Putting In the Effort to Become a Professional Life Liver

What do you think about when I say the words “you’re an amateur at living life?”

Think about that for a moment.

From Pressfield (emphasis added):

When we hate our lives and ourselves, two models present themselves as modes of salvation. The first is the therapeutic model. In the therapeutic model, we are told (or we tell ourselves ) that we are “sick.” What ails us is a “ condition ” or a “ disease.” The second way is the moralistic model. The moralistic model is about good and evil. The reason we are unhappy, we are told (or tell ourselves) is that we have done something “ wrong.” We have committed a “crime” or a “sin.”

We’ve established two potential outcomes for how we’ll treat ourselves if we’re not where we want to be in life or aren’t good at something we wish we were good at. That sound like a pretty noob way of thinking. The ultimate goal should be not to knock down but to hack and slash the crap away. In turn:

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.

That’s the end goal but it won’t happen overnight.

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?

The words of a quitter… are you a quitter? I sure as s–t am not. There are days when I feel like I should just give up but I never do because that’s me looking for an easy way out and not finding one. There’s never an easy way out of life. This includes suicide. That’s not an easy way out. There’s nothing easy about leaving your friends, family, and the world behind forever. There’s no such thing as a random act of suicide.

The biggest driver of turning pro is ambition. Without it, failure is imminent.