Book Review: Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield
I wasn’t writing books. I wasn’t facing my demons. I was spectating at life through the movie screen of a cab-over windshield, while every mile I traveled only carried me farther away from where I needed to go and from who I needed to become.
This is one of the major themes of Steve’s nonfiction work – the need to conquer resistance, ignore distractions, eschew indirect approaches and confront head-on what you need to do and fear to try. To take the risk and dive into the deep end of the pool without rationalizing procrastination. Easy to say, but difficult for all of us to do and Steve breaks his advice in Turning Pro into digestible vignettes that separate the world of the aspiring amateur from the polished professional, the apprentice from the master. Turning Pro can be read in one sitting or read again and again until you gain the habit of “the Professional Mindset”.
A second theme, maybe a meta-theme in Turning Pro is also present in Black Irish Books, which Steve has launched in partnership with Shawn Coyne, Steve’s co-blogger and the publisher of The War of Art, has to do with what might be called “craftsmanship as an identity”. This is probably not quite the right description, but there is an essence of nostalgia for America’s boom years of WWI to the early sixties when a man’s job was substantially his identity and his hard work provided not only a rising standard of living for his family, but a psychological anchor and sense of pride. Something generally considered worthy of admiration. An era I recall dimly from my earliest years of childhood in a bungalow neighborhood in Chicago where this way of life was still the norm.
Black Irish Books has a “lunch pail manifesto” authored by Coyne:
The retro lunch pail and towering thermos on the cover of Steven Pressfield’s Turning Pro are in honor of some legendary Pros.
Back in the analog days when the economy relied on blue collar muscle to build the modern world, Steelworkers gave everything they had to get that work done. In three shifts, twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year, hard-hatted men with lunch pails swinging from their gnarled hands passed through mill gates in Aliquippa, Baltimore, Bethlehem, Braddock, Buffalo, Chicago, Clairton, Cleveland, Gary, Homestead, Lehigh, McKeesport, Pittsburgh, Pueblo, Tuscaloosa, Steubenville, Weirton, and Youngstown among many other cities.
Without those fully stocked lunch pails, these men would never have made it through a single shift. Let alone a double.
They couldn’t duck out and drive to a fast food joint for lunch. Their Chevy Impalas were in the rank and file parking lot, five football fields away from the shop floor. Sweat-soaked and exhausted after four hours in 100+ degree heat, they had to shed twenty pounds of flame retardant asbestos clothing just to take their twenty-minute break.
What kept them going for the second half of their shifts were the two or three chipped ham sandwiches, the couple chunks of cheese, the extra donuts from breakfast and the quarter piece slab of peach pie jammed inside their pails. And, of course, a huge thermos of coffee.
Wives spent the tail end of their evenings packing their guys’ pails. The best cold cuts and treats always went to dad. It was a sacred thing for a kid to see a scarred hard hat and a full lunch pail on the kitchen counter. That helmet and pail represented the indispensable tools of her father’s work—the armor to enter his chosen profession and the fuel to get him back home….
This is a theme that strikes a jarring contrast with America’s melancholy zeitgeist – an economy that is stagnant and in danger of cratering, elites who look out for a quick buck and an upcoming generation of cheerful smartphone experts with helicopter parents who expect huge rewards for just showing up. The stark, black, industrial lunch box is an artifact of the world of Nelson Algren or Studs Terkel but it is also a symbol of skilled labor, hard work, excellence and productivity, of a simpler but more muscularly dynamic time while the boxing glove denotes a pugnacious stance toward adversity or resistance.
Are you ready for Turning Pro?
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