Work

What’s on your slate?

There’s so much wisdom in Steven Pressfield’s posts, but this particularly resonated, “You have to have a slate.”

I was doing a free rewrite on the lot at MGM when a producer friend spotted me on the bungalow’s porch and plopped down in the chair beside me. She asked me what I was working on beside this freebie. 

I hesitated.

Don’t hesitate…

“you have to be able to rattle off four, five, six projects—and be able to pitch ‘em all with full professionalism.”

Read the full post, and more, here.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Uncategorized

The blogs that keep on giving

Blogs come and go, but some stalwarts remain.

Here are a few that I’ve read daily for years and which still provide valuable insight:

  • Cultural Offering – Music, literature, humanity, perspective and more.
  • Execupundit.com – Michael Wade’s thoughts on leadership, ethics, management and life. Michael also writes long-form essays on his Substack channel (also highly recommended).
  • Hunter Gatherer 21C – Nicholas Bate’s new home: reflections on business, life, balance, The Beatles and his own fiction.

These three are the cornerstone of my morning reading. Also highly recommended are:

And two essentials that I follow on email:

  • Steven Pressfield – a writer’s writer with much to say about Resistance, the War of Art and “Putting your ass where your heart wants to be.”
  • The Daily Stoic – Ryan Holiday on Stoicism for modern, daily life.

Check them all out. Your lives will be richer for a few minutes’ reading each morning.

Image: Andrew Munro

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What I read on my vacation

I’ve been away. I’ve been neglectful. I have been busy, but I’ve also been distracted.

However, I did manage to read some great books. Here’s a selection of loosely relevant books I enjoyed over the past couple of years.

Stoicism

  • Marcus Aurelius, The Stoic Emperor by Donald J. Robertson – a fascinating and accessible biography from cognitive-behaviour therapist, writer and Stoic, Donald Robertson.
  • The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday – A well-deserved modern classic that’s (apparenty) sold over two million copies and which I should have read years ago. It’s packed with practical insight, quotes and examples. I’ve been lending out my copy ever since I finished it.
  • Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman – I had a big birthday. Friends bought me book-related vouchers and I bought books. This is fascinating if you’re interested in where Stoicism came from. It covers the philosophy from its founding by Zeno of Citium up to the time of Marcus, and explores the lives of famous and lesser-known Stoics and near-Stoics including Cicero, Cato the Younger, Seneca and Epictetus.
  • Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar – Not altogether Stoic, but a beautifully written fiction purporting to be the memoir that a dying Hadrian wrote for his adoptive heir Marcus Aurelius. It’s both visceral and delicately sensual. Remarkable.
Continue reading “What I read on my vacation” →
Random

A lament for lost editors, arbiters and middlemen

We live in a world of dopamine-driven, doom-scrolling, emotional incontinence and performative, manufactured outrage.

Worse, the social media echo chamber amplifies and accelerates the outrage like a Hendrix howl of feedback. Round and round it goes until it explodes onto the street as mindless protest, riot or murder.

James Marriott has an insightful column in/on today’s Times –  Why elitism is key to democracy’s survival – which addresses exactly the point.

Continue reading “A lament for lost editors, arbiters and middlemen” →
Work

The writer’s deal … or dilemma – Steven Pressfield

Today’s Writing Wednesdays post from Steven Pressfield gets to the heart of a writer’s dilemma: do you stay true to your work and possibly earn nothing (“Nobody wants to read your sh*t.”), or do you compromise to the demands of the market?

Reflecting on the author Elizabeth Gilbert’s deal with her writing, he asks if we’re prepared to do the same.

Her deal was:

“I will never ask you to support me. I will support you.”

That’s a mighty challenge to integrity and income.

Read Steven’s full post here.

Random

Things once lost are now revealed

New, pulsed thermography, imaging techniques are deciphering scrolls last read 2,000 years ago.

When Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, burying Pompeii and drowning Herculaneum in volcanic mud, the surge of hot gas carbonised an entire library in a villa now known as the Villa dei Papiri, thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. The papyrus scrolls were turned to fragile logs of charcoal, too blackened and fragile to interpret.

Over the last couple of years, thanks to advanced, non-intrusive imaging techniques, AI and an open-source Vesuvius Challenge (which awarded $700,000, the largest prize in archaeology to three computer students), the scrolls are being read.

This week, researchers from the University of Pisa revealed previously unknown details about Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, along with works on the Epicurean school and biographies of Greek physicians. Zeno, it appears, was frail and had a tendency to avoid banquets, but then he was also mocked for his poor Greek (he was Phoenician) and accused of “annoying young men with his chatter and reproaches”. His famous, but long lost, work The Republic is reported in the newly deciphered History of the Stoic School as being morally questionable and “embarrassing” because his vision of utopia rejected private marriage and family life, and advocated equality between men and women and tolerance of same-sex relationships.

The University of Pisa has a detailed post, here.

The Times has been running stories following the project here, here and here.