By Steven Pressfield | Published: August 24, 2011
What we’re really talking about is learning how to say no. (Thanks to Fabian Pallares who suggested this topic in a Comment two weeks ago after our post, An Ask Too Far.)
The all-time champ: Ming the Merciless
When Gates of Fire was first optioned by Universal Studios in 1998, the director Michael Mann was attached. I sent him hand-written congratulations and a signed first edition. I never heard a peep. I thought, “What a prick!”
The same thing happened with Robert Redford on The Legend of Bagger Vance. Again I thought, “What a prick!”
But I gotta tell you, the more I’ve thought about it over the years, the more I see both Mann and Redford’s point of view.
They have to protect their time. Their assistants have to keep “asks” and potential “asks” at bay. Surely both directors thought, if in fact they ever got my packages, “Uh-oh, this writer’s going to be a major pain in the ass; the last thing I need on the set is some hyper-possessive literary type peering over my shoulder saying, ‘I would’ve shot that scene differently.’”
(Whether a movie director should meet with the writer of a book he’s adapting is a whole other question. Don’t get me started on that one.)
The bottom line on saying no to “asks” is this: if it’s okay to ask (and it is), then it’s okay to blow off an ask. We’re not being pricks; we’re protecting our time.
The smartest take I’ve heard on this issue comes from Ken Glickman, in his CD “Time Management” (which I highly recommend from Joe Polish’s Genius Network—which I also highly recommend.)
The key point that Ken makes is that when we say yes to one person or activity, we’re simultaneously—whether we realize it or not—saying no to another person or activity. (more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: August 22, 2011
Along with Bill Mauldin, Ernie Pyle was probably the most famous American war correspondent of World War II. His dispatches from the front were carried by over 300 newspapers. (Thanks to Tina McCann for sending in this piece.)
Ernie Pyle at Anzio, Italy 1944
Pyle loved the foot soldiers, the dogfaces, the grunts; he ate with them, tramped beside them under fire and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for writing about them. One column of his urged that combat infantrymen be given extra “fight pay,” just as airmen got “flight pay.” Congress responded by authorizing ten dollars a month, a princely sum in those days. The law was called “The Ernie Pyle Bill.”
What I love about Ernie Pyle (and Bill Mauldin) is that they were indefatigable champions for the man on the ground. The WWII infantryman was part of a breed we don’t have any more—the citizen-soldier. Like the Greek farmer-hoplite who took down his spear and breastplate from above the fireplace and marched off to defend his city, the American citizen-soldier had no fondness for war, yearned only to get it over with and get home—but he answered the call and delivered, as Ernie Pyle did and as he describes so eloquently in the passage below.
IN THE FRONT LINES BEFORE MATEUR, NORTHERN TUNISIA, May 2, 1943
We’re now with an infantry outfit that has battled ceaselessly for four days and nights.
This northern warfare has been in the mountains. You don’t ride much anymore. It is walking and climbing and crawling country. The mountains aren’t big, but they are constant. They are largely treeless. They are easy to defend and bitter to take. But we are taking them.
The Germans lie on the back slope of every ridge, deeply dug into foxholes. In front of them the fields and pastures are hideous with thousands of hidden mines. The forward slopes are left open, untenanted, and if the Americans tried to scale these slopes they would be murdered wholesale in an inferno of machine-gun crossfire plus mortars and grenades. (more…)
By Callie Oettinger | Published: August 19, 2011
Two weeks ago, Jeremy Brown asked if going “after the ideas that scare [Steve], because that’s where the remarkable is hiding” carries over to my work. Have been thinking about it since then.
I’m not out in the jungle hunting Scary. (more…)
