In the book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, Steven Pressfield shares his inspiration and techniques to help us make the life-altering transformation.

These are some of my favorite takeaways from reading the book.

When we decide to put our ass where our heart wants to be, it is not enough to commit. We need to engage all the way with a full breadth of commitment. We must be in all the way.

Often, it is not enough to simply produce the art of the work. We want the work to matter to some people. We must market our work to allow other people to get to know it.

The only way to market our work is to be its champion. Only we can be the true champion of our work of art.

“Putting your ass where your heart wants to be means putting it out there where the world can judge it – and doing it in the smartest and most appealing way possible,” said Steve.

Marketing is also about fulfilling the promise of shipping the work. We will need to set a deadline. The work will not ship when it is perfect. The work will ship because we said it would.

When it is time to ship the work, we must put on our killer instinct. We need our killer instinct because we need to overcome the Resistance. Resistance is always most vigorous at the finish line.

“Killer instinct is not negative when we use it to finish a book, a screenplay, or any creative project that is fighting us and resisting to the bitter end.”

The killer instinct allows us to steel ourselves and put the Resistance out of its misery.

In other words, we ship the work!

In the book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, Steven Pressfield shares his inspiration and techniques to help us make the life-altering transformation.

These are some of my favorite takeaways from reading the book.

Steve believes that the Muse will take notice of us when we put our ass where our hearts want to be. By giving our best effort day in and day out, the Goddess comes to our aid.

When we commit to our journey, we risk everything and hold nothing back. We have hurled ourselves headlong into the unknown. When we carry out the act with the mindset of valor and fearlessness, heaven might notice and intervene, in some way, in our favor.

The journey can be difficult sometimes, and we must keep ourselves in the game and not give in to the Resistance. One technique to consider is self-reinforcement.

Can we remind ourselves periodically why we are doing this and that ultimate success will be ours if we stay and keep doing what we are doing? Can we be our coach and mentor?

That is self-reinforcement, and self-reinforcement keeps us committed over the long haul.

Self-reinforcement can also serve as a form of a reality check.

Sometimes when circumstances seem overwhelming, we need to take a breath and perhaps take a walk around the block. We might often find things are not as bad as we imagine. That, too, is self-reinforcement.

Self-reinforcement can help to keep some moments of reality in check. Often, “reality” means nothing more than conventional reality. And the conventional reality is usually made up and almost always wrong.

Sometimes self-reinforcement means kicking the conventional “reality” out the door and replacing it with what is in front of us right now. It helps us to keep things in perspective and objective by leveraging our self-validation to keep us on course.

For writers and artists, the ability to self-reinforce is more important than talent.

In the book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, Steven Pressfield shares his inspiration and techniques to help us make the life-altering transformation.

These are some of my favorite takeaways from reading the book.

When we commit to putting our ass where our heart wants to be, that sort of commitment requires us to make changes in our behavior.

We need to commit ourselves to a space. The space is a fixed place where we come to do our work.

We need to commit ourselves to a time. We show up on time and remain working till the end of the work time.

“The goodness doesn’t just want to know where we are. She wants to know what time we start and what hour we finish. How can she come to our aid if she doesn’t know where and when to find us?”

We need to commit to a level of concentration. When we work with our heart, we also exclude everything that is not about our work and our heart.

We need to commit to a level of aspiration. Every field of work has examples of individual who performs at the highest level. We will aspire to follow the standards and perform at the highest level possible.

We need to commit without a plan B. How would we answer the question, “How did you keep going all those years without success?” Our answer should be, “For this work, I had to keep going.”

We need to commit even when it is bogus. Many things we do in life can be described as a sausage. It is just another link, and we are here to grind it out. However, that does not mean we should stop giving our all to make the best sausage possible.

Every project does not have to be “(fill in the best movie, best book, best whatever).” It is OK to work on “B” movies and “C” projects, as long as we do our absolute best and keep our eyes on the prize of producing our best material.

We need to commit to no distractions. When we do our work, we will not turn our attention to anything that is not happening inside our demented selves, barring a nuclear attack or a family emergency.

When the end of work time comes, we stop. When we are tired, we stop. As artists, we are playing a long game for tomorrow.

If we see our family or friends, we never discuss what we are working on. We politely deflect any queries and let things rest. We don’t obsess. We don’t worry. We don’t second-guess what we did today.

“The office is closed.”

The last thing we should do at the end of the day is mentally preparing for the fight tomorrow. We are playing the long game. We are inculcating habit. We are deepening our practice and our commitment day by day.

In other words, we are training and reinforcing ourselves every day.

In the book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, Steven Pressfield shares his inspiration and techniques to help us make the life-altering transformation.

These are some of my favorite takeaways from reading the book.

Up to this point, Steve has been talking about making the commitment. But “put your ass” is not a short, one-time endeavor. This concept applies lifelong.

When we commit to “put our ass,” the duration of the journey can be long, repetitive, and never-ending. Consider the passage in the book from James Rhodes, the concert pianist.

Steve lists some of the accomplished artists in the book and compares them to the statement of “going the distance.” We will find… “When you and I put our ass where our heart wants to be, we do it for keeps. We’re in it to the end of the line.”

Just like those accomplished artists, we have a body of work, too. For most of us, that body of work exists inside us, just waiting for us to bring it out to the world. These bodies of work exist as alternative futures. If we choose not to commit over a long haul, that body of work may exist only in our imagination.

So, can we put our ass where our hearts want to be if we have a family, a job, and a mortgage? “Yes,” says Steve.

The Muse does not count hours. She counts commitment. We can commit to a smaller time slice, but our commitment needs to be consistent. We can add up our work and commitment drip by drip.

At some point, the practice of our vocation moves from being a challenge that we must step up and accept to becoming simply… our life.

Like a mother raising her children or a farmer tending his crops, the commitment becomes who we are and what we do.

In the book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, Steven Pressfield shares his inspiration and techniques to help us make the life-altering transformation.

These are some of my favorite takeaways from reading the book.

Steve talks about commitment also equals exposure. To be “exposed” means to be in a position where we can fall off a mountain, possibly a long way, and possibly to death.

Commitment is the act of moving from the “Known” to the “Unknown.” But something unknown is also scary to humans.

When Steve says, “Put your ass where your heart wants to be,” he proposes a mindset designed to outfox Fear of the Unknown. We need to remember:

“Don’t try to overcome your fear. Fear cannot be overcome. Instead simply move your body into the physical space you fear… and see what happens.”

While fear is the negative face of commitment, the positive face of commitment is self-empowerment. The very act of “putting our ass where our heart wants to be” makes a profound impression on those we wish to work with and on ourselves.

We change when we commit. We see ourselves differently; sometimes, those we are unaware of see us differently. They may come to our aid in ways we could never have anticipated.

Another thing we know is that the universe is self-ordering. Many endeavors in life are self-ordering too. Our symphony-in-the-works evolves into four movements. Our screenplay orders itself into three acts.

If we keep plugging away at it, the Law of Self-Ordering can come to our aid. The work, from day-in and day-out exertion and concentration, produces progress and order.

That is a law of the universe.