Month: April 2011
(Another CrossFit-related post for you up front, but stick with me for a bit and the big picture point about giving it away makes it into the post.) Each time one of Steve’s books left the table, my son reached in a box, pulled out another book, and topped off the stacks.
Read MoreFirst, I want to thank everyone who helped make last Wednesday’s launch of Do The Work such an overwhelming success. I sent pizza to the gang at Seth Godin’s Domino Project (thanks, Pizza Grill in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY)—but I also want to give a shout-out to everyone who downloaded the free Kindle version, ordered the hardback or audio, tweeted, Facebooked, blogged, retweeted or just told a friend and passed DTW along. Thanks, you guys! You helped make this thing a hit without any traditional media, advertising, testimonials, blurbs, reviews, the whole shooting match. Next week in this space I’ll talk with…
Read MoreChapter 25 The War Inside Ourselves The Bhagavad-Gita is the great warrior epic of India. For thousands of years, Indian caste structure has been dominated by two elite social orders—the Brahmins (poets and holy men) and the Kshatriyas (warriors and nobles). The Bhagavad-Gita is the story of the great warrior Arjuna, who receives spiritual instruction from his charioteer, who happens to be Krishna—i.e., God in human form. Krishna instructs Arjuna to slay his enemies without mercy. The warrior-god points across the battlefield to knights and archers and spearmen whom Arjuna knows personally and feels deep affection for—and commands him…
Read MoreThe Domino Project team should go with a YES sign—if it ever considers ditching its domino symbol. The NO sign greeted everyone entering the retirement community my husband and I lived in just out of college. We were young, broke, starting our first jobs and planning a wedding, so my husband’s grandmother pulled a few strings with the condo board, and—BOOM—there we were, in our early 20s, at least 60 years younger than the youngest retiree in the community, every day facing the NO sign in South Florida, the land of sun and fun.
Read MoreToday, the 20th, is publication day for Do the Work in all three versions—hardback, electronic and audio—so please forgive me if I do a little marketing pitch for a sentence or two. Here’s how I described the book to a friend: Do The Work isn’t so much a “follow-up” to The War of Art as it is an action guide that gets down and dirty in the trenches. Say you’ve got a book, a screenplay or a startup in your head but you’re stuck or scared or just don’t know how to begin, how to break through or how to…
Read MoreChapter 23 Coming Home But what about us? What about the soldier or Marine who steps off the plane from overseas and finds himself in the scariest place he’s seen in years: Home. Has everything he knows suddenly become useless? What skill set can he employ in the civilian world? The returning warrior faces a dilemma not unlike that of the convict released from prison. Has he been away so long that he can never come back? Is the world he knows so alien to the “real world” that he can never fit in again? Who is he, if…
Read MoreLast week’s post, this week’s and next’s all come from Do The Work, our new book that comes out, on amazon.com only, a week from today. The e-version is available for free right now, though it won’t go “live” till pub day. At that time, a hardback and an audio version will go on sale, along with a collectible. By the way, you don’t need an e-reader to download an e-book; it’ll work on your iPad, your Mac or PC, your Android. Here’s a link to free apps that make this work. But enough salesmanship. Let’s get down to today’s…
Read MorePART THREE INNER WARS Chapter 21 Casualties of War All of us know brothers and sisters who have fought with incredible courage on the battlefield, only to fall apart when they came home. Why? Is it easier to be a soldier than to be a civilian? For the warrior, all choices have consequences. His decisions have meaning; every act he takes is significant. What he says and does can save (or cost) his own life or the lives of his brothers. The nineteen-year-old squad leader and the twenty-three-year-old lieutenant often exercise more power (and in spheres of greater and…
Read MoreEast Russell Street Feed and Seed sold everything from hanging plants and corn seed to dog pedicures and Easter chicks. I was 16 when I worked there—my first non-babysitting-or-lawnmowing-and-comes-with-a-paycheck job.
Read MoreHere’s a trick I use on every project. I learned it from my friend and mentor, the novelist and documentarian Norm Stahl. Norm and I were having lunch one day at Joe Allen’s in Manhattan and I was complaining about how hard it was to get a novel started. Norm happened to have a pad of yellow legal-sized foolscap paper in his briefcase. He took it out and set it on the table in front of me. “Steve,” he said, “God made a single sheet of foolscap exactly the right length to hold the outline of an entire novel.” That was…
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Start with this War of Art [27-minute] mini-course. It's free. The course's five audio lessons will ground you in the principles and characteristics of the artist's inner battle.