Quotes from Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work

When you turn pro, your life gets very simple. The Zen monk, the artist, the entrepreneur often lead lives so plain they're practically invisible.

To follow a calling requires work. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure.

Turning pro is like kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking. It's a decision, a decision to which we must re-commit every day.

When we project a quality or virtue onto another human being, we ourselves almost always already possess that quality, but we're afraid to embrace (and to live) that truth.

The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.

Each individual is so caught up in his own bullshit that he doesn't have two seconds to worry about yours.

When we're living as amateurs, we're running away from our calling - meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves.

There's not a big difference between an artist and an addict. What's the difference? The addict is the amateur; the artist is the professional.

The professional refuses to be iconized. Not for selfish reasons, but because he knows how destructive the dynamic of iconization is to the iconizer.

Each day, the professional understands, he will wake up facing the same demons, the same Resistance, the same self-sabotage, the same tendencies to shadow activities and amateurism that he has always faced. The difference is that now he will not yield to those temptations. He will have mastered them, and he will continue to master them.