Turning Pro

The thesis of this book is that what ails you and me has nothing to do with being sick or being wrong. What ails us is that we are living our lives as amateurs. The solution, this book suggests, is that we turn pro. Turning pro is free, but it’s not easy. You don’t need to take a course or buy a product. All you have to do is change your mind. (Page 15)

We pass through a membrane when we turn pro. It hurts. It’s messy and it’s scary. We tread in blood when we turn pro. Turning pro is not for everyone. We have to be a little crazy to do it, or even to want to. In many ways the passage chooses us; we don’t choose it. We simply have no alternative. What we get when we turn pro is, we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and to live out. (Page 15)

Do you remember where you were on 9/ 11? You’ll remember where you were when you turn pro. (Page 15)

It took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that I had ambition. I felt guilty about it. Who was I to aspire to “rise above” my brothers and sisters or to aim to be “better” than anybody else? (Page 17)

To find that house and to move into it was my first act, as an adult, that embraced the idea of ambition. (Page 18)

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence. (Page 18)

That cat looked at me as if he was trying to decide whether or not to kick my ass. (Page 19)

What was really happening in that house in the country? What was happening was I was hiding. In the back of my Chevy van, under piles of junk and rusting spare parts, sat my ancient Smith-Corona typewriter. Why didn’t I throw it away? I certainly wasn’t using it. Fear and shame hung over me and over that house, just as they permeated every crack and cranny of the halfway house back in town. I was terrified of sitting down at that Smith-Corona and trying to write something, and ashamed of myself because I knew I was terrified, but I was still too scared to act. My ambition was to write, but I had buried it so deep that it only peeked out in dreams and moments of insight that appeared at odd instants and then vanished without a trace. Everything I was doing in my outer life was a consequence and an expression of that terror and that shame. (Page 20)

Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we ‘ll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us. (Page 21)

Are you working in a support capacity for an innovator because you’re afraid to risk becoming an innovator yourself? If you’re dissatisfied with your current life, ask yourself what your current life is a metaphor for. (Page 21)

My shadow career (I’ve had more than one) was driving tractor-trailers. In my late twenties and early thirties, I drove trucks for a living. I drove up and down the East Coast out of Durham, North Carolina, and later cross-country, based out of Seaside, California. I was in deadly earnest and committed 100% to making my life as an over-the-road trucker. What I was really doing was running away from writing. (Page 22)

Then there was the romance of “the road.” I loved the road because it always took you somewhere. You were never stuck in one place. Delivering a load to a factory or a warehouse, I could hang with the locals and shoot the breeze—but I always knew that, while they were trapped, I was free. In a few minutes I’d be clear of town and rolling down the highway. Of course this was all self-delusion. The road was taking me nowhere. 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. (Page 23)

Before we begin ruthlessly deconstructing the amateur life, let’s pause for a moment to give it its due. The amateur life is our youth. It’s our hero’s journey. No one is born a pro. You’ve got to fall before you hit bottom, and sometimes that fall can be a hell of a ride. So here’s to blackouts and divorces, to lost jobs and lost cash and lost self-respect. Here’s to time on the street. Here’s to years we can’t remember. Here’s to bad friends and cheating spouses—and to us, too, for being guilty of both. (Page 24)

When I was in high school, I read a book by Jack Kerouac called On The Road. The book blew my brains out. The “beat,” bohemian life that Kerouac described was, I thought, the coolest, most romantic thing I had ever heard of. I loved the idea of traveling around the country, working jobs and meeting people and submerging yourself in “real life.” A lot of other kids read that book and thought the same thing. But very few were dumb enough to actually try to live it. Again, I was getting the writer’s life confused with real life. (Page 25)

In the shadow life, we live in denial and we act by addiction. We pursue callings that take us nowhere and permit ourselves to be controlled by compulsions that we cannot understand (or are not aware of ) and whose outcomes serve only to keep us caged, unconscious and going nowhere. (Page 26)

The shadow life, the life of the amateur and the addict, is not benign. The longer we cleave to this life, the farther we drift from our true purpose, and the harder it becomes for us to rally the courage to get back. (Page 26)

This book is about habits. The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habits. The human being is a creature of habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones. (Page 28)

Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work. It’s hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure. (Page 30)

When you turn pro, your life gets very simple. The Zen monk, the artist, the entrepreneur often lead lives so plain they’re practically invisible. (Page 31)

The artist and the professional, on the other hand, have turned a corner in their minds. They have succeeded in stepping back from themselves. They have grown so bored with themselves and so sick of their petty bullshit that they can manipulate those elements the way a HazMat technician handles weapons-grade plutonium. They manipulate them for the good of others. (Page 32)

Turning pro is an act of self-abnegation. Not Self with a capital-S, but little-s self. Ego. Distraction. Displacement. Addiction. When we turn pro, the energy that once went into the Shadow Novel goes into the real novel. What we once thought was real—“ the world,” including its epicenter, ourselves—turns out to be only a shadow. And what had seemed to be only a dream becomes, now, the reality of our lives. (Page 32)

When we can’t stand the fear, the shame, and the self-reproach that we feel, we obliterate it with an addiction. The addiction becomes the shadow version, the evil twin of our calling to service or to art. That’s why addicts are so interesting and so boring at the same time. They’re interesting because they’re called to something—something new, something unique, something that we, watching, can’t wait to see them bring forth into manifestation. At the same time, they’re boring because they never do the work. Instead, the addict enacts his aspiration in shadow form. The addiction becomes his novel, his adventure, his great love. The work of art or service that might have been produced is replaced by the drama, conflict, and suffering of the addict’s crazy, haunted, shattered life. (Page 34)

Note: Enter: playstation

Robert McKee, in his story seminars, testifies that the essential quality in a fictional protagonist—i.e., the hero in a book or a movie—is that he or she must possess the passion and the will to push the story to the limits of human experience in order to achieve their goal. (Otherwise there would be no story.) This heroic monomania is also the definition of the addict. The lush or the junkie will sell her own mother to score the substance she is jonesing for. (Page 35)

Addictions and shadow careers are messages in a bottle from our unconscious. Our Self, in the Jungian sense, is trying to get our attention, to have an intervention with us. The question we need to ask of a shadow career or an addiction is the same question the psychotherapist asks of a dream. “What is our unconscious trying to tell us?” (Page 36)

Note: Gjhz

The term “pulling the pin” comes from the old days of riding the rails. To uncouple one car from another, the train crew pulled a heavy steel pin out of the coupling mechanism. In migrant lingo, pulling the pin meant quitting. You’d wake up and the bunk next to you would be empty. “What happened to Jim?” “He pulled the pin.” I could relate to pulling the pin. I pulled the pin on my first book, 99.9% of the way through. I pulled the pin on my marriage. I had never done anything in my life to that point where I hadn’t pulled the pin. I was determined, now, NOT to pull the pin. (Page 38)

The life we call “normal” isn’t normal at all. A spouse and kids, a mortgage, a 9-to-5 job... who said that was life? What’s so great about working in a factory or a cubicle? You and I, who are artists and entrepreneurs, live a life that’s closer to natural, if you ask me. We migrate, too. We follow the Muse instead of the sun. When one crop is picked, we hit the road and move on to the next. It’s a not a bad life. It’s lonely. It’s tough. It ain’t for everyone. But, like the life of a migrant on the road, it has its compensations. (Page 40)

Something that’s boring goes nowhere. It travels in a circle. It never arrives at its destination. The repetitive nature of the shadow life and of addiction is what makes both so tedious. No traction is ever gained. No progress is made. We’re stuck in the same endlessly-repeating loop. That’s what makes addiction like hell. All addictions share, among others, two primary qualities. 1. They embody repetition without progress. 2. They produce incapacity as a payoff. (Page 42)

The epiphany is everything. When we see the gaping holes in our practice (or discover that we have no practice at all), no one has to school us in time management or resource allocation. We know what we have to do. (Page 114)