at first, but believe me, its implications are profound and its applications universal. We’ll start, in this book, with the purely physical interpretation—‘ass,’ meaning body, our flesh-and-blood presence. But as the chapters unfold, we’ll take the subject deeper and deeper, into the psychological, the emotional, the metaphorical, and even the spiritual dimensions of the principle.
Let’s begin.”
~ Steven Pressfield from Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be
Steven Pressfield is one of my favorite writers and human beings.
In addition to being a brilliant writer of both fiction and non-fiction, he’s just a good human being. You can feel his wisdom and humility and realness with every word he writes.
We’ve featured five of his other brilliant books on the creative process including: The War of Art, Do the Work, Turning Pro, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, and The Artist’s Journey.
As you know if you’re familiar with Steve and his style, his books are both inspiring and beautifully pithy. I just looked that word up. Yep. His books are the very definition of pithy: “concise and forcefully expressive.” I read this one in an hour and fifteen minutes.
If you’re a fan of his work, you’ll love this book. If you haven’t read one of his books yet, go get this one and The War of Art on Amazon. You’ll thank me. (Get a copy here.)
I’m excited to share a handful of my favorite Big Ideas, so let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFLet’s declare further that the artist’s skill (above and beyond the technical prowess of dancing, playing the piano, or crafting a work of fiction) is simply the ability to access that Higher Dimension.
Get the BookResistance With a Capital R
“What is Resistance? It’s our own tendency—yours and mine and everyone’s—to yield to procrastination, self-doubt, fear, impatience, self-inflation, self-denigration, distraction, laziness, arrogance, complacency, and perfectionism. It’s our inability to focus, our incapacity to press on through adversity. It’s our terror of finishing and exposing our work to the judgment of the marketplace. It’s fear of failure. It’s fear of success. Fear of humiliation. Fear of destitution. It’s our inability to defer gratification, to acquire and act with self-discipline, self-validation, and self-reinforcement.”
That’s from the “Note to the Reader” with which the book begins.
We’d be wise to both name our enemy and be honest with ourselves that it exists.
Steve calls that part of us that does all of the above mentioned things (and more!), Resistance. With a capital R.
Phil Stutz calls it Part X.
We often call it your Demon.
Remember: The words demon and daimon are related. Demon is the diminutive of daimon. It’s the part of each of us that wants to do the vicious thing while the better part of us is whispering in our ears encouraging us to do the virtuous, noble thing.
So...
How do we deal with our Resistance?
In the nine words of the book’s title, Steve tells us: Put your ass where your heart wants to be.
We could also say: Put your mind and body and spirit where your daimon (your soul!) KNOWS it should be.
If we can muster the Wisdom and Self-Mastery (and Love and Courage and Gratitude and Hope and Curiosity and Zest!) to get ourselves to more and more consistently close the gap and show up as our best selves, we will win the ultimate game. And, as a result, over the long run (!), we’ll win all the other games we want to play.
If we DON’T do that? Well then... It doesn’t really matter what else we do—we may win some smaller little games once in a while but we’ll miss out on the real prize.
Resistance.
It will ALWAYS be there.
Pay attention to its presence.
Then ignore it as you put your mind and body (and ass!) where your heart and soul KNOWS it should be.
Not someday.
Not even Today.
All day. Every day.
Especially...
RIGHT NOW.
Here’s my frame of mind as I sit down to work: This is the day. There is no other day. This is the day. In other words, I release every thought that smacks of, ‘Maybe we can do this some other time.’ There is no other time. Today is the Super Bowl. Today is the day I give birth. Today is the day I die.
Did I Show Up? Did I Try My Best?
“Let’s start with the most obvious interpretation of this axiom. (We’ll go deeper in succeeding chapters.)
What do we mean by ‘ass’? In the first-level interpretation, the word means body. Our physical presence. When we say, ‘Put your ass where your heart wants to be,’ we mean station your physical body in the spot where your dream-work will and must happen.
Want to write? Sit down at the keyboard.
Wanna paint? Get your butt into the rehearsal studio.
Dumb and obvious as it sounds, tremendous power lies in this simple physical action.
When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best?
If I’ve done that, then I’ve put my butt where my heart wants to be. I can’t ask anything of myself more than that.”
So, at the most basic level, our “ass” is our body.
We MUST get our body where it needs to be to do whatever we’ve decided is most important at that moment. Period.
That may sound obvious and too simplistic to matter. But it’s not.
I’m currently typing this at 6:52 am on a Tuesday morning. I have been sitting in my chair at my desk working on this Note for 44 minutes. Actually, I just got up because my 1,000-second timer just went off. At that prompt, my “ass” got up and I hammered out another set of 11 burpees.
I get up and move every 1,000 seconds in part because NASA scientist Joan Vernikos convinced me that doing so will keep my mind and body at peak levels (see Movement 101 and Notes onDesigned to MoveandSitting Kills).
But that’s only part of the reason I get up.
The bigger driver is making sure I’m capable of both commanding AND obeying myself a la this wisdom from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra where he tells us: “He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.”
Before I started working this morning, my ass was on my meditation cushion—the same one I’ve had for nearly 20 years when I bought it at the Zen meditation place where I did my *very* first meditation. My ass was on that cushion for 1% of my day (14 minutes and 24 seconds as we discuss inOne Percent Better) so I could still my mind and Focus it on What’s Important Now.
But... As you know if you’ve been following along, my morning *actually* started the night before when I got my body into bed right after we tucked the kids in at 7:45 pm. That’s how I got up feeling Heroically ZESTY (!) at 5:15 am after 9.5 hours in bed.
We put our ass where our Daimons know it should be.
That’s how we KNOW we’re doing our best as we activate our Soul Force and give the world all we’ve got. All day. Every day. Especially RIGHT NOW.
My 1,000-second timer just went off.
Time for me to obey.
What fascinates me about the character of Alexander the Great is that he seemed to see the future with such clarity and such intensity as to make it virtually impossible that it would not come true—and that he would be the one to make it so. That’s you and me at the inception of any creative project. The book/screenplay/nonprofit/start-up already exists in the Other World. Your job and mine is to bring it forth in this one.
Ass = Commitment
“We know what ‘ass’ means in the physical sense. Let’s examine it now as a metaphor.
‘Ass’ means commitment.
As in, ‘His ass is on the line.’ Or ‘If she screws up, it’ll be her ass.’
When we say, ‘Put your ass where your heart wants it to be’ in this sense, we mean, ‘Commit emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually to your dream.’
In chapters 3 through 11, we urged the aspiring writer/filmmaker/chef/dancer to physically move to the city where her dreams have the best chance of coming true. But there’s an even more compelling reason from the point of view of those established professionals who might hire or mentor or promote our newly arrived aspirant.
Our writer/filmmaker/chef/dancer has demonstrated commitment. She ishere. She has left there.
She has shown that she is ‘crazy’ in the best possible sense (as those established artists and entrepreneurs see themselves). She has demonstrated that she is driven by a dream. She has shown that she is willing to risk and sacrifice. She has proven she has guts.”
Those are the first words of Book Two: “Ass = Commitment” in which we move from the physical meaning of the word “ass” to the metaphorical.
I thought of a few things when I read that.
First, when I read the word “commitment,” I knew I wanted to chat about one of the quotes I memorized and have silently repeated to myself 1,000+ times: W.H. Murray’s genius “Until one is committed...” And, when I read the word “crazy,” I knew I wanted to chat about another quote I memorized—Steve Jobs’/Apple’s “Here’s to the crazy ones.”
But...
Steve shared that W.H. Murray wisdom a few pages later, so we’ll save that for the next Big Idea.
For now, we’ll chat about how I put my ass into a tattoo chair FOUR separate times to put my life’s Mission in permanent ink somewhere I’ll never miss it.
Why would I tattoo ARETE then HEROIC then 51 | 2051 then 101 | 1M onto my forearms?
Simple. To put my ass on the line. To make an unassailable, IRREVERSIBLE (!) commitment to doing EVERYTHING I possibly can for as long as it takes to do what I believe I’m here to do.
My body is marked. The boats are burned. My ass is on the line. I’m all in.
How about YOU?!
Tattoos are, of course, optional but...
What are YOU here to do? Is your ass on the line or are you shirking your Duty?
Please go all in. Give us all you’ve got, Hero!!!
P.S. Lest you think this ALL IN (!) commitment means we *work* all the time, know that it’s about doing our DUTY in our Work AND our Love while remembering we can’t do that if our ENERGY isn’t optimized.
And, we’ve gotta know when the office is closed: “When I finish the day’s work, I turn my mind off. The office is closed. The work has been handed off to the Unconscious, to the Muse. I respect her. I give her the time. If I see family or friends, I never talk about what I’m working on. I politely deflect any queries. But beyond not talking with others, I refuse to talk to myself. I don’t obsess. I don’t worry. I don’t second guess. The office is closed.”
When you and I put our ass where our hearts want to be, we do it for keeps. We’re in it to the end of the line.
Until One is Committed...
“But let’s get back to help from others. I quoted part of the following passage in The War of Art. It’s from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition by W.H. Murray (1951).
'… but when I said that nothing had been done I erred on one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money—booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but it is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meeting and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.'”
That’s the W.H. Murray quote I memorized.
I have silently repeated it to myself WAY OVER 1,000 times. I do it in a series of four inspiring quotes. It always comes right before I recite a Churchill quote and right after I recite a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that comes right after I recite a Steve Jobs quote.
I do it EVERY SINGLE TIME (!) I get up in the middle of the night—which happens often since I put my ass on the Heroic line. :)
We’ll chat about those quotes in a moment. For now,I want to emphasize the fact that W.H. Murray’s commitment (that preceded all the magic) came in the form of him PUTTING HIS ASS ON A BOAT. The “big” things come from the TINY little things.
I repeat: We need to put our ass on the line. Not once in a while or only when we feel like it. But all day, every day. ESPECIALLY (as I constantly say!) when we *don’t* feel like it.
With that, here are the quotes I’ve memorized and recite to myself while enjoying some nice, deep breathing when/if I get up in the middle of the night. 10x better than counting sheep.
First: I always imagine Steve himself reciting this in HIS voice: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Second: Emerson tells us: “Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
Third: See W.H. Murray’s gem above.
Fourth: Churchill tells us: “There comes a special moment in everyone’s life, a moment for which that person was born. That special opportunity, when he seizes it, will fulfill his mission – a mission for which he is uniquely qualified. In that moment, he will find greatness. It is his finest hour.”
In that moment—the instant when the individual commits to solving the problem, no matter what it takes—her or his seat of identity shifts from the ego to the Self. In that instant, true change becomes possible. In fact, true change has already begun.
The Spiritual Plane
“Our priorities change when we make the shift from the ego to the Self. Our field of consciousness broadens. We see ourselves no longer as an isolated element in a random or meaningless universe. Instead, our passage through this material dimension acquires significance, even if we can’t articulate what that significance requires, even if we can’t articulate what that significance is. We sense ourselves as part of a greater cosmos, extending without limit into the past and projecting infinitely into the future.
We become conscious of our own gift. We no longer doubt this or dismiss it or despise it. We may still fear personal extinction. We may still worry about our children’s futures and the health of our community and nation and planet. But we come at these concerns from a different place and with a different sense of what kind of difference we can make and how and why, or even if we wish to attempt to make a difference at all.
We have become artists, not in the precious sense of differentiating ourselves from others in some imagined superior way, but in the sense of being servants of an intention that comes from somewhere else, even though we cannot grasp what that intention is or what its source may be. We trust this intention somehow, even though we can’t say why.
It is no small thing to put your ass where your heart wants to be.
Can you do it? Do you want to? Are you willing to pay the price?”
Those are the final words of the book. As I typed them out, I realized we could create a great book just from the final words of each of Steve’s books.
Book Eight (the final section) is called “Put Your Ass... On the Spiritual Plane.” In it, Steve walks us through the relationship between our small (lowercase) self and our big (capital S!) Self. Check out our Notes on The Artist’s Journey for more.
The short story?
Our JOB (all caps) is to do whatever we need to do to connect to and express that ineffable power that beats our hearts and keeps the planets in line while expanding the universe at an incomprehensible speed.
When our ass is on the spiritual plane?
We can do what we’re here to do.
Let’s get there, Hero.
TODAY.
Can you put your ass where your heart wants to be for life?
About the author
