Going Pro

"The Professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality.  Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working. Short of a family crisis or the outbreak of Work War III, the professional shows up, ready to serve the gods.
Remember, Resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others.  It wants us to stake our self-worth, our identity, our reason-for -being on the the response of others to our work.  Resistance knows we can't take this. No one can.
The professional blows critics off.  He doesn't even hear them.  Critics, he reminds himself, are the unwitting mouth-pieces of Resistance and as such can be truly cunning and pernicious.  They can articulate in their reviews the same toxic venom that Resistance itself concocts inside our heads.  That is their real evil.  Not that we believe them, but that we believe the Resistance in our own minds, for which critics serve as unconscious spokespersons.
The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts."