Steven Pressfield
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 whole way, dominating the field. Rory was kicking butt so totally that reporters began asking him, “What are you thinking about out there? Do you have ‘key thoughts’ that are helping you play so well?” Rory confessed that indeed he had two…
Read MoreOne 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 come from?” Then I wrote Book X+1 and said the exact same thing. We discover who we are by the works we produce. Did you know who you were when you were twenty? But who-you-were was already there. And a compulsion was on you, even…
Read MoreIn many ways this blog is me talking to myself. What makes the thing work, if indeed it does, is that there are a lot of people like me and they are dealing with the same issues I’m dealing with. So talking to myself in this public forum is, in its way, a meditation for those individuals as well. So I don’t ask myself, “What do I imagine others want to read in this space?” I ask, “What do I want? What issues are bothering me? What questions am I exploring?” Why write a book? Why make a movie? For…
Read MoreWe were talking last week about the purpose of this blog, both from my point of view in writing it and from the POV of those who read it. What are we doing here? What is this collective enterprise about? I cited a phrase from Pericles’ Funeral Oration in which he praised his fellow citizens of Athens, describing each as: … the rightful lord and owner of his own person. In other words, individual autonomy. Pericles was talking about the ideal of the citizen in the political sense, as opposed to less independent forms of individual identity—the slave, the subject,…
Read MoreWhy am I writing this blog? Why are you reading it? It’s not a bad idea to pause once in a while and ask questions like these. The blog started about five years ago. It has evolved through a number of iterations. I’ve written in this space about what interests me, but I’ve also taken cues from comments and responses from readers and tried to dig deeper into issues that seemed to strike a chord. What are we talking about on this blog? What’s our theme? What are we trying to get at, you and I? I’m going to take…
Read MoreA few changes coming to this blog in the next couple of months: 1. Jeff Simon, our version of Steve Jobs, has been reconfiguring the site to make it more video-friendly. We’ll have a new look soon (or as soon as Jeff can whip it together.) The plan is to do a lot more video posts and even video series. Jeff is also redesigning the look of the site to work better on mobile devices. I hate the term “content.” But, what the hell, here is some of the (I can’t say the word) we’ve got coming up: 1. I’m…
Read MoreI’m driving back from the Golan Heights with Eli. We’re on Route 6, the toll road south, passing an Arab town in Israel and I’m asking him if he believes there is any hope for peace. “Yes, and I will tell you why,” he says. “Look over there at that town.” Eli calls my attention to the roofs. “In Arab towns, even here in Israel, you will always see flat roofs. Flat roofs with rebar—iron bars for reinforcing concrete—sticking straight up out of the perimeter of the roof. Why? Because in Arab families, when the eldest son becomes engaged to…
Read MoreBlack Irish Books is the little publishing company that Shawn and I operate, alongside our various day jobs. When I say little, I mean little. So far we’ve only brought out stuff written by me. That started to change, though, about two and a half years ago. If you’ve been reading the Monday and Friday posts in this space (the ones about my researching The Lion’s Gate in Israel), you know that I had met and become friends with Giora Romm, the Israel Air Force’s first fighter-pilot ace. One day when Giora and I were driving somewhere he casually said…
Read MoreI am dangling beneath my parachute. Gazing down from a height of 10,000 feet, knowing I am going to be killed in less than fifteen minutes, I feel great sorrow for myself. None of my fellow pilots who’ve parachuted into the Nile Delta has survived the encounter with the welcoming committee below, and I have no reason to think my fate will be any different. This is the first paragraph of the true-life memoir of Israeli fighter ace Giora Romm, titled Solitary, which was a best-seller in its original Hebrew under the title Tulip Four, Romm’s aircraft’s call-sign on the…
Read MoreOne of the things I learned doing the interviews for The Lion’s Gate was that the best stuff often came when you least expected it. It happened in breaks, or going to lunch, or after the formal interview was over. That was when people loosened up and became themselves. They brought out the insights and memories that they had kept in the vault because they deemed them marginal or “not important enough.” It was these stories that turned out to be the most fascinating and revealing. Here’s one such nugget from Giora Romm. Romm was Israel’s first fighter ace. As…
Read MoreFREE MINI COURSE
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.