Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is Rich Diviney. Rich is a retired Navy SEAL commander. He's the author of a new book called "The Attributes," which is all about the drivers behind human performance. It's an amazing conversation, super dense, tons of takeaways. I really think it's the perfect way to launch into 2021. So, hit that "Subscribe" button and please enjoy my conversation with Rich Diviney. All right. We're rolling. Good to see you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. I'm excited about this. We have a little bit of a tradition that we started a couple of years ago on the podcast where we kick off the new year with a Navy SEAL. People seem to enjoy that. Yeah. It started with David Goggins a couple of years ago. We had Chad right last year. And you're gonna be the 2021 edition. I'm deeply honored. So, thank you. Yeah, thank you for doing this. And what's interesting about you among many other many things, but when you think of Navy SEALs in this modern culture context, we think about the movies, we think about people like Jocko Willink who is sort of this emblem of leadership. We think of David Goggins, who's kind of this emblem of physical and mental discipline, very alpha-type personalities, but you're coming from a more analytical pose. Somebody who's much more interested in the mental game versus the physical game. And given your experience and your stature in the special ops ecosystem, somebody who's spent 21 years in the military as a Navy SEAL, 13 overseas deployments, serving as commanding officer of a hereafter to be unnamed elite force within the SEALs. You have a tremendous amount of experience. And it leads me, your perspective, which we're gonna get into, leads me to conclude that perhaps this popular conception that we have about the Navy SEALs is a little bit misled. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're absolutely right. And I think that it's for two reasons I guess. First is, you have to, pop culture has to entertain first and foremost. And so, any type of story has to highlight the high highs and the low lows, if you're gonna have drama. And life, no matter what endeavor you're in, is never just high high and low low. I mean, a lot of SEAL life is decidedly normal. I remember having family or even special guests who wanna come visit the SEAL teams when I was in the SEAL teams. And they come and they'd be walking around the teams and I'd be like, "Hey, you probably expected to see parachutes everywhere and guns and all this exciting stuff." (laughs) Yeah. And that's not the case. This is just a bunch of buildings. This is where we work. A lot of our training is offsite in remote areas. And I guess I've never watched a movie get made other than on the periphery I've seen some movie sets. But I would imagine from what I know about the experience it's kinda the same thing. I mean, the movie-making process is decidedly slow and boring for most of it. You're just looking for that one-minute shot, right? And I think that that's what happens in kind of SEAL movies and even SEAL books to the extent that they are as you're recounting the high highs and the low lows. And it's more normal than that. Right. Yeah, you think you're gonna see guys pounding their chest and doing hill repeats and all kinds of crazy stuff, but part of the whole thing is to bleed into society. Right? Yeah, There's an invisibility aspect to it. Like you're meant to kind of disappear into the background. Absolutely. And again, SEALs are humans. And so, one of the things that I'm fascinated with and have always been fascinated with is this idea that we all consider ourselves fairly average dudes who just happened to go down an extraordinary path. And so, operating in that path, what are those things that make someone be able to do that and do the job consistently, do it well, and how does that separate from other people? Because everybody has competencies. Everybody is a rock star in certain contexts of life and a doofus in other contexts. Right? There are many contexts in life where I'm a doofus. And so, and you look at like professional athletes and you say the legit like LeBron James is a master on the basketball court. I'm sure he would tell you at least 10- Put him in a swimming pool. Yeah, at least 10 different context inside of which he is a complete doofus. And he'd probably be the first to admit it. He's like, "No, no, I'm bad at that." Right? So, I think I've been fascinated with what are those aspects that allow humans to understand their own potential, their own performance. And then if they understand it enough, pick the right path. Sometimes consciously, in my case, in many cases with team guys, unconsciously because we just found ourselves wanting to do it and going there and making it through at young ages. So, not very self-aware at that point in your life. Right. Well, most people aren't, right? It's exactly right. Yeah. We're sort of reacting impulsively to unconscious drivers until they reach a certain level of maturity where things are either working or not working where we engage in that process of evaluation to try to understand what those drivers are. Which is really kind of the core of your work. But you said something interesting, which was that you and the SEALs would consider themselves to be average people who've put themselves in extraordinary situation in which to excel and grow. But it takes a certain type of individual to sign up for something like that. Like when you talk about the drivers that would compel somebody to say, "That's the life that I wanna pursue for myself." I agree. And I agree, but I'd also say that I would offer that it also takes a certain mentality for someone to wanna be a surgeon or an athlete or a teacher or any profession that I really honor and respect. And I think this is one of the things I really enjoyed about the teams was that the majority of the guys respected hard work and purpose and movement. And so, there was very little ego around people who really did their job well. I mean, the janitors at our commands who did awesome jobs, awesome people. And there was no judgment. There was no putting oneself above others because you really honor and respect someone's purpose, dedication, and hard work. What you start to have trouble with is when you see apathy or misdirection. People who just aren't on the path. They don't really want, there's no drive. I mean, I think that's... And again, I say have an issue with, you just you don't resonate with those people as much. And so, anybody who's picked a path and pursued it and done it with deliberacy and consistency and integrity and I would say success, but not even success. As long as they've pursued it, there's respect there. In terms of the SEAL pathway, I would certainly think that there are commonalities amongst the guys who want to do it. And I think the process to get there, to get to BUD/S in the first place is certainly difficult. So, I always used to say, "Hey, part of the selection process for BUD/S is getting there in the first place." That's the first part. Because there's a lot of guys, you'll always meet a bunch of, you'll always be guys who say, "Oh yeah, I always wanted to be a SEAL. I just add this, I did this and then that, and then this happened." And in the back of your mind is like, "Okay, well, you got deselected." (laughs) Yeah. I think that was one of the things that happened. Right? You never pursued- You deselected yourself. You selected yourself. You never pursued it to the two day one on the beaches of Coronado. Right. And then let the BUD/S process then throw you into massive challenge. And even in that context, people are deselecting themselves. It's rare that somebody gets tossed out, right? Like people are just opting out to quit. It is rare. Yeah, it happens. I mean, and I would actually say that the process has matured and evolved over the years. I mean, I went through in '96, right? So, it's matured and evolved over the years to do better at deliberately deselecting those who might not fit the mold. Because again, as the community has gained popularity, the reasons for which guys have come in have shifted. And you and I had a little bit of a conversation about this before we came on. But in the mid '90s, very few people knew what Navy SEALs were when me and all my buddies joined. We all wanted to be kind of bad asses, invisible warriors with like the water or whatever. And then the war started and suddenly the spec ops holistically and the military, but spec ops who was doing a lot of the bulk of the initial work at least hunting down bad guys, suddenly these kids who are seeing that, they're like, "Oh, wait." That the reasons changed. "I wanna go do that. I wanna... The towers come down and hey, I wanna go serve my country." And that's another reason. And again, there's no, both are honorable. They're just different, right? There's no judgment on these reasons. And then of course, as spec ops and the SEALs in particular gain popularity, and we're kinda like, "Oh my gosh, now we're visible," that you can know that the reasons are changing again on why are guys joining. So, the community has done a really good job at starting to identify what those attributes, specifically, okay, what are the attributes we're really looking for and how do we accurately assess those and pick the right people? And it's not just the guy who can make it through Hell Week and not just a guy who could run with a telephone pole. It's there'll be more integrity and character and things like that and ethos and those guys. And so, I think it's been very impressive to see them make that evolution. Yeah. All the conversation seems to be around BUD/S, but it's so much more than that. It is. It is. I mean, so I always joke, and this is kind of how I started thinking about the work, in BUD/S and how we specifically. But you carry telephone poles around. You PT with telephone poles with like 200, 300 pounds. You carry boats on your head, which are like another- Right. Who's gonna carry the boat. Yeah, I mean, you do this thing. You sit in cold water for what seems like hours and freeze. I have done and been on hundreds of missions, real-world combat missions. And I always joke that never on one, did I carry a telephone pole or have a boat on my head? Right. (laughs) And so, what this tells- Probably some cold water though. It was some cold water. Yeah. Yes, I will admit that. What this tells us and told me as I started to think about this attributes research is that what we were doing in BUD/S, it's like they call it SEAL training, but it really wasn't training as much as it was assessment and selection. And what they were doing is they were trying to tease out their assessing attributes. What was it about grinding through that telephone pole PT that allowed someone to make it through? What was it about carrying that boat on your head? What was it about going through Hell Week where it's five days and you sleep for three hours, right? Yeah. What was it about that? It wasn't the, actually you weren't training to carry a boat on your head. You weren't training to stay up that long. You were basically seeing if guys had the ability to move through and continue to perform. And I think, and that starts to speak to attributes. Yeah. It illucinates, it shines a spotlight on these attributes and which attributes these individuals are excelling and where they're weak. But what you've done is really canonized that like evaluated it and distilled it down into like these principles that you share in the book and the program that is now like the doctrine for how you screen people and evaluate who are the best candidates. Yeah. And I appreciate you saying that because my goal was not to write another SEAL book. I never wanted to do that. And of course I was in the teams when I saw that happening. And really what I want to, what I've always really been interested in, is asking the question, what are those things that I experienced that I can draw out and ubiquitize really for people. And just here's an example. I mean, yeah, so you go through BUD/S. One of the ways... The way you quit BUD/S is you ring the bell. It's called the ringing the bell, right? And a lot of guys do. But the way all, the example I'll give you is 2020. I mean, so I say in 2020, all of us were thrown into deep challenge, stress, and uncertainty. Just take COVID as one of those many examples of 2020 where we were all thrown into deep challenge, stress, uncertainty. The difference between 2020 and BUD/S is none of us volunteered to be there and none of us had a bell that we could ring to get out of it. We were all thrown into this which meant we actually all got a crash course in our attributes during 2020. We all have. So, we all came to the end of a year where we've learned a lot about ourselves and now have the ability, if we have the understanding to capitalize on that knowledge and excel in 2021. Because we can use that information as we start 2021 because none of us can say how 2021 is gonna go either. And all of us are a little show-shocked from 2020. So, how do we then take those things and say what do we do to use this to my advantage to perform. If I know that I'm a little less on adaptability than I am on resilience, or I'm higher on discipline than I am on you name your attributes, there's ways to do that. Right. So, traditionally we've thought of this through the lens of skills. What is your skillset and how do we plug you and your skillset into the right lane so that you can excel. And you've really upended this to say skills are important, but skills are trainable. Attributes are, to use the description that you use in the book, are like your code, your computer code. And they're kind of baked in. And they can be developed, they can be enhanced, but essentially you kind of come out who you are, right? And the process of figuring out which lane to plug you into is a function of all of these attributes that you have, where you're weak, where you're strong, and then selecting for those strengths. Is that accurate? That is accurate. And I think, again, the skills are and always have been a valuable and necessary measure of performance. And as we kinda we can look at the evolution of the workplace and evolution of factories in the industrial complex, the ability to manage and run machinery were skills that work as needed. So, companies began to train people to do that. And your ability to do that effectively, efficiently, and competently was a measure of your skill. So, they actually developed classrooms inside the factories to teach people this stuff. So, it's always been... And if I go all the way back to prehistoric man, I mean, the ability to throw a spear and hit the target was a valuable skill. No one would've cared how much empathy you had doing it. So, skills always have been important. The problem with looking at just skills is they're seductive. They don't tell the whole story. Skills are not inherent to our nature. So, we learn them. We learn them or can be taught them or actually can learn them just by nature of doing a task. Just you and I looking at or working on a computer for week after week, we'll learn how to type, right? Skills can be absorbed that way. So, they can be taught. They can be learned that way. They're not inherent to our nature. And they direct behavior in certain situations, right? So, here's how to type a paper. Here's how to ride a bike. Here's how to throw a ball. Here's what to do and the skill to do it. Therefore they can be measured and tested and assessed very easily. They're very visible. You can see how well someone throws a ball, how well someone rides a bike. To that end they become very seductive assessment and hiring tools because you can see the number. You can see the sales guy's number. You can see how well someone does. You can see the graphic designers performance there. You can see how well someone shoots or runs. How well someone, how in shape someone is, how well someone runs the three-mile run at a spec ops camp. The problem is it doesn't tell us what happens in uncertainty when everything goes sideways, when the environment is so unknown and uncertain, that you don't know what skill to apply. And this is where we start talking about attributes. Attributes are inherent. We're born with them. Now, we certainly develop them over time, but they've seen levels. Those of us as parents, we can see levels of perseverance or adaptability in young kids and young almost, I would say infants, but as soon as they start crawling, you can see these things. So, they're inherent to our nature. They inform behavior rather than they direct behavior. So, they tell us how we're going to show up when we're in a situation. So, my levels or my son's levels of adaptability and perseverance and resiliency for example, told me how well he was gonna manage riding a bike when he fell off of it 10 times in a row. So, they inform behavior. As such, they're hard to assess, measure, and test because you can't see them. And so, the most visible place that you see them is in times of challenge, uncertainty, and stress which makes special operations training or assessment and selection such a great environment and such a great laboratory inside of which you tease these out because it's all about challenging stress. I mean, BUD/S takes you down to zero. It doesn't matter if you're the star athlete, doesn't matter if you're the alma mater or smartest person, it doesn't matter where you came from. You will go down to zero. And the question is, how do you show up? What do you do then, right? What do you do then. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's that high-stress environment that basically reveals the default settings on that individual. Because you don't default to your skillset, you default to your core attributes. That's exactly right. Yeah. And then the only caveat is I talk about briefly albeit, dormant attributes. The dormant attributes are those attributes that you have, but you don't know you have. And you don't know you have them. And you can have a dormant attribute all the way through late adulthood. It really depends on whether or not there's been a situation that has teased that out of you. This could be the person who thinks they're impatient. Right? And then they have kids and they realize, "Oh, wait a second, I'm actually a pretty patient person." (laughs) Because- Right. They didn't realize. They would have mis-characterized those attributes. That's exactly right. So, I would maintain that any story in our lives, and I think every one of us has a story that ends with, "I didn't know I had it in me," is an example of an attribute coming to the fore that they didn't know they had. So, that's dormant attributes. So, there are attributes that we might have that we don't know we have just because we hadn't put ourselves in those situations, which is one of the things I loved about going to BUD/S. I actually loved BUD/S. I mean, it was tough, but I loved it. And I loved it because of the purity of the system. It didn't care who you were, where you were from. And it just taught you so much about yourself. So, you came out of that, "Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay. I got it." Right. Right. Well, I mean, the thing is, we're all aware of things like grit and perseverance and resilience, but it's kind of an ephemeral thing, right? Like you were saying, like how do you actually calculate these things and identify them? I mean, any employer or executive who's hiring people who is successful at it will tell you, "Like I don't hire for skills. I hire for their disposition or whatever." But that's kind of an intuitive thing. Like I get a feeling when I'm with this person, I feel like they're somebody who's gonna show up for me or they have the right level of humility or whatever it is that they're sourcing for. But there's no rubric for that, right? No, there's no. Which is really what you've done. And you did it by dent of realizing that this was important. I mean, you open the book with this story of like this experienced SEAL. I think you had like eight years, right? Who was having an issue with this very specific like mission training that you were doing where he despite being very good on paper, he just couldn't figure out how to excel in that environment. And that led you, I mean, I want you to explain that, but that kinda led you into thinking more deeply about why these things weren't matching up in the way that you thought perhaps they should. Yeah, I had the privilege of running training, assessment and selection and training for one of our really specialized SEAL commands. And at this particular command, we would take experienced operators from other commands and they'd apply to our command. And we put those guys through our own selection process. So, you're talking about guys who have between five and 10 years of experience already in the team, successful dudes. And we were getting about a 50% attrition rate. And that happens, right? But the problem was, and when I took over, my CEO had said, "Hey, we need to do better articulating why guys aren't making it through." Because the best explanation a lot of times was why you didn't cut it. You couldn't do this right or you couldn't do that right. Right. But what does that mean? What does that mean? And it was leaving a sour taste in our mouths because we weren't explaining it properly. It was leaving a sour taste in the candidate's mouth because they just they came from this position of, "Hey, I thought I was doing great. I got accepted for this thing. Now they're telling me I'm not good enough. What the heck?" Right? And so, they asked me to look at it. And so, that's what took me back. And I began to look really at the foundation, the origins of the UDT, the Underwater Demolition Teams and Draper Kauffman and this idea that before the allied invasion, they realized that they needed to have teams of dudes swim or shore measure, basically measure depth, identify obstacles, and blow them up, blow paths clear if necessary. And so, they tapped this guy, Draper Kauffman who had put together an explosive ordnance school a few years prior said, "Hey, can you create this unit?" And Kauffman knew that he needed guys. He already had, definitely he had run an explosive school. So, he already had at his disposal, a bunch of guys who knew how to do the job, right? Who knew how to tie demolition on obstacles and swim and do whatever that is. What he recognized he needed was to figure out who could do the job, because these guys would be swimming into heavily-defended beaches with all these, a knife and some explosives and swim trunks. They'd have to adapt on the fly. They'd have to figure out what was going on. The environments would change. It would get ugly. So, I call it kind of a unconscious genius. And he said, "Well, I'm gonna start my training with a week of the most difficult things I can imagine." And so, he started training with what is now Hell Week and basically ran guys through the gambit of combat simulations, explosives, some problem-solving this and that. But it was really just very grueling. Guys slept for only couple hours. And- Is this back when it was the frogman? That's exactly right. Yeah. And he basically didn't run any testing or evaluation during that process. The decision to stay or go rested on the candidate. Would he stay or would he quit in that environment? And of course, many quit. It was about a 90% attrition rate. But what he knew at that point is he had that 10% of people who he knew could make it through when things went completely sideways, when things got so bad that all you had was yourself, maybe your teammate. And that was the initiation of the original Underwater Demolition, UDT. And of course, that training evolved. And that Hell Week still is the crucible for BUD/S. It's not the fifth week. It's at the first. But what he was doing was he was looking for attributes. He was looking for guys who could do the job, not knew how. Yeah, that difference between how to do it and can do it is a pretty wide gap, right? It absolutely is. Yeah. Yeah. But within that, lies this great mystery. Like what is the path from how to could to can, right? Right. And how do you like pin that down and create a structure around it rather than just, "Well, he's got what it takes." Like what does that mean? Well, I think part of the process is to reverse it. It needs to go from could to how. So, in other words, if you have the attributes, so, our whole philosophy became, "Hey, as long as the guy has the attributes we're looking for, we can teach them how. We can teach a guy how to shoot. We can teach a guy how to skydive." Now, competence certainly matters. So, there needs to be a baseline. But what I tell people who ask me and organizations who ask me about hiring people, I say, well, first look at the context. So, what's the team? Because the set of attributes that you need to be a Navy SEAL is gonna be different than the set that you need to be an HR person or a salesperson. So, what's the list of attributes that you think that are predominant in this type of environment? Start with that. And then if you find some, so learnability might be one of those things. Hey, we need someone with high learnability, right? If someone has high learnability, it has high on all four of the mental acuity, you're gonna be able to teach them pretty much anything you need to teach them. They can learn almost any skill and pick it up pretty quickly. Right? So, we began to reverse that process and say, okay, we're gonna still train because training by the way, is a great environment inside of which you can tease out attributes if you put challenge and stress, if you implement challenge and stress. So, you almost get periphery training. And then the process we were running, I called it like we're training for the periphery, right? We're actually, we're assessing attributes, but at the same time, they're learning critical skills that they need to know to do this job. And I think teams and businesses can do the same thing. It just takes some diligence of thought and it's subjective to the team and the individual of whatever you're looking for. So, how did you begin the process of deconstructing this to identify what these attributes are? Because you've come up with this list and you go through them in the book, but you had to arrive at these as being the critical ones. Absolutely. Well, this started when I was running training. So, the first thing I did was I created basically small groups around the command of five or 10 guys. And I said, "Hey, write down, make a list of what you think the key attributes we're looking for are." And I try to give a quick explanation of what an actual attribute was. What an attribute is. You're gonna define that. But inevitably the list is going to come up with both skills and attributes on it because they get conflated quite a bit. But I did that first. And so, we got all those lists. We had something like 100 or so things. And obviously called the skill off, all the skills. Okay, that doesn't... And put it aside because we know those. And then looked where some attributes were similar to other attributes and came up with a list at the time of 36 attributes. And that was the list we basically said, "Okay, this is what we're gonna use." When I got out of the Navy and I began to talk to businesses, I'm thinking about this more deeply and more openly outside the genre of just special operations, I said to myself, "Okay, what are those attributes we need to start looking at?" And I began to think about performance. And this is where I really started. And this is... So, Andrew Huberman, great friend of mine. And I know you know him. He says a lot. (laughs) All roads lead to Andrew Huberman. Every guest that I have on this podcast has some sort of entanglement with Andrew Huberman. (laughs) So, yeah he's a popular guy, right. Yeah. So, he says a lot. Yeah, he's awesome. I'm actually staying in his place right now. Oh, cool. But he and I met right after I got in the military. And we were at this peak performance thing where we were kind of helping think about ways to help executives and CEOs perform at their peak. Pretty good. David Goggins was there. So, he and I got to visit, right? So, but Andrew and I kind of synergized because we both started talking. What we realized is that neither of us liked nor were that interested in peak performance. And the reason was because, and it's funny because most people say, "Oh, you SEALs, you guys are the best peak performance out there. I mean, you know the secrets of peak performance." And I used to disagree with them. I didn't know exactly why at the time, but it didn't feel right. But as I started talking to Andrew, he and I kinda figured it out. And the reason is because peak is an apex. It's an apex from which we can only come down. And peak often in most cases has to be prepared for, has to be scheduled, has to be routinized. You have to have a routine together. And so, the examples of the professional football player spends his entire week preparing to peak on Sunday for three hours. Right. Or the Olympic athlete spends- Or the the Olympic athletes. yeah. Decades getting ready for that one day. That's exactly right. We realized we were interested in optimal performance. And optimal performance is something different. Optimal performances is how can I do the very best I can in the moment? Whatever that best looks like, what is my best and how can I do it? Sometimes your best is peak. Sometimes that's flow states and all that stuff. Sometimes it's your head down and you're taking step-by-step. And that's all you're doing. It's minute by minute, it's moment by moment. And it kinda hit me like when I was freezing in the surf zone in SEAL training, there was nothing peak about my performance. (laughs) Yeah. I was doing the best I could and the best I could was not to quit at the time. But this is where like you and I have synergy. Ultra-athletes I think have this mentality. I mean, when you're an ultra-athlete or a triathlete or whatever, when these races are so long, that the end of them, you don't really even wanna think about the end of them because it's too far away, you have to begin to learn how to chunk your environment in ways to perform. And I would maintain, I'm not gonna say this for certain, but tell me if I'm wrong, I would guess that there are points during your race where you don't feel like your peak at all. Oh, and not at all. And you also know going into it that it's not gonna go smoothly, right? That's exactly right. You're gonna be met with unforeseen obstacles and variables that are gonna come up that are not part of the plan at all. And it's about how you respond in the moment to those things that you couldn't have prepared for. That's exactly right. And guess what that sounds like? Life. (laughs) Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is life. I mean, we as life, and in life- 2020 particularly. Yeah. 2020 in particular, right? I mean, but life every day, we get out of bed and there's some predictability, but ultimately we don't know. I mean, things are going to happen to make an assumption or even expect oneself to perform at peak all the time all day is both unrealistic and probably irresponsible from a health perspective. There has to be a modulation. And optimal performance is that modulation. So, the idea was okay, when I think about attributes, what do I believe when I look at this kind of a collection of experience and research, are the attributes for optimal performance? What are those things that actually help us do the best we can in the moment? Again, sometimes that's peak. Peak's awesome when you get there. And if you can plan for it, that's great too. And I would recommend anybody who can plan for if. If you're a sales person or a presenter in a business, if you have a sales presentation plan to peak during that presentation. Right? Nothing wrong with that at all. The more you can control those variables, the more you can set yourself up for peak versus optimal. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you can... And if you are... And so, Andrew and I really are of the belief that if you can optimally perform consistently, that's actually true confidence because you know that no matter what hits, you'll find a way, you'll get through it. It may not be pretty. (laughs) it maybe dirty, ugly and- But you also can't hold yourself to the standard of peak performance, right? I agree. Like you have to provide some bandwidth to understand like I'm not gonna at my peak. It's not about that. So, you let yourself off that hook a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And you're prepared to. And this goes for... So, I think it's funny, I was doing some training with a buddy of mine a few months ago. And he was training me. So, we were pushing sleds and all that stuff. And he was in the- SEAL stuff. SEAL stuff. Right. Right. (laughs) And this case, I was pushing a sled and he was timing me. And I said, "Well, what are you timing?" He said, "Well, I'm timing how fast you're coming out of the gate and then how fast you're doing the entire thing." And he said, "What's happening with you is that you when you come out of the gate, you're paced. Right? But you maintain the same pace the whole way through. You never slow down. You're basically the same pace." He said, "When I do it, I come out explosively. So, I'm really fast. And then I taper. I slow down." He said it's the difference between anaerobic and aerobic. Right. And it hit me. And I said, "This is very interesting because this is optimal performance." This is actually what SEALs or say special operators do all the time. We are aerobic thinkers. We are trained to go into situations at a pace. And we don't go all out right away. We just don't because we understand that we don't know how long this is gonna last. And we may have to go all out at certain points. So, when I do go all out, I wanna be able to go all out. And as soon as I don't have to, I pull back and I start recovering. And I would imagine the same thing happens in ultra-racing and some of these longer-distance events because you know what point to say, "Okay now I've gotta turn it on. I gotta go to 10." Okay? That's done. I'm gonna dial it back to a five because I need to recoup. And I think that's optimal performance. Yeah. I mean, in the training, you prepare for that by creating a tremendous aerobic base so that when you do exceed that threshold, you're able to come back to that base more rapidly and reset, which gets into like the micro recovery kind of thing that you talk about. Yeah. Yeah. Micro recovery is, so when I was at the same place we were putting together initiatives, I was asked to take a look at resilience because we were at what, 10 years into the war and we were noticing guys were coming back and they were broken. Retiring, broken physically, mentally. And so, we started asking ourselves the questions about resilience. And in diving to resilience I was interested. In Middleby I was more interested in kind of the the other end of resilience. Resilience is an important word. And it's something we all need to have. It's an attribute, right? But resilience describes the ability to get knocked off of baseline and come back to baseline. That's what it is. Necessary in our survival. However, what's also necessary in our survival is what I'll say is anti-fragility. Great book called by Nassim Taleb. Anti-fragility is the ability to get knocked off baseline and when you come back, you're stronger. Your baseline has shifted. And so, I began to say, okay, and I and the guys who were helping me put this together, okay, how do we do that? Part of that, a large part of that we felt was the mind. And so, okay, how can we start looking at the mind and understanding the relationship to our brain to affect our physiology and be better physically. Well, when we expend energy, a lot of us when we expend energy, what we don't realize is that recovery is one of the most important factor of obviously any physical endeavor. And it often takes twice as long, if not three times as long, to recover after you've done something. This is why sleep is so important. It's the ultimate recovery. I was interested. I say I, I and the team I was, we were interested in what we were defining as micro recovery. What are those things we can do that allow us to charge our internal batteries in moments? Right? So, I would call it recovering between gunfights. So, I have five minutes here just to take a breath and pause. Can I plug in my internal battery somewhere and build up my energy a little bit? What are those things? And so, we began to explore things that allowed us to do that. This is another place where Huberman and I really jelled is because he was studying this in the lab. And techniques that you could basically shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic and begin to recover. And you could do that through breathing, you could do that through visualization. There's different ways you can do it. In terms of short-term, we call there's kind of medium recovery. You can do meditation if you're into that, you can do saunas, whatever it is. You can do macro, which is we could do, obviously sleep is one on vacation if you do it right or others. So, recovery became an important factor and micro recovery meant, okay, what are those pauses? Where can I work on I grab those moments and do a small recharge? Again, you're not fully recharged. This is you're plugging in your mobile phone that's at 10% right before you get on the airplane and you're plugging in to get up to 15%. Because that's what you got. Right. So, that's resilience more than anti-fragility. Because you're not trying to boost above the baseline. You're just trying to get back to your set point. That's exactly. In the moment. In the moment. Yeah, anti-fragility has to come typically after the moment. And that's based on him. Right. So, you use like the gunfight example, but a more relatable example might be something like I had to go meet with my boss and he chewed me out about this thing. And I'm walking back to my office and I have to jump on a conference call and I've got like two minutes. What's the technique? Is it a breath work? Is it a specific practice? Like what does that look like? Yeah, and I would say even more relatable is you just had a bad day at the office and have to go home and have some time with the family. And be okay with your kids. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the tools range from... So, breathing is a huge one, right? And just focused. And I think there's CO2 blow up breathing where you can basically, you take a breath, you go up to your capacity and then you blow out longer than you inhaled. Right? That's blowing out CO2. It's shifting you into parasympathetic. So, there's breathing. HRV breathing is something we brought in and started playing with and I would recommend. Visual tools, I know Andrew talks about some of those. Open gaze is a really good one. And open gaze is just instead of staring at something in front of you, you're basically letting your eyes relax and you're noticing all of your peripheries. That has been proven to start shifting you into parasympathetic. Those are ways you can cover. Visualization, active visualization, it's also been studied and proven that we can visualize in a way that makes our brains actually believe that we're actually conducting the act, right? So, all of the chemicals that are being released in a physical conduct of that action can be also released when you're actively visualizing it. So, when you begin, if we start to kinda think about and break down the sympathetic parasympathetic system, sympathetic obviously, engagements, active, right? Parasympathetic, recover, recharge, and then start kinda breaking down the chemicals involved in each, right? If we're angry, anxious, fearful, we're releasing bursts of cortisol, which are awesome for action, but they're, I wouldn't say destructive, they take a lot of toll on our system. So, our bodies were designed to shift us into parasympathetic where we fill up DHA, which repairs all that stuff. So, our emotions actually have a lot to do with these chemicals. When we're angry, anxious, and fearful, we're making cortisol. When we're joyful, peaceful, and calm, we're making DHA. A recovery technique is to be joyful and calm. Gratitude gets you there too. But think about, I used to visualize my, especially when my boys were little, they like babies and they'd like go take naps on my chest, right? I would lay on the couch, they take naps on our chest. That was such a warm, wonderful, positive feeling. And I began to visualize that in a way that I could feel it. And I could literally begin to feel a chemical response. And I'd use that as recovery mode. So, active visualization of some of these events can actually help. Because what you're doing is you're generating a chemical response that's shifting you and repairing you. And then we have to understand that even a sympathetic response that's positive is actually recovery. Joy is a sympathetic response. True like exuberance and joy, that's your sympathetic system. But you're creating DHA instead of cortisol. And so, I think in terms of, so micro recovery, it's about understanding those tools that you can use, either vision or breath, and maybe some visualization tools that you can feel as you're getting into more macro level recovery. It doesn't have to be just sleep, right? I don't run the distances that you do, but I run in the woods in Virginia and I run maybe five miles. I don't do... I take off, I don't use headphones. I don't use a clock. I just jog, right? And it's in the woods, it's by the water. And it is absolutely rejuvenating for me. And that's when I think the best. And I'm just, that is my recovery time. So, you can use that as well. And what's the HRV breathing? So, heart rate variability breathing. And this is a type of breathing training that allows you to synchronize. And it's really the variability between your heart rates. And so, what that does is that if you synchronize those, you actually shift into... Well, so I don't wanna get deep and I did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. So, I've got to be careful, right? I'm not an expert here. But HRV breathing, if one were to look it up, it actually helps you breathe in a way that helps you shift into parasympathetic states should you desire, or, and I haven't gotten to this level, or be more focused and active while you're in a moment. Right? So, really, really intense or high level HRV breathing, you can do actually in the moment as well. So, it's a specific breathing technique that allows you to kind of boost your HRV? It allows your HRV to stabilize. I see. It allows you to, I should say synergize. So, the waves are announced. You're in coherence basically with your heart. Got it. And synergize that relationship in your heart, your brain, and your nervous system. Right. Yeah, HRV is super interesting. I've started paying a lot of attention to it lately when I started wearing the Whoop and noticing that sometimes I'll get a great night of sleep and my deep sleep is good, my REM sleep is good and I feel like I'm ready to go. And then the whoop will tell me that my HRV is actually way lower than it was two days prior or something like that. And that this is a day. And I was like, "But I feel good." Yeah. Yeah. And then there are days where I don't feel that great. My HRV is pretty good. So, it's not a feeling thing. It's not. It's not. I've dabbled in it, which is why I hesitate to go in depth, but I do in dabbling with it and then talking to the guys who do, Huberman being one of them, it is effective. If you understand it, it's effective in your system's ability to be in coherence. But the relatability to how you feel in terms of relaxed or active- Yeah, it's disconnected. It's difficult. Yeah, it's difficult. All right, well, let's get back to these attributes. So, you were talking about how you arrived at this huge list and you began to call it. So, how did you hone in on, I mean, there's 13 in the phone book, right? And they're kind of divided into these categories as being like the core attributes. Yeah, 25 total. 25. Yeah, there's five categories. So, what I need to do and what I did as I looked at them and said, how do these group together? And then how do I categorize those groups? I have always, always been interested in grit. Right? And it's probably because I went to SEAL training, right? But one of the reasons is because people have always talked about grit as if it's an attribute. And I have disagreed with that because it didn't make sense to me. But of course Angela Duckworth wrote a book on grit which she essentially said the same thing. She said grit is not just one thing, right? It's a... And so, I began to say, okay, if grit is not just one thing, what are the attributes that make up grit? And so, I looked at the attribute list and said, okay, I think it's these four things. I think it's courage, perseverance, adaptability, resilience. Those blended and catalyzed, create grit. It's like the loaf of bread coming out of the oven. And I would say, you can have them. And those attributes singularly work in different contexts of course. But when you have those four, you're talking about grit. So, I began to say, okay, how do these clump? Mental acuity, I saw some of these attributes had to do with how our brain kinda functions in processing the external world. It's something I saw viscerally when I was running SEAL training. Because I'd see guys in the shoot house, right? And you could see how quickly they were reacting, how quickly they were absorbing. That all spoke to this mental acuity. Drive, same thing. Drive is interesting because drive, it just, we all know these people who seem driven, right? So, someone who makes a ton of goals, but they don't execute on them or someone who starts a bunch of stuff but doesn't follow through, or someone who's really hard to get started, but when they do, you can't stop them. What are those things? And so, I started trying to clump those and see if they made sense. And of course, leadership and team ability. And I have three I talk about. We can get into those later that I call the others because I call them bi-directional attributes. But that's kind of I try to use it as a process to clump them to make them a little bit more understandable for the reader. And then of course, I looked at my original 36 and said, okay, what are the ones that really don't apply? They're very SEAL-specific. And I called those out. And that's really how I came up with the 25 that are in the book. Right. It's super interesting. I mean, back to that opening example of the SEAL who was great on paper and couldn't execute in that training exercise, what you discovered was that he lacked situational awareness which is one of the mental acuity attributes, right? Yeah. Also in that category is task switching, learnability, compartmentalization. I mean, you can be really high on learnability, but if you don't have situational awareness, you're not gonna be able to clear a room. Totally. And so, I always say that the mental acuity one, yeah, the mental acuity ones are the the four, I think out of the 25 that are the most connected. They're really, you can't have, they don't operate independently as much, right? So, situation awareness is first that informs. I mean, that's 11 million bits of information coming into our systems at every second, right? And that's from all of our senses. From our visual, to our smell, to our feeling, our brain does a massive amount of discarding of stuff that we don't need to pay attention to. Right? So, we're not paying attention, for example, to the soles of our feet until we, I mentioned that now we're paying attention to them, right? But our brain is always like, okay, we don't have to pay attention to it. So, all that information coming in, a lot of it's coming in now. So, coming into our frontal lobe which is only about 3000 bits that can process, right? So, those 3000 bits are what we have to consciously say, okay, this is my environment. This is what I'm noticing right now. Situational awareness speaks to one's level of vigilance. How much are we noticing? And we all know people. I look at my wife and I joke about this all the time. I am pretty hypervigilant. I notice a lot of things. I'm the guy who walks around the New York City streets and I notice. But how much of that is just drilled into you by idea of your training? Well, so some of it is. Yeah, some of it. Because you've been trained to be that way. Some of it is, a bit of it. You're always aware of what's going on around you. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. And some of it is middle, but like I look at my son, my eldest son, he's kinda like me and he's pretty visual. And he notices things. He's more aware than say his brother who is more like my wife who isn't as. They're kind of in their head just looking around. So, we see that. So, and again, there's no judgment. It's really where you stand on these. I do maintain that all of us have all of these attributes. It's just a matter of what levels of each that we have. So, for example, I have a higher level of situational awareness, say, than my wife. We both have situation awareness. It's just the level. So, that's the first thing. Information coming in. Once that information comes in to our frontal lobe, now it's time for us to process it. And that's compartmentalization. Compartmentalization is basically three things happening. It's assessment, it's prioritization, and focus. So, information is coming in and we do assess what of this information that I'm noticing is important to my current task. I joke, I love going to New York City. I love to ride the subway. It's because the subways are thoroughly confusing to me. It's an exercise in all of these in my mental acuity attributes for me. So, I'm going in the subway and I'm saying to myself, "Okay, I need to get to Brooklyn. Okay, what about the information coming into me is important?" Obviously the news stand with the newspaper, I can discard that. That's not important. Even though I noticed it, I don't need to. I need to notice, I need to say, okay, signs, tracks, things like that. Maps. Because you're so hypervigilant, it's more difficult for you to crowd out what's not essential to focus on the task at hand, which is getting to Brooklyn. That certainly takes training. Yes. Yeah, like the thing is these things don't function or operate in isolation. Like if you're so hypervigilant, it's probably more difficult for you to focus on one thing if you're on a crowded street where there's a lot going on. You're absolutely right. And this is where too much can actually be a little bit of a detriment. Because hypervigilance to too much of a degree leads to stress. Because you're overwhelmed or there's too much your tasks switching too quickly. So, yeah, you have to manage it. And I think certainly you talk about the training. My lifestyle for 20 years trained me pretty well to have that. Have eyes in the back of your head. And know what to focus on. In fact, special operators in SEALs are in large part to a man, very, very good at this because the environment just trains you so well. And it's about, okay, what's coming in? Okay, now from what's coming in, what do I need to focus on? What do I need to assess then prioritize? What's the out of these, okay, these three things are of importance to what I'm trying to do, get to Brooklyn, right? What's the most important one of that? For me, it might be the signs, the track signs, right? So, I'm gonna focus on the track signs. I should probably look at the map. I don't have to worry about the guy who is 15 meters behind me. (laughs) That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. I can tune that person out. Then we get into task switching. This is where it gets fun and a little bit of tricky because task switching, again, I talk about it in the book. Multitask is a myth, right? We know that. Most people, however, think they're pretty good at it. (laughs) But statistically, what happens is we're not multitasking, what we're doing is we're task switching. And those people who think they're multitasking, are actually task switching very inefficiently. And studies have shown when you multitask, the more you try to multitask, the worse you get at the activity you're trying to do. Right. Right. And it's because your task switching ineffectively. Task switching is basically the ability to switch focus from one thing to another efficiently and seamlessly. We do this all the time inside fixed contexts like driving a car, right? When we're driving a car, at one moment we're steering, the next moment we're putting our foot on the brake, the next moment we're putting our blinker on. So, we're actually task switching inside that context pretty seamlessly. We do this in life all the time because we drive our car to the parking lot of the grocery store. As soon as we get out of the car, we've just swapped contexts and our brain is shifting context now we're in a parking lot. Okay, then you get to the grocery store, grocery store new context. So, we're task switching naturally all the time. The measure of task switching in an individual is your comfort and ability to do that efficiently between contexts, especially in times of stress. I am pretty good at switching tasks. And because of my situation awareness, when I switch into a task, I still maintain an awareness of the environment so that I understand if I need to switch again. Where that's a detriment to me is sometimes I have trouble focusing deeply on something. My wife is incredibly, she's incredible at focusing. When she gets into something, man, she just she drives, she's awesome. Things fall off. The things that things on the periphery- Less hypervigilance, less situational awareness. It goes down, yeah. And probably not as good on the task switching. That's exactly right. Yeah. But super, super productive and powerful when it comes to focus. Way better than I am. So, there are pros and cons to this. It all depends on what you're using it for. And then of course, there's learnability. How much are you processing all of this and absorbing it into your system, so you're not making the same mistakes again. Admittedly, if I'm higher on all of those, I'm lowest on learnability. And what that means is it takes me awhile to learn things. I actually, I repeat mistakes more often than I'd like to admit. We all know people who they learned something in the first time they got it. The first time they learned it, they pick it up. I mean, they got it right. That's high learnability. And the fact is neither is better nor worse, but understanding where you lie on that. For me, especially when I was in some of the SEAL training evolutions, I would stay late. I would repeat things in my head. I would walk the hallways of the buildings we were practicing clearing just to make sure I was hammering home some of those things that I knew it was took me while to pick up. So, lower on learnability is not a bad thing. Lower on any of this stuff is not a bad thing. It's just, okay, how do I adjust my environment so that I can affect that. Uh-huh. And high enough on self-awareness to understand that you needed to do that for yourself, right? (laughs) Yes. Like what's interesting is there's no value judgements on any of these. We all come with, our toggle switch is different for all of these different things and everybody has their unique framework. But I'm interested in this distinction between innate disposition and what is trainable. Because when I think of one of these attributes, I think, well, if somebody is walking around with a certain level of resilience or courage or situational awareness, perhaps some aspect of that, they just came out of the womb with that, but they're also a function of their environment and their parents and all of the things that happened to you as you age. So, that has to be an aspect of it too. Like what trauma did you survive? Or what was your dad or your mom telling you? Like don't those contribute to these baselines? 100%. And so, the great news is we can develop attributes. We just can't do it the same way we do a skill. We can't, if you're impatient, I can't sit down and teach you a class on how to be patient or how to be resilient or how to be adaptable. It has to be, to develop an attribute, it has to be self-directed. You have to want to do it. And you have to oftentimes make a conscious decision to affect that attribute even though your natural tendency might be opposite, right? We all in 2020 developed attributes because the environment required us to. We all developed our adaptability in 2020. But I mean, there's no one, I would imagine there's no one who didn't. Adaptability was a high-developed attribute in 2020 because the environment forced that on us. Some of us found it fairly easy. Those of us who did, probably started high on adaptability. Some of us found it more difficult and hard. Those people probably were low on adaptability. But no matter who you were, you developed it. You became better at being adaptable. And if we are hit with some weird stuff in 2021, we are all more prepared to handle it now because we've developed our adaptivity. And I would say resiliency and a bunch of the others too. What is the relationship between adaptability, and like what's missing from this list in my mind is optimism. Like people that have an optimistic disposition, are generally more adaptable and resilient. Yes. Yes. So, you're absolutely right. Optimism, so I talk about optimism in self-efficacy. I actually add it as a component of self-efficacy. And the reason why I add it as just a component is because optimism on its own is inert. You and I can be optimist all day long. Hey, you and I can plant a garden and decide just to leave it and say, "There are no weeds. I shall have a bounty." Right? And do nothing. And we'll be disappointed come springtime, right? So, optimism on its own is inert. Optimism when paired with attributes is actually when it's the most effective. I pair it in the book, I pair it with self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a combination of confidence, initiative, and optimism. So, self-efficacy is I believe I can do it and I believe as I move through. Even though I don't know how exactly, I'll make it happen. That's self-efficacy. And so, if you look at those three factors of self-efficacy, each one on their own doesn't do much confidence on its own. It doesn't do much. I grew up and my dad was a private pilot. So, he took us flying all the time, every weekend almost as we could. So, I developed this love for flying, my brother and I. And we wanted to be Navy pilots. That's what drove us to the Navy. And my twin brother actually ended up flying the Harrier for the Marine Corps. I ended up taking a different turn and going to SEAL training. I love flying. I love it. I've been in hundreds of airplanes, hundreds of hours. If you put me in an airplane, I know I could pretty much fly it. I know how to fly. I've never gotten my pilot's license. I've never flown a plane. Right? So, confidence in my ability to fly is inert, right? Initiative is the next thing. You need the ability to take the first step. Okay? Because if you don't have that, you're not going anywhere. Initiative has to have purpose, right? Because initiative on its own is frenetic energy. You put my, well, he's not eight years old, put an eight-year-old in the driver's seat of a car, that kid is gonna have initiative to push that accelerator. Right? It will be dangerous if he does. So, initiative on its own needs to have direction and purpose and then of course, optimism. Optimism. I talk about optimism in a sense that it's tempered with realism. Because optimism plus realism is actually very, very effective. Now, realism is necessary because it keeps you prepared. I know I can do this. I know I can take this long drive across country by myself. My realism says I might need some gas along the way. I'm gonna put some cans of gas in the car or whatever. Realism helps prepare you. You just have to be careful with realism tipping into pessimism, right? Because if you're too realistic, it tips into pessimism. But you've gotta be able to objectively analyze risk. You have to, because if you have no realism, it tips into arrogance. Yeah. Right. So, optimism has to be tempered. So, I think optimism is an attribute, but it's an inert one that you have to pair for it to be effective. That's what I would make. That's certainly what experience is for me. (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. On the topic of arrogance, the one that jumps out, and I'm sure you get asked about this all the time, is narcissism. I do. Yeah, that was probably my- Everyone wants to talk about that attribute. (laughs) And it was my most fun chapter to write, to be honest with you. Narcissism, when I thought about what drives people, I had to go back to why I became a Navy SEAL in the first place. And I would maintain, if you ask any SEAL why he became a Navy SEAL and that guy says, "Because I'm a patriot," that guy is lying to you. He's not lying to you, he's just not telling you the whole truth. Because we're all patriots, right? I became a SEAL because I wanted to be a bad-ass. I wanted to stand out. I wanted to see if I could do it. I want it to be special, right? That's narcissism talking, right? So, narcissism is certainly pejorative word. And of course there is- Well, it's more than that because not only did you want that, you had a belief that you could do it. I did. I did. Or at least enough initiative to sign up for it. Initiative, yeah. So, it's a combination certainly, but where I wanted to explore narcissism was this idea that narcissism is a human thing. Certainly there's narcissistic personality disorder and the DSM-5 big psych bile will describe narcissism. They'll say I think it lays out like nine descriptions. If you have five or more, you have a narcissistic personality disorder. I mean, and you read these like, "Oh yeah, that's bad." Right? But then you read them it's like, "Wait a second, I actually have a little bit of that, right? Oh, I have a little bit of that too." When I started reading that, I said to myself, "Well, I think we all have a little bit of narcissism." Because all of us at some point want to feel special. All of us at some point, wanna stand out, be recognized, be noticed, beloved, be adored. And so, you dig into it and you're like, of course, because the science tells us this. When we are infants, getting looked at and adored by our parents, we are getting hit with doses of serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin. Those three chemicals. Two neuro-transmitters, one hormone, but powerful combination of this feeling of safety, love, and pleasure. Right? That's the dopamine. Just when we're getting paid attention to as an infant, that translates to adulthood. We want to feel that, right? So, I looked at narcissism, I said to myself, and I looked at all of my team guy buddies and said if none of us had this innate desire, just let's see if I can be a bad-ass, none of us would have gone down this path. Narcissism was a driver. And so, I think the reason why I would talk about is because I want people to embrace their humanness. We are all human. We all have the need for these chemicals. So, we all have a little bit of narcissism. So, the question is, can you effectively use it? Can you capitalize it? It comes with risk because too much narcissism, it's obviously detrimental, one, two, narcissism is invisible to the owner. (laughs) It's like a vampire staring in the mirror, right? Hard to see in ourselves. So, the inoculation to narcissism are relationships, loving and trusting relationships with people who will let us know if we're getting a little ahead of our skis. My wife does this for me all the time. (laughs) Yeah. And it's great. And I do it for her, right? It's a balanced relationship. But those... And not only my wife, my friends and things like that. Are these people gonna say, "Hey, okay dial it back a little bit." Because but I tell you what, if you have a desire, if you're listening to this and you're maybe, I don't care what age you are, but you have this goal or desire, I wanna be a singer or writer or a poet or I wanna be an athlete or you wanna stand out, you wanna be recognized for that, there's nothing wrong with that. Use that as a driver because it works. Just don't let it get over you. Right. So, in going through all of these attributes, you can develop an understanding of what they are and then determine how you fit into all of that. Where you excel, where your weaknesses are. There's a self-knowledge component to all of this, but let's talk about the like the practical application. Like once you kind of understand what your drivers are, what your attributes are that are motivating your behaviors, where you excel, where you need some work, how do we translate this knowledge into forward momentum? Yeah. Yeah. Well, first understand where you wanna go, right? And in what context do you want to exemplify these attributes? So, parenting and home life, you may say, "You know what? I think," I have a teenager, right? And I have two teenagers and I think I need to develop my empathy a little bit. I need to be more empathetic. Okay? I'm gonna work on that. I certainly need, I'm a patient person. I have to hyper develop my patience with teens. So, there's the family context. There's the business context. I'm in this job. What are those attributes that my job requires that would allow me to excel. Likely if you're in the job, you already have those attributes, but how do I develop them further? Or is there an attribute that I don't have a lot of, that I do wanna develop, which again can be done. You choose that and you focus on it. The key to developing attributes is stress, challenge, and uncertainty, because when they are hyper developed. Patience, you have to place yourself into a situation of impatience to develop your patience. And again, I talk about patience as one of the bi-directional ones. So, I keep on using it. There's nothing wrong with being impatient. But do you not also have to put yourself in that high-stress environment to really get a grip on just where you fall in that pecking order with that attribute? Ultimately, yes. Because that reveals where you really sit with that. That is the purest environment. What we've done with the book and on the website is we've developed an assessment tool. You have this tool. Yeah, you've got the tool. Yeah, the assessment tool. So, what we did is we developed this assessment tool for grit, mental acuity, and drive. We put together questions and then we pushed it out to about a thousand people all around the world and got data back. And that data basically gave us baselines that we could use for someone who comes and takes the assessment. So, what I say about the assessment is if you take this assessment, what it'll do is it'll tell you where you fall on these attributes as compared to other people, as compared to a group of a thousand. And that number will increase as we get the data. That's only a start point. Okay? Because ultimately you as an individual, need to ask yourself some questions about how you showed up in uncertainty. 2020 is a perfect- Barometer. Barometer yes, and example. You can kinda look back and say, okay, when I was forced to stay home almost overnight, and now I'm teaching my son advanced calculus, I'm trying to write this book, I don't have enough toilet paper, I mean, when that all happened, how was I on resilience, adaptability, open-mindedness, courage. How was I on that? How was I on task switching? Task switching was a huge one. I thought I was pretty good. I, in fact, I'm a pretty good task switcher. Home context, it was a little bit more difficult. Whereas my wife was task switching beautifully because she had been at home with small kids while I was deployed for months on end. Moms are usually, well, mom's parents who have small kids are usually phenomenal task switchers because they're just constantly doing it. They're constantly exercising that. So, the assessment tool is one way to get a a little bit of a snapshot, I call it. And then asking yourself some deliberate questions. By the way, if I'm showing up a little bit low on say open-mindedness, why is that? Let me think about some other situations where my open-mindedness was challenged. Okay? Let's see. I was at an event and someone came up to me and began talking to me about political views that were the polar opposite of mine. (laughs) What was my open-mindedness at that point? Those are ways you can start assessing your own barometer. But then the other question is, okay, do I need to develop this? Do I need to or even want to? I always say I talked about the leadership attributes. There's some professions that are self-directed. You don't need a lot of the leadership attributes to be in that profession. Now, I would maintain that probably other aspects of your life, you might be a leader, so you might wanna pay attention. However, empathy is a good example. The amount of empathy needed for a Navy SEAL, the level of empathy is not as much as say a nurse, right? So, if you're in the nursing profession, you might want a little bit more empathy. Right. Well, too much empathy for a Navy SEAL could be quite a hindrance. It could be detrimental. Yeah. You're absolutely right. I always talk about Navy SEAL empathy as a dimmer switch. Because again, most of us are family guys. And so, I always thought about it is that you you dial it up and down as you needed to. But there were times you needed to dial it way down. Because to have it too high or even smidgen too high, it will affect you. Yeah. I would think that the assessment tool, like getting a really solid picture of where you lie on the spectrum of all of these attributes would just be such a powerful tool to somebody to help them direct their path into the right. Like trying to be the square peg into the square hole. Right? Yes. Like what's the best career path? Well, here's what I'm dealing with. Like here are the careers that actually require excellence in these areas where I'm already excelling like for a young person who's trying to figure things out, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like you could sell this to ZipRecruiter and it could help them match candidates with the right jobs. Like it's a very powerful thing, right? Absolutely. And I get excited about it because of that. And the only thing I would offer is if you're younger and you're looking at this, just realize you're still- Malleable. Malleable and you probably sell a lot of dormant attributes because you haven't had a life experience or maybe that has thrown you. I mean, I had the tremendous fortune of going to BUD/S at 22 years old. That was an attribute factory. (laughs) I mean, you learn in that six months, you learn so much about yourself and your attributes. And again, a lot of it was I hadn't processed it in a way that I could articulate it. But you come at, they ask how do you feel after BUD/S? I mean, you feel so super confident because you just, you didn't... And it's not because you learned how to be a precision shot or you learned how to do halo jumps, right? You don't learn that stuff in BUD/S. It's because you just learned that in some of the most harsh situations on the planet, you made it through. And that is powerful stuff. And that's really less than an attribute. So, the younger people just have to recognize you may not think you have an attribute, but just understand you may not have been tested yet. So, don't dismiss yourself just yet. But in some ways, and I talk about again in the book, it's in some ways our values, understanding our values start to point to some of our attributes. If you value competitiveness, then you might be higher on the competitiveness scale. If you value humor, you might be higher on the humor scale. You probably are. And so, those are some clues into that. So, as somebody who has been studying this for a long time and has come up with this framework, how has that impacted like when you were a Navy SEAL commander, how has that impacted the selection process? Like because I feel like BUD/S kind of happened the way it happened and it's sort of perfect in the way that it is. Almost by accident or just by running so many people through this, it just became what it is. And it's probably not that different than it was 10 years ago. I don't know. But I would suspect that now coming into such a deep understanding of all of these attributes would alter how you look at candidates and screen them. So, yes. And I'm gonna separate them too, because the way we... What didn't have to change was the training. What did have to change was the way we looked at candidates. So, in other words, the training we recognized, whether it was BUD/S or the training I was running, was really quite good. There was not much we wanted to or needed to change because it was really quite refined and been going on. But it had proven successful for decades. All we needed to do was change what we were looking at. And what that allowed us to do in that environment at least, was to A, begin to understand more effectively why guys were faltering and not or being successful, but it also allowed us to spot the dark horses early on. Guys who may not have shown a lot of technical expertise, but they had all the attributes we needed. And they were like, "Okay, I can teach that guy to shoot okay." I mean, yeah, he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn right now, but I could teach him how to shoot. That's easy. I could do that in a day. And this is where I think organizations, companies fail because their hiring processes are typically designed around skills. Here's the resume, which we all know can be very flowery, here's all your stats. And then let's do a 30-minute interview and see how that goes. Right? And it's funny because even in interviews, I was working, while I was doing this, I bumped into a guy who ran for one of our agencies, ran a program where he'd help people develop undercover personalities. And he and I were talking about this. He's like, "Rich, this is so cool." Because one of the things we do is when we do these undercover personalities, we try to make sure we help someone develop something, a persona that's congruent with who they really are. Because what we found is that no one, even the very, very best actors can pretend to be someone else for maybe 30 days before they revert back to who they really are. And oh, by the way, challenge and uncertainty will revert you back almost immediately. So, very few of us are really, really good actors. So, some us may be able to do it for a couple of days. Some of us may be able to do it for eight hours every day when you go to work. Who knows? But someone, almost every one of us can do it for a 30-minute interview. I mean, that's easy, right? Right. Right. Right. Right. So, you can pretend to be anybody you wanna be for a 30-minute interview, which is why interviews aren't really good measure. I really am supportive at least in the hiring process of probationary periods. Now, I hate the word probationary, by the way, because it's just there's a pejorative to that too. So negative. Right. But periods where a new hire can spend some time in an organization getting the feel of that, they are assessing the attributes of the organization they wanna be a part of or they think they wanna be a part of and the organization is getting a chance to see that person in different contexts. Because again, some of these attributes have to take time and context to accurately assess. Integrity is one of those. Do the right thing. And again, I go into what do the right thing is, because it's different. It's subjective to whatever group you're in. But does this person do the right thing in front of people on their own out in town when things are going bad. So, these are all different. And by the way, one fail is not necessarily a measure of who we are. All of us are guilty of sometimes not doing the right thing or lacking some adaptability. Any one of these attributes, any one of us even if we're high on, we can find examples of, "Oh, I didn't show up with who I really am." So, you have to do it over time and in a few different contexts to actually get a good accurate feel for it Right. And above and beyond that, we were talking before the podcast about what happens so frequently is people do find themselves in the right job or position. They excel at that. And then they get promoted out of that core competency into a job where their attributes are a mismatch for the expectations. This is one of the classic problems of leadership. This is true again to leadership because so often leadership promotions are based on successes in an organization that are skills-based. Someone does really well and they they've been at the company for a while, they get promoted into a leadership position. And I always say, and I've actually since I got out of the Navy, I have been working in the kind of the leadership space. So, I've really been able to dive into it deeply. All you SEAL guys end up being consultants trying to get businesses to figure out how to run properly. (laughs) Yeah, it seems like that. But for me, it was certainly a deliberate jump into something I wasn't necessarily comfortable with, talking in front of people and teaching classes. But it was also a chance for me to again, look internally and look back at what I did as a leader and say, okay, where did I fail? Where do I think it felt good? One of the things I've realized and I'll call it a truism is that you don't get to call yourself a leader, right? It's not... That we often conflate being in charge with leader, right? Being a leader is... Saying I'm a leader is like calling yourself funny, right? Unless you're making someone laugh, you're not funny. Other people designate you a leader. Which means leadership is a behavior. It's not a position. Okay. You can be in charge, but other people will decide whether or not you are their leader in terms of how you behave towards them. And so, we begin to look at leadership from a behavior standpoint. And this is where a lot of promotional processes fail us because promotional, because a lot of us say, "Okay, if you do this and then this, and then this, you will promote to this and you'll be in charge of a bunch of people." Well, okay. Just because you're in charge of a bunch of people or just because you did this and it doesn't make you qualify necessarily to be in charge. You just you're in charge because you did what they're now doing really well. Right. Right. Which at that point, you're at risk with- It has nothing to do with the other job. Nothing to do with leading people, right? And it puts you at risk of micro-managing because you're gonna look at it as like, "No, no, no, that's not the way to do that." Right? So, oftentimes people are promoted out of what they're so good at into maybe a position of leadership. And it doesn't mean they shouldn't be there. What it means is that if that happens, you have to recognize that your job has fundamentally changed. Now you have people in your span of care. You are now, well, if you look at the leadership attributes, you are accountable for the development, the growth, the success of the people in your charge, right? And it's your job to behave in a way that allows them to say, "Okay, yeah, I would follow that guy, I would follow that girl anywhere." Right. And that's a completely different set of attributes that are required of you. It is. Yeah. And I would say, I mean, some of those are transferrable. I mean, empathy across a lot of the categories could be a good thing. Accountability is always good. But yeah, if you are a master at something, a master at a trade and it perhaps it's a singular activity. Maybe I don't know, I'm gonna say a graphic designer. I don't know how singular that is, but maybe whatever. You're working by yourself, right? Some of these leadership attributes aren't as important. I mean, authenticity, decisiveness, who knows? I mean, accountability probably, but I mean selflessness. Selflessness. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that... Well, you have a great story about that though. The story of upon graduation, getting called to run the hill. Oh yes. Yeah. Oh yeah. So, okay. That illustrates that I think pretty beautifully. Yeah, so it does. Yeah, so this was in context of trust. And so, I think the behaviors that build trust, by the way, are very similar to the behaviors that qualify leadership. Because again, trust is not just a feeling. I feel like I trust this person. It's more than that, right? It's actually a belief. A feeling is just an emotion that's rationalized, a human emotion that's what a feeling is. A belief is a human emotion that's been rationalized or justified. So, we make a belief to trust someone. You can't make anybody trust you. All you can do is behave in a way that allows them to make a decision to trust you. So, goes leadership. So, when I was studying this- So, asking somebody, "You need to trust me," is an ineffective strategy. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. "Trust me," or, "I am your leader." Those are just, if someone says that, run the other direction, right? I mean, because that's not good. And if someone says, "Trust me," just ask yourself why they're saying that. I mean, a fireman comes in the building, you got some trust there, right? You can believe that. But or I guess a Schwartzenegger shows up and says, "Come with me if you wanna live," that's another one. Right? But okay, so we were studying trust. I was working for a company called the Chapman & Co Institute. So, I still do some work with them. Wonderful leadership company out of St. Louis. We were studying this thing called trust. And I remember the story from my own SEAL training. And so, in SEAL training, it's three phases. First phase, second phase, third phase. First phase is a lot of the heavy, hard stuff. Hell Week is in there, things like that. And you go to second phase and you're doing dive training. A lot of scuba stuff's. Still hard, but you're learning how to scuba dive. And then third phase is weapons and land nav and demolition. And so, for the last five or so weeks of third phase, you go out to an island, San Clemente. We can see it off the coast here. San Clemente Island is about 10 miles long. It's about a mile wide. It's basically owned by the military. It's mostly military operations. There's an airstrip on the north end. SEAL teams go out there and do a lot of live fire or demolition. SEAL trainees go out there for the last five weeks to do their weaponeering and demolition training. And then the joke is or the word is when you go out to the island as a student is when you're on the island, no one can hear you scream, right? Because- No neighbor complaints. (laughs) Yeah, and no one hears your screams. And so, instructors can screw with you all they want and no one notices. And even though, I mean, yeah, it's the last five weeks of a six-month program, but you're still in SEAL training. So, it's still tough. So, there at San Clemente Island, they're still requiring you to do certain things to just live, right? So, you have to do PT, some sort of PT evolution physical training before you're allowed to go eat a meal. So, there were three different things you could do. Ironically, we ate three meals a day, right? So, one of them was a rope clump. So, right outside the chow hall, there was a 65-foot rope. They had those at Coronado too. But climb up and down the rope with full gear. Okay, that's where you go eat, right? That's one. The other one was a combination, and I'll get this wrong, but I'll just estimate was something like 50 pushups, 50 dips, and then like 10 pull-ups or something. And if you do those, then you go and eat. The third one was what they called the hill run. So, right next to the chow hall in the barracks, there was a hill. And the only way to describe this hill accurately, was it was long, tall, and steep. Okay? And the idea was you stood at the base of this hill and the instructor has a stopwatch and he says, "Go." He hits the stopwatch. You have to run to the top of this hill, sprint to the top of this hill. It's about I would guess 200, 300 yard sprint up to the top of this hill. There's like a little concrete monument there. You tap the monument and come back down. So, you had the time with what you had to go up and down decreased every week. And if you didn't make your time, you didn't get to, or they never starve. You basically had to go get wet and sandy and he had to eat your meal outside. Which by that time in SEAL training, you're- Wet and sandy. You're hydrophobic. You're wet and sandy as you go to the surf, you jump yourself in the surf, you just get soaking wet. And then you go roll in the sand afterwards. It's called sugar cookie, right? Awesome. Yeah, totally awesome. Sugar cookie. (laughs) And so, by that time in BUD/S, you are truly hydrophobic, right? You're just like, look, I'm gonna do this. So, that was the hill run. They had a modification for punishments. They called it the flight. So, the flight was the punishment version of the hill run which meant now you're at the base of the hill. You have all of your H harness gear. So, you have your H harness with all of your ammunition. So, that's about 30 pounds of stuff. And you're at the base. Some instructor had painted a line called the flight line. Some other statistical instructor had built like this mock control tower that he could stand up with his megaphone and yell at you. You'd stand at this thing and then you take a moving pallet. So, you'd see forklifts movies these pallets of goods, right? The wooden ones are about 30 pounds. They also have metal pallets which are about 70 pounds or so. We of course had the metal version. Only the best for SEAL students, right? So, you take a metal pallet and you put it on your back and the instructor says, "Go," and you have to sprint up the hill. Now, you're not sprinting anymore because you're carrying about 120 pounds of stuff. Right. So, you trudging up this hill, you hit the monument, come back. That's usually reserved for punishments if you screwed up whatever. If you were lucky, you didn't have to do a lot of flights when you're there. Some guys had to do a lot because they were wise asses. But that's a flight. So, it was my class. It was like the day before we were getting ready to fly back to San Diego to graduate because we were done. And we had started with I think 160 people. We were down to 38. 38 of us left. We were in the barracks cleaning up, just getting ready to think, packing and getting things ready to go. Really just on top of the world because we're done. And from the outside of the barracks, we hear, "Class 210, muster on the flight line." And all of us go, "Oh, okay." So, we all kinda begrudgingly march out there. We're in line. The instructor gets on the podium. This guy's name, it was Instructor Goodman. Right? Ironically, he was not a good man. But Goodman says, "All right." And he said, "What's the fastest hill run anybody's done so far?" And I think I'm just gonna say it was two minutes or something. He's like, "Okay, we're gonna do flights until someone beats that time." Now, just to remind reminder, hill run when you do it, you're slick. You have nothing. You just used sprinting up the hill. Yeah, no pallets. Flight is HRS pallet, right? And so, I am not certain what sound I made or face I made at that moment that cued Goodman into me. But we were all pissed, right? But I must have made a sound because he looks at me and said, "Hey, Diviney do you have a problem with that?" And so, I'm feeling a little bit snarky I guess. I step out of line I say, "Yeah, I have a problem with that." And he's like, "Why do you have a problem with that?" I was like, "Because this is stupid. Guys are gonna hurt themselves going up the hill. It's a stupid idea." Right? Now at that moment, the rest of my guys in my class are dead silent. Okay? Yeah, let me just interrupt. Like I would imagine it's highly unusual to challenge your commanding officer in that way. Yeah, or the instructor at that point. Yes, I would imagine it is. I'm not sure. I'm not... Luckily, I've only gone through BUD/S once, so I don't know. (laughs) I don't know if it's happened before. Yeah, the consequences could be dire. I will tell you this. The moment I, so my classmates were silent. Some of them I saw like we're kinda moving away from me a little bit. They didn't know what was coming down. The words left my lips in a bit, I was like, "Okay, what the hell did I just do?" Because Goodman was silent for a good, well, it seemed like hours. So, it's probably- You're not leaving the island. You're gonna be here a little bit longer. (laughs) Yeah, I don't know. And so finally he speaks up and he says, "All right, since Diviney has a problem with this, what we're gonna do instead is we're gonna run back to the barracks. We're gonna go to the auditorium and we're gonna watch movies for the rest of the afternoon." And so, now all of us are silent until someone's like smart enough to start moving before he changes his mind. So, we start running back to the barracks. High-fives, I feel great and all that stuff. So, we watch movies throughout the afternoon. But the reason why I tell that story is not because of that event. The reason why I tell that story is because 17 years later, I run into two guys from my BUD/S class. I hadn't seen them since BUD/S. I was pretty much an east coast SEAL, which means I was in Virginia Beach, west coast to San Diego. So, sometimes you just don't see guys. And I hadn't seen these guys in that long. And we were reminiscing. It was great to see them. And at one point, one of the guys says, "Hey, sir, do you remember that time you stood up the Goodman on the flight line?" Of course I hadn't thought about it, but of course remember. And I said, "Yeah." Like I like both of them at the points of serve, "Man, we'd follow you anywhere. We trust you anywhere, anytime." And obviously that's nice to hear. And these guys are good friends, right? But I thought about why does that still exist? Well, how does that trust still exist? Right? After all those years, I mean, they didn't necessarily know, I mean, I was still a SEAL. So, obviously I was obviously still active, but they hadn't served with me. So, why does that still exist? And what I realized is it came down to these attributes. It came down to the fact that I was selfless. It came down to the fact that I cared about them. The competency of my studentness or even my SEALness up to that point had nothing to do with why they were saying that. What stuck with them over time for me, in their minds, as a leader in their minds was the selflessness, was the authenticity, was the fact that I had integrity in that moment. Right? That's what stuck with them. The attributes stuck with them. Right. And I think that was really the lesson. Right. Like the attribute being your first instinct was to think about the welfare of the other guys. As it would have been a very different scenario if you said, "This is stupid because I'm gonna get injured." That's true. Yeah. That would've been stupid to say. (laughs) Admittedly, yeah. Yeah, and you would have ended up running a lot of hills of disrespect. (laughs) Yeah, I would imagine I would. Yeah. But here's the thing. People ask me all the time when I tell that story, "Hey, do you think Goodman had planned that?" Right? And what I tell them is this, Goodman was actually... It's funny, because of BUD/S instructors are like they feel like Satan when you're in BUD/S. Right? But then BUD/S ends and they're like the nicest dudes. Because they're just doing a job. They're really just pushing you. Goodman, wonderful dude. I haven't seen him since. I don't know where he is or who's doing well, but wonderful guy. The fact is, I don't know if he had planned. I don't know if he'd ever done it before. What I do know is that he probably didn't expect that response. And what I did notice after that was the instructors treated me distinctly differently. And I believe it's because they saw someone who would step out of line if I needed to, even at risk. That's selflessness. So, selflessness I define it's more than just altruism. It's more than just generosity. Selflessness involves a risk. It involves a cost to the person who's being selfless. But you have to calibrate that against chain of command, like your allegiance to chain of command, right? Right. You do. And this is where attributes come in very well. They're extremely important when you're assessing leadership. Because leaders in any organization, military specifically have to understand the balance between executing the mission as directed and commanded, and keeping the welfare of the people in their span of care in mind. There has to be a balance. Unfortunately, the military mission means that sometimes one, the mission becomes predominant over care. But every spec operator, every SEAL note, we all sign up for that. So, that's not... I mean, we go risk our lives. That's the thing. But let's just put it in a regular business sense. Sometimes you will be told to do something that's just a bad idea or outright wrong. The question is, or bad for the people in your span of care. The question is, do you have the attributes? And I would count integrity in there. I would count accountability. I would count authenticity. I would count selflessness. Do you have those? The attributes enough so that you can stand up when you need to be stood up to the leaders. But sometimes it's about also the leaders or the stuff coming down is actually the right stuff. And it's the people who you're in charge of who are complaining. Do you have the same attributes? Just say, "Hey, guys, no, this is the way it is. We're doing this." Are you steadfast in conducting that mission, right? Because that has to happen too. Leadership is tough. True leadership is tough. No one said it was easy. That's why it's hard. Right? So, but if we think about it, if I just ask your listeners to think about a great leader, and it could be someone they don't know, it could be someone in history, but even someone in their own lives. Someone in their own lives they consider a leader. Right? Ask yourself to put, I would ask them to- What are the attributes to care for that person? Yeah, to think about that person. Now think about the attributes that characterize that person, right? It's those attributes. It's authenticity, it's decisiveness, it's empathy, it's accountability. It's all those things. And those are behaviors. Those aren't skills. I always give the example of my dad. My dad was a lawyer for 50. He still practices law, right? He doesn't know much about plumbing. It's still didn't stop me from calling him when I bought my first house and I had troubles with my pipe. So, I was like, "Hey, dad, my plumbing is off." Well, dad doesn't know it all. I just know dad is always gonna be there. He's gonna listen. He's gonna help me solve the problem. He's gonna be a leader. And that's what leaders do. Yeah. The other characteristic of the story you just told is vulnerability. Like you put yourself in a vulnerable situation by doing that. So, how does vulnerability play into the equation? Like on the attributes scale or in the context of being an effective leader? Yeah, it does in both cases. Although I put vulnerability in the team ability category, it's not an attribute because I actually lumped vulnerability into humility. I think humility is vulnerability. That's what it is. It's vulnerability expressed. Hmm, I never thought about it that way. Vulnerability is incredibly important. And it's because in any team, in any high-performing team, what has to happen is something that I call dynamic subordination. So, dynamic subordination is this concept where actually the story behind that was a bunch of CEOs had asked me to draw the task organization for a high-performing team. Hey, what does that look like in a SEAL team? And I had some options, but like the pyramid that we all know didn't make sense. That's I'm in charge. You do what I say, right? That's the classic. Basically how every business and the military is structured, right? Then you have the flat model which is like became popular. Like hey, we're decentralizing everything. Everybody's equal. We all make decisions. But even then what happens is silos. Because if you have a flat line, the right end of that line makes a decision. The left end doesn't maybe know what's going on. So, that doesn't happen on a performing team. Then of course you have the upside-down pyramid, which is great. It's kind of the Greenfield's philosophical models. "Hey, I'm your leader. I work for you." Cool, but it puts a lot of burden on that leader, right? So, actually largely in frustration, I drew a blob on the whiteboard. And I said, "Where do you think the leader sits in here?" And I got answers like left side, right side, middle. And basically said, "No, all of you are right." The leader is wherever the leader needs to be in the moment. Right? So, in dynamics subornation what that means is high-performing teams understand that challenge, uncertainty, and problems can come from any angle at any moment. And in that moment, the person who is the most capable and competent and closest, steps up and takes charge, and everybody follows. It's a dynamic swap between leader and follower. It happens as the environment changes. Because once the environment changes again, then someone... This was so apparent in the SEAL teams. So apparent. I mean, it was incredible to work with guys, especially when you're working with guys and you just know, I mean, you know them, you know their silhouettes. That's how well you know them. And things happen and solutions just... People are just attacking the problem. I mean, suddenly it's my record guy who needs, we're all, okay, what does he need? Suddenly it's the assaulter. Suddenly it's me. I have to coordinate whatever. The rapid swamping was so apparent. But I'll just give everybody a real world example of this. We all know in a commercial airliner that the captain of that airplane is in charge. There's no debate that that captain is in charge of aircraft. If on taxi out to the runway, that captain gets called by the maintenance officer and the maintenance officer says, "Hey, there's a problem with your aircraft. You have to turn around." No captain worth their wings is gonna ignore that. That captain will immediately subordinate to that maintenance officer and turn that aircraft around. Okay? Aircraft turns around and gets back to the gate. Now they have to deep-plane. Captain doesn't take charge of deep-planing either. Now, the flight attendant's in charge. Right? And so, this is an example of dynamic subordination. It actually, in high-performing teams, in very effective teams, that happens all the time. What does that take? That takes vulnerability. Vulnerability though, is not just the stigma of showing your weaknesses. Vulnerability is showing your weaknesses and your strengths. Because teammates need to understand where they can lean on you because they are your strengths, and where you're gonna be leaning on them. So, vulnerability works in the team aspect. And then as a leader, vulnerability works because it shows people who are in your span of care, that you don't know it all. It shows humility. It shows that they're needed. I remember, I mean, another thing I love about the teams is everybody just understood their jobs and everybody stepped up. And this idea like I needed, I can't do what the sniper does. I can't do what the assaulter does. I can't do what the breacher does. I need them. They need me to be able to know what I do. Vulnerability helps- You may need to feel respected and they need to have agency over their own department basically. Yeah. And feel like what they do and their presence matters. Right? They are an important effective part of that team. That's where vulnerability really helps in a leadership aspect. So, when you show aspects of vulnerability, such as third phase where you are saying, "Hey, one of my jobs as an officer right now is to make sure that I'm looking out for the welfare of my guys." Okay? I'm gonna step up and show that I care about that even if it's at risk to me. I literally thought that I was gonna be running hills by myself for the rest of the day. But again, for me, it was a lesson that I enjoyed the moment, but it was interesting how I didn't really process that fully until I actually started thinking about trust and leadership later on like 20-plus years later. So, but yeah, I think it's a really interesting point. Yeah. So, much of this seems to be about matching the attributes with the demands of the job. Obviously in the context of the SEALs, if you're doing underwater demolition in the middle of the night, that's very different than being on presidential security detail. You're both SEALs, those jobs are extremely different, and there's gonna be a core competency or set of overlapping attributes that those individuals are gonna share. But at the same time, it's recognizing that there are many other attributes that are at play here. So, in thinking about it in that way, is there, like what are the crown jewels? Like in the SEAL context, like of all of these attributes, there's gotta be a hierarchy of which ones are more important than others. In the SEAL context? Yeah. Yes. I would say that the grit attributes are pretty high up. I would say the, I would say a few of the drive attributes are pretty high up especially like something like cunning. Cunning is an enormously powerful. And most SEALs you meet, the success of the Navy SEAL teams is largely based on cunning. It's not because of a super muscle- Cunning can have a pejorative. It can. It can. Interesting. But cunning really as I kinda define on the book means the ability to look outside rules and boundaries. Basically think outside the box, right? Because we are all subject to what's called functional fixedness or fixedness. And this is this idea that we are drawn to see boundaries that may or may not exist. Okay? So, we look at a problem and suddenly we place either, we look at boundaries that we're given or we place imaginary boundaries that we think are real on it versus we say, okay, what about this? First of all, are these rules real or are they imagined? If they are real, if I break them, what happens? So, the example I give is a medieval one, a fantasy one. Because I always I used to tell this to my guys too, to describe the difference between us and maybe some other people. And I would say, okay, imagine you'd get dropped into a fantasy medieval world and there's a princess in a tower guarded by a dragon, right? And the king wants that princess rescued. And the king has sent night after night to slay that dragon and rescue the princess. And night after night, has been killed by the dragon, right? You drop a special operator. And when I say, special operator, I don't mean just SEAL. I mean, spec operator, SF guy or Greenbrae, ranger, whatever. Put him in the problem. And first thing that guy asks is, "Hey, what's the mission?" "Save the princess." "Well, who gives a damn about the dragon, right? I'm gonna find a way to save the princess without hitting the dragon because I don't wanna hit the dragon, right? That dragon will kill me, right?" So, by design, special operations was created to think outside the box, to frustrate and agitate, to find ways around that people we're thinking about. That's one of the things that drew me to spec ops in the first place, was this idea of being cunning and invisibility. And like, okay, can you sneak around? So, when I was growing up, I grew up in a town in Connecticut. And I worked... One of my jobs I worked at a Marina. And the security guard at the Marina, he'd basically come on at like 5:00 in the evening and he'd stay the whole night and leave at like 8:00 in the morning once we came back. The guy's name was Ed Stoleng. And Ed, man, he was a Marine veteran. He was in World War II. He was at Iwo Jima. And we would sit there and he'd tell us the stories of Iwo Jima. And this guy, I mean, he'd bring us, I was a teenager and he'd bring me to tears. I mean, this guy was the bravest. To this day, he's one of the bravest men I've ever met. And one of the things I remember him saying, he's like, "Rich, it's hard to describe the feeling when you're advancing, right? And you're in a line of cover, say folders or whatever. And there's a open area that you have to go across to get to the next line of cover. And the first wave goes, and almost all of them get mowed down, right? And you're the second wave." And I thought about that. And first of all, I was just like, and this is why I get chills talking about him because he's just... And I haven't talked to him. He died several years ago and we were able to say hi to his sons. His sons were just as awesome. But I remember thinking that I was like, I don't know if I have an interest in being the second wave. I have an interest in sneaking around and like killing the machine gunner before he ever sees me coming. I just think that for me, that was the attraction of special operators. Can you find a way around to actually accomplish something that needs to be accomplished with minimal life loss or whatever. And so, I think that, so cunning is an important one. So, I would say cunning. I would say most of the team ability ones, humor incredibly important. I'll dive into. That's an interesting one. Yeah. I'll dive into humor in a second. I'll just finish the question. I think for the leadership ones, I think decisiveness, I think accountability, they're all pretty important. I think so. Yeah, I mean, those would seem self-evident. Yeah. And it goes- The humor one is a little more unexpected. The humor? Yeah. Yeah, so humor, so we all need to take a bow to all the comedians of the world because they do such a great service. And the reason is because humor is an unconscious or is an involuntary, laughing is an involuntary response, right? And when we laugh, what happens is we get jolted with three chemicals, two neuro-transmitters and one hormone. We get jolted with dopamine, which we all know, powerful pleasure chemical that's one of the most powerful in the world, right? We get jolted with endorphins, which is what masks pain. Right? All of us who do. I mean, you especially and endurance runners know this. Runners high, that's endorphins. It's basically by evolutionary design, it's our body saying, "Okay, humans are endurance creatures. You need to keep going. So, I'm gonna flood you with these opiates to make you feel better." Which is interesting because they didn't know really, we had endorphins. I think it was the late '60s, mid '70s, they were studying drug addiction. And they found opiate receptors in the brain. And then they said, "Well, why the heck do human brains have opiate receptors?" Well, the answer is because the human body makes its own opiates. (laughs) Opiates around. Yeah. Enter endorphins, right? That's endorphins. They're the human bodies opiates that mask pain. So, we get a dopamine, we get endorphins and then we get oxytocin. Oxytocin, a hormone, but guys like Huberman will say it's almost a neurotransmitter hormone. Neurotransmitters and hormones, just to break it down, neurotransmitters are like the fast flash, right? They enter into our system very rapidly and they dissipate very rapidly. Hormones on the other hand, enter into our system a little bit slowly, but they last a lot. They're like the fire burning into the night. So, the neurotransmitters are like the fuel on the fire and then the hormones are like the wood that keeps it burning, right? So oxytocin, it's in between, but it definitely lasts longer. That is the love. It's known as the love hormone. It's the feeling of safety and connection and love. We exchange oxytocin in really engaging conversations, in physical contact. When we experience or effect acts of kindness between human beings, oxytocin is created. Right? So, when we laugh, all three of those chemicals are pumped into our system and we have no control over it. It's why we all feel good when we laugh. Laughing makes us feel good. So, why is that important? And why does every single high-performing team I've ever encountered have at least one class clown? It's because when we're in pain and misery, humor is a hack. It's a hack into keeping ongoing, right? We get slapped with these three chemicals. So, one of the things I didn't say about dopamine, it kind of falls into that courage attribute. Courage is really interesting. This is where Huberman and I really geeked out. The act of courage, you have to, moving into our fear gives us a dopamine reward. We decide to move in, we get a dopamine reward. So, that dopamine reward is designed by evolution to tell us, "Hey, keep going. This is good, right?" It's not necessarily a constraint as to when you actually reach the goal. It's as you take steps. So, as we take step-by-step, we get dopamine reward. So, it's encouraging us to keep on going. So, we think about when we're in stress and pain, we're getting all three of those. So, the story I'll tell you is this because I remember it was, it was Hell Week. And we were sitting in the surfs and we were going through surf torture. All right? And so, you probably know what surf torture is. For those who don't, surf torture is when you as a BUD/S student, you link your arms up in the Pacific Ocean there in Coronado, which is like I think low 60s. We did a November, so it's probably high 50s. And you basically link your arms and you go to about ankle deep and then you lay down. And then the waves crash over you and then they recede. And they crash. And it is coldest thing you'll ever do. You're there like all night, right? Well, they actually time it. They have stopwatches there, so you don't get hypothermic. So, it feels like all night as a student, right? But anyway, we're in, and it's usually at night, right? So, we're in, we're getting surf-tortured. This is during Hell Week. And as usual, the instructors, because they're... It's funny when you see it on the outside. It feels sadistic when you're in it. They will drive a van onto the beach. And the guy will get out with his megaphone. He says, "Okay, anyone who wants to quit right now? I have hot chocolate and I have warm blankets and I have donuts in the van for anybody quits right now." It's kind of like "The Survivor" thing, right? You offer food for anybody who wants to quit. And a lot of people quit. But I remember him saying that, right? He pulled the van and he said that. And the guy next to me, they guy to my right immediately pipes up. He's like, "Hey, do you have any chocolate glaze donuts? Because if you don't have any chocolate glaze donuts, I'm not quitting." And I burst out laughing. He's laughing, I'm laughing. I thought it was hilarious, right? And immediately, I knew this guy's gonna make it. Because he could make a joke. He could find the funny, right? I knew I was gonna make it because I was laughing. I look over to my left, the guy next to me to my left, that guy, his face hasn't even moved. He's like he's lost in his misery. Didn't even hear the joke, right? And I said to myself- He's not gonna make it. He'll ring the bell. This guy is like five minutes later, he rang the bell. Right? So, what happened there? So, just in that moment, what happened? That my buddy cracked a joke, right? I was immediately and involuntarily flooded with dopamine which is a chemical that tells me to keep going. This is good. Endorphins, which is a chemical that says, "Actually, this doesn't feel that bad, right?" I'm masking my pain a little bit. And then oxytocin, I'm connected to this guy over there. Right? It's a courage check. It's a hack into keeping going. If we think about the pandemic, I would imagine those of us who were able to find some funny, actually started feeling better. It's why cancer patients report, "Hey, I just started focusing on funny movies. So, I started laughing more." Why? Because it's pushing all those chemicals. It's causing you to keep going. Oh, by the way, I'm sure any scientists could say the whole host of other chemicals that it's producing. Right. And I would think a means of developing a bit of anti-fragility also. Like you get this reset, right? Totally. That allows you to like hit a baseline and maybe push through to another gear. Yeah. And I think one of the things about anti-fragility is the ability to effectively recover and reframe. So, anti-fragility is based on the idea of being able to look, especially if it's a traumatic event or challenge, can you look back and can you understand and learn effectively from that experience positively? Right. And you do that in a couple of ways. First way you do it is you actually you ask better questions. So, I talk about this idea that again, high-performing teams, high-performing humans, they consistently do this. We are neurologically designed to ask questions about our environment. That's what we do to make sense of the world, right? We're doing it oftentimes unconsciously. However, we can take control and sometimes consciously control this. The problem is a lot of people are guilty of, and I've been guilty of this too, asking the wrong questions. Things like, "Why does this always happen to me? What's wrong with me? Why am I so bad at this?" Right? As soon as we place a question into our forebrain, our brain will start coming with answers. I do this experiment. I could ask you any question right now and I can say, okay, write down this question. How can I double my income in the next six months? And I'll give you 30 seconds. Write down anything that pops into your brain. Okay? If I give you 30 seconds, you're probably get a list of say five things. Now, it doesn't really matter what those five things. Some may be inane, some maybe bad ideas. Selling your kidney is not a good idea, right? Some are likely to be practical. The point is as soon as you lodge that question into your brain, your brain begins to answer it, right? This happens to us when we ask ourselves questions. Why am I so bad at this? Your brain starts to pollute your brain with why you were so bad at this, versus what are some of the things I learned? How can I be better? And so, part of the resiliency process is the ability to ask better questions as you look back on that experience. Humor, laughing about something helps reframe those questions. If you are at the point where you can laugh about something, you're in a perfect position to ask better questions about it and say, okay, how can I learn? How can I grow from this? And that's the seeds of anti-fragility. Well, I think that's a good segue into how we begin to think about 2021. Like we've emerged from 2020 and the shitshow it's been. That's right. Yeah. And all the stress that it's carried in various ways for people. So, I think it would be beneficial. I don't wanna do the kind of tropey set new year's resolutions. I'd rather focus on how we can reframe how we think about this stress that we carried in 2020 and use that as a launchpad or leverage for growth in 2021. Yeah. That's a big one. Yeah. Well, no, and it's an important one. And this is what's on everyone's mind though, right? It is. Yeah, it is. Like it's early January and we gotta get a grip on. We can't just keep in this static situation. A lot of people feel like they've just had their feet in cement for the last year. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Well, so the first point is to understand that you have made it through. Okay? So, you've actually grown because of it. So, one better question to ask is how have I grown from this? Again, that's a subjective question. So, I can't answer it for people. I will say fairly ubiquitously, that most of us have worked very effectively on our task switching attribute and our adaptability attribute. Resilience might be something we need to help ourselves with by saying, okay, what are some of the positives that came out of 2020? And how is my life better because of it? So, that's a great question. How is my life better now in January 2021 than it was in January 2020? Admittedly, that might take some thought, right? But you will come up with answers. One of the best ways to put yourself in the proper state, and I love this question, is just ask what you're grateful for. Gratitude also is an enormously powerful chemical combination. When you are truly grateful, you're getting oxytocin, you're getting DHA, you're getting dopamine. Asking yourselves, "What am I grateful for now," is a great way in. So, then you say, okay, what are some of those things I learned? What are the things I have to think about going into 2021? Okay, well, it's gonna be uncertain. We know that. So, when I think about my grit attributes, I'm gonna need a little bit of courage. If I like I'm low on courage, I should probably try to develop that a little bit. I'm definitely gonna need to have adaptability. Perseverance. Okay, I have some goals. Obviously my goals might've been derailed in January 2020. Okay, now what do I do? What are the things I can do to persevere and affect my goals in 2021 no matter what happens? And how am I going to adapt to do that? I think an enormously important, in fact, if I were to scale them I'd probably say one of the most important attributes that we can all focus on in 2021 is open-mindedness. Open-mindedness again, the closed mind is not driven. Because the closed mind is certain. And certain minds aren't curious and they're not seeking what's next. They weren't seeking what could be. And if 2020 taught us anything, is that we don't know. We don't know what's coming down the pike. And if we're open-minded enough to start understanding, okay, I'm gonna take... Now, this is a passive active. Optimism is, I would call optimism proactive pathway. Open-mindedness is a passive pathway where you're saying, okay, I am going to be open to other ideas, viewpoints, situations, so that I can try to look at them from a positive, not necessarily positive, but a proactive and effective lens. But there's between making that decision and actually effectuating it, right? That's right. You can say, "I'm open-minded," but then you find yourself in a situation and you're very much not open-minded. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we all found ourselves in that situation in 2020. And again, I come back to this idea of asking questions. Ultimately, it comes down to the questions we ask ourselves. If we find ourselves in a situation where we're feeling like, okay, this person I'm talking to seems to be of complete opposite political beliefs than me. How might I be wrong? What might this person be feeling? What might this person be experiencing that I'm not? You start to tap into empathy certainly. But again, empathy is about feeling what that person feels. That's a little bit more of a leap, but you can certainly start having a perspective without necessarily feeling. And I think- Curiosity. Curiosity. Curiosity is the buttress to open-mindedness. Absolutely. But I say, some people are more naturally curious than others. And most of those people are automatically open-minded. So, the reason why I didn't put curiosity there is because I think open-mindedness can be accessed by almost anybody just by asking the right question. Can I just... Let me give this person the situation, this event a chance. And let me start seeing what might be positive about that. Let me see it in a different light. Take myself out of my own perspective. If I'm not this 47-year-old male, former Navy SEAL, author living in Virginia, if I'm not that person, then how does this look? Right? And those are really powerful questions to ask and ones that can help open your mind quite a bit. So, it's a proactive approach to a passive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I also think here we are in 2021, we did survive 2020. So, no matter how difficult it was to reflect back on that and realize that maybe you have a little bit more resilience than perhaps you imagined, right? 100%. 100%. And again, humans are designed to be resilient. That's why we've evolved and survived as a species. We're designed to be that way. We can effectively speed it up. And we can also effectively grow from it. That's transferring to anti-fragility. But we are all here. We're all here. We're all operating. We're all in our lives. Admittedly, some of us might be in worse positions than we were at the beginning of 2020, but again, sometimes you get thrown down the hill. And when you stand up and dust yourself off, you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm I'm way further down than I was before. I gotta climb again." But the fact is you can do it. And we can do 2021. And I think if we are effectively able to understand and dissect the lessons 2020 taught each one of us individually, we are all in a position where we can crush 2021. I really believe that. I really do. Because we've been through some stuff that historically, is so unique. And that's something to just give ourselves a quick pat on the back for. What is the process of performing that dissection now for somebody who's never done anything like that? Yeah. Well, so the first process is to put yourself in a calm state, right? You wanna try to take emotion out of the equation. Very difficult, admittedly, right? But emotion tends to blur our, it's more limbic than it is for our brain. So, it blurs our logical ability to dissect. So, to the extent possible, take the emotion out of it. From that position, begin to ask yourself some questions about it. Okay? What happened? How did I respond? Was that response effective or ineffective? What can I learn from that? And then how can I grow from it? And then how can I... And then from that list, then you say, okay, how can I transfer that to what I wanna accomplish in 2021? That's a start. That's that sounds like what we call the four step in AA. (laughs) (laughs) Maybe so. Maybe so. The inventory. Yeah. Is there, in the process of learning about all these attributes, is there an attribute that comes to mind that's like the bastard stepchild? Like the often overlooked and underappreciated attribute that you realize like we should be paying more attention to this. Well, I mean, we already talked about narcissism. And the reason is because narcissism can be so dangerous, but it counts to be powerful. No, I wouldn't say that, but I think what I would call out would be the three others that I talk about in the book. The four category or the five categories outline 22 attributes. But the title of the book is 25 attributes, right? So, I talk about the others, which are patience and competitiveness and fear of rejection. When I started to look at those as attributes, I began to discover that they were unique from the other ones. Because while the other ones, if you put on a sliding scale, most of them, it could be argued that more is better. Obviously, we could make an argument against that for narcissists and things like that. But for the most part, you could say more is better. But those are the three, competitiveness, patience, and fear of rejection. I wasn't getting the same answer, right? Impatience can be just as powerful as patience. And there are very super successful people who are inpatient and it works very well for them. Fear of rejection, this idea that I care what people think to the extent that I'm gonna push myself beyond my boundaries. This is why a lot of SEALs do what they do. Some of us, I write in the book, I don't like heights, right? Skydiving was always a challenge for me. I skydived every time. I did hundreds of skydives because everybody else was and I was not going to be left behind. And I was not gonna let them down. I cared what they thought. So, why the guys who, the SEALs who don't like scuba diving still get underwater, right? So, fear of rejection can be powerful, but insouciance, I don't care what other people think is just as powerful. We all know those iconoclasts who just broke from the pack and they didn't care what anybody thought, right? Those people are very powerful too. They can be. So, the idea is where you fall on the scale. The other one is competitiveness. It's very often in the peak performance world or the performance world that competitiveness is looked at as a very, very powerful trait to have. And that competitive gene is really essential. And I don't disagree with that. What I disagree with is the implied corollary, which is non-competitiveness is bad, right? And I had to, a lot of this stuff I did a lot of self-reflection for. Right? I am not a competitive person. (laughs) I never have been. When I played sports in high school, I really played too. I played lacrosse, which was my main sport. And then I did track basically to get in shape for lacrosse. Right? I love the game and I love playing. I love the intricacy of the game. I love the stick work. I love that. I didn't really care if we won or lost. I didn't find myself emotionally moved either direction. But being part of the team- Being part of the team, I liked all that stuff, but the winning or losing piece, it didn't affect me the way I saw it was affecting other people. And I fought for a while. I was like, "Oh boy, I think this might be a problem." Right? Especially when I started thinking about SEAL training, it's like I'm not competitive. Is this a problem? What I realized is in SEAL training, BUD/S favors neither the competitive gene or the non-competitive. That's interesting. And one example of that are the two awards that are given at the end of BUD/S, are two awards given him a BUD/S class. One is the Honor Man. The Honor Man is the award for the guy who has the best scores in everything. Fastest runs, best on course time, fastest swims. It favors that competitive gene, right? You're basically given award for the best scores. The other reward is the Fire in the Gut. Fire in the Gut award is given to the person who showed the most grit and drive and perseverance through BUD/S. Often that guy who wins that has some of the lowest scores, right? So, you don't win the Fire in the Gut. It's earned. And it's based on a vote of the instructors and students. So, what that told me was the SEAL teams, and I think any high-performing team does extraordinarily well with both polarities. Because the competitive mind is extraordinarily adept and powerful at looking at a situation, especially one with boundaries and rules and saying, "Okay, how can I win in this situation?" Whereas the non-competitive mind, my mind, says, "I don't feel like playing that game. What's the other game we can play that's different. The hard worker game. What's a different pathway? I literally find myself looking at the pack of people and saying, I'm not really interested in competing. And they're all doing great work. I'm gonna do this. When you're talking about special operations, that's powerful. I think when you're talking about business, that's very powerful. Because in business aspects, certainly there are times, there are aspects of business where you have to be competitive. But there are also aspects of business where you think outside the box and kinda thinking about disruption and different things to do and not competitiveness or non-competitiveness is really important. So, both, what I say is that both, for all three, both polarities can contribute to high performance. And if you have teams that honor both, you have a really incredibly high-performing team. And the last example I give on that is my wife and I. I am typically a very patient person. My wife is not a patient person. That's her default. It works beautifully. We've been married 20 years. It's worked beautifully, right? Because when the situation requires patience, I get pushed to the front. I step up. I shouldn't say I get pushed. I step up to the front, right? When the situation requires impatience, she steps up and takes lead. And it's that dynamic swap. It's dynamic subordination in terms of patience. Yeah. Yeah, it makes me think that another application of the assessment tool is to figure out how people pair up in dating. Right? Like if you could figure out which attributes match with other attributes in terms of compatibility in a relationship. (laughs) Yeah. And I would just offer a few dates. Give it a while. It can't just be one or two days. (laughs) It has to be shorter than marriage, of course, but longer than just a few dates, right? So, you have to, I dunno what that secret sauce is. Again, I met my wife in Hawaii. My first duty station was Hawaii. I met her and we went on one date and then I left. I moved to Virginia. And so, our relationship for the first three months was all letters and phone calls. We literally wrote each other letters. And then she finally came and visited me a few times. And then I flew out six months later and proposed to her. Right? So, so I- Wow. Yeah. And we've been married for 20 years. So, something went right there. So, I can't necessarily prescribe timelines responsibly, but... And then we know of people who they date for years and you see us. Wow, we have to make room for a little fairy dust in all of this, right? I agree. Yeah. Yeah. As much as we love Andrew Huberman, like there's a mystical aspect in these things as well. Well, so you're absolutely right. And what I'll tell you is, so when I was a kid, I was just before high school or just getting high school, my mom handed me a book called "The Key to Yourself." It's written by Venice Bloodworth. It was written in the '50s. "The Key to Yourself" is a book that explained the law of attraction and visualizing and all that stuff. And I was enamored with this stuff. I read that book over and over again. I began to read everything I could on the powerless of the conscious mind and law of attraction and things like that. And I began to, my brother too, and I began to practice it and start writing things down and visualizing and things like that. And it started working for me. I mean, and the first thing that happened was like I wanted a Jeep. I wanted a Jeep CJ-7 as a high school car. And my brother did too. And so, we visualized that and I could just picture myself driving it. Senior year, I got a Jeep, a 1984 Jeep CJ-7. Powerful manifester. I drive it to this day. It's at the airport right now waiting for me. I've kept that car. Right? Same thing happened when I went to college and I wanted to get an ROTC scholarship. I began to visualize it. Same thing happened when I wanted to be a SEAL and the selection was really tough. And they were only selecting a few people. So, well, I'm neither here to promote or purport the efficacy of metaphysics. Right? I do believe that this idea of visualization, of positive thinking, of optimism works. I believe there's stuff yet to be studied in terms of why it works. I would say one practical, just because I do like to try to put some science around some of it, is that if we just look at this 11 million bits of information that comes into our systems every second. When we decide on something, when we write something down or decide on a goal, suddenly that's telling our brains, our forebrains, "Okay, notice things about that." Same thing when you buy a car and suddenly that car is everywhere. It's like, "Oh my God, did everybody buy this car? It's everywhere." You hadn't noticed that car before. It's because you just put that in your forebrain. You basically told your forebrain out of that 11 million bits, if something along this line comes, I want you to notice it. Right? So, I think the power of visualization, I think the power of positive thinking, optimism. And I'm really a big believer on writing things down. I think writing goals down, and as specifically as you can get, I think is a powerful evolution because there's a merger of the physical and the mental kinda cements. And I've done that my whole life. Yeah, it makes it real. It makes it real. Yeah. And I tell the story. I did that for my... I wrote down at one point. I was like I really wanna meet one of my dreams. I wrote down. And I still, I had these small notepad sheets, the real small ones. And I started writing down just what I thought my perfect woman, just description of my perfect woman. And it took about four of these things to write down all the things. And I just wrote it down and put it away, put it in a drawer. And I remember the date that I was on, my first date with my wife, and I remember we were talking and in the back of my mind, I was like, "Oh my God, these things are kinda clicking off." And I like, and it just worked out. I still have those sheets by the way. And I showed it to her years later. I said this and she was blown away. But I think understanding that, getting that clear in your head helps put that lodge that into your brain Powerful creator, Rich Diviney. Well, thank you. (laughs) Yeah. All right, we gotta lay on this plane, but I'm not gonna let you go without asking you, I know you can't speak to the specifics of any of the operations that you've been on, but I'm interested if you could share any experiences that you've had that you're comfortable sharing that maybe shifted your perception while serving or kind of informed the work that you do now. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll tell you one story. And nothing... It's an operation and nothing happened, right?. Nothing combat happened. So, we were tasked with an operation where we, so we got some of these back up. We got some intelligence on something that was gonna happen in the village during the daytime. In Afghanistan or? This was Iraq. Yeah. And so, when you get something like that, you say, okay, what do we wanna effect and how can we affect that? Sometimes that means you okay, what you're gonna do what's called a remain-over-day operation. So, what that means is you're gonna find a place on the map, you're gonna go in at night. You're gonna put yourself there in a position where you can watch at effective needed. And you'd just sit there all day and just watch. It's kinda like a recon mission, but you have hopefully an objective if something happens. And then, affected if effective. So, we had one of these things. We had intelligence that something was gonna happen. So, we looked at it and said, okay, this was in a village in Iraq. And we picked a compound that we were in. Okay, we'll sit here. It's a good visibility. We can put everybody hide. No one knows we're there. So, we go in, in the wee hours of the morning is still dark. We descend into this compound silently. Of course, these people have no clue that we're coming and now we're gonna be there all day. So, it's the multi-generational houses. So, you have grandmas down to babies. So, we're making sure everybody's positioned, all the civilians are safe. We're positioning our guys so they can see all that stuff. I'm in charge of the mission on the OIC. And while I'm walking around, I'm noticing new this little girl. She's following me around. This little girl was probably six years old, six or seven. She's following me around. She's trying to tell me something, but I'm working, so I can't stop to address it just yet. But once everything is settled down, I brought the terp over. I said, "Hey, can you tell me what this little girl is saying?" And so, he asked her and she says, she tells him. And he says, "Yeah, she said you remind her of some movie star, some Iraqi movie star. And she wants to know if you can play a game with her, if you wanna play a game with her." And so I said, "Sure." Those types of missions can often be very boring until something happens. So, we knew we were in the long haul, just gonna settle in. Yeah, sure. So, she runs into a room, she grabs this game, she comes out. And we start playing. And the only way, I don't know, I mean, this ages us out a little bit, but I don't know if you remember a game called Tribulation. But this game, it's a math game. It's like you have numbers and you have to, you get a number and you have to find out how to multiply to it or whatever. It was kind of an Iraqi version of this. It was something having to do with math. And we start playing this game. And two things happen that I notice. The first thing I noticed is that the terp got up and left. I didn't even notice he left. Okay? Because now it's just two human beings having the experience from just playing the game that this little girl. Then the second thing I noticed was this girl was incredibly smart. I mean, she was kicking my ass at this thing. I mean, she was incredibly bright and smart and just really with it. And so, we play this game throughout the day. But she points at which I had to get up and work. I work and then she comes back. And then what we were looking to have happen, never happened and end up being a pretty boring day. So, we play periodically throughout the day. Now the sun goes down. We wait until it's time. And then we're getting ready to leave and go back to our pickup zone where the helicopters can get us. So, we get everything together. We're up and moving, working. This girl is following me around again trying to tell me something. Finally, we're getting ready to step out and leave. And I bring the terp over and I say, "Hey, can you tell me what she's saying?" He asked her and he says, "Hey, she's wondering if you can come back tomorrow and play with her?" And at that point, I realized you ask yourself, "Okay, is the truth the best thing here right now?" And so, I remember getting on one of my knees and I put my hands on her shoulders. And I said, "Tell her that if I'm ever back here again, I promise I'll come play with her." And he told her, and that seemed to satisfy her. I hugged her and we left. And I never went back. And I'm glad I never went back. Because if spec ops guys have to go to the same place twice, then you know it's probably not a good thing. Right? And so, as I went through my career and I have processed it, I realized everything that we did out there, I with my troop and team, I have no regrets. We acted honorably. We act with integrity. I don't lose sleep. I'm fine with everything, which I'm fortunate. I know that's not the case for everybody. Because war is tough. I think about, I see that girls face a lot. Like all the time. I can still picture her face. And I wonder if she's okay. I wonder how she's doing. I wonder where she is. And I wonder... And she was so smart. I wonder, did she ever, was she ever able to affect that intelligence, that talent, that just the beauty inside of her. And then I wonder about all these other kids. It doesn't have to be at a town in Iraq. It can be a kid in LA. It can be a kid in New York. I mean, how many of those kids are out there that don't have the resources or some of the tools to be able to start realizing their own potential. And so, I think a lot about it. I call it finding Einstein. Like where's our next Einstein. This girl could have been or could be our next Einstein. I am certainly not it, but I'm really, really, I get excited about human potential. This idea that we as humans can imagine something that doesn't exist and then bring it into an existence. And so, that type of, and we do that, that type of evolution, that type of process is just very inspiring to me. And those people who can help us evolve are inspiring as well. And so, that's really, for me, it's all about human potential human performance. Can I think about things I've learned to help people start to explore their own potential, find their own potential if their parents or if they're in the lives of young people, can they help those young people start to explore? Can we start drawing out some of those Einstein's because ultimately, we can do great things. And there are some leaders. And I don't know if this little girl was one of them, but that's a- Yeah, it seems like something that should be a social mandate. I mean, you would have to suspect there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people walking the earth who are brilliantly talented in some way or another who are never able to tap into the right vein in order to become fully expressed in that. And it's almost a miracle when that person who has that talent is able to figure out how to get the resources to be fully expressed in that. Like that's almost the fluke when it should be the other way around. That's exactly right. And you're dealing with a kid in a small village in a remote part of the world, the chances that that person is gonna find what they need to support them in that expression is extremely limited. It really is. And the key is, and at least from my perspective is let's start with ourselves. We have so much inside of ourselves. I mean, if an average guy, I had an average upbringing. I was an average student. I was an average athlete. If an average guy like me can- All you SEALs guys with this average stuff. Come on now. (laughs) (laughs) Yeah. But I mean, if you can affect, I mean we're all in some ways, unless we're Mozart, we're all average, at least a little bit, right? But if I can affect, again, environment matters certainly. But if I can start digging into my own attributes, can people start to think about, "Hey, it can start inside." It always does. It always does. And how do we best understand ourselves first? But you need to understand the engine before you start tweaking it and putting putting high-speed stuff on it, right? So, I sometimes I get frustrated with all these gimmicks and hacks that say, "Oh, do this, do that." It's like, well, if you don't understand your own engine first, then you might put something on it that's gonna blow it. Yeah, you're just revving it in park. Yeah, you're revving it in park. So, what are some ways we can begin to understand ourselves? And the best news of all is we all have uncertainty and challenge and strife in our lives. And those are wonderful crucibles inside of which we can start understanding ourselves. Yeah. And the good news is 2021 is here. 2021 is here. Congratulations. (laughs) You explore that, right? You got a whole year to dive into that hole. And the best way to begin that process is to pick up Rich's new book, "The Attributes." You can go to theattributes.com. You can check out the assessment tool, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question for people to start. The assessment tool, we partnered with Typeform, Awesome company. They've helped us put it together. Assessment tool is free. So, while I would recommend definitely the book, we'll break down the attributes for you so you can understand exactly what they are. The assessment tool will help you get a sense of where you stand. And then I've thrown some stuff on there to help guide you in developing the ones you wanna develop too. Cool. So, yeah enjoy. Right on. Book comes out January 18th? January 26. 26. All right. Pre-order it now. Pre-order it now. And I will say, we're gonna do something special. If you pre-order the book, you'll get a ticket to a live stream that I'm gonna do with Huberman. All right? All right. And we're gonna to talk about the book. We're gonna ask questions. We'll talk about the book. We'll allow people to ask questions and have a conversation about it, but we'll also give a sneak preview onto some of the stuff he and I have been working on for the last four years. That's very cool. That's worth the price of the book right there. (laughs) Yeah. So, that'll be offered if you pick up a pre-order and you'll get your pre-order purchase, we'll give you a ticket to that. Excellent. Great talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed that. Come back and talk to me again sometime. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right, Rich, good luck with the book. Thanks. Peace. Yeah. Nice.
This is the kinda shit middle aged white guys jerk off to
Is he saying the same things as Jocko?