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Infanterie Greift An. (Infantry Attacks) by Erwin Rommel
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Examining what leaders in business and civic life can learn from Erwin Rommel’s classic military account, Infantry Attacks, this episode dives into the value of tactical thinking, the reality of self-selection in civic engagement, and why direct, “boots on the ground” leadership outperforms over-reliance on technology. The hosts challenge prevalent objections to leveraging military strategy in the business world, shed light on the pitfalls of single-issue focus, and discuss how excellence in any domain demands courage, humility, and willingness to do hard things. Key insights are illustrated with both historical context and modern management parallels, making the lessons actionable for today’s leaders.
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Examining what leaders in business and civic life can learn from Erwin Rommel’s classic military account, Infantry Attacks, this episode dives into the value of tactical thinking, the reality of self-selection in civic engagement, and why direct, “boots on the ground” leadership outperforms over-reliance on technology. The hosts challenge prevalent objections to leveraging military strategy in the business world, shed light on the pitfalls of single-issue focus, and discuss how excellence in any domain demands courage, humility, and willingness to do hard things. Key insights are illustrated with both historical context and modern management parallels, making the lessons actionable for today’s leaders.
- Book: Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel
- Guest: John Hill (Small Mountain)
- Host: Jesan Sorrells
07:09 Discussing legal vs. illegal immigration
24:09 Reflecting on underlying issues
28:01 Understanding customer desires in sales
36:54 Military career and controversies
41:28 Discussing a compelling book choice
48:52 Aggressive training mindset shift
53:10 Impact of WWI on Germany
55:49 Comparing business to martial arts
01:01:03 Comparing Patton and Rommel's leadership
01:09:52 Criticism of Sales Leadership Practices
01:16:21 Traits of Successful Salespeople
01:17:50 Measuring true progress and success
01:26:03 Drone operators and military tactics
01:32:47 Discussing societal and personal cowardice
01:35:23 The book's mysterious disappearance
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- Opening theme composed by Felipe Sarro - Bach - Silotti - "Air" from Orchestra Suite No. 3, BWV 1068
- Closing theme composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.
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- Pick up your copy of 12 Rules for Leaders: The Foundation of Intentional Leadership NOW on AMAZON!
- Check out the Leadership Lessons From the Great Books podcast reading list!
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Creators and Guests
Guest
What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?
Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.
Hello, my name is Jesan
Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from
the Great Books podcast, episode number
204.
Opening up with, with
our book today, I want to read
a little bit from the very first chapter,
some observations that the author of the
book had when he was
engaged in a war of movement in
Belgium and northern France in
the year of our Lord
1914.
And I quote, observations
facing the enemy, the reconnaissance detachment commander becomes
conscious of his heavy responsibilities. Every mistake means
casualties, perhaps the lives of his men.
Therefore, any advance must be made with extreme caution and deliberation.
Taking advantage of all cover, the detachment should keep off of the roads and repeatedly
examine the terrain with field glasses. The detachment should be
organized in considerable depth. Before crossing open stretches of terrain,
fire support must be arranged for. Entering a village,
advance with part of the unit on the left, the rest on the right of
the houses and with fingers on the triggers.
Report observations rapidly, for delay lessens the value of
any information. Train in time
of peace to maintain direction at night with the aid of a
luminous dial compass. Train in difficult
trackless wooded terrain. War makes
extremely heavy demands on the soldier's strength, and nerves.
For this reason, make heavy demands on your men
in peacetime exercises.
Rommel, you magnificent bastard. I read your
book.
Applying the lessons from military strategy and tactics
to solving business problems is usually objected to by people in
business for one
of two main reasons. The first is that people in the
civilian world are now, in the year of our Lord
2026, largely ignorant of the discipline, focus,
and grit required to execute tactically in an environment
defined primarily by violence and death.
The second objection is that people in the civilian world are either unwilling
or unable to subject themselves to the discipline, focus, and
grit required to execute tactically in
environments that feature just a little friction, much
less the friction on a battlefield.
So the critics think, and concludes, what possible lessons
could a leader in a civilian space glean from
studying the tactics and strategies military commanders have
recorded in their writings throughout history?
The core idea inherent in both objections is that there
exists somewhere a field of study from which leaders cannot learn,
or even worse, that there might be a field of study that leaders can safely
ignore because the nature of the field itself may be
unsavory. The people who have engaged in tactical practices
in that field may have questionable ethics, or that the air of
civilian life is so rare. And this is the one I think that
drives most of us, that it does not require suggestions of
improvement from the pedestrian. Or even the banal.
We reject the assumptions that exist under these ideas on this
show, however, and we prove
the continued commitment to such rejection every October
and November when we read and glean what we can from books that
address military strategy and tactics, like the
book we're going to read and we're going to examine today.
So today on the show, we will extract lessons for
leaders from what is quite possibly one of the best books I've read in a
while that pulls lessons from battle that can be
applied to civilian business problems.
Infanterie greift an,
or if you're going to do the English,
attacks by Erwin
Rommel. Yes, that Erwin Rommel.
Leaders, tactical thinking is what we are
missing in so many areas of society and culture. And the
best place to understand, or at least to begin to understand tactical
thinking, is in the space of military strategy and
tactics. At least that's what I think.
And back from episode number 203, the last episode, Uh,
where we covered Neuromancer by William Gibson, where I
left, uh, I left him hanging without an answer to the following
question: should there be like some sort of intelligence quiz to vote to participate
in these ideas that have such a big, huge impact on our day-to-day lives?
Coming out of our observations about Robert Heinlein's 1959 military
science fiction novel Starship Troopers, where the fact that
government service most often military service,
was a prerequisite to the right to vote,
is our now, I think, semi-regular host. I think
you're a semi-regular host now, coming in back to back.
John Hill, AKA, of course, Small
Mountain. How you doing today, John? You're back. How you doing
today? Dude, I'm good. Um, I, uh,
I had to create some space because you did leave me hanging last time, right?
So I kind of forgot that, uh, that you did leave me hanging in such
a profound manner, um, because like I had to go write in my journal about
it, um, because I don't like open loops. So I don't know if
we're gonna dig into this in this episode. We're gonna get to close this loop
or not. Yeah, we're gonna close this loop. We're gonna close this loop right now.
That way we can start clean with Rommel. Rommel would want us to close the
loop. So you want us to close the loop? Finish. He would want us to
close the loop. He would. It is— well, it is a maneuver. Yes. Um, he
would call it a defilade and
retreat while fighting
the Romanians. Um, okay.
So should military— should there be sort of some sort of intelligence quiz to vote?
So the answer to this question, at least from my opinion, is when
you ask about intelligence quizzes to vote, now you're getting into the
long history of poll quizzes
and African Americans not being able to vote in the
South under Jim Crow. And so there's a lot of history
underneath that question, and it's weighted with that history in an
American context. You also have on the other
side, as we are currently going through the royal in our country, as are people
globally about immigration, you have the fact
that when people legally— and yes, I am using this term as a distinction
with a difference— legally migrate to the country and
stand in line, and I know many people who have,
when they do that, they have to take a test, a citizenship test,
in order to participate in a democracy,
which is what we claim we have. By the way, when people illegally
migrate to America by either jumping a border or coming over
in a, uh, in a shipping container,
like in the Port of LA. They don't do
any of that. And because we have an open society, they're
not allowed to vote. They are not allowed to
participate in civic life, but they are, weirdly enough,
given Social Security numbers and they are given benefits
by states, some of which will remain nameless. Okay.
So we have those 2 twin poles that vibrate in the national character
around this question that you asked. Then the other dynamic we have
Is the concept of an IQ test. So
IQ research—I don't know if you've ever researched IQ IQ
findings—but the military actually has done a lot of research, particularly coming out
of World War II and in Vietnam around IQ.
And IQ research is brutal. It is utterly,
completely demoralizing when you read it because what you realize
is. most things are not about race or class
or even social status
beforehand in a person's life. Most things are
about how much— and I frame it this way— how much horsepower a person
has. And then after that, all the other things just sort
of come forth. And when you are
thinking about a country that is as utopian as the United States,
both conservative utopian and liberal utopian, it doesn't matter. We both
operate underneath the same sort of Mindsets about how to how to
create how to create heaven on earth here. The fact that some people are
born with less horsepower than others disturbs us greatly,
and we don't know what to do with it. So we just kind of it's
like a little hole in the boat. We just kind of ignore it, and we
pretend that it's not there. And we do a whole lot of pretending by with
education, with culture, even with racial
strife, poll taxes, tests. Like my
kid's going through standardized testing right now. She's gonna take the ACT, right?
That's going to be a measure, whether we like it or not, of how much
mental horsepower she has. Yeah. Now, part of
that is— can be, can be, uh, what do you call it? Um,
uh, well, it's the old argument of nature versus nurture, right? So we have
IQ, we have racial history, and we have immigrant history that
goes into the answer to this question. So with that context, I'm
going to answer the question this way. Should there be some sort of intelligence quiz
to vote? Yes. Yes, there
should be. And the reason why I say this is not
because I want to keep people out, but because
we already have an intelligence quiz to vote.
And about 50% of the people in the country,
and it's an increasing number going, I mean, going every year on year.
And I'm just gonna look at the presidential elections alone, an increasing number of people
self-select out because they don't have the
horsepower to keep up with the issues
and the intricacies and all of this,
or they don't have the interest, which is also driven by horsepower, to
care about the issues.
Yeah. And so it's a brutal question, and
Heinlein got into it in Starship Troopers,
um, but I get into it from the perspective of
We already have it. So what are we— why are
we pretending we don't? And
this is such a fascinating thing, because like, as soon as you're talking about some
of these things, and I'm like, oh, yep, of course,
we have— we've, we've done versions of this for
the wrong limitations, right? And so then
I was like, oh, yeah, of course, there has been really
biased tests, or maybe the tests are only given to like certain
people, right? But, um,
yeah, I mean, uh, to, to me, there's a whole book—
the whole thing— sorry, there's a— sorry, there's a whole book that we're going to
cover at some point called McNamara's— like, it's like McNamara's Idiots or
McNamara's Morons, where the Army
basically decided after IQ testing from the '50s
at the end of World War II all the way through the '70s
that there were certain
people that just— they were never going to take in the military.
Oh, interesting. Based on IQ research. And it's called McNamara's Morons
because it really hit, hit in like the '60s and '70s with
Vietnam because there was a draft. And so everybody had to go into
the pool regardless. And, and the military was already integrated,
had been integrated since the '50s. Truman did all that. So it wasn't an
issue of race. It was an issue of horsepower or
IQ. And the Army— say what you want about the US
military— the Army was ridiculously brutal about
this, and they just tested the hell out of it. And at a
certain point— and this is the reason, one of the reasons also why the Pentagon
no longer wants a draft— they don't want
people with low IQ, quite frankly.
Coming in. They'd rather have volunteers with high IQs.
Yeah, absolutely. Right. So anyway, sorry, sorry.
That's just a side note to that. Yeah. No, like, to me, the thing
that always is hilarious is whenever I see a clip of someone
who's interviewing just people on the street about the same
questions from the immigration exam. Right.
I'm not saying we need to go create a new exam or anything, because
since we do already have one that is the standard, You know, we
should— hey, before you walk in here and pull these handles and fill out these
things, right, how many
senators are there? Oh, I have no idea. Okay,
like, you know, like, there is a— like,
and, and I've seen some stuff, and I've not researched this too deeply, about like
how some— like, the whole formulation of IQ has been biased and
loaded and different things like that. And, you know, but there is
Capacity of this thing, right? And I really appreciate how you talk about it.
Like, I do think some people have an affinity for this stuff and they like
it, and then not everybody does, and that's totally okay. And
so I think that that capacity has to be there because, you know, some of
it is just preferences, right? Some people don't want to spend their time
reading really old books or looking for overlap or however these
things are. I can totally respect that. I'm not saying that I don't want those
people to vote. I like— I'm trying to get the people who don't know their
head from the hole in the ground, right? And are just on the receiving end
of a constant line of rhetoric. And they're just going in and
just, well, red or blue, just straight down the column line kind
of thing. There is no discerning thought.
That's the thing I would love to, like, not have
personally. Well, and you and I both live in Texas.
And currently, I'm sure you are receiving as well as I am
endless text messages from candidates. Oh my God.
So I like, I'm a sales guy and a business owner and marketing
is a thing I am trying to get better at every day as a business
owner. I loathe, I
loathe all the text messages, all of it
spamming. And because like, you know, at least from like a
domain, I can go look up the domain and figure out who it is from
a cold email perspective. This can spoof numbers. Like, random people that
spoof numbers for their outreach and stuff like that. So half of this stuff, you
can't even tell if it's real or valid. But I'm getting 5 to 7 text
messages a day, and I'm not signed up on any of these lists. Right. And
I'm getting stuff from lists I wasn't even
like— and I'm relatively politically active. Yes, folks,
I do put my money where my mouth is. But at the same time,
like, I'm getting things from people that I've never even— I've never even expressed an
interest. I've never even clicked on anything that even interested that I would even
Well, I say that to say this. I was talking with somebody. I
was at a jiu-jitsu tournament actually this weekend. We talked a little bit about that
too. Actually worked out really well. I was coaching at a jiu-jitsu tournament,
coaching kids, and I was talking to one of the other parents who's the
wife of the owner of the school that I go to, and she's a single-issue
voter. And then the other— the other coach who was there,
one of the other coaches who was there, is also a single-issue voter. And both
of their issues are, of course, in the opposite direction as usual. And
they are both ground into those single issues. And I— you
would— you would love me. I literally laughed at both of them and I said,
God bless the single-issue voter. I mean, God grant me the
confidence of the single-issue voter. It's like, God grant me the confidence of a blue
belt. You know how they say that in jiu-jitsu? God grant me the confidence of
a blue belt. And I looked at both of them and said, God grant me
the confidence of a single-issue voter. Oh my God, you're going to bet everything on
this with either one of these people, and then everything else is just going to
be like away. Okay, that's fine. That's, that's fine.
That's fine. And I just walked away because I couldn't, I couldn't handle the conversation
anymore. Such a fascinating thing because I've never,
I've never— And by the way, I get it. Like, I understand why people are
single-issue voters. I get why. And at the same
time, most politicians are not single-issue
politicians. They never are. They never
are. And whatever your pet peeve issue is, and I'm not going to name any
issues at all, just pick one out of the, out of the basket of things
you've heard about. I guarantee you that politician does not care
about it as much as you do. Not even close. Oh, yeah. Like,
that's so— it's interesting because I've never really thought about this
concept of, like, the single-issue voter as we're sitting here talking about it. Right.
Because, like, hearing that term single-issue voter, part of me is like, it's like,
okay, Like, are you trying to find only one thing that you care about,
or is it like this one thing is
such the big deal on top of the pile to you and stuff like that?
And, and, you know, I think that's such an interesting
concept because like, do you just not know how the
rest of the sauce gets made? Like, like,
and, and I'm not trying to say it negatively or anything else like this, but
it's like, it's like, do you think that the other points that other people do
care about, like, don't matter, or they just don't care about to you, or
different things. But yeah, the idea that, like— now,
here's the thing. This is also kind of fascinating, right? Because, like, the label is
not really the person, right? Because, like, the people that are like, hey, I
only care
about
immigration policy or war or religion or
different— like, these are single-issue voters, right? Mm-hmm.
They're— but yeah, that's an interesting thing because like I know a lot of people
and they're like, well, I only really care about this, you know, kind of, kind
of people, right? But I would imagine they don't see
themselves as single-issue voters. They'd probably get a little offended even at
that label. So the wife, the owner, the wife of
the owner, she got so mad at me, she wouldn't talk to me for like
15 minutes. She just got mad at me. I
was like, And that's literally the sound I
make. I don't know what, what, what. Like, number
one, when, when, and this is just sort of a standard I have,
when, when other grown men or grown women get mad at
me, number one, with grown women, it's like, I'm not married to you. So like,
we're on an even playing field anyway. Like, I'm not, I don't have to like
live with you. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, we're just 2 adults having a conversation.
If you're mad, well, that's a you problem, not a me problem. I didn't say
anything that you— I didn't say anything that was offensive. Now, if I do say
something that offends, I own that. But if I don't say anything
that offends, if I just say something that's a fact, or I say something that
I think is funny, like humorous or whatever, then like,
oh, okay, you got offended. I don't know, deal with it. But then like, if
it's a grown man, and in general I'll have a different sort of— there will
be a different sort of approach there. By the way, the guy, his single
issue was so far, again, so far away from hers. It was like
night and day. He started laughing and he's like, oh, I'm still going
to do the thing that I'm going to do. And he just walked away. Like,
so 2 different people, 2 different responses, right, to this.
I will say that over the course of the last 20— no, I mean, I've
been following politics in one form or another since I was 15 years old in
this country, in various states and municipalities and
places I've lived and all of that. And everywhere I
go, there are single-issue voters who are rabidly,
emotionally— and this is the keyword— emotionally committed to a
position, and they cannot see anything else
outside of that issue. And again, I'm making this very bipartisan.
I want to be very clear, this is very, very partisan. I don't care whether
you're right or left. I've
talked to libertarians, I've talked to socialists. Oh my God, the
single-issue people, God bless them all. God bless you. But in a
democracy where you're supposed to be informed, and this gets back to should
there be a quiz to vote, you're supposed to be informed on a broad range
of issues, not just one narrow one. Yeah. If we give
you a test and you don't know anything about If you can't figure out
contextually why terrorism and gun
control and drug policy and,
I don't know, LGBTQ
race things— if you can't figure out how all this stuff clicks together,
I'm worried. And by the way, many people
self-opt out. I want to be very clear. Many people self-opt out because they
can't figure it out, which reveals how little
horsepower they have without a test even being done.
That's fair. Yeah. I'm fascinated by this idea though,
because like, I wonder, I wonder if the, the more you
hold a torch for that, for that single top line issue, the more,
the more likely it is that you are going to be
emotionally invested in it, like, like to the point of fanaticism, right?
Because one of the lenses that I have over here on my, on
my board behind me, like things that I try to use and look through with
my client work is like, if I can't find the elephant in
the room, right? And usually as a sales guy, the elephant in the room is
like, hey, you might be just fine. You might not need any
changes. Everything could be hunky-dory. I don't know enough yet,
right? If you can't find that lane, you are going to be the feverish
acolyte. And then you get, you get tossed out.
You don't get the trust. You don't get any of these things. All your questions
look like bear trap questions and everything because— You can't
even show up with an understanding like, hey, maybe some people don't need HubSpot. Maybe
some people are just fine on spreadsheets, right? Like, hey, maybe,
like, and if that's not okay with you, you're, you're going to be the
zealot. Just how it should be. If you can't spot
the sucker at the table in the first 5 minutes, was this from Rounders? I
love that. You are the sucker. I mean, you're the per— you're the one. And
there are so many zealous people. And don't get me wrong, I, I
want to be even clearer. I have been zealous in my time for
single issues. This is how I know it's a problem. This is how I know,
right? I have been zealous for single issues. I have been
emotionally unable to
disconnect my personal emotional feelings about an
issue from a larger hierarchical scale
idea, right? And that is a huge trap that
people fall into, but I don't even think they recognize it as a trap. Yeah.
If I am opposed to
banning books in the public library, let's just pick one. Okay. Mm-hmm.
All right. Which, it's a book podcast. This is an easy one, right?
Most people who listen to this show or know me would be like, oh, well,
he's— of course he's going to be anti-pulling books from the library.
And 20 years ago, yeah, I would have absolutely had a
knee-jerk reaction to that. When someone brings me
a single issue though like that, it says sign up for this so we
can impeach these people or get these people out for taking out the books, or
oh my God, sign this thing so we can sign this petition so we can
get these people out who are putting in the books. Okay, either
one, because both sides can both get signatures. Oh yeah. Okay,
now I have to sit, and this is the wisdom that comes from
time maybe, I have to sit with this and go,
what's the real issue here? That's number one. What's the
real battle that's happening? Is it really about the book coming
in or the person coming out or whatever? Is it really about that? Or are
there other underlying things that are here that a politician
sees but doesn't say anything about, or a policymaker
sees and doesn't say anything about, that they will then use to do something else?
And what is that something else? And I'm doing this on all kinds
of issues. So I don't sign the petition because I don't have an
opinion. And that's like, as I've gotten older, like, it sounds like
if you listen to the show that I have an opinion about everything. I have
a lot of opinions about a lot of things. I don't know if they're good
or bad. I just have opinions. That's why I have a show and that's why
I write books and do all the things I do. And I have
no opinions about a lot of things. And that's okay.
It's fine. Does that sound like I'm
knocking the no opinion, I don't know where to vote people because they're not single
issue? No, I'm just saying you want to participate in a demos. You want
to participate in a democracy, you should be tested on that.
And if you fail, or if you don't meet whatever the minimum
standard is— now, of course, we then get into who determines what the minimum standard
is and how do we, you know, all those kinds of— the devil's always in
the details. Um, and invariably it will be congressmen that
determine— invariably it will be congressmen that determine what the
minimum standard is. Yeah. That benefits them. It will always be them.
Um, but the question of should we actually have the thing
Yeah, because it's a public acknowledgment of something we're
already all privately doing and are just hypocritical about.
Say that again. We're
already giving ourselves an internal
test, and we are either opting in or
opting out based on our own internal test, and then we're hypocritical
about it because we say, oh no, there should be no testing because that's
unfair or biased. Okay, I'm with you now. Okay, we're
already there. Like, we're already fully in the— to me, we're
already fully in the cul-de-sac at the end of the path. I, you know,
so let's just say— and, and as I also have gotten older, I've gotten more
and more into the just say the thing. Just say the thing that's the thing.
Just say it. Why are we shading it? Why are we hiding?
Which is why I'm, I'm not— I mean, One thing, when they
struggle with sales, I'm bad at sales because it's like, you're gonna buy a yellow
car anyway, so just pick the yellow car.
Just go buy it. Just go buy the
yellow car. In what way, shape, or form does that make you bad at
sales? Um, because I'm not— I'm unwilling
to do the, the, the influence, pull along, tug along, draw
along, drip thing, that, that kind of stuff. Yeah, all of
that. Hold on, I'm not going to turn this into a coaching session, but like,
why, why is— why, why is your opinion that that's the
job? Well, it's because I've been told that by other
people. It's actually really not my opinion. I've been told that by other people. You're
talking to people who don't understand the job, my friend, right? These are the same
people that come to me and they're like, they're like, hey, can you get me
someone who can like close all the deals? And I'm like, do you want a
magician? These— well, these are also some people who I am, uh,
Engaged in a lifetime commitment to have
given me that feedback.
I mean, I mean, this is a fascinating conversation
and— It is not. Yes, it has nothing to do with the book.
You might need to come on my show so we can talk about this a
little bit more. Yeah. But it's like, like if, if you really want a
yellow car, like I really want to know why yellow is so important to you.
I would love to understand that. But like, If I don't have a yellow card
past that point and I can understand that this is there and it feels like
you're familiar with the fact that like it's going to be hard to clean and
you're familiar with the tradeoffs, every, every salesperson with their
salt, they don't have a yellow card. They just leave. Now it's
everyone else playing at sales thinking they know what the
job is, especially when they don't have to do it anymore. And they can just
give someone else a bunch of like make busy busy work and go pest
everyone else around and everything else like this. Because like, now that I'm not doing
this anymore, you should just be so excited to go take over the world and
have endless confidence. and waste your time and everything. And then like, why aren't you
at gold? Because you didn't want it enough. Like this, this is, these are the
talk tracks from people who should not be giving anybody sales
advice at all because it's, it's things, it's, it just reinforces
the stigma. You got me a little excited.
Put that down as a mark. We'll mark this moment. We are, we are,
we're, yeah, we're like 20 minutes in. We'll mark this moment here. Just,
just edit this part out.
Cutting room floor. We're keeping it all in. I don't cut.
Keeping it all in. It's fine. All right, let's talk about the
book. So I answered the question, I think. Yes, there should be
a quiz. And yes, things have a big, huge impact on our day-to-day lives. And
I think that people self-select out already. I think they give themselves that
quiz and then they just automatically opt out. I think an actual
manual quiz itself would make it really sharp for people.
Now, what people would do with that sharpness, I don't know,
because people are all over the place. I think some people would rise to the
challenge. And this is where I do have faith. I think that
some people would rise to the challenge. So wait a minute, hold on.
I was listening to an old-time radio show. This is the last thing I'll
say. And a PSA ran for voting in the next
presidential election. It was from like 1955. And the statistic
that it gave was that less than 60% of the available
voting population voted in the last presidential election, do your part.
And I thought, holy crap, that number hasn't shifted since
1955. Because guess what? It was
the same back in 2024.
Interesting. That's interesting.
So I have a question philosophically for you
at this point. Yeah, because I am, I am myself. Okay, because,
because I hear a statement like that, and part of me just starts like
spinning, right? And so Part of me is like, okay, great, it hasn't
changed. And then I'm like, okay, is that okay?
Should we be putting effort proactively in so that way we're
pushing that number up because we deem it as
important to get an actual representative vote? Because I
would say that 60% of our total population, like, only
participating in these things is not an actual representative kind of like vote.
So is, is the thing like, oh, okay, cool. We're
just level, so things aren't really getting better or worse because
it's just level, or should we be trying to
get more people to be voting? Like, like, what is Hasan's
philosophical bent at with this idea?
I think we have tried literally everything in the last 80 years to get more
people to vote, with the exception of— well, and we've even tried this. We've tried
dragging people out of their houses and putting them on buses. Like, we do that
all the time. We've tried literally everything. The only thing we
haven't tried, because again, we have history with
testing that's negative. The only thing we haven't really committed to
trying is testing. We haven't committed, really
committed to that because it feels icky. So case in
point, when George Washington
was running for president, I think the second time, if I remember
correctly, because it was after the Shays' Rebellion.
where all the old veterans were like, we don't want whatever it is
they didn't want. It was a big deal. It was a big deal, right?
And Washington's folks, and I
think Jefferson ran against him the first time, if I remember
correctly. And if I don't, correct me, folks.
But whoever his opponent was,
it was standard practice to put people on wagons
take them to the pub, have them drink,
and then take them and tell them where to vote. Like, that was standard practice.
Wow. We've been dragging people to the polls since the beginning of
this country, and it hasn't
moved the needle. We've already tried everything except for the one thing that
makes us feel icky. And I see this, by the way, in conflict
management. People will try everything to resolve the conflict
except for the things that make them feel icky, because the things that make them
feel icky are the things that actually work. But they can't get past their feelings
about them. Preferences, yeah. They can't get past their
preferences. And so I will have somebody come to me in the space of
negotiating a conflict, and they will say, well, I've tried everything.
And I will say, really, have you? Have you tried
everything? Because— and then we run down the
list of things they've tried, and then I present all the other things they haven't.
And they go, well, I haven't tried everything. And I go, I know, go try
these things. Well, I feel it might make me feel better, make the other person
feel better. And it's all the excuse, the Excuse piling
up begins to happen. And I know you see this in sales. And
at the end of it, you're like, well, do you really
want to resolve the conflict? Do you really want to close the sale? Do you
really want to vote? Or do you just want to make a bunch of excuses?
Yeah, 100%. Like, I can't tell you how many times in a sales conversation
where people are like, man, how do I close this deal? I'm like, well, you
know, I'll do anything. I'll do anything to close this deal. How do I overcome
this objection? Okay, well, first of all, what'd they tell you was the real problem?
Well, John, you don't get it.
Well, okay, I think we're done.
Right? Because like the most powerful thing you can do is like, hey,
kind of sounds like maybe we— you don't need my help. I'm not really doing
anything here. And that's totally okay. Is that where we are? Like, should we save
the extra 25 minutes in this hour-long meeting? And I'm happy to give you some
focus back. It doesn't feel like you're doing anything. It looks like my research
was off. Is that, is that, is that real? You get to have a real
conversation. And then if they're like, hey, I don't think you have yellow cars.
You know what? You're right. I don't have yellow cars. Like, sounds like that's really
important to you. Why is it? Oh, that's our brand color. Oh, okay.
Interesting. It sounds like it must be super important to you.
Interesting. How do you get the budget to pay for the yellow cars? Like, I
mean, we're still gonna have a delightful conversation, right? Right. People are just too
zoomed in, right? And they don't want to fail, right? And I love how you're
talking about this because it's, It's not the uncomfortable, it's like the things that
make you feel icky, right? If it makes you— if it— and this goes
for, for us too, right? If it makes us feel icky, I'm gonna have to
sit with for a second, right? And really kind of like look through a
couple of lenses. Is this compromising you? Does this go against other things? But
if it doesn't hit those big marks, I'm gonna try it before I
judge it, right? Yeah. At least now in my older state, right? Whenever I was
younger, I would come up with a whole list of excuses about why something wouldn't
work because it was gonna to be hard or challenging before I'd even taken any
positive action to go do it. Meanwhile, I'm over here playing poker and, you know,
trying to get really good at kung fu and just getting stomped over and
over and over and over again and still getting a
little bit better. And that's enough, right? So the biggest
hypocrisy is that it's really okay in certain lanes, but abhorrent, and we
can't even try in other lanes. Right, right. And maybe
this is— well, this ties into our book. So let's— I mean, I
opened up our episode today, if folks are still listening, now that
we've gone through, you know, almost 30 minutes of
the other conversation at the other end of the other episode.
You know, when we think about a guy like Rommel, okay,
so Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
was born in 1891, November 15th,
1891. Coming up here in about a month will be his
birthday, the anniversary of his birth. And he died by suicide
in 1944. He was known as the
Desert Fox, and he was a German field marshal in World War
II, probably the least political out of all of
Hitler's field marshals.
You read his book Attacks, which, by the way, he wrote in
1937 as the
National Socialist Party was beginning to make its move
really intentionally. I mean, they started in the '20s, but they were really making their
move in '30s. And so
he wrote and published this book where he
described the tactics and experiences he used in World War I
to overcome and to defeat
the Russians and various folks on the Eastern Front, and then also some, some of
his Western Front activities.
He was implicated in 1944 as part of the
Operation Valkyrie plot, to assassinate Hitler.
And it's not really clear how much involvement he actually
had with that, or whether he was just a name that people threw around
because, you know, he was considered to be a good,
quote unquote, German or good National Socialist.
His, his, his
actions in World War I earned
him the, the Pour le Mérite for his actions on the
Italian front, which was like the highest honor you could get in, in World
War I. And he,
he was able to parlay that into continuing to be
engaged with the German military in the interwar period
between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. As
a matter of fact, he was
He led several brigades and divisions, divisions with several brigades
and troops into Berlin, actually,
to put down riots. And he was called to put down riots of workers and
former soldiers. And according to the history that I
read, never once in any of those attempts,
not attempts, but never once in any of those times where he actually had to
put down people that he had formerly served with who were
rioting in Berlin and other places in Germany during that interwar
period, never once did he fire a shot. He was able to actually
talk people out of, you know, doing whatever it was they were
doing. I think the guy was probably
solid. And I don't mean solid in terms
of character, although I think he did have that. You could read his
book Attacks, and you see his character come through. I think the guy
was just a solid human being who loved war. Like, that was the thing he
was good at. And there are people who we've covered on this show where the
thing they were good at was war, and they weren't good at anything else.
So Grant is the— Ulysses S.
Grant. If you read about that guy, like, he
failed at everything else, even the presidency, even the
presidency, which was hard to fail at in the 1880s and the 1870s.
Like, it was really hard. And he failed at that. He was no good at
it. And he knew he was no good, by the way. But he did it
because that was the next step thing that you were supposed to do when he
was popular. And so how was he going to turn that down, right?
But Grant was like that. Sherman was like that. We're actually going to cover the
book Empire of the Summer Moon about the Comanche coming up here
with, with Tom Libby in our next episode. And Sherman
was the guy that the US military threw with the Comanche. And Sherman knew
exactly what it would take to break the Comanche. And he was very
sorrowful about it. And he said, there's no other— just like with the
burning of Atlanta, there's no other way we're going to be able to do this.
And so it's gonna suck, and we're gonna do it anyway.
Rommel was in that line of those kinds of guys who had character all
the way through, but understood
that— they understood the tragedy and the triumph of
war. And I don't think Rommel wanted
warfare, but if warfare was going to come, he was going to be as
excellent and as tactically brilliant and as
strategically well-placed as he possibly could have, as he possibly
could be, regardless under whose regime that war was going
to run. I think you could take a guy like Rommel and you could put
him in the Turkish army or the Russian military or the
Japanese or the Brazilians or name any other military force
during World War II, and he would have been the exact same guy.
And that's rare in warfare. I don't think you, you run across guys like
that too, too often. Um,
I was kind of surprised when you picked this book to read, another one just
like Ben-Hur. It's like, oh, okay, I guess we're gonna do— I guess we're gonna
do this. Um, what drew you to
thinking that this might be a book that you would wanna— that you would wanna
talk about? Um, honestly,
uh, the name stood out, you know, because you, you
shared the list of what you were going to read, and so I was like,
oh, well, that would be at least interesting,
right? At least some— sometimes I just like to read things that force a
perspective that I don't really think I could get to through
any other. Because like, you know, I can sit and I can think and I
can, okay, let me try to put myself in that person's shoes and stuff like
that. But when it comes to this stuff, like, there's just a,
you know, there's a limit to how far I can go for that stuff, right?
And so like going back to reading these kinds of books and everything is super
helpful for like forced perspective, right? And
that really drew
that to me on this thing. And to your point, like, it's such a—
I love how you're talking about this because like, as I'm reading through this book,
like, I'm kind of having this moment of like, this guy is just—
he like, he
just wants to be the best that he can be in whatever his lane
of greatness is, right? Mm-hmm. And I love how you're talking about that because
like, I like, you know, there's some turns of phrase and we'll get into that
here in a second. Um, but like, I was like, this guy would perform
under anybody. Like, you know, like, oh yeah, he would, he would be a high
performer. He would be someone we were hearing about no matter who
he was serving under or what his thing is. Because, you know,
um, someone said this about someone I worked with once, you know, 'cause he was
like a top performer on the sales team and they're like, that guy's just gonna
be a top performer anywhere he goes. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Mm-hmm. He's just gonna
figure it out, right? Mm-hmm. That to me sounds very much like, like
Rommel, right? And to your point, like, I think, I think when they're
trying to make a, like, a movie
and the archetype is military, right? And they're trying to give him that, like, hey
man, you're just, you're not that guy. You just, you just
really want to be. I think, I think that Rommel is essentially the
stereotype that they're trying to shoot for in that thing because
He just wants to be tested. He just wants to see how good he can
do, right? But it seems like he is
passionate about his, like, nation, but isn't really
drinking all of this other Kool-Aid, or at least in, in, in
this stuff here. Like, I don't know how much that changed after and stuff like
that. So it's interesting, and I want to pick up
something from the book here, from chapter, from chapter 3.
But in chapter 1, right at the beginning, he says
something, and I underlined it because
he lays out, you know,
how he got to the frontier, right? How he got to—
how he got to— oh, where was it he was
going to? Yeah, Belgium and northern France, right? Right at the beginning of the war.
And there's this great line in here, right in the very first chapter. He says,
Early on August 19th, we moved to the southwest, passed under the cannon of the
French fortress at Longueuil, and bivouacked at Dahlem. The
first battle was near. My stomach gave me a great deal of trouble, and
even a chocolate and Zwieback diet brought no relief. And this is the line I
underlined. I would not report sick, for I did not want to be looked upon
as a shirker. Yeah, very much a thing. And I
looked, I thought, I underlined that. And we've covered, and
I'll kind of lean into this. John Keegan's First World
War. We covered that with Tom Libby. Go back and listen to that episode. But
Keegan is British. And so of course, he wrote the book from a British perspective,
where he basically pumped up the French. He was
sort of as even as he possibly could have been to the
Germans, and then stared in puzzlement at the Russians and whatever the
heck they were doing. So I get it, like, I understand from a British
perspective. But you read this and you realize
And this was my stunning realization. The Germans might just have just been better
at war in World War I. And that's what scared the
hell out of everybody. They just might have been better. And you see
it. And this is where I pick up in chapter 3,
where when he's talking about combat in the Argonne in chapter 2,
and then he goes to the battle in chapter 3 of positional warfare, the war
of movement in Romania. Everything comes
down to— it
comes down to how he observes and how he thinks.
So in the very first battle, the occupation of
Hill 1794, so I want to read this.
Observations. So he goes through the battle, he describes it in
detail. He describes what he's doing with the Württemberg Mountain
Battalion going into the Transylvanian Alps. By the way, weirdly enough, I'm
also reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. So this is actually like a weird sort of
overlap here. It's very interesting. Um, but observations.
The occupation of Hill 1794 showed how high mountain weather can influence
the efficiency and resistance of the troops, especially when the
equipment is not suitable and complete and supply fails.
On the other hand, we saw what the soldier can endure in the presence of
the enemy. Under certain circumstances, dry wood or charcoal must be
furnished for troops living at an elevation of 6,000 feet. A few days later, on
the southeastern slopes of the Vulcan Mountains, we were heating our tents with small
charcoal fires built in suspended tin cans.
Close quote. How do you beat people who are willing to do that?
And that's the thing the French couldn't figure out. Like in the first 2
chapters, when he's describing what's going on in France and Belgium, the
only solution the French have for the problem of the German
military in World War I is they're just going to drop ordnance on them from
the sky and hope to kill as many of them as possible. And all they
did was dig in. And even Keegan points this out in, um, in the First
World War. They, the Germans figured out that if you dug the trenches
deep enough, the, the ordnance wouldn't get to you.
Mm-hmm. And somehow the French struggled to figure this out
until like midway through the war. And the French were, I was saying
this to somebody on Sunday, the French were the Germans' nearest near pure
competitor on the continent. And they couldn't get close to the
Germans. Well,
it's interesting because like part of me, okay, this is such
a fascinating kind of perspective, right? Because like for anybody who's
listening to this, right, I am prior service. I joined in 2001
before 9/11. So I've never deployed.
I've never had to go anywhere or anything else like that. So this is with
a lot of space not colored in by actual personal experience.
Um, but the training that I went through
was— it was filled with guys like that. There was just like this
joy and glee, right, of
the hardest training you could possibly imagine, right? Like, they would
talk about they wanted it raining, they wanted it wet, they wanted
it garbage weather, because like that meant now we're
really training, right? And we're all like
But wouldn't it be better if it wasn't like wet, if it wasn't like water
up to your knees and the foxholes and everything else like this, right? Like, and
we're like, why don't we want to like, like easier training, right? Because
whenever I went through, like all of my basic training was, was in peacetime. So
this is largely just an exercise, right? Right. And that even happens during my job
training, right? In the, in the intention shifts, right? You can tell that it's
different, right? But we're covering the same information.
Right? But all of a sudden people were okay with the more hard-edge training and
everything else like this because now it's very clear why we're taking
it to this pinnacle and this extreme, right? And so
there's— there were— there were all these people that whenever I was going through, I
was like, man, like, you're just too excited about like war,
right? Like, why are you so excited,
bro? Like, like, like, it was such a flooring concept, right? Because like, I just
meet these guys and they're like, oh yeah, up and at 'em, and you know,
blood and all this stuff. And I'm I'm like, what has happened? Like, this is
such a bizarre thing, right? But it— I'm
reading this book and that's, that's who's coming to mind of these guys. And it's
just like napalm in the morning kind of stuff, you know? Like, like, and then
not, not even because like you want to like go
like that hard on someone, it's just you want to see
what you're capable of doing, right? It's like this very weird competitive kind of like
nature. So it's in— I mean, Martial arts.
Oh yeah, you see this in martial arts too,
right? So I'm
going to talk about this now. Um, so I'm at the point in
my jiu-jitsu journey where I actually have to like develop a game. Like I
have to quit effing around and quit screwing around and quit just showing
up and I'm gonna roll for cardio and whatever
and then leave. Develop a specialty, if you will.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotta put together some sequences and I gotta do some
things, I gotta try some things, and I have to not be reactive and stop
I'm very excited.
I am so unbelievably excited because you know what, here's what I know.
And this is the, this is the thing that I know that this is what
I recognize in Rommel and, and, and in the culture that he came from.
The second I decide, the second I'm going to click over and decide, okay, I'm
going to be good at this. It's not just the writing and the
documenting of being good at it. That's the tip of the
iceberg. It's not just that. There's a whole
bunch of other dominoes that start to fall. And I know because I've
been through this before. So this is not my first— jiu-jitsu is not my first
martial arts journey. I've been through this with taekwondo. Like,
when I was— I mean, from 17 to 27,
26, all I did was taekwondo. That's all I did. I did
competitive combat. I did all the different variations and versions you could
possibly imagine. You know, 6'2,
150 pounds, like soaking wet. I did the whole thing, right?
And, you know, then I let my body take a break, and then I went
into rugby and did the whole thing, the whole domino thing through my 30s,
right? And now I'm in my, my 40s, getting ready to be in my late
40s, 50s, and the domino— I can feel the domino falling.
And the reason I'm the way I am about it is because I know what
happens when that domino hits the next domino and the next domino and the next
domino. And what happens is, to your point about,
I want to do the hardest training possible. Okay, so now
it's not hardest training possible. I'm already doing that. I've already overcome that.
It's, I'm going to do the hardest sequences possible.
And in jiu-jitsu,
okay, okay. And you're like
4— and I'm 47 years old. With 20-year-old,
30-year-old guys. Okay, let's,
let's— I did birthday rolls, a bunch of birthday rolls, right?
Monkey in the middle birthday rolls. It's fine. It's whatever. And
7, 8 rolls in, I'm exhausted. I'm sitting there and I'm sweating. I'm like, okay,
who wants to come on? Who's ready for the title? Because now I'm locked in.
Now I'm past the emotion. I'm past the whole, I don't like this.
I'm past all of that. And now I'm into the space of,
okay, I'm going to be excellent. I'm going to be excellent at the small thing,
or I'm going to be excellent at this thing. I've stripped away all of the
garbage and the nonsense and the excuses like we were just talking about with voting.
I've stripped away all of that, and now the thing is in front of me.
And this is what you get from Rommel too, and in essence also from, I
think, a lot of the German military. Although All
Quiet on the Western Front kind of puts paid to that a little bit. I
want to kind of acknowledge that too, because it does— that book
postulates that Germany Germany started in one spot
as a culture, but then through deprivation and
through the, through the, the, the nastiness of World War
I wound up in a different spot that led to
resentment and, and other things. And I
keep thinking the worst thing that can happen with
someone who, like myself, whose dominoes are falling in their head, or like
the German people where they've made the commitment and now they're pushing through to excellence,
the worst thing that can happen to you is that you lose.
And by the way, not lose because of anything you did, lose because of circumstance,
lose because of, to our point earlier about politicians, lose because
politicians aren't aligned with the people. And the German politicians
weren't aligned with the military and they weren't, sure as hell weren't aligned with the
people. Mm-hmm. They were playing a totally different kind of game. They
thought they could get away with it. And of course they couldn't. And that led
to the crackup of their country in the interwar period.
But again, that's the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing that can happen
is I do all this sequencing, just to make this about me for just a
minute. I do all this sequencing and then I don't get my black belt.
Like I, or I get injured or I zig where I should have
zagged. And now I gotta come, I gotta come back from that.
And that's the thing that goes in, in your head because you've got,
if you read enough of these books, you, you wind up in that. You want
to be thinking about all those dominoes that haven't fallen yet.
Yeah. It's, uh,
um, you shared a thing and I don't know if, I don't know if we
talked about this on a recording or maybe this is, um, how we met,
but you shared your first jiu-jitsu like session and being gassed
afterwards and smoked and out of breath and someone being like, it's
okay, buddy, it gets better. Right. And you like
almost having to like not guffaw in this person's face because
the, like, the sheer audacity that you
think I'm like out of shape because I'm just a
little winded is a little kind of absurd, but you don't know me. That's okay.
Right. Right. That's okay. But like, just the idea of like, I'm just trying to
figure out if this is what I want to spend the next decade working on.
Right. Right. Like, I think about that line maybe once a month, honestly.
Right. Because like, I am that person as well. Right. And honestly, whenever
I've, you know, stopped training jiu-jitsu largely because,
you know, it's tough on the body, you got to get really good
practice partners, time, right? Yeah. I know a bunch of guys with like really
bad neck issues from training and stuff like this. And you can say this for
any martial art, but it is what it is. And so I know for
myself, right, that if you— that if I don't go create this space for
myself, I'm going to find myself into one, right? Yeah.
So because like it just is who I am. So I started playing
guitar, right, to see if it would take up the same space, right? And lo
and behold, it largely has. But business is also kind of the similar,
right? It's a path of challenge. You're going to challenge yourself, you're going to learn
a lot. And I think of them as being the same, right? And so
when I think of a guy like Rommel, right, or,
you know, you could put half a dozen other war generals,
admirals, war leaders in this thing, and if we just change the labels, you get
the same kind of person, right? A person who just
wants to be at their best. And this is the
part I really appreciate— not ego-driven enough that they're
gonna try to hold it all in their mind, right? Because like, right, this comes
from his journals, right? Right. Meditations comes from his journals,
right? Like, there are so many great bastions of knowledge, deep
wells of expertise that have come because people were
good and confident, but still being like, you know what, I should,
I should maybe write this down. There might be some good things in here, right?
Like, which is just funny because I talked to so many people and like, I
don't need to write anything down. I'm just good. Like, I'm still trap, right? Like,
okay, like, why would you want to carry that pressure around? I don't get that
personally. Well, this is this. So I quoted from George
Patton right at the beginning, right? Which is, which is a quote from the, from
the movie Patton. Allegedly, he actually said this when he showed up in North
Africa in World War II and Rommel had just just gone through
North Africa like poop through a goose and had gone through the American
military like they weren't even there. And, you know,
Patton shows up. And by the way, Patton was cut from the same cloth as
Rommel. The way I sort of frame it is same church,
different pew. And
he recognized from the jump who Rommel was.
Like, yeah, he absolutely understood that guy.
And he wanted to— Montgomery. Now, Montgomery The difference
between Patton and Montgomery, Bernard Montgomery—
Montgomery was so captured by British class considerations,
he wouldn't even consider Patton or
Rommel as being anywhere near his, like, whatever, which is—
this is a touch of the Keegan kind of thing, like the British whole
stiff upper lip slash I'm of a different class than you
kind of nonsense, right? Kind of like nonsense. Yeah, it's the thing they
have that just cuts through their culture that they can't really get away from because
it's sort of embedded into their national identity.
Well, Montgomery brings that to North Africa and also gets his tail whooped,
you know, just all over North Africa, right?
But Patton
I think if Patton had lived, he probably would have written a book similar to
Rommel's. Now, he did write one
book, but it was sort of hodgepodge patched
together. It wasn't— I mean, I looked it up on Amazon
and I may get a copy of it. There's an ancient, ancient copy that's like
$700. It's ridiculous, ridiculous first edition. I'm not going to spend that amount of money,
but I'll get a reprint somewhere for like $29.99.
But I think, I think if Patton hadn't gotten—
if he hadn't gotten in that car accident,
he would have written probably the same kind of book as Rommel. And we'd be
having the same kind of conversation about those 2 guys. I agree.
Because they both— body recognizes body coming through the rye.
And they both wanted to be the best. They both wanted to be engaged with
each other. They both wanted to be— maybe not necessarily at each other's throats, but
they both wanted to— it's like a
UFC fight, right? They wanted to fight the best. If you're the best, you want
to fight the best. You just do. Or a boxing match. You just do. Why
do I want to fight also-rans? Why do I want to be in a match
against somebody who's not as good as me? There's no challenge there.
Yeah. The thing with Rommel, though, is— and I
think this is a fundamental difference between him and Patton. You talk about ego.
Rommel was able to subsume his ego. And you see
that in his, in his writing. Whereas
Patton's ego came out in the Pearl Pistols and all the
shenanigans with the poetry he was spouting, and I've lived other lives and all
this other kind of nonsense like he did. And then Montgomery's ego, of
course, came out in British class status. And he's like, I'm going to be
snobby about the British military system.
But, but Rommel Rommel was able to kill his ego. And you
see that in, in attacks, like his observations. And that's what I've
been reading this whole time. Like, the things he observed were actually
like, to your point about journaling, he was able to strip away the emotion from
it and be like, well, we did this, we did that, and this didn't work.
Or we did this, we did that, and that did work. And for a business
leader, just to kind of make a turn here, for a business leader, I think
that's critical. And I think that's what you can learn from military strategy and tactics.
Well, I think, man, because you were talking through this and I was like, that's
the split. Like, to me, whenever I think about Patton, right,
I think about a guy who was like, man, like a little bit like Hamilton,
right? If I just do good enough in this war, I'm not gonna have to
do this crap anymore. Right. Whereas Rommel was like, I'll do the
crap, right? Like, there's this, because,
you know, it talks about how
Um, reluctant he is to give up any, any command,
right? He talks about almost falling out of his horse. He talks about being so
fatigued from loss of blood that like he can only give orders from like the
thing. And like it'd be super easy to be like, oh yeah, ego, ego. But
like how he's talking about it and how he's doing this, like
in the fact that like he's still doing it later, like he's still,
you know, he's still like jumping on a horse with his men to go do
these things and stuff like this, right? Yeah. Like he's not You know,
and I see this all the time sales side, right? Like there's so many people
and they're like, okay, well, I'm gonna grind for a little bit and then I'm
not gonna have to do it anymore, right? It's like you're already
screwed because you think that you shouldn't have to
do this. Mm-hmm.
Whereas like he just wants to be— he wants to be the best
soldier he can possibly be. He doesn't— he like— and this distinction I
think matters, right? He doesn't want to be the best general he can be.
He wants to be the best soldier. He wants to be the person entrusted to
go win these battles and everything, you know. And it's so interesting
because I was curious about this because I remember one time
during my training and being in Georgia and everything,
they were one time talking about how they say how they send us off to
decision-making school, right? And I was like, well, that's weird. I like to make
decisions. Like, why do we need to go to school? for that? And they're
like, well, liking to make decisions is not the same thing as being good at
decisions. And I was like, well, I'm pretty good at making decisions. I'm pretty here.
I'm all of 20 years old, right? So I'm obviously killing the game.
And he goes, no, when you hit NCO status, E-5, we're going to send you
to school so that way you can learn how to make imperfect decisions. And I
was like, what? No, you want to make the perfect decision. And he's like, what
if there's not time for it to be perfect? Like, what— like,
sometimes the best decision is based upon which
decision loses less lives, but there's not going to
be a decision at all that leads to no lives lost. And it was
so weird because, like, as, as they're saying this to me, like, I'm, like,
being imparted with the full weight of really what we're talking about here, right?
And you can see that through his words, that he's always
considering the trade-offs, right? Mm-hmm. If I go this route, I'm gonna lose 25% of
my force. forces. If I go this route, we might only lose about 15 max.
And so while this is going to be harder, this is the way we're going
to go. Like, and I think, I
think when we talk about this stuff, it's super easy to just be like, okay,
cool, great, it's like check. But like, he's also with these guys, right?
Mm-hmm. Like, they're traveling together. This is not now
where there's vehicles and kits and, you know, all this stuff and everything
else like this. Like, they're in the trenches together, right? He's having these
guys march for days on end and then dig in
and entrench. And it's not just for the exercise. It's in the hopes that
they can make it through all the bombings and artillery and everything else
like this, right? And so to me, it was
such an interesting perspective because I think he does a really
good job. I think most people would probably read it and be like, well, this
guy's a sociopath with how he talks about the loss of human lives and
everything. But this is the job. job. If you can't get to that
point, you're not going to be effective.
This is right. And this is where, so when I opened up, I talked about
how there's usually 2 objections to aligning, you know,
the study of military strategy with the study with business practices, right?
And these 2 main objections I most recently within the last few years
heard almost explicitly from the guys at Basecamp.
And I like Basecamp as a business. I like those guys. I have no problem
with that service. I have no problem with how they're running their business. I actually
think they run it brilliantly.
And I think there's a fundamental blind spot there
that— I would love some background on this. Like, so because, because I like
the guys at 37signals a lot, right? I think they're smart. I think they're very
on it, intelligent. Yep. So are they known for saying that
like, hey, we shouldn't be using like military jargon and—
Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're, they're, they're the, they're the, we shouldn't be using military
jargon because what we're running is not a war guys.
They're in that, they're in that space now. And by the way, Seth
Godin's also in that space. The marketer Seth Godin, bunch of other
people are in that space. That space is very, very crowded. I'm in that space.
Okay. You're in that space. Okay. And I think when you,
when you, this is, this is my, where I come from with my
sort of, uh, on this. I think, I think, um,
I think saying we don't use the
jargon allows you to dismiss the other ideas that lie behind the
jargon. And so I, and I think I have an example here that, that proves
this rule. So when I was reading Infantry Attacks,
which I would encourage everybody to go out and get. I immediately— well, not
immediately, but as I was going through the book, I started thinking of a guy
we both talked about on this show somewhat extensively, who's
got his own podcast, Jocko Willink.
And God bless the guys at 37signals,
but they would never talk to Jocko. They never
would. There's no overlap there. And that's okay. I'm not saying there doesn't have to
be. I'm not saying there has to be overlap. I think Jocko's operating in a
completely— he's doing another thing over there and they're doing another thing over there. And
that's fine. You can have multiple threads. There's more than one way to skin a
cat. However, I
think that when we
when we fail to see the overlaps everywhere, then
we automatically and this gets even to like the question that we were covering and
masticating about for the first 45 minutes of the show today. When we have
those blind spots, we fail to see connections, and I'm very much a
guy who's who's about context and
connections. So like things are not just Things are not just
single issue. Everything connects to everything else, right?
Right. And to paraphrase from Tony Soprano, if you're a leader, at the end of
the day, you're with it. Now, you can either be with it
alone. You can make that decision if you want to be. You can— you could
be alone. You could be with other people. But either— but either way, you're going
to be with it. It's going to be you. And you have to figure out
how I think particularly in our time, how
religion or religious idea or whatever connects
to a business idea, which connects to this
military idea, which connects to this technology idea. Because all
of these things— and I think AI is going to push this
incredibly further than we even give it credit for. And this is where I'll say
something positive about artificial intelligence now, because normally we dog it on this show.
But I think it's going to push people Not people. I think it's going to
push business leaders to become way
more generalist than they're comfortable with right now. I think the
era of the specialist, I don't think it's at an end, but I think the
specialist is going to have to acknowledge this generalized
contextual pieces, these generalized contextualized pieces of
understanding strategy. And it's going to— you're
going to have to broaden your scope, I think. And so
that's where I get off the train with with the
37signals guys. But I'm like, okay, I mean, I've gone as far with you as
I can go. That's okay. That's cool. You can have your opinion about that. That's
cool. I don't have to— I'm gonna go read your Patriot Attacks,
and then I'm gonna try to apply some of that to what I'm doing. I
think, man, oh, wow. I have a lot to say on this, actually.
So my favorite, all-time favorite saying,
and I have a lot of sayings that I really like a lot, is it
goes back to the very first book we did together on the show, Musashi's
book, right? When you know the way broadly, you see it in all things. Yeah.
So I, um, it really
bothers me that while I see a lot
of overlap around chain of command, rules of engagement,
how do we act with other people in the trenches, right? Uh, in
the weeds, right? Every, every line of military
jargon that someone would use helpfully inside of an organization or
on a sales team. There's another line that we can also choose to
use. Okay. Okay. Morale, culture,
right? In the trenches, in the weeds, right? Like, like we can,
we can use other phrases, right? We can use other terminology to get
people aligned and moving forward. Okay. What bothers
me, right? And this might be my lens, right?
Because I work in this space. Is that it happens to salespeople so much more
than I think it being applied to other business units
or teams within a business, right? And
this is where it really bothers me, right? Because like salespeople are, you know, the
sales stigma is very well known, right? We're going to lie, we're going to cheat,
we're going to steal, we're going to do anything we can until I get the
deal done. Okay. Who's pushing that stuff?
Right. It's the leadership who are creating the goals, right? I'm just
gonna put it bluntly, are not good enough at leadership to
have a way of getting people bought in,
invested, moving, enrolled, and doing it the right way. So
instead what they do is they just come up and they try to use war
jargon, get in the weeds. It's a battle. You got to kill them.
You got to kill your goals. You got to kill all these things because we're
trying to just coax more out of somebody,
right? And, you know, more is the only
thing you know to go looking for when you're a leader, when you don't know
enough to like go ask for what you specifically need, right?
So this idea that like, you know, we're bringing people
in, we're trying to make them rabid with excitement. So they're gonna go off and
take massive action. So we hit all of our sales goals and everything. Well,
old saying is that the person who gets emotional in negotiation is the person who
loses the negotiation. So we're holding these people hostage. We're paying them as
little as we possibly can, and we treat them and look at
them like, like no one else inside of the organization. And we're gonna use all
the— like, we're trying to put people into this emotional state because we don't have
a better way of getting people actually interested and invested in doing their work
consistently. And that to me is where, like, really
bothers me whenever I see someone who's not in the military and never been in
the military using military jargon. Like, I saw a guy on
LinkedIn and he was talking about that if you don't have a war board you're
not a real sales leader. And I was like, oh, what do you mean by
a war board? Well, it's our dream account list. Then just call it
that. Like, why can't we just call it that, right?
And he's like, well, John, I don't really think it matters. And I'm like, well,
it does. You know, you probably haven't served, so it probably doesn't
make a whole lot of sense that it should matter to you. But why do
you have to go that far to get your people to like show up and
do their jobs? Let me ask you this
question. Sure. Do you
think that there's more use of this jargon
casually because the
average male
in America in the year of our Lord 2026, when we're
recording this, hasn't served and doesn't know
anybody who has? And, and, and gets their
scripts about this jargon not from
books like Infantry Attacks, not from,
you know, studying whatever it is Jocko might be writing,
um, not from reading, um, the biography of William
Tecumseh Sherman or Empire of the Summer Moon. They're getting it
instead from— let me be blunt now—
Marvel movies and Hollywood. I mean, I
would wager that the same guy who watches The Wolf of Wall Street and
takes that as a lesson on like how to sell as a professional
salesperson is also the same, same kind of person who watches Fast and
Furious 7 or The Expendables and then leaves thinking that they know a lot about
how military training is, right? I think,
and I think, I think there's a whole lot of psychology as to why that
happens as often as it does. And like, I'm
not saying that it's not like a
judgment, right? It's shiny, it's cool, it feels great. There's a big,
huge dopamine rush. And at the end of it, like, everyone leaves those
movies feeling like they can handle some business, even if they've never done a day
of training and they've never been on the mats any one time and stuff like
that. You know, like, you're wrong.
And like, I hope you don't ever have to find out, but like, there's a
reason why those movies get made, they get funded, they get,
they get the returns that they do. And it leads to everyone feeling
way more able than they probably
should if they zoomed out and really had the real range of
like human performance when it comes to that stuff.
Now let me ask you another question. So another book that I'm reading, because of
course I'm reading 10,000 books all at once, is Gift of
Violence by Matt Thornton. And yeah, just
start reading it. Just, just pick it up, just start reading it. I'm only like
the first 2 chapters in. Um, but one of the points he makes in
that book is that violence and
sex are the 2, the 2 things that— and he's
really hammering on it in the first 2 chapters— like, they're the 2 things that
really have driven human evolution.
Oh, okay. That's an assertion that he makes. And then, and
then from that assumption, from that assertion, he
goes into, you know,
we in the West, we in America specifically,
live lives that are far less violent than
even the lives of medieval peasants 400
or 500, 600 years ago, 700 years
ago. And because we live less violent lives, we have
deluded ourselves into believing
falsely, he claims, that violence can never happen to us.
Now, he starts from there and then goes into a different direction. I'm using that,
that, that set of assumptions to ask this question. Mm-hmm. A
salesperson who's grown up in a— through no fault of their own—
has grown up in an America that is, as Matt, as Mr.
Thornton would define it, relatively cushy and
violence-free.
Well, okay, let me make this question very simple. Do salespeople
need to be doing more martial arts
to change their language because they haven't done a hard thing?
I mean, what a beautiful question, right? Because like,
as a very old kind of thing
in my lane, of sales training, recruitment placements, and everything else
like this, right, is a lot of people talk about if you can find prior
service military, you can find a Division 1 athlete,
yeah, half of the battle's already won. You've already found someone who can be driven
and disciplined, right? And I
found that to be kind of true, right? But I've also found that the lens
is way wider than that, right? So what salespeople really actually need
is an evolution or a season to where they have had to take critical
feedback and choose to suck a lot,
right? So martial arts is that thing. Being in the military is that thing. Being
a D1 athlete and your livelihood, your scholarships, right?
Because the other part of this thing is like, I talked to so many people
who are like, well, I could do that if I had to. Okay, cool. You've
never been in a situation where you had to. That's going to be problematic
because every day you have to when you're in sales, right?
And, you know, there's, there's a lot to be said about building
And so that way you don't always have to be in that scramble. And there's
a whole lot of people that don't want to work on those things, and they
get to be in that scramble, and they get to be burnt out all the
time, right? And so what, what I'm always looking
for is like, have you had to choose to suck over a
long period of time and you still found some way to get
excited about it? If yes, we can move mountains
as far as deals and revenue and projects and all that stuff. And profitability and
everything else like this. But if you have never done any season to
where you have had to get essentially chosen to get kicked in the face,
right, this is being a white belt in a martial arts school. You're choosing to
just tap as many times as you possibly can that first minute for your first
year, right? Like, I remember in my martial arts school, my first
art, I remember asking a guy, I said, hey man, how do I know if
I'm getting better? He's like, I'm hitting you less. Don't
Don't make it about anything else other than that. Other people are going to tell
you these things and everything else like this, but like when I'm hitting you
less, when someone better than you is hitting you less, that is when you know
you're getting better. Everything else is nonsense, right? And I
think about that line all the time, right? What is the true mark of success
here, right? Because like, are we, are we picking a data point or a
KPI that doesn't really matter, or, or can we look at this in that same
way, right? So Like, you know, are you getting
meetings? I don't care how much outreach you're doing, how many calls you're— are you
getting a meeting? If you can't get a meeting, you're not as close as you
think you are, right? You're like— and if you need 5,000 emails
to get one meeting, you're not anywhere close to like the place that you need
to be, right? So focus on the right parts of the problem. Develop a game,
right? Kind of the place that you're in right now. But
like, up until that point of like, okay, you're now at a space to
where like you need to develop a game, We're all in that scrambling thing,
right? And the best you can do in that mode is like just show up
and have the intention of like, you know what, I'm not gonna quit, I'm not
gonna let this get to me, and I'm gonna try not to lose, right? Like,
I'm not trying to win, I'm just trying not to get crushed. Let's try
to do that in the early days. Well, you also have to arrive at a
spot where you don't tap to bullshit, and you like, you
actually recognize what it actually is. Oh, this is just bullshit,
and I'm not going to tap to it. So Yeah, this isn't a real choke.
This isn't a real choke. Or like, or like, yeah, he's hitting me
or she's hitting me, but they're not really trying to take me out.
Like, it's a little bit whatever, but I'm not like getting rocked, right? I
love the other side of that as well, is like when that, when that, uh,
when that rear naked choke is sunk and you know that it's there, and like
you don't have to do the 2 minutes of perfunctory like, oh, I can get
out of this, bro, or like really put it me because you're doing it for
someone else, right? And you can be like, nope, this is real. I'm just gonna
tap now, as opposed to the wasted 45 seconds of fake
tussling over here so we can reset and get some more training in. Like,
that season is beautiful, man. Yes. Like, a friend of mine
that I trained with in Wing Chun, he talked about this thing one time. He
was like, man, we all walk in the door wanting to be Billy Badass, everybody,
right? And I was like, yeah, that's valid. And he's like, but did you ever
notice Anyone who gets up there,
that intention has to drop away at different times. Oh yes.
Right? But if you're like, go find me a black belt who is
just like trying to murder everybody with the same intention that they were
on— like, you won't find them because they're not there. Because they've either changed
through the crucible of practice and appreciating your practice partners in a practice
environment, or your ego got you. Gotcha.
Right. Something, something got in the way, right? Yeah. You allowed it to happen
kind of thing. So I don't— I think, I think part
of it is leaders and managers need to actually go back to
training sales fundamentals. And that includes things like planning. So that way we
stop putting magician-like pressure on brand new
salespeople because things like ramp up, things like break-in periods, things like,
hey, let's plan for the amount of time we need to even
hit these goals really do matter. And then
let's start talking to people about, hey, you know, you
should have other things in your life that like aren't just sales conversations. Hey.
I know that's weird. I know that's wild. That's going to give me some hate,
but like otherwise they're going to burn out
and then they're not going to be there anymore. And then that top performer goes
and takes the other job at someplace else because they're going to give them a
little bit more quality of life in the form of maybe a little bit higher
base, maybe a little bit more time off and everything. And now you have to
fill a black box. You're not really sure how that
person is generating all that pipeline and all those deals and everything. And man, I
hope you can find another one. Right? It's, it's
like when we zoom out and we look at it, like, how do we not
see all the flaws? Right? Pushing people way too
hard. A fraction of them actually make A lot of those guys
have stents in their hearts because they're pushing themselves so hard
and then something happens and then they go take an easier job. Take an easier
job.
Yep.
Yeah, here we go. So I want to close with this because there's another point
I want to make. This applies directly to leadership in what you're talking
about here. This is deep in— oh,
deep into— and I've marked this book
up. So, you know, it's because there's all kinds of stuff in here. I might
actually use it for some future training that I might wind up— that I am
going to wind up doing because there's just so much good stuff in this book.
So he's talking about engaging with the fire attack of the
Romanian artillery the night of August 8th and 9th.
Right. And he,
he makes a number of different points about
the benefits of telephone lines and of technology and how that was really helpful for
him. But also how,
how quickly they, they engaged and accurately ascertained the
strength of the enemy, and how they were able to do that. By the way,
he, speaking of Rommel being out in it and getting up after it, he went
out on reconnaissance with his boys, with the people he was leading. You know, he
didn't just say, oh, go out and figure it out and then come back and
report to me. Um, it wasn't like the, the line of
the Pink Floyd song, which I always think of World War I with this, forward
they cried from the rear and the front rank died. He wasn't doing any of
that. You know, he was, he was definitely out there. Go ahead. And I have
a question for you about this, right? Because like one of the things that really
struck me a lot as I was— because of the, of all the hand
Yes. Right, which I really appreciated a lot because this would have been a
slog without those little bitty diagrams that he decided
to put in there. And I'm curious,
obviously it'd be super easy to say, well, he's got to go do
that because there's no real proper reconnaissance,
there's no drones, there's no technology, there's no photographs,
there's none of these things. things, right? And I'm curious,
do you think it was easier to be a better leader
then? Because you're not going to get a dossier, you're
not going to get a briefing, you're not going to get 17 cuts of 30
seconds from each photo from the site before you go do the thing.
Mm-hmm. Like, you had to, you had to want to go look at
it yourself. You had to want to go put eyes on the battlefield before you
lead your men into it, because intelligence was at such a lower level,
right? Now, the martial arts guy in me, the guy who reads
Musashi, wants to call BS on all of that stuff, right? And say that if
you really want to go do the thing, you go do the thing, right? Right.
But I'm curious if that stuck out to you as you were reading this,
that like, it's maybe easier to fall into some of these traps because there is
so much intel, but we're still not boots on the
ground, which is a military term. I on the scene?
Well, I'll answer that by saying that's battle reconnaissance. I want to
quote from this. Sharp observation of the hostile territory yielded
excellent results during the night of August 10th and in the first hours of the
morning. The forward hostile installments and the behavior of the garrisons were
accurately ascertained. Love that. Scout
squads were not sent out by us in order not to arouse the enemy and
make him curious as to our attack preparations. The enemy,
however, and I double underline this, committed the great mistake of not
surveying the terrain in front of his position, and in fact behaved in a
most unwarlike manner. Visible sentries,
garrisons outside of their shelters. Thus our surprise
attack struck him like a thunderbolt.
Technology has convinced us that we don't need to do this.
It has, it has convinced us. So the kid— and I'm not
knocking this kid— the kid who grew up playing
Grand Theft Auto 1 through 5— there will never be a Grand Theft Auto 6,
don't worry kids, it'll never happen— the kid who grew up playing Grand Theft Auto
1 through 5 and SOCOM
and all of these other wonderful video games, who is now
inside of a Navy ship ship off the coast of the Persian
Gulf driving a drone. By the way, we're now 2
generations into this now. Driving a drone,
by the way, driving a drone into the Ukraine to help the Ukrainians against
the Russians, by the way, just want to point that out.
Sitting in that ship in the Persian Gulf or sitting in
that ship off the coast of Venezuela, like when we turned the lights off
and then went in and got Maduro earlier this year. Okay,
we turn off lights in entire cities. Just think about that for a minute. Rommel
would have killed for that. Please, he would have killed for that technology.
But that technology has convinced us, and even the CIA has noted this,
over the last couple of generations, from the millennial generation sort of moving down,
the CIA is less and less able to recruit people who actually want to go
out and do what used to be called human intelligence. You know,
where you show up in a place, you give a person a cigarette, and you
have a conversation with them. You know, sales. They are less and
less able to recruit individuals who are comfortable doing that because
technology has convinced people— this started with the internet, by the way, and went to
scale now with drones and reconnaissance— that they don't need to do that.
And yet the best military,
uh, tactics are executed by strategies
that involve human intelligence. And the example that proves the rule— I've mentioned
this on this podcast before—
Mossad. The Israeli Mossad had a
listening station that helped turn out the lights in Tehran
before the Americans bombed the Iranians like 8
months ago. And by the way, they had a listening
station in Tehran running human intelligence for the last 5
years that the Iranians didn't even know about, right next to
where the Republican Guard headquarters
world. Nothing beats human intelligence. Nothing beats getting out of the
office, getting in there with your people, figuring out
exactly what it is that they need, learning their
jobs, not to do them, but to know what the correct questions
are to ask. Mm-hmm. And then going out and, dare I
say, learning your opposition, going out and actually buying your opposition's
product and testing it, not having your people test it and come back and tell
you. You go out and buy it and test it. You go out and figure
it out. Oh, well, I'm too busy. Well, okay. Yeah.
Okay. So for me, I come down just like you do. I come down on
the side of human intelligence. I think the technology has fooled us. And by the
way, I think AI will allow us to be fooled at scale, particularly with surveillance
and flock cameras and things like that. I don't know. The human beings on the
ground always beat the tech. Always. 100%, man.
Like, um,
One of the old martial arts lines that
my kung fu teacher would talk about all this, all the time, is that he
would say the master would find greatness in the chores that the beginner wants to
avoid. Hmm. So, so essentially he'd be like,
you know, like you can find your next level scrubbing pots and
pans, but most people are gonna do everything they
can to like not not scrub pots and pans, right? He talked about chop wood,
carry water. So then fast forward, I'm starting to read philosophy and more things,
and I find this chop wood, carry water idea in the Buddhist kind of lane
and everything. And now it's a thing that I talk about with my clients, right?
Like, before we're gonna go build some big huge 5,000 cold
email thing a day and everything, shouldn't we be able to pick up the phone?
Mm-hmm. Have one conversation. Let's
validate the problem state. that we think is so
pressing that everyone's going to be so excited to come to
us because we're going to change the world on this thing. And they're like, can
you even validate that people are feeling the thing that you think is so
pressing? Like, and you don't want to.
I get it because you're in a hurry, you're fearful of rejection. And these are
all big blind spots because I can't tell you how many people, Hasan, are like,
well, Jon, I'm only interested in scalable ideas.
Like, if I had a dollar for every person that has said
that to me because they're scared and they're fighting rejection,
right? And they're not even aware that they're hiding from it. They're fearful of it.
And it's fueling all of these things, right? Like, I
wouldn't need to run a business anymore. Like, years and years of
people telling me this thing. And I'm kind of like, okay, like,
I'm not coming on to work with you when you're so
fearful of this thing. I'm definitely not bringing you another human human
that you think is gonna be able to do this job when you have not
even tested the waters for yourself? So the— I'll close with
this idea because we're, we're around the corner.
Um, the venture capitalist Peter
Thiel, who gets a lot of run,
um, for a whole variety of reasons, some of it well deserved. Um,
I, I read his book and actually facilitated his book, um, with startups, Zero to
Or Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future from his Stanford
lectures, right? I wanted the— one of the quotes in there, and
it's absolutely the truth. This is one of those perhaps the
wrong clock shows the right time at least twice a day kind of things, right?
Mm-hmm. He says, brilliant thinking is rare,
but courage has always been in even shorter supply.
And we exist in a time— I'm having a conversation with— it's interesting— with
another person in another project that I'm on about cowardice.
Right? I wrote a whole blog post about this. I think we are
coming out of a time of intense
technologically enabled— I'm going to use the
Freudian term— technologically enabled cowardice.
And I'm not talking about
cowardice in terms of military bravery or
running into a burning building. That's not the kind of cowardice I'm talking about. about.
I'm not talking about it in opposition to that. I'm talking about cowardice in terms
of, I will only do the thing that supports the status quo because that's what
I'm paid for, and then I'm going to go home. And we see this at
all levels in our society and culture, and we see this at all levels in
our business. Now, we, we can see it in
others, but it's really hard to
recognize the cowardice in ourselves. So you use the
word fear. I'm going to use the word cowardice.
And we look for the supports for our cowardice
because if we were to put
down, if we were to put down our cowardice and actually make a courageous
decision, like to leave, such as to leave the office
and go out and be in the field and talk to people,
we might have to upend the status quo, which might threaten our paychecks,
which might threaten our mortgage, which might threaten our kids getting into a school
that we really like. And we don't want to
put— talk about dominoes. We don't want to knock down that first
domino because there's a bunch of other dominoes that will fall
after that. And we are unwilling to live with the consequences
of courage. But we're plenty willing to live with,
and we are supported in, I believe, society and culturally at many levels.
We're plenty willing to live with the consequences of cowardice because they
don't show up immediately.
Whereas we are afraid, to your point, that the
consequences of courage will show up immediately. And
the thing that I would say is that they— the consequences of courage and the
consequences of cowardice both show up at the
exact same time down the line. You just have to—
you have to pick which lane you're going to walk in consciously and intentionally,
pick which lane you're going to walk in. And that's what you can get. One
of the things you can get from Rommel But you can also get it from
a bunch of other books too. Yeah.
With that, I would recommend going out and picking up
Infantry Attacks. Um, the, um, by the way,
the, the one of the things I will say this as a last note, one
of the things that was in the introduction, I freaking love this, um, the publisher's
note from the original, um, Oh, gosh. From the original,
the original version that we're reading here by Lee Allen. He writes— he wrote this
publisher's note.
Let's see. Oh, here we go. Attack is a classic of
military literature, first published in Germany in 1937 under the title
Infanterie greift an. It became a great success before World War II
and played a major role in launching Rommel on the road to fame. We've mentioned
that the US Army translated the book in 1943, and
General George Patton became familiar with it. Um, we've also
talked about that. Today, 35 years
after its initial publication in the United States, the book is mentioned frequently as a
magnificent account of imaginative and successful combat
leadership. This is the line that jumps out to me. Copies
of the wartime English edition are among the most valued works in private
collections. All copies in the Library of
Congress and in the Army Library of the Pentagon Have,
however, mysteriously disappeared.
If it's good enough for the Pentagon to basically just
draw a black marker through it so you can't read
it, it's good enough for you to pick up.
And of course, now you can't. You can go out and pick up Infantry
Attacks by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Underline
the observations, take what you can from it, think about how it applies
to your business, and think about the conversation that we've had today.
I want to thank my friend John Hill for coming on today, having a
robust conversation with me. Always a pleasure. Thank you, man. It's
always a blast. And with that, well, we're out.