Read “Do the Work” by Steven Pressfield

I recently finished reading Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work and it is a fantastic book. He addresses resistance, how we all have it, and how it is resistance that must be overcome in order to realize our hopes and dreams. Only he does not give you some feel good self-help bullshit advice. He gives you a battle plan to overcome resistance with.

If you want to make something happen in your life this is the book for you. If you want someone else to make something happen in your life save yourself the seven bucks. Pressfield makes it clear that you have only yourself to blame if you do not do the work until the project is completed, and that means that you shipped the project knowing that you did everything you could to achieve excellence with it regardless of the results.

Gamemasters should definitely read this book, because we all have talked about a game that we were planning to run but never did. A game that we failed to ship. A game that we did not do the work for, and thus our personal and unique genius was selfishly kept from the world. Read this book if you are a GM and keep it close at hand whenever you are doing your prep work. It will become your prep work manifesto!

Plus it has some great advice that can be applied to the art of GMing very easily despite Pressfield having written the book from the perspective of being a writer. Again, his advice can be applied to anything as it is really about what an individual must do to turn any idea into a reality, but I think that for GMs this book instantly converts into motivational and inspirational gold!

This book is art, it is about creating one’s own art, and it is about not listening to what others tell you art is. It is only 98 pages long, but this book makes every one of those 98 pages count!

Buy it, borrow it, beg for it, but as long as you do not steal it read this book!