Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 87

Learning from the Airline Industry

Before computers stepped in, if you wanted to find a book in your library, you walked over to a shelf of drawers (or a few walls of drawers depending on the size of your library), scanned the labels on the outside of each drawer, opened the drawer that corresponded with the author or title for
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“The Office is Closed”

This blog can get kinda hardcore at times, I know. The posts can seem relentlessly insistent on hard work, self-discipline, and so forth.

Today let’s talk about the other side.
Let’s talk about when the writing day is over.
I’m a big believer in “the office is closed.” What I mean is that, when the day’s work is
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The Things You Complain About are the Things You Could Be Changing

In the dream, the writer and reader need no publisher or retailer. There’s no pooh-poohing gatekeeper or everything store keeping a writer in the wilderness or hiding his gems in the stockroom.

There is no front table. No cooperative advertising.
It’s simple. In the dream, the writer and reader are connected. One creates. The other supports the
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The Sphere of Self-Reinforcement

The last two Wednesday posts, Process and Spot and The Game of Numbers, have been about the mental game of writing. Specifically, they’ve been about self-reinforcement.
This is a subject they don’t teach at Harvard.
What exactly is self-reinforcement?
It’s not just patting yourself on the back or telling yourself, “Good work, kemo sabe” (one of my own
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Crowdfunding, Part Deux

For the past few weeks, Steve’s interviews with Jeff Simon have been appearing on this site. The last one ran just before Jeff’s Indiegogo campaign ended — fully funded I’d like to add (with a congrats to Jeff and Team Abercorn).
I shared a bit about his campaign via the post “Why You Need to Know
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“The Game of Numbers”

Last week we were talking about Rory McIlroy’s “trigger words” from his victory in the British Open a few weeks ago—”process” and “spot.” We were saying that the principle behind these concepts was equally applicable to writing and to entrepreneurship.
What is that principle?
It’s the idea of detaching yourself emotionally from the ultimate outcome of any
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The 10,000 Reader Rule

The sum total of my twenty-two years of experience in book publishing comes down to the number 10,000.
What is a book publisher’s job?
Is it to get a writer on The Today Show?
Is it to buy a full-page four-color advertisement on the back page of The New York Times Arts and Leisure section?
Is it to make
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Process and Spot

Boredom alert: this post is about golf.
If your reaction is “Arrggh!”, now is your chance to bolt. I promise, however, that what follows will be extremely relevant to you and me and to our endeavors as artists and entrepreneurs.
Here goes:
Rory McIlroy won the British Open a couple of weeks ago. He was out front the
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Getting on Base and the Long Game

In his “Acting ‘As If’” post last week, Shawn wrote:
“Our books are not Frontlist. They are backlist, evergreen, long-term commitments. So we spend weeks, months, years on every single one we put out there in an effort to reach what we think is the publisher’s job . . . getting the book into the hands
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Work Habits

Today we talk about Jeff’s work habits. Eighteen-hour days, writing via Skype with his two partners, organizing the episodes of the web series using his own digitial version of the Foolscap Method. Jeff also takes me on a tour of his house and workspace. It’s like Van Gogh’s tiny room at Arles, only with graphics-power
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