In his book, Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield teaches us how to navigate the passage from amateur life to professional practice.

These are my takeaways from reading the book.

The amateur lives for the future.

We place much emphasis on getting what we want, as soon as possible and as cheaply as possible. We take on debts to finance our materials needs and confuse the debt as an investment. We look to getting what we want today without doing the hard work or asking the hard questions of why we want something. The amateur love to get what he wants today without paying anything right now.

The amateur lives in the past.

The amateur either looks forward to a hopeful future or spend much time looking backward. The amateur likes to relive the past glory and hope things will go back to the way they were. The past was gone, but the amateur still carries the baggage of the past that is no longer relevant today. By living in the past or the future, the amateur avoids doing the hard work that is required in the present.

The amateur will be ready tomorrow.

The amateur has a million plans, and they all start tomorrow. The professional may have only one plan, but she is busy working that plan right now.

The amateur gives his power away to others.

The amateur follows a guru or a mentor. They consider themselves a disciple of the master, and they act only with the master’s permission and blessing. When we wait for the master telling us what to do, we gave away the power to act on our own behalf. When we give away our power and wait to be told, we become a compliant cog, and we give ourselves the excuse we need to hide from the real, hard work.

The amateur is asleep.

The force that can save the amateur is awareness, particularly self-awareness. But to act upon this self-awareness would mean we must define ourselves and how we differentiate from others. When we take a stand to define ourselves, we open ourselves up to the judgment, criticism, and rejection of others. The amateur avoids self-definition and the responsibilities that come with it. They choose to hide by acting as an undifferentiated individual in the herd.

In his book, Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield teaches us how to navigate the passage from amateur life to professional practice.

These are my takeaways from reading the book.

The amateur is easily distracted.

The work can often involve solitude and silence. The professional leverages the solitude and silence as opportunities to focus and channel her energy onto the work.

The amateur tries to minimize the solitude and silence by getting himself distracted. Engaging in social media and busy work are two favorite activities of the amateur.

The amateur seeks instant gratification.

Most of us look for the low hanging fruits to pick. The professional does the hard work of planting trees to grow the fruits.

The amateur is jealous.

As an amateur, we over-identify our work for ourselves. That means we often take everything that affects our work personally. It also means we often find it difficult to see things through other people’s eyes.

The professional also seeks to make changes with someone or through someone, but the pro practices empathy instead of jealousy. The professional knows that not everyone knows what she knows and not everyone wants what she wants. Different viewpoints are OK by the professional.

The amateur lacks compassion for himself.

In our hearts, we know we are often hiding from being the best we can be. We know we were meant for better things, but we find ways to avoid hard work. Practicing empathy on ourselves and not getting into the self-downward spiral is the first step going from being an amateur to being a professional.

The amateur seeks permission.

The professional knows the responsibilities are taken, not given. The amateur waits for another authority to give him the responsibilities. Without explicit permission, the amateur refuses to take actions, even when it is always his turn all along.

In his book, Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield teaches us how to navigate the passage from the amateur life to professional practice.

These are my takeaways from reading the book.

The amateur is terrified.

Fear is the main driving force behind many actions of the amateurs. The amateur experiences fear of failure, fear of success, fear of looking foolish, fear of under-achieving, fear of over-achieving, fear of poverty, fear of loneliness, and so on.

The amateur fears being excluded from the tribe the most. We fear that, if we must live up to who we are and what we are truly capable of, our tribe might view us as phony and kick us out into the cold to die.

The professional is just as terrified as the amateur, perhaps more so because the professional is more acutely conscious of herself and her interior universe. The difference is that the professional show courage and dance with fear.

The amateur is an egotist.

The amateur identifies with his ego, and he holds a world view of everything being hierarchical. The amateur is always conscious of his status, constantly feeling self-inflated or desperately anxious when things go or do not go his way.

The amateur competes with others and believes that he cannot rise unless a competitor fall. The amateur’s ego tells him that he is operating in a zero-sum game world.

The amateur lives by the opinions of others.

Although the amateur’s identity is deeply seated in his ego, that ego is so weak that the amateur allows others to define his identity and worth. The amateur craves third-party validation, and the perceived role, as he believes others have defined and approved for him, imprisons him.

The amateur permits fear to stop him from acting.

Because the amateur believes that the outside world needs to validate his actions, he takes himself and the consequences of his actions so seriously that he paralyzes himself. The amateur fears being different from others and thus, possibly, violating the expectations of the tribe.

Without whose acceptance and approval, the amateur believes, he cannot survive. Instead, he chooses not to act and wait to be told what to do.