Rhoneisms

As I said in my review of the book, Turning Pro is an essential message for anyone ready to take the next step. Those who are currently living an amateur life or toiling away in a shadow career and are on the verge of staking everything they have, doing the work, and devoting it all to their passions and the dreams.

Is this you?

Are you a writer but working in a cubicle job to pay the bills? Are you an artist but working in tech support because you don’t think your work will sell? Are you looking to be your own boss instead of being bossed around?

Are you ready to do the work? Work that is purposeful and authentic? Work that is true to who you are and the offerings you wish to make to this world?

Then you need this book.

I have two copies to give away to the people that need it most. To find them, I have assembled a panel — Myself (Professional Author and Essayist), Shawn Blanc (Professional Writer and Technology Pundit), and Myke Hurley (Professional Podcast Producer). We all know what it takes to turn pro and what the life before is like. We all know what it takes to fight the resistance and fear and to take that next step.

Here is how we will do this:

• Pros have a plan and we want to hear yours. Send an email via this link and explain where you are in your work life right now and how you plan on Turning Pro.

• Emails will be accepted until one week from today (June 20th, 2012 — June 27, 2012). Any coming past this date will be automatically deleted.

• The panel will review those entries and notify both winners via email reply to their entry by July 1st, 2012. In this reply I will request shipping information for the book and will send it out that week.

OK. Got it? Do you need this? Are you ready for it? Let me know.



Turning Pro is the new book by Steven Pressfield, author of War of Art and Do The Work. In fact, I would argue that together, read in order, the three make a cohesive whole. Turning Pro is an essential followup to those previous works and answers any question of “Now what?” the first two books may have left.

That “now what?” is this: The time for amateur hour is over. You have made excuses for too long. It is now time to change. Time to pull the pin and release yourself from the train of other people’s expectations and desires. Time to ride the rails that only you can put down in front of you. Time to go pro.
I counted those earlier works among my favorites and essential to artists and creatives who wanted to break past the fear, self-doubt, and blocks we face daily to get to the hard work of doing.
For a writer like myself, that means having a routine and carving out space and time that is sacred for the task. Write every day. Because the muse only shows up for those that are at the same time and place, every day. That, anything else is not the work. Anything else is a hobby.
Even though I subscribed to many of the principles set forth already, even though I am a published author, even though I took much of what was laid out in his first two books to practice, this book was a wake up call for me.
If you are an artist or creator of any stripe, you need this book. If you are one who is stuck in a shadow career working on someone else’s job, you need this book. And, if you are a professional who thinks you have it all figured out, you really need this book.
Even more so, you need to give this book to anyone you know who you feel is in any of those places. I was only a quarter of the way in before I came up with a short list of people who I knew would benefit from it greatly (and sent it to them as a gift). Then, even after I had already purchased it and started to dig in, I received several emails from other trusted friends of mine telling me they were only part way through but could not wait to tell me to go and get it. Therefore, do yourself a favor and get the paperback. This is one to highlight, mark up the margins, and pass around.

My presentation at Ignite Minneapolis 2012.

Many of us tend to mark our relationships based upon a place, experience, or time period they began. For instance, I have friends I have known since high school. Others that began at past jobs. Still others are tied to events. For instance, I met my wife when her computer broke through a mutual friend who called on me for help.
These marks also infer a relative timeline for the length of the relationship and, sometimes, even its depth. If I tell you about my friend Dan who I have known since high school, that automatically tells you I have known him for a fairly long time. You might even infer that the relationship was a close one if we are still friends after all these years.
If I tell you about a guy I used to work with a particular company, and you also know that this company closed in the late 1990’s, you now know I have known him for a bit more than 10 years and, once again, if we are still in touch it must have been a relationship of some meaning.
We have so many more places we are now. For example, I have friends on Twitter that I have known since we met on Jaiku. I can use that now departed social network as a place – a point of first contact – as any other. Saying this, you know roughly how long I have known them in that context. And what does the fact that we remain friends infer? Perhaps one might guess that we followed each other to this new network after the other one died to maintain that connection.
I’m sure some of us have a few friends that we know from, say, Facebook that are not on Twitter so we maintain a presence on both. Still other relationships can blossom in online forums or blogs that we frequent and comment on.
I wonder if will one day, many years from now, I’ll be able to say, “I’ve known her since Twitter” and have that impart the same sort of immediate understanding of length and importance as high school does?
All of this is to say that these virtual places are as much a point of beginning and ending as those we have long-held in the real world. And, just like school or business or events, these virtual places begin and end, open and close, occur and stop. Yet, as well, the connections and relationships are what remain and the strongest transcend.