Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 120

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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The Villain Speech

Shakespeare, Milton and Dante all understood villains. They loved villains. Their villains are their greatest creations.
Directors savor villains because villains light up the screen. Actors love to play bad guys. What could be more memorable onscreen than crushing a half-grapefruit into your wife's face, as James Cagney did to Mae Clarke in Public Enemy, or,
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Why Fight?

When asked why he battled, Audie Murphy replied, "They were killing my friends."
Throughout history, as seen in fiction and non-fiction writing, the reasons for fighting are often much simpler than the wars being fought. Country, family, friends, self-preservation are often the reasons.
The following are excerpts from different books and papers, on why different people/groups have
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What's Your Story?

Seth Godin is a difficult guy to figure out.
Steve Pressfield introduced me to him on a very cold January dusk in 2010. Seth admired Steve's The War of Art and got in touch with him via email. For fun, they decided to do a cosigning/event at the now defunct Borders in New York's Columbus Circle.
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Stuff That Works

I was in Israel for most of the past month, doing research for a book. That's why I haven't been able to deliver a new Writing Wednesday each week. My apologies!
The sojourn in the Holy Land produced mucho grist for future WWs, however. But we can bang one post out immediately: Product Recommendations.
Stuff I took
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A Letter from Lawrence of Arabia

The piece below comes not from Seven Pillars of Wisdom or from the David Lean movie or from Michael Korda's wonderful new book, Hero. It's from a letter written by T.E. Lawrence during the WWI revolt in the Arabian desert, when he led what the British called "Bedouin irregulars" against the Turks.
Alas, I can't recall
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Third Party Validation Revisited

"Third Party Validation" first ran March 4, 2011. It's back again for the long Thanksgiving weekend.
There's an old joke.
An extended family lives in a valley. One night a torrential rain comes over the mountain. Flash flooding…the works. The mother and children prepare to seek shelter. Dad decides to ride it out and do his best
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Gravitational Fields Revisited

"Gravitational Fields" ran November of 2009 for the first time. It's visiting again for the long Thanksgiving weekend.
How do you get a project started? Sometimes the thoughts in our head are so scattered, we don't know where to begin. Here's a trick that my friend Paul Abbott taught me:
Just start.
Even if you don't know where
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"With the Old Breed"

[This post first ran in July but, reading it over recently, I felt E.B. Sledge's thoughts were particularly pertinent again, as close-combat wars continue to proliferate. See if you agree.]
E.B. Sledge was a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa in WWII. His first-person memoir, With The Old Breed (which he reconstructed from notes scribbled in
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Open Markets

When I was in high school, "cool" was defined in many different ways.
There was "freak" cool, which was represented by

long unkempt hair,
ripped Wranglers,
a pack a Marlboros tucked into the left breast pocket of an oil-stained jean jacket, and
a MacGyver-like ability to construct a bong out of an


empty eight ounce orange drink (only Rockefellers drank real
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