Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 111

Thinking in Blocks of Time

I’m just home from two weeks’ vacation—and gearing up to get back to work. The first thing I’ll do is stop myself from thinking in terms of immediate gratification.
I will make myself think, instead, in blocks of time.
I will not put pressure on the first day, or even the first week. Resistance would love me
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Praise for the Vuvuzela-Loving Steel Magnolia

I don’t want to get up.
This thought hits me at about 4:30 AM every morning. It comes in the voice of the animated devil sitting on my shoulder, a la the old Tom and Jerry cartoons. The little angel on the other shoulder always responds by climbing into my head and yelling, get up, lazy—almost
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Personal Anguish

[The blog is on vacation this week. Here's a favorite post from 2009. Back soon!]
What happens to us as artists when our personal lives crash and burn? When we’ve lost our spouses or our homes or our minds; when we’ve been betrayed or, worse, betrayed someone else; when it’s three in the morning and sunrise
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Black Dog Fall

I just read Steve’s post, THE BIG PAYOFF, and if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to let the continued saga of how Honore de Balzac’s influenced my life rest.
My gut is that the continuation of my hero’s journey story from last week would have devolved into something of an isolationist rant about the pitfalls of
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The Big Payoff

We had a birth in the family recently—my nephew Justin and his wife Lissa had a healthy baby boy, whom they named Bryce. It got me to thinking about the concept of the Big Payoff.
The Big Payoff is central to the American dream. In Westerns, it’s claiming that ten-thousand-acre spread where Ma and Pa can
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Cafe Society, Part One

Decades ago, I was required to do two things I didn’t want to do…read and write.
While I didn’t really love either of C. P. Snow’s two cultures, science came much easier to me than the humanities. I liked science because there was usually a definitive right and wrong answer. Plus there is a clear scientific
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Admiral Nelson’s Advice to Artists

I heard this from Gen. James Mattis a couple of years ago when he was speaking at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. It has proved invaluable to me as a writer.
Gen. Mattis was talking to a roomful of young officers. The subject was command and control in combat. If we’re the senior officer, how
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The Sally Carrol Dream

Do you know Sally Carrol Happer? She lives in the sleepy southern summers of Tarleton, GA, bathed in golden light and “freckling shadows.” She was brought up on “memories instead of money” and raised within F. Scott Fitgerald’s mind. She rests within his “Ice Palace.”
She exists in a world free of 4G ads telling us
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Something Unique To Say

If you’re a writer or artist or entrepreneur and you sometimes think to yourself, “I have nothing unique to say,” you’re wrong and I’ll tell you why.
First, that voice in your head is 100-proof Resistance. It’s bullshit. I get a lot of e-mails from the trenches and, trust me, Resistance is spamming you with the
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Art and Manipulation

David Carr’s piece this past Monday about The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer and Time’s Fareed Zakaria, reminded me of one of my favorite movies, 1987’s Broadcast News.
In the piece, Carr calls out these two writers for their recent mea culpas for fabrication and plagiarism, revelations that seem to get more frequent with less consequence. Lehrer
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