PRACTICE HARD THINGS

“The special operations community is not comprised of people that put a cape on and go to work. They are very normal people that are tasked with doing some exceptional things at times, but they suffer from the same ailments of life that everybody else does. You can easily create this unrealistic expectation that they can do anything, that they can tolerate anything, that they are impossible to knock down. And that isn't the case.”

“Emotional control—as ridiculous as that is to say, because it is an emotionally scary event, you have to be able to detach your emotions from your decision-making process. You have to be able to function. This diving test had absolutely nothing to do with diving and everything to do with stress management and following procedure regardless of what's going on in the world around you.”

“Until you view yourself as the author of your life, you'll be the victim of it. It means until you stop blaming everything else around you for the course and trajectory of your life, you're just going to be a flag in the wind. For clarity, you have almost no control over what happens in your life, but you have complete and total control in how you respond to it. That is being the author of your life.”

“Instead of trying to get from here to here and only looking at that distance, you slam these two together. There is a microscopic step that you can take and you only focus on that step and then the next one and you don't have to keep track of your steps because as long as you keep making forward motion this bridge will be gapped. The key to that is to chunk your goals into the most digestible piece that you possibly can.”

“I'd actually at this point in my life rather see people fall a little bit short of their goals and know when to walk away than destroy themselves because they don't ever want to quit and they end up having nothing in their life. There's a fine line between resilience and suppression with this. And a lot of the time I think we confuse suppression for strength. I put my children and myself through 10 extra years in a relationship because of that.”

“I've reframed how I view failures. I now consider them tuition payments. Some of my tuition payments have been relatively inexpensive and some have taken me to the brink of bankruptcy. It's just an easier way to get comfortable with consistently failing—by reframing it as a lesson that I learned then that I can apply moving forward, a tuition payment that you really don't understand the cost of until later.”

“I never for a single second thought about the danger of drone warfare. I don't mean reapers or overhead surveillance platforms... I mean somebody essentially ordering a drone on the internet and having that be a kinetic option on the battlefield. I am glad that I am not a part of that because sometimes they find you and people running away from basically a DJI drone that detonates—the hardest of passes being involved in that.”

“I never for a single second thought about the danger of drone warfare. I don't mean reapers or overhead surveillance platforms... I mean somebody essentially ordering a drone on the internet and having that be a kinetic option on the battlefield. I am glad that I am not a part of that because sometimes they find you and people running away from basically a DJI drone that detonates—the hardest of passes being involved in that.”

“I've reframed how I view failures. I now consider them tuition payments. Some of my tuition payments have been relatively inexpensive and some have taken me to the brink of bankruptcy. It's just an easier way to get comfortable with consistently failing—by reframing it as a lesson that I learned then that I can apply moving forward, a tuition payment that you really don't understand the cost of until later.”

“Instead of trying to get from here to here and only looking at that distance, you slam these two together. There is a microscopic step that you can take and you only focus on that step and then the next one and you don't have to keep track of your steps because as long as you keep making forward motion this bridge will be gapped. The key to that is to chunk your goals into the most digestible piece that you possibly can.”

“The phase that I think terrifies everybody is human out of the loop. If we take humans off the loop, I don't know how you combat that as an adversary without doing exactly the same thing. Because if it can think and make decisions faster than any human that's in any of those earlier phases, then you're already at a tactical disadvantage and we end up working for robots for our daily water ration.”

“I'd actually at this point in my life rather see people fall a little bit short of their goals and know when to walk away than destroy themselves because they don't ever want to quit and they end up having nothing in their life. There's a fine line between resilience and suppression with this. And a lot of the time I think we confuse suppression for strength. I put my children and myself through 10 extra years in a relationship because of that.”

“The phase that I think terrifies everybody is human out of the loop. If we take humans off the loop, I don't know how you combat that as an adversary without doing exactly the same thing. Because if it can think and make decisions faster than any human that's in any of those earlier phases, then you're already at a tactical disadvantage and we end up working for robots for our daily water ration.”

“Emotional control—as ridiculous as that is to say, because it is an emotionally scary event, you have to be able to detach your emotions from your decision-making process. You have to be able to function. This diving test had absolutely nothing to do with diving and everything to do with stress management and following procedure regardless of what's going on in the world around you.”

“The special operations community is not comprised of people that put a cape on and go to work. They are very normal people that are tasked with doing some exceptional things at times, but they suffer from the same ailments of life that everybody else does. You can easily create this unrealistic expectation that they can do anything, that they can tolerate anything, that they are impossible to knock down. And that isn't the case.”

“Until you view yourself as the author of your life, you'll be the victim of it. It means until you stop blaming everything else around you for the course and trajectory of your life, you're just going to be a flag in the wind. For clarity, you have almost no control over what happens in your life, but you have complete and total control in how you respond to it. That is being the author of your life.”