Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 6

Episode Date: July 17, 2017

Questions from the Internet, Round 2. My philosophy on training, Terrorism in Europe, Influential books, thoughts on self defense and courses like Sheepdog Response, and closing with my thoughts on the trend and desire to "Hack" your life.

Episode six, here we go from the cleared hot studios in Montana. Yeah, I'm just kidding. I don't have a studio. I'm sitting in my basement, which is pretty cool. I've never owned a basement before, and the windows down here have these little ladders that go up to the backyard, which I have probably a building requirement. It kind of makes me think like I'm in the Batcave, so that's what we're going to go with.

So episode six, I'm still by myself. Back on the road, Tuesday. I'm going to get around some interesting people and definitely plan on picking their mind, but until then, more questions from the internet. So here we go. Let's dive right in. I'm looking at danger close now. Question number one is about training, specifically physical training, and it reads, what is my philosophy on working out, specifically strength training, crossfit, cardio, etc. Well, my theory is that there is no downside to being a strong human being. I can't think of any negative consequences to being strong.

Having said that, I think it's important that you match the demands of your real-life challenges, whether that's occupational or recreational, to the demands that you see inside of the gym. I think most people fall into the category of general fitness, and very few people truly fall into the category of specialized, training. So my theory is that if you're not a triathlete or a long distance runner or fill in the blank, something that is highly specialized, you should touch a lot of things throughout your training week or month or cycle, however long it might be. You're much better served with a broad stimulus than a scalpel. Personally, I think you should train for your worst or most challenging day.

and what I mean by that is even if you're just recreational and you're training to go hiking, don't train for the bare bones minimums. Always set a standard that you want to feel comfortable meeting when everything that you think is going to go correctly goes in the opposite direction. So therefore you're going to be prepared. And even if everything goes wrong, you're still going to be just fine. One thing I've noticed to be true, very true, across just about everybody, I've ever talked to is that in environments where you actually need real strength, you're going to have to have that strength at a pretty high or near maximal heart rate. You're going to be served a lot better

if in the gym you can experience those two things together, as opposed to breaking your training up and doing just strength and then just high heart rate. I haven't seen a lot of success with an individual approach with those two things being slammed together when life demands it of you. So train like you fight. It's a common term inside of the military police, LEO. As for my myself. I set pretty simple rules. I try to sweat at least once a day, twice if I can, and I don't get too tied to where that sweat's going to come from. Just like everybody else, I have constraints in my time, and I have the best laid intentions every week or every day or the beginning of every cycle, and quite often things don't go out the way that I want them to go. So I changed it on

the fly, and I get in what I can, but I make sure I try to sweat every single day. And with that, I try to find a routine, and I think you should find a routine that positively impacts your life and not controls your life. Fitness and training is supposed to make the rest of your life better. It is not supposed to be your life. Again, that's just Andy Stomf's opinion, take it or leave it. But I've seen many people who reverse that and fitness becomes the end state and what ends up happening is they give up quality of life. And that's not a choice that I'm willing to make. working out's great if you're going to work out and you really want to optimize your training you got to talk about diet i'm not nearly educated enough on diet to give any dietary advice other than the following don't eat like a garbage disposal

and after any meal if your fingers are orange because they've been going into an aluminum foil bag and that contents of them been shoved in your face you might be on the wrong track if you want to get advice on I suggest you seek out guys like Rob Wolf. He is a genius and the stuff that he puts out is amazing. So check him out. As far as functional training goes versus the way that I used to train, when I first got into the SEAL teams, you know, not a lot of people are going to talk to you when you first get there because you're a brand new guy. So what you basically end up doing is watching what other people do and you emulate their behavior. And when I first got there in the late 90s, it was split between kind of two crowds. There was the weight stack.

crew, right, the muscle heads. And then there was the, the people who trained very similar to triathletes. They did long distance running, long distance swimming, not really much on the biking side of the house, but I guess some guys had some bikes, but it was more those two things. And there wasn't a whole lot in between. So I watched a guy going to the gym, watched his routine, and it pretty much did that for about eight years. The classic chest and tries, back and buys, and then my leg day was running on the beach. And I repeated that for, yeah, about eight years, which worked well at the time.

And then when I got injured in 2005, my training methodology switched and I got exposed to functional training. And one of the things that resonated most with me in the description of that type of training. And the type of training I'm talking about, I found CrossFit specifically to rehab from an injury, sustained at work,

was when it was described in the manner of movements that you are going to encounter in everyday life. You know, things you'll find on a job site, things that a housewife would be tasked with, picking something up and putting it overhead. And especially when the compare and contrast between a functional movement, meaning something that you would, or the description I'll give is something that you would encounter in real life, versus a contrive movement or a isolation movement. And when I was asked, you know, when had I ever been challenged with the movements

that I had been doing previously, I didn't really have a good answer. And then as soon as I started training in a more functional capacity, the difference in my performance was, it was unbelievable. Not only was I was able to rehab, but I was able to rehab and come back lighter, yet more effective than I was before. I was stronger, I was faster,

I had better endurance. And since that day, I haven't turned back. The training I do now is definitely at a lower intensity level than it was when I was in the military because my life is at a lower physical intensity level than it was in the military. I used to train to run around with my body armor and carry a gun. I hung those spurs up. And it took me a bit to realize I don't need to train like that anymore. I don't need to smash myself into the ground every single day.

I don't need to smash myself into the ground. every single day because I'm going for longevity now and the ability to do the things I enjoy for as long as I possibly can but I still take the same methodology the functional training methodology I just apply it slightly differently and I try to touch a few more things that I wasn't touching when I was in the military I wasn't hopping on the spin bike back then it was much more around heavier weights getting as strong as possible

and working on my endurance. I think I'm going to train that way for the rest of my life because I still can't get past the question of if you don't get challenged with it in real life, what are you doing using it in your training routine? To me, that's the litmus test. If it doesn't directly impact and enhance the real life performance and improvement, then I don't have time for it.

Everybody's got a limited schedule. I choose not to add things into mind that aren't going to have a direct and positive impact. Question number two. I think was spawned from something that I said in episode number five when I was talking briefly about going to marriage counseling. And the question was, why did I, or we, my wife and I, go see a marriage counselor? The answer is pretty simple.

We have had issues throughout the course of our marriage. It will be 17 years this February. And it has not been a straight line. It's been a sign wave where we've had some times that were very high. and there's been some times that were very low. And I think we've flirted with the idea on more than one occasion of going our separate ways. And the anchoring point in that was our combined love for our children. We got two points, about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, where we were at one of those lower points.

And we decided that we needed to seek outside professional help. So how do we get to that point? Or, you know, that's not really answering the question. So how do we get to that point and why do we decide to go? We got to that point, I would say largely because it was my fault. And I mean that I was extremely selfish while I was serving in the military. I didn't mean to be selfish. I didn't realize how selfish I was being specifically with my time and attention while I was in.

But I was extremely myopically focused on my job. The easiest way to say it would be that work was my number one priority. I was training, deploying, training, deploying at nauseam for a very long period of time. That was required to thrive and survive at that occupation, but at the same time it was a choice. And it was a choice that I made very easily in the moment and in that time period, and it took a long time after the fact to truly understand the impact that it had. with that choice came some negative consequences. Communication strain, for one. Not only the fact that you had less time to talk, but especially when you're deployed,

it's your connectivity, especially in the earlier era of the global war on terror. It was much more difficult. Email not as often. Phone call, definitely not as often. So you had less talking and less times to communicate. And the reality is when I was home. I was physically present, but I couldn't. turn my mind off from thinking about work.

So what happens with that schedule of train deploy, train deploy, train deploy, the person that you're with has to be extremely independent. They develop an ebb and flow of their own life and at some point you become a distraction and a disruption to the life. So using words that my wife has told me, yes, she was extremely happy when I would come home. when obviously she was very grateful that I was that I was unharmed, but at the same time, it was disruptive to her everyday life. So we went to counseling for each other.

And like I said, our kids were our anchoring point in that decision to go. Because even if we had made the decision to separate, you know, it's 2017. There's plenty of families out there that don't share of the same roof. But we wanted to have an understanding of what would be required, to do that. And the bottom line was, is we wanted to make sure that regardless of the decision we made for ourselves, that it didn't negatively impact our children. We wanted to set the example for our kids with our behavior. We wanted to show them what healthy relationship and communication can look like. I wanted to show them what proper conflict resolution between two adults looks like.

And I specifically myself wanted to show my kids that it's okay to ask for help. I mean, I certainly don't know everything, and I'm not an expert at many things at all, relationships being one of them, and I needed help. We also needed that third-party impartiality or objectivity. I can't speak for anybody else, but I definitely have found myself at some points in my life unable to see through my own bullshit. And it's amazing what happens when you take two people and put an objective, neutral, third party in the middle of them. They can literally repeat what one of the parties is saying, and your partner will actually hear that person because they're stuck behind their own wall of bullshit as well, and they need that objective third party to help break through it. We were at that place where we needed that. And last thing I'll say about why I went to counseling is one of the major decision points for me was the realization that I don't want to be alone.

And I don't want my kids to be alone. I don't want them to go through life by themselves because they're afraid of a long-term, lasting, loving relationship because of what they saw for my wife and I. And it was a difficult decision to make for us to go there. It was an extremely difficult course, but we were better people coming back from it. And I think there's been huge positive impact on our family. But it takes work every single day. Don't think if you are trying to figure out whether or not you can go to counseling that it's some magic pill that you're going to take and it's going to be done after that. let's just say that that's the first step down a road that could be miles, if not hundreds of miles long.

And it's going to take work every day for the rest of your life. So that's why we went to counseling. Question number three, what are some influential books that I would recommend? So I'm going to go with a disclaimer on this one as well before I answer the question. And the disclaimer is pretty simple. I am not a literary genius by any stretch of the imagination. If you're looking for a great resource for books and a great reference for books, I'm going to point you directly at Jocko Willink. He has an awesome podcast called The Jocko Podcast, and he has discussed and reviewed nearly every book that I could possibly recommend that has been influential for me.

He's a complete psychopath in the best sense of the word. Love the guy. I love what he's doing. I love his message. He was also an English major. He knows many large words, and he can break down the books at a level that I'm not capable of doing. So check it out.

You'll be happy that you did. If I was to recommend a book, the first book that I would recommend would be about face. It was about Colonel David Hackworth in his entire military career from soup to nuts, from inception all the way till the end. It's a thick book. This sucker's got to be seven inches thick, but it's awesome. I think I've read it three or four times. The first time I read it, I was maybe a lot.

a hundred pages into it and I was already trying to figure out how to get a hold of the guy and unfortunately he had died just a few years before I picked it up but it's a it's a long read but it's a worthwhile read second book I would recommend is called Boyd the fighter pilot who changed the art of war and he was actually a fighter pilot not a spec ops guy definitely not a seal but there's a concept discussed in this book called the udaloupe observe orient decide and act and maybe some other day I'll dig into that a little bit deeper. Inherently, I think a lot of people who think tactically and think critically, that's the way that their mind works. But it's very interesting to dive into the subject, which he does in a couple of chapters in the book,

and explain a thought process that Speck War has now put on paper and teaches to junior leaders. So in case they do get stuck, they have a template to move forward. So again, it's Boyd to Fighter Potter who changed the art of war. and the last book that I would recommend actually comes from the person whose podcast I recommended. It was a book by Jocko Willink and Laf Babin called Extreme Ownership. And I couldn't agree with the principles in that book more. It's about owning your actions, integrity, responsibility, humility, all of those things. So those are the three books, About Face, Boyd, and Extreme Ownership.

And on the question, actually, I'll just answer the fourth question now. and that is am I ever going to write a book? The answer to that is probably not. I personally feel like I'm tapped out at a coloring book, and I don't think there's much of a market for that. And any time that I do have the desire to write, which I occasionally do, and I needed an outlet to not argue with people in the line of Starbucks,

which is where my blog idea was originally formulated. I have a blog called Confessions of an Idiot. I don't write on it at on any given routine or structure, but occasionally when I have something to say, I'll throw it up there. If you want to see something that I've written, go there. www.com. And before you ask me why I called it that, it's because I'm an idiot.

Question number four. Thoughts on terrorism in Europe. Man, I have a lot of thoughts on terrorism in Europe, but I'm going to hold off on really digging into this because in the next few weeks, I'm actually going to be with some people who are from Europe and I think it would be a much better discussion

with me sitting across from somebody and asking them their opinion about their hometown, about their country of origin, as opposed to just throwing my thoughts out there. So I'm not going to dig into this one too deep because we're going to get into it shortly. But I will say this about what I see going on in Europe in the modern day.

I see it as a fortune cookie for the United States of America. we have the opportunity to watch what is happening separated by an ocean and decide whether or not the rules and regulations and structure of that country are serving their citizens or are being detrimental to their citizens. It's a fortune cookie and it gives us the ability to see a theory tested before it hits the United States. Now, my thoughts on it coming to the United States, I think it's here. I think it's coming. I think it's here. I think things like San Bernardino are unfortunately a look into the future of what we'll experience more of. And I think we're in a forever war. I think that the enemy that we're facing now, we're going to be facing for hundreds of years. And I think we need to see. strap in as a society. Question five ties in really well to question four. And it was,

what are my thoughts on courses like the sheepdog response, which are run by Tim Kennedy? If you don't know who Tim Kennedy is, he is a, or was a, I believe he just retired from professional fighting, but he was a UFC mixed martial artist fighter. I believe his background is in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but he is also an Army Special Forces, Ranger qualified sniper. still active, still deploying to war zones. So he runs sheepdog response. And in general, I have never attended sheepdog response, so I can't educate, I can't from an articulate level speak about what happens in that course, but from a conceptual level,

I think it's really good. I've met Tim twice. Seems like an awesome guy. And at the end of the day, I believe what he says when he says he's trying to make a difference, and that's all I care about. You don't have to be a soldier to make a difference. And I hope that rings true to anybody that hears this who thinks that the only people who can fight are soldiers

because that's 100% absolutely untrue. You do not have to be a soldier to make a difference. How do you make a difference? Well, it starts between your ears. And it starts with embracing violence. And I've talked about this when I was talking with Tony Blower on episode number four. And I don't mean embracing violence.

embrace squaring off of somebody in a bar fight or squaring off of somebody in an alley or two idiots punching each other in the face. I mean, embrace the fact that the world we live in is violent and it is populated with sharp corners and that you can put yourself into a bubble if you want to and pretend that the world has rounded corners. But if you leave your artificial environment that you are trying to force on the reality of the world, your bubble is going to pop and you're going to be completely unprepared. The beginning of preparation starts with embracing the fact that we live in a violent world. And whatever it is you choose to do with your life, I want you to do it as violently as humanly possible. I'm talking about commitment, conviction, and the will to fight.

Sometimes you have to use your fists, but you need to use them as a last resort. Use your brain first. It's infinitely more powerful. I think people should be prepared. for the worst that the world can throw at them. Sometimes that means you should know how to fight. And I know that there are people out there who have no desire to learn how to fight. And I'm totally on board with you believing that. I believe that if somebody is going to be a pacifist, you should be the most violent pacifist that anybody has ever encountered.

Not with your fist, but with your conviction. But if you're going to be a pacifist or you abhorre violence and you refuse to participate it in any way, shape, or form, learn some basic skills. Learn some basic life-saving skills. Learn how to use a tourniquet. Learn how to stop bleeding. Learn how to be the potential difference in somebody's life in a critical moment of need.

Bottom line, however you feel like you can do it, make yourself hard to victimize. If it's mentally, if you need to mentally toughen yourself up in order to feel comfortable to be able to brush off negative comments, to be able to walk away from a fist fight or a drunk idiot in a bar and not take a hit on your ego, work on that. If that's not enough for you and you feel like you need to learn how to use your fists if you have to or you need to or you need to learn how to use a weapon if you need to, then by all means pursue those things. And that goes right back into the sheep dog response course.

Find something nearby. Find something that's reputable. And go give it a spin. What's the worst thing that's going to happen? You're going to come back with perhaps. an enhanced perspective and an enhanced set of skills that might prolong your life. If you don't remember anything else, just remember this. Terrorists and terrorism, they seek soft targets.

They're not looking for people who are prepared. They're looking for people who are not prepared and not paying attention. So make yourself physically and mentally hard. Make yourself hard to victimize. And you do that by exposing yourself to the things you're afraid of. If you're afraid of violence, I highly recommend you experience some violence. If you can go to a boxing club, go to a boxing club and just spar with somebody or go to an MMA class or learn some basic self-defense. I'm not saying you need to go out into the street and fight people, but just experience engaging in some type of confrontation with another human being.

It's eye-opening. A couple of things that I want people to remember. The first one is that you can be prepared without being paranoid. Evil is very real. I have seen it with my own eyes. I've looked into the whites of the eyes of absolute, without a doubt, pure evil. So it does exist. I would never say that it doesn't exist.

But what I will say is that it's not around every single corner. If you look at the world we live in from a pure mathematical perspective, we're doing pretty good. And your odds of encountering pure evil are not that high. All right. So being prepared is one thing. Being overly paranoid is another. All right. Aim for preparation. Avoid paranoia. Guns. All right, I'm going to get into this at some point, I'm sure, but I want to find somebody to have a really good conversation with about this and not just give my opinion. But what I will say is, guns don't solve problems.

Guns in and of themselves don't kill people. I could put a pistol on a table for 30 years and it's not going to do anything. Guns in the hands of people who are hell-bent on evil can be extremely dangerous, just like guns and guns and, you know, in the hands who are hell-bent on defending and protecting can be extremely valuable. It's they carry potential. They carry kinetic energy that a human being has to pick up and impart on somebody else. And the difference in that situation is the human being. I hear people all the time who, you know, say, if we all had guns, then would be a safer place. And I don't, I don't necessarily agree with that because there are things that you need to have to make guns.

effective. You need to be trained, you need to be competent, and you need to be current. Just because you carry a gun and you took it to a range in the daytime and shot at seven yards on a paper target does not mean that you are ready to engage in a gunfight in a crowded environment with a low-light situation where you're not sure of the penetration of your round or your backstop or even your ability to aim at distance. So for people out there who say or think that they have a gun on them and they're prepared and it's going to make the difference. My first question that I ask people is, do you have night sights on your gun? Most of the time, if not always, they say no, because they've only shot their gun in a daytime environment. And if you pull a gun out at night and you

don't have night sights, guess what? You can't aim it or hit anything. Or I take that back. You could probably hit a lot of things. Most likely they're not going to be what it is that you're aiming at. So get a set of tritium night sights on your gun and it actually can be aimed in. light and in daytime if you're going to carry. A second question I ask is, do you carry around in the chamber? Constantly blown away by the number of people who say, no, they don't carry around in the chamber. And here's my personal thoughts on this. If you carry a gun and you're not comfortable carrying it with a round in the chamber,

meaning that if you pulled it out and squeezed the trigger, it's going to go off, you have no business carrying a gun. You don't understand how they work, or you don't have an understanding of the weapon system that you own. Both of those things are very dangerous. The first thing that's going to go in any type of high consequence adrenaline-filled environment is going to be your fine motor skills unless you're trained and inoculated against that. But if you're trained and inoculated against that, guess what? You're going to be carrying a gun with a round in the chamber because you know that the only time a gun is going to come out

means that you're going to use it. Guns are not used for threats and they're not used for intimidation. If a gun comes out, it better get used because if you pull a gun out thinking you're going to intimidate somebody, thinking that you're going to threaten them, you may well find yourself

having that weapon taken from you and being killed with it, especially if you don't have a round in the chamber. They don't solve problems in and of themselves. It's the hand of the person that holding it makes the difference. And if you're not ready to do that, and you haven't thought through the consequences of taking life

or the consequences of using a firearm in a confined environment with innocent civilians, don't carry a gun, please. But again, we'll get into that a little bit later, hopefully on another podcast. All right, so the last thing I'm going to cover today, and then I'll give everybody a break from listening to my voice, is a concept that, for whatever reason,

had been eating at me and bugging me, and I couldn't figure out exactly why until I heard somebody articulate it much better than I think I would be able to. So I'm paraphrasing a little bit, something that I heard just a few days ago, but it's around the concept of hacking. I'm not talking about computer hacking

and somebody getting into your email. I'm talking about the insatiable desire that I have heard recently of people trying to, to hack their life or hack their diet or hack their finances or hack their occupation. And it just bug me for some reason. I couldn't figure out what it was. And it seemed like everybody was trying to take a shortcut.

And in some things like emails, if you want to hack your email inbox, I would say go ahead. But in other things or in anything that has physical consequence or requires experience. I don't think it's possible to hack. And I think that the attempt to hack, the attempt to take the shortcut, the attempt to not put in the time and effort is just setting people up for failure in the long term. I don't have a problem with the concept of hacking. I think what I have a problem with is that in people's desire to try to hack their life, they lose sight of mastery.

and I think it's much more important that people focus on mastery and putting the time and effort in than trying to find the shortcut constantly. So the way I heard described is a journey from being a novice to a master and the steps along the way. So I'm going to lay this out for you. And if you're driving, you're just going to have to imagine what this looks like. And if you're sitting down listening, pull out a piece of paper and draw a line across a piece of paper. to 45 degree angle. At the bottom put novice, at the top right, put mastery. And let's fill out some steps along the way. Okay. So the first one is whatever it is that you do. And this doesn't have to be

an occupation, but it applies to both occupation and hobby. I could have applied this to be in a seal or to the skydiving and base jumping I do now or to driving a car, fill in the blank. But let's just say everybody starts at novice, okay? Nobody starts at master, even though I think some people inherently believe that they do, I would recommend avoiding those people. So we all started novice at everything that we do right out of the gate. And the first thing you need to focus on after realizing that you're a novice is just being proficient at whatever it is that you want to do. And I'm going to define proficiency as a high degree of competence.

So to use being a seal as an example, we were tasked with doing so many things. They're called medals, mission essential task lists. And it's basically a three-ring binder of everything that a seal is supposed to be able to do. And everything that a commanding general overseas should be able to task a seal team with doing. It's a thick document, and you are constantly flirting with your currency in any of those things. But when you first get into the seal community, you don't really know how to do any of those things. And your baseline goal should be competence. at your skill sets. Shooting, moving, and communicating are the bedrock principles of the seal teams,

and you need to be competent at those things. So after you become proficient, the next thing you need to focus on is being effective. I'm going to define that as the degree to which something produces the desired result, or, in other words, success. So you're now proficient and competent at your skill set, now you need to be as effective as possible. You need to be successful as often as possible, right? So you go proficiency, effectiveness. Then along the route becomes efficiency after that. The maximum useful work with the minimum energy required, right?

So you're proficient, you're successful often, and now you can streamline your approach. After being efficient, now we start talking about being innovative, new methods, new ideas. In the SEAL teams, now we're talking about creating tactics that can trick the enemy, thinking well outside of the box about things that might enhance the desired result that you're looking for. Only after you have all of those things, from proficiency to effectiveness, to efficiency, to innovative, do you start approaching mastery, which is absolute control and superiority.

Now, I've heard a lot of talk about millennials, and I know quite a few millennials, and I think that most millennials are highly concerned with mastery. Like they're obsessed with mastery to a certain degree, which I think is a good thing. But somewhere along the way, they haven't been explained how much time it actually takes to achieve mastery.

You know, I've heard the 10,000 hour rule, I'd say it's relatively accurate. You know, because instead of hearing 10,000 hours, what I'm hearing is hack, four hours, two hours, hack, hack, hack, hack, hack, right? Like, well, let's just cut that time down as much as possible. And there's a problem with that. And the problem is, is that you can't hack experience. Think about driving, which I was thinking about this before.

I knew I was going to talk about this, so I was thinking about it. and I'd say the only thing that I even approach mastery on, even though I'm not innovative in the way that I drive, so I'm not even at mastery, would be driving because I've done it for so long. You could get somebody to the position where they think they are near mastery and driving through hacks, and if they get challenged with something

that they don't have the requisite experience to deal with, they're in trouble. And you can do the same thing with leadership. You could do the same thing with shooting, with relationships, with jumping, anything of physical consequence. If you try to skip the experience and go directly to the hack, you're setting yourself up for a long-term failure, regardless of what anybody tells you. I think one of the biggest things missing in the modern day is the appreciation of the mentor-e relationship. When I look back at my time in the SEAL teams, that's what it was. You know, for the first five years, you are so dangerous to not only those around you, but to yourself,

because you think you know everything and you don't actually know anything. So we protect you by pairing you up with junior personnel that can kind of guide you through that journey until you, you know, achieve a level of competence and become effective and are working on your efficiency. If you're a good leader, which everybody should think of themselves as a leader, especially if you're in a leadership role, or in a business role that requires leadership, you should be able to name three people that you're training to take over your job. You should be able to name three people that you are mentoring and helping pull along in the story arc of their life from novice to mastery. At least give me one, okay? If you can't do that, you're part of the problem and not part of

the solution. Something else that's interesting when the topic of mastery comes up is the that I get from people who I consider to be masters in any given field. If you ask them where they are along that arc from novice to master, it's surprising how low they will put themselves. They usually hover somewhere between efficient and effective. And when you talk to people who obviously are not a master at what they do and ask them where they think they are, they often hover up around innovation and mastery. There's a disconnect between where people truly sit in their station in life and where they think they sit in their station in life. And I equate that to people constantly being told they can cut corners. They constantly are being told that they can hack it. And I think

it's dangerous. And the most dangerous situation is the person who's a novice yet thinks there's a master. not always to themselves, but most often to the people around them, especially if you're in a leadership position. There's so many consequences to failing. And in business, thankfully, most of them are not physically threatening in nature, but if you're in the military or an organization that has a level of personal risk associated to it, and you are not self-aware and constantly critiquing yourself and checking yourself as to where you are on that spectrum, it could have severe consequences, much like the person who just learned how to drive and thinks they know everything about it, encounter some weather conditions that they've never experienced, crosses the center

line and hits a family, you know, a car full of a husband and a father and kids and kills that family. Hack the things you can, right? Everybody has a limited amount of time. We all have 24 hours in a day to try to work ourselves through. So optimize your time. I totally understand that. But don't confuse optimizing your time with the amount of time, effort, and energy required to truly master whatever it is you're passionate about or you do professionally. And if you have something you're passionate about and you have an occupation that you do professionally, you need to dedicate yourself to the time required to master it and put yourself and realize where you are on that spectrum and slowly work yourself towards mastery, not skipping any of the

steps along the way so that when you arrive at a terminal station of whatever your occupation or passion may be, you're prepared and you're also in a position to turn right around and mentor somebody else and pull them up the same ladder that you climbed. That's what makes a difference, not constantly trying to find the shortcut. In my opinion. And we're going to close out episode six with that. I hope you guys have a good one. Episode six, it's in the can. Thank you to everyone who submitted the questions. I would not have had anything to talk about had it not been for you people. So I know I didn't get to them all and I'm sure in the future, hopefully not the near future. I'll be doing a solo podcast again and I'll

keep referencing back to social media and the questions that people ask me. But I can only pick five or six at a time. Otherwise, I'd be rambling on for hours. and I personally cannot listen to the sound of my own voice for that long. Same ask as always, everybody, if you like what you're hearing and you think you could help somebody, just share it, you know, tell somebody else about it and hopefully the word can organically spread. If you've got the time, write a review on iTunes or whatever platform you use, good or bad.

I'm open to any and all feedback you guys have. So until next time, that's all I got for you. See you.