Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 103

Specificity

If I were only allowed to give one piece of advice about line-by-line writing (constructing sentences one after the other), it would be this:  Be specific.
To write well is to be clear, to choose language that best suits your message. To accomplish both of these tasks (clarity of word choice to beget laser focus on
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Put Ass Where Heart Wants 2 B, Part 2

I was reading an article about Twlya Tharp, the renowned dancer and choreographer of Push Comes to Shove and many more—and the author of The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life.
The article said that every morning Twyla emerges at six A.M. from her New York apartment building (my apologies to Ms. Tharp
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Who Owns—And How Are Artists Paid For—Art?

Who Owns the Art?

If ideas arrive on the wings of Muses, God, or whatever divine creator you believe in, does the final art belong to the artist or to that divine creator?
I believe in the Muse. I believe that she arrives, laden with ideas, upon that “thunderous train of air” Elizabeth Gilbert described when
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The Free Agent Mindset, Part Two

The artist’s mindset has always been that of the free agent. The painter, writer or filmmaker by definition can only follow her own vision. She has to know (or teach herself) how to be self-defining, self-motivating, self-reinforcing, self-validating.

And yet artists have always run in schools. Paris in the 20s, Rome in the late 50s and
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The Courage to do Nothing

If you‘re like me, you want to clear your desk every night before you head home. You want to make sure that anything that might impair you that evening at home is off the to-do list and out of your mind. Then you’ll be able to relax without having unresolved work issues hanging over your
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The Free-Agent Mindset

What is the Macro Change that’s going on in the world today? As fish never realize they’re swimming in water, is there something happening all around us that’s so apparent that we can’t see it?
I think there is, and here’s how I’d define it:
We—meaning anybody now living in the globalized/digital/satellite-linked/worldwide-web world—are faced with the challenge
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Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose and Sometimes it Rains

The story of David and Goliath is one of history’s greatest reruns—played out on repeat in books and boardrooms and battlefields.
Big Guy goes after Little Guy.
Little Guy finds inner strength.
Little Guy taps into inner strength.
Little Guy fights Big Guy.
Big Guy falters.
Little Guy knocks Big Guy’s lights out.
The David and Goliath story is the story of
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Self-Doubt and Self-Reinforcement

[The blog is on vacation this week. Herewith an "encore presentation" of a fave from the past:]
I never talk about a project I’m working on. It’s bad luck. But something happened a few nights ago that made me think I should make an exception, both for the sake of my own thinking and for sharing
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Getting Screwed is a Compliment

Obviously, Steve and I are not Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. We’re just average Joes with average business acumen. So sometimes we get short-sticked.

Someone reaches out to one of us and we like the Chutzpah and ideas presented so we pull the other one into the hare-brained scheme. Now one of the principles that Black
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“In the End, We’ll Succeed”

Not long ago I took a wilderness trek with an old friend who had been the commander of a Recon company in the army. We were out in the boonies for five days, with no check-ins with civilization. I had never done this kind of thing before and I noticed two things:
One, my friend was
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