Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the
Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast.
Bonus. There's no book reading usually
on these bonus episodes. These
are, in general, interviews, rants, raves, insights, and other
gentle and sometimes not so gentle audio musings and
conversations with interesting people about leadership.
Because listening to me and an interesting guest talk about
leadership for at least a couple of hours is better than reading and trying
to understand yet another business
book. And today, of course, because
I created the format, we're gonna break the format. I feel like Pablo
Picasso a little bit. We're gonna break our rule
about covering business books, and we are going to talk today about
another business book following on the heels
of our most recent bonus episode
conversation around the 4th turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and the end of
the world is just the beginning by Peter Zihan.
Sometimes there is a business book about leadership that is so
good that as a person in leadership development space, I sit back
while reading it. I nod my head and I say to myself,
damn. I wish I had written this.
The book we are talking about today is easily one of the top five
business and leadership books written in the last 10 years, and
it was written by a former, never x
as I've been informed, a former navy
seal and current podcast host whose name you'll
know when I say it. This book details how
lessons learned from over 20 years of military
experience can be put to use in the corporate world, in
the business world, and even in the civic and
family world. It also shows
that military culture can be just as screwed up, just as
dysfunctional, and just as in need of change as any
culture, civilian or otherwise
operating outside of the military. And we are
going to take somebody or we're going to be joined, not take. We're going to
be joined on our journey through this book today by a
guest who is the number one best selling author in 13 Amazon
categories, a 5 time worldwide bestseller for books and
leadership. He's a top 40 under 40, candidate
in tech and innovation, a bronze star medal winner for
meritorious service in war zones, from service in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was a White House military
officer of the year. And if that's not enough, a
TEDx Southlake Tahoe speaker. I would like to welcome to the
podcast today, Atlas Altman. How are you
doing, Atlas? Hey, Hassan. Man, you know, I said it before,
but I gotta say it again, man. Your voice is so silky
smooth. I just I couldn't wait until you got into, you
know, introducing me, so that I could interrupt it for a second to just
realize if I was it was in a dream or if it was real life.
And I pitched myself a couple times while you're while you're doing the intro.
Thanks for having me on the show. You know, I love your show. I love
all the content that you put out. You put a lot of work into this.
And man, you are right. It is way better to listen to you on a
book and you listen to you and a guest on a book than it is
reading a book. It's like when you read a book and then you go see
the movie. Right. You know, you're yeah. You're like, well, the
podcast said more. So Well, it's
it's interesting because I'm a huge movie guy. Just as an aside,
I am a huge movie guy, and I've I, in in my most
my more recent, regular episode podcast, I've been talking a lot
about the intersections of film and books and all that. And I've been try I
had good discipline the 1st couple of years keeping all that out, but it's starting
to leak in a little bit. So I gotta tighten up I gotta tighten up
a little bit. But I'm a huge film guy. Huge. I love it.
Yeah. Yeah. I love I love content in general. So thanks for having me, Assad.
I appreciate this, man. This is gonna be awesome. You ready? Absolutely. Let's jump into
it. Let's let's says as the author would say, let's,
let's get some. Yeah. Let's get after it. So today,
we will be talking about
extreme ownership, how US Navy SEALs lead and
win by Jocko Willink and Leafa Babin. So I have the
black cover today if you're watching on the video. Atlas has
2 different versions. He has the white cover, and he has the
black cover version. So he is doubling
up on his ownership, such as it
were. Now Extreme Ownership opens.
And, again, you can go get this book. I would encourage you to go pick
it up. Extreme Ownership opens with part
1, winning the war with Ian. And so we're going to do
something that we've been doing on our podcast recently
where we've been sort of summarizing some of the chapters and
summarizing some of the content and giving you a broad overview of what's in the
book because, obviously we can't cover everything in the book. And
also, you know, we'd like to talk with the guests particularly one like Atlas who's
very well versed in the content, but also
very well versed in how it applies to our real
leadership lives. So the very first
chapter opens up in the Malab district in Ramadi
in Iraq. And, Jocko describes what
exactly extreme ownership actually means
through the lens of a blue on blue, through the lens
of a fratricide. Now war is a dirty
business. William Tecumseh Sherman
said that, and you cannot make it any better. And
the first chapter opens up
with what exactly ownership actually
means in a place where winning and losing is
not about the balances on an account sheet. It's actually
about the blood in the streets and people's lives.
From there we move into and or jocko moves into the
idea of no bad teams and only there
being bad leaders which is an important distinction with the
difference that many people fail to make,
in in all of all sorts of leadership realms.
And when I was thinking about this book, when I was reading it, a very
particular story that I'm gonna tell here in just a moment,
really resonated, really made this piece of the book resonate with
me. He moves towards
this idea of belief, when
and this is an idea this is a concept in part one that
really focuses around the need of the
team to believe in the mission and really embedding
that belief not only in the team, but making sure that leaders
actually articulate that vision, articulate that belief to the
team. And finally, part 1 of extreme ownership
ends with with,
the coauthor, Leif Babin. I believe this is Leif's part. No. It
was actually Jocko's part. Sorry. With, with Jocko
talking about, probably the most important aspect
of any, leadership act or
any leaders act, and that is that is the
aspect of checking the ego. And we're gonna talk about all of
these different aspects today with Atlas, But I wanna
kinda talk a little bit about a story that occurred to me when I was
reading part 1. So and I've never talked about this on the podcast
before, But, many years ago, when I was in administrative
position in higher education and, most of my career, the
first part of it anyway, before I started my leadership consultancy and
started doing a whole bunch of the other things like this podcast that I'm doing
now, I spend a lot of time in higher education,
training and leading teams of anywhere between 12
to 50, 18 to 19 year olds. And what I tell
people very often, particularly if I'm in a corporate training,
scenario when I'm teaching and leading and training 45 to 60
year olds, is that the only difference between you and the 19 year olds is
the number of years. Because y'all have the same kind of
stuff going on, same kind of challenges.
Well, many years ago, back in 2012, well over 10 years
ago now, I was leading a team of college
students that collapsed. And it
was a leadership failure, on my part, actually.
And it took a lot for me to understand
why the team failed. Now I was
hired, of course, to fire somebody on the team, and I, of
course, I did that part successfully. But I didn't realize
that one of the dichotomies of leadership, and we're going to talk a
lot about this later on. Jocko talks about this in Jocko and Leaf both talk
about this in their book, and it is one of the principles of extreme ownership
But one of the dichotomies of leadership is you can do the right thing
But you could do it with the wrong motives Actually, that's there's something
biblical in there as well. I failed
to check my ego, you know, with that team.
And it turned out that because I failed to check my ego, even in the
manner in which I fired that person, I turned out to be a bad
leader, which created a toxic team.
I failed to get people to buy in and to believe in the mission
overall of that team. And it was a pretty substantially large team of my
25 student leaders, all of whom were 19 years old, all of whom
were looking to me for leadership, and I was not providing
it. As a result, I had to check
myself. I had to check my ego after some good counsel
from a supervisor of mine. I had to check my ego, and
then I had to constantly retake ownership over the team for the
remaining year and a half that I was with that team.
All of the aspects of extreme ownership that I failed on
that Jocko talks about in his experience with the
seal teams in Iraq and in Ramadi.
I had those exact same experiences just in a different kind of way and
experienced the exact same kind of thing. And I'm sure Atlas is going to
talk a little bit about some of his experiences today, as it relates
to extreme owners. Bad teams and bad leaders believing
and checking the ego, of course. And so I'd like to turn it over to
him with this question, just to start Atlas. This is a
very jocko question. So we're going to start here. How can
leaders win the war within, How does that
happen? Well, I mean, it starts off with with exactly what you
just said. It starts off with checking your ego. So the story that I
that I'm gonna share with your audience is one that, I don't
share too often, but it's an extreme
story, that mixes a special mission with presidential
support and diplomacy. And it was when I realized that
I could be different and I could win the war within. And it goes like
this. I was in Afghanistan, for a long time, and I realized that,
there's a lot of violence there. I was in Iraq for a long time, and
I realized that there was a lot of violence there. And in college, I was
a bouncer. I used to fight a lot. I come from a family that said,
you know, if you get into a fight, you come back as a winner, or
you get into another fight. My whole life, I've answered with violence
with violence. But in Indonesia, I was on
a presidential mission, and, a lot of the things that Jocko
and and Leif talk about, they they kind of roll into this.
I had to take extreme ownership of this situation
because I had the responsibility of bringing the president's
communication device into this peace conference.
And the security guard, who I didn't know was a security guard,
told me it wasn't coming in. And I was like, it's it's coming in. I'm
bringing in my device for the president of the United States. They're like, no. It
isn't. So I asked him what I needed to do, and after jumping through
a lot of hoops that he didn't think I jump through, I I had
a diplomatic note from the state department, which is an agreement between countries
to bring in this device specifically, and he was mad. So
he ushered me into this back room, and he's wearing this
black outfit. Right? All black. And it looked
like a uniform, but I didn't really realize it was a uniform until I was
in a room with a whole bunch of dudes in black
uniforms all around me, and I have this device.
So I did what I always do, and but this is what you do whenever
you're in a situation where you think violence is about to ensue. You put your
hands up, You go into guard. You know
all about guard. We're probably gonna go talk about some some guard a little bit
later, but you go into guard. That way you know something's coming. So I put
my hands up and I said, hey, I don't know why I'm here, and he
swung and hit me right in the face. Now
I just told you I'm a man that answers violence with violence, but as I
looked down as I looked down after I got clogged in the face,
I saw this word diplomat, and it was on
my chest. I was wearing a suit. I was not able to
fight. I'm not able to. The agency that I worked for told me if I
ever got into a violent confrontation, I
was going to get kicked out of the agency, and it took me years to
get into this position that I was in to work directly for the president of
the United States. So I had this war
inside me. Okay? It just brewed
up, and I had this emotional onset that I've never had
before as I pushed the guy off, and I grabbed the device and left
the room. Immediately, cameras went my direction,
people saw it, and I got the call. What just
happened? And I was like, hey, I'll tell you when you get here. And they're
like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah. So just like in the story
where, this top leadership was coming to the scene to the ex
where I was. Same thing happened with me. They're coming, and they
wanna know what happened. What did I do? What did my team
do? What happened specifically? And like all of
this, I left the team out of all of this. The team went in, did
everything they were supposed to do. They were in the venue. I handled
everything from the point of of conflict. Mhmm.
Because I'm used to doing that. So when they showed up, they asked me to
go through this, and then I had to struggle. Unlike Jocko, I went through all
of the emotions. I, you know, I asked the team, you know, whatever
he did the same thing. I asked the team is is there something we could
have done better? Nobody's gonna give me any answers on that, because everyone
feels at fault that I just got hit in the face, you know. And
instead of them trying to come on and figure out how they were part of
it, I just immediately shut that down because I've already read this book.
I had read the the white version before it turned into the black version
later. The, you know, the black's, number one New York
Times Center with q and a's. This is the big one. This is the book
that I was like, I'm gonna get the q and a's on this. But
when I got there and the leadership came up to me,
they they said what happened? And I said, hey, you know, this is what happened,
and I I couldn't answer with violence, and then the seal,
the the president's military aid was a seal at that day.
And I'm looking at his Trident, and like I just you know,
I can see what they go through to get that Trident, to wear that
Trident, and it's a lot. It's a lot. So, he's
looking at me like why didn't you hit the guy and he knows that I
couldn't have. So he just walks away and like I just I
felt a little little wet thing pop out of my eye,
and I'm like all of a sudden I'm crying. I have no idea why I'm
crying. And I'm like okay, put that back, and then I'm
angry. So I went through anger, fear that I was gonna lose my
job, and then like I squirted 1, I I don't cry, so I
didn't know what the heck was happening. It wasn't out. My eyes were just
pushing out this this bubble that I couldn't understand, and all of
that came back to, you know, the higher brass came down
and they said hey let's keep him in the job. He did the right
thing, and then they got me paired with a diplomatic
response agent because I'm not, you know, I'm not a politician. I don't know what
I'm doing. So they put some professional in there, and the guy was like, hey.
We're gonna go see this guy. He's gonna apologize. I need you
to say, yeah, yeah, I accept your apology. Then we're walking
away. And you know how that went. The guy was like, hey, I'm a Christian.
I'm like, well, dude, well, Christians don't hit other Christians. Christians don't hit
people, but I accept your apology. And then I walked away and
the the political aide was like, oh, my gosh. That was amazing. Like, I had
been trained for years to say that kind of stuff. I was just you know
what I mean? I was just me. And the whole thing is, like, whenever you
read a good book, and this is why I think we're talking about it, when
you read a good book and you take it and you're like, how can I
apply what he did, which was a grandiose scale, I mean, somebody died
under his watch? And he he was like it's my
responsibility. No one died in my situation. I got clocked
in the face, but still my job was on the
table. You know, the president's movements, and how he was
gonna act, and how he was able to do his presidential duties, They were all
on my shoulders, and there's no fail. So I had a
different type of stress that was still really high that I had
to work through, and it was a war within me, and it was a war
within. Do I blame somebody else? This dude hit me for no reason. I could
have said that. That would have been stupid, but like I, you know,
I I obviously had my hands up. I don't know. You know, I maybe I
provoked something. So honesty is the best policy, all of
that, but the other part to this this
whole chapter that I gotta end on is is Leif says it
in there. He said there's no bad teams, only bad leaders. And he
talks about the boat example where they had these
seal team training scenarios where one team was always
losing, and one team was always winning, and they flopped the
leaders and the team that was losing,
became like the winning team.
You know, and and like the the winning team was number 2,
but the leaders matter. And it all hit the
whole the whole thing is extreme ownership. When you realize that your
environment is controlled by you, if
there's struggles, you have to get through it.
You have to figure out what's going on. Nobody's gonna help you, man.
No one's gonna help you through the hard times. It's in you to
get through that situation. And when you start looking in, the
battle becomes a whole lot better. Sun Tzu puts it this way in The Art
of War, If you know your your enemies, you'll win half the
battles. If you know yourself, you'll win half the battles. If you know yourself and
the enemy, you'll win a 100% of the battle. But
here's the war within. The enemy is usually yourself.
You talk to yourself more than anyone else talks to you in your life. The
voice that you hear the most is you. That voice
should be positive, especially in conflict. You know,
when I when I was crying, I didn't think, oh my gosh, I'm
crying. Oh, how embarrassing. I was like, why am I crying?
Immediately I attacked it. Like why is this happening?
And then I realized I'm going through something. My body's trying to figure out what's
going on because we didn't just pretzel the guy we normally would have pretzeled.
You know what I mean? I couldn't get into the way I normally solve
problems, and my body's like why couldn't we just do that? Why
couldn't we just Why couldn't we engage that muscle memory? Yeah. What
what is happening to you? Are you okay? And it's like going through
all the emotions and like that's a real war and we all have it.
So what a great question to ask because it really is a
war within, and you have to own it. And that's what the book talks
about. That's what my book talks about. And that's basically all my
book talks about is like putting the right people in
and around your environment. To where they
influence you to be better, to be bigger, to be the best
version of you. And whenever you realize that's on you
too, your network changes and you start to become somebody
that people don't recognize. The kid that everyone used to, we used to
talk to and be like, you know, that kid, he can't, whatever. They don't say
that anymore. That stops because you focus in on
what you were specifically made to do. And that
niche is what some people call it. It's inside you man, but it's
different with everybody. And that is why
leadership is a $1,000,000,000 a day business. $1,000,000,000 a
day is being spent on how to fix
leadership. And that's because they can't, everyone's got a different mode.
Everyone's got a different leadership opinion. So whenever you
start realizing that and you start looking in to how you can lead, not
how someone else can lead, but use someone else's lessons to become a better version
of you, That's when you start winning that war within. What do you think about
that? Oh, I think that's I think that's exactly correct.
Several things occurred to me while you were talking. I was taking notes. So,
you know, one of the things that I wrote about in my 3rd
book, 12 rules for leaders, the foundation of intentional leadership is
that leadership is like pornography. Everyone knows what it is when they
can spot it. And everyone knows when it's not when they don't see it.
And that's why leadership is, to your point, you know, a
$1,000,000,000 a day you know, industry. That's why
there are over 400,000 plus of volumes on Amazon.com
just in the leadership category alone.
And what people are searching for is how their
individual lived experiences and this is
what what has done so brilliantly in Extreme Ownership,
and in your books and in my books, how could your lived experiences,
scale up? Right? What's the ways that they can go to a much
larger world? And that's something that I wanna I wanna ask you about because you
mentioned something in there in that great story,
about the Indonesia presidential mission and the dudes in the black uniforms
that have been jumped through all those hoops. Dude, let me tell you too. Like,
the guys that I was with that were from the country, they were like, don't
mess with them. They'll bury you. They'll kill you. And I was like, I'll kill
them. I ain't I ain't have you know, but I didn't even think about any
of that. It's gonna be a close it's gonna be a close run thing. We're
gonna find out. We're gonna find out.
I wanna talk I wanna ask you a little bit about your background so that
people can get to know you a little bit a little bit more. So,
how do you go from being a bouncer in college to being in the diplomat
core, you know, in Indonesia? How did what's that life path? How
does that happen? And you can give me either the the the
the the 10 minutes version or you can give me the 5 minute condensed version,
however you wanna however you wanna do it. But how do you go? Because a
lot of people would be interested in that. Yeah. How I'm interested in that. Heck,
that's why I'm asking the question. How do you go from bouncer
to diplomat? Like, what series of decisions
was made that got you into that room? Because no
one was in that room by accident, not even you. Do
yeah. No. No. It's very, very, very selective on who
comes into that environment. Very selective.
Okay. Yeah. So early on in my life, I started watching
TV like everyone else looking for man examples, And one of
the man examples that I always got was Rogan, man. Rogan
used to be the person that would stand up to someone when they were wrong.
And he had that confidence that, you know, look man, you're wrong, you're
just wrong. And people were like, no I'm not wrong, and they would get emotionally
charged, and then Rogan would correct because he could.
He had the ability physically to stop anything that was
happening, you know, but that he was actually he was controlling
intellectual, but he was he was controlled until he didn't he
didn't have to be. And someone would would press that button, he would he would
answer the call. So I started looking at him and other
like movie examples, man. I mean, my my mom, I I talk about it
on Ted's stage, my mom used to put me in these scenarios where she
would she would send me to she would have me read books or watch movies
that had strong leaders in them. And what I found in strong
leaders was a physical health acumen.
Like every strong leader was actually strong. Now
whether it was physical or intellectual, the
strength that component was needed.
So I found myself at a very early age, and when my adopted dad
told me, it was like, hey, you're a strong kid. So I found myself
gravitating towards the violent side of strength, towards
what can I do? So I I took martial arts as a kid.
I I took in, like, you know, all the stuff we all do. Right?
All the stuff. The sports and stuff. And then, that turned
into what I wanted to do in my life, which at freaking 3 years
old, my grandpa was in special forces. He had
me around a bunch of special forces people. I always wanted to be in special
forces. So my mom kinda always put me in that environment,
and then whenever it was my choice, and and I had been
studying all the leadership decisions because really that was where I was as
a kid. I was interested in how people make these decisions.
Mhmm. I found the 5 w model. Right? Who, what, where, when, and
why to be used everywhere. And then I thought it was really fancy, because I
added how. So I had like 6 things, and I'd be like, like, you know,
and I'd be like boom we're doing this. Strong voice.
And so I started looking at my scenarios of where
I was gonna go, and I was gonna go in the army, because that's where
special forces is. And, my dad was in the army. He
was in the special forces community as well, my adopted dad, and he said,
no. Go in the air force. And, he's like, it's it's
gonna be better for you. You're gonna have all these jobs that you're gonna be
able to do what you wanna do in the air force. So,
I went through, the air force. I got selected to be
an officer, which is a full time leader. That's what Jocko and Leif were
doing. They were commanding. And this is what my mom really wanted me to do
anyway. She wanted me to be a leader in in future wars. She
named me Joshua Michael, and she used to frequently tell me that
stands for leader of warriors. Joshua, you know, after
Moses, was a strong leader in the bible. Right? And then,
with Michael, Michael being the general of God's armies, we're a big
Catholic family, so so she's like this is what your name means. I want you
to be a leader of warriors. Not standard what you hear from my mom, but
that's what my mom used to say. So whenever I came up to my
mom Mom mom was a warrior in and of herself. She was one of those
Spartan women. You either come back out of your shield or, like, you know, buried
with it. Yeah. Yeah. So all of
that, that transpired into, me going
into the air force and really making her, but she got mad. She
got so mad because she wanted to be an army brat as an
army child. She wanted to be an army spouse, which she was. Then she wanted
to be an army mother. She wanted to have, like, an army life, and I
went to the air force. And, you know, before she
passed away, she saw me at the White House leading soldiers,
and that was a special mission. So, like, transferring through my
career, special things allowed themselves
or afforded opportunities for me to go into unique
environments like the White House. And Yeah. That was one of the special missions that
I got to do after doing special missions in Iraq. So I did special
missions in Iraq, then it brought me into this
environment called combat comm, and I was in the mob is what they call it.
And combat communications is a group that goes out, takes over a
field, sets up an airstrip, and then has the airfield come in so that
we start wars. That's how that works. Got it. So I was doing
that, and then we started a worldwide one because the
community got bigger because of the things that were going on in the world. Mhmm.
And I spent lots of time, man, doing that.
And I went from being in Iraq winning a
bronze star like you told like you told the the earlier.
And that's not something the air force gets. That's an army medal for
like, the the the beginning of that says while engaged with the
enemy. That's not something that you get in the Air Force
usually. You don't get a medal that says while engaged with the enemy Right. If
you're in the Air Force. So that's an army medal, and,
I got that, and my mom was pretty proud of that, because my
grandpa had a bronze star. He had a purple heart. I didn't want one of
those. But, you know, he did the the MacVeesock
thing. So all of that transpired into the opportunity to go
assess to be at the White House, and that took 2 years. And I went
through lots of, background checks. My security clearance had
to be what they call, a presidential security
clearance. Mhmm. So I had to have carpoolanche.
They had to do a ton of research on me, and then assessments
and then tests and all that. And then I got brought into the team, but
not the team that was around the president, just just the team. And then I
got to work, you know, around the president, which is that one I told you.
And then 2 years later, I started working on the president's staff as one of
the top top five people in the agency to go represent.
And that was that was interesting. Living at the White House was fun. So we've
we've had folks on this podcast before,
with, with extensive military experience. We
last year, we covered, or last season, sorry, season 2,
we covered the book, About Face by Colonel David Hackworth,
with a good friend of mine who, did a couple of tours in,
in Iraq and a tour in Afghanistan as well.
Another one of our somewhat regular co
hosts was a graduate of West Point
and did a tour in Iraq. Right. And
so, one of the things that you and I had talked about before we
press record on this was, and I want to say this
early, what we're seeing happen
right now in, I would say, the last
5 or 6 years, and it's really started to speed up after the
Afghanistan withdrawal. What you're starting
to see is all of those men who like
yourself, Jocko, the the 3 people or 2 people, 3 people that
I've named already, you know, starting to come
out and starting to really say to the
civilian world, hey. We have this military experience. We have
this military background. You should really pay attention to us. And it seems
like it's on a sharper edge primarily because
of a couple of things, I think. And I don't you don't necessarily have to
respond to this. It's just an observation. Primarily, I think
because of the politics around Iraq and Afghanistan that were sharply different than the
politics around everything that it's always compared to, which is Vietnam
Mhmm. Or even the first Persian Gulf War.
And then you also have a good chunk of people who are my age, I'm
45 this year, who are my age, who are
quite frankly self consciously determined
not to do the same things and not to have the same sort of social
and cultural responses to folks like yourself and Jocko
and all of that and all those folks, not have the same cultural responses
as our parents did to folks in their time. We're we're we're we're
hyper self conscious about that. And that's where you get the thank you for
your service kind of stuff and all of that. Right? And I get it that
that it sounds flat when when you hear it because it's just a job.
And at the same time, when only less than I think
it's less than 1% of the available male population serves in the
United States now, forget World War II. That's just gone.
Less than 1% of the available male population served in in,
in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we run
across somebody who's speaking from that space, like a Jocko, like
you, like the folks that I brought on to this podcast before,
we run across people who are coming speaking from that space. We do we do
as a generation sit up and listen. And quite frankly, folks who are
younger than us, where the the military participation
rate is even lower, also sit up and
pay attention. And so I think that there's some real, I know that there's some
real leadership value in those experiences that
again, the military isn't and let's not put it up on a pedestal.
It is another sphere of how we operate in the world, but there
are lessons that could be brought across from that sphere. That's why we're talking to
you and covering this book today. Well, so the military
is the largest organization in the world when it comes
to people employed. Mhmm. How much is spent?
Land, buildings, like, assets.
So, like, the military itself is the biggest corporation, if you want
to think about it in those terms. And lessons pulled out of
that environment, usually have a life or death consequence.
So I can see where the lessons are, but I do I gotta be
careful, like, who I'm listening to. Right. Because what's happened
is, especially in the last couple years, people
have transferred into becoming thought leaders without
actually producing thoughts that are fully developed.
So when you start to latch on to something that isn't ready
and you start to go with it, you have half back half baked
ideas that come out, and those half baked ideas are dangerous.
Right. So, like, whenever you have, I only I was really
careful, and I used a couple people's books. You
know, Jocko and Laffer were one of them. But I used a couple
books to, like, get through the process, because the Department of Defense has to
clear your book to make sure that you're not, you know,
divulging any operational secrets. And I'm I'm pretty pretty cake when I
don't I don't talk anything operations. I talk personal experience.
Right? Right. So my personal experience doesn't talk about operations
most of the time. Time. So I was very careful to take things
that actually were fully developed and put them in a book. I'm very
careful what I speak, like the the story that I share with you. I don't
share with it too I don't share that too often, but whenever I
do, that's fully developed so that you can
realize you're going to go through something hard. It may not be
what I went through, but you're going to go through something hard, and your
body and your emotions are going to flare. And
when they do, realize it. And then realize you can control it. That's
the lesson that that I like to that's a fully developed
lesson. You know what I mean? I don't share things that aren't fully developed. No.
I like it. I love that. I love that idea that half baked
ideas are dangerous. Yeah. And and
you I love it how you tied that directly to this idea that the you
compared the military to a corporation. And of course, going back to Eisenhower, the military
industrial complex. Yep. Yada yada yada yada. We know. Okay.
Social spending is still more in the United States than military spending is, but I
won't get into all that. Anyhow, it's true. It's very
true. Like, there's more money in corporations than there ever will be in the military.
Trust me. Exactly. But just looking at the military as a corporate
entity, just like in any other corporate entity, taking
that idea to its logical conclusion, you're going to have some people that are going
to be at the pinnacle of the peak of their powers who are going to
have fully baked ideas. You're going to have a bunch of people in the
middle who have half baked ideas, who are running around thinking their ideas are fully
baked. And then you're going to have an even larger mass of people at the
bottom
who have no ideas and just
wanna ascend the hierarchical ladder. Right? And to say or do
anything to get up that ladder. And so, I agree. Like, we do
have to be careful as people who are purveying
leadership ideas to make sure that our ideas aren't half baked
and make sure that they are fully thought through. And that's one of the reasons
why I do this podcast. It's because this is it gives me an opportunity to
talk through ideas with folks, reality check my ideas
against not only a book but also an interesting guest, and then see if this
idea is actually real. Like, am I actually seeing something
that's real here, or am I just making it up as I go along? So
it's true. Yeah. One other thought, and then we'll go
back to the book. All right. You mentioned,
how most people engage in negative self talk. And so
by my master's degree is in conflict management and in conflict
resolution. Right? I did a lot of divorce and family mediations.
I've done my fair share of tough negotiations. And
we'll talk about a little bit more about this, but I was a I was
a fighter. I was a playground warrior from the time I was 12 till That's
right. I stopped being a playground warrior. Right?
Sometimes I will say to people, you know, I'm part of the last generation where
we actually had real fist fights about things like real genuine
fistfights. People don't fight anymore. Well, interestingly
enough, I was in line, and this will kind of date this recording, but I
was in line to to vote yesterday. And there were
2 kids standing behind me, 2 young men standing behind me, and a young woman
standing in front of me. And they both knew her from the local high school.
They both just turned all 3 of them just turned 18 and they were voting
for the first time. And I was like, oh, okay. But they actually talked to
each other. And I actually said this out loud while I was standing in line
to them. And I was, of course, on my phone looking at email. And I
look up from the email, and I go, wait. I thought people in your generation
didn't talk to each other without phones. Like, this is They're, like, get
your phones out. This is crazy. This is crazy. What is
happening? I can hear your voice. And
and to their credit, the 2 the 2 young men behind me just started laughing.
And the young lady, she kinda rolled her eyes as most 18 I I have
an 18 year old daughter. So, like, yeah, she's gonna do that thing. Who's this
weirdo talking to me? Right? But neither not one
of them had their phones out. They were focused on what they needed to do
and and to be in line. And they're having a conversation later on
as we move through the line about the, about something going on
at their local high school. And I won't say where the locality is. It doesn't
really matter. But about something going on at their local high school, and they said
the 2 boys were talking and they go or they said to each other,
well, XYZ person. I don't remember the name. It doesn't matter. XYZ person,
punched that other person the other day. And then like the person
who got. Like, apparently rolled up to this other
person later on and, like, waylaid him.
Wow. Yeah. Like, waylaid him totally. And so they were talking about it, and then
the girl in front of me, she starts laughing, and she starts telling them about
what she heard about this.
Oh, and, and so she starts telling them what she heard about
this this, this interaction. And
I I got to admit, my heart kind of warmed a little bit.
Got to admit. And that's terrible of me. I know it is,
but I was like, at least at some
point, people aren't just social media warriors.
At some point, it does you you can
hit that Mike Tyson, you know, sort of idea that everybody's
strong online, but at a certain point, you're gonna get punched in the mouth.
Yeah. And and no one has a plan. And no one has a plan. No
one has a plan for that. And so it did weirdly enough. It sort of
rolled my heart. That's an interesting little aside there. I had to tell I had
to tell that story because that happened yesterday. Because I do often feel
like we are part of that last cohort where
physical confrontation for the words that come out of your mouth, there's
going to be an escalation there. And it is and the skill set of being
an adult in conflict management is learning how to deescalate
from that or not to allow it to get to that. And that's where
to tie this all into self talk, that's where your self talk has to
come in. And so the great Zig Ziglar once said years ago, the motivational
speaker, Zig Ziglar said, you know, almost
99% of our internal conversation is negative.
Mhmm. And we need to re we need to switch the switch
the gears on that. And of course, scientific research and psychological research on that
has proven that the vast majority of our self talk is negative. Now
seals, special forces, air
force, you know, special forces folks, One of the
ways that they teach or train, and you probably went through this,
is is reinforcing positive self talk versus negative self talk.
Let's talk a little bit about that, and then we'll go back to the book.
We'll talk a little bit about that. How do we how do we switch our
self talk so it's more positive rather than negative?
Yeah. Well, so it depends on where you are in which
environment, but there's a lot of things that, that come out
of that that special operations environment that,
breed positive influences.
The the the way what I what I gotta start off with though is there's
a lot of negative self talk in that environment too.
Because whenever you have a bunch of alpha people
comparing each other to other alpha people, there's
a negative connotation where someone might be
faster, stronger, smarter in certain areas. So
what the special operations community is really good at and why we
do really well, especially in American Special Forces,
is we start looking at everyone's strengths, and we put them together,
and we make them a real tight knit group, and then we
put them on a mission. After they've figured out who's
strong at what, after they know where they belong. And then
this talks we'll we'll go back into this probably a little bit later, but this
talks about the the decentralized command. If I know you're really good at
something, I'm gonna trust you to do it without question. And
so, you start looking at all those things. They ask you during the
assessment process to come on any special operations team. Like
what are you good at? The strengths and weaknesses questions that everyone gets in an
interview Mhmm. It's it's dissected at
a a very cellular level whenever you're assessing to be
in a special operations environment. They make you take, tests
that are cognitive in nature to figure out things
that you may not know about yourself. They make you take personality tests.
They test the way you are from an EQ or an
EI, emotional intelligence perspective. And
then I I like to breed all that into what I'm what I like to
call, and this is still half baked, so be careful.
Emotional equity. And what that does is
it builds up a certain amount of self worth. So
at night, I look at my schedule, and I say, what did I
do today? And the things that I didn't do normally would get like a,
oh, you didn't get to it? I'm like, yes, I can do that better tomorrow.
And I start to push that into an equity mode to where whenever I am
ready to do, like, a podcast with you, and we talked a couple times. You
know, when I'm ready to do a podcast with you, it's gonna be a good
podcast. And so I know it's coming, I know it's coming, and
the build up to that instead of the let down, it
works in an equity mode for me. I'm putting sweat equity into something that's gonna
be great, equity mode for me. I'm putting sweat equity into something that's gonna be
great when it comes out. I'm putting this equity in. So I move it
into an equity bucket, and I have emotional equity. And I
really learned that in the special operations, you know,
environments. Because I got on these teams, man.
And I'll probably talk about it a little bit, but
if we go into chapter 11, I
could hold off and tell you this story later. I could tell you now. Yeah.
Hold hold on hold on and tell us the story when we get to chapter
11 because I wanna I wanna hold on to that because that's, that's, what is
that? Decisiveness and uncertainty, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's, let's hold off and talk about that. Let's go back to the book.
Yeah. Let's, let's hold off on that. Back to the book, Back to extreme
ownership, how US Navy SEALs lead and win by Jocko
Willink and Leif Babin. By the way, you do need to check out
Jocko's podcast. His podcast, quite
frankly, was the inspiration for what I do here,
except I read classic books. He's doing something a little bit more
modern, but we're both pursuing again the same thing
in the same direction, trying to, trying to
promulgate. That's a fancy word, trying to promulgate
fully baked ideas into the world.
So back to the book. So we got through part 1.
Let's look at part 2, the laws of combat. Okay.
So in looking at the laws of combat and extreme ownership, this is divided
up into 4 parts. Right? And the first part opens
up with, Leif Babin describing,
covering the flank in south central Ramadi, Iraq, and
talking about what it means to engage in a process called
cover and move. Particularly a process
of cover and move when you're in a retreat where,
and I love saying this, it's almost in line from the movie Armageddon, when there
are no good options, you just have to pick the best of
all of the bad ones. And cover and move is an
interesting idea where no one person is
allowed to not be covered, but also no
one person is allowed to stay static, right, and is allowed
to merely nest in place. With
cover and move, it allows a small team
to, engage in a fundamental tactic of breaking down
silos and depending upon each other. It also
encourages teams to develop trust. And Leaf talks a lot
about that in his application to business and the principle. Then from
there, we move into this idea of simple, which
was this chapter was written by Jocko. And simple
is the idea that plan complexity defeats
you. The most simple plan is the best one, as a matter
of fact. And then we're gonna I'm gonna talk a little bit about jujitsu.
He paraphrases from, his great pal and,
jiu jitsu instructor and the great jiu jitsu competitor, Dean Lister,
in talking about how jiu jitsu is simple but not easy,
and I can testify to that. But plans should
be as complex as they need to
be, but no more complex. And that is
something that a lot of leaders struggle with because they get they
fall in love with their own complexity. Right? They become seduced by their own
complexity. And Jocko breaks that down very effectively as an
application to business in this chapter.
And from simple, we're moving to prioritization and execution, something you probably
if you listen to the Jocko podcast, you've heard him talk a lot about this,
but priority prioritization, and execution, this chapter
was written by Leaf, and it talks about how
how do you kill as many bad guys as possible with the, with the
US marines and the soldiers in Ramadi? And how do you
do that when everything is going to hell, quite frankly,
and all of the available options are exploding
upon you at once as a leader and when the massive pressure
of a situation is pushing on you.
Countless problems on the battlefield and in life,
snowball, each one becoming larger and larger and larger.
How do you prioritize and execute? I'm gonna talk a little bit about
that because my mom used to say something that I think Jocko would
agree with, actually, on that one. And then
finally, decentralized command, which you were just talking about with Atlas.
Decentralized command is the idea that the people below you as a
leader need to be able to actually lead,
but that's only half of it. Right? Junior leaders need to know and
need to have the confidence that you're actually going to support them as the senior
leader. You're going to support them and trust them in their decision making.
You're going to allow them to experience the consequences of their successes and
failures. And I wrote about this in my book,
12 Rules for Leaders. You're going to allow them
to not only experience the consequences and failures,
but you're also going to avoid as a leader yourself, what I call this
is my version, I guess, of decentralized, command. You're going to
avoid the blame credit trap where leaders
want to give away all the blame and take
all the credit.
Those are the laws of combat. That's in part 2 of extreme ownership.
And let's gonna talk a little bit about a couple of things that relate when
I think of this chapter. So, I've
built teams before in my leadership consultancy, and I've worked with teams obviously
in other contexts. And I've built with teams working on projects.
Most recently, I'm building a local team, to do a
podcast project for our local community. Right? Really cool
idea doing an old time radio show because I'm a huge fan of those kinds
of things. Right? But I cannot do it all by myself. I need about
6 other people. 4 to 6 is usually the optimal team
size. You cannot do everything at once as an
You cannot do everything at once. And I've been an entrepreneur my entire almost my
entire career and the places where I have not been allowed to be an entrepreneur,
I've struggled. But even inside that, when I've been an
entrepreneur, I've realized that the first thing,
the biggest challenge to the team being the success
is me. I'm the biggest challenge to the team being the
success. Any leader is the biggest challenge to the team
being the success, because if the leader doesn't check their ego, then there can't
be covered and move Plans can't be made simple. We cannot
prioritize and execute because everything is in the number one slot all
of the time, And we cannot have trust in order to
effectively engage in decentralized command.
My mom used to say that the number one slot is
called number 1 for a reason because only one thing can go in the
number one slot. And then after that you can have
everything else I think Jako would agree
so would leaf It's what's picking.
It's choosing what goes into that number one slot that's hard for us
as leaders. And so the question I have
for Atlas, after we look at laws of combat and thinking about
your own experience and thinking about your own life Is how
can leaders follow the laws of combat? You know that are described in part 2
here and I think that this is the core of the book. These ideas are
simple decentralized command prioritize and execute,
and of course, you know, cover and move.
How can leaders apply those laws of combat
to their their leadership lives?
I like it. Well, one of the one of the parts of this book that
I absolutely love is 2 words, and it's
decisively engaged. Mhmm. That's not something people
normally hear. Decisively engaged, as as they describe
as Jocko describes, is whenever there is no
good way out. Like, the only thing that can
happen is you have to win or you
die. Right. You're you can't get out, of the
building, and you can't get out on a road. You have to go through
something. So what do you go through? And you pick the
least worst option. That's what what you're trying to do.
That's what that's what everybody's trying to do, but I'm with you on that. These
are the core principles that a leader must think about. Cover
and move is how people the people that
you control, the people that you are in charge of, the
people that are going to do the work, how do they
operate. And in order to do that, what the book
doesn't cover, which I'll add to it, which it's something that that I'm
sure you you have probably talked about whenever you're doing consulting is,
what are these people passionate about? Yep. Because a
lot of people get hired onto a team, and then they never get
asked, could they do more, or would they contribute
in a different way if they were allowed to? And whenever you start asking those
questions, you open the door to people doing more because
they are empowered to do so. Unless you have that question
unless you have that question built in early, these people will only
do what you hired them to do. And if they don't like doing it
anymore, they're gonna start sucking at it. So I'm with
you. It's on the leader to figure out what their team is actually
good at. And if you aren't a leader who asked that question, if you don't
leave your mark with a question mark, which is what
are you passionate about, you're not gonna
ever know the full dynamic impact of your
team. Every team I've ever built just want to insert here.
Every team I've ever built, every person I've ever hired, and you could I
mean, even down to a volunteer intern.
Yeah. I would ask them.
What do you want to contribute to
this organization? Not what your goals are because that's a
different question. That's a different question. What do you want to contribute to
this organization? What do you want to contribute to the team? And then I would
ask them the follow-up question. How can I best help you
make that happen? And so many people who used to
work with me on teams that I built and now have gone off to do
other things with other teams, they've come back to me and they've
said You're not asked that question. Yeah. Yeah,
exactly. They said, you know, no one asked that question. You, I, I, I, I
would tell them sometimes even in the interview process, but a lot
when I was working with them, I'm on purpose spoiling
you for other roles. I'm doing it on purpose. I guess I'm
making you better, obviously. Yeah. Even just a little tiny bit, even
if it's just 1% better. But I want you to remember this experience
when you go out and you have other experiences with other folks. Because guess what?
I know enough to know it's not gonna be like that everywhere else. It's
so true. That's so good. But you as a leader, it's
on you to make them leaders. Right. And you're doing that with that
question because if you're not asking that question, they're not gonna think about it in
the shower or while they're driving down the street or doing their exercises.
No. But but when you plant that seed, they start thinking about
it, and then they start figuring out who they really are, and that
is powerful. So that
is the one that I would say cover and move. Figure out how people
can cover so that you can move. That's the business
application, to what they're saying. Keep it simple,
stupid. The kiss theory is is talked about,
and and that's the next part. Right? And I like what your mom said. You're
the number one spot. There's only one place for one one thing
there. Yeah. I heard it said another way
recently on another show. It says, keep first
things first and everything else never.
Because whenever you focus on one thing and that's gone, the
next first thing comes up. So I'm gonna relate a story here
very briefly. Recently in my family,
there's been some health issues with a relative of mine. I'm
gonna hash some information here. That way, identifying information
isn't isn't out there in the public. There's been a health issue with a family
member of my immediate family member, and it's been causing stress to
my wife. Right? And This is a
anybody who's ever had anything happen with their health and a family member
knows that that's one of the most trying, stressful,
sharp, you know, kind of things that can happen to you. Yeah.
Everyone's got a lot of problems until they have health problems and they got one.
Yeah. Exactly. Then they got one. But even in that, even in how my
wife approached me on this to how to solve this problem, she was
extremely stressed, crying, distraught,
had was gathering a bunch of information to try to fix the problem herself, which
is, you know, she's taking ownership. And
the first thing I did was listen.
And that's a key aspect. I think that that when Jocko
talks about, this this this
idea of prioritizing and executing Yeah. When Jocko and Leaf talk about this,
I think the first role of the leader is to listen, not to solve the
problem, to listen for what the number one problem should be
that needs to be solved. What is the first thing that goes in that slot?
Because that's the hardest thing to determine. The hardest thing to determine isn't the 1,
2, 3, 4, 5. Like, the ordering is easy after you determine what's
number 1, and then all the other dominoes begin to fall. Yeah.
Yeah. Or am I incorrect in that? No. That's absolutely true.
Brian Tracy is the the one person that talks about goals.
Now I have a different aspect on what goals are. Right? Mhmm. I don't call
I don't believe in goals. I don't believe in New Year's resolutions. I believe in
targets. So I'll I'll take you, through Brian Tracy's
mindset. What he would have everyone do is get out a piece of
paper, and I do this too. And write down everything you want, even if it's
ice cream. Put it all on paper. And then
look at your list and see what would change your life
if it could be magically given to you right now.
Whatever that is, whatever would change your life the most if it could be given
to you. Like, you know, you you have a genie and he's gonna give you
one wish. Boom. Which one is it? That's your number one, and
that's how he does goals. Mhmm. And the way I do it
is similar. I said put it all down. Now it's real.
Now your subconscious starts to work on it because you've made it something
that belongs in the world. And now internally, you're going to
see your wheels spinning because of that Harvard study, right, in the eighties where they're
like, how many people have goals? How many people wrote them down? Well, the people
who had goals were making 10 times more, and the people who had them written
down were making, you know, 50 to a 100 times more because they wrote them
down became real. So I take that and I make that to target. And
whatever your target is, whatever your one target is, you can only shoot at 1
target at a time. Mhmm. Whatever your target is, whenever
you hit the target, you can do this. Do I need to hit it again
or to make it more refined, or should I move on to the next target?
And so Brian Tracy talks about that. Write it all down, and
then whatever can be magically given to you, that's your number one target.
Yeah, I believe that, but whenever you write it down, you had that feeling like
I need to knock that out. Just writing it down, getting it on
paper is one thing, but then you push that into a target, and then all
these other things become secondary, third targets. Not high value,
these are low value targets. Your high value target is the one that will change
your life. And if if you have health problems,
it's it's it's always health. Everyone has a lot of problems until they have
health problems, and then it goes right to first. Because without health,
you're not living life to your fullest and you know it. And it's such a
it's a hard thing to get through. And people who do, like I had a
battle with skin cancer. And whenever I got through skin cancer, I
started becoming more productive. I was way more I wrote my
books, I got got on stages, you know what I mean? But I don't tell
people, this is probably the first time I've ever told anybody that I had skin
cancer. It's just something I had something that I was working on. People like, you
okay? I'm like, I'm fine. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Well, and and, you know, it's
Jocko kind of touches on this in when he when
he's talking about this idea of
prioritizing and executing, he kind of touches
around the edges of it, but he doesn't go directly to it because I think
he assumes the reader will just get it. Yeah. And, and,
and maybe he's fleshed it out a little bit in subsequent podcast episodes. I'm sure
he has because you can see it everywhere. But in prioritization and
execution, the thing that flummoxes
or stops people from prioritizing and executing is
confusion about what the target is, which is to your point about Brian Tracy,
Right? It's also confusion about and Jordan Peterson talks a little bit about this
too. It's confusion about the hierarchy of
values. What's at the bottom of the hierarchy
and what's at the top? And many, many people this is why one of the
things we talked about in this podcast last year when we covered the Gulag
Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
and Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. 2 heavy books. Right.
But what you find in both of those books is
the solution at the beginnings of the solution to the crisis
of meaning we currently have in the West and the crisis of
meaning we currently have is is because I think is
fundamentally due to people's misordered hierarchies.
Mhmm. So we have a hierarchy, and we don't ever want to
publicly admit this, but we privately I totally see that. Yeah. We
privately walk it out or not private. Sorry. We publicly
walk out what we don't privately admit to ourselves. Right? And what we don't
admit is we've got a lot of stuff that's number 1 in the hierarchy for
us personally, but we're either too ashamed or we
don't understand or we're not that we're not that self aware to your
point earlier, about what's in that
number one slot. And we don't we don't turn and face it. To your
point, we're not decisively engaged with what that number one thing is. Nope. We don't
have our North Star. And because we don't have that, everything else is then
misordered. And then we wonder why our families are off the rails or our communities
are off the rails or our country is off the rails. Well, it's because things
are fundamentally misordered. Now Yeah. If you don't know what's in
the number one slot, then prioritization and execution can't happen
because you're constantly in a space of chaos. Yeah.
And and you can organize chaos, but it takes time to figure that
out. And that's why he talks about the fog of war. Right? Correct. That's right.
The the fog of war. Now my master's degree is in war theory
and national defense strategy. So whenever it comes to
war and and that conflict that you just described, that
that exists in that environment. Like, you're supposed to be able to thrive in
chaos. But realistically, it's prioritizing
in chaos. And then you execute whatever
that priority is. That's the only thing you can do. So you're right.
When people are all confused, and they start to set these, all these crazy
things, they get overwhelmed and stressed out and they become bigger
people because they're stress eating or they stop working out or, you
know, name it, don't sleep. I mean, they they become bigger people,
but not in the way they wanna be. Right. Because
because of chaos. Because of chaos. And it's understandable. It's It's understandable. But,
yeah, back to this, you're right. It's a core core process,
like, prioritize and execute. Huge deal. Huge
deal. The way I talk about it in my book, rule of 3, is people
cannot do more than 3 things. If you give somebody more than 3
things, that's too much. If you're trying to sell somebody something and
you say I can do 4 things for you, well that's great, that's a good
deal because it's more than 3. And rule 3 is something that we're brought up
into. No matter where you are in the world, you got read,
bedtime story, you got told a bedtime story, and the most popular one is the
Goldilocks theory, right? 3 times decisions,
3 3 decisions to make, and then 3 bears showed up.
There's there's 3. You know? And then, you know, I played baseball.
Three strikes, you're out. There's 3 teams on football. You know, it just grows
and metastasizes in politicians. They say, I'm gonna lower taxes.
I'm gonna get you more jobs, and we're gonna make sure this this this
area is secure. Whatever the three things are makes
it completely, ingrained into your brain as a
complete cycle. So as a leader, if you give somebody more than 3
things, they aren't doing any of it. And
so we're gonna talk about this as we go into the book, but
you're right. If you take the chaos and you make it just 3 things,
that's manageable. If you make it one thing, it's gonna get done.
That's just how it works. The book, The One Thing
talks about it. Yeah. And he he says, you know, we spend most
of our day I'm gonna use my fake stacks of money here. Yeah. So, you
know, I got my my my Hollywood money. Right? So those are all For those
of you listening on the podcast or the audio version, he's got he's got a
a stack of fake money here. Yeah. Money. 50.50,000
represented in 100 dollar bills. It's it's, it's Hollywood money for
sure. But like this represents how much in seconds
you get every day. And most people see this 5
stacks and they go well I got lots of time, and then they get down
to the end and they're like well I got much time. So everything happens in
the last minute. You wait till the last minute, it only takes a
minute. Except for whatever gets produced is not usually that good. So what
happens whenever you start taking the stack is in the book he says
you spend, 33% of your time switching between
tasks. So I'm taking 2 stacks off this, which means I got $30,000 right,
worth of worth of money that I'm gonna spend, worth the seconds that I'm gonna
spend. Well let's make this bigger.
Let's talk about it in a month, and let's pair it down to 25%.
That means if it's a 4 week month, one of those weeks is
switching between tasks. Wait wait wait, let me go a little bit bigger.
That means in every year, 4 months of your year is switching between
tasks. Now let me let me make this a little bit bigger. 4
years. It's we go 25.
That's 2 and a half years, but really 2 and a half to 4
years because of technology, because technology helps you
switch between tasks. Yeah, right. It gets you engaged in something
else. Yeah. So so now you're spending 6 years
of things that you can actually do instead of 10. And how you
do the prioritize and execute is you focus on the one thing,
that one target is what I like to say. You pick that one target, you
hit that, you move on to the next. And people ask you the question they
always ask us, how are you doing so much? How do you get all this
done in one day? It's easy. It's just not, it's
not simple for you to execute. It takes a lot of habit
changing for you to be like me. And a lot of people don't like
that, because they wanna live in the chaos, and they call that
comfort. And that comfort chaos will
creep up and kill you. And by the end of your life, you're going to
be asking, well, what happened? Well, I thought I had more time.
And the reality is you just didn't prioritize correctly.
Because you lead your life. No one else does that for
you. So it's on you again to figure out what that looks
like, Or you could spend all the all the stacks that you
have in your life, switching between tasks and not doing
anything. That's the chaos that we talk about. That's the fog of war.
That's the decision cycle. That is the problem.
That's it in the crux. I'm a 100% with you. That is
the core of the what he calls, was it the the laws
of combat, cover and move simple, Keep it simple. Prioritize and
execute. Decentralized command. That's all. That's all
on you. Decentralized command, it's the easiest thing to do whenever you
find somebody who's an expert at whatever it is you're trying to do, and you
say how much time and money do you need? Mysteriously
it doesn't cost as much as if you tried to do it all yourself.
And that's just a life hack right there that I have tried to tell people
all the time. You can get a lot more done if you find the right
person to do it. And, usually, it's not you.
No. That's a that's no. Those are excellent points.
I wanna bring in, and I have to do this at least once per podcast.
It's ironic that I'm doing it with Jocko because Jocko's book, Jocko and
Leaf's book because as I was singing to you before offline,
he and I weirdly share other than the military piece, which we don't. We share
a lot of weird parallels, but he plays guitar. I play guitar.
Play guitar. Yeah. You know,
he owns a leadership consultancy. I don't lead a leadership because, obviously, he's written books.
I've written books. It's weird. And now this is the other
parallel. I started doing now, obviously, he's been doing jujitsu way the heck longer than
I have, but I started doing jujitsu a couple of years Yeah. Ago.
And, you know, starting jujitsu in your forties is different than starting your jujitsu
when you're a hard charging 20 year old special forces guy.
Radically different. Right? And I came through combat
Taekwondo. I've hit people in the face. I've gotten hit in the
face, and I I know how the deal goes. Right? And I always resisted
jujitsu because, number 1, I my
principle was I'm never going to give you the opportunity to throw me to the
ground. That's number 1. And then number 2,
I'm going to run away from you. So after that, what do you have? Like,
if I just run away from you, I'd I'm fairly sure I could outrun you
a long enough time. Fairly sure I can. I'm pretty fast. My knees
used to held up you have held up pretty well. I don't know, man. I'm
a truck fu kinda guy. You know? If I can run you over, actually You
just I'm a do that. Well, you won't fight? I'll be right back. That's
right. We say now.
And so but but then what And so
but but then what happened and the weird thing in my life is what happened
is I started playing rugby, and I played rugby for many, many years. K. And
rugby got me into the idea of or got me comfortable with the idea
of being under a dog pile and getting tackled and all this. Because I didn't
do any of that kind of stuff when I was in when I was in
high school. I just I it wasn't that wasn't where my interests were. Okay. Fast
forward a few years, I'm looking around for something to do. I'm a little bit
bored. I'm like, okay. Fine. Jackal's been banging on me for 10 years about this
jujitsu thing. Fine. I'll go do jujitsu. I remember the
first time I rolled with my with my instructor who's a
former battalion commander from Afghanistan, and I've
actually had him on the podcast as well. And, he,
I I sat down, and and I I'm
I'm I'm never a person who thinks I'm a I'm a pardon my usage. I
I don't think I'm a badass. Like, I I think I'm a person who's if
you Capable. With me, there's going to be something that's gonna happen that you won't
like. Yeah. But I'm not going out and seeking it because why would I? I
don't know. I have other things I need to do in my life. Plus, I'm
an adult, and lawsuits suck, and going to jail sucks.
I don't have time for any of that. I got I have different priorities. I
prioritize There it is. Exactly. I prioritize different things.
And I'm not 20 anymore, so I'm not going out drinking in nonsense
anyway. Point is I sat down that very first time after the
first, like, 5 minute, like, oh, we're gonna go. And number 1, I realized how
much I don't know about fighting on the ground. That was number 1. Then number
2, the second thought right behind that was, well, I guess I'm
gonna this is gonna be another one of those that takes 10 years to be
an overnight success kind of thing. At least 5.
Well, in my case, in the 4 in your forties, it's 10. It goes up
for every decade. It doubles every decade. You know? I I keep telling people now
I'm on the I'm on the 15 year plan. I might be a black belt
at 15 years. I'm not gonna worry about it. Let's see if
the body holds up first. But the point that he makes about
things being simple but not easy Yeah. I see that all
of the time in Jersey. You know, and I'm a, I'm a measly,
I am, I'm a measly white belt. I'm not even a frigging blue belt anymore.
I probably shouldn't be talking about this. I'm a measly white belt. Right?
But even a measly white belt like myself who
comes from a background of training and development in teaching and academics, understands how
hard it is to make complicated concepts simple, understands
that, number 1, it's great to have a plan. And number 2, it's great to
have a simple plan, but it's not easy to execute that simple plan.
True. And jujitsu is a good example of, yeah, you're gonna have a
simple plan, but that other person's gonna get a vote.
Yeah. And there goes your simple plan. Yeah. The enemy gets a
vote. That's what we always say. He puts it in his book, I think, too.
But, yeah, the enemy gets a vote. You're always gonna have that
hard side, and that's what makes it interesting. Yeah. That's where
I'm at with that. But yeah. You got a lot
of parallels with Jocko. A weird weirdly, a weird number, and I
haven't only I've thought about that only recently.
And it's one of those things that I sort of think about, and then I
shut that door real quick. And then, like, I I gotta close that door. I
can't get you focused on that. You opened it. So let me ask you this.
Do you think see, all those things that you that you described are things that
I do as well. Mhmm. I I know I've I've done
mixed martial arts. I've done, I was combatives instructor in, a
marine, line combatives, which is all jujitsu.
Yep. I I play guitar quite
frequently. I have a guitar problem, I think. I don't know. It's not hoarding if
you're just, like, collecting guitars. Right? That's not hoarding. Right? No. That's not hoarding. No.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you for yeah. You're welcome. But, like, leadership
consulting, yeah, I do that a lot. And, I've written books and, like, the
podcasting world is something that's extremely interesting to me. I don't have a
podcast yet. I always like to say that. But,
yeah, there's a lot of parallels. Let me ask you this. Do you think it's
because we're just built
different? So I believe
in uniqueness
for, like, the country of the United States of America. I believe
that we have a unique proposition because of our our particular founding documents and our
creed and the path that we've gone through. Now, what has happened in the last
40 years, that's a different story. But I I do believe in the uniqueness of
the United States as a national state
polpoly, right, in the history of the world. I think they will be writing
if we collapse, they will be writing books about us and papers
for centuries. Forget the Roman Empire. Just for centuries. Right? Yep. How did this
actually work? Yeah. But do I believe in the
uniqueness of human beings?
I believe that we are all made unique in the image of God for sure
because I'm a I'm a I'm a strong Christian in that in that space. By
the way, you talked about the rule of 3. Interestingly enough, just a side note
on that, you've got the trinity, the father, the son, and the holy spirit. My
whole book is biblical. I just don't tell people, because people
immediately shut it down. Like, the rule 3, like, your top three people.
Jesus had top he he had 9 followers and then top 3
people. He had Top 3. Top 3. So, like, the rule 3
and people who influence you, all of that stuff comes out of the bible. I
got so many parallels to what works in leadership and what
what works with Christianity. Mhmm. But I I just don't talk about it
because people immediately dismiss it. They're like, well, why is
this, you know, it's a biblical book. It it is, but it's just stuff that
works. Well, it's about this the the Bible itself is
about the structure of reality. Yes. That's what it's
about. Now you can you can object to that structure. You can have
friction. Iron can sharpen iron against that structure. Yeah. You can even,
as we have attempted to do for the last 150 years in the west, you
could attempt to dislodge that that foundation stone from the Mhmm.
From the underpinnings of western culture and see if it'll still stand up. You can
try all of that. All of that. But the book I said this in the
context of a different
a different book we were talking about in a previous episode, but the book
defies the algorithm. It does. The book the book goes
against that. So I believe to to to kinda answer your question about
the uniqueness piece, do I think that we're unique? I think that we are unique
as individuals in the sight of an almighty god. Absolutely. For sure.
100 percent. And of course, we should work on our salvation with fear
and trembling as a man named Paul once said. But I also
believe that
in the world in which we live with the types of opportunities that have been
offered up to us, the parallels between people,
are more than accidental. I I believe they're fundamentally on purpose
because I believe that too. The universe the universe. I believe
that god operates both,
both, what do you call it, with free will
and on purpose. So the both those things work together. And don't come at me
about predeterminers. All the Calvinists can hold
your hold your hold your chest, Calvinist. It's okay. All of you out there who
are listening to me, I'm it's okay. Just hold on.
But I do believe in free will, and I do believe in predestination, and I
do believe all these things are operating together, but I also believe it's a great
mystery, again, to go go back to Paul. And we can't really pull it apart
because it's like gossamer. So, I
believe that people do share certain paths, but where people
diverge and what the what the ping pong balls are Yeah. Or
the or the billiard balls, actually, how we click off of each other,
I believe that that's out of obviously, that's
out of our control. But I think it's a I think it's a great thing
to think about. Yeah. Okay. We'll get back
into the book. I'm I'm sure we're getting ready to go back in the book.
But before let me pull this thread one more. Yeah. Go ahead. One more. So
between what what you're seeing is these people who are making changes
in the world have the same influential, background.
You're working on yourself and your physical strength by doing jujitsu. You're
working on your ability to express yourself by playing the guitar.
There's a creative side that happens there. You're putting something out into the world
that's gonna help people for free, it's a podcast. And then you're helping
people because you can't give away things that you don't have.
You have to have something that gives you money. Mhmm. You're getting money so that
you can give it away. And, like, all of the things that you just
described are the same things that Jocko has in his
life, because you guys are basically doing the same
good mission that I think we're all called to do,
and like you become these people. Like you're in your forties, I'm in my
forties, but like when you when you become these people you start looking
at who you want to associate with, who you
wanna be like, who you wanna be. And
whenever you start focusing on you, well, then the world
changes, doesn't it? Because you realize it's not about you. It's
about everyone else. It's it's it it ties into what she said, you know, in
the beginning of our conversation today. You know, the
the the the
the self awareness that's required
to prioritize and execute effectively Yeah. Which is, of course, the
same self awareness that's required to check the ego, engage
in extreme ownership, understand that it's not the team's fault. It's
your fault. That's right. I mean and and by the way, to be able to
to be able to invite you know, do I always
accept feedback? Well, no. There there are people in my family who will tell you,
Hasan is horrible accepting feedback. Honestly, it depends upon which
mood you're approaching me and what the kind of feedback is. There's a couple of
different things, you know, going on underneath there. But what I tell
my clients is feedback is
the gift that's given to you in order to get you to
grow more in self awareness. And most of us
don't treat even myself, I'm guilty of this sometimes, don't
treat feedback as a gift. We treat it as a threat. Yep. And
fundamentally, our biology is wired that way,
and we are responsible, I think, at an individual level. You talked about, are we
unique? I think at an individual level, we are responsible for overcoming our own
biology. Mhmm. And by overcoming, I don't mean altering our
biology, you know, through surgical means or medical means. That's not what I'm talking
about. Yeah. I mean, overcoming our base desires, our base
appetites rising above. Again, because those things are going to exist. Maslow's hierarchy of
needs exist because Maslow understood that there was a hierarchy of
needs. Correct. But that hierarchy of needs is just at
the bottom level of where the rest of the things in the hierarchy should
be. It's true. It's yes. It's
absolutely true. The discovery of something that you know exists and then
furthering your decision to get into it, it opens
up so many parallels that
that then expand someone else's ability to
to make an impact. So. Wow. That's deep. I'm sorry.
I'll leave it alone. Let's go back to No. No. No. You're good. No. You're
good. Well and and, you know, and, you know, and the other thing is and
I'm writing a whole chapter about this in my 4th book. It's hopefully going to
be upcoming here in about a year.
Because I think what we've done with the internet,
Let me bounce this idea off. And you could think about this while talking about
about Jocko and about, and about, part 3,
which is how do we sustain victory?
What we've done with the Internet is we've caused a revolution
to begin. So So the commercial Internet got turned on by Timothy Berners Lee
in 1989. And once the commercial Internet got
turned on, it started with email and AOL,
and a little server called a little server, sorry, a little browser called
Netscape that was built by, by a couple of by a couple of
kids in by a couple of kids in, in Illinois who eventually
became, you know, Mark Andreessen and a couple of other folks out there in Silicon
Valley who are now worth 1,000,000,000 of dollars and are techno optimists. Okay.
It's been a long strange trip. I was there at the beginning of it. It's
been really interesting. You were there at the beginning of it. A lot of us
were there at the beginning of it. But a lot more of us, we now
have 2 or 3 generations now, getting ready to be 4 generations that have just
been born into it with it just being there. Yep. The
revolution that we started, we
will not fully be able to take take, I
believe measure of for probably another
500 years. Because what happened with the turning on of the
of the Internet was as revolutionary an act of
human engagement as was the printing
press. Mhmm. And when the printing press finally got
promulgated, wars happened, revolutions happened, but
also reformations and renaissance has happened.
All of Luther's reformation, all the protestant revolution and the protestant
reformation, none of that would have happened without the printing press, without mass distribution.
Okay. The same thing is happening right now with the internet and the
internet is an engagement machine. And so now you and
I who share similar life paths, but before the internet may never have
sent a letter to each other. Now we can connect here, like,
and not even leave our house, not even leave our house. I I can even
reach out to I was joking with one of my former employees because he was
a big Joe Rogan, and he's a big Joe Rogan fan. He's like, oh, you
can't get Joe Rogan. I literally dead I dead eyed him, and I go, he's
a young kid. He was only like maybe 19 or 20 at the time. I
said, anybody can be gotten with the internet anywhere. I can go get
Joe Rogan. It's just a matter of time. It's gonna be, you have to wear
them down. Right. Or what is that? Or I just have
to do enough good work. We all have to do enough good work to create
those engagements and create those connections through our content. Yeah. And
now the Internet is this big sampling and connection and narrowcasting
machine that's creating revolutions that, to quote from
Malcolm x, take land. They take property.
That's what a revolution does, and he was exactly right.
Yeah. He was exactly right. And, no, with
Joe Rogan, you're absolutely right. The thing, I sent to
his his, his booking agent last was, I'll earn it.
He's like Yeah. He's like, Joe hasn't said anything yet. I said, that's cool.
I'll learn it. But every day, I'm providing more
and more value of what I could bring to his show. Right. So
I'm showing him all the things that I could bring to his show because you're
right. Absolutely. You can. You anyone
can talk to anyone now, and that is not something that
existed when we were growing up in the eighties nineties. That is
not something that was something is far farfetched. It's
a massive, massive upending. And we don't
really appreciate how much No. We don't. Things have been upended, but but we are
going to. We are, we're going to,
well, yeah, it goes right into where we're going in the book. It
does back to the book. Speaking of which, back to the book, back to
extreme ownership, how US Navy seals lead and win,
by Jocko Willock at Leaf Babin. As Ari has been pointed out, the
version that I have and the version that one of the versions that Atlas has,
has the New York Times number one bestseller, a ribbon
across the front with a new forward and q and a section. By the way,
the q and a section comes directly from questions asked to
Jocko or or or or emailed into his show,
are you built into him from listeners of his show? Sorry. That's how I want
to frame that. By the way, I've also read, a number of
other of Jocko's books, including leadership
strategy and tactics, the dichotomy of leadership,
the leadership field manual, the big thick one,
and a couple of other ones that he's put out there. So as you could
tell, I'm I'm a huge, I'm a huge proponent of what Jocko's,
putting out here today, and Leaf as well.
Alright. Part 3, sustaining victory. So
it begins with chapter 9. I'm talking
about a hostage rescue occurring in Ramadi.
Right? The the rescue of a young Iraqi teenager,
who had been kidnapped by an Al Qaeda linked terrorist group
who demanded that his family pay $50,000 in ransom for his
release. By the way, a task unit bruiser,
the task unit that, that Jocko and Leaf led,
which also included, Mark Lee and Chris Kyle, key of
American sniper fame. Yep. Were the
ones who were engaging quite a bit in Ramadi. And all of
these experiences that he talks about, the Leaf and Jocko talk about in book,
come out of those experiences, including this hostage rescue, which
apparently, we did on the regular.
Now the point of this first piece around planning,
and I love, by the way, just as a side note, I love in the
chapter planning where he talks about how Mark Lee,
quoted quoted the line from Michael BN in the
19 90 movie. We don't exist. We and I
quote from Michael BN, we're a SEAL team. We're here to get you out.
There's no reason to thank us because we don't exist. You never saw
us. This never happened. What are you dead eyes,
the kid? I can't tell you, like, these guys
okay. So combat brings out a a point of humor
that no one really understands unless they're there. Like, comedians
do a great job of pointing out what everyone thinks but doesn't say.
Right. And war does the same thing. So you find
yourself laughing at the the points where you
probably shouldn't be laughing, and and I can just see this happening. I I mean,
I wasn't there, obviously, but Right. Like, I can just see this happening, and I
could totally tell you what happened. I I mean, I could see it. I mean,
this is what on the regular, these guys are hilarious like that. So Well and
I think you have to be because humor is that thing that just releases
all the pressure and the tension of the stress because you can't be you can't
be down in the mouth all of the time. I mean Yeah. You just have
bullets flying past your head. Come on. It's fine. It's a start of the
day in paradise. It's fine. Well and it never stops either, man. Because I was
on a podcast with the Green Beret and a seal, called
harder, not smarter. They just started a podcast recently. And these guys
are still the same funny, and and they're they're still jabbing me.
And there's it's their humor is on point, and it's
for everyone. So Yeah. Reading that in there too, I mean, I chuckled, but I
was like, yeah, that that's exactly what was said. Well, the point of the
chapter on planning is for any team and for any team, whether it's
in business, whether it's in the military, whether it's in industry, whether it's even in
your home. Right? A plan is a standardized planning
process is essential. And and quite frankly, I agree.
The point that's made here is that
to the point about goals, right, that Atlas was making earlier,
goals are fine for writing those down, but then you have to go in the
weeds and you have to figure out what the actual plan is. This is where
many entrepreneurs and small business owners fail on the planning
piece. They don't fail to do the day to day. They fail to document
and standardize the plan. And so this chapter was very much about
the documentation and the standardization of planning in addition
to a unique process of debriefing, which I was talking about
years before I read this book, because I found out that the special forces did
it, and I thought that's brilliant. This idea of debriefing
after an intense engagement and figuring out the answers
to, one of 3 actually figured out
the answers to all three questions, what went right, what went wrong, and how can
we make this better for the future, whether we are succeeding
or failing When you fail to plan,
well, guess what? You're going to get failure.
Leading up and down the chain of command is chapter 10, the chapter written by
Leif Babin, which makes an important point
that many people forget, particularly junior leaders.
Junior leaders have a responsibility to lead up the chain, but junior
leaders also have a responsibility to lead down the chain. And I would talk about
this a lot with managers and supervisors that I train
through my consultancy Leadership Toolbox. And, of course, I've
written about this in, again, my book, 12 Rules for Leaders. Leading up
and down the chain of command means, yes, understanding,
as Leif puts it, commander's intent. But it's also
paramount that senior leaders and junior leaders
understand the big picture and understand where they sit in the big
picture in order to effectively lead up and down the chain
of command. I'm currently going through we're not going
through. I mean, I'm engaged in a project, with
another individual, and he is senior to me in
that project. Right. And he has a lot of experience. He
has a lot of knowledge. I can't take that away from him. And I realize
in reading this chapter, and this is just a thing that happened right now, right?
When I was recently rereading this book for the podcast, I need to be leading
him better because I'm junior to him. Right? But I also need to
understand what the overall mission is for the project that we are
engaged in. Chapter 11 is about decisiveness
and amid uncertainty. How do you take the shot?
Now in my time, I've known a few marine snipers. Matter of fact,
I've known a couple of guys who were, literally graduated high school and then
right went right to Afghanistan in October of 2,001.
I've known snipers in my time. Matter of fact, I I can name offhand 3
people for sure who I know of I'm absolutely sure have killed people,
for sure. And there is nothing more
stressful than being a sniper. I
cannot imagine a more stressful or stress inducing role
in the military because if you're wrong, it's a
real problem either
way. And that's the end of the sentence. And
so this chapter begins with,
relating leaf bab and relating a story about Chris Kyle,
looking down, a scope and seeing an individual with a scope
weapon in another building and asking,
do I take the shot or not? What is happening here?
How do you have decisiveness amid uncertainty when outcomes are
unclear, when directions are unclear, and even
when the process is unclear, and when success is
not clearly defined? What does it mean to not be
paralyzed by fear and how do you act? And
Atlas already brought this up. How do you act decisively? One
of the other points that Leaf makes in this chapter is about this idea,
and Jocko talks about a little bit on his podcast as well, this idea of
being default aggressive, which many people in the
civilian world don't understand what that means. But I
frame it this way for managers and leaders being default aggressive
means always moving forward and taking territory, to
paraphrase from George c Scott as Patton back in that great
19 seventies movie Patton. We don't retreat. We
let the hun do that. We're gonna grab him by the nose, and we're gonna
kick him in the ass. And
that's what managers have to do. That's what leaders have to
do in many organizations and cultures. And very often in your
family, that's what you have to do. But there is a measure to this,
and that then goes into the last chapter, chapter 12,
the discipline transformation, discipline equals freedom, and the
dichotomy of leadership. Do we wanna be default
aggressive all of the time? Do we want to,
be taking ownership everywhere all of the time?
Do we want to be telling other people to cover and move and making everything
simple all of the time?
Or are there no absolutes? Is there some
times when maybe it's okay to just step
back a little bit and breathe? Is it okay when
sometimes when there's chaos and mayhem, particularly maybe around a
health problem or a wealth problem, to actually listen to the
problem before we make a solution? How do leaders
propose a solution? How do leaders navigate those dichotomies?
That's the point of the dichotomy of leadership. And of course, he expands on this
in his book, the dichotomy of leadership, which I would
also recommend that you pick up. Reading through these
last chapters 9 through 12 in sustaining victory,
I was I recalled my experiences at the University of Minnesota. Normally, I don't talk
about the University of Minnesota on this podcast, and I don't talk about the people
who led me there, not Not because those experiences were bad, but because I don't
wanna put the University of Minnesota on blast. And so,
but it's enough time has passed since I was since I've been there. It's been
almost 15 years, so I think perhaps I can talk about this
now. I failed to lead
up when I was at the University of Minnesota in an administrative position. I
was a young leader with a young team,
Didn't really know what I was doing. But also the senior leadership who
was above me, kind of left me there to fend for
myself. Matter of fact, I'm thinking of a particular person who I will not
name, who when I asked,
what's my plan here? What's my future? The
person responded to me by saying, well, you just have to figure that out yourself.
I can't tell that for I can't tell you that. I
can't provide you with that sort of direction. And then he sort of
laughed and kept eating his salad at lunch.
That's poor leadership. That
guy was a poor leader or another
supervisor that I had who every time I spoke to him,
I felt like I was being politic.
And I inherently, because it happened to be as a young leader, I
inherently am sensitive to that now. And I could spot a fake,
like a dime on the highway at 80 miles an hour.
I also thought when I was reading this book,
reading this chapter on sustaining victory of my experiences playing rugby, which
I've already mentioned on this podcast and, the rugby team that I
was on were a lot of good guys, and they had a lot of
good, a lot of good hearts. But the coach
lacked decisiveness, And a lack of decisiveness leads to
not winning. Lack of decisiveness leads to collapse on the
rugby scrum. It leads to collapse in the rugby field. It
leads to me standing out there in
20 degree cold in the middle of
February or the middle of October or the middle of November,
staring into the pack as I'm watching big burly
men, not able to cover the ball
and yelling at each other about who failed what.
Not exactly engaged in cover and move, not prioritizing and
executing, not having decisiveness amid uncertainty
and not having ownership in leadership starting
from the top. No plan always
equals no future. My, my
old supervisor at the university of Minnesota
was exactly correct about that.
So Atlas is a lot there,
but we're rounding the corner. We're going to talk about solutions to problems.
Yeah. How can leaders navigate the dichotomies of
leadership on their teams? You know,
how do we deal with all this? How do we put all this in a
box together for folks today? Yeah. We can we can sum this up
really easily, but it's not gonna be simple.
Yeah. So realize that there are lots of dichotomies in
leadership. Everyone thinks that they know. But
management and leadership are 2 separate things, and
you have to let managers manage. And whenever you're asking
a manager like you did at the university, what's my plan,
you can't expect them to be a leader because they only know how to manage.
You nailed it. Not a good leader. Great manager probably. Not
a good leader. And the difference between management and leadership is
this. The management sections were
in a little ago when
oh, let's just we could pay people way more money to do
something simple. And if they repeat that task over and over again, we could take
somebody who's making 30¢ and give them $3 and create
what we now know as management. If they manage something that's
continuously done over and over again, it's easy for them to manage,
and they can make sure that it works. And if you put a lot of
managers on a line, you need a leader. A leader to say, we need
to do this many things in this many days,
or there needs to be a metric or a future
that's described. That all comes together in a
plan. So whenever you're looking at the dichotomies, you
have to realize there are managers who think they are leaders.
And telling them that they're managers is probably gonna be a stroke to their ego.
And that's okay sometimes, but a lot of times it's not. Giving them a
specific task to manage, and then say you're in
charge of leading that effort, is how it's done today.
And so people get confused on management leadership quite often, and they expect
managers to be leaders, and that shouldn't be in your plan.
That should be something that you go back to where where you started
this. Know your people. Know what they're capable of. Know what they're
going to produce and all that's there. And where does that get
found out? You nailed it with the debriefs.
So there's a rugby team. It's the most winningest team
of any sports ever. It's called the All Blacks. And
the All Blacks do something that a lot of teams don't do every
time they get done with their their their play on the ground.
They all get into the locker room and they say, you sucked at this. You
were great at that. Blah blah blah, but they're brutally freaking
honest. Honesty is something you can't buy, but you can
build it. And when you build honesty into a
team, you'll figure out who is there for what. And
if they're looking for self preservation, you'll be able to correct that
early whenever they start blaming everyone else for something
that happened. The people who are true leaders are the ones that take
accountability, which is Extreme Ownership in the book we're talking about.
When you find that built in quality, those are what we call born
leaders. But even born leaders have to learn how to
grow. So born leaders and people who
are learning how to be leaders symbiotically come
together whenever you have a hot wash or a debrief.
We call them both in the military. And that is
what just happened, let's see if we can do it better next time. And guess
what, if you think about it, if you talk about it, if you start figuring
out who people are, well then you become a winning
team like the All Blacks. There's nobody who's won
more than them, and it's because of their their
ability to lead up and down the chain of command. They talk to their coaches
the same way that they talk because it's an open forum. The
other thing that I love about that team is they all respect each
other. You know they have this environment where they can say
whatever they wanna say, and realize it's not personal,
it's business. But wait a minute, Atlas. You don't understand.
I get this a lot. This this pushback. I'm gonna push back on you.
Yeah. Go. Wait a minute. You don't understand.
I'm a mid level manager in a massive bureaucracy, and these people
were just given to me. Yes. I don't get to sit in on the
meetings where they're hired. I don't get to give my input. No
one asks me. They rip away my team or they rip away half or
a percentage or a quarter or whatever, and they give me these people that are
underdeveloped, underfunded. Then they tell me they want me to do these missions.
You don't understand. You were in the military. You could get whatever you
wanted, whenever you wanted it, however you wanted it. And I gotta work out
here where people that can't stay that don't say yes or no, sir, and they
come in here with their purple hair, and they come in here with their requirements,
and they wanna leave it at 4:30 in the afternoon on a Monday. And I
had to bust my behind to get here, and I've been in this role for
25 years, and I know what you don't get it. Yeah.
Don't you love hearing that? Oh, I love it. You you you tell I've heard
that you tell I've heard that quite a bit. Yeah. I I absolutely love that
problem because I know what the problem is. Yeah. It's it's them.
It's them. It's always them. Everybody who gives me
that has not figured it out That they can ask for the
things that they need. They can document the true successes.
That the people that are underdeveloped can get trained. The the
time that they don't have can be made. That all of the things that they
describe are things that they just haven't done yet,
and they aren't empowered to do it.
Or wait a minute, they don't feel like they're empowered. They don't feel like they're
empowered to do it. So the the biggest answer to
that whenever I hear it is, I empower you. I
empower you to fix it. I empower you to do it, or I empower
you to leave. And then guess what? Someone else is gonna come in
here and they're gonna be like, I have all these problems that I can fix,
not complain about. Because in the military, we
hear that often too. The army likes to say you have to go to war
with the troops you were given, not the troops that you want.
Don Rosfeld. Don Rosfeld infamously said that.
It's amazing if somebody at that level is saying you know what
I'm saying? So, like, I hear that all the time. I do. And
it's also because they have not figured out who's on their team. These
underdeveloped people probably just don't want to do the job that you
hired them to do, And you didn't ask them the questions
like you should have when they came in. What are they passionate about? What do
they want to contribute? How can I help you contribute what you
want to do? Because now they've accepted the ownership of something that
they've told you and you are now their coach to help
them get something better in life or the company or whatever the
mission set is. But yes, I love hearing
that because then I absolutely know what to look for. And then, I don't know,
well, you probably do this too, but whenever I go into a company and then
I I come back 6 months later, I usually come back 6 months later. Yeah.
The people who say that don't work there. Normally, they're not Yeah. Usually, they're gone.
Yeah. Usually, they're not. They're they're like, well, if I can't get what I
want, then I'm leaving. And then we're like, bye. Bye.
Yeah. Because somebody else will probably hire you and you can complain
about the same things wherever you go because you're gonna find the same problems if
you're looking for it. Shockingly enough, your problems will follow you wherever
you go because, well, everywhere you look, there you are. Yes.
There you are in the mirror. Which which then goes
back to uncertainty. You know, they're uncertain
on how to fix things, and then that's a higher leadership problem. So usually
what I'll end up doing is I'll say, hey, I heard this, I've all I
hear this all the time. But you know, I told them that they're empowered to
do this, you need to go in and tell them that they're empowered to do
this. That just those words, I empower you to do this,
will change the the directive if they want their direction, if they
want to change. The other thing you need to do is realize that you have
a communication problem. Because whenever you have that,
it's a real problem. And it's because you didn't communicate effectively.
So it's being muddled, it's being confused,
or it's being misread, but you need to clarify what they're able
to do and if they're leaders or managers. The lack of
communication I wanna jump in here on this. Huge. Right?
So in my own personal life, my wife and I, in our
marriage, we try to have as clear and as open even about
things we don't like as clear and open to communication between each other as we
possibly can because in the hierarchy of the
household, I'm the leader, she's the leader,
and then we got the kids and we got the troops. Right? And then you've
got a bunch of other things happening there. And, and honestly, you know,
I'm not at the top of that hierarchy. God's at the top of that hierarchy,
then there's me. Then, you know, So, like, you know, that that's how that
that's how that kind of that that kind of works. That's how that works. Right?
Absolutely. So clear communication up and down the chain has to
occur so there's no confusion. And the the the the the
place of conflicts in our marriage has been when
clear communication was not there. When
things either wanted to be said but were not
or things were inferred from statements that were
made that were not tracked to reality. And so
we also see this, and I'm not unusual. The only reason I bring this
up is because it's a touchpoint. Most
I believe fundamentally, many people struggle with
communication. And I believe fundamentally, leaders struggle with communication,
but not in terms of I'm going to word vomit on to other
folks. They've got that part. Yeah. It's the
expectations of what other
people or how other people will communicate with them
that creates decisiveness and uncertainty. Yeah. So
you mentioned the all blacks. There's an expectation in that culture Yeah.
That there's going to be open communication and that there's gonna be feedback in order
to facilitate communication regardless of the level of talent that you
have. We see this in in sports and in the military, you see it very,
very broadly because it's sharp there because the the the outcomes are black and
white. Where it gets muddy is when the outcomes are hidden.
Yep. Or they're not black and white or
the outcomes that are being clearly defined. So if you're in a small business,
the owner of the small business, even though
they may be brilliant and may be a founder and an owner, they
are the ceiling on that business. They just always Always always
on the business. Unless they hired somebody to manage the business, they're Right. They're not
able to it's not worth anything because you can't sell their business. Right. Exactly.
And so when we work in our consult
with small businesses, because I I we had to do this ourselves. First, you gotta
do is write down your processes and your and your procedures and your tasks. Right?
AI. You have to make a plan.
Right? Yeah. Exact yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You have to make a plan.
Then after you've written down your processes and your procedures and your task list and
your operations and you've written down your organizational chart and you put everything together in
a nice package, now you actually have a business. That's a business because that can
survive without you. That you can give to somebody else.
Is it harder to do that in a family? Yeah. But
not impossible. Is it really hard to do on the other end
of that in a civic organization? Maybe, but you should probably be doing that
once every 6 months anyway or once every year anyway. You should be checking
into seeing are the processes, the procedures, the plan that we have.
Are we still leading amid uncertainty? Because chaos is the only
guarantee stability you gotta work
for. Yeah. Well, I like this because we're gonna parallel
companies to families now. So most people's priorities
are health, wealth, and relationships. Those three things.
And in the book he talks about, leading up and down a chain. He starts
looking at the chain of command. When you're a solopreneur,
an intrepreneur, whenever you own everything and you're doing everything,
the line structure for that is one person does it all. And that's not really
a business, just like you said. But when you start to hire people out and
you start to do things at a a bigger level because you have to,
things start to get crazy. And you have to put, like he said in
the book, you can only manage up to 6 people. I only
think you can manage up to 3. Because
giving more than 3 people your your, your time looks like this. This is how
I used to do it while I was deployed, by the way. So I do
what most people do in one day. I do 3 days worth
of work in one day because I split it up into this. I go morning
day, afternoon day, and evening day. And
then my priorities are morning day is usually a
podcast, afternoon day is usually my books and
writing, right, my social media, whatever. I'm gonna post out on
that. And then my 3rd day is my family. So I have three priorities right
there, because wherever you spend your time
is where your heart is. Right? Ah, I mean I don't even have
to say anything about that. You get what I'm saying. Mhmm. So I'm putting my
priorities into my timeline like that, and then I'm looking at it each night. And
then I'm sitting on my next day. And then that's the priority.
Where most people get confused is, they're like, okay, I can't change my family. Right?
So if you can't change your family, if you can't change your work family, then
what?
What happens? You hire a professional.
And this is called consulting or coaching. And what do pro athletes
do? They get coached and consulted. What do pro athletes do? They find
strength coaches and dietitians. What do pro athletes do? They freaking
win, or they get off the team.
Now here's the parallel with the family. Sometimes you can't have a
winning family member all the time,
but they're gonna win some of the times. And if
you if you see them winning, if you recognize their wins, guess what
happens? They usually win more. And if
you find people to come in and help you with them
recognizing their wins, your family becomes
stronger. Your work family becomes
stronger the same way. The difference between your regular family and your work
family is if your work family isn't working out, you could find a new
family member. Alright? And then and
if you're you're not a family, then you're not really going to succeed for
long periods of time. And that all goes back into the book. How many
people can you really have in your life? I think it's 3. I'm against what
Jocko and Leif say. I think it's 3. Any more than
3, and I'm overwhelmed because I only have 3 parts
of my day, and I wanna touch it every day and say, hey. How are
you doing? You know? It's just how I am. The psychological research
on this is clear. I mean, Dunbar's number says anything past, I think it's
9 people. We just can't keep. Oh, no, it's not 9 people.
Sorry. Anything past 150, like, different people, but we
can't keep track. Yeah. We can't keep track of those relationships. Yeah.
And that's because fundamentally, I believe it's because we were
created to be in community with each other, and
became community with, with, with the godhead.
But if you don't wanna buy into any of that, that's fine. It's
fundamentally because our psychology is wired to reality in a
certain way. Let's go there. And reality
cannot be, it cannot be repealed. You
can negotiate with it. You can maybe try to shift it a little bit, but
you can't repeal it. You can't. You can't. Reality
always gets a vote. Well, I gotta tell you the story, though,
because chapter 11 really hit me hard. Yeah.
Referred to in a joint they're
known for a lot of the really elite
teams. So I was there, and I was
trying to figure out how these people operated. Because I've
never been around so many people with inflated egos in
my life. Because they've all been told for a long period of time they're the
best at what they do. Sure. So when I walked into the the
position, the person that was in the position before me was managing
everything. And, they expected me to be another manager. So they're like,
hey. We know that you're gonna come in here because you're a Lieutenant
Colonel, and you have to do your Lieutenant Colonel job here. And I was like
no, I'm here to lead, you know I'm gonna lead you. And they were
like okay, some of them. But 2 of them,
2 of them confronted me. And how the confrontation happened is
when I walked into the job, there was another person that was hired to do
something similar to the job that I was hired to do. To be the
chief technology officer for Joint Special
Operations Command. And I won't say his name, but he's a good guy,
great guy. He just didn't come from our environment. So he didn't
know much about the military, especially about special operations,
and he had a corporate mindset that he was trying to
instill in our special operations community, which has been around
for a very long time. The chain of command came from the
military. Why? It's 1,000 of years old, and it works.
So when he's coming in and trying to insert himself in our chain of
command, it didn't really work well. So we had some people that were splitting
off and going into his school of thought, and then some people that
were staying standard. And what I saw was 2 members,
specifically 2 members. And in the book, he talks
about, meeting with this chief executive who had this
technology problem, and the 2 scientists didn't get along with
each other. Now I got along well with the CTO and so did my
boss, the CIO. So everyone got along just
well. It just didn't work because we were trying to do the same thing,
and we weren't talking. There was no communication there. And he didn't want to talk
to me because he saw his level as being above
mine even though I did not talk, I did not answer to him, it did
not work for him. You know I didn't have any authority
chained to him at all. So he came in and we just weren't talking.
And in fact we would be in meetings and he would ask me my opinion,
he would stop me, and then he would keep talking. And I was like well
that's very disrespectful. So like I didn't make
up a point, but I had the same problem that he talked about in the
book. It's like what are the options? Well you can get rid of 1 of
them, or the other one, or you can do what the book says and get
rid of both of them. And so what I did was I
started looking at who's on my team and who's on their
team, and that's an us and them. Don't do that. That's dangerous.
But the reason why I did it was I was trying to help them work
for him or whatever they wanted to do. And
what I found was this really hard place. So I had 2
members. These 2 members wanted to work on his team, and
I fueled that the best I could. I created a building for
him. I said what do you need, I found resources, and I tried to
push that envelope over there to see what would happen. I didn't go against
them, but what I did was fuel them to do
something they were passionate about. And I had another one that
was really trying to join us, and I was like that's just not gonna
work. The military environment and the corporate environment are different,
and that's okay. But I can't adopt the corporate environment
in my military environment that works. We're elite for a reason. And
it's not because we have somebody else telling us how to be
more corporate. It's because we are at this level
already, this top level, and we know how to we know how to do what
we need to do at the most effective levels. He's just trying to bring in
technology, which is one of the things that I was hired to do. Mhmm.
So I took one member, pushed him off into that
team, and it didn't work. Didn't work at all.
So he came to me, he goes, hey, I'm trying. I'm I'm really trying to,
and he's not he's not listening to me. I'm like, well what else do you
wanna do? He goes, I wanna work at this other elite organization.
And 2 weeks later he was there. I let him, you know, I
promoted him into another job, and now he's been promoted a couple more
times. The other person that wanted to join us together, I was like,
that's just not gonna happen. And he's like, well, I'm gonna quit. And I
said, bye. And he got a job
working another executive place somewhere else, and he was
happy for a while. And then that guy got mad at me. He's like, he
shouldn't have worked there. And I'm like, I just helped him do what he was
supposed to do and that's what he's doing. Now he's back, he's in another executive
role back in the military, and he's doing that. But what I learned from
that is if you fuel people, if you find
out what they're passionate about, and you let them do it, it works out well.
What happened with this guy, he claimed my wins
from my team who was still producing, like amazing
things. One of the things that Jocko talks about is all these people on different
radio nets, and they all have their own different radio nets and they're all communicating
in their own little teams. And one of the things that I did was I
paired them all together, so that all these elite people could talk to each
other. I mean, what?
Who would've thought of that? You know? And so he claimed that, and he
claimed a lot of our other wins as his own. So that he would maintain,
I don't know, some kind of he claimed our
wins. Really made my team mad. Really made my
team mad. But the people who were on my team, they got
promoted. They all got higher ranks. They for
life. Not for because I found out who they really
were and what they're really passionate about and we started producing
major wins for an organization that is
at the tip of the spear. And
he claimed them all. So that was a real hard thing. He's no longer in
there. He's doing something else. He took a lot of the elite people that were
working for him on that team, and now they have a corporate
environment that they all work in. They're all still friends or whatever. I don't really
talk to him that much. It looks like they're doing good on social media, but
doesn't everyone post their best things on social media? Everyone posts their
highlight reels. Yeah. The highlights are the highlights are
great, but you know I just I didn't wanna marry that
together because it didn't work. Right. And recognizing that
is leadership, not management.
So the whole thing of being decisive in a
period of uncertainty, I was very decisive. I was
very meticulous, and we produced wins. And then I
let him claim the wins because he went out and mouthpiece them to everybody.
And people don't do that. That's the
biggest thing. Like, you wanna lose communication and be a problematic
organization? Start getting mad at people for not claiming
wins that, you know, that are for claiming your wins. Start getting
mad. That happens all the time. Yeah. And if you just let it
happen, your organization gets to a level that
you would have never expected it to be at, Because the people who are good
at talking usually aren't good at doing. Right.
Say it again, the people that are good at talking usually aren't
good at doing. Well, if you Let them talk. Well, the irony is that
yeah. The irony well, everybody needs marketing, right, apparently. Yeah.
You know, understanding
what people are good at, understanding their internal motivations,
understanding your own internal motivations.
The there's an idea in leadership theory, and I don't
expound too many leadership theories only because I think they
don't work fundamentally, because, again, leadership is is
almost an individuated act now. However,
with that being said, there is a leadership theory
that says that leaders and members it's called leader
member exchange theory. Leaders and members of teams exchange
content. Now I've always used that in a framing around emotional
intelligence, because, yes, we'll exchange status or we'll
exchange wins or we'll exchange blame or we'll exchange credit or
we'll exchange feedback or we'll we'll exchange all of this stuff. We'll
exchange hierarchy, money, whatever. But the
biggest thing that a leader and a member will exchange is emotional
and is emotions and emotional exchanges. Our
feelings are what we are going to exchange. Yes.
Feelings of anger, feelings of disappointment, feelings of happiness, feelings of sadness.
Those feelings are what we are going to exchange. And
until we all get replaced by the Terminator robots, which may be right around the
corner, until we all get replaced by them,
that's the one thing that only human
beings can do well. And we just talked about the
Internet being this machine of engagement. Right? This revolutionary
machine of engagement. The things that were
prioritized, the exchanges that were prioritized pre Internet
are still valuable,
but their value has shifted around and where they show up
has shifted around and how they show up in people's lives has
shifted around. 1 of the things we like to do on this podcast
is talk about solutions this year, and this leads us into this is a
segue into the solutions conversation. So you talked about the size of
the wins. You talked about knowing your people. You talked about a little bit about
blame and credit. I love how you said, you know, you could buy honesty, but
you can't, you can't buy honesty, but you could build it. I love that. Wrote
that down. That's brilliant.
Obviously, there's applications from the military to the civilian life, military to to
all these other different places, military's a bureaucracy, just like any other bureaucracy. They're gonna
pull something out of there. One of the things that I
look at with, with extreme ownership and, and I look at
it again as through my lens as a divorce and family mediator,
I would sit across the table for 2 people who used to love each other
and now don't. Yep. And I would watch a lot of a lack of
accountability, a lack of ownership going on at that table, whether
accidental or on purpose, whether influenced by other folks or not.
If you wanna build leaders for to to solve
tomorrow's problems, heck, if you wanna build
leaders to solve some of today's problems, let's focus on tomorrow's problems, the problems we
haven't quite gotten to yet. If you want to build leaders to solve those problems,
that act begins at
home. Mhmm. And I'll go
even deeper. I said this recently in a shorts episode that you should go back
and listen to episode number 120. Sort of my
sharpest shorts episode yet. But I said, you
know, paraphrasing from Jesus,
telling his disciples that the harvest is much, but the laborers are
few. Well, that's directed towards 12
disciples. Mhmm. Yes, sir. All of whom were
men. Yes, sir. And so to the men
listening to my podcast, whether you are,
middle aged men, older retired men, or
young men who have stumbled across this, this is for
you. Men have to take ownership of every single thing in their sphere
of influence. That means getting up off the couch. That
means not relying on playing video games for your entertainment
or pornography for your sexual release. It means
not looking at social media so much. It means making
a plan. It means prioritizing and executing. It means taking
ownership of making your bed and cleaning your room.
Let's start with that. You don't have to go out and get a job immediately,
but maybe taking ownership of the idea that it might be a good idea to
go get a job. You're already hardwired to do that. And the
ladies who are listening, and there are many women who listen to my podcast, who
do you wanna be with? Do you want to be with a man who actually
takes ownership of every single aspect of his life and his fear of influence as
much as he possibly can or do you want to be with? The
opposite Because if he's taking ownership of everything in his sphere of
influence, then that allows you to take ownership of everything in your sphere of
influence. And now those 2 can come together, and now
we can have a real dynamite family and a dynamite
team. And if we want to solve the problems of
the future, leadership starts at home. And then you
role model that for your children. And I'm saying this specifically because Atlas has
written books for children just like Jocko has,
and children are
the children are the the the the
fathers of the future men. Right? And they're the fathers of the future
daughters. Right? That are coming down the pike. Do you want to
build intergenerational wealth? There's a lot of talk about building intergenerational wealth.
Robert Kurosaki and many others talk about this idea.
Well, generational wealth is more than just money. Money
comes and money goes. Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations
used to be the idea in America. And by the way, it still is.
What lasts longer than money? Well, the legacy that you give that is
a spiritual legacy, the legacy of a 2 parent home,
the legacy of appropriate role modeling of ownership. We may not have had
much money, but we stayed married and we took ownership of everything in our
sphere of influence. And then the child can go off
and become the next thing because there's
a granite underneath there that cannot be broken.
Ownership always has its drawbacks,
but ownership also has its privileges.
And when Jocko and Leaf talk about ownership, they of course use
the adjective extreme next to it.
And, I usually pair this book with the
Oz Principle, which is another great book about accountability,
because that one gets into the weeds a little bit with how you scale accountability
across massive organizations and massive bureaucracies. And that's another book
where I read the first literally, the first ten pages of it, and it
was everything that I ever heard from any of clients
that I'd had in my leadership consultancy giving me feedback about
their problems with accountability, with other people not taking accountability. It was
literally everything I complained I'd ever read, and I thought who the heck had guts
to write this down and publish it. And so if you're gonna get extreme
ownership, go pick up the Oz principle. It's written on the conceit of The Wizard
of Oz. I recommend that book as well. 2 great books you can pair
together. I talk about the nuts and bolts of ownership and the nuts and
bolts of accountability and then go off and be accountable.
And the privileges of ownership, the privileges of accountability
are often not talked about.
Because at the moment that we are at right now in our culture, we talk
a lot about rights, but not responsibilities. We talk a lot
about wanting privileges, but not sacrifices.
The idea that comes from Atlas, the idea that comes from Jocko and from
all of the other folks that have come onto my podcast, that
come onto this show and have talked about their past experiences,
particularly military based experiences come from a perspective of sacrifice.
You sacrifice before you get the privileges. You
sacrifice the things that you
want today for a better future tomorrow inside of your
sphere of influence. And sacrifice doesn't always look like taking
a bullet. Sometimes sacrifice looks like not
letting your kid have a cell phone at 10 and
just committing to picking them up every day so they're not on
social media. And so you have a conversation with them.
Sometimes sacrifice looks like not having television in your house
on 247 and maybe just having music on in the
background and talking to each other to fill the
silence. Sometimes sacrifice looks like
not sacrificing mealtimes with
your family because the boss who isn't going to be there at your
funeral wants a little bit extra out of you.
Sacrifice has to come before privilege and
ownership has its privileges. The sacrifice always
comes first. Those are some of the lessons I think that we could take
from extreme ownership, but I'm going to let Atlas have the last
word on this. As we round the corner, How
can civilians apply these principles? I mean, we've kind of been talking about this this
entire time, but what's a good summation for us as we round the
corner? And by the way, thank you for coming on the show today. This has
been an awesome conversation. For sure. And, I look forward to
maybe potentially having you back on in the future. I love it.
Yeah. So, how can civilians apply extreme
ownership? I think most civilians, I think most people are
renting their lives, and they look at their lives as rentals.
And whenever you're in real estate, you, when
you rent anything, you realize that, a
rental isn't taken care of as much as, an
owned house is. So if you own the house, your
yard's taken care of. Your house is well painted. You know, things are
cared for a little bit more. When you're renting something, you treat it like a
rental. And I think a lot of people's lives, they're
treating their their lives as a rental. They're driving it as fast as they
can. They're showing it off to their friends on social media.
They're being as loud as possible with the things that they
think that they can tell people that are believable. When in
reality, it's it's a not not true inside
them. You know, whatever they're showing to people is is
not truly who they are. They're fake, and people
can spot a fake. You've stated this earlier in the
show. It's easy it's easy for people to spot a
fake. The whole phrase is fake it until you make
it. That is not something I
subscribe to. I think you should talk about it until you make
it. I think you should highlight it until you make it,
but faking it only brings in other fake people.
So if you take that aside and you look at who you really want
to be, own it. Don't rent it. When
you own it, your yard's gonna be tighter. Meaning you're gonna go to the
gym. Your your thoughts inside your your
your walls, this brain thing that you have in your head, they're going to be
freshly painted. They're not going to be marred up with negativity. You're
going to start taking care of the, the, the neighbors trash
whenever it rolls into your yard, and you're gonna talk to your neighbor
instead of just complaining about them. The things
that come with ownership are something that we control, but
we rarely do nowadays because we are so afraid to talk to other
people, especially those that are closest to us and the ones
that impact our lives. So I'd say take ownership, stop
renting your life, start thinking about things as you as
you should instead of as people tell you you should.
I know you've got books. I know you've got a website. Go
ahead. Talk talk with folks about where they can get ahold of you, where they
can see you Yeah. Where they can get you. Where the where where can we
where do we spot that TEDx conversation that you Yeah. Not conversation. I'm
sorry. Speech that you, that you dropped. Where can we find you? Where are all
the places we could find Atlas Altman? Yeah. Google
how elite leaders win. You'll find me on on a TED
stage talking about, my time with the president and and a
lot of general officers, the highest ranking people in the military. And
I got I got very blessed and fortunate to be placed in the
places that I was at. But it wasn't me. It was the
teams that I got to, you know, find out about the people that were in
my life. You know, Jesus likes to say, we be a fisher of men.
And I took that to heart. You know, I like to figure out what people
really want to do and then fuel that. And I find great success
whenever you do that. So, the books I have,
the rule of 3 is number 1 in a lot of categories.
It talks about a lot of the stories that I learned, from
from these extreme leaders and some of my personal stories were,
where I'm at. Shows, leaders dash kit.com/shows
is all the podcasts that I've ever been on. I think there's like 40 or
some odd shows that are posted out there if you wanna hear more of me.
I don't have a podcast yet, but I'm gonna do a 100 podcasts before I
even think about it because I'm finding great things. Like, I found a
I wrote down 3 pages of notes from the first time we talked. Just just
getting a feel for the the guest is is something that
3, 4, 4 of the podcast shows that I've been on has has done.
And those shows are always amazing. And, you know, they they're award
winning for a reason. So, and then, you know, I have a Fox
leadership series for kids, and that talks about the
basics of life as as they own themselves as a
leader and allows the parents to connect with their kids at bedtime
usually. And then it asks a series of questions, allowing the
parent to share that part of the day where they're leading something that they don't
normally share with their kids. So it's a deep connection
that forms between the parent and child, and then the child starts to look at
the parent more as a leader, rather than someone that provides them everything
that they ever wanted. And interestingly enough,
you know, the kids not having the cell phone was a Yale study that was
published last November. And they said that kids lead to happier
lives if they aren't given a smartphone,
until later in life. And you know why that is, is because all the
negativity that gets pushed out and and the positive
vibes. So it's a weird mixture for kids to try to figure out that
chaos that we all figure out later in life or as you and I did.
We grew up with it and it started to become really noisy. Yeah. World's so
noisy right now. So that's your thanks for letting me plug my
stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. No. It was
it was it was great to to have you on. And, of course,
we are going to have links in the show notes to all of the places
where you could find Atlas Altman, all the places where you could find
information about his books, his TED talk, his, his
leadership courses, his consultancy, everything that he's ever done.
We're gonna have links to all of that to the show notes below the podcast
player of the show you're listening to, right now.
If you would like to stay on the path with us here at leadership
toolbox, we have, we have a few things that you may wanna
consider. We're not as good as Atlas, but we like we try
to kinda worm our way in there. You know? We, of course,
would recommend that you subscribe and like this podcast. Recommend
that you tell every single leader that you know that the leadership lessons from the
great books podcast exists. Of course, we love it if you go on
Apple, Spotify, drop us 5 stars,
subscribe, pass it around your email list. Of course, word-of-mouth is
how this show grows, so tell all your friends.
If you have people who, you know, won't listen to a podcast or
they won't attend a training, how do you get a leadership tools?
Well, we have this little book that was released back in,
April of 20 22 called
12 rules for leaders, the foundation of attentional leadership. I
co wrote that with my coauthor Bradley Madigan. And in it are
the 12 rules, the 12 areas we think that leaders need to know the
most about. And we've covered a lot of them today, including ownership and
accountability, avoiding the blame credit trap, and many, many
other spots. So go pick that up everywhere where
you can find books, most notably Amazon, of course.
And we have it in Kindle format and, of course, paperback. By the
way, I have been promising an audiobook for years now. I should
probably get on that. Oh, by
the way, there's another little red book we have that was little
red at the time of its release back in 2018. But
people started picking it up a little bit over COVID, and I'd recommend that you
pick it up as well. It's called my boss doesn't care. 100 essays
on disrupting your workplace by disrupting your boss. There's a nice snazzy red cover
with white lettering on it. I recommend you go pick that up if you're finally
ready to disrupt your boss and disrupt your workplace, but you don't
quite know which form of disruption to prioritize and
to execute on. If you were having some uncertainty
and a lack of decisiveness, that book is a guide because you're going
to need a map. You're going to need something to help you. And then
finally, we have a YouTube channel. You're gonna hear the audio of this
podcast on their YouTube channel. If you're listening to it on YouTube, you should
subscribe to the Leadership Toolbox YouTube channel. We are
ticking up our subscriber numbers as we ingest more of
this podcast content into those
algorithms that I often talk about. I haven't I think that's the
first time I mentioned algorithms actually on this show. But, you should,
you should listen and subscribe to, the, the the
leadership lessons from the great books podcast on YouTube. And of
course watch the videos We are we have a backlog
now of almost 50 videos. Don't worry We're getting videos up as
quickly as we possibly can. And eventually, you'll see the video version of this
podcast as well with Atlas Altman with all the same show notes,
all the same information. But we are audio first. We're
partisans for audio. And don't worry, Google. We see
you operating over there. You and your little AI. We
got you covered. With that,
I'd like to thank once again, Atlas Altman for coming on our podcast and joining
us today. And as usual,
as I always say, we're out.