Beyond OODA Quotes

“First, being trained to a highly proficient level does not guarantee that the individual will perform well under force pressure. Second, the lack of training does not guarantee that the individual will not perform well under force pressure.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“intuition is always right in at least two important ways; It is always in response to something, it always has your best interest at heart.” Intuition is defined as the ability to understand, know or consider a thing likely without exclusively using conscious reasoning.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“This is where mistakes are made, and our perceptions are colored by our fears, attachments, experience or lack thereof, and our cultural inputs and values. This is where incestuous amplification takes place.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“Observation and perception are two separate things; the observing eye is stronger, the perceiving eye is weaker.” What happens between observation and perception? A series of factors come into play where a person tries to interpret and understand what they see through the analysis and synthesis of information as it feeds into their orientation.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“Without personal experience or death-defying initiation, you are at a deficit here. Your performance is affected by your ability to have clarity concerning the incoming information and to not allow your biases and incestuous amplification to corrupt that information. I would argue that it all begins with acknowledging the reality that we do face the possibility of extreme violence and that violent people are present in every town and every city.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“What is not so easy is knowing when you yourself are full of shit. Convincing yourself that you are among “the initiated” because you took some classes, ran a Spartan race, or did the Murph for the last three years, or because you have taken jiu-jitsu for eight years and can shoot really well is a mistake. The cool gear, the cool truck, the belt, the patches...it all screams badass. You are creating an image of the Instagram-friendly warrior, but maybe not so much real life.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“But make no mistake, there’s no human out there operating at normal cognitive and social levels that is not telling themselves a story about who they are and how they fit into the world around them.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“I learned that past performance in the absence of stress is NOT an indicator of performance under stress and that this is also heavily affected by orientation.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“stop looking for things and start looking at things.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“Humans learn well by doing. The bad part is that street violence, prison, and war are high casualty environments that claim a lot of lives along the way.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“Robbing students, police cadets and future soldiers of that process of analysis and synthesis through doing is a leading cause of inaccurate attitudes that graduates have about their own capabilities. It”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“Simply developing physical capabilities, mental toughness and being “ready to fight” is not preparing you to make precise, effective and efficient decisions about very specific problems under force pressure.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence

“We should not discount the anecdotal evidence of the survivors or the past offenders of violence, nor should we ignore the perspectives of the participants and veterans of it who go on to become thinkers and developers in the business of violence training.”
― Varg Freeborn, Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence