Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 133

The Warrior Ethos

Today we launch something new on the site. Some people may hate it. (We've already had one high-profile colleague flee, screaming, from his first sight of it.)
It's called The Warrior Ethos. It's an ongoing series about exactly what the title says. The primary audience I'm writing it for is our young men and women in
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Wars Change, Warriors Don't

Today we launch a new series on the site. It's called The Warrior Ethos. Here's a short intro, in case you missed it. The series is intended for our young men and women in uniform, but I hope that other warriors in other walks of life will give it a chance too. Posts will appear every
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The Two Cultures

In 1959, Cambridge University selected Charles Percy Snow for its annual Rede Lecture, a centuries-old series of oratories that dated back to 1550. Previous presentations covered such scintillating topics as Terrestrial magnetism and the ionosphere and Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods.
Snow seemed to be the perfect candidate. He was the UK's civil service
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The Inciting Incident

I'm on the road this week, visiting Robert McKee in Sedona, AZ. It's his birthday. Bob McKee, if you don't know him, is the guru of screenwriters and the founding force behind Storylogue on the web. His intensive story workshops, which he gives all around the world, are like four years of writer's college in
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Selling Books in the Trenches

So far, we've been talking in these What It Takes posts from our own point of view, from the angle of the writer and his agent and publicist. Today I'd like to turn that around.
Let's get down and dirty–in the trenches, selling books to bookstores. We'll talk with Random House's David Glenn, who's one of
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Collectively-Enforced Mediocrity

Have you seen the movie, The Fighter? It's already won Golden Globes for Melissa Leo and Christian Bale–and looks like a strong Oscar contender in a number of categories. I loved it.
The movie is also–in its depiction of the psychological dynamics within the Ward family of Lowell, Massachusetts–one of the great cinematic evocations of Group
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Art & Commerce

In my last post, Rubber Meets Road, I talked about "the number." Here's what I said:
A number gives you clarity. Don't fear a number. Embrace the number. It will focus you like nothing else.
After some analytical research, I came to the conclusion that THE PROFESSION's number is 15,000.  Fifteen thousand sold copies will put THE
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On the Subject of Fear

[Today's post is an interview with me in fear.less online magazine. If you haven't heard of fear.less, it's a terrific enterprise founded and run by Ishita Gupta and Matt Atkinson, who are two young stars of new media.

[Fear.less appears once a month; it's free; you can sign up via the link above or below. The magazine
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Bringing It All together

Do a Wayback Machine search for www.stevenpressfield.com and check out the late 2002 version of Steve's first author site—and then check out the 2008 version.
Not much of a difference . . .
Steve's first site was a traditional early 2000's author site—a stylized resume, offering readers information about authors and their work. Steve's site was static,
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Resistance Tomorrow

I just came in from getting my stuff ready for the gym tomorrow–packing my bag, loading up my gear, leaving it in the car. It got me thinking about one of the most useful books I've ever read, Dr. Robert Cialdini's Influence. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
In the book, Dr. Cialdini
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