I’ve mentioned Steven Pressfield before.

Not only is he the author of a few notably good tales (including Gates of Fire and The Legend of Bagger Vance), but he is also a writer who has written about writing and being a writer.

He wrote those latter books to try and help budding writers to stick it out and become successful. With titles like The War of Art, Turning Pro and Do the Work!, his writings on writing are serious efforts at trying to help the amateur keep moving forward. He knows what he’s talking about- and he knows where the amateur can fall and fail.

One of Pressfield’s main concepts perfectly describes an issue that every creative faces.

Resistance.

Anytime a writer runs up against anything that tries to interfere with the completion of a creative process, he identifies that as resistance.

It’s an interesting idea in relation to creativity. Resistance is almost a little character that fights us in our effort to produce.

Like a demon.

Resistance isn’t just one specific thing that keeps someone from getting their 100 or 100 words a day written. It is anything, including compulsions and distractions and detours offered by the author’s mind itself. Resistance provides an assiduous and relentless assault on our goals and hopes, on our discipline and determination, always offering us outs to keep us from getting our work done.

It’s not the excuses and detours that are our specifically our productivity problem, but rather the nefarious influence of resistance around us, which we have to consciously fight, when our routines are disrupted and our self-criticisms are too loud. Resistance wants to keep us from success.

It’s a unique perspective on one reason we fail to perform as people.

I find it interesting how easily Pressfield’s anti-productivity theory translates over into Christianity and the concept of sin.

It’s not the individual acts of inappropriacy that are our problem before a moral God. Behind the sins lies sin, the faceless form of a resistance to God and His goodness that dwells in every human heart, whispering for them to choose not what’s best for them, but what is otherwise easiest, most fun, least taxing, least expensive, most distracting, most exhilarating, despite where it leaves them after the moment has past. In moral terms, though, the resistance found in sin is ultimately a resistance to love, and by extension, to life.

I don’t know if Pressfield related his concept of resistance to the idea of sin at all, but the two definitely share qualities. Both resistance and sin push us to abandon efforts, to give up on goals, to compromise our visions and expectations, and to dally in other, baser interests instead of spurring us on towards health, growth, accomplishment, and success. And both resistance and sin must be acknowledged as enemies and fought heavily to be overcome.

It’s not the distractions that keep you from writing well. It’s resistance.

It’s not the sins that keep you from living well. It’s sin.

Both thrive well when you ignore them, especially if they can make you think they don’t really exist. You have acknowledge and deal with each one of them, resistance and sin, to get past them.