The Rich Roll Podcast - Navy SEAL Rich Diviney On The Attributes That Drive Optimal Performance

Episode Date: January 4, 2021

It’s hard to predict success in the real world. But there’s a reason why some people thrive — even when things get hard. But what exactly is that reason? Today’s guest became obsessed with better understanding what differentiates those who prevail from those who fail. What he discovered would forever change the game. Rich Diviney is a former Navy SEAL Commander who served up 13 overseas deployments over 21 years as an active member and officer of the armed forces’ most elite, secretive group. A group that shall remain unnamed—but one I suspect you might quickly surmise. Throughout his career, Rich was intimately involved in a specialized SEAL selection process, which whittled a group of hundreds of extraordinary SpecOps candidates down to a handful of the most elite performers. Oddly, which candidates washed out and which succeeded was often wildly unpredictable. Some could have all the right skills and still fail. Others more easily dismissible would ironically prove to be top performers. The seemingly objective criteria weren’t telling him what he most needed to know: who would succeed in one of the world’s toughest military assignments? Over time, Rich began to see that beneath obvious skills are hidden drivers of performance,surprising core attributes—including cunning, adaptability, courage, even narcissism—that determine how resilient or perseverant we are, how situationally aware and how conscientious. This epiphany evolved into a SpecOps training program called MindGym—the first of its kind scientifically devised to help elite soldiers perform faster, longer, and better in all environments—especially high-stress ones. In his new book, The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance, Rich defines and examines these various attributes to explain how we perform as individuals and as part of a team. As you may suspect, his military methodology is equally applicable to our personal and professional lives. Understanding the valence of one’s attributes not only promotes greater self-awareness, it provides a guiding rubric to train the characteristics that predict optimal performance in any situation—from parenting and sports to business and relationships. Diviney currently works as a speaker, facilitator, and consultant with the Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute and Simon Sinek Inc. He’s taught leadership and optimal performance to more than five thousand business, athletic, and military leaders from organizations such as American Airlines, Meijer Inc., the San Francisco 49ers, Pegasystems, Zoom, and Deloitte. Today he breaks it all down. This conversation continues our annual tradition of welcoming the new year with a Navy SEAL—and the bankable life advice you need to embrace 2021 correct. A must-listen for anyone looking for deeper self-understanding, this is an incredibly powerful primer on how your attributes determine life outcomes—and how you can train said disposition to create more optimal performance in all areas of your life. READ MORE: bit.ly/richroll571 WATCH: bit.ly/richdiviney571 I can think of no better conversation to harken in 2021. May it change your personal game. Because the new year is now upon is. And it requires everything we’ve got to give. Peace + Plants, Rich

You don't get to call yourself a leader. We often conflate being in charge with leader. Other people designate you a leader, which means leadership is a behavior, it's not a position. You can be in charge, but other people will decide whether or not you are their leader. One of the most important attributes that we can all focus on in 2021 is open-mindedness.

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 aren't seeking what could be. open-mindedness. 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, you know, we don't know what's coming down the pike, but we are all here. We're all operating, you know, we're all in our lives. Admittedly, some of us might be in worse positions than we were at the beginning of 2020, but sometimes you get thrown down the hill. And when you stand up and dust yourself off, you're like, oh my gosh, I'm way further down than I was before.

I got to climb again. But the fact is you can do it. 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, you know, and that's something to be, it's something to just give ourselves a quick pat on the back for. My name is Rich DeVinney, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. Well, it's official.

2020 is in the rear view. 2021 is finally upon us. So let us come correct. By continuing what has become a bit of a tradition here on the podcast, kicking off the new year with some bankable life guidance, courtesy of a Navy SEAL. In 2018 and 2019, our New Year's messenger was Mr. David Goggins. 2020 launched with Chad Wright, another SEAL-turned-ultramarathoner. And today brings us Rich Deviney, a former Navy SEAL commander who served in what I think most would agree was the most badass, elite, and secretive group in the armed forces, a team I've been cautioned to not name publicly, but one I suspect you could quickly

surmise. This conversation is a must listen for anyone looking to sharpen their grit, their mental acuity, and resilience as we embrace 2021. And it's all coming up, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical

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And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs.

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And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay. Commander Rich Devaney. I think it's fair to say that if you spend 21 years as a Navy SEAL, including 13 overseas deployments, that you're gonna pick up a thing or two. But Devaney's thing isn't about woo-ha or physical prowess

and instead is really much more about things like mindset and disposition. It's a perspective that evolved out of his role in selecting highly trained soldiers for elite teams. In the course of that, he became obsessed with why some succeed and others flame out. In other words, what actually dictates human performance under stress? And ultimately what he discovered almost ironically

is that that equation had very little to do with physicality or even skill for that matter. And instead had everything to do with the individual's core attributes, things like resilience, mental acuity, perseverance, and drive. He's got a new book coming out all about it. It's called The Attributes,

25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. It hits bookstores January 26th, and today we break it all down. It is worth mentioning before we get into it that Rich will be doing a live event with podcast favorite, Dr. Andrew Huberman. He's also giving away the Courage chapter for free. And those two things are available

for everybody who pre-orders the book. And all the information on that can be found on the book's website at theattributes.com. Rich is fascinating. His work is highly instructive. And I just can't think of a better, more impactful conversation to hearken in 2021. So let's do it.

This is me and Rich Deviney. 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. It started with David Goggins a couple of years ago. We had Chad Wright last year and you're gonna be the 2021 edition. I'm deeply honored. Thank you for doing this. And what's interesting about you among 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's sort of this emblem of leadership. We think of the movies. We think about people like Jocko Willink, who's 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. 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, you know, your perspective, which we're going to get into, leads me to conclude that perhaps this popular conception that we have about the Navy SEALs is a little bit misled. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're absolutely right. And I think that's, it's for two reasons, I guess. First is, you know, you have to, you know, 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 want to come visit the SEAL teams when I was in the SEAL teams and they'd 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. 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 kind of 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. You're recounting the high highs and the low lows and it's more normal. 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? 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 were all, we all consider ourselves fairly average dudes who just happened to go down an extraordinary path. 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's a rock star in certain contexts of life

and a doofus in other contexts of life. There are many contexts in life where I am a doofus. And so, and you look at like professional athletes and you say, 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. Well, at least 10 different contexts inside of which he is a complete doofus.

And he'd probably be the first to admit, it'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, 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? We're sort of reacting impulsively to unconscious drivers until we 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, you know, an 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 want to pursue for myself. I agree. But I'd also say that it also takes a certain mentality for someone to want to be a surgeon, you know, or an athlete or a teacher or, you know, any profession, you know,, 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, apathy or, you know, misdirection, you know, 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, I say, you know, 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, and I say 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 to Bud's in the first place is certainly difficult. So I always used to say, hey, part of the selection process for buds 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, a bunch, you'll always meet guys who say, oh yeah, I always wanted to be a SEAL.

I just, ah, this, I did this and then that, and then this happened. And in the back of your mind, it's like, okay, well, you got deselected. That was one of the things that happened, right? You never- You deselected yourself. You deselected yourself. You deselected yourself.

You never pursued it to day one on the beaches of Coronado. And then let the buds 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 communities gain 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 badasses, invisible warriors, 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, the reasons change. I want to go do that. The towers come down and, hey, I want to

go serve my country. And that's another reason. And again, both are honorable. They're just different. There's no judgment on these reasons. And then, of course, as spec ops and the SEALs in particular gain popularity, and we're kind of like oh my gosh now we're visible that you can you know that the reasons are changing changing again 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 um and how do we accurately assess those and pick the right people and it's not just the guy who can make it through a hell week and not just a guy who can run with a telephone pole.

It's there to be more, you know, 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 buds, 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 buds and the Hell Week 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- 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. You know, 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. You know? And so what, you know, what this tells-

Probably some cold water though. It was some cold water, 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 BUDS, 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, they were 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? What was it about that? It wasn't the action. 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's, that starts to speak to attributes. Yeah. It's a, it elucidated, it shines a spotlight on

these attributes and, you know, where, which attributes these individuals are excelling and where they're weak. But what you've done is really canonize 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 wanted 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 BUDS. One of the ways – the way you quit BUDS is you ring the bell. It's called ringing the bell, right? And a lot's an example. I mean, yeah, so you go through BUDS. One of the ways, the way you quit BUDS is you ring the bell. You know, it's called ring the bell, right?

And a lot of guys do. But the way, the example I'll give you is 2020. I mean, you know, so I say in 2020, all of us were thrown into deep challenge, stress and uncertainty. And just take COVID as one of those many examples of 2020 where we were all thrown into deep challenge, stress and 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 going to go either. And all of us are a little shell-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 attribute. There's ways to do that. Right. So traditionally we've thought of this through the lens of skills. What is your skill set? And how do we plug you and your skill set 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 evaluating all of these attributes that you have, where you're weak, where you're strong, and then selecting for those strengths.

Yes. 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 can look at the evolution of the workplace and evolution of factories and the industrial complex, the ability to manage and run machinery were skills

that workers 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 they go all the way back to, you know, prehistoric man, you know, I mean, the ability to throw a spear and hit the target was a valuable skill. No one really cared how much empathy you had doing it, you know. So skills always have been important. The problem with looking at just skills is they're seductive and 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 working on a computer for week after week, we'll learn how to type. 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, right? 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 designer's performance of that. You can see how well someone shoots or runs, 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 can, we certainly develop them over time, but they've seen levels. You can see those of us as parents, we can see levels of perseverance or adaptability in young kids, in young, almost, I would say infants. But as soon as they start crawling, you can see these things, you know,

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 visceral, 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, BUDS takes you down to zero. It doesn't matter if you're a star athlete, doesn't matter if you're the alma mater or smartest person, 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? What do you do then? Yeah, yeah, and it's that high stress environment that basically reveals the default settings on that individual, right? That's exactly right. 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. Uh-huh. 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, and then they have kids and they realize, oh, wait a second, I'm actually a pretty patient person. Right, because they didn't realize. They would have mischaracterized themselves.

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 what one of the things I loved about going to buds. You know, I loved, I actually loved buds. 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. Well, came out of that, oh my gosh, yeah, okay. Right. I got it. Right. Well, any, I mean, the thing is, we're all aware of things like grid and perseverance and resilience in, 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's 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? Which is really what you've done. And

you did it by dint of, you know, realizing that this was important. I mean, you opened the book with this story of like this experienced SEAL, I think he 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 kind of 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 CO, it said, hey, we need to do better articulating why guys aren't making it through. Because the best explanation a lot of times was, well, 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, Underwater Demolition Teams and Draper Kaufman. And this idea that, you know, before the Allied invasion,

they realized that they needed to have teams of dudes swim ashore, measure, basically measure depths, identify obstacles, and blow them up, blow paths clear if necessary. And so they tapped this guy, Draper Kaufman, who had run a, who had put together an ordinance, explosive ordinance school a few years prior, said, hey, can you create this unit? And Kaufman knew that he needed guys,

you know, he already had, it was interesting, 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 only a you know, a knife and some explosives, right? And swim trunks. They'd have to adapt on the fly. They'd have to figure out what was going on. Environments would change. It'd get ugly. So I call it kind of

unconscious genius. And he said, well, I'm going to 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, things like that. But it was really just very grueling. Guys slept for only a couple hours. Is this back when it was the frogmen?

That's exactly right, yeah. And he basically didn't run any testing or evaluation during that process. The decision to stay or go arrested 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, the UDT. And of course that training evolved and that hell week still is the crucible for Bud's. It's now the fifth week instead of 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. But within that lies this great mystery. Like what is the path from, you know, how to could to can, 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 a 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.

What's the team? Because the set of attributes that you need to be a Navy SEAL is going to be different than the set that you need to be an HR person or a salesperson. What's the list of attributes that you think you need that are predominant in this type of environment? Start with that. So, learnability might be one of those things. Hey, we need someone with high learnability, right? If someone has high learnability, 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, you know, 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're going to 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 in 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 or whatever you're looking for. So how did you begin the process of deconstructing this to identify what these attributes are? Cause 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. Uh, well, so, so this started when I was, when I was running training. So the first thing I did was I, I created basically small groups around the command, uh, uh, five or five or 10 guys. And I said, Hey, write down, make a list of what you think the, the key attributes we're looking for are. And I try to give a quick explanation of what an attribute is. 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, culled the skill off all the skills okay that doesn't and put it aside because we know those um and then and then we looked where some attributes were similar to other attributes and came up with a list at the time of 36 uh attributes and that was the list we basically said okay this is what we're going to use when i began to when i got out of the navy and i began to talk to businesses i'm thinking about this more deeply and more openly you know 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, so Andrew Huberman, great friend of mine, and I know you know him. He says hello. All roads lead to Andrew Huberman. Every guest that I have on this podcast has some sort of entanglement to Andrew Huberman. Every guest that I have on this podcast has some sort of entanglement with Andrew Huberman.

Yeah, he's a popular guy, right? So he says hello. I'm actually staying at his place right now. But he and I met right after I got out of 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? 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, you guys are the best peak performers 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 kind of 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, you have to, you have to, it has to be routinized. You have to have a routine to get there. And so, so the example is that the professional football player prepares, you know, spends his entire week preparing to peak on Sunday for three hours. That's what happens. Or the Olympic athlete. Or the Olympic athlete, 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 performance 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 kind of hit me. Like when I was freezing in the surf zone in SEAL training, there was nothing peak about my performance. I was doing the best I could and the best I could was not to quit at the time.

But this is where 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 want to 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 going to 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. Not at all. And you also know going into it that it's not going to go smoothly. That's exactly right. You're going to be met with unforeseen obstacles and variables that are going to 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. Yeah, right. I mean, that is life. I mean, we as life, you know, and, you know, in life. 2020 in particular. 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 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 it. If you're a salesperson 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 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. It may be dirty, ugly and painful. But you also can't hold yourself to the standard of peak performance, right? Like you have to provide some bandwidth to understand, like I'm not gonna be 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 this case- Seal stuff. Seal stuff, right? Right.

In this case, I was pushing a sled, and he was timing me, and I said, 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 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, I said, this is very interesting because this is optimal performance. This is actually what, this is actually what seals, I say special operators do all the time. We are aerobic thinkers. We go in, 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 going to last. And we may have to go all out at certain points. So when I do go all out, I want to be able to go all out. And as soon as I don't have to, I pull back and I start recovering. I would imagine the same thing happens in ultra racing and some of these longer distance events because you know what points, hey, okay, now I 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 baseline more rapidly and reset, which gets into like the micro recovery

kind of thing that you talk about. Yeah, yeah. Micro recovery, 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, we were what, 10 years into the war and we were noticing guys were coming back, and they were broken, retiring, physically, mentally.

And so we started asking ourselves the questions about resilience. And in diving into resilience, I was interested. Admittedly, I was more interested in kind of 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 by Nassim Tlaib. 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, you know, and my eye 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, you know? And so, okay, how can we start looking at the mind and, and, and understanding the relationship to our brain to affect our

physiology and, and, and be better physically. Well, a lot of us, when we expend energy, what we don't realize is that recovery is one of the most important factors 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 with, 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 gelled 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 can do that through visualization.

There's different ways you can do it. In terms of short term, 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, vacations if you do it right, are others. So recovery became an important factor and micro recovery meant,

okay, what are those pauses? Where can I grab those moments and do a small recharge? Again, it's not, 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, 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.

Yeah, anti-fragility has to come typically after the moment. Right, so you use like the gun, like the gunfight example, but a more, you know, relatable example might be something like, you know, I just, 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 now you have to go home and have some kid time, be okay with the family. Right, exactly. Yeah, I mean, the tools range from, so breathing is a huge one, right? And just focused, I think there's CO2 blowout breathing where you can basically, you take a breath, you go up to your capacity, and then you blow out longer than you inhaled. 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, 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 recover. 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, when we, if we start to kind of think about and break down the sympathetic parasympathetic system, you know, sympathetic, obviously engagement, you know, active, right.

Parasympathetic recover, recharge, and then start kind of breaking down the chemicals involved in each, right. If we're, if we're in sympathy, if we're, if we're angry, anxious, fearful, we're releasing bursts of cortisol, which are awesome for action, but they 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 build up DHEA, 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 angry, anxious, and fearful, we're making cortisol. When we're joyful, peaceful, and calm,

we're making DHEA. 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're like babies and they'd go take naps on my chest, right? I'd lay on the couch, they'd take naps on my chest.

and they'd go take naps on my chest, right? Lay on the couch, they'd 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 a 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 DHEA instead of cortisol. And so I think in terms of, so micro recovery, it's about understanding those, 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, doesn't have to be just sleep, right? You know, I run, I don't run the distances you do, but, but I run in the woods in Virginia and I run maybe five miles. I don't use headphones. 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, you know? 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 heartbeats. And so what that does is that if you synchronize those, you actually shift into... Well, so I don't want to 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 if you – 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, I should say synergize. So the waves are now, you're in coherence basically with your heart and synergize that relationship between 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, I was like, but I feel good. And then there are days where I don't feel that great. My, my, my HRV is pretty good. So it's not a feeling thing. It's not, it's not, it's been, it, I, I've dabbled in it, which is why I hesitate to go in depth, but I do in, in dabbling with it and then talking to the guys who know, you know, 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, there's, it's disconnected. It's difficult. Yeah. 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 cull it. So how did you hone in on, I mean, there's 13 in the book, right? And they're kind of divided into these categories as being like the core attributes. Yeah, 25 total.

25. Yeah, there's so five categories. So what I really need to do and what I did as I looked at them is 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. 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, resiliency. Those blended and catalyzed create grit. It's like a 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 that's how I, so I began to say, okay, how do these clump? You know, mental acuity, you know, I saw some of these attributes had to do with

how our brain kind of 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. And that all spoke to this mental acuity.

Drive, same thing. You know, drive is interesting because, you know, drive, it's 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 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. You know, what are those things? And so I started to try 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 are,

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 I, 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? 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 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 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 and now we're paying need to pay attention to, right? So we're not paying attention, for example, to the soles of our feet, you know, until we, I mentioned that,

and now we're paying attention to it, right? But our brains always say, okay, we don't have to pay attention to it. So all that information is coming in, a lot of it's coming in now, so coming into our frontal lobe, which is only about 3,000 bits that can process, right? So those 3,000 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 your ones level of vigilance. How much are we noticing? And we all know people, 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? Well, so some of it is. Because you've been trained to be that way. on the New York City streets and I notice. But how much of that is just drilled into you or into your training? Because you've been trained to be that way. Some of it is admittedly. You're always aware of what's going on around you.

Yeah, you're right. And some of it is admittedly, but like I look at my son, my eldest son, he's kind of like me and he's pretty vigilant. He notices things. He's more aware than say his brother, who's more like my wife, who isn't as, they're kind of in their head, just looking around. So we see you know, 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'm, I have a higher level of situational awareness, say, than my wife, you know, we both have situational awareness. It's just the level. So, 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's coming in, I'm going to assess what of this information that I'm noticing is important to my current task. I joke, I love to go to New York City. I love to ride the subways. 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 do I need to, is important? Obviously the newsstand with the newspaper, I can discard that. That's not important. You know, even though I noticed it, I don't need to, you know, I need to notice, I need to, I need to say, okay, signs, tracks, things like that, you know, maps, you know. Because you're so hypervigilant, it's more difficult for you to crowd out what's non-essential to focus on the task at hand,

which is getting to Brooklyn. That certainly takes training. 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 hyper-vigilance to too much of a degree leads to stress because you're overwhelmed or there's too much, your task switching too quickly, you know? So yeah, you have to manage it. I think certainly you talk about the training.

My lifestyle for 20 years trained me pretty well to have that. Eyes in the back of your head. And know what to focus on. In fact, special operators and 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? You in, what do I need to focus on? You know, what do I need to assess then prioritize? What's the, out of these, okay, these three things are important, are of importance to what I'm trying to do, get to Brooklyn, right? What's the most important one of that? You know, for me, it might be the signs,

the track signs, right? So I've got, 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's 15 meters behind me. 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 tricky because task switching, again, I talk about in the book, you know, multitasking is a myth, right? We know that

most people, however, think they're pretty good at it, you know? But statistically what happens is people, what's happened to, we're not multitasking. What we're doing is we're task switching. And, 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. And it's because you're 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 context, like driving a car. 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. Then you get to the grocery store, grocery store, new context. So we're task switching naturally all the time. 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 situational 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. You know, that's, you know, what, where that's a detriment to me is sometimes I have trouble focusing deeply on something. You know, my wife is incredibly, she's incredible at focusing. When she gets into something, man, she just is, she drives, she's awesome.

You know, things fall off, you know, things on the periphery. Less hypervigilance. Yeah, fall off the plate. 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, you know, way, way better than I am, you know. 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 that 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 a while to learn things. I repeat mistakes more often than I like to admit. We all know people who they learn something and the first time they got it, the first time they learn it, they pick it up.

I mean, they got it, right? That's high learnability, you know? And the fact is neither is better nor worse, but understanding where you rely 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 I couldn't, it took me a while to pick up. So lower on learnability is not a bad thing. Lower on any of this stuff is definitely not a bad thing. It's just, okay, how do I adjust my environment so that I can affect that? And high enough on self-awareness to understand that you needed to do that for

yourself, right? Like what's interesting is it's not, there's no value judgments on any of these. We all come with, you know, 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, you know, things that, you know, happen to you as you age. So that has to be an aspect of it too. Like what trauma did you survive or, you know, 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. 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 adaptability. 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 optimists 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 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 if 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. Initiative is the next thing. You need the ability to take the first step. Because if you don't have that, you're not going anywhere. Initiative has to have purpose, because initiative on its own is frenetic energy. You put an eight-year-old in the driver's seat of a car,

that kid's going to have initiative to push that accelerator. It'll be dangerous if he does. So initiative That kid's going to have initiative to push that accelerator, right? It'll 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 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 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, 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. Yeah. That's what I would make.

That's certainly what experience is. Yeah, 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 most fun. Everyone wants to talk about that.

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's lying to you. Well, 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 badass. I wanted to stand out. I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to be special, right?

That's narcissism talking, right? So narcissism is certainly a pejorative word. And of course there- 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.

So it's a combination certainly. But where I wanted to explore narcissism was this idea that narcissism is a human thing. You know, certainly there's narcissistic personality disorder and the DSM cycle, DSM-5, the big psych Bible, right? Will describe narcissism. I think it lays out like nine descriptions. If you have five or more,

you have 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 want to stand out, be recognized, be noticed, be loved, 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 neurotransmitters, 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, right, that translates to adulthood. We want to feel that, right?

So I looked at narcissism, you know, 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 badass. None of us would have gone down this path. Narcissism was a driver. And so I think the reason why I would talk about it 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 is obviously detrimental, one. Two, narcissism is invisible to the owner.

You know, 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 out of, head of our skis, you know. My wife does this for me all the time. And it's great.

And I do it for her, right? It's a balanced relationship. But those, and not only my, my friends and things like that, are these people gonna say, "'Hey, okay, dial it back a little bit.' 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 a writer or a poet or I wanna be an athlete or whatever, you wanna stand out, you wanna be recognized for that, there's nothing wrong with that. Use that, use that as a driver because it works. Just don't let it get overboard.

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 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 want to 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. You know, I need to be more empathetic. Okay, I'm going to work on that. I certainly need, I'm a patient person. I have 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 patients 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 that's when they are hyperdeveloped. 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. 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. Because that reveals the truth of 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. Yeah 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. 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 1,000 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 1,000. 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, yes, an example. You can kind of 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. 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, moms, parents who have small kids are usually phenomenal task switchers because they're just constantly doing it. They're constantly exercising that. So, so, so the assessment tool is one way to get a little bit of a snapshot, I call it. And then asking yourself some deliberate questions about, okay, if I'm showing up a little low on say open-mindedness, why is that? You know, what, let me think about some other situations where my open-mindedness was challenged.

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. 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? You know, I always say, you know, I talked about the leadership attributes too. There are 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, you know, probably other aspects of your life, you might be a leader, so you might want to 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.

Well, too much empathy for a Navy SEAL could be quite a hindrance. Could be detrimental. You're absolutely right. I always for a Navy SEAL could be quite a hindrance. Could be detrimental. 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 as 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 a smidgen too high, it will affect you. 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 and into the right, like trying to be the square peg into the square hole, right?

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? Like you could sell this to a zip recruiter and it could help them match candidates with the right jobs. Like it's a very powerful thing, right? 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 had the tremendous fortune of going to Bud's at 22 years old. That was an attribute factory. 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 out,

they ask, you know, how do you feel after a butt? 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, you know, halo jumps, right? You don't learn that stuff in butts. It's because you just learned that in the, some of the most harsh situations on the planet,

you made it through. And that is powerful stuff. And that's really a lesson in attributes. 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 it again in the book,

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? Because I feel like BUDS 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 going to separate that into two 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 Budge or the training I was running, was really quite good. You know, there was not much we wanted to or needed to change because it was really quite refined. It had been going on. 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. I could teach that guy to shoot.

He couldn't hit the broadside of a barn right now, but I could teach him how to shoot. That's easy. I could do that in a day. 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. And it's funny because even interviews, I was working, when 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, you know, 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 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 of us may be able to do it for a couple 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 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. So you can pretend to be anybody you wanna be for a 30 minute interview, which is why interviews aren't really a 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 there's a pejorativeness to that too. 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 want to be a part of or they think they want to 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, they 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 oh, 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 where we get into leadership

because so often leadership promotions are based on successes in an organization that are skills-based. Someone does really well and they've been at the company for a while, they get promoted into a leadership position. And I always say, since I got out of the Navy, I've been working in 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. 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, 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? We often conflate being in charge with leader, right? Leader, being a leader, saying I'm a leader is like calling yourself funny, right? Unless you're making someone laugh, you're not funny, you know? 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, because a lot of says, 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 qualified necessarily to be in charge of, you're in charge because you, you did what they're now doing really well. Right. Which at that point, you're at risk. It has nothing to do with leading people, right? And it puts you at risk of micromanaging because you're going to look at it like, no, no, no, that's not a 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. If you look at the leadership attributes, you are accountable for the development, the growth, the success of the people in your charge. 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 gal anywhere.

Right, and that's a completely different set of attributes. It is. That are required of you. It is, yeah, and I would say, I mean, now some of those are transferable. 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 may perhaps is a singular activity, maybe, I don't know, I'm gonna say graphic designer. I don't know how singular that is, but maybe, you know, whatever. You're working by yourself, right? Some of these leadership attributes aren't as important.

I mean, authenticity, decisiveness, who knows? I mean, you know decisiveness, who knows? I mean, you know, accountability, probably, but, I mean, selflessness. Selflessness. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if that, you know, so. 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 pretty beautifully. 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 build, 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 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. 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, you know? And if someone says, trust me, just ask yourself why they're saying that. I mean, if fireman comes in and the building,

there's some trust there, right? You can believe that. But, you know, or I guess if Schwarzenegger shows up and says, you know, come with me if you want to live. That's another one, right? But, um, uh, okay. So we were studying trust. I was working for a company called the Chapman and Co Institute. There's still, I still do some work with them. Wonderful leadership company out of St. Louis. Um, we were studying this thing called trust. And I remembered, I remember the story from, 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. 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 Clement Island. We can see it off the coast here. San Clement Island is about 10 miles long. It's about a mile wide at its widest point. 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 to do a lot of live fire demolition. SEAL trainees go out there for the last five weeks to do their weaponry 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. No neighbor complaints. Yeah, and no one can hear you scream. The instructors can screw with you all they want. 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. 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, there were three different things you could do. Ironically, we ate three meals a day, right?

So one of them was a rope climb. 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.

It 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 and the barracks there was a hill. And the only way to describe this hill accurately was it was long, tall, and steep. 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 base of this hill, and the instructor has a stopwatch.

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 a, I would guess, 200, 300-yard sprint up to the top of this hill. There's a little concrete monument there. You tap the monument and come back down. The time with which you had to go up and down decreased every week. If you didn't make your time, you didn't get to eat. They never starved you. Basically, you had to go get wet and sandy, and you didn't make your time, you didn't get to eat, or they never starved. You basically had to go get wet and sandy

and you had to eat your meal outside, which by that time in SEAL training, you're- Wet and sandy? Yeah, you're hydrophobic. But 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 after. It's called sugar cookie, right? Awesome. Yeah, totally awesome. Sugar cookie. So by that time in BUDS, you are truly hydrophobic, right? You don't, you're just like, okay, I'm gonna do this. So that was a 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 of some instructor had painted a line called the flight line.

Some other sadistic 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'd take a moving pallet. So you'd see forklifts move 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 versions, 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 carrying, now you're not sprinting anymore because you're carrying about 120 pounds of stuff. Right. So you're 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. So we were done. And we had started with, I think, 160-odd people. We were down to 38. There were 38 of us left. We're in the barracks cleaning up, just getting ready to pack 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 like, okay. So we all kind of 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.

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 a reminder, hill run, when you do it, you're slick. You have nothing, you're just you sprinting up the hill. Flight is- No pallets. Not that you just use sprinting up the hill. Flight is H harness 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've made a sound because he looks at me and said, hey, DaVinny, 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. And so I'm feeling a little bit, you know, 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 going to hurt themselves going up the hill. It's just a stupid idea. Now, at that moment, the rest of my guys in my class are dead silent. Yeah. Let me just interrupt. 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 BUDS once, so I don't know if it's happened before. The consequences could be dire. I will tell you this.

The moment I, so my classmates were silent. Some of them I saw like were kind of moving away from me a little bit they didn't know what was coming down i the words left my lips and admittedly i was like okay what the hell did i just do you know because goodman was silent for a good well uh-huh seemed like hours you're not leaving the island you're gonna be there a little longer yeah i don't know and so finally he speaks up and he says, all right, since Ensign Devaney has a problem with this, what we're going to do instead is we're going to run back to the barracks. We're going to go to the auditorium and we're going to watch movies for the rest of the afternoon.

And so now all of us are silent until someone's smart enough to start moving before he changes his mind. So we all start running back to the barracks. High fives. I feel great and all that stuff. So we watch movies for the rest of 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, 17 years later, I run into two guys from my BUDS class. I hadn't seen them since BUDS. I was pretty much an East Coast SEAL, which meant I was in Virginia Beach, West Coast of 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 to Goodman on the flight line? Of course, I hadn't thought about it, but of course I remember. I said, yeah, both of them at that point said, sir, 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? 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 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

student-ness or even my seal-ness 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 it. The attributes stuck with them. 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. That's right. Because 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 have been stupid to say. if you said this is stupid because I'm gonna get injured. That's true, yeah. That would have been stupid to say. Right. Yeah, admittedly.

You would have ended up running a lot of hills. Yes, I would imagine I would, yeah. But here's the thing, people ask me all the time when I tell that story, they say, do you think Goodman had planned that, right? And what I tell them is this, Goodman was actually, it's funny because 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 hadn't seen him since, you know, I don't know where he is. I know he was 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, as 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 so 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, 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 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 to say,

hey guys, no, this is the way it is. We're doing this. You know, are you steadfast in that type of, 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?

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, you know, ask them, I would ask you 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. You know,

it's all those things, you know, it's, and those are behaviors. Those aren't skills. You know, I always give the example of my dad. My dad was a lawyer, you know, for's all those things, you know, it's, and those are behaviors. Those aren't skills. You know, I always give the example of my dad. My dad was a lawyer, you know, for 50, he still, he still practices law, right? It didn't, you know, he doesn't know much about plumbing. It still didn't stop me from calling him when I bought my first house and I had troubles with my pipes. I was like, hey, dad, my plumbing's off. Well, dad doesn't know.

I just know dad is always going to be there. He's going to listen. He's going to help me solve the problem. He's going to be a leader, you know, 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 attribute 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 lump vulnerability into humility.

I think humility is vulnerability. That's what it is. It's vulnerability expressed. 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 I was actually, the story behind that is I 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 the pyramid that we all know didn't make sense.

I'm in charge, you do what I say. That's the classic, basically how every business and the military are structured. Then you have the flat model, which became popular. Hey, we're decentralizing everything. Everybody's equal, we'll 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 high-performing team. Then of course you have the upside down pyramid, which is great. It's kind of the Greenfield's model, 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, you know, left side, right side, middle. And basically, I said, no, all of you are right. The leader is wherever the leader needs to be in the moment, right? So in dynamic subordination, 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 recce 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 I need. The rapid swapping 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 captain's in charge of that 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 the aircraft. You have to turn around. No captain worth their wings is going to ignore that. That captain will immediately subordinate to that maintenance officer and turn that aircraft around. Aircraft turns around, gets back to the gate, now they have to deplane. Captain doesn't take charge of deplaning either. Now the flight attendant's in charge. And so this is an example of dynamic subordination. It actually, in high-performing teams, in very effective teams, it happens all the time. What does that take? That takes vulnerability. Vulnerability, though, is not

just the stigma of showing your weaknesses. 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 that's your strength, they're your strengths, and where you're going to be leaning on them, you know. So vulnerability works in the team aspect. And then as a leader, vulnerability works because it shows people who you who are in your span of care that you don't know it all it shows humility it shows that they're needed you know i remember you know i mean another thing i love about teams is everybody just understood their their jobs and everybody stepped up and and this this idea like i needed you know i can't do

what this i can't do what the sniper does i can't do what the assaul know, I can't do what this, 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, you know. They need me to be able to know what I do, what I do. Vulnerability helps. They 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. And 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 going to step up and show, you know, that I did, you know, 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 rest of the day. You know, but again, for me, it was, it was, it was a lesson that I, you know, I, 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 these are,

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 going to be a core competency or set of overlapping attributes that those individuals are going to share.

But at the same time, it's recognizing that there are many other attributes that are at play here. So I'm 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 got to be a hierarchy of which ones are more important than others. In the SEAL context? Yeah. Yes. I would imagine, I would say that the grid attributes are pretty high up.

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 everybody is a super muscle. Cunning can have a pejorative.

It can, it can. But cunning really, as I kind of define on the book, means the ability to look outside rules and boundaries, to 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 were 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 used to tell this to my guys too, to describe the difference between us and maybe some other people. describe the difference between us and maybe some other people. And I would say, okay, imagine you 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. When I say special operator, I don't mean just seal. I mean, you know, spec operator, SF guy, you know, or Green Beret, you know, Ranger, whatever, put him in the problem. And that 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 going to find a way to save the princess without hitting the dragon because I don't want to hit the dragon, right? That dragon will kill me, right? So by design, special operations were created to think outside the box, to frustrate and agitate, to find ways around that people weren't thinking about. That's one of the things that drew me to spec Ops in the first place was this idea and 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 at one of my jobs was I worked at a marina

and the security guard at the marina, he'd basically come on at like five in the evening and he'd stay the whole night and leave at like eight or nine, eight in the morning once we came back. Guy name was, the guy's name was Ed Stalling. 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, you know, 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 an 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, you know, 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, you know, and it's, you know, we, I haven't talked to him. He died several years

ago and we were able to say, you know, say hi to his sons. His sons were just, just as awesome. But, but, uh, but I remember thinking that I was like, I don't know if I have an interest in being the second wave. You know, I have an interest in sneaking around and like killing the machine gunner before he ever sees me coming. You know, um, I just think that's, you know, for me, that was, that was the attraction of special operators. You know, um, can you, can you find a way around to actually accomplish something that needs to be accomplished with a minimal life loss or whatever?

And so I think, 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 humor. 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. I mean, those would seem self-evident. Yeah. I think those are the ones. 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 us such a great service. And the reason is because humor, laughing is an involuntary response, right? And when we laugh,

what happens is we get jolted with three chemicals, two neurotransmitters and one hormone. We get jolted with dopamine,, two neurotransmitters and one hormone. We get jolted with dopamine, which we all know, powerful pleasure chemical, that 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 an 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 they said, well, why the heck do human brains have opiate receptors? Well, the answer is because the human body makes its own opiates. Enter endorphins, right? That's what endorphins, they're the human body's opiates that mask pain.

So we get 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. 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 affect 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 on going, 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, the act of 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 to when you actually reach the goal, it's as you take steps. So as we take step by step, we get dopamine. 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 hell week and we were sitting in the surf zone. We were going through surf torture. All right. And so I don't know. You probably know what surf torture is. For those who don't, surf torture is when you, as a bud student, you link your arms up in this, in the Pacific ocean there in Coronado, which is like, I think low sixties, you know, we did in November.

So it was probably high fifties. And you basically link your arms and you, 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 the coldest thing you'll ever do. They're 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, it's usually at night, right? So we're getting surf tortured. This is during Hell Week. And as usual, the instructors, because 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 on 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 who quits right now. It's kind of like the survivor thing, right? You offer food, right? Anybody wants to quit, and a lot of people quit. But I remember him saying that, right? He pulled the van, he said that. And the guy next to me, the guy to my right, immediately pipes up. He's like, hey, do you have any chocolate glazed donuts? Because if you don't have any chocolate glazed 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 going to make it. Right. 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 is not, 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, this guy's like- He's not gonna make it. He's gonna ring the bell. He's gonna, five minutes later, he rang the bell, right? So what happened there? So just in that moment, what happened? 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 right now. It's a courage hack.

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. 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 scientist 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.

And it 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, from that experience positively. Right. And you do that in a couple of ways.

First, the way you do it is you actually, you ask better questions. So, so I talk about this idea that, you know, 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, 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 could 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'll probably get a list of, say, five things, you know? Now, it doesn't really matter what those five things. Some may be inane. Some may be bad ideas. Selling a 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 began 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 are so bad at this versus what are some of the things I learned? You know, how can I be better? You know? 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. You know, if you can,

if you're 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 shit show that 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 want to do the kind of tropey set New Year's resolutions. I'd rather focus on how we can reframe how we think about the stress that we carried in 2020 and use that as a launchpad or leverage for growth in 2021. Yeah. That's a big one. Well, no, and it's an important one.

This is what's on everyone's mind though, right? It's early January and we got to get a grip on it. 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, yeah. 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, 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 thoughts, 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 DHEA, 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 that I learned? What are the things I have to think about going into 2021?

Okay, well, it's going to be uncertain. We know that. So when I think about my grid attributes, I'm going to need a little bit of courage. If I feel like I'm low on courage, I should probably try to develop that a little bit. I'm definitely going to need adaptability. Perseverance. Okay, I have some goals. Obviously, my goals might have 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 going to take, now this is a passive, it's a passive act. It's, you know, optimism is, I would call optimism proactive pathway. Open-mindedness is a passive pathway where you're saying, okay, I am, I am going to be open to other ideas, viewpoint 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 a difference between making that decision and actually effectuating it, 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. It's all, 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 is, 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 it. Curiosity. Curiosity is the buttress to open-mindedness, absolutely. But I say, you

know, 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, you know, 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, you know,

take myself out of my own perspective. If I'm not this, you know, 47-year-old, you know, male former Navy SEAL author living in Virginia, if I'm not that person, right, 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, you know? So it's a proactive approach to a passive environment. 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. 100%, 100%. 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 way further down than I was before. I got to 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, you know, and that's something to be, it's something to just give ourselves

a quick pat on the back for. What is the process of performing that dissection though for somebody who's never done anything like that? Yeah, well, so the first process is to put yourself in a sense, in a calm state, right? You wanna try to take emotion out of the equation. Very difficult, admitted state, right? You don't, you wanna try to, 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 forebrain. 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 want to accomplish in 2021? That sounds like what we call the four step in AA. Maybe so. The inventory. 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 can also be powerful. No, I wouldn't say that, but I do, I think what I would call out would be the three others that I talk about in the book.

The four categories, 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 narcissism 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, you know, and there are very super successful people who are impatient and it works very well for them. Fear of rejection. This idea that I care what people think to the extent that I'm going to 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. 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 those scales. The other one is competitiveness. You know, 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. I never have been. When I played sports in high school, I really played two. I played lacrosse, which was my main sport. And then I did track basically to get in shape for lacrosse, right? I loved the game and I loved playing. I loved the intricacy of the game.

I loved the stick work. I loved 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 it affected. I saw it was affecting other people. And I thought 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, BUDS favors neither the competitive gene or the non-competitive gene. That's interesting. And one example of that are the two awards that are given at the end of Bud's. There are two awards given in the 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 O course time, fastest swims. It favors that competitive gene, right? You're basically giving an award for the best scores. The other reward is the fire in gut. Fire in the gut award is given to the person who showed the most grit and drive and perseverance through butts. Often that guy who wins that

has some of the lowest scores, right? So you don't win the fire in 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. Right. 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? What's a different pathway? I literally find myself looking at the pack of people and saying, I'm not really interested in competing. They're all doing great work. I'm going to 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 thinking outside the box and kind of 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 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. And it's that dynamic swap.

It's dynamic subordination in terms of patience. 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. Yeah, and I would just offer if your date, give it a while.

It can't just be one or two dates. It has to be shorter than marriage, of course, but longer than just a few dates, right? So you have to, I don't know what that secret sauce is. I met my wife in Hawaii when I was, 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 I- Wow. Yeah, and we've been married for 20 years.

So something went right there, you know? So I can't necessarily prescribe timelines responsibly, you know, but, and then we know of people who, you know, they date for years and years. We have to make room for a little fairy dust in all of this, right? I agree, yeah. You know, as much as we love Andrew Huberman,

like there's a mystical aspect. 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, just getting into high school, my mom handed me a book called The Key to Yourself. It's written by Venice Bloodworth.

It was written in the fifties. The Key to Yourself was a book that explained the law of attraction, you know, 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 power of the subconscious mind and law of attraction, things like that. And I began to, and 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 CJ7, you know, 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 CJ7. 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 while 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 to,

cause 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. You know, same thing when you buy a car

and suddenly that car's 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 kind of cements. And I've done that for, I've done that my whole life. It makes it real. It makes it real.

And I tell the story, I did that for my, I wrote down at one point, I was like, I really wanna meet the 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, this 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, I 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 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 kind of clicking off. And I was 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, Richard Vinney. Well, thank you. All right, we got to land this plane, but I'm not going to 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 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, you know, it's an operation and nothing happened, right? Nothing combat happened. So we were tasked with an operation where we, so we got, let me back up. We got some intelligence on something that was gonna happen in the village during the daytime. Now- In Afghanistan or? This was in Iraq, yeah.

And so when you get something like that, you say, okay, how can I, what do we wanna affect and how can we affect that? Sometimes that means, okay, you're gonna do what's called a remain over day operation. So what that means is you're going to find a place on the map, you're going to go in at night, you're going to put yourself there in a position where you can watch and affect if needed, and you just sit there all day and just watch. It's kind of like a recon mission, but you have hopefully an objective if something happens.

And then affect it if affected. So we had one of these things. We thought we had intelligence that something was gonna happen. So we looked at it and said, okay, this, it was in a village in Iraq. And we picked a compound that we were gonna, okay, we'll sit here. It's good visibility.

We can put everybody, hide. No one knows we're there. So we go in, in the wee hours of the morning, it's still dark. We come in and we descend into this compound silently. Of course, these people have no clue that that we're coming you know and now we're going to be there all day so we're it's they are multi-generational houses so you have grandmas down to babies so we're making sure everybody's positioned all the civilians are safe uh we're

positioning our guys so they can see all that stuff i'm in charge of the mission i'm the oic and and while i'm walking around, I'm noticing there's 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 can't, I don't, I'm working, so I can't stop to address it just yet.

But once everything settled down, I brought the Terp over. I said, hey, can you tell me what this little girl's saying? And so he asked her and she says, she tells him, and he says, yeah, she said, hey, can you tell me what this little girl is saying? And so he asked her, and 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 want to 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 kind of settled in. Yeah, sure. So she runs into our room. She grabs this game. She comes out. So we knew we were in the long haul, just kind of settled 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 was, it's a math game. It's like you have numbers and you have to,

you get this, you get a number and then you have to find out how to multiply to it or whatever. It was kind of an Iraqi version of this. It was, 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 an experience. I'm just playing the game with this

little girl. Then the second thing I noticed was this girl was incredibly smart. She was, 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 and, you know, throughout the day back, you know, she points at which I have to get up and work, you know, I work and then she comes back

and then what we were looking to have happen, never happened. It ended up being a pretty boring day. So we play periodically throughout the day. Now the sun goes down. We wait till 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's following me around again, trying to tell me something. Finally, we're getting ready to step out and leave. And I bring the trip over. 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.

You know, and at that point, you know, I realized, you know, you ask yourself, okay, is the truth the best thing here right now? And so I got, 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 will, I promise I'll come play with her, you know. And he told her and that seemed to 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 it's probably not a good thing. 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 acted 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 girl's 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. You know, 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. You know, it doesn't have to be a town in Iraq. It can be a kid in LA. It can be a kid in, you know, in New York.

I mean, how many of those kids are out there that aren't, they don't have the resources or some of the tools to be able to start realizing their own potential. And so I, I think a lot about, I call it finding Einstein, like where's our next Einstein. This girl could, could, could have been, or could be our next Einstein. I am certainly not at, you know, but I'm, I'm really, really, um, uh, I get excited about human potential. You know, this idea that we as humans can imagine something that doesn't exist and then, and then make it,

bring it into an existence, you know? Um, and so that type of, and we do that and that type of evolution, that type of process is, is just very inspiring to me. And those people who can help us evolve are inspiring as well. And so, so that's really, for me, it's all about, it's 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 they're 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 Einsteins? 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, it drives me. 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

going to find what they need to support them in that expression is extremely limited. It really is. And the key is, 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, 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. 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? You need to understand the engine before you start tweaking it and putting high-speed stuff on it.

So sometimes I get frustrated with all these gimmicks and hacks say, oh, do this, do that, you know? It's like, well, if you don't understand your own engine first, then you might put something on it that's going to blow it, you know? 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. 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. The assessment tool partnered with Typeform, awesome company. They've helped us put it together. Assessment tool is free. So while I would recommend definitely the book will 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 want to develop too. So yeah, enjoy. Book comes out January 18th? January 26th. 26.

All right. Pre-order it now. Pre-order it now. And I will say we're going to do somethingorder 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?

And we're gonna 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, so. That's very cool. That's worth the price of the book right there.

Yeah. So that'll be offered if you pick up a pre-order and your pre-order purchase will 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. What did I tell you? 2021 is already better than 2020. Thank you, Rich. That was awesome.

I hope you guys enjoyed it. Now, put it to work. Before we go, Rich's book, "'The Attributes' is available for pre-order now. So pick that up, check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com for more on Mr. Devaney plus links and resources related to everything we talked about.

And again, Rich will be doing a live event with neuroscientist, Dr. Andrew Huberman, a podcast favorite. For everybody who pre-orders the book, you'll also get a free copy of the Courage chapter upon pre-order. All information on all of that is available on the book's website at theattributes.com.

If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media is of course always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates,

special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition was created by Blake Curtis, portraits by Allie Rogers and Davey Greenberg, graphic elements courtesy of Jessica Miranda, and our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis. Thanks. I love you guys. Right now, I'm taking a little bit of time off. I will be out

of pocket for a big chunk of January, but not to worry. The show goes on, including an amazing conversation next week with Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, Brian Fogel. The man behind Icarus is back with a powerful new film coming out called The Dissident. It's all about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It is gripping and our conversation is one you're not gonna wanna miss. So until then, welcome to 2021. Together, let's make it the best year ever.

Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.