Personify Your Resistance (How to Fight a Hydra)
Turn fear and complexity into a named monster you can face skillfully.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 78%
Building on Steven Pressfield's idea of 'Resistance' with a capital R, Kaufman personifies the fear and complexity of hard projects as a hydra — the monster that grows two heads for every one you cut off. Framing the problem as a thing you can face leads to more useful insights than treating fear as a vague cloud. The core stance is that although you can't control outcomes in an uncertain universe, you can control how you think, act, and make decisions. His fiction book How to Fight a Hydra dramatises a protagonist responding skillfully to exactly this kind of escalating, uncertain challenge.
Origin
Kaufman had long been fascinated by how humans handle uncertainty and fear — a through-line in both The Personal MBA and The First 20 Hours. Reading Pressfield's The War of Art and its personified 'Resistance', and drawing on his love of science fiction and fantasy, he framed uncertain problems as a hydra. The project unexpectedly evolved into his first fiction book, a sub-one-hour story with an afterword explaining the underlying research.
Core principles
- 01Personifying a problem as a 'thing' unlocks new insights about how to face it.
- 02You can't control outcomes, but you can control how you think, act, and decide.
- 03Fear of the unknown is the emotional undercurrent of hard projects.
- 04Complex projects feel like a hydra — solve one problem and more appear.
How to run it
- 1
Give the problem a name and a face
Personify the obstacle — as Resistance, or as a hydra — so it becomes a concrete thing you can confront rather than a formless dread.
Pro tip Personification, as Pressfield does with Resistance, surfaces insights that abstract framing hides.
- 2
Separate what you control from what you don't
Accept that outcomes and many circumstances are outside your control, and deliberately shift focus to what is: your thinking, your actions, your decisions.
Pro tip You can't determine the result, but you can always control how you decide and act.
Watch out Living in the truth that bad things can happen beyond your control is uncomfortable — but it's where skillful response begins.
- 3
Respond skillfully to each new head
When solving one problem spawns several more, meet each with composed, deliberate action instead of fear, the way the story's protagonist does.
Pro tip Expect the multiplying heads — treating them as normal keeps you steady.
In the wild
In How to Fight a Hydra, a character sets out to hunt a huge monster knowing it will be hard, without social support, skills, or a plan — only the conviction that they must. The story shows them applying skillful psychological strategies through to the end.
→ The narrative conveys research-backed ways of orienting to uncertainty without lecturing, letting readers absorb the lessons through story.
Common mistakes
Trying to control the uncontrollable
Fixating on outcomes you can't determine breeds fear and paralysis; the leverage is in your thinking, actions and decisions.
Being surprised by multiplying problems
Expecting a project to be simple makes each new 'head' feel like a crisis, when escalation is the normal nature of hard, uncertain work.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone starting something uncertain — a new skill, business, or big project — who is stalled by fear and mounting complexity.
Not ideal for
Problems that are fully within your control and better solved by direct action than reframing.
From the transcript
“he personified the problem he calls it resistance with a capital r and he talks about resistance as if it's a thing and it's a…”
“we can't control everything we can't determine the outcomes but we can control how we think how we act how we make our decisions the…”
From the episode
Josh Kaufman Teaches How to Acquire Any Skill in Just 20 Hours