Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 96

Getting to Zero

Do you know “scat” music’s tipping point—that moment just before it started spreading like wildfire?
The short version is that, though artists had been experimenting for years with the form, scat’s explosion in popularity followed the release of Louis Armstrong’s Heebie Jeebies. In the book Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words, he explained:
The day we recorded
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What’s So Great About Perfect?

I was watching a documentary about Lindsey Vonn, the champion ski racer, and she said something really interesting (I’m paraphrasing):
The fastest runs are never the perfect ones. Perfect runs are always slow.
My friend Christy is a downhill racer herself. I asked her about this. She said,
That’s absolutely true. In the runs that are your fastest,
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Family Pressure

Today’s Ask Me Anything question comes from John Thomas.
How in the world do you keep focused to do the work consistently with outside pressures of family (spouse and four kids who I want to spend time with) and financial pressures? How do you carve out an habitual practice of doing your work?

PDF Transcript: Coming Soon
Shawn:
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Creating New Stars

“To an engineer, fan belts exist between the crankshaft and the water pump. To a physicist, fan belts exist, briefly, in the intervals between stars.”
—George Dyson
That’s beautiful, I thought, after reading the quote above. But . . . What’s it really mean?
Some background:
This quote appears at the end of the following story, in the acknowledgements
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Blowing Off Maslow

I was having breakfast with a friend and we were talking about Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” You know, the pyramid with food and shelter at the base and self-actualization at the apex. My friend was making the case that before we can take a shot at fulfilling the needs at the top of the
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Luca Brasi Bought Me Lunch

Here’s some more from THE STORY GRID.
Many years ago I had to do the one thing an editor hates to do above all others. I had to cancel a book.
For fiction, publishers often buy multiple books from a single author. They buy one that is just about ready for publication. And then they buy one
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Urgent vs. Important

How do you organize a day? How do you organize a year?
This post kicks off our latest podcast or planning for the new year. Today’s question comes from Brian Geraghty. He asks …
How do you determine what is urgent and what is important? After you decipher which is which how do you schedule it out?
Additional
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Operating Close to the Edge

Here’s something I learned from my friend Paul. He has a metric he applies to characters in a book or a movie. He asks, “How close are they to the edge?”
What he means is, “How desperate is this character? How capable is he of going to extremes?”
Paul’s theory is that, if we want to write
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Out With The Old, In With The Fused

“In an Uber-fied future, fewer people own cars, but everybody has access to them.”
—Marcus Wohlsen, Wired (January 2014 issue)
In the above quote, “Uber” refers to a company. Set that factoid aside and think about the meaning of the German word uber, translated as above, beyond . . .
Substitute the word cars with the word televisions
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“He’s a Winner”

At the gym where I work out, there’s a program called Pro Camp that specializes in training professional athletes. They train basketball players, football players, hockey players, track athletes. And they train high school and college athletes whose ambition is to make it to the pros.
I was standing with the chief of Pro Camp, T.R.
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