Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be

A NOTE TO THE READER

Who is this book for? What sort of person is a book called Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be for?

It’s for writers and artists and actors and Instagram chefs and podcasters and filmmakers and choreographers and videogame creators and every kind of entrepreneur—­whether your game is startups or nonprofits or your new Thai fusion restaurant.

In other words, it’s for everyone who is on their own in business or the arts. And for everyone who wants to be on their own, who dreams of being on their own.

We all know how hard it is to write a book, make a movie, or create a new business. Powerful forces line up against us—­obstacles to entry, rivals, competitors, finances, funding, the difficulty of the craft itself.

But the most formidable antagonist of all resides inside each of our own skulls. I’m talking about that negative force I call Resistance with a capital R.

What is Resistance? It’s our own tendency—­yours and mine and everyone’s—­to yield to procrastination, self-­doubt, fear, impatience, self-­inflation, self-­denigration, distraction, laziness, arrogance, complacency, and perfectionism. It’s our inability to focus, our incapacity to press on through adversity. It’s our terror of finishing and exposing our work to the judgment of the marketplace. It’s fear of failure. It’s fear of success. Fear of humiliation. Fear of destitution. It’s our inability to defer gratification, to acquire and act with self-­discipline, self-­validation, and self-­reinforcement.

Resistance is our tendency to self-­sabotage, fail to start, and fail to finish. In its most extreme forms, Resistance expresses itself as vice and even crime—­abuse of ourselves or others, cruelty, addiction to substances, diva-­ism, compulsive self-­dramatization, self-­aggrandizement and self-­diminishment.

How do we defeat this monster that lives inside all of us and never tires, never loses strength, never takes a day off, and is endlessly ruthless and protean and subtle and clever and diabolical in the ways it can set snares for us and bring our most noble and brilliant aspirations to nothing? How do we get past this force called Resistance and set ourselves on the path to achieve our dreams?

The title of this book, as we said, is Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be.

That, in nine words, is my answer. It’s the simplest and most direct way to get up in the morning and do our work . . . and to lie down at night feeling at peace with ourselves, knowing for this one day at least we have defeated our demons and moved twenty-­four hours closer to living the True Self and Best Self we were born to be.

Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be may sound glib and superficial at first, but believe me, its implications are profound and its applications universal. We’ll start, in this book, with the purely physical interpretation—­ass, meaning body, our flesh-­and-­blood presence. But as the chapters unfold, we’ll take the subject deeper and deeper, into the psychological, the emotional, the metaphorical, and even the spiritual dimensions of this principle.

Let’s begin.

Book One

PUT YOUR ASS WHERE YOUR HEART WANTS TO BE

Chapter 1

PUT YOUR ASS WHERE YOUR HEART WANTS TO BE

Let’s start with the most obvious interpretation of this axiom. (We’ll go deeper in succeeding chapters.)

What do we mean by ass? In the first-­level interpretation, the word means body. Our physical presence. When we say, Put your ass where your heart wants to be, we mean station your physical body in the spot where your dream-­work will and must happen.

Want to write? Sit down at the keyboard.

Wanna paint? Step up before the easel.

Dance? Get your butt into the rehearsal studio.

Dumb and obvious as it sounds, tremendous power lies in this simple physical action.

When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best?

If I’ve done that, then I’ve put my butt where my heart wants to be. I can’t ask anything of myself more than that.

Chapter 2

FEAR

What keeps us from writing or dancing or painting? If the process is as straightforward as we just described it, what’s the big hang-­up? Why doesn’t everyone do it?

In one four-­letter word: FEAR.

Yes, we’re terrified to begin our eight-­hundred-­page Elizabethan family saga. When we sit over our morning coffee thinking about it, our palms sweat. Our heart