Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 112

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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The Girl from WAZE

I’ve been traveling overseas for the past few weeks, and one of things I’ve encountered is a vehicle navigation system called WAZE. WAZE has a couple of cool features that I’d never seen before. (Forgive me if this kind of system is old-hat to you; it was blockbuster, earth-shaking news to me.)
First, WAZE takes traffic
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Lighten The Load

[I almost never do this, but this guest post by Mark Mars compelled me to make an exception. Mark's zine, Brooklyn To Mars (see link below), ain't bad either. Thanks, Mark. I'll be back next week  --- Shawn.]
There was pounding on my door.  I clicked “file save” and got up from my desk to answer
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Thinking A Career

Once we turn pro (and even before we do), our Muse has plans for us. Those plans are our career-in-potential. They exist, whether we choose to believe in them or not. And they’re operating upon us, influencing us like the gravitational pull of an enormous invisible star.
If you’re a writer, your career-in-potential is a shelf
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iCrazy Interrupted

The headline stared out from the magazine rack in the check-out line. Beyond the guess-which-celebrity-has-the-worst-beach-body headlines was:
iCrazy
Panic. Depression. Psychosis.
How Connection Addiction Is Rewiring Our Brains
It was splashed across the top of Newsweek.
* * *
In January, my husband and I bundled up our kids and headed skiing. The lodge where we ate lunch was the only
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Finding “Real”

To say that a voice (or a look or a sound) is “real” in art requires quotation marks. We will never speak in our “real” voice because the very act of speaking in a compelling and interesting manner requires, first, a point of view—and every point of view implies a voice that is dictated, and
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Art and Amplification

I was at a dinner party the other night.
It was a book party for a friend and it was as good as those things get. Lots of fun arguments about the state of the business, where the opportunities were, hypocrisy, stupidity, cowardice etc.
Then, as these things go, someone asked if we could all switch seats.
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