Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 94

The Uses of Anger

Anger is not a sustainable business plan.
If you want to start something…sure…use anger about the powers that be to get you off your ass and figure out a better way. But don’t count on that furious passion to drive you to the unattainable 21st Century Promised Land—mass wealth matched with inner peace.
What usually happens is
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Write Your White Whale

The #1 question that writers ask: “I’ve got a million ideas. How do I know which one to write?”
Answer: Write your White Whale.
Which idea, of all those swimming inside your brain, are you compelled to pursue the way Ahab was driven to hunt Moby Dick?
Here’s how you know: you’re scared to death of it.
That’s good.
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For Love or For Money?

Elizabeth Lada, like many of us, struggles to decide which job to take. She asks …
What to do when you have a number of medium-sized talents, and the ones that make you money aren’t quite as fun to do (that would be painting/illustrating) and the ones that are more fun to do are not (yet?
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Going Long-View, Angel’s Share Bourbon Instead of Magic-Bullet Plastic

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

—The Graduate

Magic-Bullet Plastic

For The Graduate’s Mr. McGuire, “plastics” was it—that sure-fire, magic-bullet road to riches. A couple of decades later, he might have said “home health care”—and today’s young Benjamin
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How I Get Ideas

Herewith, ten idiosyncratic observations on the subject of generating ideas.
1. Ideas seem to come by themselves, unbidden.
In certain careers that I’ve spent time in—advertising and the movie business, for example—I’ve labored under conditions where you have to produce on demand. It’s hard. It’s do-able, but it’s never really worked for me. I can’t press. It’s
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Telling Friends You Don’t Work for Free

Cindy Lou asks a question that we’ve all had to figure out over the years.
How do you get your friends to understand you don’t work for free. Especially during the Holiday’s, friends seem to forget I work for a living.
Listen to our podcast and then read I Will Not Read Your Fucking Screenplay. It’s great.


TRANSCRIPT:
Steve:
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Boiling Frogs

Here’s another chunk from my slowly evolving book, THE STORY GRID: What Good Editors Know, soon to be published by Black Irish Books.
How does one know when a story isn’t working?
That is, if you decided to become a literary agent tomorrow, how could you figure out if a story has a chance to be acquired
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“Give Me One Redeeming Moment”

Did you ever see the movie Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze, and starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper? If there has ever been a truer or more devastating depiction of the writer’s self-induced hell (including those by Proust or Stephen King), I haven’t seen it.
In the film there is
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Service or Self?

This week on Ask Me Anything we take a question from Sheri Kleintop. She asks …
In your book, The War of Art, the focus is recognizing and facing Resistance head on. Throughout the ages, women such as Gorgo, Jackie Kennedy and women in every household across the globe have (had) an obligation to nurture, serve
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Olympic Character

Jean-Dominique Bauby, Stephen Hawking, Francis Tsai—a journalist,  a theoretical physicist and an artist.
The similarities? Olympic character.
Olympic Character
In his column DNA of Champions, Joel Stein wrote about having his DNA compared with Olympic Gold Medalist Sergei Bubka’s DNA. It wasn’t surprising to read that there are certain genes that are common within Olympic athletes.
However . .
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