Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 99

Booking Your Own Tour

Though it’s sometimes hard for me to take in, I know that numbers of people look to me as a mentor. Well, I have a mentor too. His name is David Leddick. He was my first boss, in advertising, on the Revlon account at Grey Advertising in New York.
David will be 84 in January. Is
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Foolscap Anything

I’m excited to announce we have a new series to add to the blog!
When we were promoting The Authentic Swing we asked for questions you’d like Shawn and I to answer in an hour long podcast. We received an overwhelming number of great questions, over 250 of them, and in that first hour only made
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Developing Multiple Revenue Streams

The Nov. 18 edition of Fortune Magazine contains a story about Barefoot Books and Nancy Traversy, who:
Pulled out of national store chains years ago because they made her eat large quantities of unsold books . . .
AND
Severed her relationship with Amazon this year out of frustration over its discounting of her products.
AND
Sells via partnerships with
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Advanced Forms of Resistance

[Some quick notices before we get into today's post:
[Remember the "Ask Me Anything" Q&A we did a few weeks ago? The hour-long audio went out then to everyone who had signed up for First Look Access. Well, since then Shawn and I and Jeff have recorded three more half-hour AMAs from that original batch of
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Gut Check

You’ve heard this story before, but I’m going to tell it again. It’s from a wonderful book by A. Scott Berg published in 1978.
A young writer’s first novel, nontraditional in structure and language, lands on the desk of the editor-in-chief at a big publishing company. He reads a few pages and pushes it off on
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“Poof Goes the Middle Class”

When I was a kid my dad’s dream for me was that I would become an engineer and work all my life for Lockheed or G.E.  In other words be an employee. That was how the middle-class dream expressed itself in the days of American pre-eminence post-WWII, before the European countries had rebuilt their shattered
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Getting Past No

I started this post Wednesday.
Thursday I read this from Seth Godin:
What “no” means

I’m too busy
I don’t trust you
This isn’t on my list
My boss won’t let me
I’m afraid of moving this forward
I’m not the person you think I am
I don’t have the resources you think I do
I’m not the kind of person that does things like
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Resistance and Self-Loathing

Hang on while I make the case that self-loathing is a good thing. I don’t mean only within the comedic-material sphere, within which self-loathing has been mined for years by Woody Allen, Howard Stern, Richard Lewis, and the godfather of them all, Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint.
What exactly is self-loathing? It appears almost always as
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Portrait of a Launch

The launch of Steve’s new book, The Authentic Swing, was unlike those preceding it. Steve, Shawn, Jeff and I (a.k.a. The Black Irish team) charted a new course after benefiting from the advice of a launch pro. Just as his personal experiences proved valuable to us, our hope is that some of ours will be
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Writing and Money, Part 3

In last week’s post I made a case for writing out of love. This week lemme dig into that idea a little deeper.
The profession of writer (or musician or filmmaker or athlete) is not really a “job” like other jobs. It’s not like working in a coal mine or toiling in a cubicle as a
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