Do the Work (7 page)
Authors: Steven Pressfield
Thanks to Seth, Ishita, Willie, and Michael for being the brains behind this project. Thanks to Shawn and Callie for being my comrades in the trenches. Thanks to Amazon for supplying the muscle.
And thanks to you who’ve read this, for taking yourself (and us) forward.
Books worth buying are books worth sharing. We hope you’ll find someone to give this copy to. You can find more about what we’re up to at
www.thedominoproject.com
.
Here are three ways you can spread the ideas in this manifesto:
- Hold a discussion group in your office. Get people to read the book and come in and argue about it. How open is your company to innovation and failure? What will you do if your competitors get better at it than you are?
- Give away copies. Lots of them. It turns out that when everyone in a group reads the same thing, conversations go differently.
- Write the names of some of your peers on the inside back cover of this book (or scrawl them on a Post-it on your Kindle). As each person reads the book, have them scratch off their name and add someone else’s.
We hope you’ll share.
In 1885, Vincent Van Gogh created this cover drawing,
Man with Hoe
, as a part of his life-long pursuit “to give happiness by creating beauty.” We at The Domino Project were drawn to this image because it represents the quiet strength of a person who actually does the work, regardless of glamour or crowds or the resistance. The drawing is also a reminder that there’s an artist within each of us, and we must encourage that artist to do the work, to make something that matters, regardless of anything else that is going on.
In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent shared this thought, “Blessed is he who has found his work.”
Perhaps he was talking about you.
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence
New York City, April 4, 1967
