The War of Art

I recently read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It's a book about overcoming creative blocks and other factors that prevent you from being creative, called Resistance.

I found it to be an entertaining, quick read (~2 hours). I didn't actually find it as useful as I was expecting. I originally bought it to try to get past some blocks, but I overcame them naturally. In fact, at one point I was procrastinating so much that I thought about reading this book, rather than doing anything else -- and that spurred me to stop procrastinating and just do something. One of the key ideas in the book is that by just starting something, you will overcome the blocks.

At a few points the author talked about difficult parts of his life, which seemed to be key to him forming his idea of Resistance (in all its manifestations). I felt there wasn't quite enough detail at these points (and there isn't much more on his website). It would have been useful to understand his journey. That said, it didn't really detract from the presentation of the ideas.

A lot of the ideas in this book are quite simple. But it's easy to lose track of them, when you are being distracted. And the book contains some good quotes. So I think I would turn to this book, if I were in the middle of a creative funk.

Syndicated 2007-09-08 12:32:34 (Updated 2007-09-08 12:34:04) from richdawe