Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 88

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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On Filmmaking

Today I talk with Jeff about the actual filmmaking—casting and shooting Jeff’s web series, Camp Abercorn. Jeff talks about his first day directing (“I’m a learn-by-doing kind of guy”) and how he and his partners are working up to a full-on eight-week $500K shoot. To me, this is what being an artist in 2014 is
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Why, #4

One of the outcomes that has always surprised the hell out of me about my own work is that, until I did it, I had no idea I was going to do it. Do you know what I mean? I wrote Book X and looked at it and said, “Where in the world did that
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Acting “As If”

I had dinner with a friend the other night who makes a fine living investing in Silicon Valley start-ups. It’s his passion to follow online innovation, so I threw out a hypothetical to him:
“Say you had to set up a website/blog/online store today…how would you do it?”
And then, as I often do, I started to
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