Turning Pro

Turning Pro — summary

The typewriter under the junk

Picture a young man living in a cinderblock cabin off a highway in North Carolina. No electricity, no toilet, no running water, no heat, no back door, no windows. The rent is fifteen dollars a week. He cooks his meals outside on a fire of pine kindling. A scarred redheaded tomcat from the woods watches him from the edge of the trees with a look of total condescension, like he is the one being judged. Steven Pressfield, who would eventually write novels read by millions and a small black book called The War of Art that almost every artist and entrepreneur ends up reading at some point, was that man. He had just escaped a halfway house full of people coming back from the state mental hospital. He was the only person there with a job, driving trucks, making a dollar seventy-five an hour.

Now picture what was sitting in the back of his Chevy van the whole time. An old Smith-Corona typewriter, buried under piles of junk and rusting spare parts. He never used it. He could not throw it away. He was terrified of sitting down at it and trying to write a single sentence. He knew he wanted to write. He knew it the way you know the weather. And he could not bear to do anything about it.

That gap, between knowing what you want and being unable to start, is the entire subject of Turning Pro. The book is short. The story is the opposite of short. It is the story of nearly every person you know.

What this book actually answers

Pressfield wrote The War of Art to give a name to the invisible force that stops us from doing our real work. He called it Resistance. Turning Pro is the sequel, and it tries to answer three brutally practical questions. Why do most of us fail to live the life we sense we were built for? What are we actually doing instead, and why does it feel so much like the real thing? And what does it take, in concrete habits, to cross the line from one to the other.