You don't get to call yourself a leader, we often conflate being in charge with leader. Other people designate you a leader, which means leadership is a behavior, not a position. You can be in charge, but other people will decide whether or not you are their leader. One of the most important attributes that we can all focus on in twenty twenty one is open mindedness. The closed mind is not driven because the clothes might have certain and certain minds aren't curious and they're not seeking what's next.

They want seeking what could be. And if 20-20 taught us anything is that we don't know, you know, we don't know what's coming down the pike, but we are all here. We're all operating. You know, we're all in our lives. Admittedly, some some of us might be in worse positions than we were at the beginning of twenty twenty. But sometimes you get thrown down the hill and when you stand up and dust yourself off, you're like, oh my gosh, I'm, I'm way further down than I was before I got to climb again.

But the fact is you can do it. I think if we are effectively able to understand and dissect the lessons 20/20 taught each one of us individually, we are all in a position where we can crush twenty, twenty one. I really believe that. I really do, because we've been through some stuff that historically is so unique, you know, and that's that's something to be it's something to just give ourselves a quick pat on the back for. My name is Richard of Any and this is the Rich Role podcast.

The Rich Roll podcast. Well, it's official. Twenty twenty is in the rear view, twenty twenty one is finally upon us. So let us come correct by continuing what has become a bit of a tradition here on the podcast, kicking off the New Year with some bankable life guidance, courtesy of a Navy SEAL in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen. Our New Year's messenger was Mr. David Goggins. Twenty twenty, launched with Chad, writes another SEAL turned ultra marathoner.

And today brings us Rich Devinney, a former Navy SEAL commander who served in what I think most would agree was the most badass, elite and secretive group in the armed forces, a team I've been cautioned to not name publicly, but one I suspect you could quickly surmise this conversation is a must listen for anyone looking to sharpen their grit, their mental acuity and resilience as we embrace twenty, twenty one.

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You've got to check out Woop. And right now for my listeners, all you guys group is offering 50 percent off. When you use the code rich role at checkout, go to Woop Dotcom, that's op dotcom and use the code rich roll at checkout to say fifteen percent off your order. Unlock your best self today. OK, Commander Rich Devinney. I think it's fair to say that if you spend twenty one years. As a Navy SEAL, including 13 overseas deployments that year, you're going to pick up a thing or two, but divinities thing isn't about wooer or physical prowess and instead is really much more about things like mindset and disposition.

It's a perspective that evolved out of his role in selecting highly trained soldiers for elite teams. In the course of that, he became obsessed with why some succeed and others flame out. In other words, what actually dictates human performance under stress. And ultimately, what he discovered, almost ironically, is that. That equation had very little to do with physicality or even skill, for that matter, and instead had everything to do with the individual's core attributes, things like resilience, mental acuity, perseverance and drive.

He's got a new book coming out all about it. It's called The Attributes 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. It hits bookstores January twenty six. And today we break it all down. It is worth mentioning before we get into it, that Rich will be doing a live event with podcast favorite Dr. Andrew Huberman. He's also giving away the courage chapter for free. And those two things are available for everybody who preorders the book. And all the information on that can be found on the book's website at the attributes dotcom, which is fascinating.

His work is highly instructive. And I just can't think of a better, more impactful conversation to harken in twenty, twenty one. So let's do it. This is me and Richard Emeny. Good to see you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. I'm excited about this.

We have a little bit of a tradition that we started a couple of years ago on the podcast where we kick off the New Year with a Navy SEAL. People seem to enjoy that. It started with David Goggins a couple of years ago. We had Chad, right last year.

And you're going to be the 2021 edition.

I'm deeply honored to thank you for for doing this. And what's interesting about you, among many other many things. But, you know, when you think of Navy SEALs in this modern culture context, we think about the movies. We think about people like Chocho Willink, who's sort of this emblem of leadership. We think of David Goggins, who's kind of this emblem of physical and mental discipline, very alpha type personalities.

But you're coming from a more analytical pose, somebody who's much more interested in the mental game versus the physical game. And, you know, given your experience and your stature in the special ops ecosystem, you know, somebody who's spent 21 years in the military as a Navy SEAL 13 overseas deployments, serving as commanding officer of a hereafter to be unnamed elite force within the SEALs. You have a tremendous amount of experience.

And and it leads me, you know, your perspective, which we're going to get into, leads me to conclude that perhaps this popular conception that we have about the Navy SEALs is a little bit misled. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. And I think that's is for two reasons. I guess. First is you have to you know, pop culture has to has to entertain for first and foremost. And so so any type of story has to highlight the high highs and the lows.

If you're going to have drama and life, no matter what endeavor you're in, is never just high, high and low, low. I mean, a lot of a lot of seal. Life is decidedly normal. I remember, you know, I remember, you know, having family or or even even special guests who want to come visit the SEAL teams. When I was in the SEAL teams and they come in and they'd be walking around the teams and I'd be like, hey, you probably expected to see parachutes everywhere and guns and and all this exciting stuff.

And, you know, that's not the case. It's just a bunch of buildings.

This is where we work a lot of our training offsite in remote areas.

And I guess I've never watched a movie get made other than on the periphery. I've seen some movie sets. But I would imagine, from what I know about the experience is kind of the same thing. I mean, the moviemaking process is decidedly slow and boring for most of it. You're just looking for that one minute shot. Right. And I think that that's what happens in kind of seal movies and even seal books to the extent that they are, as you're recounting the high highs and the lows.

And it's more normal, right?

Yeah. You think you're going to see guys pounding their chest and, you know, doing hill repeats and all kinds of crazy stuff. But part of the whole thing is to bleed into society.

Right? There's an invisibility aspect to it, like you're meant to kind of disappear into the background. Absolutely.

And, you know, again, seals are humans, you know. And so so one of the things that I'm fascinated with and those have always been fascinated with is the idea that, you know, we were all we all consider ourselves fairly average dudes who just happened to go down an extraordinary path. So operating in that path, what are those things that make someone be able to do that and do the job consistently, do it well? And how does that separate from other people?

Because, you know, everybody has has competencies. Everybody is a rock star in certain contexts of life and an a doofus in other contexts. Like there are many contexts in life where I am a doofus, you know, so and you look at like professional athletes and you say, you know, LeBron James is a master on the basketball court.

I'm sure he would tell you at least what I get for, well, at least 10 different context, inside of which he is a complete doofus and he'd probably be the first to admit is like, no, no, that's I'm bad at that. Right. So so I think it's I've been fascinated with one of those aspects that allow humans to understand their own potential, their own performance, and then if they understand it enough, pick the right path, sometimes consciously in my case and in the case of team guys, unconsciously, because we just found ourselves wanting to do it and going there and making it through at young ages.

So, you know, not very self-aware at that point in your life. Right. Well, most people aren't exactly sort of, you know, reacting impulsively to, you know, unconscious drivers until they reach a certain level of maturity where things are either working or not working, where we engage in that process of evaluation to try to understand what those drivers are, which is really kind of the core of your work.

But you said something interesting, which was that. You and the SEALs would consider themselves to be average people who've put themselves in, you know, an extraordinary situation in which to excel and grow, but it takes a certain type of individual to sign up for something like that.

Like when you talk about the drivers, that would compel somebody to say, that's the life that I want to pursue for myself. I agree.

But I'd also say that it also takes a certain mentality for someone to want to be a surgeon, you know, or an athlete or a teacher or, you know, any profession. You know, I really honor and respect. And I think I think this is one of the things I really enjoyed about the teams was that the majority of the guys respected hard work and purpose and movement. And so there was very little ego around people who really did their job well.

I mean, the janitors at our commands, who did awesome jobs, awesome people. There was and there was no judgment. There was no putting oneself above above others, because you you really honor and respect someone's purpose, dedication and hard work, which you start to have trouble with is when you see, you know, apathy or, you know, misdirection, you know, people who just aren't on the path they don't really want. There's no drive.

I mean, I think that's and again, I say I say, you know, have an issue with you just you don't resonate with those people as much. And so anybody who's picked a path and pursued it and done it with deliberately and consistency and integrity and and I say I would say success, but not even success as long as they've pursued it. There's respect there in terms of the seal, the SEAL pathway, I would certainly think that there are commonalities amongst the guys who want to do it.

And I think the process to get to Buddz in the first place is certainly difficult. So I always I always used to say part of the selection process for Budd's is getting there in the first place. You know, that's the first part, because there's a lot of guys you always meet a bunch of, you know, a bunch you'll always be guys who who say, oh, hey, I always wanted to be a seal. I just add this.

I did this and then that and that this happened. And in the back of your mind, like, OK, well, that's you've got deselected, you know that I was that was one of the things that happened, right. You did. You never you never preselected yourself, elected yourself.

You never pursued it to the to to day one on the beaches of Cornetto. Right. And then and then let the Buddz process then throw you into massive right challenge. And even in that context, people are deselecting themselves.

It's rare that somebody gets tossed out. Right. Like people are just opting out to quit.

It is rare. Yeah, it happens. I mean, and and I would I would actually say that the process has matured and evolved over the years.

I mean, I went through in 96. Right. So it's matured and evolved over the years to do better at it, deliberately deselecting those who might not fit the mold. Because, again, as as the communities gain popularity, the the reasons for which guys have come in have shifted. And you and I had a little bit of a conversation about this before we came on. But in the mid 90s, you know, very few people knew what Navy SEALs were when me and my all my buddies joined.

We all wanted to be kind of badasses, invisible warriors. We like the water or whatever. And then the war started and suddenly the spec ops holistically and the military. But spec ops, who would who was doing a lot of the bulk of the initial work, at least hunting down bad guys, the you know, suddenly these kids who are seeing that they're like, oh, wait, that the reason I want to go do that, I want to I want, you know, the towers come down and, hey, I want to go serve my country.

And that's another reason. And again, there's no both are honorable to just different. There's no judgment on these reasons. And then, of course, as spec ops in the SEALs in particular gain popularity and we're kind of like, oh my gosh, now we're visible.

You can you know, the reasons are changing again, our guys joining. So the community has done a really good job at starting to identify what those attributes specifically. OK, what are the attributes we're really looking for and how do we accurately assess those and pick the right people? And it's not just the guy who can make it through hell week, and that's just a guy who could run with a telephone pole there to be more, you know, integrity and and and character and things like that and and ethos and those guys.

And so I think they've it's been very impressive to see them make that evolution. Yeah.

All the conversation seems to be around Buddz, but it's so much more than that. It is.

It is. I mean, so I always joke. And this is kind of how I started thinking about the work in Buddz and Helwig specifically. But you carry telephone poles around, you know, with telephone poles, two hundred thousand pounds, you carry boats on your head, which are like another guy who's to carry the boat. Yeah. I mean, you do this thing, you sit in cold water for what seems like hours and freeze, you know.

I have done and been on hundreds of missions, real world combat missions, and I always joke that never on one did I carry a telephone pole or have a boat on my head, you know? And so what you know what? This tells probably some cold water, though. It was some cold water. Yes, I will I will admit that what this tells us and told me as I started to think about this attribute to researchers, that is that the what we were doing in Buddz, they call it SEAL training, but it really wasn't training as much as it was assessment and selection.

And what they were doing as they were, they were trying to tease out their assessing attributes. What was it about grinding through that telephone pole that allowed someone to make it through? What was it about carrying that boat on your head? What was it about going through? Hell week was five days and usually for three hours. Right. What was it about that? It wasn't the actually you weren't training to carry on. You had you weren't training to stay up that long.

You were you were basically seeing if guys had the ability to move through and continue to perform. And I think and that's that starts to speak. To attribute.

Yeah. It's a loose it shines a spotlight on these attributes. And you know, where which attributes these individuals are excelling and where they're weak. But what you've done is really canonise that, like evaluate, evaluated it and distilled it down into like these principles that you share in the book and the program that you that is now like the doctrine for how you screen people and evaluate who are the best candidates.

Yeah, and I appreciate you saying that because because my goal was not to write another book. I never wanted to do that. And of course, I was in the teams when I saw that happening. And really what I want to do, what I've always really been interested in is is asking the question, what are those things that I experienced that I can draw out? And Ubiquiti is really for for people. And just here's an example. I mean, yeah.

So so you go through Buddz. One of the ways the way you quit Buddz is you ring the bell. It's called a bell. And a lot of guys do. But the way are the example I'll give you is that is is twenty twenty. I mean, you know, so I say in twenty twenty all of us were thrown into the deep challenge, stress and uncertainty and just take it as one of those many examples of twenty twenty where we were all thrown into a deep challenge.

Stress, uncertainty, the difference between Twenty, Twenty and Buddz is none of us volunteered to be there and none of us had a bell that we could ring to get out of it. We were all thrown into this, which meant we actually all got a crash course in our crash course on our attributes during twenty twenty. We all have. So we've all, we all, we all came to the end of a year where we've learned a lot about ourselves and now have the ability, if we have the understanding to to capitalize on that knowledge and excel in twenty, twenty one because again we can use that information as we start twenty, twenty one because none of us can say how twenty, twenty one is going to go either.

And all of us are a little shell shocked from twenty twenty. So, so how do we then how do we then take those things and say how do we, what do we do to use this to my advantage to perform. If I know that I'm a little less on adaptability than I am on resilience or or I'm higher on discipline that I am on, you know, you name your matchup, right. You know, there's ways to do that.

Right.

So traditionally, we've thought of this through the lens of skills. What is your skill set and how do we plug you and your skill set into the right lane so that you can excel? And you've really appended this to say skills are important, but skills are trainable.

Attributes are, you know, to use the the the description that you use in the book are like your code, your computer code, and they're kind of baked in and they can be developed, they can be enhanced.

But essentially you kind of come out who you are. Right. And the process of figuring out which lane to plug you into is a function of evaluating all of these attributes that you have, where you're weak, where you're strong, and then selecting for those strengths. That is that accurate?

That is accurate. And I think, you know, again, the the. Skills is a skills are and always have been a valuable and necessary measure of performance and and as we as we kind of we can look at the evolution of the workplace and evolution of factories in the industrial complex, the ability to manage and run machinery where skills that workers need it.

So, so so companies begin to train people to do that. And your ability to do that effectively, efficiently and competently was a measure of your skill. So they actually developed classrooms inside the factories to teach people this stuff. So it's always been and go all the way back to, you know, you know, prehistoric man, you know, I mean, the ability to throw a spear and hit the target was a was a valuable skill. No one cared how much empathy you had doing it.

So so skills always have been important. The problem with looking at your skills is they're seductive and they don't tell the whole story. Skills are are not inherent to our nature. So we learn them and we can we learn them or can be taught them or actually can learn them just by nature of doing a task. Just aren't you and I looking at or working on a computer for week after week, we'll learn how to type skills can be absorbed that way so they can be taught.

They can be learned that way. They're not inherently nature and they and they direct behavior in certain situations. Right. So so here's how to type a paper. Here's how to ride a bike. Here's how to throw a ball. Here's what to do and the skill and the skill to do it right. Therefore, they can be measured and tested and assessed very easily. They're very busy. You can see how well someone throws a ball, how well someone rides a bike.

To that end, they become very seductive assessment and hiring tools because you can see the number, you can see the sales guys number, you can see how well someone does. That is a you can see the graphic designers performance that you can see how well someone shoots or runs, how well someone how in shape someone did, how well someone is. It runs runs the three mile run right at a spec ops camp. The problem is it doesn't tell us what happens in uncertainty when when everything goes sideways, when the environment is so unknown and uncertain that you don't know what skill to apply.

And this is where we start talking about attributes and attributes are inherent. We're born with them now.

We can we certainly develop them over time, but they've seen levels. You can see those of us as parents. We can see levels of perseverance or adaptability in young kids, almost, I would say infants. But as soon as they start crawling, you can see these things, you know, so they're they're inherent to our nature. They inform behavior rather than the direct behavior. So they tell us how we're going to show up when we're in a situation.

So my levels are my son's levels of adaptability and perseverance and resiliency, for example, told me how well he was going to manage riding a bike when he felt when he fell off of it, ten was in a room.

So inform behavior as such, they're hard to assess, measure and test because you can't see them, you almost. And so the most visceral, visible place that you see them is in times of challenge, uncertainty and stress, which makes speckle special operations, training or assessment of selection. Such a great environment is such a great laboratory inside of which you tease these out because it's all about challenging stress. I mean, Buddz takes you down to zero. Doesn't matter if you're a star athlete.

Doesn't matter if the the alma mater or know smartest person doesn't matter where you came from, you will go down to zero. And the question is, how do you what do you do that then?

Yeah. And it's that high stress environment that basically reveals the default settings on that individual right. Because you don't you don't default to your skill set. You default to your core attributes.

That's exactly right. Yeah. And then the only caveat is that I talk about briefly, albeit dormant attributes. The dormant attributes are those attributes that you have, but you don't know you have and you and you don't know you have them. And you can have a dormant attribute all the way through late adulthood. It really depends on whether or not there's been a situation that has teased that out of you. You know, this could be the the the the person who thinks that they're who thinks they're impatient.

Right. And then they have kids and they realize, oh, wait a second, I'm actually a pretty patient person. Right. Because I would if they would have character, they would have mischaracterized. That's exactly right. So I would I would maintain that any story in our lives and I think every one of us has a story that that ends with I didn't know I had it in me is an example of an attribute coming to the fore that they didn't know they had.

So that's dormant attribute. So their attributes that we might have that we don't know we have just because we hadn't put ourselves in those situations, which is what one of the things I loved about going to Buddz, you know, I loved I actually love. But I mean, it was tough, but I loved it and I loved it because of the purity of the system.

It didn't care who you were, where you were from, and it just it taught you so much about yourself. Came out of that. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. OK, right. I got it right.

Well, any I mean, the thing is, we're all aware of things like grit and perseverance and resilience in.

But it's kind of an ephemeral thing, right, like you were saying, like, how do you actually calculate these things and identify them? I mean, any employer or executive who's hiring people, who's successful at it will tell you, like, I don't hire for skills. I hire for, you know, their disposition or whatever. But that's kind of an intuitive thing. Like, I get a feeling when I'm with this person, I feel like there are somebody who's going to show up for me or they have the right, you know, level of humility or whatever it is that they're searching for.

But there's no rubric for that, which is really what you've done. And you did it by dint of, you know, realizing that this was important.

I mean, you open the book with this story of like this experience. He had like eight years. Right. Who was having an issue with this very specific, like, mission training that you were doing where he despite being very good on paper, he just couldn't figure out how to excel in that environment. And that led you I mean, I want you to explain that by that kind of led you into thinking more deeply about why this was why these things weren't matching up in the way that you thought perhaps they should.

Yeah, I yeah, I was I had the privilege of of running training, assessment of selection and training for one of our really specialized field commanders.

And at this particular command, we would take experienced operators from other commands and they'd apply to our command and we put those guys through our own selection process. So you're talking about guys who have between five and 10 years of experience already in the team successful did. And we were getting about a 50 percent attrition rate and and you know that it happens, right? But the problem was in my in when I took over, my CEO had said, hey, we need to do better articulating why guys aren't making it through, because the best explanation a lot of times was why you cut you didn't cut it.

You couldn't do this right or you couldn't do that right. What does that mean? What does that mean? And that was leaving a sour taste in our mouths because we weren't explaining it properly. It was leaving a sour taste in the candidate's mouth because they just they came from this position of, hey, I thought I was doing great. I got accepted for this thing. Now they're telling me I'm not good enough. What the heck? Right.

And so they asked me to look at it. And so that's what took me back. And I began to look really at the foundation, the origins of of the underwater demolition team and Draper Kaufman and this idea that, you know, before the allied invasion, they realized that they needed to have teams of dudes swim, swim ashore, measure, basically measure depth, identify obstacles and blow them up, blow paths clear if necessary. And so they tapped this guy, Draper Kaufman, who had run a who put together an explosive ordnance school a few years prior, said, hey, can you create this unit?

And Kaufman knew that he needed guys. You know, he already had he had he had run an explosive school. So he already had at his disposal a bunch of guys who knew how to do the job right, who knew how to tie demolition on obstacles and and swim and do whatever that is. What he recognized he needed was to figure out who could do the job because these guys would be swimming into heavily defended beaches with only, you know, a knife and some explosives.

Right. And swim trunks. They'd have to adapt on the fly. They'd have to figure out what was going on. The environment would change it, get ugly. So I call it kind of a unconscious genius. And he said, well, I'm going to start my training with a week of the most difficult things I can imagine. And so he he started training with, you know, what is now Hellweg. And basically, Iran guys, through the gambit of simulated combat simulations, explosives, some problem things that but it was really just very grueling.

Guys slept for only a couple hours just back when it was the frogmen. That's exactly right. Yeah. And and he basically didn't run any testing or evaluation during that process, the decision to stay or go arrested on the candidate. What do you say to everybody? Quit in that environment? And of course, many quarters, about a 90 percent attrition rate. But what he knew at that point is that he had that 10 percent of people who he knew could make it through when things went completely sideways, when things got so bad that all you had was yourself.

Maybe you're your teammate. And and that was the initiation of the original underwater demolition unit. And of course, that training involved in that hell hell week still is the is the Crucible for Buddz. It's now the fifth week and so the first. But but what he was doing was he was looking for attributes. He was looking for guys who could do the job, not out. Newt not knew how, you know. Yeah.

That difference between how to do it and can do it is a pretty wide gap, right? It absolutely is. Yeah. But within that lies this great mystery, like what is the path from from, you know, how it occurred to can write and write and how do you how do you like pin that down and create a structure around it rather than just while he's got he's got what it takes. Like what does that mean.

Well, I think part of the process is to reverse it. It needs to go from good to how so. In other words, if you have the attributes. So our whole philosophy became, hey, as long as a guy has the attributes we're looking for, we can teach them how we can teach. We can teach you how to shoot. We can teach. You guys got up now competent, certainly better. So there needs to be a baseline.

But but what I tell people who ask me in organizations who ask me about hiring people, I say, well, first look at the context, you know, so so what what's the team? What you know, because because the set of attributes that you need to be a Navy SEAL are going to be different than the set that you need to be an H.R. person or a sales salesperson. So what are what's the list of attributes that you think you do that are predominant in this type of environment?

Start with that. And then if you if you find them so learnability might be one of those things. Hey, we need someone with high learnability. Someone has high learnability, has high on the all for the mental acuity. You're going to able to teach them pretty much anything you need to teach them. They can learn almost any skill, you know, and pick it up pretty quickly. Right. So so we began to reverse that process and say, OK.

Well, we're going to we're going to still train because because training, by the way, is a great environment inside of which you can tease out attributes if you put challenge and stress, if you implement challenges. So you get you almost got you almost get periphery training. And in the process we were running, I called it like we're training, we're training for the periphery. Right. We're actually we're assessing attributes. But at the same time, they're learning critical skills that they need to know to do this job.

And and I think I think teams and businesses, because you can do the same thing, it just takes some some diligence of thought. And it's subjective to the team and the and the individual, whatever you're looking for.

So how did you begin the process of deconstructing this, to identify what these attributes are? Because you've come up with this list and you go through them in the book, but you had to arrive at these as being the critical ones.

Absolutely. While so so this started when I was when I was running training. So the first thing I did was I created basically small groups around the commands of five or five or 10 guys. And I said, hey, write down, make a list of what you think the the key attributes we're looking for are. And I try to give a quick explanation of what actually what an attribute is. But inevitably, the list is going to come up with both skills and attributes on it because they get conflated quite a bit.

But I did that first. And so we got to so we got all those lists. We had something like 100 or so things and obviously called the skill off all the skills. Okay, that doesn't and put it aside because we know those and then and then looked where some attributes were similar to other attributes and came up with a list at the time of thirty six attributes. And that was the list. We basically said, OK, this is what we use.

When I began to when I got out of the Navy and I began to talk to businesses, I'm thinking about this more deeply and more openly, you know, outside the genre of just special operations. I said to myself, OK, what is it? What are those attributes we need to start looking at? And I began to think about performance. And this is where I really started. And this is so so Andrew Habermann, great friend of mine.

And I know you know, and he says all roads lead to energy.

Every guest that I have on this podcast has some sort of entanglement with Andrew.

He's yeah, he's a popular guy. Right. So he says, hello, I'm actually staying in this place right now. But so but he and I met right after I got the military and we were at this peak performance thing where we were kind of helping think about ways to help executives and CEOs perform at their peak. Pretty good, David Goggins was there, so he and I got to visit, right, so so so we entered and I kind of synergized because we both started talking.

What we realized is that neither of us liked nor were that interested in peak performance. And the reason was because and it's funny because most people say you you seals, you guys are the most you guys are the best performers out there. I mean, you know, the secrets of peak performance. And I used to disagree with them. I didn't know exactly why at the time, but it didn't feel right. And as I started talking to Andrew, he and I kind of figured it out.

And the reason is because Pique is an apex. It's an apex from which we can only come down and peak often in most cases, has to be prepared for has to be scheduled and has to be. You have to you have to. It has to be routinized. You have to have a routine together. And so so the example the professional football player prepares, you know, spends his entire week preparing to peak on Sunday for three hours.

That's when the Olympic athlete or the Olympic athletes. Yeah, decades getting ready for that. That's exactly right.

We realized we were interested in optimal forms and optimal performance is something different. Optimal performances. How can I do the very best I can in the moment? Whatever that best looks like, what is my best and how can I do it? Sometimes your best is peak. Sometimes that's flow states and all that stuff. Sometimes it's your head down and you're taking step by step and that's all you're doing. It's minute by minute, it's moment by moment. And it kind of hit me like when I was freezing in the surf zone in seal training.

There was nothing pique about my performance.

You know, I was doing the best I could and the best I could was not to quit at the time, you know, but this is where like this is where you and I have synergy. Ultra athletes, I think, have this mentality. I mean, when you're an ultra athlete or a triathlete or whatever, when these races are so long that the that the end of them, you don't really even want to think about the end of them because it's too far away.

You have to begin to learn how to chunk your environment in ways to perform. And I would I would maintain I'm not going to say certain, but tell me if I'm wrong. I would guess that there are points during your race where you don't feel like your peak at all.

Not at all. And you also know going into it that it's not going to go smoothly. That's you're going to be met with unforeseen obstacles and variables that are going to come up that are not part of the plan at all. And it's about how you respond in the moment to those things that you couldn't have prepared for.

That's exactly right. And guess what? It sounds like life. Yeah. I mean, that is life.

I mean, we as you know and, you know, in life, twenty, twenty, twenty in particular. Right. I mean, but life every day we get out of bed and we there's some there's some predictability. But ultimately we don't know. I mean, things are going to happen to to make an assumption or even expect oneself to perform at peak all the time, all day is both unrealistic and probably irresponsible from a health perspective. There has to be a modulation and optimal performance.

Is that modulation so so the the idea was, OK, when I think about attributes, what do I believe when I look at this kind of collection of experience and research are the attributes for optimal performance.

What are those things that actually help us do the best we can in the moment? Again, sometimes that's peak peaks. Awesome when you get there and if you can plan for it, that's great too. And I would recommend anybody who can plan for if you're if you're a salesperson or presenter in a business, if you have a sales presentation, plan to speak during that presentation. Right.

Nothing wrong with that at all. The more you can control those variables, the more you can set yourself up for peak versus off. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And you can. And if you are and so Andrew and I really are of the belief that if you can optimally perform consistently, that's actually true confidence, because you know that no matter what hits, you'll find a way you'll get through. It may not be pretty.

It may be dirty, ugly, but you also can't hold yourself to the standard of peak performance. Right. Like you have to. You have to you have to provide some bandwidth to understand, like I'm not going to be at my peak. It's not about that. So you let yourself off that hook a little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

And you're prepared to. And this goes for. So I think it's funny. I was I was doing some training with a buddy of mine a few months ago, and he was you know, he was trained. He was he was training me. So we were pushing sleds and all that stuff. And and he was in this stuff. Steel stuff. Right. Right. And in this case, he was I was pushing a sled and he was timing he was timing me.

And I said, what are you timing as well? I'm timing how fast you're coming out of the gate, you know, and then how and then how fast you're doing the entire thing. And he said, what what's happening with you is that when you come out of the gate, you're Paiste. Right. But you're but you maintain the same pace the whole way through. You never slow down. You're basically the same pace. He said, when I do it, I come out explosively.

So I'm really fast. And then I taper. I slow down. He's it's the difference between anaerobic anaerobic. Right. And it hit me and I said I said, this is very interesting because this is optimal performance. This is actually what this is actually what seals I say special operators do all the time.

We are aerobic thinkers. We go we are trained to go into situations. At a pace and we don't go all out right away, we just don't because we understand that we don't know how long this is going to last and we may have to go all out at certain points. So when I do go all out, I want to be able to go all out. And as soon as I don't have to, I pull back and I start recovering.

And I would imagine the same thing happens in ultra racing and in some of these longer distance events, because you know what point say, OK, now I've got to turn it on. I got to go to 10. OK, that's done. I'm to dial it back to a five, you know, because I need to I need to recoup, you know, and I think that's optimal performance.

Yeah. I mean, in the training, you prepare for that by creating a tremendous aerobic base so that when you do exceed that threshold, you're able to come back to that base more rapidly and reset, which gets into like the micro recovery kind of thing that you talk about. Yeah, yeah.

Micro recoveries. So when I was at the same place we were, we were putting together an issues. I was I was asked to take a look at resilience, you know, because we were at we were, what, ten years into into the war. And we were noticing guys were coming back and they were broken, you know, retiring, broke physically, mentally. And so we started asking ourselves the questions about resilience and and in diving to resilience, I was I was interested admittedly, I was more interested in kind of the other end of resilience.

Resilience is an important word. And it's and it's something we all need to have. It's an attribute. Right. But resilience describes the ability to get knocked off of baseline and come back to baseline. That's what it is necessary in our survival. However, what's also necessary in our in our survival is what I'll say is Antifragile. Great, great book called I Seem to Leave A.. Fragility is the ability to get knocked off baseline. And when you come back, you've you're stronger.

Your baseline has shifted. And so I began to say, OK, you know, I and the guys who were helping me put this together, OK, how do we do that? Part of that, a large part of that we felt was the mind, you know. And so how can we start looking at the mind and and understanding the relationship to our brain to affect our physiology and and and be better physically? Well, you know, a lot of us, when we expend energy, what we don't realize is that recovery is one of the most important factors of obviously any any physical endeavour.

And it often takes twice as long, if not three times of long to recover after you've done something, which is why sleep is so important. It's the ultimate recovery.

I was interested. I say I, I and the team I was with, we were interested in what we were defining as my recovery. What are those things we can do that allow us to charge our internal batteries in in moments?

Right. So I would call it recovering between gunfights, you know, so I have five minutes here just to take a breath and pause. Can I plug in my internal battery somewhere and build up my energy a little bit? What are those things? And so we began to explore things that allowed us to do this, do that.

This is where another place where human and I really gel is because he was studying this in the lab and and techniques that you could you could basically shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic and begin to recover, you know, and you could do that through breathing. You do that through visualization. You know, you could there's different ways you can do it in terms of short term. You know, there's we call it there's kind of medium recovery. You can do, you know, meditation.

If you're into that, you can do sonas, whatever it is, you can do macro, which is, you know, we could obviously sleep as well on vacations if you do it right. Right. Or other. So so recovery became an important factor and micro recovery meant, OK, what are those pauses? Where can I work? And I grab those moments and do a small recharge again. It's not you're not fully recharged is you're plugging in your your your, your mobile phone.

That's at ten percent. Right. Before you get on the airplane you're plugging in to get up to 15 percent.

Is that's what you got. So. Right. So that's resilience more than antifragile because you're not you're not trying to boost above the baseline. You're just trying to get back to your your set point.

That's during the in the moment Antifragile has to come typically after the moment right now.

So. Right. So you use like the gun, like the gunfight example. But a more relatable example might be something like, you know, I just I had to go meet with my boss. If you chewed me out about this thing and I'm walking back to my office and I have to jump on a conference call and I've got like two minutes. What's the technique? Is it a breath work? Is it a specific practice? Like what does that look like?

Yeah, and I would say even even more relatable as you just had a bad day at the office and have to go home and have some OK with you. OK with a family.

Right, exactly. Yeah. I mean the tools, the tools range from me. It was so, so breathing is a huge one. Right. And just, just focused and I think there's, there's CO2 blow up reading where you can, you can basically you, you, you take a breath, you go up to do your capacity and then you blow out longer than you inhale. Right. That's that's blowing out CO2. It's shifting you into parasympathetic.

So there's breathing. Heavy breathing is something I you know, we brought in and started. I started. Langworth and I would recommend visual tools. I know Andrew talks about some of those open gate open gays is a really good one and open gays just instead of staring at something in front of you, you're basically letting your eyes relax and you're noticing all of your peripheries that has been proven to start shifting you into parasympathetic newsroom where you can cover visualization, active visualization, you know.

You know, we it's also been studied and and proven that we can visualize in a way that makes our brains actually believe that we're actually conducting the act. Right. So so all of the chemicals that are being released in a in a physical conduct of that action can be also released when you're actively visualizing it. So when you begin when we start to kind of think about and break down the sympathetic parasympathetic system, you know, sympathetic, obviously engagements, you know, active, right.

Parasympathetic recover, recharge and then start kind of breaking down the chemicals involved in each right. If we're if we're in if we're if we're angry, anxious, fearful, we're releasing bursts of cortisol, which are awesome for action. But they're there. I wouldn't say destructive. They they take a lot of toll on our system. So our bodies were designed to shift us into into parasympathetic where we build up DHEA, which repairs all that stuff.

So our emotions actually have a lot to do with these chemicals when we're angry, anxious and fearful and cortisol, when we're joyful, peaceful and calm, we're making DHEA. A recovery technique is to be joyful and calm. Gratitude gets you there, too. But think about I used to visualize my social. My boys were little. They like babies and they go take naps on my chest. I lay on the couch, they take naps on my chest.

That was such a warm, wonderful, positive feeling. And I began to visualize that in a way that I could feel it and I could literally begin to feel a chemical response and I'd use that as a recovery mode. So active visualization of some of these events can actually help because what you're doing is you're generating a chemical response that's shifting you and repairing you. And then we have to understand that even even a sympathetic response that's positive is actually recovery.

Joy. Joy is a sympathetic response to like exuberance and joy. That's that's your sympathetic system. But you're creating DHEA instead of cortisol. And so so I think, you know, in terms of so micro recovery, it's about understanding those those tools that you can use either vision or breath and maybe some visualization tools that you can feel as you're getting into more macro level. Recovery doesn't have to be just sleep. Right. You know, I run I don't run the distances you do.

But but I run in the woods in Virginia and I run maybe five miles. I don't use headphones. I don't use a clock. I just jog. Right. And it's it's in the woods by the water and it is absolutely rejuvenating. And that's what I think the best. And I'm just that is my recovery time, you know, so. So you can use that as well.

And what's the of breathing. So heart rate variability, breathing. And this is this is a type of breathing training that allows you to synchronize. And it's really the it's that it's the variability between your your heart. Right.

And so what that does is that if you synchronize those, you actually you actually shift into well, so I don't want to get deep. And I did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I got to be careful. Right. I'm not an expert here, but but if you if you have heavy breathing, if one were to look it up, it actually helps you breathe in a way that that that helps you shift into parasympathetic states, if you will, should you desire or and I haven't gotten to this level or be more focused and active while you're in a moment.

Right. So, so really, really intense or high level HRB breathing you can do actually in the moment as well. But it's a specific breathing technique that allows you to kind of boost your H.V. It allows you allows your Harvey to stabilize. It allows, I should say, synergise. So so the so the waves, the waves are now you're in your incoherence basically without it, with your with your heart and synergise our relationship, your heart, your your your brain and your nervous system.

Right. So yeah, HIV is super interesting.

I've started paying a lot of attention to it lately when I started wearing the Woo and noticing that, you know, sometimes I'll get a great night of sleep and my deep sleep is good, my REM sleep is good and I feel like I'm ready to go. And then the group will tell me that my HRB is actually way lower than it was two days prior or something like that.

And this is a day I was like, but I feel good. Yeah. Yeah. And then there are days where I don't feel that great. My, my, my H.V. is pretty good. So it's not a feeling thing.

No it's not. It's been I, I've dabbled in it, which is why I hesitate to go in depth, but I do in dabbling with it and then talking to the guys who. You know, you remember being one of them, it is effective, if you understand it, it's effective in your system's ability to be in coherence, but the relatability to how you feel in terms of relaxed or active.

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No questions asked. You got nothing to lose. All right. Back to the show. All right, well, let's get back to these these attributes, so you were talking about how you arrived at this huge list and you began to call it. So how did you hone in on. I mean, there's 13 in the book, right? And they're kind of divided into these these categories as being like the core attributes.

Yeah, 25 total. Yeah. There's so five categories. So what I so what I really need to do and what I did as I, as I looked at them is how do, how do these group together and and and then how do I categorize how to categorize those groups. I have always, always been interested in gret. All right. It's probably cause I want to feel proud. Right. But one of the reasons is because people have always talked about it as if it's an attribute.

And I I have disagreed with that, too, because it didn't make sense to me. But of course, Angela Duckworth wrote a book on grit, which he essentially said the same thing. You say grit is not just one thing, right? It's a it's a. And so I began to say, OK, if grit is not just one thing, what are the attributes that make up grit? And so I looked at the attribute list and said, OK, I think it's these four things.

I think it's courage, perseverance, adaptability, resilience. Those blended and catalyzed create grit. It's like a loaf of bread coming out of the oven. And I would say, you know, you can have them and they can. Those those attributes singularly work in different contexts, of course. But when you have those four, you're talking about grit. So that's how I so I began to say, OK, how do these clump, you know, mental acuity, you know, I saw some of these attributes had to do with how how how our brain kind of functions in the in processing, processing the external world.

It's something I saw viscerally when I was running SEAL training because I'd see guys in the in the shootouts. Right. And you could see how quickly they were reacting, how quickly they were absorbing that. All spoke to this mental acuity drive. Same thing. You know, drive is interesting because, you know, drive it just we all know these people who seem driven. Right. So so someone who makes a ton of goals but they don't execute on them or someone who starts a bunch of stuff but doesn't follow through or someone who's really hard to get started.

But when they do, you can't stop them, you know, what are those things? And so I started to try to clump those and see if they made sense. And, of course, leadership and team ability. And I have three I talk about we can get into those later that are I call the others because I call them bidirectional attributes. But that's kind of I try to use it as a process to clump them, to make them a little bit more understandable for the reader.

And then, of course, I looked at my original thirty six and said, OK, what are the ones that really don't apply? They're very specific. And I called those out and that's really how I came up with the twenty five there in the book. Right.

It's super interesting. I mean back to that opening example of the seal who was great on paper and couldn't execute in that training exercise. What you discovered was that he lacked situational awareness, which is one of them mental acuity. And it's right. Also in that category is task switching learnability compartmentalisation. I mean, you can be really high on learnability, but if you don't have situational awareness, you're not going to be able to clear a room totally.

And so I always say that the mental acuity you have, the mental acuity ones are the the the four, I think out of the twenty five that are the most connected there, really, you can't have they don't operate independently as as much. Right. So situational awareness is first that forms. I mean that's 11 million bits of information coming into our system and every second. Right. And that's from all of our senses, you know, from our visual toward our smell to our feeling.

Our brain does a massive amount of of of discarding of stuff that we don't need to pay attention to. Right. So so we're not paying attention, for example, to the soles of our feet, you know, until we I mentioned that now we're paying attention also.

But but our brains, obviously, okay, we don't have to pay attention. So all that information coming in, a lot of it's coming in now. So coming into our frontal lobe, which is only about 3000 bits that can process. Right. So those three thousand bits are what we have to consciously say, OK, this is my environment. This is what I'm noticing right now. Situational awareness speaks to your one's level of vigilance. How much are we noticing?

And we all know people. You know, I look at my wife and I joke about this all the time. I am pretty hyper vigilant. I notice a lot of things. I'm the guy who walks around the New York City streets and I notice how much of that is just drilled into you. Well, so some of it training some of you. You've been trained to be that way. Some of it is aware of what's going on around you.

Yeah, you know, you're right.

And some of it is. But like I look at my son, my eldest son, he's the kind of like me and he's pretty vigilant.

He he notices things, you know, he's not he's he's he's more aware than, say, his brother, who's more like my wife, who isn't, as you know, they you know, they're kind of in their head, you know, just looking around. So we see that. So and again, there's no judgment. It's really where you stand on these. I do maintain that all of us have all of these attributes. It's just a matter of what levels of each that we have.

So, for example, I'm I have a higher level of situational awareness, say, than my wife. You know, we both have situational awareness. It's just the level. So so that's the first thing. Information coming in one. That information comes in to our frontal lobe. Now it's time for us to process it, and that's compartmentalisation. Compartmentalisation is is basically three things happening. It's its assessment, its prioritization and focus. So information is coming in.

I'm going to assess what of this information that I'm noticing is important to my current task. You know, I joke. I love good New York City. I love to ride the subways. It's because the subways are thoroughly confusing to me. It's an exercise in all of these in my mental acuity attributes for me. So I'm going in the subway and I'm saying to myself, OK, I need to get to Brooklyn. OK, what about the information coming in to me?

Do I need to do I need to. Ah, is important. You know, obviously the the newsstand with the newspaper, I can discard that. That's not important.

You know, even though I noticed it, I don't need to, I need to notice, I need to, I need to say signs, tracks, things like maps now because you're so hyper vigilant, it's more difficult for you to crowd out what's nonessential, to focus on the task at hand, which is getting to that certain that that certainly takes training.

Yeah, like the thing is, these things don't function or operate in isolation. Like, if you're so hyper vigilant, it's probably more difficult for you to focus on one thing. If you're on a crowded street where there's a lot going on, you're absolutely right.

And this is where this is where too much can actually be a little bit of a detriment because hyper vigilance to it to do too much of a degree leads to stress because you're you're you're overwhelmed or you there's too much for your task switching too quickly, you know. So so, yeah, you have to manage.

And I think I think certainly you talk about the training my my my lifestyle for twenty years trained me pretty well to have to have that in the back of your head and know what to focus on.

In fact, you know. Special operators and seals are are in large part to a man very, very good at this because the environment just trains you so well and it's about, OK, what's coming in? OK, now from what's coming in, what do I need to focus on? You know, what do I need to assess then prioritize? What's the out of these OK, these three things are important are of importance to what I'm trying to do.

Get to Brooklyn. Right. What's the most important one of that? You know, for me, it might be that the signs, the track signs. Right. So I've got to I'm not focused on the track signs.

I should probably look at the map. I don't have to worry about the guy who's 15 meters behind. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. I can I can I can tune that person out. Then we get into task watching. This is where it gets it gets fun and a little bit of tricky because task switching again, I talk about in the book, you know, multitasking is a myth, right.

We know that most people, however, think they're pretty good at, you know, but statistically, what happens is what's happening. We're not multitasking. What we're doing is that we're tasks switching. And and those people who think they're multitasking are actually tasks switching very inefficiently. And studies have shown when you multitask, the more you try to multitask, the worse you get it at what you're trying to do. Right. And it's because your tasks switching in effectively task switching is basically the ability to switch focus from one thing to another efficiently.

And since we do this all the time inside fixed contexts like driving a car. Right. Well, we're driving a car at one moment. We're steering, you know, the next moment we're putting our foot on the brake. The next one we're putting our blinker on. So we're we're actually task switching inside that context pretty, pretty seamlessly. We do this in life all the time because we drive our car to the to the parking lot of the grocery store.

As soon as we get out of the car, we've just swapped contexts, you know, and our brain is shifting context. Now we're in a parking lot. OK, then you get to the grocery store, grocery store, new context. So we're task switching naturally all the time.

The are the the measure of task switching in an individual is your comfort and ability to do that efficiently between between context, especially in times of stress. I am pretty good at switching tasks and because of my situational awareness, when I switch atat, when I switch into a task, I still maintain an awareness of the environment. So I understand if I need to switch again, you know, that's that's right. You know what where where. That's a detriment to me.

Sometimes I have trouble focusing deeply on something. You know, my wife is incredibly she she's incredible at focusing when she gets into something, man, she just is. She drives. She's awesome. You know, things fall off, you know, things things on the on the periphery, less hyper vigilance situation, situational awareness.

Yeah. And and probably not as good on the task switching. That's exactly right. Yeah.

But but super, super productive and powerful when it comes to focus, you know, way, way better than, than I am. So, so there are pros and cons to this. It all, it all depends on what you're using it for. And then of course there's learnability. How, how much are you processing all this and absorbing it into your system so you're not making the same mistakes? Again, admittedly, if I'm if I'm higher on all of those, I'm lowest on learnability.

And what that means is it takes me a while to learn things. I actually, I repeat, mistakes more often than I like to admit. We all know people who they learn something in the first time they got it.

The first time they learn it, they pick it up. I mean, they got it right. That's high learnability, you know. And the fact is, neither is better or worse. But understanding where you where you lie on that for me, especially when I was in some of the SEAL training evolutions, I would say late. I would repeat things in my head. I would walk the hallways of the of the buildings we were we were practicing clearing just to just to make sure I was hammering home some of those things that I knew I couldn't.

It was took me a while to pick up, you know, so so lower on learnability is not a bad thing. Lauren, any of this stuff is actually not a bad thing. It's just. Okay, how do I just my my environment so that I can affect that and high enough on self-awareness to understand that you needed to do that for yourself. Right.

Like what's interesting is it's not there's no value judgments on any of these.

We all come with, you know, our our our toggle switch is different for all of these different things.

And everybody has their unique framework. But I'm interested in this distinction between innate disposition and what is trainable, because when I think of one of these attributes, I think, well, if somebody is walking around with a certain level of resilience or courage or situational awareness, perhaps some aspect of that, you know, they just came out of the womb with that. But there are also a function of their environment and their their parents and all of the, you know, things that that, you know, happen to you as you age.

So that has to be an aspect of it, too. Like what trauma did you survive or what what was your dad or your mom telling you? Like all of don't those contribute to these baselines? One hundred percent.

And so so the great news is we can develop attributes. We just can't do it the same way we do a skill we can't if you're impatient, I can't sit down and teach you a class on how to be patient or how to be resilient or how to be adaptable. It has to be to develop an attribute. It has to be self directed. You have to want to do it. And you have to oftentimes make a conscious decision to affect that attribute, even though your your natural tendency might be opposite.

Right. We all in twenty twenty developed attributes. We all because the environment required us to, we all developed our adaptability in 2020. But I mean there's no one I would imagine. There's no one who didn't. You know, adaptability was a high developed attribute in twenty twenty because the environment forced that on us. Some of us found it fairly easy. Those of us who did or probably started started high on adapting. Some of us found it more difficult and hard.

Those those those people probably were low on adaptability. But no, no matter who you were, you developed it. You became better at being adaptable. And if if we are hit with some some weird stuff in twenty, twenty one, we are all we are all more prepared to handle it now because we're, we've developed our adaptability and I would say resiliency and a bunch of the others to what is the relationship between adaptability and like what's missing from this list in my mind is optimism, like people that have an optimistic disposition.

Are generally more adaptable and resilient. Yes, yes, so you're absolutely right, optimism, so I talk about optimism in self efficacy. I actually add it as a component of self efficacy. And the reason why I added as just a component is because optimism on its own is inert. We can you and I can be optimistic all day long. You and I can plant a garden and decide just to leave it and say there are no weeds, I shall have a bounty.

Right. And do nothing and will be disappointed. Come springtime. Right. So optimism on its own is inert optimism when when paired with attributes is actually one of the most effective I peritoneoscope I pair it with self efficacy of self efficacy is a combination of confidence, initiative and optimism. So self efficacy is I, I believe I can do it. And I believe as I move through, even though I don't know how exactly I'll make it happen, that's self efficacy.

And so and so if you look at those three factors of self efficacy, each one on their own doesn't do much confidence on its own, doesn't do much. You know, I grew up and my dad was a private pilot, so he took us flying all the time, every weekend, almost if we could. So I loved I developed this love for flying my brother and I, and we wanted to be Navy pilots, you know, that's what that's what that's what drove us to the Navy.

And my twin brother actually ended up flying the Harrier for the Marine Corps. I ended up taking a different turn and going to seal training. I love flying. I love it. I've been in hundreds of airplanes, hundreds of hours. If you put me in an airplane, I know I could pretty much fly it. I know how to fly. I've never I've never gotten my pilot's license. I've never flown a plane. Right. So confidence in my ability to fly is a great initiative.

Is the next thing you need the ability to take the first step, because if you don't have that, you're not going anywhere. Initiative has to have purpose. Right. Because initiative on its own is frenetic energy. You know, you put a you put my while he's not eight, you put an eight year old in the driver's seat of a car that kids are going to have initiative to push that accelerator. Right. It'll be dangerous if he does Yuzo initiative on its own needs to have direction and purpose and of course, optimism, optimism.

I talk about optimism in a sense that it's tempered with realism, you know, because optimism plus realism is actually very, very effective. Now, realism is necessary because it keeps you prepared. You know, I know I can do this. I know I can take this long drive cross-country by myself. My realism says I might need some gas along the way. I would put some some cans of gas in the car. Whatever realism helps prepare you.

You just have to be careful with with with realism, tipping into pessimism. Right. Because if you're too realistic, it dips into pessimism. But you've got to be able to objectively analyze risk.

You have to, because if you have no realism, it tips into arrogance. Right. So so optimism has to be tempered. So I think optimism is an attribute, but it's an inert one that you have to pair for it to be effective. Yeah, that's what I would make.

That's certainly what experience is on the topic of arrogance. The one that jumps out and I'm sure you get asked about this all the time is is narcissism. I do. Yeah.

That was that was problemi everyone wants to talk about that and it was my chapter, the right to be narcissism.

I you know, when I thought about what drives people, I had to go back to why I became a Navy SEAL in the first place and. And I would maintain, if you ask any CEO why he became a Navy SEAL and that guy says, because I'm a patriot, that guy's lying to you. Well, he's not lying to you. He's just not telling you the whole truth because we're all patriots. Right. I became a seal because I wanted to be a badass.

I wanted to stand out. I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to be special. Right. That's narcissism. Not right. So narcissism, certainly pejorative word. And of course, there.

Well, it's more than that because not only did you want that, you had a belief that you could do it. I did. I enough initiative.

Yeah. So it's a combination, certainly. But where I where I wanted to explore narcissism was this idea that narcissism is a human thing. You know, certainly there's narcissistic personality disorder and the DSM cycle, DSM five, the psych big psych bible. Right. Will describe narcissism. That's I think it lays out like nine nine descriptions.

If you have five or more, you have a narcissistic personality disorder.

I mean, and you read these like, oh, yeah, that's bad. Right? But then you read them is like, wait a second. I actually have a little bit of that. Right.

Well, I have a little bit of that, too. When I started reading that, I said to myself, well, I think we all have a little bit of narcissism because all of us at some point want to feel special. All of us at some point want to stand out, be recognized, be noticed, be loved, be adored. And it and so you dig into it. You're like, of course, because the science tells us this.

When we are infants getting getting looked at and adored by our parents, we are getting hit with doses of serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin, those three chemicals to neurotransmitters, one hormone, but powerful combination of this feeling of safety, love and and and pleasure. Right. That's the dopamine. Just when we're getting paid attention to us as an infant. Right. That translates to adulthood. We want to feel that. Right. So so I looked at narcissism.

You know, I said to myself and I looked at all my team guy buddies and said, if none of us had this innate desire, let's see if I can be a bad ass, none of us would have gone down this path. Narcissism was a driver. And so I think the reason why I would talk about is because because I want people to embrace their humanness. You know, we are we are all human. We all have the need for these chemicals.

So we all have a little bit of narcissism. So the question is, can you effectively use it? Can you capitalize on it? Comes with risk because too much narcissism, it's obviously detrimental. One to narcissism is invisible to the to the owner. You know, it's like a vampire staring in the mirror. Right. Hard to see in ourselves.

So so the innoculation to narcissism are relationships loving and trusting relationships with people who will let us know if we're getting a little out ahead of our skis. You know, my wife does this for me all the time. And and and she and I do it for her. Right. It's a balanced relationship. But but those not only my my my friends and things like that, are these people going to say, hey, OK, dial it back a little bit?

Because but I tell you what, if you if you have a desire, if you're listening to this and you're maybe I don't care what age you are, but you have this this goal or desire, I want to be a singer, a writer, a poet, or I want to be an athlete or what you want to you want to stand out. You want to be recognized for that. There's nothing wrong with that. Use that use that as a driver because it works.

Just don't let it get right.

So in going through all of these attributes, you can develop an understanding of what they are and then determine. How you fit into all of that, where you excel, where your weaknesses are. There's a there's a, you know, a self-knowledge component to all of this.

But let's talk about the the like the practical application.

Like once you kind of understand what your drivers are, what your attributes are that are motivating your behavior and where you excel, where you need some work, how do we translate this knowledge into. Forward momentum. Yeah, yeah, well, first, understand where you want to go, right, and what in what context do you want to exemplify these attributes? So, you know, parenting and home, home life, you may say, you know what, I think I have a teenager.

Right. And I have two teenagers. And I think I need to develop my empathy a little bit. You know, I need to be more empathetic. OK, I'm going to work on that. I certainly need I'm a patient person. I have to hyper develop my patience with teens, you know, so so there's a family context. There's the business context I'm in. I'm in this job. What are those attributes that my job requires that would allow me to excel?

Likely, if you're in the job, you already have those attributes. But how do I how do I develop them further or is there an attribute that I don't have a lot of that I do want to develop, which again, can be done? You choose that and you focus on it. The the key to developing attributes is stress, challenge and uncertainty, because that's when they are hyper developed. Patients, you have to you have to place yourself into a situation of a situation of impatience to develop your patients.

And again, I talk about patients is one of the bidirectional ones. So I keep on using it. There's nothing wrong with me.

Do you not also have to put yourself in that high stress environment to really get a grip on just where you fall in that pecking order with that attribute also reveals all truth where you really are.

That is the purest environment. What we've done, what we've done with the book and on the website is we've developed a special tool. Yeah, you've got the tools. Yeah, the assessment tool. So what we did is we developed this assessment tool for Grit's mental acuity and drive. We we put together questions and then we pushed it out to about a thousand people all around the world and got data back. And that data basically gave us baselines that we could use for someone who comes and takes the assessment.

So what I taught, what I tell you, what I say about the assessment is if you take this assessment, what it'll do is it'll tell you where you fall on these attributes as compared to, you know, other people as compared to a group of a thousand. And that number will increase as we get the data. That's only that's only a start point because because ultimately you as an individual need to ask yourself some questions about how you showed up in uncertainty.

Twenty twenty is a perfect, perfect barometer. A barometer. Yes, an example. You can kind of look back and say, OK, when I was forced to stay home almost overnight and now I'm teaching my son advanced calculus, I'm trying to write this book. I don't have enough toilet paper. I mean, when I watched it happen, how was I on resilience, adaptability, open mindedness, courage, you know, how was I on that?

How was I on task switching tasks? Washing was was a huge one. I thought I was pretty good.

I in fact, I'm a pretty good task switcher, you know, home context.

I it was a little bit more it was a little bit more difficult, whereas my wife was task switching beautifully because she had been at home with small kids while I was deployed for months on end.

Moms are usually well moms. Parents who have small kids are usually phenomenal. Tacitus, you know, because they're just constantly doing it. They're constantly exercising that. So, so.

So the assessment tool is one way to get a little bit of a snapshot, I call it, and then asking yourself some deliberate questions about, okay, if I'm showing up a little low on, say, openmindedness, why is that? You know what? Let me think about some other situations where. My open mindedness was challenged. OK, let's see, I was at a I was at an event and someone came up to me and began talking to me about political views that were the polar opposite of mine.

You know, what was my open mindedness at that point?

You know, those are ways you can start assessing your own barometer. But then the other question is, OK, do I need to develop this?

Do I do I need to or even want you know you know, I always say, you know, I talk about the leadership attributes. There are some there are some professions that are self directed. You don't need a lot of the leadership attributes to to be in that profession. Now, I would maintain that, you know, probably other aspects of your life. You might be a leader, so you might want to pay attention. However, empathy is a good example.

You know, the the amount of empathy needed for a Navy SEAL, the level of empathy is not as much as, say, a nurse. Right. So so if you're if you're in the nursing profession, you might want a little bit more empathy, empathy, you know?

Well, too much empathy for a Navy SEAL could be quite a hindrance. Could be detrimental. You're absolutely right. I always talk about Navy SEAL empathy as as a dimmer switch, you know, because, again, most of us are family guys. And so and so I always thought about it is that you dial it up and down as you needed to. But there were times you needed to dial it way down because to to to have it too high or even even even a smidgen too high, it will affect you.

Yeah, I would think that the assessment tool like getting a really solid picture of where you lie on the spectrum of all of these attributes would just be such a powerful tool to somebody to help them direct their path and, you know, into the right, like trying to be the square peg into the square hole. Right. Like like what's the best career path? Well, here's what I'm dealing with.

Like here are the careers that actually require excellence in these areas where I'm already excelling, like for a young person who's trying to figure things out. Right. Yeah. Like you could sell this to Zipp recruiter and it could help them match candidates with the right jobs. Like it's a very powerful thing, right? Absolutely.

And I get excited about it because of that. And the only thing I would offer is if you're younger and you're looking at this, just realize you're still malleable, malleable, and you probably sell a lot of dormant attributes because you haven't had a life experience or maybe something that has thrown you.

I had the tremendous fortune of going to Buddz at 22 years old. That was that was an attribute factory. I mean, you learn in that six months you learn so much about yourself and your attributes. And again, a lot of it was I hadn't I hadn't processed it in a way that I could articulate it.

But you you come at you, they ask, you know you know how you feel after. But, I mean, you feel so super confident because you just you didn't.

And it's not because you learned how to be a precision shot or you learn how to do, you know, Halo jumps, right. You don't learn that stuff. And but it's because you just learned that in the some of the most harsh situations on the planet, you made it through, you know, and that is powerful stuff. And that's really a lesson and attributes. So so the younger folks, the younger people just have to recognize you may not think you have an attribute, but just understand you may not have been tested yet.

So don't dismiss yourself just yet. But in some ways and I talk about, again, the book and some ways our values, understanding our values, start to point to some of our attributes. If you value competitiveness, then you might be higher on the competitive this scale. If you value humor, you might be higher on the human scale, you probably are. And so those are those are some clues into that.

So as somebody who has been studying this for a long time and has come up with this framework, how has that impacted, like when you were a Navy SEAL commander? How has that impacted the selection process?

Because I feel like Buddz kind of happened the way it happened.

And it's sort of perfect in the way that it is almost by accident or just by running so many people through this. It just, you know, became what it is. And it's probably not that different than it was 10 years ago. I don't know. But but I would suspect that now coming into, you know, such a deep understanding of all of these attributes would alter how you look at candidates and screen now.

So so, yes. And there's there's going to separate then two, because the way we what didn't have to change was the training we did have to change was the way we looked at candidates. So in other words, the training we recognized, whether it was BUDG or the training I was running, was really quite good. You know, there was there was not much we wanted to or needed to change because it was really quite refined. It's been going on with it, proven successful for decades.

All we need to do is change what we were looking at. And what that allowed us to do in that environment, at least, was to to a begin to understand more effectively why guys were faltering and not or being successful. But it also allowed us to spot the dark horses early on, guys who may not have shown a lot of technical. Expertise, but they had all the attributes we needed and we're like, OK. I can teach that guy to shoot.

I mean, he's he couldn't hit the broad out of a barn right now, but I could I could teach him. That's easy. I could do then the day, you know, and this is where I think organizations companies fail because they're they're hiring processes are typically designed around skills. You know, here's the resume, which we all know can be very flowery. Here's here's all your stats, you know, and then let's do a 30 minute interview and see how that goes.

Right. And it's funny because even interviews, you know, I was working when I was doing this, I bumped into one of our a guy who ran for one of our agencies, ran a program. We'd help people develop undercover personalities. And he and I were talking about this. He's like, this is so cool because, you know, one of the things we do is when we do these undercover personalities, we try to make sure we help someone develop something, a persona that's congruent with who they really are.

Because what we found is that even the very, very best actors can pretend to be someone else for maybe 30 days before they revert back to who they really are. And, you know, by the way, challenge and uncertainty will revert you back almost immediately. So very few of us are really, really good actors. So some of us may be able to do it for a couple of days. Some of us may be able to do it for eight hours every day.

When you go to work, who knows? But someone almost every one of us can do it for a 30 minute interview. I mean, that's that's you know. That's right. Right, right. Right. So you can pretend to be anybody you want to be for a 30 minute interview, which is why interviews aren't really good measure. I really am supportive, at least in the hiring process of probationary period. Now, I hate the word probationary, by the way, because it's just there's there's a pejorative, I guess, to that, too.

But periods where a new hire can spend some time in an organization getting the feel of that, they are assessing the attributes of the organization they want to be a part of, where they think they want to be part of. And the organization is getting a chance to see that person in different contexts because, again, some of these attributes have to they take time and context to accurately assess integrity. Is one of those, you know, do the right thing.

And again, I go into what do the right thing is, because it's different. It's subjective to whatever group you're in. But it you know, does this person do the right thing in, you know, in front of people on their own out in town when things are going going bad? So these are all different. And oh, by the way, one one fail is not necessarily a measure of who we are. All of us are guilty of sometimes not doing the right thing or lacking some adaptability.

Any one of these attributes, you know, any one of us even high on, we can find examples of. Oh, I wasn't I didn't show up with who I really am. So you have to do it over time and in a few different contexts to actually get a good, accurate feel for it. Right.

And above and beyond that, we were talking before the podcast about what happened so frequently is people do find themselves in the right job or position. They excel at that and then they get promoted out of that core competency into into a job where their attributes are a mismatch for for the expectations.

This is this is one of the classic problems of leadership. This is a resort, again, to leadership, because so often leadership promotions are based on successes in an organization that are skills based. You know, someone does really well and they've been at the company for a while. They get promoted into a leadership position. And I always say no. And I you know, I've actually since I got out of the Navy, I've been working in the kind of the leadership space, so I've really been able to dive into it.

DCL guys end up, it seems like that's trying to get businesses to figure out how to run properly. Yeah, it seems like that.

But for me, it was it was it was certainly a it was a it was a deliberate jump into something I wasn't necessarily comfortable with talking in front of people and teaching classes.

But it was also a chance for me to, again, look internally and look back at what I did as a leader and say, OK, what were where did I fail? Where do I think it felt good? One of the things I've realized, and I'll I'll call it a truism, is that you don't get to call yourself a leader. Right. It's not a you know, we often conflate being in charge with leader. Right. Leader being a leader is saying I'm a leader is like calling yourself funny, right?

Unless you're making someone laugh, you're not funny. You know, other people designate you a leader, which means leadership is a behavior, not a position. OK, you can be in charge, but other people will decide whether or not you are their leader in terms of how you behave towards them. And so we begin to we begin to look at leadership from a behavior standpoint. And this is where a lot of promotional processes fail us because promotional because because a lot of says, OK, if you do this and then this and then this, you will promote to this and you'll be in charge of a bunch of people.

Well, OK, just because you're in charge of a bunch of people or just because you did this and it doesn't make you qualified, necessarily be in charge. You're in charge because you you did what they're now doing really well. Right. Which right at that point you're at risk, has nothing to do with nothing to do with leading people.

Right. And it puts you at risk of micromanaging because you're looking at alike like, no, no, no, that's not the way to do that. Right. So so oftentimes people are promoted out of what they're so good at, into maybe a position of leadership, and it doesn't mean they shouldn't be there. What it means is that if that happens, you have to recognize that your job has fundamentally changed. Now you are you are you have you have people in your span of care.

You are you're now well, if you look at the leadership attributes, you are accountable for development, the growth, the success of the people in your charge. Right. And you and it's your job to to behave in a way that allows them to say, OK, yeah, I would follow that guy, I would follow that girl anywhere.

You know, that's a completely different set of attributes.

It is. That are required. It is. Yeah. Now. And I would say now some of those are transferable. I mean, empathy across a lot of the categories is could be a good thing. Accountability is always good. But but yeah, if you are a master at something, a master to trade and it may perhaps is a singular activity, maybe a maybe. I don't know. I'm going to say graphic designer. I don't know how singular that is, but maybe, you know, whatever you're working by yourself.

Right. Some of these leadership attributes aren't as important.

I mean, authenticity. Yeah, decisiveness. Who knows? I mean, you know, accountability probably. But but I mean, selflessness, selflessness. I mean, I don't know if that if that you know so.

Well, you have a great story about that, though. The story of of upon graduation getting called to run the Hill.

Oh yes. Yeah. Oh yeah. So OK. That illustrates that so beautifully. It does. Yeah. So this was in context of of of trust. And so I think I think the, the behaviors that build trust, by the way, are very similar to the behaviors that build that, that, that qualified leadership because because again, trust is not just a feeling. I feel like I trust this person is more than that. Right. It's actually a belief.

A feeling is just a human emotion. That's what the feeling is, a belief as a human emotion that's been rationalized or justified. So so we make a belief to trust someone. You know, you can't make anybody trust you. All you can do is behave in a way that allows them to make a decision to trust you. So goes leadership. So so when I was studying this, I was asking somebody, you need to trust me.

Is it effective? That's exactly right. Yeah. Trust me or I am your leader. Those are just if someone says that, run the other direction. Right. I mean, that's not good. Yeah. And if someone says, trust me, just ask yourself why they're saying that. I mean, a fireman comes into the building. You there's some trust there. Right. You can do that. But you know, or I guess if Schwarzenegger shows up and says, you know, come with me if you want to live, that's another one.

Right. But OK, so we were studying trust. I was working for a company called the Chapman Co. Institute Stihler. I still do some work with some wonderful leadership company out of St. Louis. We were studying this thing called Trust. And I remembered I remember the story from from my own SEAL training. And so in SEAL training, it's three phases. The first phase. Second phase, third phase. First phase is a lot of the the heavy, hard stuff.

Hell week is in there, you know, things like that. And you go to a second phase and you're doing dive training, a lot of scuba stuff still hard, but you're learning how to scuba dive. And then third phase is, is weapons and land nav and demolition. And so for the last five or so weeks of third phase, you go out to an island, Sanclemente Island. We can see it off the coast here. Sanclemente Island is about ten miles long.

It's about a mile wide, its widest point. It's basically owned by the military. It's mostly military operations. There's an airstrip on the north end. SEAL teams go out there to do a lot of live fire, demolition SEAL trainees go out there for the last five weeks to do their weapon. Heering and demolition training. And then the joke is of the the word is, when you go off the island as a student is when you're on the island, no one can hear you scream.

No, no complaints. Yeah. And no one hears the instructors can screw with you all they want. No, no.

And even though I mean, yeah, it's the last five weeks of of a six month program, but you're still in training, so it's still tough. So there is Sanclemente. Alan, you're still there still they're still requiring you to do certain things to to just live. Right. So you have to do some sort of evolution, physical training before you get the book, before you're allowed to go eat a meal. So so there there were three different things you could do.

Ironically, we ate three meals a day. Right. So so one of them was a rope climb. So right outside the chow hall there was a sixty five foot rope. They had those at Coronado too. But climb up and down the rope with full gear. OK, that's where you go, right. That's one. The other one was a combination and I'll get this wrong, but I'll just estimate something like fifty push ups, fifty dips and then like ten pull ups or something.

And if you do those then you, you go in. The third one was what they called the hill run. So right next to the chow hall and the barracks there was a hill. And the only way to describe this hill accurately was it was long, tall and steep. And the idea was you stood at the base of this hill and the instructor has a stopwatch and he says, go, he had a stopwatch. You have to run to the top of the class.

Into the top of the hill, it's about a, I would guess, two hundred, three hundred yard sprint up to the top of this hill, there's like a little concrete monument there. You tap the monument and come back down. So you're at the time with which you had to go up and down, decreased every week. And if you didn't make your time, you didn't get to or they never starve. You basically had to go get wet and sandy and you had to eat your meal outside, which by that time and still trying to wet your hydrofoil but were wet and sandy as you go, you go to the surf, you jump yourself in the surf, you just get soaking wet and then you go roll in the in the sand.

It's called sugar cookie, right?

Yeah, totally.

And so by that time in buds, you are truly hydrophobic, right? You don't like to do this. So that was a whole run. They they had a modification for punishments. They called it the flight. So the flight was the punishment version of the Hill run, which meant now you're at the base of the Hill, you have all of your harness gear, so you have your attorneys with all your ammunition. So that's about 30 pounds of stuff.

And you're at the base of some. Some instructor had painted a line called the flight line. Some other sophisticated instructor had built like this mock control tower that you could stand up with a megaphone and yell at you. You'd stand at this thing, and then you'd take a moving pallet. So you'd see forklifts move these these pallets of goods. Right. The wooden ones are about thirty pounds. They also have metal pallets, which are about seventy pounds or so.

We, of course, had the metal versions, only the best for school students. Right. So so you take a metal pallet and you put it on your back and the instructor says, go and you have to sprint up the hill. Now you're carrying now you're sprinting anymore because you're carrying about one hundred and twenty pounds of stuff. Right. So you trudging up this hill, you hit the monument, come back. That's usually reserved for punishments.

If you screwed up, you know, whatever. If you were lucky, you didn't have to do a lot of flights when you're there. Some guys had to do a lot because they were wise. But but that's a flight. So we were it was my it was my class. We were it was it was like the day before we were getting ready to to fly back to San Diego to graduate schools when we were done. And we had started with, I think, 160 people.

We were down to thirty eight.

Thirty eight of us left. We're in the barracks cleaning up, just getting ready to pack and getting ready to go. Really just. On top of the world, because we're done and from the outside of the barracks, we hear class to musterer on the flight line. And I was like, oh, OK, so we all kind of begrudgingly march out there, we're in line. The instructor gets on the podium. This guy's name, it was Instructor Goodman, right.

Ironically, he was not a good man. But Goodman says, all right.

He said, what's the what's the fastest he'll run anybody has done so far? And I think I'm just say it was two minutes or something like, OK, we're going to do flights until someone beats that time.

Now, just a reminder, he'll run. When you do it, you're slick. You have not that.

You just you sprint. Flight is owlets. Yeah. Flight is Charness. Pallett. Right. And so I am not certain what sound I made or face I made at that moment that Kud Goodman and to me. But we were all pissed. Right. But I, I must have made a sound because he, he looks at me, he said, Hey Devinney, do you have a problem with that? And so I'm feeling a little bit, you know, you know, snarky.

I guess I step out of line. I say, yeah, I have a problem with that. And he's like, why do you have a problem with it? Because this is a stupid guys are going to hurt themselves going up the hill. It's just it just it's a stupid idea right now. At that moment, the rest of my guys in my class are dead. Silence.

Yeah, let me just interrupt. Like is I, I would imagine it's highly unusual to challenge your commanding officer in that way or the instructor at that point.

Yes, I would imagine it is. I'm not sure I'm not.

Luckily, I've only gone through buds once, so I don't know. I don't know if it's happened before.

The consequences could be dire. I will tell you this. The moment I saw my my my classmates were silent. Some of them I saw, like, we're kind of moving away from me a little bit. They didn't know it was coming down. I the words left my lips and immediately I was like, OK, what the hell did I just do? You know, because Goodman was silent for a good well, seemed like hours. So we're not leaving the island.

You're going to be and. Yeah, I don't know.

And so finally he speaks up and he says he says, all right, since since divinities insensitivity has a problem with this, what we're going to do instead is we're going to run back to the barracks, we're going to go to the auditorium and we're going to watch movies for the rest of the afternoon. And so now all of us are silent until someone like smart enough to start moving before he changes his mind. We saw start running back to the to the barracks, high five.

I feel great. And all that stuff. So we watch movies, they're safe. But the reason why I tell that story is not because of that event. The reason why I tell that story is because seventeen years later, seventeen years later, I run into two guys from my buddies cause I hadn't seen them since. But I was pretty much an East Coast seal, which means I was in Virginia Beach, west coast of San Diego. So sometimes you just don't you don't see guys.

And I hadn't seen these guys in that long and we were reminiscing. It was great to see them. And at one point, one of the guys says, hey, sir, you remember that time you stood up to Goodman on the flight line? Of course, I hadn't thought about it. But of course, I remember as a guy who like both of my other points to serve man, we'd follow you anywhere. We trust you anywhere, any time.

And obviously, that's nice to hear. And these guys are good friends. Right. But I thought about why does that still exist? How does that trust still exist, right. After all those years?

I mean, they didn't they didn't necessarily know. I mean, I was still a seal. So obviously I was obviously still active, but they hadn't served with me. So why does that still exist? And what I realized is it came down to these attributes. It came down to the fact that I was selfless. It came down to the fact that I cared about them.

You know, the competency of my student nurse or even my silliness up to that point had nothing to do with why they were saying that they had what had to do with what stuck with them over time. For me, in their minds, as a leader, in their minds was the selflessness, was the authenticity, was the fact that I had integrity in that moment. Right. That's what stuck with the attributes, stuck with them. Right. And I think that was really the lesson.

Right. Like the attribute being your first instinct was to think about the welfare of the other guys would have been a very different scenario if you said this is stupid because I'm going to get injured.

That's true. Yeah, that would've been stupid to say, right? Yeah. You would have ended up running a lot of hills. I guess I would. I would imagine I would.

Yeah, but here's the thing. You know, people ask me all the time when I tell that story, they say, do you think Goodman had planned that right? And and what I tell them is this Goodman was actually I it's funny because bunch structures are like they feel like Satan when you're in buds. Right. But then Buddz ends and they're like the nicest dude because they're just doing a job. They're really just pushing. Goodman Wonderful. Dude, I hadn't seen him since.

I have, you know, I don't know where he is or who's doing well, but wonderful guy. The fact is, I don't know if he had planned I don't know if he'd ever done it before. What I do know is that he probably didn't expect that response. And what I did notice after that was the instructors treated me distinctly differently. And I believe it's because they saw someone who would step out of line if I needed to, even at risk that selflessness.

So selflessness as I define, it's more than just altruism. It's more than just generosity. Selflessness involves a risk. It involves a. Costs to the person who's being selfless, but you have to calibrate that against chain of command, like your allegiance to chain of command, right, that you do.

And this is so this is where attributes come in very well. They're extremely important when you're assessing leadership. Because because because. Because leaders in any organization. Military specifically. Have to understand the balance between executing the mission as directed and commanded and keeping the welfare of the people in their spending. Bear in mind there has to be a balance. Unfortunately, the military mission means that sometimes, one, the mission becomes predominant over and over care.

But every every speck operator, every seal, we all sign up for that. So that's not I mean, we go risk our lives. That's a thing. But let's just put it in a in a regular business sense. You know, sometimes you will be told to do something that's just a bad idea or outright wrong. The question is or bad for the people in your care.

The question is, are you do you have the attributes?

And I would I would count integrity in their accounts, accountability. I would count authenticity. I would count selflessness. Do you have those the attributes enough so you can stand up when you need to be stand stood up to to the leaders. But sometimes it's about also the leaders or the stuff coming down is actually the right stuff. And it's it's the people who are you're in charge of who are complaining. Do you have the same attitude? Just say, hey guys know this is the way it is.

We're doing this.

You know, are you are you steadfast in that type of in in conducting that mission? Right.

Because that has to happen to leadership is tough. You know, true leadership is tough. No one said it was easy. That's why it's hard. Right. So and but what if we think about if I if I if I just ask your listeners to think about a great leader and it could be it could be someone they don't know. It could be someone in history, but even someone in their own lives, someone in their own lives, they consider a leader.

Right.

Ask yourself to put it. You know, I ask them I would ask them the attributes to think about that person. Now, think about the attributes that characterize that person. Right. It's those attributes, its authenticity, its decisiveness, its empathy, its accountability. You know, it's all those things. You know, it's and and those are behaviors. Those aren't skills. You know, I always give the example of my dad. My dad was a lawyer, you know, for fifty still.

He still practices law. Right?

It didn't you know, he doesn't know much about plumbing. It still didn't stop me from calling him when I bought my first house and I had troubles with my pipe. So say like, hey, dad, my plumbing is awful. That doesn't know. I just know Dad is always going to be there. He's going to listen. He's going help me solve the problem. He's going to be a leader, you know, and that's what leaders do.

Yeah.

The other characteristic of the story you just told is, is vulnerability. Like you you put yourself in a vulnerable situation by doing that.

So how does vulnerability play into the equation, like on the attribute scale or or in the context of being an effective leader?

Yeah, it does. It does in both cases, although I put vulnerability in the team ability category, it's not an attribute because I, I actually lump vulnerability into humility. I think I think humility ability is vulnerability. That's what is its vulnerability. Express vulnerability. Never thought of it is incredibly important.

And it's because in any team, in any high performing team, what has to happen is something that I call dynamic subordination. So dynamic subordination is this concept where I was actually the story behind that is I was I was a bunch of CEOs had asked me to draw the task organization for a high performing team. Hey, what does that look like in a SEAL team? And I had some options, but like the pyramid that we all know didn't didn't make sense.

That's I'm in I'm in charge. You do what I say. Right. That's the classic basically how every business and the military structure. Right. Then you have a flat model, which is like that became popular like, hey, we're decentralizing everything. You know, everybody's equal. We're all make decisions. But even then, what happens is silos, because if you have a flat line, the right end of that line makes a decision. The left end doesn't maybe know what's going on.

So that doesn't happen by pointing. Then, of course, you have the upside down pyramid, which is great. It's kind of the greenfields model philosophical models. Hey, I'm your leader. I work for you.

Cool. But it puts a lot of burden on that leader. Right.

So actually, largely in frustration, I drew a blob on the whiteboard and I said, what do you think? The leader sits in here? And I got answers like, you know, the left side, right side, middle, and basically said, no, you're all of your are right. The leaders, wherever the leader needs to be in the moment. Right. So in dynamic subornation, what that means is high performing teams understand that challenge.

Uncertainty and problems can come from any angle at any moment. And in that moment, the person who is the most capable and competent and closest takes steps up and takes charge and everybody follows. It's a dynamic swap between leader and follower that happens.

It happens as the environment changes because once the environment changes again, then so when this was so apparent in the SEAL teams, so apparent, I mean, it was incredible to work with guys, especially when you're working with guys.

And you just know I mean, you know them, you know their silhouettes. That's how well you know and things happen. And solutions, just people are just attacking the problem. I mean, suddenly it's my guy who needs you know, we're all OK. What does he need? You know, suddenly it's the assaulter, suddenly it's me. I have to I have to coordinate whatever I. The rapid swamping was so apparent, but I'll just give everybody a real world example of this.

We all know in a commercial airliner that the captain of that airplane is in charge. There's no there's no debate that that captain's in charge of that aircraft. If on taxi out to the runway, that captain gets called by the maintenance officer and the maintenance officer said, hey, there's a problem with your aircraft, you have to turn around. No Captain Worth their wings is going to ignore that. That captain will immediately subordinate to that maintenance officer and turn that aircraft around, OK?

Aircraft turns around and gets back to the gate. Now they have to deplane. Captain doesn't take charge of deplaning either. Now the flight attendants in charge. Right? Right. And so this is an example of dynamic's coordination where it actually in high performing teams, in very effective teams. It happens all the time. What does that take? That takes vulnerability. Vulnerability, though, is not just the stigma of showing your weaknesses. Vulnerability is showing your weaknesses and your strengths, because teammates need to understand where they can lean on you, because that's your strength there, your strengths and where you're going to be leaning on them.

You know, so so vulnerability works in the team aspect. And then as a leader, vulnerability works because it shows people who you are in your span of care that you don't know at all. It shows humility. It shows that they're needed. You know, I remember, you know, I mean, another thing I love about teams is everybody just understood their their jobs and everybody stepped up and. This this idea, like I needed, you know, I can't do this, I can't do with the sniper does I can't do with the assault or does I can't do what the breacher does.

I need them. You know, they need me to be able to know what I do, what I do, vulnerability, need help, feel respected.

And and and they need to have agency over their own department.

Yeah. And they feel like what they do and their presence matters. They are they are an important, effective part of that team. That's where vulnerability really helps in a leadership aspect. And so so when you show when you show aspects of vulnerability, such as third phase, where you are saying, hey, one of my jobs as an officer right now is to make sure that I'm looking out for the welfare of my guys. OK, I'm going to step up and show, you know, that I did.

You know that I care about that, even if it's at risk to me, I literally thought that I would be running hills by myself for the rest of the rest of the day, you know.

But again, for me, it was it was it was a lesson that I you know, I enjoyed the moment, but it was interesting how I didn't really process that fully until I actually started thinking about trust and leadership later on, like 20 plus years later. So, yeah, I think these are it's a it's a really interesting point.

Yeah.

So much of this seems to be about matching the attributes with the demands of of the job.

Obviously, in the context of the SEALs, if you're doing underwater demolition in the middle of the night, that's very different than being on presidential security detail. Yeah, you're both seals. Yeah, those jobs are extremely different and there's going to be a core competency or set of overlapping attributes that those individuals are going to share. But at the same time, it's recognizing that there are many other attributes that are at play here. Yeah, so I'm thinking about it in that way.

Is there like what are the crown jewels like in the seal context like of all of these attributes? There's got to be a hierarchy of which ones are more important than others in the seal context.

Yeah, yes. I would, I would imagine I would I would say that the the great attributes are pretty high up. I would say the I would say a few of the drive attributes are pretty high up, especially like someone like cunning. Cunning is an enormously powerful and most seals you meet. The success of the Navy SEAL teams is largely based on it's not because of a super cunning can have a pejorative.

It can it can be cunning really as as I kind of defined in the book, means the ability to to look outside rules and boundaries, to think out, basically think outside the box. Right. Because we are all subject to what's called functional fixedness or fixedness. And this is this idea that we we are drawn to to to see boundaries that may or may not exist.

OK, so we look at a problem and suddenly we we we place either we look at boundaries that we're given or replace imaginary boundaries that we think are real on it versus we say, OK, what what about this? First of all, are these rules real or they imagined if they are real, if I break them, what happens? You know, so the example I give is as a medieval one, a fantasy. One is always I used to I used to tell this to my guys to to describe the difference between us and maybe some other maybe some other people.

And I would say, OK, imagine you're in. You'd get dropped into a fantasy medieval world and there's a princess in a tower guarded by a dragon. Right. And the king wants that princess rescued. And the king has sent night after night to to slay that dragon and and rescue the princess and and night after night has been killed by the dragon. Right. You drop a special operator and I say special operator. I don't mean just seal.

I mean, you know, spec operator guy or Green Beret, you know, Ranger, whatever, put him in the problem. And that first thing that guy asks is, hey, what's the mission, say the princess. Well, who goes who gives a damn about the dragon, right? I'm going to find a way to say the princess without hitting the dragon because I don't want hit the dragon. Right. That dragon will kill me. Right.

So so the so by design, special operations was created, were created to to think outside the box, to frustrate and agitate, to find ways around that people weren't thinking about. That's one of the things that drew me to spec ops in the first place was this idea and cunning and invisibility and like can you can you stick around? So when I was growing up, I grew up in a town in Connecticut and and I worked at one of my jobs.

I worked at a marina and the security guard at the marina, he he'd basically come on at like 5:00 in the evening and he'd stay the whole night and leave at like eight or nine at 8:00 in the morning once we came back. Guy named the guy's name was Ed Stalin and Ed Man, he was he was a Marine veteran. He was in World War Two. He was he was he was at Iwo Jima. And we would sit there and he'd tell us the stories of Iwo Jima.

And this guy, I mean, he'd bring us I was a teenager and he'd bring me to tears. I mean, this guy was the bravest to this day. He's one of the bravest men I've ever met. And one of the things I remember him saying, he's like rich. You know, it's hard to describe the feeling when you are at a you're you're you're you're advancing. Right. And you're out you're in a line of cover, say, Foldit or whatever.

And there's a there's a open area that you have to go across to get to the next line of cover. And the first wave goes and almost all of them get mowed down. Right. And you're the second wave, you know. And I thought about that.

And first of all, I was just like and this is why I get chills talking about him, because he's just evil. And, you know, we I haven't talked to he died several years ago and we were able to say, you know, say hi to his sons. His sons were just just as awesome. But but I remember thinking that is like I don't know if I have an interest in being the second wave. You know, I have an interest in sneaking around and, like, killing the the machine gunner before he ever sees me coming.

You know, I just think that's, you know, for me, that was that was the attraction of special operators. You know, can you can you find a way around to actually accomplish something that that needs to be accomplished with a minimum, with minimal life loss or whatever? And so I think so König is an important one. So I would say cutting. I would say. I would say. Most of the team ability, one's humor, incredibly important and interesting.

Yeah, I'll dive into human second. I'll just finish the question. I think I think for the leadership ones, I think decisiveness, I think accountability or both are they're all pretty important.

So, I mean, those would seem self-evident. Yeah, I think is is a little more unexpected.

The humor.

Yeah. Yeah. So humor. So. So we all need to take a bow to all the comedians of the world because they do do a such a great service. And the reason is because humor laughing is an involuntary response. Right. And when we laugh, what happens is we get we get jolted with three chemicals, two neurotransmitters and one, we get jolted with dopamine, which we all know, powerful pleasure, chemical.

That that one of the most powerful in the world, right, we get jolted with endorphins, which is what masks pain, but all of us who do I mean, you, especially on endurance runners, know this runner's high. That's endorphins. It's basically by evolutionary design. It's our body saying, OK, you need that. Humans are endurance creatures. You need to keep going. So I'm gonna flood you with these opiates to make you feel better, which is interesting because because they didn't know really we had endorphins.

I think it was the late 60s and 70s. They were studying drug addiction and they found opiate receptors in the brain. And they said, well, why the heck do human brains have opiate receptors? Well, the answer is because the human body makes its own opiate around. Enter, enter endorphins. Right? That's when they're the human bodies, opiates that that mask pain. So we get dopamine, we get endorphins, and then we get oxytocin, oxytocin a hormone.

But guys like human, we'll say it's it's almost like a it's almost a neurotransmitter hormone. Neurotransmitters and hormones, you know, just to break it down, neurotransmitters are like, ah, like the fast flash. Right. They enter into our system very rapidly and they dissipate very rapidly. Hormones, on the other hand, enter into our system a little bit slowly. But they last a they're like the the fire burning into the night. So the so the neurotransmitters are like the fuel on the fire and then the hormones are like the wood that keeps it burning.

Right. So oxytocin, it's it's in between but it definitely lasts longer. That is the love. It's no. Just the love hormone. It's the it's the feeling of safety and connection and love. We exchange oxytocin in really engaging conversations in physical contact when we when we experience or effects acts of kindness between human beings. Oxytocin is created. So when we laugh, all three of those chemicals are pumped into our system and we have no control over it.

It's why we all feel good when we laugh. Laughing makes us feel good. So why is that important and why is why does every single high performing team I've ever encountered have at least one class clown? It's because when we're in pain and misery, humor is a hack. It's a hack into keeping on going. Right. We get we get slapped with these three chemicals. So one of things I didn't touch to say about dopamine, it kind of it kind of falls into that courage attribute.

Courage is really interesting is we're human. And I really eked out, you know, the act of courage. You have to be moving into our fear gives us a dopamine reward and we decide to move in. We get a dopamine reward. So so that dopamine reward is designed by evolution to tell us, hey, keep going. This is good, right? It's not necessarily constrained to when you actually reach the goal. It's as you take steps.

So as we take step by step, we get dopamine. So it's encouraging us to keep on going. So we think about when we're in stress and pain, we're getting all three of those. So the story, I'll tell you is this because I remember it, it was hell week and we were sitting in the service and we had we were going through self-torture. All right. And so so I don't know. You probably know what self-torture is for those who don't surf.

Torture is when you as a bud student, you link your arms up in this in the Pacific Ocean there in Coronado, which is like, I think low 60s, you know, we did in November. So it's very high fifties. And you basically link your arms and you you go to about ankle deep and then you lay down and then the waves crash over you and then they recede and they crash. And it is the coldest thing you'll ever do there, like all night.

Right. Well, they they actually time it. They have stopwatches there so you don't get hypothermic. So they'll it feels like all night as a student. Right.

But anyway we're in and they usually it's usually at night. Right. So we're in, we're getting torture. This is during Helwig and as usual, the instructors, because they're it's funny when you see it on the outside, it feels sadistic when you're in it, they will drive a van onto onto the beach and the guy will get out with megaphone.

He said, OK, anyone who wants to quit right now, I have hot chocolate and I have warm blankets and I have donuts in the van for anybody quits right now. You got it's kind of like the survivor thing, right? You offer food or anybody wants to quit and a lot of people quit.

But but I remember him saying that he pulled up and he said that. And the guy next to me, the guy to my right, immediately pipes up.

He's like, hey, do you have any chocolate glazed donuts? Because if you don't have any chocolate, he's doing this. I'm not quitting. And and I.

I burst out laughing. He's laughing. I'm like I thought was hilarious. Right. And immediately I knew this guy's going to make it right because he could he could he could make a joke. He could find the funny. Right. I knew I was going to make it because I was laughing. I look over to my left, the guy next to me, to my left. That guy is not his face. Has he moved?

He's like he's he's lost in his misery. Didn't even hear the joke. Right. And I said to myself, this guy's making a ring that he's going. Five minutes later, he rang the bell. Right.

So what happened there? So so just in that moment, what happened? He my buddy cracked a joke, right? I was immediately and involuntarily flooded with dopamine, which is a chemical that tells me to keep going. This is good endorphins, which is a chemical says actually this doesn't feel that bad. Right. I'm masking my pain a little bit and then oxytocin. I'm connected to this. Right. It's a it's a currituck. It's a it's a hack into keeping going.

If we think about the. Pandemic, I would imagine those of us who were able to find some funny actually started feeling better. It's why, you know, cancer patients report, hey, you know, I start I just started focusing on funny movies, so I started laughing more. Why? Because it's pushing all those chemicals. It's causing you to keep going. Oh, by the way, I'm sure any scientist could say the whole host of other chemicals, that it's, you know, that it's producing.

Right. And I would think a means of developing a bit of a..

Fragility also, like you get this reset, right. If you like, hit a baseline and maybe push through to another gear.

Yeah. And I think one of the things about antifragile fragility is the ability to effectively recover. And reframe, so antifragile is based on the idea of being able to look, especially if it's a if it's a traumatic event or challenge, can you look back and can you can you understand and learn effectively from that from that experience? Positively? Right. And you do that in a couple of ways. First, the way you do it, as you actually you ask a better question.

So so I talk about this idea that, you know, again, high performing teams, high performing humans, they consistently do this. We are neurologically designed to ask questions about our environment. That's what we do to to make sense of the world. Right. We're doing it oftentimes, unconsciously. However, we can take control and sometimes consciously control this. The problem is a lot of people are guilty of and I've been guilty of this, too, asking the wrong questions, things like why does this always happen to me?

What's wrong with me? Why am I so bad at this? Right. As soon as we place a question into our forebrain, our brain will start coming with the answers. I do this experiment. I could ask you any question right now and I could say, hey, write down this question. How can I double my income in the next six months and I'll give you 30 seconds. Write down anything that pops into your brain. OK, if I give you 30 seconds, you're probably get a list of, say, five things.

You know, now, it doesn't really matter what those five things, some maybe inane, some may be bad ideas. You're selling a kidney is not a good idea. Right? Some some are likely to be practical. You know, the point is, as soon as you lodge that questions your brain, your brain begin to answer it.

Right. This happens to us when we ask ourselves questions, why am I so bad at this? Your brain starts to pollute your palate, your brain with why you were so bad at this versus what are some of the things I learned? You know, how can I be better? And so part of the resiliency process is the ability to ask better questions. As you look back on that experience, humor, laughing about something helps reframe those questions.

You know, if you can if you if you're the point where you can laugh about something, that you're in a perfect position to ask better questions about it and say, OK, how can I learn? How can I grow from this? You know, and that's that's the seeds of Antifragile.

Well, I think that's a good Segway into how we begin to think about twenty, twenty one like we emerged from twenty twenty and the shit show.

It's bad, right. Yeah.

And all the stress that it's carried in various ways for people. So I think it would be beneficial. You know, I don't want to I don't want to do the kind of trappy, you know, set New Year's resolutions. I'd rather focus on how we can reframe how we think about the stress that we carried in in twenty twenty and use that as a launchpad or leverage for for growth in twenty twenty one. Yeah, that's a big one.

Yeah. Well no it's and it's an important this is what's on everyone's mind. It is. Yeah. It's early January and. Yeah. And we got to get a grip on it.

We can't just keep in this static situation and a lot of people feel like they've just had their feet in, in cement total in the last year. Totally.

Yeah. So the first the first point is to understand that you have made it through. OK, so you've actually you've actually grown because of it. So so one better question to ask is how have I grown from this? You know, again, that's a subjective question, so I can't answer it for people. I will say fairly ubiquitously that most of us have worked very effectively on our task switching attribute and our adaptability attribute.

Resilience might be something we need to to help ourselves with by saying, OK, what are some of the positives that came out of twenty twenty and how is my life better because of. So that's a great question. How is my life better now and January 20 21 than it was in January. Twenty twenty. Admittedly that might take some thoughts. Right, but you will come up with answers.

You know, one of the one of the best ways to put yourself in the proper state and I love this question is to ask what you're grateful for. Gratitude also is a inor is an enormously powerful chemical combination when you are truly grateful. You're getting oxytocin, you're getting DHEA, you're getting dopamine, asking yourselves, what am I grateful for? Now is a great way in. So then then you say, OK, what are what are some of those things that you learn?

One of the things I have to think about going into twenty twenty one. OK, well it's going to be uncertain. We know that. So, so when I think about my great attributes, I'm going to need a little bit of courage. If I, if I feel like I'm low on courage, I should probably try to develop that a little bit. I'm definitely in need to have that adaptability. Perseverance, OK, I have some goals.

Obviously, my goals might have been derailed in January. Twenty twenty. OK, now what do I do? What are the things I can do to persevere and affect my goals in twenty twenty one, no matter what happens, I want to and how I'm going. How am I going to adapt to do that. I think an enormously important. In fact, if I were to if I were to scale them, I thought I'd say one of the most important attributes that we can all focus on in twenty twenty one is open mindedness, open mindedness.

Again, the closed mind is is not driven because the closed mind has certain actions and certain minds aren't curious and they're not seeking what's next. They want seeking what could be. And if 20, 20 taught us anything is that we don't know, you know, we don't know what's coming down the pike. And if we're open minded enough to start understanding, OK, I'm going to take now this is a passive it's a passive activity. You know, optimism, as I would call optimism, proactive pathway.

Open mind is a passive pathway where you say, OK, I am I am going to be open to other ideas, viewpoints, situations, so that I can try to look at them from a from a from a positive, not not necessarily positive, but a proactive and and and effective lens.

But there's a difference between making that decision and actually effectuating it. Right. You could say I'm open minded, but then you find yourself in a situation and you're very much not open minded.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think we all found ourselves in that situation. Twenty, twenty. And again, I come back to this idea of asking questions. It's all ultimately it comes down to the questions we ask ourselves. If we find ourselves in a situation where we're feeling like, OK, this person I'm talking to is seems to be of complete opposite political beliefs than me. How might I be wrong? How might what might this person be feeling?

You know, that what might this person be experiencing that I'm not you know, you start to tap into empathy, certainly. But again, empathy is empathy is about feeling what that person feels. That's a that's a little bit more of a leap, you know. But you could certainly start having having a perspective without necessarily feeling anthroposophy here.

Out of curiosity is the buttress to open mindedness. Absolutely. But I say, you know, some people are more naturally curious than others and most of those people are automatically open minded. So so the reason why I didn't put curiosity there is because I think open mindedness can be accessed by. Almost anybody, you know, just by asking the right question, can I just let me give this person the situation, this this event a chance, and and let me start seeing what might be what might be positive about that when we see it in a different light, you know, take myself out of my own perspective if I'm not this, you know, you know.

Forty seven year old, you know, male, former Navy SEAL author living in Virginia. If I'm not that person right, then how does this look? Right. And that's those are really those are really powerful questions to ask and and ones that can help open open your mind quite a bit, you know, so it's a proactive it's a proactive approach to passive aggressive passive.

And I also think here we are in twenty, twenty one, we did survive twenty twenty. So no matter how difficult it was to reflect back on that and realize that maybe you have a little bit more resilience than perhaps you one hundred percent in one hour.

Again, humans are designed to be resilient. That's why we've, that's why we've evolved and survived as a species were designed to be that way. We can we can effectively speed it up and we can also effectively grow from it. That's, you know, transfer into a.. Fragility. But we are all here. We're all here. We're all operating. You know, we're all in our lives. Admittedly, some some of us might be in worse positions.

And we were at the beginning of twenty twenty. But again, that, you know, that's sometimes you get thrown down the hill and when you when you stand up and dust yourself off, you're like, oh my gosh, I'm I'm way further down than I was before I got to climb again. But the fact is you can do it, you know, and we can do twenty, twenty one. And I think I think if we are effectively able to understand and, and dissect the lessons Twenty Twenty taught each one of us individually, we are all in a position where we can crush twenty, twenty one.

I really believe that. I really do because we've been through some stuff that historically is so unique, you know, and that's that's something to be, it's something to just give ourselves a quick pat on the back for. What is the process of of performing that dissection now for somebody who's never done anything like that? Yeah, it was.

So the first process is to put yourself, in a sense, in a calm state. Right. You don't you want to try to you want to try to take emotion out of the equation. Very difficult, admittedly. Right. But emotion tends to blur are it's more limbic than it is than it is for brains. So it blurs our logical ability to dissect. So so to the extent possible, take the emotion out of it from that position. Begin to ask yourself some questions about it.

OK, what happened? What did I how did I respond? Was that response effective or ineffective? What can I learn from that? And and then how can I grow from it? And then how can I. And then and then from that list then you say, OK, how can I transfer that to to to what I want to accomplish. Twenty, twenty one.

That's a that sounds like what we call the first step in AA. Yeah. Maybe so inventory. Yeah. Is there in the process of learning about all these attributes. Is there an attribute that comes to mind that's like the bastard stepchild, like the over the often overlooked and underappreciated attribute that you realize, like we should be paying more attention to this?

Well, I mean, we are talking about narcissism. And the reason is because narcissism can be so dangerous, but it can also be powerful.

No, I wouldn't say that. But I do. I think I what I would what I would call out would be the three others that I talk about in the book. I the the four categories are the five categories outlined. Twenty two attributes. But the title, the book is twenty five after which. Right. So I talk about the others which are patients and competitiveness and fear of rejection. Mm hmm. When I started to look at those as attributes I began to discover that they were unique from the other ones because all the other ones, if you put on a sliding scale, most of them, it could be argued that more is better.

Obviously, we could make an argument against that for narcissism, but for the most part, you could say more is better. But those are the three competitiveness patients and fear of rejection. I wasn't getting the same answer right. Impatience can be just as powerful as patients, you know, and there are very super successful people who are impatient and it works very well for them. Fear of rejection. This idea that I care what people think, to the extent that I'm going to push myself beyond my boundaries, this is this is why a lot of seals do what they do.

Some of us write in the book, I don't like heights. Skydiving was always a challenge for me. I skydived every time I did hundreds of skydives because everybody else was and I was not going to be left behind, you know, and I was not going to let them down. I cared what they thought was why the guys who the SEALs who don't like scuba diving still get underwater. Right. So fear of rejection can be powerful, but insouciance, you know, I don't care what other people think is just as powerful.

We all know those iconoclasts who just broke from the pack and they didn't care what anybody thought. Right. Those people are very powerful, too. They can be. So so the idea is where you fall in this goes. The other one is competitiveness. You know, it's very often in the peak performance world of the performance world that competitiveness is looked at as very, very powerful trait to have. And that competitive gene is really essential. And I don't disagree with that.

What I disagree with is the implied corollary, which is non competitiveness is bad. Right. And I had a lot of the stuff I did a lot of self reflection for. Right. I am not a competitive person. I never have been. When I played sports in high school, I really played to I played lacrosse, which was my main sport. And then I had a track basically to get in shape for lacrosse. I loved the game and I love playing.

I love the integrity of the game. I love the stickwork. I love that. I didn't really care if we won or lost. I didn't find myself emotionally moved either direction.

But being part of the team, being part of the team, I liked all that stuff. But the winning or losing piece, I didn't it didn't affect me that way. It affected. I saw it was affecting other people. And I thought for a while I was like, oh, boy, I think this might be a problem. Right? Especially when I started thinking about seal training. It's like I'm not I'm not competitive. Is this a problem?

What I realized is in SEAL training it Buddz favors neither the competitive gene or the non-competing. It's interesting. And one example that of the two awards that are given at the end of. But there are two awards given and Bud's class. One is the honor man. The honor man is the award for the for the guy who has the best scores in everything. Fastest runs best, of course, time fastest wins. It favors that competitive gene. Right.

You're basically giving an award for the best scores. The other reward is the fire and gun fire in the gut award is given to the person who showed the most grit and drive and perseverance through. But often that guy who wins that has some of the lowest scores high.

So you can't you can't win the firing, but it's earned and it's based on a vote of the instructors and students. So what that told me was the SEAL teams and I think any high performing team does extraordinarily well with both polarities. Right.

Because the competitive mind is extraordinarily adept and powerful at looking at a situation, especially one with boundaries and rules and saying, OK, how can I win in this situation? Whereas the non-competitive mind, my mind says, I don't feel like playing that game. What's what's the other game we can play that's different? You know, the heart's at work. What's what's a different what's a different pathway?

I literally find myself looking at the pack of people and saying, I'm not really interested in competing, that they're all doing great work. I'm going to do this. You know, when you're talking about special operations, that's powerful. And I think when you're talking about business, that's very powerful because in business aspect, certainly there are times, there are aspects of business where you have to be competitive, but there are also aspects of business where you thinking outside the box and kind of thinking about disruption and and different things to do and not competitiveness are not competing.

This is really important.

So so both what I say is that both for all three both polarities to contribute to to high performance. And if you have teams that honor both, you have a really and. Credibly high performing team and the last example I give on that is my wife and I, you know, I am typically a very patient person. My wife is not a patient person. That's her default. It works beautifully. As we've been married 20 years. It's worked beautifully.

Right. Because when when when the situation requires patience, I get pushed to the front. I step up, I should say. I get pushed a step up to the front. Right. When the situation requires impatience, she steps up and takes lead, you know, and that's that if that dynamic swap, if it's dynamic subordination in terms of patient, it makes me think that another application of the assessment tool is to figure out how people pair up.

Yeah. In dating. Right. Like if you if you could if you could figure out which attributes match with other attributes in terms of compatibility in a relationship. Yeah.

And I would just offer if you give it a while, it can't just be one or two dates, you know, it has to be shorter than than marriage, of course, but but longer than just a few dates.

Right. So you have to have the I don't know what that secret sauce is. I can I I met my wife in Hawaii when I was my first duty station was like I met her and we went on one date and then I left, I moved to Virginia.

And so our relationship for for the first three months was all letters and phone calls. We literally wrote each other letters. And then she finally came and visited me a few times. And then I flew out six months later and proposed to her. So so I now. Yeah. And we've been married for twenty years. So so they're so something went right there, you know.

So I can't I can't necessarily prescribe timelines to responsibly, you know, but and we know people who, you know, we have to make room for a little fairy dust and all of this. Right. I agree. Yeah. You know, as much as much as we love Andrew Duberman, like there's a mystical aspect. Well, so so you're absolutely right. And what I'll tell you is, so when I was a kid, I was just before high school, just getting in high school, my mom handed me a book called The Keys to Yourself.

It's written by Venis Bloodworth. It was written the 50s. The key to yourself was a book that taught that explained the law of attraction, you know, and and visualizing and all that stuff. And I was enamored with this stuff. I read that book over and over again. I began to I began to read everything I could on the power of the subconscious mind and law of attraction, things like that. And I began to and my brother, too, and I began to practice it and start writing things down and visualizing and things like that.

And it started working for me.

I mean, and the first thing that happened was like I wanted a I wanted to see J7, you know, as a high school car. And my brother did, too. And so we visualize that and we could just picture myself driving in senior year, I got a jeep in nineteen eighty four seven. I manifest, I drive it to this day. It's, it's at the airport right now waiting for me. I've kept that car right.

Same thing happened when I went to college and I wanted to get ROTC scholarship. I began to visualize that same thing happened when I, you know, when I wanted to be a seal. And they were the selection was really tough and they were only selecting a few people. So I were well, I am neither here to promote or support the efficacy of metaphysics. Right. I do believe that this this this idea of visualization, of positive thinking, of optimism works.

I believe there's there's stuff yet to be studied in terms of why it works. I would say one practical just because I do like to try to put some science around some of it is that if we just look at this 11 million bits of information that comes into our into our our systems every second, when we decide on something, when we write something down or decide on a goal, suddenly that's telling our brains are for brains. OK, notice things about that.

You know, same thing when you buy a car and suddenly that car's everywhere, it's like, oh, my God, did everybody buy this car? It's everywhere. You hadn't noticed that car before. It's because you just put that in your forebrain. You basically told your forebrain out of that. Eleven million bits. If something along this line comes, I want you to notice it. Right. So so I think the power of visualization, I think the power of positive thinking, optimism.

And I'm really a big believer in writing, writing things down. I think writing goes down and as specifically as you can get, I think is a powerful evolution because there's a there's a there's a merger of the physical and mental kind of cements. And I've done that for I've done that my whole makes it real. It makes it real. Yeah. And I sell that. I tell a story. I did that for my you know, I, I wrote down at one point.

I was like I was like, you know, I really want to meet the one of my dreams. I wrote down and I still I had I had these small notepad sheets, the real small ones. And I started writing down just what I thought, my perfect woman, this description of my perfect woman. And it took about four of these things to write down all the things. And I just wrote it down and put it away. I put it in a drawer.

And I remember the date that I was on my first date with my wife. And I remember we were talking. And in the back of my mind, it's like, oh, my God, these things are kind of clicking off, you know?

And I like, you know, and it just worked out. I still have those sheets, by the way. I showed it to her, you know, years later I said this and she was blown away. But I think, you know, understanding that getting that clear in your head helps put that lodge that into your into your brain.

Powerful creator Richard Vinnie. Well, thank you. All right. We got to land this plane, but I'm not going to let you go without without asking you.

I know you can't speak to the specifics of any of the operations that you've been on, but I'm interested if you could share any experiences that you've had that that you're comfortable sharing that maybe shifted your perception while serving or kind of informed the work that you do now.

Absolutely. I'll tell you one story and and nothing. You know, it's an operation and nothing happened, right? Nothing combat happened.

So we were we were we were tasked with a with an operation where so we got some of these backup. We got some intelligence on something that was going to happen in a in the village during the during during the daytime now in Afghanistan or this was in Iraq.

And so so when we say when you get something like that, you say, OK, how can I what do we want to affect and how can we affect it? Sometimes that means, OK, we're going to do what's called a remain over day operation so that what that means is you're going to go if you're going to find a place on the map, you're going to go in at night, you know, put yourself there in a position where you can watch at effect if needed.

And you just sit there all day and just watch. It's kind of like a recon mission, but you have a hopefully an objective if something happens and then, you know, affected if in fact. So we had one of these things. We thought we had intelligence that something was going to happen. So we looked at it and say, OK, this it was in a village in Iraq and and we picked a compound that we were in. OK, we'll sit here.

It's good visibility. We can put everybody hide. No one knows we're there. So we go in in the wee hours of the morning, it's still dark. We come in and we descend into this compound silently. Of course, these people have no clue that we're coming, you know, and now we're going to be there all day. So we're they are multigenerational houses. So you have grandmas down to babies. So we're making sure everybody's positioned.

All the civilians are safe. We're positioning our guys so they can see all this stuff. I'm in charge of the mission of the OIC. And and while I'm walking around, I'm noticing new this little girl, she's following me around. This little girl was probably six years old, six or seven. She's following me around. She's trying to tell me something. But I can't. I don't. I'm working. So I can't stop to to address it just yet.

But once everything is settled down, I. I brought the tarp over. I said, hey, can you tell me what this little girl is saying? And so I asked her and she says she tells him and he says, yeah. She said, you remind her of some movie stars, some Iraqi movie star, and she wants to know if you can play a game with her if you want to play a game with her. And so I said, sure, you know, those those types of missions can often be very boring until something happens.

So we knew we were in the long haul. Just kind of settled in. Yeah, sure. So she she runs into a room, she grabs this game, she comes out and we start playing. And the only way I don't know, I mean, this is this this is ages, ages us out a little bit. But I don't know if you remember a game called tribulation, but this game was it's a math game. It's like you have numbers and you have to you get this, you get a number and you get to find out how to multiply to it or whatever.

It was kind of an Iraqi version of this. It was it was something having to do with math. And we start playing this game and two things happen that I notice. The first thing I notice is that the terp got up and left. I didn't even notice he left because now it's just two human beings have experienced I'm just playing the game that this little girl. The second thing I noticed was this girl was incredibly smart. She was I mean, she was kicking my ass at this thing, which she was incredibly bright and and smart and just really with it.

And so we play this game and and, you know, throughout the day, you know, she points at which I have to get up and work, you know, I work. And then she comes back and what we were looking to have happen never happened and end up being a pretty boring day. So we play periodically throughout the day. Now the sun goes down. We wait till it's, you know, it's time, and then we're getting ready to leave and go back to our our pickup zone where the helicopters can get us.

So we get everything together. We're up and moving, working. This girl is following me around again, trying to tell me something. Finally, we're getting ready to step out and leave. And I bring the tarp over. I say, hey, can you can you tell me what she's saying? He asked her and he says, hey, she's wondering if you can come back tomorrow and play with her, you know, and at that point, you know, you know, I realized, you know, you ask yourself, OK, is that truth the best thing here right now?

And so I, I remember getting on one of my knees and I put my hands on her shoulders and I said, tell her that if I if I'm ever back here again, I will. I promise I'll come play with her, you know. And he told her and that seemed to satisfy. I hugged her and we left. And I never went back, you know, and I'm glad I never went back, because if if spec ops guys have to go to the same place twice, then, you know, it's probably not a good thing.

Right. And so when I you know, as I've gone through as I went through my career and I, you know, have processed it, I realized, you know, I everything that we did out there, you know, with I with my troop and team, I have no regrets. We acted honorably. We acted with integrity. I lose I don't lose sleep. I'm fine with everything which I'm fortunate. I know that that's not the case for everybody because war is tough.

I think about I see that girls face a lot like all the time. I can still picture her face and I wonder if she's OK. I wonder how she's doing. I wonder where she is and I wonder, you know, and she was so smart, you know, I wonder, did she ever was she ever able to affect that intelligence, that that talent, that just the beauty inside of her. And then I wonder about all these other kids.

You know, it doesn't have to be a town in Iraq. It can be it could be a kid in L.A., can be a kid in you know, in New York.

I mean, how many of those kids are out there that aren't they don't have the resources or some of the tools to be able to start realizing their own potential. And so I think a lot about I call it finding Einstein, like, where's our next Einstein? This girl could could could have been or could be our next Einstein.

I am certainly not it, you know, but I'm I'm really, really I get excited about human potential. You know, this idea that we as humans can imagine something that doesn't exist and then and then make it bring it into an existence, you know, and so that type of and we do that and that that type of evolution, that type of process is is just very inspiring to me. And those people who can help us evolve are inspiring as well.

And so so that's really for me, it's all about it's about human potential, human forms. Can I think about things I've learned to help people start to explore their own potential, find their own potential if they're if they're parents or if they are or if they're in the lives of young people, can they help those young people start to explore? Can we start drawing out some of those Einsteins? Because because ultimately we're we can do great things, you know?

And there are some there are some leaders and I don't know if this little girl was one of them, but that's just it seems like something that should be a social mandate. I mean, you would have to suspect there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people walking the Earth or brilliantly talented in some way or another who are never able to tap into the right vein in order to become fully express then. Yeah, and it's almost a miracle when that person who has that talent is able to figure out how to, you know, get the resources to be fully expressed in that like that.

That's almost the fluke when it should be the other way or.

That's exactly right.

And you're dealing with, you know, a kid in a small village, in a remote part of the world, the chances that that person is going to find, you know, what they what they need to support them in that expression is extremely limited.

It really is. And the key is to listen right from my perspective is let's start with ourselves. We have so much inside of ourselves. I mean, if if if an average guy had an average upbringing, I was an average student. I was an average athlete. If I can if an average guy like me can you you guys with this average stuff.

Yeah, but I mean, if you if you can affect, you know, I mean, we're all at in some ways, unless we're Mozart, we're all average at least a little bit. Right. But if I can affect, you know, again, environment matters certainly. But if I can start digging into my own attributes, can, can people start to think about, hey, it can start inside, you know, and and always does.

It always does. And how do we how do we best understand ourselves first?

You know, you need to you need to understand the engine before you start tweaking it and putting putting high speed stuff on it. Right. So so I get I sometimes I get frustrated with all these gimmicks and hacks, say, oh, do this, do that. You know, it's like, well if you don't understand your own engine first, then you might put something on it that's going to blow it, you know, just revan at a park.

Yeah, you're rubbing it in park. So. So what are some ways we can begin to understand ourselves? And the best news of all is we all have uncertainty and challenge and strife in our lives. And those are wonderful crucibles inside of which we can start understanding ourselves. Yeah, and the good news is twenty, twenty one is here.

Twenty two that congratulations. You got a whole year. Yeah. To, to dive into that hole. And the best way to begin that process is to pick up Rich's new book, the attributes you can go to the attributes dotcom. You can, you can check out the assessment or write the assessment tool.

Let's Start partnered with type form awesome company. Then they helped us put it together, assessment tools free. So. So while I would recommend definitely the book will will break down the attributes for you so you can understand exactly what they are. The assessment tool will help you get a sense of where you stand. And then I'm going, I'm going to throw in some stuff. On there to help guide you in developing the ones you want to develop to so cool.

So, yeah, enjoy.

Sinon book comes out January 18th, January 26, 2006. All right, preorder right now. Preorder now.

And I will say we're going to we're going to do something special for you. If you preorder the book, you'll get a ticket to a live stream that I'm going to do with Herberman. All right.

And we're going to we're going to talk about the book. We're going to ask questions. We'll talk about the book will allow people to ask questions and have a conversation about it. But we'll also give a sneak preview on some of the stuff he and I have been working on for the last four years. So that's very cool. That's worth the price of the book right there. Yeah. So that'll be a they'll be offered if you if you pick up a preorder and you'll get your preorder purchase will give you a ticket to that.

Excellent. Great talking to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed that. Come back and talk to me again some time. I appreciate. Thanks for having me. Good luck with the book. Thanks. This is.

What did I tell you? Twenty, twenty one is already better than twenty twenty. Thank you, Rich. That was awesome. I hope you guys enjoyed it.

Now, put it to work before we go. Richard's book, The Attributes, is available for preorder now. So pick that up. Check out the show notes on the episode page at Roll Dot Dotcom for more on Mr. Devinney. Plus links and resources related to everything we talked about. And again, Rich will be doing a live event with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, a podcast favorite for everybody who preorders the book. Also, get a free copy of The Courage chapter upon preorder.

All information on all of that is available on the book's website at the attributes dotcom. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify and YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media is of course, always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner and other subjects, subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page of retro dotcom.

Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Kamei, although the video edition was created by Blake Curtis, portraits by Ali Rogers and David Greenberg, graphic elements courtesy of Jessica Miranda and our theme music was created by Tyler, Pietje, Trapper Pietje and Harry Mathis. Thanks.

I love you guys. Right now I'm taking a little bit of time off. I will be out of pocket for a big chunk of January, but not to worry, the show goes on, including an amazing conversation next week with Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Brian Fogel. The man behind Icarus is back with a powerful new film coming out called The Dissident. It's all about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It is gripping and our conversation is one you're not going to want to miss.

So until then, welcome to twenty twenty one together. Let's make it the best year ever piece by.