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There are many different ways to frame the fundamental struggle of what it means to be human: trying to fulfill our potential. Science has the therapeutic model, in which some disease or condition must be cured and religion has the moral model, which says we must pay for our sins. However, there’s a third model, a much simpler one: the model of the amateur and the professional.
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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.
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The 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.
Sometimes it’s easier to be a professional in a shadow career than it is to turn pro in our real calling.
You can spend your whole life living a shadow career. But it’s turning pro in the craft of your calling that will bring you enduring fulfillment.
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Every addiction shares two qualities:
Amateurs are addicts; professionals are artists.
Amateurs use addiction (distractions, displacement activities, drugs, etc.) to run away from their calling, which is the obligation to become our truest and highest selves.
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Turning pro is a decision. It’s a decision to pursue your calling in the face of overwhelming fear. It’s a decision to structure your life to confront that fear day after day. It’s a decision to develop the habits that your professional craft requires. It’s a decision to wake up.
The pro mindset is a discipline that we use to overcome Resistance. To defeat the self-sabotaging habits of procrastination, self-doubt, susceptibility to distraction, perfectionism, and shallowness, we enlist the self-strengthening habits of order, regularity, discipline, and a constant striving after excellence.
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A Pro:
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Professionals follow a practice, which is “a rigorous, prescribed regimen with the intention of elevating the mind and the spirit to a higher level.” This is true for writers, yogis, bankers, and directors.
A practice has a few elements:
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Fear is the primary color of the amateur’s interior world. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of looking foolish, fear of under-achieving and fear of over-achieving, fear of poverty, fear of loneliness, fear of death.
Most importantly, the fear of being excluded from the tribe, i.e., the family, nation, race, religion.
The amateur fears that if he turns pro and lives out his calling, he will have to live up to who he really is and what he is truly capable of. The amateur is terrified that if the tribe should discover who he really is, he will be kicked out into the cold to die
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CURATOR'S NOTE
Enlightenment in a simple way.
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