War of Art

A sales presentation is a sprint. Winning a sale and delivering the intended result is a marathon.

Infatuation is a sprint. A relationship is a marathon.

A sprint is a technique, part of a marathon.

There are many books about keeping the nose to the grindstone. A lot of rock’n’roll, too.

Jackson Browne’s The Pretender was always my favorite, until he did For A Dancer at Bill Graham’s memorial.

The problem is most of these commentaries tend to mushroom into a belief system, and then a behavior system, as adherents add paint jobs, and performance decals, and fuzzy dice to the frame.

Many of us have a fascination with the trappings of doing better work. Marc Andreessen called it “productivity prøn.” Finding a better way is worth celebrating.

Steven Pressfield wrote one of my favorite books this summer. The Profession is a very useful fiction. I decided to read his other books.

War of Art is not fiction. It is a stripped-down examination about the act of being productive.

It’s a three hour read that changed my understanding of what I do.

It has some amazing distinctions, like the difference between a fundamentalist and an artist, which have resorted a lot of what I believe.

A very useful book.

Blah, Blah Blog is this afternoon, so you’ve probably missed it. You can still take advantage of BlogLab, coming August 16. at the Web Managers Roundtable, We’ll be investigating how to develop a high impact repeatable blogging operation that makes a difference.