Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 119

The Bubble Men

This blog is taking a few days off at the end of the year. Here's a favorite post from 2011.
The most beautiful woman in the world called me yesterday to tell me a story.
Every day she walks her three children through Central Park, drops off her eldest at school, and then walks her two youngest
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Take What the Defense Will Give You

Everybody loves the vertical game. We all thrill to the deep ball, the long completion, the 55-yard bomb that breaks the game open. (Yes, I've been watching a lot of football over the Holidays.)
The problem is that, a lot of the time, the guys we're playing against are as good or better than we are.
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Crackpot, Problem Child, Great Fighting Leader Revisited

War Stories is taking the day off and will be back next week. For now, here's a re-run of a post that ran August 29th.
One of these things is not like the others:
Crackpot. Problem Child. Great Fighting Leader.
Or is it?
What does a leader look like?
Eisenhower called Patton a "crackpot" and a "problem child" and a
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Getting in the Ring

At the end of the year 2000, I had it all figured out. I left my job as senior editor at Doubleday to start up a new kind of publishing house called Rugged Land Books. Rugged Land would publish a very small list of titles, twelve original books a year (one per month), and would
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The Professional and the Primitive

A couple of years ago when I was in Africa, I got a chance to visit a Masai village. The place was so far out in the boonies that we had to fly to it. There were no roads. We had two city Masai with us, a young man and a young woman, who did
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What Would Will Durant Write Today?

They tried to sift out the best from the mass of existing manuscripts, and to guide the reading of the people; they made lists of "best books," the "four heroic poets," the "nine historians," the "ten lyric poets" the "ten orators," etc.
Every time I open Will Durant's The Life of Greece, a smile yanks at
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A Hitch in Time

About fifteen years ago a colleague and I had the pleasure of buying Christopher Hitchens a porterhouse steak.
We were in Washington, D.C., at a book launch party at Morton's in Georgetown. My friend had acquired and edited a jaw dropper of a memoir by a former KGB operative. The event was a bit of a
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Playing Hurt

The past two and a half years have been really rough for me. Issues of love and work, health and mortality have pushed me into places I've never been before. Yet through all this balagan (chaos, in Hebrew), I've produced some of the best work of my life.
I think there's a connection.
It's a myth, in
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Why Fight, Part II: I Like It and I'm Good At It

The special forces operator told me the children in Afghanistan need him more than his own kids.
My gut reaction: Tell him he's off his rocker. His kids need him, too.
But then he explained that the kids in Afghanistan needed someone to fight for them. His wife was strong and could do that for their
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Bullshit Incorporated

A story titled "A Silicon Valley School that Doesn't Compute" appeared above the fold on page A1 of the Sunday October 23rd edition of The New York Times. The byline was Matthew D. Richtel's, a San Francisco-based technology reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for "Driven to Distraction," a series of articles that
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