Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 27

Episode Thirty-Nine: The Afghan Campaign

When a “civilized” army like Alexander’s confronts a primitive tribal foe (as Alexander did in the Afghan kingdoms in the 330s B.C.), it often sinks to the level of brutality and pitilessness of its enemy.

Ask the British and the Russians of their own experience in that cruel country.

Ask our own guys.

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Episode Thirty-Eight: Limits of the Warrior Archetype

Alexander’s Macedonians–and even the Spartans themselves–saw their virtue crumble as they achieved preeminence over others.

It seems that the Warrior Archetype by itself is lacking a moral dimension.

Things get complicated when power and success enter the equation.

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The Intersection of Necessity and Free Will

“What I have tried to do is follow the dictates of Necessity. This is the solitary god I revere and, in my opinion, the only god that exists. Man’s predicament is that he dwells at the intersection of Necessity and free will. What distinguishes statesmen, as Themistocles and Pericles, is their gift to perceive Necessity’s dictates in advance of others—as Themistocles saw that Athens must become a sea power and Pericles that naval supremacy prefigures empire. That course of individual or nation aligned with Necessity must prove irresistible.”

This passage is from Tides of War, published by Doubleday in 2000. The speaker is the true historical character, Alcibiades of Athens (or my fictionalized version of him).

You and I too reside at the intersection of Necessity and free will.

Our vocation is Necessity—the works we are called by our unique genius to produce.

Free will is that agency that enables us to act.

Between the two stands Resistance.

Our job as artists and as free men and women is to first discern and then align ourselves with our own Necessity, the creative calling of our hearts, and to summon the resources and resolve (and the skill) to follow the dictates of that call.

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Episode Thirty-Seven: Each Archetype Builds on the One Before

If Jungian psychology is right, and we mature from Archetype to Archetype … what happens to each Archetype as we evolve past it?

Does it go away?

Do we lose everything we’ve learned?

I don’t think so.

Rather each archetype builds on those that came before.

Our Warrior stays with us, even as we mature and evolve into higher and more complex forms.

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Episode Thirty-Six: We Mature From Archetype to Archetype

Do we grow and mature in a smooth, straight line?

I don’t think so.

Jungian psychology says we mature in stages that correspond to the archetypes of the Unconscious–Youth to Warrior to Mentor to Father to King (or Queen) to Sage to Mystic.

We’ll examine this in today’s episode.

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“Don’t Look Back and Don’t Look Down”

This is a powerful mantra for any of us launching upon a long-form creative or entrepreneurial enterprise, e.g. writing a book, starting a business venture, trying to get our daughter into Harvard.

Don’t look back, and don’t look down.

“Don’t look back,” meaning banish all second thoughts and all self-doubt. Block them out. Do not allow them to find purchase. Once we have cast off from the dock at Tenerife, don’t turn around to gaze back fondly at the shore. 

During my truck driving days in my late twenties, I teamed with a driver named Jim Abbott. When we would have to turn off the interstate into a city to deliver a load—a potentially scary situation with traffic, the possibility of getting lost, etc.—he always used to say, “We’re committed!” With the exclamation point.

“We’re committed!”

That’s how it should be when you and I launch into a new book or other enterprise.

Don’t look back. All systems go. Focus entirely on what’s ahead.

And don’t look down.

Dismiss all thoughts of failure, incompletion, embarrassment, shame. Yeah, those evil outcomes might eventuate. But we can’t let ourselves think about them. Block them out!

In Gates of Fire, the central character is the Spartan captain Dienekes. Instructing his protégé, he speaks of the “house of the mind,” which contains many rooms.

“There are rooms we must never let ourselves enter. Never.”

Looking down is one of those rooms.

We’re talking here about a discipline of the mind. Mental toughness. A choice that you and I make (and hold ourselves to) as professionals … a deliberate proscription of these two actions:

Don’t look back.

And don’t look down.

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Episode Thirty-Five: “I Have Come to Hate War”

The writer of historical fiction must sometimes bend true-life characters to fit his conception of a story’s theme. In The Virtues of War, I made the historical Hephaesteion, Alexander’s dearest friend and second-in-command, take a stand for compassion and empathy for others.

He becomes the character who feels the most deeply for the defeated and the subjected.

In today’s episode, we let him speak on the topic of the Warrior Archetype.

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Episode Thirty-Four: “It May Have Been Wrong for Us to Take It”

Torn between the dark side of the Warrior Archetype and the light, Alexander (at least in my own historical fiction rendering) was pressed by his friend and second-in-command, Hephaesteion, to choose.

He turned instead to Zeus the Creator.

In today’s episode, we’ll see how Alexander answered the dilemma of the limits of the Warrior Archetype.

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Practice = Professional

We were talking a few weeks ago about Seth Godin’s new book, The Practice.

What exactly is a practice?

What it’s NOT is preparation for the Real Game.

The practice is the game.

Nor is a practice a commercial enterprise as, say, a “legal practice” or a “practice in internal medicine.”

The phrase I prefer is “having a practice,” as in “She has a yoga practice” or “He has a martial arts practice.”

A practice, in my definition, is 

a dedicated daily application of time and effort toward the goal of actualizing one’s higher self. 

That’s a mouthful, I know. But it boils down to nothing fancier than being a pro.

The practice floor is a sacred space.

A pro shows up every day.

A pro puts in a full day (even if that day only lasts an hour) every day.

A pro is committed lifelong.

A pro sets no aspiration (of success or recognition or financial reward) beyond her practice itself. A pro’s practice exists for the practice alone.

It took me twenty-eight years (from age twenty-four to age fifty-two) to publish a novel. The good news is that those years without any conventional reward forced me to answer the question, “Why am I doing this?”

It couldn’t be for money because I wasn’t making any, nor was there any such prospect on the horizon. Likewise out of reach were artistic recognition or fame or even notoriety. (I might have started with such aspirations … and indeed I did. But years of failure burned them out of me.)

My answer to “Why am I doing this?” could be only, “For the work alone.”

For the fun of it. For the satisfaction of learning, of getting better. For how it made me feel at the end of the day.

That’s a practice.

When the student of martial arts enters the dojo, she enters barefoot, out of respect for the space and for the purity of her intentions. At the threshold, she presses her palms together and bows to the sensei, to her teacher, again out of respect to the enterprise and gratitude for the assistance her master is about to render. 

The student leaves behind her, outside the door of the dojo, all base or profane aspirations, all mundane distractions, all cares and concerns of the material world.

That’s a practice.

Within the sacred space that is the fighting floor, the student is humble but aggressive. She is prepared to take blows and to deliver them. There is no such thing as “loser” or “winner” on the practice floor. All are here to serve a higher purpose, to seek, in the training and conflict between and among one another, to realize the best of themselves.

That’s you and me every day at the easel, at the piano, at the keyboard.

That’s a practice.

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Episode Thirty-Three: Those Who Loved Him

Alexander’s closest generals were his dear friends Craterus and Hephaesteion.

Each represented a different (and conflicting) aspect of the Warrior Archetype.

Alexander stood in the middle.

In today’s episode, we’ll get more deeply into the dark and light sides of the Warrior Archetype.

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