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Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. The all new five year business boost from Comcast Business it's the certainty of a price lock for five years on qualifying Internet bundles plus the most reliable WI fi with their best equipment. And ask about a $500 prepaid card when you add two lines of mobile. The five year business boost only from Comcast Business powering possibilities ends 22226 new customers only one year contract required for guaranteed rate. Five year pricing applies to monthly service charge excluding taxes and fees. Best Wi Fi based on open signal awards USA fixed broadband experience report May 2025 There's a moment in every meaningful career, especially in business, where talent stops being the problem, ideas are not the problem, access is not the problem, and the real issue becomes something much harder to face. You're still an amateur, and that's what this episode's all about. That's why today's must read episode is Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. This book is not about tactics. It's not about hacks, it's not about a fast track to success. It's not even about creativity. It's actually about identity. And once you understand what Pressfield is saying in this book, you'll never look at your work the same again. Today I want to share with you the core idea from this book, my favorite takeaways, and why you should read it. I find that Steven Pressfield's work in general is very thought provoking, but this book in particular, especially if you've been at this online business thing for a couple of years and you're kind of stuck, you're going to find a lot of value in it. So let's get into it. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA show I'm your host, Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. The core idea of this book is that Steven Pressfield draws a hard line between two identities and amateur and professional. This isn't about skill level. It's about how you show up to what you do. The amateur, for example, waits for motivation, works when they feel like they're inspired or feels right. They get derailed by something that happens in the day, their mood, a fear, a distraction. They treat the work very closely to like they treat a hobby. The professional, on the other hand, shows up no matter what. They work on a schedule, and they treat their craft with the utmost respect. They do the work even when it's boring, when it's uncomfortable, and when it's hard. And they do the work especially when it's scary. Professionals, in my opinion, don't wait for confidence. Confidence comes after action, and this is why I love this book. It really drills this home. This is why so many people feel stuck for years. They keep trying to feel like a professional before acting like one. That's backwards. You gotta act like a professional, and then you'll start feeling like a pro. One of the most powerful ideas in this book that I want to share with you is this idea that turning pro is not something that happens to you. It's something that you decide. And once you make that decision, from that moment on, you're a professional. This is not a ceremony or some sort of promotion or external validation or some sort of award you're given. No. You wake up one day and say to yourself, this matters enough to me to take it through so, so seriously. I need to be pretty much obsessed with what my work is all about. With my craft, with my business, with what I'm trying to build. From that moment on, you stop negotiating with yourself. You stop waiting for permission. You just start doing, because that's what you decided to do. You stop dabbling and you start focusing. You don't need to be perfect, but you do need to be committed. And that's the big differentiator here. You're committed for the long haul to do what you want to do, to do this pursuit, to build this business, to create this product, to build this brand, whatever it might be for you. This is why people can be working on something for five years or so and still be in the same place and they never turn pro. This book really resonated with me because I saw my own journey as an entrepreneur in the early days when I was really just an amateur thinking I was pro, but really I wasn't committed. I wasn't fully 100% making it a part of my identity. And the funny thing is, is that I'm finding that every 10 years or so you evolve to a different level of pro. So even now I am making the decision to go pro in a new endeavor that I'm doing here in my business, like going pro on video, making sure that we're creating incredible video content for our audience. So this is something that you have to consider and do over and over in your career. It's not just once and done. Now, Steven Pressfield in this book talks about the concept of the resistance. And this is something that he mentioned in his other book, the War of Art, which I did a must read episode on as well, because it's just a great book. But the concept of resistance is so important. It's the real enemy that's standing in your way of your success. Resistance isn't just procrastination. It's actually quite sneaky. It shows up in different ways that you might not recognize. And at the end of the day, what it does is stops you from progress. So what are some ways they show up in a sneaky way? Number one, resistance can look like perfectionism. It could also look like over planning, over researching, endless learning without execution. I just need one more course before I get started and start building. I'll start when things start to calm down in my life. This is the resistance. This is the stuff that stops you from moving forward and being a professional. The funny thing is that the resistance is super, super sneaky. Like I mentioned, it doesn't tell you to quit. It actually tells you to delay. It distracts you. What I learned from this book is that turning pro means recognizing that resistance exists and you see it for what it is. And you work anyway. You take action anyway. Professionals don't eliminate fear, they work alongside it. They use fear to take action. So what I like to do is when I feel scared and I don't want to do something, I ask myself, what kind of regret, what feelings will I have if I don't do it right? And that fear of regret, that fear of resentment, that fear of what if is actually bigger than the fear of doing the actual thing. So I actually try to use fear to my advantage as much as possible. So I move forward and do the work regardless of how I feel about it.