The War of Art

Matthew: Welcome to DevRel Book Club. My name is Matthew Revell.

Carmen: I'm Carmen Huidobro. Welcome very much and happy to be on once again to do another book club.

Matthew: So this week we'll bring him in a moment, but we are joined by Adam DuVander, who is someone you might have come across. Thanks to his book, developer Marketing does Not Exist, but this week we are not going to talk about Adam's book. We are going to talk about a book that has influenced him, and that book is The War of Art Carmen, should we bring Adam in to find out a bit more about him and the book that he's chosen?

Carmen: Yes, please. Very happy to have Adam join us today and tell us about the War of Art.

Matthew: Hey Adam, welcome to the DevRel Book Club. Hi.

Adam: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Matthew: So where are you joining us from today?

Adam: I am in Portland, Oregon on the west coast of the us.

Matthew: And you've been around in developer relations for quite some time with stints at SendGrid and Zapier, I think amongst other places, and now you run a developer content company.

Adam: Yes. So every developer we work with dev focused companies help them create a better technical content strategy.

Matthew: As someone whose day-to-day work is primarily around bringing together the creative with the technical, I think this is an interesting book to choose as your dev book club title. I'm keen to know how you came across this book and where you were in your career at the time. What problem were you looking to solve?

Adam: Yeah, and I should say first of all, that this is, someone asks me for a book recommendation. This is the one I go to when you asked about book club. It was the first one that popped into my head. I discovered the War of art at the exact moment that I needed it. I was maybe a month into writing a book, my first book, which was Map Scripting 1 0 1, about adding maps to your websites, Google Maps, API and an open source abstraction library. And I had that classic writer's block where, I mean, every time I went to type A sentence, I saw it printed in 5,000 copies In my head, that was what I saw and that kept me from actually making any progress on it. And so the War of Art is about overcoming feelings like that and being able to do the work that you're meant to do. And I think for DevRel who are watching this, that means all the DevRel activities that you do, very how rare the combination of skills are that you have.

And so finding a way to be able to put those forth in the way that we'll have the biggest impact, I mean, that's what I would wish for you. And so I read the War of Art now just about every year. I find the format with the short little bursts kind of easy to get through and kind of meditative. I can even just sit and kind of read one and think on it, or often I think I'll read one and I just end up flipping pages because it's kind of so consumable in that way. And so it gives me inspiration. I hope that if you choose to read it, and I know the two of you did that you look for those moments in it.

Matthew: It's worth saying that what you mentioned there about the book being, would it be too much to say they're like Cohens almost these little, and I'm going to give you an example here. This is an example page which you can just about see.

Carmen: Yeah, they're quite short.

Matthew: Yeah, there are shorter pages where it's giving you a few sentences on an aspect of the topic. And I think I understand what you're saying about flicking through it and just being able to almost use it as a jumping off point. Would that be fair?

Adam: Yeah.

Matthew: Yep. And in a

Carmen: Way it, oh, sorry.

Matthew: No, go ahead.

Carmen: I was just going to say it kind of feels like it allows you to also traverse it in any order you want, especially if you've got these specific sections that really speak to you, that you can really go there and use that as a jump, like Matt said, like a jumping off point.

Matthew: Yeah. So Steven Pressfield is an author of both fiction and factual works. You mentioned the phrase Do the Work. I think he's even got a book with a similar title to that, hasn't he? And I think this came about because he was in a stage of writers block himself and he started to write about the process that he was going through and he ended up with a whole load of notes and essentially asked editor to help him turn that into a cohesive story. And so that explains, I guess the format. But we can talk about the format as much as we want, but it's the content that we're here for. So I want to talk through, I feel as though there are two, I don't want to be reductive, but there are two key takeaways from the book, I think, and obviously Stephen Pressfield dives into them and expands upon them.

But the first is this concept of resistance. So we talk about writer's block or about procrastination, things like that. He calls it out as resistance. And for him, this is almost like a universal force like gravity. It's there. What does that concept of resistance mean to you as someone who has sat there desperately trying to forget the impact of what you're doing and just actually get on with the work?

Adam: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, going back to that time where I was working on the first book, reading through his definition of resistance, which you described the format takes, I don't know, 20 pages or something like that, right of 20 maxims or whatever about what resistance is. It was describing exactly my experience in that moment. And I also could tie it to other things that I had. You might call procrastination. I mean he talks about procrastination also separately, but that's one of the ways that it shows up. And so it is like you said, a force, the way he describes it. So this outside force, I'd say it's kind of conspiring against our noble pursuits.

And I'm not sure if that's exactly how he said it, but that's the way I get it. And I certainly for DevRel, there's lots of content production, so you could take this straight away as me writing a book. I didn't have to stretch to be able to get the points that he was making because he was writing about being an author. But he does say that it connects into many other fields. He talks about being an entrepreneur, anything you want to pursue. He talks about art a lot in it. And I mean we don't have to dive deep into sort of DevRel's art, but I think that would make a good topic for another day. I think there's a lot of things that would align there in a way that's the engineering side of DevRel doesn't as much though.

Certainly there are those that make the engineering as art argument as well. So yeah, there are, I think one of the big things for DevRel and to think about where resistance could show up is there are so many potential activities that you can do in DevRel and you know, can't do them all. But there are times probably where resistance is showing up, where you're off doing some time consuming activity that is certainly part of your job, could be considered part of your job, but might not be the noble pursuit, the one that you know need to do.

Matthew: And I think there are a couple of things that I would like to highlight. One is that developer relations is even still now in 2022, is still a role where we don't have a playbook a lot of the time. And so in devel there's this, I think the resistance comes from the idea that not only do you have to do the thing, but a lot of the time you feel like you have to work out from first principles how to do the thing. And then there's the idea that you don't always know how to measure the impact of what you're doing. And so you dunno how people will react. And I think that for me anyway, can be a real source of what Pressfield calls resistance. The one thing that he talks about is resistance being the sense that you can't make a start because you are almost self editing for what you might be producing further down the line. So you're so petrified of not creating something good that you create nothing at all.

Does that resonate with you?

Adam: It does. And I think that goes back to that seeing the printed book in my head as I was typing the very first draught blank documents, there's a lot of steps between that and a printed book. And maybe I didn't realise all of them at the time that I had an editor that was going to catch errors and folks that would make sure that the line that I pointed to in the code matched up with the reference that I made. All of those things. But I think what you're mentioning, the thinking through how are we going to track this and be able to point to this as a great success, those things are important things to think about at the beginning, making sure that you have some way to be able to do it, but not having that stop you from progress I think is kind of the core message of the war of art is that when you think of those things as things that stop you from action, that's probably a sign that there's some resistance in play there.

Carmen: And when I was reading this book, this very part, this very notion reminded me very strongly about, in my Devrel experience was my nerves with public speaking and how I would be very nervous about going up on stage or very nervous about proposing a talk because I felt a sort of something holding me back. And I called it nerves. And I had a conversation with lots of DevRel folks about, or public speakers in general about that nerves and how it manifests itself. And what one person told me that really resonated, resonated with me, and I felt it in the book as well, was this notion of you're nervous because you care. And if you can reframe that into excitement, you're excited because you care, because you want to do a good job. And I felt that very strongly with those things that we care about, those things that we love, those things that we are passionate about, the more the better a job we want to do it them. Yeah, it's going to be harder to start.

Adam: And he writes about fear in there, and that's probably the part that part of the book you're thinking of there and about how Henry Fonda apparently would be nervous before every performance throughout his whole career. And I've definitely felt, I've been there on the before, getting on stage feeling, and there's one in particular in my mind that I can remember watching maybe the two presentations before mine from the back of the event and thinking, I need to leave. I need to not be here. What would happen if I left? And really seriously considering that and thinking of that still as I was getting micd up and as I was backstage about to go and at some point there it flipped to, okay, it's actually harder for me to leave than it is for me to go out there and give a great presentation. I

Carmen: Feel you.

Adam: Yeah, I mean I've come up with ways to be able to do that better. A lot of that has to do with remembering that audience that is there and there are people in that audience who need to hear the message you have to deliver today. And going back to that as a way to be able to combat that feeling that I don't want to do it. Right.

Matthew: Before we move on to the solution to resistance, I want to dive into it a little bit more because I feel as though if you can put a name to something, then it helps, but then really getting to understand, put it into context is I think a way to help people start to recognise it. What does resistance feel like? So first unhappiness, we feel like hell, a low grade misery pervades everything. We are bored with restless, we can't get no satisfaction. For me, that kind of resonates with descriptions of burnout and depression as well. And he talks about depression somewhat as well. And I wonder if someone's feeling that way about their work in developer relations then it could be that they have this problem of resistance, but

Adam: Maybe not.

Matthew: You might have a good reason for feeling that way.

Adam: And I think some of the solution that he talks about are some of the ways to know whether it is resistance or not. If you have done what you can to be able to overcome this feeling and it's still there. This is me talking, maybe it's not resistance. I think that, and I bet we'll talk about this, Pressfield would take that further and maybe be a little less understanding. But I think there are definitely moments I have had them in roles that just weren't a fit for what I needed them to be, where I tried pretty dang hard and then realised that the problem wasn't me, it was that it was the fit. And so whether that is a role or whether it's another pursuit that you have right now, for sure, I'm one that takes some good from something that I read and am willing to forgive it the other thorns that it may have. So David Allen's getting things done. I have never created 43 folders in my drawer for the 31 potential days in a month, then the 12 months in a year, and organised everything that way.

I haven't done it in folders on my desktop either, but I have taken away things like you need to get the ideas out of your head so that they don't just keep rattling around that if there's something you can get done in two minutes, do it otherwise it goes on a task list. Those sorts of things I've taken from that book while not needing to take all of it. So I think that's the case here too, where yeah, look for the good that you can take from this. But yeah, it's not gospel and I bet Steven Pressfield would agree with that.

Carmen: Yeah, I think that context is the important part.

Matthew: So I'd love to dive into some of the slightly kookier parts of the book later, but I still feel like we haven't really tied down how to recognise resistance. So I think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes resistance type feelings might be actual depression or burnout or something else that you perhaps need to address, but if someone's working in a devra role and all other things being equal, I guess half the battle is just being aware that this is a thing that happens and that's okay and there are certain things you must do to overcome it.

Adam: Yeah, and I think procrastination is probably the easiest thing to use to describe kind of what it is when you see it. And that recognising that that's not one of the things that I like about it, about giving it this external name is that it's not some deficiency within you, it's that there's something that's attempting to stop you from that noble pursuit. He about, he calls it professionalism As a way to overcome that and to sort of the show up, show up, do the work. And that's where I think it is dangerous to say that that's the only thing to do that there could be a situation where resistance is not actually the enemy here, but I think you don't really know that until you feel like you've actually tried. And so that show up do the work is really, that's the simplified version of, I mean there are many pages that he goes into and like you said, another book called Do the Work, but it kind of comes down to that, and I think for us in DevRel it is looking for consistent progress on the things that are important. So now you have to identify the things that are important, but that consistent progress I think is the key piece. And going back to my writing the book, that was what I mean, obviously a book will never have printed words on it if you don't have a first draught. So at that moment, that was what I had to do and it wasn't helpful to think of the full breadth of that project

Carmen: And that whole part about showing up every day and doing the work. It also reminds me a lot of the community work we do or the personal branding work we do of showing up every day and being consistent about that. I like that that can kind of manifest itself in several different ways, be it in our DevRel work or other kind of work otherwise. So that really spoke to me

Adam: And I think that's good seeing it as all of those activities that it could be, it's not, doesn't have to just be writing. That definitely is how it usually shows up for me. But yeah, it's identifying those things that are important and really the important things done consistently are no matter what those things are going to be, where you're going to see larger results.

Matthew: Let's dive into professionalisation. Pressfield talks about maybe setting aside specific hours, that kind of thing. But for us in developer relations, this isn't, we are not writing the next great novel, which means that for most of us, we're getting paid in the context of a normal job. So professionalisation almost feels like, well, it comes with the territory, doesn't it?

Adam: Well, and I think he even says that, he says you're already professional in a lot of ways and sort of talks about if you have a job that maybe isn't your art, that you show up that you do the work. And so I guess maybe what you're saying is that the waters are a little muddied in that as dev, our art is our job, and certainly hours are much more inconsistent in Devre;, given that there might be events, there might be time zones, but I think to say that that means that you can't have any consistency, even a same time consistency is there's maybe another example of resistance that you're saying, oh, well, I mean schedule is so wacky that there's no way that I could carve time to do one thing at the exact same time every day. And I would argue that you probably still can, and maybe you don't hit it every day that you want to hit it, but you can still do it in the majority of the days would be my guess. For most people,

Matthew: It's a bias for doing that thing and you have to decide not to do it rather than the other way round.

Adam: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think that it can also work at different times. It doesn't have to be the same time. He definitely talks about the same time he talks about when does the muse show up at exactly 9:00 AM when you pull out the typewriter or something like that. But yeah, so I think that structure definitely for me, that structure works better when there's sort of a timeframe. But I think the biggest part is what you said, Matthew, about the bias toward doing it and making it that thing that you make the time for.

Matthew: As a younger person, I had a job for a while where I had to put pieces of metal into a machine and they came out covered in plastic, and that was an eight hour shift every day and you knew what you had to do, and at the end of it, it was done in developer relations. I still feel like there's this huge fear of the blank page, whether it's writing a blog post or giving a talk or even diving into a community and having to play that role and being the person who has the answers or at least has the map for where to go professionalisation. In that context then what are some practical guidances that the three of us can give to people who are feeling that, who are suffering with this external force of and want to use professionalisation as a means to overcome it?

Adam: First of all, I think that we don't have to be the ones with the answers. And some of that feeling itself can be, that's a little bit like imagining the completed book is that if you have to be the one with the answers, then that is in a moment where you don't have the answers, that can be intimidating. And so I think being okay to not be the one with the answers is a starting place there. I think the classic being okay with a rough draught or initial thoughts is another way, and I'm saying rough draught, which is a writing term, but that can be a presentation, that can be an answer to someone's question.

Matthew: This feeds really well. It's something that Ramon's been doing for a while now, which is the learning in public.

Carmen: Yeah, thank you. This is something that I feel pretty strongly about actually, this whole notion of giving ourselves a good reminder that we all have gaps in our knowledge. We all have places where we need to improve and we all need help with the things that eventually come out to be amazing. One thing I've been doing lately is just putting a call out there to be like, Hey, do you want to come on livestream with us and practise your talk? Or Hey, you want to, I'm actually doing a livestream pretty soon about helping somebody in DevRel write up a proposal for a talk and sort of showing that methodology online. And this is something that I find not just in DevRel but in most of tech areas, is having loads of experience doesn't mean that you can do everything on the first try. And that was something that was really eyeopening for me, especially when teaching programming, finding that me getting stuck and showing my problem solving methodology was far more valuable than the answer to the problem I was solving to the learners. And I feel like that's something that we can bring over to our daily work as well.

When people are starting up with public speaking, for example, and they're afraid of the q and a because they're scared that they might be asked a question that they don't know the answer to and how liberating it is to tell somebody, you don't have to have that answer.

Adam: And that feels like for someone who's paralysed in action, that should be freeing to be able to admit that you don't know it all, admit that something isn't perfect. And Matthew, I think at a couple of DevRelCons I've talked about planning contents and creating a content calendar, one of those, there's a couple of spots where I kind of gloss over what might be the hard work and I acknowledge that and say, write is the next step. You have to write this thing. And then one of them is click publish. And I think that that is often a huge barrier. Something might be essentially done and all it requires is that you click publish and yeah, there might still be some typos in it, and if it's a video, there might be something you say that where you sound foolish, but if you don't click publish on it, you won't get a chance to do the next one and you won't get a chance to find out what resonates with people about the one that you need to publish right now also. So that kind of, I find it's practising under editing, which might seem like the opposite of professionalism to some, which maybe is why that term might not fully work. That's why I think I like the sort of show up terminology better because under editing seems, oh, that's unprofessional.

But the reality is that you need to get those cycles in and that if you wait for the one perfect thing, you won't get a chance to do that.

Matthew: And perhaps there's something to be said for having a couple of people that you trust enough to show your work to at a stage where you're not confident in it.

Adam: That's its own click publish, right? I mean, so it's not published, but it's click share. Find some way to lower that barrier for you.

Carmen: I think one thing that's helped me a lot with that is to ask for feedback from my colleagues is kind of publishing. I'm publishing it to my colleagues and being like, Hey, what do you think? And I think once I reframe it less as me making myself vulnerable to my colleagues and potential to criticism, but rather to reframe it as sort of bouncing ideas, helping them mould really was really positive for me.

Matthew: There are some unusual aspects to this book that we really do have to just touch upon. I think if you're going to buy this book and read it, then you might wonder why we hadn't mentioned it if we didn't. And Pressfield takes quite a spiritual religious viewpoint. He goes to the extent of saying that if your creative endeavours are blocked, then that can lead to all sorts of outcomes that typically we would put down to bad luck or character flaws rather than saying that you didn't write your novels so you became a very bad person or got sick. Is that something that you're able to separate from the parts that you do draw value from?

Adam: Yeah, I do. And we touched on this a bit with the idea that you might actually have depression or you might be in a role that's a bad fit, that not everything is resistance. The thing that I don't like about the book is if I think one could get the message that you just need to try harder any problem in your life, it's because you didn't try hard enough. And that's not what I take away from it. I take away that you should examine the potential reasons and say maybe resistance is playing a role here. But there are some things then that he says that I certainly would not endorse, would not, I mean, even the forward author Says, the last third of the book, I don't really agree with this, but then he says, but these are the things that I take out of it. So he doesn't agree with the angels and the muse and he prefers a different interpretation of that, but he's able to still get some things out of it. And so Pressfield was when he was not writing novels and screenplays, he was in advertising.

And so I think one of the things is the what the ADHD is just a marketing term. It's possible that he actually believes that. I think it might also be a little bit of an exaggeration for effect, but as an ad man, I think he might actually believe some of that. Again, that doesn't have to mean that that's what we take from it. I think my statement there would be to think through resistance as a possible reason, but recognise that it might not be for everyone. Right. And he definitely has bold, gruff statements. I mean, one of his other books is called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit.

He's right there with those. So certainly those are in there.

Matthew: Yeah, well, I seem to recall something about the general notion being that if Hitler had been able to pursue his art, then perhaps he wouldn't have been one of the most evil psychopathic killers in history. And Hitler did a lot of paintings, so I feel as though he probably did get that out of his system. So there are some things that I think it's just worth, we mention this because if people go away and read this book as a result of us talking about it, they might be a little surprised at some of the content.

Adam: And that one in particular, he does say this might be an overstatement. And I think it sounds like the three of us would say to Steven Pressfield, yes, you're right, overstatement might be an understatement.

Carmen: I have to admit, when I was reading this book, there were some of these statements that were quite provoking that I had to sort of stop and take a step back. And if I were to give, I would go as far as to give somebody a heads up that there are some statements in this book that are, I dunno if problematic is the right word, but definitely something to look out for because they kind of come out of nowhere.

Adam: And you mentioned that I reread it, so you would think that I would come upon those often. I think one of the positive things about the format of the short bits is that you can kind of turn the page and see what's next and choose to kind of ignore that. And I think that's probably what I've done, given that it didn't actually occur to me until we were talking about that, that there were some of these things that you probably should give people a heads up on. So I appreciate that because it's a book I recommend often, so now I can remember that there are some caveats to that.

Carmen: And I think giving a heads up of those caveats, I think is the best way to go about it, because it allows us to bear in mind that of what to expect going in. Because like you said, there are definitely, ever since we've been talking about this today, I've been thinking about that sort of separation of the good parts of the book that we can take away. And I think that's really important to bear in mind. Thank you.

Adam: We can use that in our own work also. And acknowledging, I mean, those are, I would think Steven Pressfield's opinions and that we also might have opinions about technologies we use and other tools that might also seem controversial in some circles. I think it's okay to share those because those are your opinions, but recognising that no one has to take gospel from anyone

Matthew: In developer relations. It is a creative field. There's a lot of technology in it, but also there's a lot of filling that blank page, whatever form that might take. As humans, we are naturally disposed to or subject to a force that makes it more difficult to achieve those creative endeavours. And the solution to that is just to get on with it.

Adam: In the third part, in addition to talking about angels and muses, he talks about the ego and the self as separate things, and that when you look at them as too connected, that that can keep you from that noble pursuit. Right? That's a little bit of what you were saying there of worried too much about the outcome is really about your ego potentially, but then to those that have listened this far, chances are the activity that you'd like to do more of. And so really the takeaway would be to try making that time for it and find ways to identify the barriers that aren't real, because there are barriers that are real and there are definitely barriers that are imagined. And so how can you find those imagined ones that, when removed, make it that much easier for you to consistently pursue that activity, you know, want to do.

Carmen: I think that that sort of balance and prioritisation of what we want to do and how we approach that in a way that is healthy and balanced is something that I would say also is an important takeaway for folks. And when it comes to having these conversations and reading these sorts of things, this is something that I'm actually trying to do in my day-to-Day as well, is to sort of tear down that barrier and tell everybody, Hey, this is the transparency behind what I'm doing, how I can do it. My day job role is part-time that I use the rest of my time to do the other things I want to do. So it's not like I'm working on weekends. I learned a long time ago, and by a long time ago, I mean not that long ago, that you're not supposed to work on weekends because it's not sustainable. And I think having that as a reminder on the day to day is really important, and I appreciate that we can have this conversation.

Matthew: And the crux, I think of the whole conversation is that it's for each of us individually to be able to find those examples of where it's an internal hurdle we have to overcome versus something that perhaps needs some more reflection.

Adam: There's a reason why I read it every year, it's that it reminds me that it is hard, but that it's worth that pursuit.

Matthew: Cool. Well, Adam, thank you so much for sharing the War of Art with us. Where can people find out more about you and ever read developer and your book?

Adam: Yeah, well, every developer.com is a good place to find the book and find me, and also on Twitter at Adamd.