Book Review: Do The Work

Lately, I've been doing 4-5 books in parallel. A book in the gear bag, a book on the night table, one floating around the house, one on the iPad, and something lightweight on the phone.

The latter of these, my pick for the iphone, needn't be lightweight in sense of subject matter, but rather for phone use I tend favor books digestible in short chunks. Books by Seth Godin, Hugh McLeod or Guy Kawasaki come to mind. It was in this vein that I came across Do the Work by Steven Pressfield and thought I'd add it to my reading list.

I was really rather disappointed by the book.

It's a sort of motivational book about execution, and pushing through resistance (outside and self-inflicted) to complete creative works.

While this is a topic that can help many, the problem is that the book doesn't have a lot of substance to it. Unlike Godin, who draws many on-point analogies from experience, or McCleod's ability to cut through to tell-it-like-it-is fact, Pressfield's book is filled with labored rhetoric, repetitive truisms and the like.

I didn't find it of much use. YMMV.

Do the Work