Books Like
The War of Art

If you liked The War of Art, the closest books are Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield, The Practice by Seth Godin, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, You Are Capable of More by Chris Sund, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, and Finish by Jon Acuff. Pressfield’s own sequel is the right next read, and it is the better book.

What Pressfield gave you and what he did not

Pressfield names something most people have felt for years without a word for it. Resistance is the force that shows up the moment you sit down to do work that matters, and his sharpest claim is that its strength is a measurement rather than a warning, because the more important the work is to you, the harder it pushes. Whatever you are most avoiding is probably the thing.

The book is short, it reads like a series of blows, and the diagnosis is close to perfect. The prescription is one sentence long. Sit down and work anyway. Which is true, and which is why so many people finish The War of Art feeling briefly invincible and then find themselves back at the same desk on Thursday having done nothing.

The other thing worth saying plainly is that the last third turns mystical, with muses and unseen forces and angels on your side. Some readers love it. Many put the book down there and never picked the argument back up, which is a shame, because the first two thirds are as good as this category gets.

One

Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield

His own follow-up, less famous and considerably more useful. The War of Art tells you what is stopping you. Turning Pro is about the shift that gets you past it, which he frames not as effort but as identity, moving from someone who does the work when conditions allow to someone for whom the work is simply what they do.

The chapters on shadow careers land hard. His argument is that most people who are not doing the work they want are doing an adjacent version of it that carries no risk, and once you have read that you will start noticing it everywhere, including in yourself. Pair it with Do the Work, which is even shorter and reads as a companion.

Two

The Practice by Seth Godin

The same message in a completely different temperature. Pressfield writes like a drill sergeant, and Godin writes like someone who has decided the drama itself is part of the problem. His position is that you ship the work on a schedule, you detach from whether any particular piece is good, and you trust the practice rather than the outcome.

Read this if Pressfield’s combat framing left you exhausted. It is two hundred and nineteen short entries, and it makes doing the work feel ordinary rather than heroic, which for most people is the more sustainable position.

Three

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Nominally a book about writing and actually a book about doing anything difficult while your own mind is working against you. The title comes from her brother, ten years old, paralyzed by a report on birds he had months to write and had not started, and their father telling him to take it bird by bird.

Lamott’s chapter on first drafts is the antidote to the perfectionism Pressfield only glances at. Where he hardens you, she forgives you, and a lot of people who bounced off The War of Art for being too severe find this one gets them working.

Five

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

The closest thing to The War of Art in form, built from short chapters that work more like meditations than arguments, from a producer who has spent forty years in rooms with people trying to make something.

It goes further into the mystical than Pressfield does, so if the muses lost you, this one will lose you sooner. If that was the part you liked best, this is your next book, and Rubin’s observations about how strongly the environment governs whether the work happens are genuinely useful.

Six

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

Short enough to read standing up, and it attacks a specific form of Resistance the others leave alone, which is the belief that you have to be original before you are allowed to begin. Kleon’s answer is that nothing is original, everything is built on what came before, and waiting for a wholly new idea is simply a permanent excuse.

Slight compared to the rest of this list, and the right book for someone who is stuck at the very start rather than stuck in the middle.

Seven

Finish by Jon Acuff

The least mystical thing here and the most immediately usable. Acuff’s finding is that perfectionism does its worst damage not at the start but on the first day you fall short of the plan, because that is the day people quit.

His fix is deliberately unromantic. Cut the goal in half, choose what you are willing to be bad at, and make the work easier rather than more virtuous. Pressfield would probably call that surrender. It also works. There is a fuller list on books like Finish if that is the direction you want.

Which one to pick

If you want one, read Turning Pro. It is the book The War of Art was setting up, and the shadow career chapter alone is worth the afternoon.

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