Steven Pressfield
Here’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…
Read MoreChapter 20 Die Laughing The warrior sense of humor is terse, dry—and dark. Its purpose is to deflect fear and to reinforce unity and cohesion. The Warrior Ethos dictates that the soldier make a joke of pain and laugh at adversity. Here is Leonidas on the final morning at Thermopylae: “Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we’ll all be sharing dinner in hell.” Spartans liked to keep things short. Once one of their generals captured a city. His dispatch home said, “City taken.” The magistrates fined him for being verbose. “Taken,” they said, would have sufficed. The river of…
Read MoreI went to a Paul Anka concert a couple of years ago and I learned something that I use now, every day, in my writing. Do you remember Paul Anka? He was a teen idol back in the days of Fabian and Frankie Avalon. He’s still an extremely popular performer, who sells out shows around the world. Paul Anka wrote the Sinatra classic, “My Way,” along with hundreds of other songs. He tours with a band of about fifteen and he delivers a terrific show. Here’s what I learned from watching him onstage. Throughout the performance, Mr. Anka communicated to…
Read MoreChapter 19. The Will to Victory When Alexander was a boy, a party of traders came to Pella, the Macedonian capital, selling trained warhorses. Philip the king and all his officers went down to the plain to put these mounts through their paces. One horse, called Bucephalus, was by far the fastest, strongest and bravest—but he was so wild that no one could ride him. Alexander watched as his father let the steed go without making an offer. “What a fine mount you lose, Father,” he said, “for want of spirit to ride him.” At this, the king and all his…
Read MoreMy friend Daphne used to take riding lessons from a legendary horsewoman in Carmel Valley, California named Sue Sally Hale. Have you ever heard of Sue Sally? Sue Sally competed in polo matches for twenty years disguised as a man (she used to daub mascara on her upper lip to simulate a mustache, while tucking her long hair up under her helmet) before finally being admitted, in 1972, as the U.S.P.A.’s first female member. Sue Sally had a mantra that she taught her polo, dressage and jumping students: “Sit chilly.” I’m not a rider but apparently it can get pretty…
Read MoreChapter 17 The Joys of Misery Among all elite U.S. forces, the Marine Corps is unique in that its standards for strength, athleticism and physical hardiness are not exceptional. What separates Marines, instead, is their capacity to endure adversity. Marines take a perverse pride in having colder chow, crappier equipment and higher casualty rates than any other service. This notion goes back to Belleau Wood and earlier, but it came into its own during the exceptionally bloody and punishing battles at Tarawa and Iwo Jima, the Chosin Reservoir and Khe Sanh. Marines take pride in enduring hell. Nothing infuriates…
Read MoreI wish I could remember where I saw this (it might have been in a documentary on PBS about Battleship Potemkin) but some master of filmmaking was asking a roomful of students, “Of what does the vocabulary of cinema consist?” I was guessing lamely in my head along with the students onscreen, when the master finally ran out of patience and answered his own question: “Shots and cuts.” Everything else, the man said, is just variations and refinements. The greatest cuts we’ve ever seen Let’s have a little communal interchange. Write in your fave. What is the greatest movie cut…
Read MoreChapter 15 Citations for Valor Decorations for valor, from ancient days to modern, have seldom been awarded for raw bloodthirstiness or the brute act of producing carnage. The feat that inspires witnesses to honor it is almost invariably one of selflessness. The hero (though virtually no recipient chooses to call himself by that name) often acts as much to preserve his comrades as he does to deliver destruction onto the foe. In citations, we read these phrases again and again: “Disregarding his own safety . . .” “With no thought for his own life . . .” “Though wounded…
Read MoreWhen I first started blogging, I wasn’t really hip to the ethic. That, I learned from Seth Godin. A blog is about giving. Or, perhaps more accurately, giving back. A guy like Seth, who has started many businesses and failed and succeeded in about equal measure, has acquired a thoroughgoing education from the University of Hard Knocks. When Seth blogs, he shares that knowledge. He’s not asking for anything, he’s giving. But one thing I didn’t know about Seth was that he has also passed along that knowledge in an extraordinary free MBA program. 48,000 people visited the announcement page…
Read MoreChapter 12 How the Spartans Became the Spartans All warrior cultures start with a great man. In ancient Sparta, that man was Lycurgus. He took the city from a normal society and made it into a warrior culture.
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