Kill and Survive: A Stealth Pilot's Secrets of Success | Bill Crawford | TEDxRexburg

I have to start with a confession tonight I'm an old fighter pilot and we're known as big fat liars we have a rule it's called the 10% rule and with a 10% rule it means that as long as anything I say is ten percent true it's totally accepted all right so with that I'm here to tell you a secret it's a secret I learned as a fighter and bomber pilot in the Air Force it's how to become the best in the world at what you do I'd like to start by sharing a conversation I had with my teenage son I told him your life is going to be hard it can be hard because you decided not to pay the price to become valuable and we'll be left with limited options or it can be hard because you've paid the price and paying the price is hard but if you'll pay the price to become valuable and your options become unlimited ever since I was a little dude I wanted to be a fighter pilot and in 1992 I was an ROTC cadet at BYU studying to become a fighter pilot I was paying my own way I was working hard and one day I walked into the ROTC building and a staff member said you're not going to be a fighter pilot I looked at him and I said why not he said the Air Force has cut the number of pilot training slots from a thousand a year down to about a hundred I looked him in the eye and I said I don't care if they only choose one as long as they choose one it's going to be me and about a year later I was awarded a scholarship for being the top pilot candidate in the nation now you might be saying well that's great but let me explain something to you the people who know me best would say I'm not smart enough I'm not tall enough I'm not good-looking enough and yet I made up my mind that I would become the best at what I did so when you when somebody tells you that you can't do what you want to do look them in the eye and say there's always room at the top for the best then all you have to do is be the best at what you do and there will be a place for you I'd like to illustrate with an example in 2003 I was part of an elite group of Air Force pilots who flew the b-2 stealth bomber we were tasked with taking down Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq flying 36-hour nonstop missions we flew from Whiteman Air Force Base Missouri across the Atlantic to downtown Baghdad some of the most heavily defended airspace on the planet using stealth technology and precision weapons we targeted high-value command centers headquarters and other targets I still remember how Baghdad looked as we approached from high altitude it looked a lot like this the lights were still on it looked like Kansas City Missouri or st. Louis or Phoenix or Rexburg except for that smoke drifted across those lights creating an eerie glow from the combat that raged beneath us although we had left 18 hours prior we arrived to the target within one minute of our assigned time pilots on the nights before and the nights after this mission reported surface-to-air missiles but this night we didn't see any of that we released 14 mm precision weapons on several targets in and around Baghdad and I'll tell you something right now when people tell you that stealth works for you guys that's great but when you're flying in the missile zone you're really thinking about does this really work so as we traverse the the target area and came home everything worked like clockwork really it was nearly an uneventful mission almost routine we returned home 36 hours after we departed and we were undetected by the enemy and unscathed the stealth bomber and the pilots who fly it are truly the best in the world at what they do I'd like to talk a little bit about what it takes to become the best in the world that's the secret I want you to take away tonight a lot of people have the misunderstanding that execution is the key to excellence and while execution is an important part of it it's only a small part let me illustrate with one of my passions I'm passionate about pizza I love pizza right I can tell there's a few of it here who also love pizza but in my case it's kind of an obsession and believe it or not I try to be the best in the world the best in the world at making pizza now one day I was talking to a guy who owns his own pizzeria and I asked him a question are you going to the expo he looked at me the expo just so you guys know is a place where thousands of independent pizzeria owners gather every year to share best practices to learn to improve their businesses to grow their top line to improve their bottom line but most importantly to learn management principles that will help them have better lives because they won't be stuck as slaves in their own businesses this guy said to me I can't go to some Expo I'm too busy making pizza that's a classic example of execution mode the guy is stuck in execution mode execution alone doesn't work because it robs you of the chance to learn from your experience so how did we do it in the Air Force what's the secret we had a very simple model plan execute debrief let me illustrate by discussing a little more detail about that 36 hour mission I flew four hours prior to takeoff a crew of numerous pilots whether people intelligence officers etc spent planning this mission they worked around the clock in shifts to plan every detail from the targets to the weapons to the threats headings altitudes frequencies country clearances and a thousand other details that I can't remember actually the planning started way before that it started back in 1992 when I was at ROTC cadet who made up my mind that I'd be the best in the world at what I did after the 24-hour planning periods over we have the execution phase in our case 36 hours we took off from Whiteman which is in the heartland of America flew all the way to Baghdad and all the way back during that time we had no fewer than five aerial refueling --zz now imagine two crew members working together for 36 hours in the air and having to refuel under a tanker both flying at 300 miles an hour 24,000 feet with minor variations in our positioning as we took on that fuel it's exhausting and by the end of this mission we had been on the job for 40 hours straight now what would you want to do after being on the job for 40 hours straight you'd go home right you want to go home we wanted to go home pretty badly but we spent the next two hours after landing in a debrief and in the debrief we answered five questions what happened what went right what went wrong why and what can we learn from this let me show you what that debrief looks like on a pie graph because I think no TED talk would be complete without a pie graph so here's your pie graph and what you see is that 58 percent of the time was spent in the execution phase and whatever other numbers up there 39 percent planning and 3% 3% of the time was spent in the debrief but that 3% makes all the difference that's where the learning takes place that's where the improvement happens so how do you debrief well the first step is to ask what happened now in the what happened phase it sounds simple but it's really not it's really actually difficult because our nature our nature is that we want to defend ourselves we want to blame somebody else for what's gone wrong and so we've walked right into a situation where we're just trying to deconstruct what happened here and somebody becomes defensive so this what happened phase gives us a chance to reconstruct the events objectively we're not trying to place blame or judgment we just list out in order what we did then we ask the question what went right we want to keep doing those things right so we record that we want to get good at it what went right next what went wrong well this is a really important question but once again if you'll notice it doesn't say who screwed up it's really easy to say who screwed up but it's really important that we not do that because what went wrong gives us a chance to break down the next question why and once again it doesn't say who it says why why did that go wrong if we can do that we can get to a root cause identify what's called a lessons learned and roll that back into our planning cycle so before the next aircrew took off for the their combat mission in Iraq our lessons learned we're already incorporated into the planning cycle so that the next pilots benefited from anything we saw that might have helped them and incorporate improvements in my flying but also in the planning and the flying of those around me that's how you become the best in the world so you might be sitting there going we'll bill that's great but I'm never going to drop bombs and I'm never going to fight bad guys give me something I can use I've used this principle to get into Harvard Business School and where you're like well yeah it may be you're smart but the people who know me would disagree with that right the people who know me best go I don't know how he did that actually to tell you the truth I'm not sure how I did it either and when I got to Harvard they were wondering themselves but if I spent the time learning from my mistakes practicing and getting better I've used this principle and sales product development product support I've used it in my teaching and believe it or not I used it preparing for tonight's talk I want to share one last example with you from my teaching I teach by the case method it's kind of grueling I have to spend hours probably on a new case we're talking between six and eight hours if it's one I'm familiar with it's less than that but I prepare myself upfront just like I did in the b2 then I execute it's the most visible part of the activity but it's actually one of the shorter times it's what everybody sees and then even though it's been a long day and even though I'm tired and even though I want to go home after I'm done teaching I go back into my office and I answer five questions what happened what went right what went wrong why and what can I learn I record careful notes on the things I'm going to improve next time I teach sometimes those notes are recorded and I use them the next day sometimes they only apply to a specific lesson and I'll use them the next time I teach that lesson so tonight I want to end with a challenge I want you to decide now to become the best in the world at whatever you want to do I want you to commit to paying that price it's only three percent and with that three percent I want you to ask five questions what happened what went right what went wrong why and what can we learn from it thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 647,127

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Achievement, Change, Education, Learning, Passion

Id: rF5hDwZa7-0

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2016