Grace Under Pressure

The Great Gatsby was a commercial failure when it was published in 1925. F. Scott Fitzgerald was tight on money and depressed so his new friend Ernest Hemingway helped him out. He not only asked his publisher to send all of his royalty checks to Fitzgerald but also gave him some advice. He said he needed more than just the sheer will to keep going. He needed “grace under pressure. Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers.”

Grace under pressure… What does that look like?

The Growth Of Our Soul

You know the type of fear that slowly works its way into your body? Not the kind that shocks you, like when something unexpected happens in a movie. But the kind that takes its time. Spreading like an infection. Preventing you from doing what you know that you really need to do. The author Steven Pressfield calls this type of fear “Resistance.”​

“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”

The fear is gripping you for a reason. It’s wrapped itself around an important piece of you. it’s a roadmap.

You’re Good Enough

You work really hard, you’re carefully guarding your time, you’re creatively approaching the problems you’re facing, you’re technically improving. But now what? Shouldn’t that be enough? The performance psychologist at West Point Dr. Nate Zinsser would say no.

“The ‘work’ that you have done only has practical value if you conclude from it all that you’re good enough to do what you have to do…Making that decision initiates a most crucial internal mental shift—transitioning from an attitude of building yourself up and acquiring skill/knowledge/capability, to an attitude of releasing or letting go of everything that you have built up.”

Last week was full of guts, self-doubt, and late nights. Gotta focus on grace next week.

Talk to you then,

Dawson

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