By Steven Pressfield | Published: December 28, 2011
Everybody loves the vertical game. We all thrill to the deep ball, the long completion, the 55-yard bomb that breaks the game open. (Yes, I’ve been watching a lot of football over the Holidays.)
Jerry Rice. A short completion + a long run-after-catch = a long completion.
The problem is that, a lot of the time, the guys we’re playing against are as good or better than we are. Or they’re lucky, or they’re having a great day, or they’ve just studied our tendencies and know how to counter them. The defense won’t let us throw the deep ball. We’re dying to. We’re on fire to. But the bastards just won’t let us.
That’s when we’re not unwise to rein in our expectations, give up on what we wish we could get and settle for what we can get.
In writing terms (and I know this is true for dance, for painting, for film-making and on and on), there are days—and sometimes weeks—when Resistance is just too strong. For me, there are parts of a book that feel like knots in a plank of wood. They’re bears. They refuse to yield. I can surround them like a besieging army ringing a city—and I still can’t find a weak spot.
On those days, you have to take what the defense will give you.
There’s no shame in being realistic. On the football field, we close that part of the playbook that contains the deep routes and the 55-yard bombs. We turn to that section that has the short slants and the quick passes into the flat.
Remember, no defense can cover everything. If they’re shutting down our vertical game, it means they’re leaving some slack close to the line of scrimmage. Let’s take it.
The important thing is to keep advancing the ball and keep moving the chains. If we can get enough completions by dinking and dunking three yards and four yards, one of those may break out into the secondary; maybe another will blast through all the way.
The other thing I’ve found about those Heavy Resistance days is that, if you can hang in long enough, sometimes the defense will crack. Sometimes late in the fourth quarter, the opponents’ legs will give out. Suddenly you can go long. All at once the deep ball works. (more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: December 21, 2011
A couple of years ago when I was in Africa, I got a chance to visit a Masai village. The place was so far out in the boonies that we had to fly to it. There were no roads. We had two city Masai with us, a young man and a young woman, who did the translating.
Masai warriors dressed for a lion hunt
When we landed, we could see that there was a commotion going on. Our guides explained to us, after speaking with several of the camp elders, that the shaman had just determined that the site upon which the village had made camp was “unwholesome.” So everyone was packing up to move.
The population of the camp was about five hundred—warriors, kids, old folks, plus all the tribe’s livestock. The ceremony of moving camp required that the procession be led by the white cattle. So these were being rounded up. This was not so easy, as the individual white cows were owned by different families and were scattered all over the valley. We watched for more than an hour while the elders, under the direction of the shaman, collected the white cattle and herded them to the front of the procession. The whole tribe had packed up now. The warriors—the tall, slim morans—were singing a ritual song and jumping up and down, surrounded by the pretty young maidens, who were contributing their own chorus.
Finally the village moved.
Two hundred yards up the hill.
“That’s it?” my girlfriend Nancy asked.
We were watching the shaman. Yep, that was it. He had solved the problem. The new campsite was much better.
At the time I didn’t think much about this. It all seemed perfectly natural and in keeping with Africa and tribal life. But when I got home, I started to wonder about the assumptions, as best as I could grasp them, that underpinned this whole extravaganza.
1. Some invisible malignant force threatened the first camp. What was this force? Ghosts? Restive ancestors? Free-floating evil? Would wicked things befall the tribespeople if they remained in the first camp?
2. This invisible evil could be warded off by moving the camp—even though that move was only a few hundred feet. Did that makes sense? Couldn’t the evil force simply follow the tribe up the hill and work its malice there? Why did such a simple fix solve the problem? (more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: December 14, 2011
The past two and a half years have been really rough for me. Issues of love and work, health and mortality have pushed me into places I’ve never been before. Yet through all this balagan (chaos, in Hebrew), I’ve produced some of the best work of my life.
I think there’s a connection.
It’s a myth, in my opinion, that we need to have our ducks in a row to produce good work. When I first started writing seriously, in my late twenties, I would work for ten hours a day, in the prime of health, with nothing to distract me. Now I’m lucky if I get an hour and a half, and I’ve got more balls in the air than I can count. Yet I do more now, and do it better, than I did then.
When I was finishing The Profession eighteen months ago, I was so sick that I had to work standing up, naked from the waist down (don’t ask). I was so unstable emotionally that I couldn’t be alone at night. I was riddled with doubt. I had lost all bearings.
Yet the work was good.
The idea that we need to be fit and trim and sane and organized to do good work is baloney. The best stuff I’ve done, I’ve produced under excruciating pressure of time and money, amid massive Resistance, insecurity and self-doubt, with my personal life in chaos. Not that I’m recommending such a state. But the fact remains: you can light up the board even with both hands tied behind your back and your feet sunk in forty pounds of cement.
Athletes play hurt. Warriors fight scared. Mothers give birth cursing, and babies emerge to daylight bawling and thrashing and wishing only to turn around and crawl right back where they came from.
The act of creation, particularly self-creation, is messy. It hurts. It’s terrifying.
(more…)
