Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 139

Sunni Brown

I was introduced to Sunni Brown via the visual book summaries she did of The War of Art. I've read different things people have written about the book in the past, but this was the first visual. And it blew my mind. I've talked about doing a "2.0″ version of The War of Art in
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Karzai's Counterinsurgency Strategy

Marc Ambinder, politics editor of The Atlantic, explains that there exists a general perception among theorists and policy planners in the Pentagon's policy shop that General McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy has failed to sustain Hamid Karzai's government in critical areas and is therefore destined to ultimately fail.
"This is not how the war is supposed to be
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Cover the Canvas

Is the first draft the hardest? Is it different from a third draft, or a twelfth? Does a first draft possess unique challenges that we have to attack in a one-of-a-kind way?
Yes, yes and yes.
First drafts are killers
A first draft is different from (and more difficult than) all subsequent drafts because in a first draft
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Mark Safranski

I met Mark Safranski last year, just after launching "It's the Tribes, Stupid." Soon after the videos launched, he wrote a post for his blog "Zenpundit."  Though he didn't agree with everything I said, he showed respect for the effort. That's one sign of a professional. He might not always agree with you, but he'll
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Second Act Problems

I'm reading a terrific book by David Mamet called Three Uses of the Knife. It's not a play or a novel, it's a treatise on the subject of drama. There's some great stuff in it, particularly in the section Mamet calls "Second Act Problems," that we as writers, artists, entrepreneurs (and just plain human beings)
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Little Governors

Two recent articles in the Washington Post and Time magazine describe the political realities faced by the U.S. military, when participating in local politics in Nangahar province, in eastern Afghanistan. Both articles go to great length to describe what many would perceive to be another example of a failed local engagement strategy—and both articles fail
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Mark McGuinness

"The Story of a Reluctant Entrepreneur" was my introduction to Mark McGuinness. Read it. Mark wears a number of hats—and wears them all well. He is a poet, an entrepreneur, a creative coach and trainer, and the author of Wishful Thinking and Lateral Action. You can also find his work at http://www.markmcguinness.com/ and Magma Poetry.
SP: Mark,
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Write What You Don't Know

[Writing Wednesdays is taking a break this week. Here's a favorite from last year. :]
Probably the most classic kernel of writing advice is "Write What You Know." On the surface, that seems to make a lot of sense, and I'm sure it has worked for thousands and thousands of writers. It didn't work for me.
When
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Glenn Reynolds

I was first introduced to Glenn Reynolds through his blog Instapundit. If you've ever seen the Instapundit stream, then you know Glenn's posts are like the tide coming in—full and constant, waves, arriving all-day long.
S.P.: O Blogfather! You were among the very first to really make blogging work. What was your original impetus for jumping
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Noah Coburn's "Connecting with Kabul"

Read Noah Coburn's Connecting with Kabul.  The information contained in this report is invaluable for the practitioner of population-centric COIN looking for insights into the importance of local patronage networks in Afghanistan. While Coburn's work focuses strictly on Afghanistan, similarities in patterns of social networking behavior can be found in other traditional societies.
I personally witnessed
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