Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 28

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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Episode Thirty-Two: “You Are Not a King, You Are a Conqueror”

What are the limits of the Warrior Archetype?

When does a virtue like the will to win become the crime of brutality and senseless aggression?

Alexander came face to face with this issue on the banks of the Hydaspes River in India, when he encountered and was confronted by the great king Porus.

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Recommending Rich Roll

I want to recommend a podcast to you. This is actually the only podcast I save every time and the only one I never miss. 

Have you heard of Rich Roll?

I don’t know if I would call his book, Finding Ultra, an autobiography … but it’s certainly a tale of the ordeal of finding one’s calling—and a tremendous introduction to the man himself. 

Rich Roll is an ultra-marathoner/swimmer/cyclist/Ironman/you-name-it endurance athlete who hit his stride at age fifty-one. He’s also a husband and father, a passionate advocate of plant-based nutrition, and much much more.

But the guests and subject matter of his podcasts range far more widely than what I’ve just hinted at.

Just in the past few weeks he’s interviewed Matthew McConaughey, Adam Skolnick, David Goggins, not to mention his own wife Julie Piatt (the latest of multiple times), who’s a fascinating personage in her own right.

I love the podcasts because I’m totally in synch with Rich’s point of view, his passions, and his curiosity about events, about politics, about how to live in these insanely trying times. He gets the guests that I myself would like to talk to, and he asks them the questions that I would ask if I were there.

And Rich Roll himself is a fascinating personality. He’s been up, he’s been down, he’s been sideways. He has reinvented himself over and over. And I would say (I’m not sure he’d agree) that in his mid-fifties he’s at the top of his game. 

Myself, I’m not a podcaster. I never will be. I would not be good at it. But I love the idea of sitting across a table from an eclectic range of fascinating men and women … and digging into their heads to find out what they’re thinking right now, how they live their lives, what they feel about what’s going on in the world, and how they are taking action (or not) within all these spheres.

That’s the Rich Roll podcast. There are a lot of terrific podcasts out there, but his is the one I never miss.

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Episode Thirty-One: “And what will you keep for yourself, Alexander?”

Today, we’ll examine two more stories of Alexander … and see if we can learn how we was able, over ten years of war (during which the majority of his soldiers never saw their homes even for a brief leave or furlough) to maintain the passionate devotion of his officers and men.

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Episode Thirty: How Alexander Led

Alexander was twelve years old when horse dealers brought the great stallion Bucephalus, for sale, to his father Philips’s court in Macedonia.

The princes all agreed that the animal was spectacular.

But he was so wild, no one could even mount him.

Then Alexander stepped forward.

Nearly twenty years later, Alexander was still riding Bucephalus in battle, still in front of everyone else.

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Ryan Holiday’s “Lives of the Stoics”

I’m going to recommend another book today. You may think, eyeballing the title, that it could have no place within our “writer’s bookshelf.” But it should sit, believe me, front and center.

First let me introduce you to Ryan Holiday, if you don’t know him already.

Ryan’s first book, which I absolutely loved, was Trust Me, I’m Lying. It was about Ryan’s nefarious career as a guerrilla-marketing scammer for American Apparel, the fashion company that was constantly in the news for ethical lapses, marketing overreach, etc. But Ryan took his netherworld experiences to a whole other level. He laid bare the structure of fake news (I mean REAL fake … deliberately fake) and how crazy stuff starts at the bottom of the social media food chain and rises, slimy inch by sleazy foot, to the mainstream media-verse, where it acquires credibility and goes on to contaminate and infect us all.

Then Ryan got into the ancient world, specifically the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Zeno, Arrian, etc. He began writing books about this. He started a blog, The Daily Stoic. (This is the second blog I read every morning, right after Seth Godin’s.)

What is Stoic philosophy? (“Stoic” comes from the Greek word stoa, meaning a covered public portico, i.e. the shaded precincts in ancient Athens where the original “stoics” met each morning to teach and to debate.) In a nutshell, it’s this:

Memento mori. Remember always that you are mortal and that fortune cannot be controlled. Prepare yourself mentally for the worst that might happen. Then, if it does, you will not be destroyed by it.

Concern yourself only with those things you can control. Don’t drive yourself crazy worrying about stuff you can’t.

Amor fati. Embrace everything, good or bad, that comes your way. What matters is not what happens to you, but how you respond to it.

The Daily Stoic has influenced tens of thousands, including me. It’s not hard to see why. Stoicism is a philosophy made for chaotic times.

It’s also a powerful way of thinking for you and me as writers and artists.

Our working lives are by definition unstable, insecure, governed by forces often far beyond our control. How do we respond to this? One of Ryan’s titles is The Obstacle is the Way, a sentiment Marcus Aurelius or Seneca would embrace in a moment. In other words, that horrendous story problem/publishing setback/pandemic/economic meltdown that has just hammered you senseless is NOT a catastrophe. It is an opportunity for growth. The bad stuff leads to the good if we think of it rightly and act upon it with imagination and rectitude.

Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday. Five stars for the book and five stars for the man.

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Episode Twenty-Nine: “With a King Like This to Lead Us…”

With today’s episode we’ll move on from the Spartans, the consummate Warrior Collective, to the paramount individual warrior in history—Alexander the Great.

Today we’ll tell two stories of Alexander that demonstrate his style of leadership and the ideals he aspired to as a man and as a king.

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Episode Twenty-Eight: “I Will Tell His Majesty What a King Is…”

We will talk about the King archetype a lot as this series goes along.

Why?

Because at the center of all our psyches resides this paramount figure, upon whom our happiness, our honor, and the health and prosperity of our family and our country depend.

When the king is absent or unjust, the kingdom falls.

When the king rules with justice and wisdom, the kingdom prospers.

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Notes from the Inner War

My girlfriend Diana and I were shooting a video for the “Warrior Archetype” series when we came upon this charming country cottage.

It reminded me of a place I once lived in, at a critical juncture in my long struggle to learn how to write.

We decided on the spur of the moment to shoot a video for “Writing Wednesdays” using this cottage as a backdrop.

Here it is:

Read more and view the transcript here.

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Episode Twenty-Seven: The Virtue Of Selflessness

Certain warrior virtues are obvious.

Courage.
Fidelity.
Mental and emotional toughness.

But one that often gets overlooked is selflessness.

This ideal comes straight from ancient phalanx warfare, where a man’s shield protected not just himself but also the man on his right … and the unit was always more important than the individual.

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