Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

Have faith in your subordinates after you have trained them.

It freed me up to not worry about my next command and focus instead on doing the best job I could in the one I had.

Churchill noted, “To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

Improvise, adapt, and overcome;

When you are in command, there is always the next decision waiting to be made. You don’t have time to pace back and forth like Hamlet, zigzagging one way and the other. You do your best and live with the consequences. A commander has to compartmentalize his emotions and remain focused on the mission. You must decide, act, and move on.

In any confrontation, you need to know your enemy.

you have to observe what is going on, orient yourself, decide what to do, and act before your opponent has completed his version of that same process, repeating and repeating this loop faster than your foe.

the military does not accept “difficult” as an excuse for failing at anything.

Every institution gets the behavior it rewards.

“Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it,” Aristotle wrote.