Steve Pressfield

Writer

Steven Pressfield is the kind of author who understands that before you can write an epic, you have to win the hardest war: the battle against procrastination. Born in 1943 in the United States, he struggled for years before making it big — he spent years doing odd jobs, writing in obscurity and living with what he later called ‘The Resistance,’ that invisible force that sabotages any creative project.

He made his breakthrough with the historical novel Gates of Fire, about the Spartans at Thermopylae, but it was with The War of Art that he became a guru for tired creatives suffering from writer's block. Combining Spartan discipline with almost shamanistic advice, Pressfield writes like someone who has fallen a thousand times — and learned to get up by writing.

Today, he is read by aspiring novelists and entrepreneurs in the midst of an identity crisis alike. After all, according to him, the only way to overcome fear is to sit your bum in a chair and do the work.