Reading Steven Pressfield’s blog this week I came across a few great quotes and ideas from Erik Proulx on personal motivation.

Steven: Once you find the idea, how do you move forward? In what form does your personal kick in the butt arrive?

Erik: My friend Adam Kuhr told me about a JFK quote, and it pretty much sums up how I confront the Resistance:

“The Irish writer Frank O’Connor wrote how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside. When they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall—and then they had no choice but to follow them.”

Kennedy concluded,

“This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it.”

Here’s another about what got Erik motivated enough to make a movie after having been laid off:

Steven: When you decided to make “Lemonade,” you had just been laid off, and said “not doing it wasn’t an option.”
What drove you to knock down Resistance, leave your safety zone, and go after something that wasn’t a sure thing?

Erik: Catholic guilt. Let me explain.

I’m not a very devout churchman these days. As an adult, I’ve either come to question most of what I learned in Catholic school or simply dismissed it outright. But there was one lesson that always stuck with me, and it was when Sister Claire told our 4th grade class that we were all endowed with unique talents, and that wasting them was a sin in the eyes of God.

These are just two of many good quotes from Steven’s interview with Eric (full transcript here)

So the next time you find yourself looking for that little extra nudge, you can always burn the boats, or you try throwing your cap over the wall.