Better to be in the arena getting stomped by the bulls, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot. - Steven Pressfield

The Mammoth we attacked was not Rommel's after all. [...] Rommel himself, we'll learn later, was not in that camp and never had been. At the time of our raid, he was with the 15th Panzer Division, somewhere west of Kidney Ridge, in the thick of the fighting at El Alamein.

Alexander operated by the same principle. Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.

The professional knows when he has fallen short of his own standards. He will murder his darlings without hesitation, if that's what it takes to stay true to the goddess and to his own expectations of excellence.