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December 30, 2023
The poem is titled “Death Song,” and it was written by Tecumseh.
So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, and beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for
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“Making better choices is often a matter of choosing
better constraints. By limiting your options to those that fit your values, you are taking an important step to ensuring that your behavior matches your beliefs. Plus, constraints will boost your creativity. Know your principles and you can choose your methods.”
You need to ask yourself what you are willing to do to live by those values and, even more importantly, what you are unwilling to do to avoid deviation.
In times of war or uncertainty there is a special breed of warrior ready to answer our nation’s call. A common man with an uncommon desire to succeed. Forged by adversity, he stands alongside America’s finest special operations forces to serve his country, the American people, and protect their way of life. I am that man.
Start by writing one core value on each Post-it. For example, faith, integrity, wellness, family, etc. Remember, they must be meaningful to you. Authentic. Not values you think others would like to see you have.
Group them into piles, stick them on the window, the mirror, a white board, whatever works best. You will dive deeper when you detail the supporting behaviors and accountability mechanisms in the next step, but for now, narrow it down to between four and six core values.
I can resist anything except temptation. —OSCAR WILDE, LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN
Resilience is not about hard work toward short-term gains, but rather maintaining the long-term grind toward an ultimate goal.
We become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.
The only easy day was yesterday. —NAVY SEAL PHILOSOPHY
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit. —NAPOLEON HILL
Steven Kerr’s simple performance formula. Kerr is a senior advisor to Goldman Sachs after a six-year term as a managing director and Goldman’s chief learning officer (CLO). Before joining Goldman, he spent seven years as General Electric’s CLO and vice president of corporate leadership development, working closely with Jack Welch and leading GE’s renowned leadership education center. He went on to co-found the Jack Welch Management Institute. His formula is as follows: Ability x Motivation = Performance
Reality 2: Failure alters your perception of your abilities. As much as failure can distort your perception of goals, it can also alter your assumptions about ability.
Reality 3: Failure can make you feel helpless. According to psychologists, this is a mental defense mechanism. When we fail, the brain sends signals making us feel temporarily helpless; it’s an emotional wound so to speak.
Reality 4: A failure experience can cause a fear of failure complex. People can also trend toward avoiding success as much as they try to avoid failure, but the two usually go hand-in-hand. Success rarely comes without some failure along the way, which makes the journey very uncomfortable. So rather than working on improving their ability, skills, or approach to succeeding at something, people head back to home base—their own cozy little comfort zone.
Reality 6: The pressure to succeed increases performance anxiety, causing choking.
Reality 7: Willpower is like a muscle—it needs both training and rest. As we’ve discussed, much like muscles that become fatigued, mental willpower can become overworked and undernourished. Soldiers participating in sustained combat experience battle fatigue, which causes clouded thinking, lack of ability to control emotion, confusion, depression, and inhibited decision-making ability. So when you feel your willpower fading, be sure to rest and be willing to revisit your motivations once you’ve nourished your willpower muscles. Just don’t rest too long!
Reality 8: The healthiest psychological response to failure is focusing on what you can control. This ability is a fundamental tenet of building resilience. Failure can result in us focusing primarily on the cause of our current adversity. We look backward instead of forward. We focus on the elements we have no control over as opposed to developing an action plan—leveraging what is in our control.
Mark looked down at his teammates who were still making fun of him. Then he looked out to the Vegas skyline. “Why are you looking down at the guys? They can’t fucking help you. Neither can Las Vegas. Stay in your three-foot world bro. Right here. Only focus on what’s in your immediate control. Ignore everything else,” he said.
Mitigating Failure Through Calculated Risk So how the hell do we know when we are taking calculated risk versus blind dumb risk? Simple. When the crazy shit we decide to do turns into a positive outcome! I
Define the Goal. Such as marrying the girl you just met, taking down a terrorist stronghold with limited information, finally telling your unappreciative boss to fuck off, or launching yourself from a perfectly good airplane. Make the goal as concise, measurable, achievable, and time bound as possible. List Threats and Hazards. Don’t really know the girl, could end badly. Unknown number of terrorists on target. Will probably get fired when I tell my boss to fuck off. Parachute may not open. You’ll come back to this list when weighing your options. Identify Resources for Successful Execution.
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Questions to ask yourself: How do I respond in the face of failure and setbacks? What could I potentially gain by looking at failure through a different lens? Does failure drive my goals further away, or like Thomas Edison, just confirm a few ways things won’t work? How often do I assess the odds and take calculated risk? How might I feel toward the end of my life if I realize I never really strayed
from my comfort zone?
“Do something that sucks every day.” David Goggins’s philosophy on mastering your mind is simple: push the boundaries of your comfort zone daily, mentally and physically. Psychological and physical fortitude require training—they are perishable qualities. Our comfort zones are surrounded by moveable barriers. When we take decisive action in pushing against those barriers, our comfort zones begin to overflow with challenges, tasks, and fears we used to deem insurmountable. They become part of our everyday lives. Whether it be obstacles at work, difficult relationships unattended to, goals
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Neuroscience research from Matthew Lieberman of UCLA shows how just acknowledging stress and adversity can move reactivity in your brain from the automatic and reactive centers to the more conscious and deliberate ones.
STEP TWO: Own it. As I mentioned, we usually only stress about things that matter to us. Owning this realization unleashes that positive aggression I keep referring to, because deep down we know that the things that really matter in life don’t come easy.
Basically, we do something that sucks every day, so we get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Though it often feels like it, the body’s stress response was not designed to kill us. In fact, the evolutionary goal of the stress response was to help boost the body and mind into enhanced functioning, to help us grow and meet the demands we face.
And while the stress response can sometimes have adverse effects, in many cases, stress hormones do in fact induce growth and release chemicals into the body that rebuild cells, synthesize proteins, and enhance immunity, leaving the body even stronger and healthier. Researchers call this effect physiological thriving, and any athlete, combat veteran, or POW survivor knows its rewards. As we have discussed, it’s all about perspective. Shifting the narrative on anxiety to excitement and opportunity can improve performance on any task or objective.
The challenge is that we often engage in activities that have no real connection to our passions, purpose, values, or goals. It’s about doing the right things that suck. People choose jobs that leave them unfulfilled. Stay in relationships that will only end in suffering. Hold grudges that only cause more pointless pain. Follow paths defined by others, which are rarely the paths less traveled. Get caught up in hateful acts for no real reason. Become distracted by laziness and temptation and give up on fitness goals. Quit when the going gets tough. So how do you do the right things that suck
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SEALs are arguably the best at what we do in our given field. Yet we practice, rehearse, dirt dive, execute, and debrief constantly. Over and over. The general public might assume SEALs are constantly deployed downrange, but we actually spend 75 percent of our time training. The other 25 percent of the time we are deployed. And on deployment, when we aren’t fighting, eating, or sleeping, we’re training—living each day in a constant state of improvement.
If one of your personal goals is related to fitness, I recommend creating your own Wheel of Misfortune packed with exercises and routines designed to train you in key areas—you know, the ones you hate the most. One of my professional goals is to transform people and organizations through
enhanced leadership ability at every level. That means I must constantly study and practice the art and science of leadership. One of the things on my list of stuff that sucks is having difficult conversations. On the literal battlefield, I ran swiftly to the sound of gunfire. In my current personal and professional life, however, I struggle with conflict avoidance. Tackling challenges and difficult conversations is critical for effective leadership. So, I make a point to practice, practice, practice. And it gets a little easier every time.
Questions to ask yourself: What do I do regularly to at least peek over the barriers of my comfort zone? When I do, what do I see? Does it compel me to leap over or climb back down? How do I channel the negative energy from adverse situations? Do I reinvest that energy into something new? What positive benefits could come if I started doing something that sucks every day? What is my growth potential? Am I committed to tackling the list of things that suck, knowing it will drive me closer to my goal?
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. —KAHLIL GIBRAN
My decision didn’t come overnight, of course. It was a long process of training and weighing risk. But I knew the harder I trained and prepared, the lower the risk could potentially be. I say “potentially” because there are just too many unseen obstacles. Failure. Quitting. Being dropped for underperformance. Severe injury. Death. But I knew that deciding not to take on this challenge would lead to bad problems. Regret. Depression. Mediocrity. Always asking, “What if?” Naturally, my decision to leap over the wall of my comfort zone and race off into the abyss would come with new problems. New
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Life is a series of choices. But how many choices do we make each day? How many are consequential? How many don’t really matter?
Finally, not all decisions may be important in the grander scheme of things. Whatever the statistics are, we cannot deny being faced with a never-ending stream of decisions from the moment we crawl out of bed in the morning. Sometimes, seemingly small choices can have monumental consequences. We must not underestimate the butterfly effect. Commonly cited in chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the idea that a small change can result in much more significant events—one tiny incident can have a huge impact on the future. By ignoring email or other notifications on your phone (which we should
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John C. Maxwell famously put it—“Life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you.
These are all choices. Bad choices, indecision, and inaction lead to bad problems. Good decisions, calculated risk, and action lead to good problems. Which do you prefer? Why not choose what you are willing to suffer for rather than letting life—or others—choose for you?
The Embrace the Suck model has five suffering practices that are backed by research to help you grow through times of struggle. 1. Find safe relationships to process suffering.
Suffering is meant to be dealt with in a relationship. We all need people to walk alongside us on the journey of suffering.
2. Face and express your emotions.
Once you find people to walk with you on this journey, you need to approach and express your emotions, rather than suppress and run from them. It’s commonly known that sharing your emotions related to suffering leads to positive outcomes.
3. Process the emotions of suffering all the way through. Once you start talking about and feeling the pain of your suffering, stay with the feelings until you get to the end of the emotional arc. This principle comes from what is sometimes called a functional theory of emotion, which suggests that emotions are fundamentally adaptive. Emotions are your automatic evaluation of the events in your life. They provide information that is crucial, and they orient you to what is important for your well-being.
Reflect on and reorder your priorities. Trials have a way of making you rethink your priorities in life. This can help you grow. But you must actively reflect on what is truly important to you and then be intentional about changing your routines, habits, and rhythms in ways that align with your revised priorities. That might mean spending more time with your spouse and kids and cherishing each present moment with them.
5. Use your experiences of suffering to help others. Many people find an immense sense of meaning in helping others who’ve gone through similar trials. Even if others didn’t experience the same challenges as you, using your pain as the fuel for empathy and compassion for others is a way of redeeming your suffering. It helps you create meaning out of it.
It’s no different for elite athletes, successful entrepreneurs, or anyone who has chosen to expand their comfort zone in pursuit of something they are passionate about. It’s a willingness we all have if we just tap into it. If you just embrace the suck and the good problems that will undoubtedly follow, you’ll eventually find greatness—whatever your definition of that is.
