Asymmetric Creativity and Leadership with CEO and Retired Navy SEAL, Marty Strong

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I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by our new video course, how to Publish in the New Millennium. From Scientific Journals to Best Sellers, it's an asynchronous course offering so you can watch it when it's convenient for your schedule. It's based on eight video lessons and provides three hours of material with new concepts, stories and examples, and it includes several attempts at humor. You'll learn about the best ways to submit a manuscript to a peer reviewed journal, the mechanics of book contracting, what publishers are looking for, how to evaluate and negotiate a contract, royalties, advances, copyright and ownership, why to never first submit a manuscript to a publisher when you need an agent and when you don't, and the differences between publishers. You'll learn about ebooks, print on demand, Amazon's CreateSpace and KDP programs and other non traditional approaches to publishing along with how to tell if a platform is of high quality or not. We do a deep dive into marketing, how to create media kits and what goes into them, along with examples how to create a great Amazon author page, how book signings work and how to be invited to do library talks and the economics of both, along with developing speaking engagements, promotional tours and being a podcast guest as well as a number of other publicity aspects. We cover blogging and provide additional resources to help you in crafting your work and making it better. This is a rich, fun and fact filled course that covers everything you need to know from a practical and actionable perspective. It's for anyone wanting to get their written work into the world, be it academia, popular media, or both. Join the Masterclass in Getting Published. To learn more please visit tinyurl.com gettingpublishedcourse

thanks

welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. What is the journey like to move

from enlisting in the Navy at age

17, being recruited into the SEALS instead of going to law school, then serving as a SEAL team member for 20 years, later leading combat missions and helping to design and test new special operations capabilities while becoming a combat decorated officer and later instructor to next becoming an Entrepreneur, novelist and nonfiction author, CEO and chief strategy officer, portfolio manager, sought after media expert and keynote speaker while being the father of five and beating cancer twice. Well, that's what Marty Strong will be discussing in this episode and how to apply what he's learned to your life and work. But first, let me tell you a

little bit more about Marty.

In the Navy, he served as a former task unit commander and ops boss, was a member of Seal Team 2 and Seal Team 4, and was leading Chief Petty Officer at the Naval Special Warfare center in Coronado. He's traveled to over 40 countries and been shot at in a few.

After an injury led to his retirement

from the Navy, he worked in the financial services industry and became a Portfolio Manager at ubs. From there, he went on to build business divisions and small, rapidly growing companies working on valuation, organizational design, and scaling strategies. Marty is currently the CEO of three companies within an ESOP enterprise structure and he runs his own consulting firm. He's appeared on cnn, Fox News, Inside Edition, and was a Featured expert on two History Channel documentaries. In all, Marty has over 400 TV and radio interviews to his credit. He holds an undergraduate degree in Business Administration and a master's in management. And he's a graduate of Villanova University's Black Belt Lean Six Sigma program. Marty has taken the thread of leadership

to stitch together the fabric of his

vibrant, albeit challenging career and life.

Welcome to the show, Marty. It's great to have you on.

Thanks for having me. That was an exhausting. I sound scatterbrained.

Oh, no, no, no. You have a fascinating life and that's one of the reasons why I'm have you on as a guest. There's just so many things, but I think they all really kind of speak to the, you know, living your life in full. I don't, I guess maybe yours should be living your lives in full because you've done so many different kinds of things. I mean, you've, you've, like, I want to talk with you about leadership and issues of overcoming adversity. I'd also like to dig in a little bit about buds and being a SEAL team member and instructor. But, you know, again, I'm also. People that have heard this show, you know, also know that I like to go into the writers process and talking about, you know, your, your being an author as well as an entrepreneur. So maybe just to kind of ground us, could you maybe start with your

origin story and the transitions from Nebraska

to Japan to Hawaii?

So I was, I was born in Nebraska, out in the far west Panhandle of Nebraska in a little town called Sydney. My father worked for the Department of the Armies. He was a four year veteran of the Korean War in the Navy, served on a destroyer, which I also happen to have frogman on board, which, that's a different story. But the result of his job, we ended up moving from the east side of Nebraska to Omaha, Nebraska, in the far west. He went off to Vietnam to work in administration in Saigon for a couple of years. And when he came back, his boss said, hey, I want to. I want you here working for me in Japan. So the whole family got up, we took off from Nebraska, rented the house, and I lived in Japan for four years.

Wow.

In a very strange environment because the music was all controlled. We were basically only allowed to listen to music up to about 1964. 65 on the jukeboxes.

Wow.

It was kind of a footloose thing. Young people were. We didn't wear jeans in school. It was just. We were stuck in the like late 1950s. And meanwhile, the Vietnam War is nearing its end and in the United States, you know, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, all those, all those guys were bursting onto the scene and we knew nothing of it. So because of that, I'm kind of an expert in late 50s, early 60s doo wop and surfer music, which is out of sync with my age. So my parents got divorced in Japan. My mom, myself, my two siblings ended up back in Omaha in the house we'd rented. My mom had a lot of mental issues and she was a drinker. So we had a falling out one day and I exited through the second floor of an apartment because by then she'd already lost the house.

Wow.

And my friend picked me up. I called my dad, who by now had been reassigned to Honolulu, Hawaii. And the next day I was on a plane to Hawaii. So I ended up going to high school in Hawaii for a couple years, learning to surf and growing my hair real long and living that life. Then he was moved to Detroit, Michigan for the what became the M1 Abrams Tank Project. And I ended up graduating from Grosse Pointe South High School in Michigan. Same one. The movie was made after. Wow. And, and I joined. I joined the Navy wanting to be a radar operator, air traffic controller, like my dad was in the Navy. Finished that and was given orders to SEAL training. And I didn't know what the acronym meant. So I got to the airport and I called my dad and I said, something's wrong. He said, well, I've never heard of these SEAL things. So go to, go to San Diego, figure it out and they'll set you straight. You'll be on your ship in no time. What actually happened was I showed up and they talked me into staying and volunteering. So at 17 and a half, about 125, 28 pounds, I started my buds class. 126 people.

Wow.

And started bludgeoning my way through the six month process.

Gosh. Can you maybe unpack that for us? I mean, I think it's something that's maybe gotten more awareness probably when you went through it like even yourself. What the heck is buds? What the heck is seals? They become a little bit more commonplace for people's awareness, but maybe not the specific, but can you step us through what BUDS was like for you?

So the difference is there's a kind of a threshold, probably in the early 90s where it was a very secretive organization, every aspect of it was secret. Most of the people that volunteered were actually coming from ships because they were aware of the program. And a small smattering of legacy types that maybe their father, their uncle, or maybe some other relative had served in the Navy as a frogman or even in the SEAL teams. So you had a very, very shallow, light funnel of intake into the SEAL selection process known as Basic Underwater Demolition, SEAL training, or buds. No recruiting, no recruiting movies, no recruiters. Navy recruiters weren't, weren't aware of it. So that's kind of where I, my, I started in the profession, not knowing what profession I was even starting in because nobody would tell me. So you know, that that's good thing. It's kind of a good thing and a bad thing. I think the good thing was I went in not eyes wide open, but basically 100 ignorant of what I was about to go through, as opposed to somebody nowadays or say post mid-90s who's seen movies and watch documentaries and have gone through all kinds of that if they just finished, but they quit before they started because you know, their, their brain saw this, all the stimulation and all this information and said, yeah, I'm not that person in that movie. So the, the, the beginning is a couple of weeks of what they call pre training. Our class was cut in half before we started Hell Week, which is kind of the infamous crucible. Five days, little to no sleep. They feed you, by the way, all the way through. Unlike Army Ranger school that uses starvation as kind of their, their crucible of psychological conflict. And whether I should stay here or not. In the BUDS course, it's about cold water and sleep deprivation. But they have to feed you because they can't do those other two things and not feed you. You just stop.

Right?

So you go through the first, say four or five weeks. Hell Week shifted a couple of times. Usually it was the fifth week, fourth week, sixth week over the different decades. And at that time we had half the class gone. So half the class had either quit, been hurt and rolled out of the class. And that's a shock, especially if you're, you know, a young person. It's not the same as combat, but it's similar to a lot of movies like Saving Private Ryan or something where you start off with all these. The band of brothers, the buddies. You know, you hit the beach and then 20 minutes later there's only five of you left.

Wow.

So you get to know all these people, you run everywhere with these people, there's 100 plus of you and all of a sudden you get ready to start Hell Week. You look around, there's only 60, and then you get through Hell Week. And in our case there was about 30. And of the 30, quite a few were injured and had to be rolled back. So we kind of made our way through the selection first. One third of the course, one third of the six month period and we're around 20 to 22 people out of the original class. And then we started getting some people that were injured and they were rolling into our class. So we eventually graduated with 24, but about anywhere from 18 to 20 originals from that 126 on day one.

Gotcha. Are they like you were probably 17, 18ish at this point. So are they similar in age or kind of. What was the composition of your colleagues?

They were actually it was about a 50, 50 split because of the kind of the source that I method that I described earlier. They're coming from the ships, they're coming from the fleet, so. Oh, I see about half the class are probably in their early 20s, anywhere from 22 to 24. And the other half the class were like me, they were 17 to 19. Once in a great while you get somebody older than 24. It. When I was a actual, when I ran that first phase as a senior enlisted before I became an officer, the, the oldest person ever to go through BUDS went through. So I got to see how he, how he reacted. I think he was 29 or 30. Maybe he's 30 and he looked like he was 60 by the time that, that time Hell Week was over.

I can imagine.

I mean if you're 17, you can bounce back pretty quick from A lot of things. Sleep deprivation, just exhaustion. But boy, when you start to get past about 28, your body just reacts biologically in a completely different way. It's kind of bizarre to watch experience.

Yeah. Wow. So then post buds, is it, is it scuba navigation or what happens after for those that, that graduate, so to speak? What's, what's next?

Yeah, so again, they've changed the order of the, the second, third phase a couple of times. When I went through it was die phase. So you went through basic scuba. There's also some crucible events in there that they're basically testing your ability to handle stress underwater. They tie up your scuba gear. You're on the bottom, you have to untie it. You're, you have a face mask that's blacked out so you can't see anything. So you've got to do it all by feel.

Oh, my gosh.

Instructors are swarming on you. They're turning things off and disconnecting straps. And you've got to figure it all out. There's, you know, you have to tread water with, back in my day, with two steel tanks on your back and without the fin. So you're treading water the traditional way. You got to keep your fingers, your fingers pointed to the sky and your wrists out of the water. And it's a timed thing. And of course those scuba tanks are heavy. They just want to drag you down. So there's a bunch of little things like that that aren't about the learning part. But then you go through, you know, diving physics and you learn all about, you know, how not to kill yourself breathing compressed air, depth. Then they shift you into a gas mixture type apparatus. And that of course, has evolved with the technology. And in that case, you can dive without any bubbles being seen on the surface, which obviously has a great, has great tactical significance. If you're right up against the edge of an enemy ship and you're about to put a bomb on it to blow it up, you don't want them looking down, you know, what the hell are those bubbles? Because usually right after that, a grenade comes right down the middle of the bubbles. So that's why those rigs are important. We've learned those a little bit. Not much about the tactics of diving underwater with a, a board with a compass and depth gauge and chronometer of some sorts evolved into digital these days so you can do your time distance tracking. You have a, you learn the rudimentary ship attack planning. How do you get from where you are? You start whether you parachute into the water, you come out of a submarine or you're dumped out of a rubber boat. How do you get from that point of origin as a swim pair and work your way into an enemy harbor around all the piers and all the other boats and stuff to get to a very specific location on a specific target. They don't really teach you anything about the, the munitions, the timing assemblies and all the other things that would go along with the munitions and buds, but they do teach you all the way up to planting a dummy bomb on the bottom of a ship and where to place it. And so you learn all that in die phase and then when I was going through the third phase was land warfare which was weapons tactics, ground tactics, basic kind of infantry tactics, patrolling small unit leadership, pistols, rifles, machine guns, submachine guns later on. And then you get all these demolitions materials, all these fabricated manufactured demolitions packages, everything from a block of TNT all the way up to more sophisticated things that make a big booming sound when they go off. And there's a certain amount of science and mathematics and all that to calculating those charges for different things like blowing up a bridge or dropping a telephone pole. And, and so you learn all that. And when you're done with that, in my day you would go to army jump school after graduation and then you would go to your assigned SEAL team. Nowadays they go straight into SEAL qualification training or sqt. And that's a concentrated four month and change course that takes you from a basic understanding both diving and weapons tactics and demolitions, and takes you to a much higher advanced level to include high altitude, low opening parachuting, how to actually, you know, handle and set up the demolitions that you would use on that ship attack mission, close quarters battle, hostage rescue related tactics that are different from field tactics. So that's all crammed in those four months.

Wow.

Nowadays. And then you get your SEAL pin at the end of the SEAL qualification training when I went through, you showed up a SEAL team and you went into that intermediate four month block at the SEAL team. It wasn't run in the main schoolhouse in, in Coronado California like it is now.

I see.

And at the end you were, you were on probation the whole time, but at the end they did a little doss student dossier on you. And unless you did something really bad, there was usually some kind of a ceremony and you got your, your SEAL pin at the end of it. So those, so it's change, it's modified, it's where it happens is a little bit different. But for the most part, since the mid-1960s, that's been the process.

Wow. It really sounds like an interesting blend

of a person that would be successful through it of, you know, obviously having the physical strength and stamina, having the ability to withstand the stresses. So the whole psychological thing, and then even then with these other kinds of things of just really the intellectual aspects of being able to understand the physics and being able to, you know, do the kinds of things that would be required, you know, mentally with it as well, too. Not just the psychological, but the. The intellectual. So it's really a. I mean, quite a. Quite a warrior that comes from that kind of a training. And a person that would need to have a certain number, baseline of skill, ability to be, you know, have those skills develop.

Right. So there's. There's a couple of different things that are attributes or traits that have to be there as a core capability, and then it's enhanced and groomed and strengthened and sharpened through training. Whole training process until the day you retire actually never stops. And that is, you have to have a psychological resilience to uncertainty. And that uncertainty is bigger than just, you know, the issue of pain, like stubbing your toe or not sleeping for two days. That uncertainty is really what's going to happen to me. It's that deeper kind of sense of, am I personally at risk? And that, you know, I often talk about the voice in your head. When I was an instructor, I understood it a lot more because I was watching the experiment in front of me holding a coffee cup in a warm. In a nice warm jacket. And you're watching the cause and effect, the cause and effect. You can see what the point of the training is, the way it's been sculpted and designed, what you're trying to elicit. And in SEAL training, what you're trying to elicit is you're trying to basically strip away through pain, punishment, and exposure to fatigue, you're trying to strip away the person's personality that they use socially and allow that voice in everybody's head to have that conversation about their status. And 75% of the people that start SEAL training quit or drop or drop for other reasons. And that's usually because the voice in their head isn't their voice. It's. It's the voice of doubt, the voice of. Of risk mitigation. It's the logical kind of internal attorney that's telling you all the reasons why you shouldn't be there or how you can get out of the situation you put yourself in and you can actually physically see a change in people. You can see it in their eyes. You can see when they're starting to transition. And there's a certain point that all Bud's instructors know that you get to, that you're probably going to keep most of the guys that have got to that point because they've already gone through that struggle, that psychological struggle. And instead of listening to the voice in their head, they start being the voice in their head. And, and so it's not just affirmations. It's not that kind of thing. You don't have a mantra. It's just, you start. You just basically say, you know, shut up. I'm not going to quit. You know, you don't, you're talking about, you know, I've got, I've got people that are relying on me. I'm just going to put one foot in front of me and one day at a time. And then when you make that decision consciously and subconsciously, you're, you're good to go. So at that point, you've, you've crossed and passed this. The point where the psychological resiliency is a check, then you have. In my day, the Navy used to do IQ tests along with their aptitude battery of cross capability. So there's like five or six different categories. Mechanics, mathematics, communications, comprehension, all these things. And you'd get scored. And that's how the Navy puts together your total scores and aptitude to what you should be doing in the Navy. And they stopped the IQ test sometime in the early 80s. But what doesn't come across in movies and TV shows, not even in books necessarily, is part of the screening is the intellect and the, the high iq. So you, you can't get into the seals with a low iq. You can't get into the seals with a low Armed Forces aptitude battery test. Matter of fact, it's, it's high. As high up there as is fire control and missile technicians and a lot of other highly skilled technical people in the Navy. So, so that's, that's a, that's already a prerequisite. If you, if you showed up and if you've got to the point where you've got the psychological resilience box checked and you're training physically and getting stronger and starting to trust what you can and can't do with your body and how far you can push your body, you're basically creating a triple threat. You're creating this thinking, operating, psychologically resilient person that didn't have anything given to them. We didn't we didn't train them to be anything. They evolved slowly through the process and started to come to the realization of what their, their capabilities were. So it's, it really amplifies their self esteem and their understanding of self. And that's what you start with. Basically when they graduate buds, that's what shows up in the SEAL teams ready to be trained.

I think that's fascinating. And it, it speaks to also like

part of the subtitle of your Be

Nimble book of the mindset aspect of that. I think there's a lot more appreciation these days from military things, from athletic kinds of things, from even the boardroom looking at mindset and how if there's already a hiccup in that, that it's just going to cascade down and be amplified by the time it gets to whatever the activity was or whatever the project was or whatever the goal was. So I want to talk about some

of your nonfiction books and your professional personal life. And it's sort of hard to like

parse those out neatly. So I'm going to bounce around a little bit if that's okay with you.

That's fine.

All right, so let's talk about your first nonfiction book. Here's what Don Mann, New York Times bestselling author of Inside Seal Team 6, he's also an adventure racer and a retired SEAL himself, had to say about your first nonfiction book, Be Nimble. How the Creative Navy SEAL Mindset Wins on the Battlefield and in business.

It's the testimony of leadership and success

written by a highly effective, well respected Navy SEAL officer and world class business leader.

The book is instructive, full of brilliant ideas, and provides a clear and straightforward approach to decision making that can be employed regardless of personal or business objectives.

And Marty, I have to say that I really enjoyed reading Be Nimble. I enjoyed the follow up to be visionary and one of the things I have to, you know, big respect and tip of the hat. You're very transparent in these books about talking about your experiences, not just as, you know, as a Navy seal, but then it's almost like there's this, your writing has a certain kind of authenticity that make both the books really kind of like a, you know, like a, like a conversation. You know, it wasn't really like a textbook, you know, here's, you know, chapter 1.1, paragraph 2 kind of a thing. I mean, it was really as a reader, I felt like it was just, you know, very engaging.

Did that come from having first been a novelist or.

Tell us about that. The mechanics of putting the books together and your style.

I think that the, and I appreciate you picking the very best review that's ever been written about.

That's great.

So don't read any more.

Stop while I'm ahead, huh? I'm right there.

I'm at a high point. So, you know, I'm a voracious reader myself. I just for fun, I track how many books I read a year. I'm roughly around 55 on average, 59 last year. And that's every format you can think of that's Audible, Kindle, hardcover, and, and about two thirds are, are non fiction and, and one third is fiction. So I have a lot of experience reading other authors and not just business, but a lot of different, you know, read. You know, I read a lot of Hawkins, Stephen Hawkins books. I mean, I read books about all kinds of different things because it all kind of opens up your brain and makes you think a little bit differently about your world, the universe, the people around you, et cetera. So I knew what I didn't want to feel like or sound like as a writer because of that, that deep experience and background in reading people that are trying to convey a message, convey knowledge, convey competence, or convey a formula for success, whatever the field is. And as I can appreciate the academic approach. But I thought, okay, what do I really want to do here? And I'm glad you came across, you know, that came across that way to you because it was a very conscious decision. I sat down and said, what kind of books do I like to read? And I like to read books that are very conversational. I like to read books where the author is credible and knowledgeable and, and they're basically, it's like you're sitting there having a mentoring session with them. And so I told, I had a lot of beta readers that were CEOs in different, different, you know, manufacturing industry, high tech, unmanned aerial drones, all kinds of different areas. And I said, here's what I want to do. Here's my formula. Here's what I want the reader to feel like as they're reading this stuff and hold me accountable to that because it's very easy. As a business person, you have, I probably have 50 times more words on paper as either a military officer or as a business person than I do as an authority. Even though I got 11 books out now. Because you're in a constant state of writing. But what kind of writing is it? It's not inspirational, it's not aspirational, it's technical, it's, you know, very stilted and formatted and chunky and, you know, lists and timelines and. Because that's what you do and when you're doing that professionally. So I knew that if I did that, I could get it done pretty fast, but then I wouldn't want to read it. So I issued my instructions to my. I think I had five for being nimble. And then I gave them the first draft chapter, and then I'd get all their feedback. And I was doing pretty good until, I think, the fourth chapter, and they all came back and said, you just slipped into professor mode. My whole tone, my author's voice shifted into, you know, a much more stilted form of communications.

Interesting.

And I don't even think I had any analogies or anything that that helped helped, you know, illuminate or create a picture in the reader's mind of what I was trying to say. I went back and had to rewrite that whole chapter.

Wow.

Because I. I realized what I did is I slipped into kind of technical writing. And then I was very, very careful after that. So, yeah, it was intentional. I wanted it to be a conversation with me. I thought that it was important. Not, you know, I could sit there and tell you every great thing that's ever been accomplished, but all my lessons learned are from failures. And if you ever sit down, I. I golfed in a charity golf tournament for Kyle Milliken, who. Who was a. A SEAL Team 6 guy who died in Somalia about six years ago. And every year that their family, they have a foundation for him now. And. And so we had, you know, 100, 110 seals of various ages, all playing golf, and all seals do when they get around each other is. Is rag on each other and fun and tell stories about things that. That went completely sideways. You'll never. You're never going to get in a room with a bunch of seals, and they're going to say, yeah. So, you know, we loaded up the helicopter and we flew there, and we got the right on time, and everybody deployed, and nobody, like, tripped or fell out in the dark. And guess what? The bad guys were exactly where they're supposed to be. There was exactly the right number of bad guys. They were armed exactly the way we were told. We shot. I mean, we didn't even use an extra bullet. Everyone was perfect. And then helicopter came in, we got in, and we flew back, and it was all done in, like, 42 minutes. And it was time, you know, to watch a rerun on tv. Because, I mean, you're laughing, but we wouldn't do it because, you know, so what, so what you want to hear is the helicopter inserted us and something got screwed up with the, the GPS antenna dome on the helicopter. And they put us 40 miles across the desert away from where we were supposed to be put in. And so we spent the next 11 hours with £80 on our back jogging in soft sand trying to get to the target. That's the kind of stuff that happens all the time.

Oh man.

Right. And, and that, and business is no different. Business is exactly the same paradigm, best laid plans. Right. So, yeah, you don't learn anything. You don't really learn anything from, from easy success. You learn things from failure. I don't have to be failure. Sounds like it's, you know, catastrophic. It, it could be a small failure, it could be you, you realize you just didn't communicate the right way with somebody to motivate them or get them over a, a, a morale hump. And as they're walking away, you knew you didn't hit the right button. It could be something that small. But, but if you accept it and you, you face it and you think about it, you can learn from it. Maybe the next time you want make that same mistake.

Is that part of the mindset that you had when you were writing it because you had noted somewhere that you almost titled Be Nimble instead of being nimble as be humble?

Yes. I've kind of codified it over time in interviews and some written responses. I have kind of a three step process now. I think that wasn't as clear in my mind when I wrote Be Nimble, much more clear when I wrote be visionary. And I'm also on a board of Best Robotics. So Best Robotics is a nonprofit that, that runs 29 different competitions or day and a half competitions, kids 6th through 12th grade. And I'm on the board, did pro bono strategic development with them last year. Came on the board early this year and trying to evaluate. It's actually where I'm going to a competition to judge it this Friday in Pittsburgh. So the interesting thing was I'm not an engineer, I'm not a technical expert. I don't know anything about software and hardware other than how to use it or break it. And I, I came in there and I, I said, well, I don't know how I can help. And the executive director had heard me on a podcast a year ago and then he read Be Nimble and he says, you got to be on this, on this board because you're not what everybody else is because you're an asymmetrical objective input. And you, you're, you're coming in completely, you know, blind and deaf to what all of us have been saying over and over again for a long time, which is essentially what we know. So having a Navy SEAL non technical person dumped in the middle of all these super smart technology people from intel and Advanced Microsystems and Locomotion and Texas Instruments, I was a little intimidated, actually. I was a lot intimidated. I, I thought they're gonna ask me, you know, SAT questions related to robotics or something.

Quiz at the end.

Yeah, but what it came down to was the, they were trying to figure out what makes their event so successful from the standpoint of these kids moving on in life and getting into technology. And what, what, what, what element inspired them, you know, what was the secret sauce? What was the lightning in the bottle? And so I spent a lot of time interviewing everybody because I didn't know I'd never been to one of the competitions. And because I was an outsider, maybe because I was a writer, I was able to start to codify what they were doing. You know, kind of a crucible of creativity. And a lot of it was a lot like the way the SEALs practice mission planning. Everybody gets into the room, everybody has a voice. Rank is not, you know, doesn't mean anything until you run out of time and Rank has to make a decision. The most junior person in the room can come up with the idea that makes the whole mission make, make sense and work. And so rank isn't a part of it. And even experience, because experience is an inhibitor at a certain point in creative, in creative development. So being humble is the first step. I call it intellectual humility. Not my term. It's been out there. So if you practice intellectual humility, basically walk into each situation with a clear mind and you don't have any preconceived notions, which sets you up for the next thing, which is intellectual curiosity. I said before, I've read Stephen Hawking's I'm, I'm actually, I get on the Peloton, I watch different stuff and I'm watching one on, on Infinity, on a Netflix special on Infinity, listening to all these, these PhDs talk about wormholes and string theory and all this stuff. Okay, what's that got to do with my life? Nothing. That's why I'm listening to it, because it's something that's missing, something, I don't know, something that I don't understand is something that might have kind of a asymmetrical or tangent. Tangential impact on what I'm looking at in life. So that's why you listen to everybody in a SEAL planning session, because the, the young guy who hasn't been there or hasn't done that might be the guy comes up with the insight or the innovative way to do the job where the older guy with 10 years of being a SEAL won't see that because he's got so much rote memory of the formula and the football plays. He can't see it. You just can't see it.

Wow.

So the same thing that's happening in the robotics crucible of creativity. And that's a very, to me, that's a very interesting world. And it all starts with that intellectual humility, which is why I was almost, I almost named being able be humble.

That's great. Wow. I think that's hard too. I mean, there's, there's plenty of people that don't have the level of bonafides that you have in all the different areas that you have that, you know, just are filled with hubris, you know, that just, you know, feel like, you know, every time at bat's going to be a home run and, you know, their way or the highway kind of a thing. So it's, it's nice to hear that operationalized in a way that's beneficial to the task at hand. I really like that. And I think that kind of comes through certainly in the, in the Be Nimble book, you also talk about like a perspective or maybe it's a mindset issue as well, too, around how people view adversity.

Can you talk a little bit more

about that, of how you dealt with that in the book and life as well?

I think it's an important component to both being able and be visionary because I think it's an important concept related to human nature. I think there's more, and there's a lot of science behind this. There's much more brain power applied to risk mitigation than there is to opportunity seeking. And if the risk of going to the edge of your camp 20,000 years ago to find food was greater than your hunger, you just stayed hungry. That was kind of the way we all started out. And, and there's not a lot different. So with, when you look at the literature that's out there, when you look at planning processes and you, and you look at, you watch TV for, try this, watch TV for at least four or five commercials and think about what the commercials are addressing and what their assumption is. Their assumption is that you're Trying to avoid a risk. You're trying to avoid being overweight, you're trying to avoid having pain because of an ailment. You're trying to avoid losing your house without insurance. You're trying to avoid. It's basically risk mitigation is the way you sell and the way you get people to turn on that older part of their brain is you create fear related to the risk. The greater the fear, the more the risk, the more likely they're going to do whatever it takes to avoid mitigate the risk. So we're even more and more traditional. Not traditionally, but we're more and more conditioned than ever before by the bombardment of these things to help and relieve us from the pain of risk. And then you can watch for the next two weeks and try to find anything that comes up on TV as a commercial that's telling you to take a risk, that's telling you to do something new. You know, take a shot, quit your job and try. Try being, you know, a ceramics person and sell your pots. You know, there's nothing out there but risk taking. And that's the reflection of the, at least in the United States of the. Of the nature of the social structure. Everybody's gonna reinforce that. So if you're in a business or you're in a family or in a relationship and you say, hey, let's take a risk, or let's, hey, let's, and they perceive risk, you're in for a fight. And that risk, whether you call it adversity, that's part of the concern of the risk. So if they've gone through something in the past and they have a bad memory of a change in a company that caused some people to lose their job, or maybe a cut in pay or a change in their positional authority, their titles, they'll see all change related to that particular experience as a negative, and they'll see that as adversity that should be avoided, that risk that should be avoided at all costs. And they'll become more and more conditioned to basically, if ain't broke, don't fix it, don't change anything, don't change my world. The status quo is fine with me. And that is. Is something that's really hard to shock or snap people out of, and that senior leaders, CEOs, large organizations in small countries, people get into this rut and they start looking at the tips of their toes and they stop thinking big thoughts, and they stop really looking at the bigger threats or the bigger opportunities on the horizon, and they start minimizing their life and shrinking their telescopic vision down to next week or maybe two days from now. And that's, that's where this whole optimization and metrics and counting everything that happened in the past and only two days in the front and just extend everything that happened in the past for five days because that nothing's going to change. Well, yeah, if you don't want anything to change, then you already. You already have a bias.

Yeah.

To project. Nothing's going to change. And then. And companies like that and people that live like that are getting creamed by reality in the universe because it's all about change.

Right. It reminds me of the Nassim Talib's thing about, you know, black swans and, you know, kind of trying to figure out a way to expect or prepare for the unexpected, which is exactly what you guys did with your, you know, SEAL team training, that things are not going to go always according to plan and sometimes quite different than it. And, you know, the kinds of things like a black swan that just really presumably, you know, never could happen and then does happen, a Covid happens or this happens or Ukraine happens. So I think it's interesting too, there seems to be more in the literature in this ilk. I can't remember the author's names off the top of my head, but there's one that's about the comfort crisis that we've all become a little too cushy and too out to lunch, so to speak, because we just seek comfort rather than seeking challenges or seeking growthful opportunities. There's another book, I think it came out a year or so ago, called Do Hard Things and the benefit that those kinds of things have for people. And I think that gets back to your point as well, too, of these being able to, you know, be prepared for what can come and being able to presume that adversity, you know, is going to be there and it's not just always going to be like the, like the commercials you said of just always, you know, risk mitigation kinds of things. What can we do, you know, to develop ourselves and to, you know, get out of that kind of mindset? So you also talk about the, like a gravitational pull that people have towards either positive or negative. I don't know, those can be things or people or whatever. Can you talk about that or unpack

a little bit more about what you

mean about that kind of pull?

Well, it goes back to being a student of human nature and part of the. It's easy to say it when you're my Age. But when you watch people or you've been affected by people, of course you are a person. And the longer you do it, the more you start to see certain standard behaviors. Sometimes it's just a standard behavior period, or sometimes it's a standard behavior in a reaction to some stimulus. And then you also see that there's a smaller population, maybe a handful, that don't act the way the majority do when presented with the same stimulus. That's always curious to me. You know, when there's a fire in a theater, why do, you know, 70 people scream and run around like crazy, and four people actually go down, open up the exit, and try to calm everybody down. Those four. Those four people weren't hired to do that in case there was a fire. It's not their job. Why did they do that? Why. Why do we always have people that kind of step up and, you know, and maybe they don't know. They don't do it again. It happens in the military. Lots of Medal of Honor winners were average soldiers, and then they did what they did in the moment, and then they were average soldiers again. They weren't, you know, war gods. They weren't like Thor the hammer running around slaughtering on the battlefield. They were just somebody who did what had to be done and it turned out okay. At least, you know, they saved a lot of people and it was recognized. So. And that's the same way in life. People step up, help people do things, and then they go back to their regular life, but they behave different to the stimulus. I think the more positive you are as a person, the more of an optimistic outlook. Glass half full. Or in my case, sometimes somebody said glass overflowing. If you're. If you're an optimistic person, it colors your look on the world. It colors your. Your reaction to the stimulus of your day. If you always think, you know that old saying that, you know, nothing is as bad or as good as it first sounds or seems, you know, wait a minute until you hear the rest of information. Well, you know, there are people that react to stimulus and immediately go to the dark side. Immediately go to the negative, the negative reaction. And a lot of people do that. Much more people do that than immediately say, it's probably not as bad as it sounds. And I know we have. We. I know we have people that can handle this. Let me get some more. And the team will take care of it. See, that's a positive way to look at it. Even if it's a negative event.

Not. Not a Chicken Little. The sky is falling at the first hiccup.

Yeah. So, you know, you roll your sleeves up, you gather in front of a whiteboard, you say, okay, everything's changed. You know, global pandemic. We got to reinvent the company. We got to reimagine what we are. We got to figure out how we're going to do this with the people we have, the money we have, the buildings we have, the facilities we have. Let's go. Who's got some ideas? You know, forget all the rules. Forget what we were before. Forget the org chart. Let's see what we need to do now in this new normal. And negative people aren't going to have that. That. That's not a scene from the negative movie. Negative people are not going to do that. Roll their sleeves up, get in a room and say, hey, let's figure out a way. What they're gonna be doing is they're gonna be laying over in the corner in the fetal position.

Yeah.

Hoping that Covid goes away.

Yeah.

In two weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And nothing, nothing against people like that. Like I said before, they're conditioned, you know, the kind of robust American spirit. The people that, you know, came from all these other countries that risked their lives to get to the United States. So right off the bat, right, they're different. They're a different breed. They're coming to a place they don't know anything about. They're so optimistic, they believe, sight unseen, they can just get in a chuck wagon or something and just started heading out towards the sun. It'll all work out. They take a bunch of sticks and sod and make their first house. Oh, it'll get better. We'll figure this out. We've gone from that kind of national DNA much, much more to things should be taken care of. For me, if it's wrong, it's somebody's fault. Nature doesn't change. The universe doesn't change. Everything should be static. Because I'm comfortable with static. And if you. If you move something, Remember that book, who Moved My Cheese? Right. Yeah. At the same premise. Right. If you. If you stimulate somebody and their first reaction is you're changing the status quo. I had this chair sitting this way, you know, that kind of thing. And I'm using it, obviously, as a kind of metaphor, but it. Psychologically, it's. To every stimulus you can think of, then you're not going to be optimistic and you're not going to be a positive person for the most part.

Well, in that context, too, you talk about, you know, keeping A cool head even when things are chaotic and don't go as planned as force multipliers. And that's, that's also kind of a military concept as well too, right?

Absolutely. But, but I am convinced through personal experience and practice that that particular military capability is something that conveys to the commercial or to families or to any organization. The difference between the military and everybody outside the military when it comes to being prepared for this is that the military trains for disaster. They train for failure, they train for everything going crazy, being wrong. And they start with the individual skills of each person so they can rely on that and they can rely on each other's skill. Then they start cross training everybody so you have depth and resilience and bench strength as a unit. And then they take the unit with the leaders and they start putting them through different scenarios and they put injects into those scenarios and inputs into those scenarios. That, that mixes things up and changes the premise of their planning. And then they have to think on their feet, which means they also have to think on their feet, but they have to rely on the people that are with them to do their job without a perfect plan being briefed and rehearsed. And the more you do that, and the elite forces are much more, I'm talking, you know, the Marines, Air Force, army and Navy special operations units, elite fighter pilots, you know, they all do the same thing, the contingency plan, the contingency train. They do scenario based activities that you get to a point where you don't ever think anything is going to go the way they say it's going to go. And so you just chill out. And that's that poise that you started, you started to allude to in your question. You get this kind of a calmness in that chaos and storm crisis doesn't, doesn't turn you into, you know, a blubbering idiot trying to figure out what's going on. Actually most people that were there in those professions I noted and probably in EMTs and you know, emergency responders, you, you get to a point where you're almost in a state of grace when the, when the stuff gets bad. The proverbial, you're in the flow zone. You know, things start to slow down a little bit. Your mind actually dumps everything that doesn't have anything to do with the moment. And you start to absorb information and absorb what's going on. And if you do that, because you've been trained to do that and you've been through all these practice scenarios, then you're going to do a much better job dealing with the problem. Whether you're a CEO, a vice president, head of sales, whatever it is you do, a parent, a mother, a father, because you are psychologically prepared for it not being right, for things not going right and things going wrong. And it's okay. And anybody that hears this interview that's ever been in, especially in combat, but in a crisis situation. And again back to that. Those are always those four people out of the 75 people in the movie theater. You know exactly what I'm saying. Because it's like they look like they're in a state of grace. They're calm, their voice is calm, their tone is calm. And they start to affect everybody with that. And that can be trained. You can actually set up a training program and do that in your company, your organization. You take out your version of I did this years ago, make have all your people put, put together a blacks on black swan checklist. What are all the things you think is a black swan? And list them all and then start building scenario training based on that. This just happened. Put a timeline to it. Bring the people in. What are we going to do? We just found this out. We got, you know, two hours before our whole supply chain shuts down. See what I mean? You can do that. You don't have to be wearing a uniform to do that.

I think that's so important with, you know, as a leader in the context of, you know, people will look to not just what to do, but also as a measure or leader in a family too, as a parent, you know, as a, like, you know, if, if mom or dad are freaking out about this, if the whole C suite, you know, is ready to, you know, pull their hair out, then. Oh, you know, it's. If they're freaking out, then I really need to double down and know that this is something that we're probably not going to survive. So that the capacity of it, but also that coolness and that grace under pressure, I think is so critical of the meta communication of how you as you in your example, the calmness and the flow state ish of being able to know what to do and how to handle something that was a surprise or wasn't, you know, a typical kind of circumstance. So maybe that's a good segue then into your newest book, be visionary Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization. So you cover a variety of. And it may be almost kind of take a couple of pokes at some sacred cows about your feelings around KPIs and you know, is that replacing common sense and, you know, corporate vision and all that? Can you maybe unpack a highlight reel of be visionary?

Well, the simplest bumper sticker way to understand where I was coming from and be visionary is the phrase optimization is the enemy of strategy. And the reverse of that strategy is the enemy of optimization. Strategy is about an unknown future. It's a future that you try to parse and calculate for and you try to shove it into some kind of project management paradigm that you think gives you control, but it's still the future. It's still out there. That is not, that's not tidy. That is not something that the hyper kind of micro measurement world that we're living in, especially in business these days, in my opinion, enhanced incredibly by the technology of measurement that those people that are focused on that as their way of managing a leading an organization would appreciate. Nobody that does that and runs their day, their month, their year through a pure metrics and measurement approach, nobody that does that is also simultaneously going to be comfortable with thinking big thoughts and let's just throw something up against the wall and see if it'll stick. What are we going to look like in 24 months? It's a, it's a different mindset. It's a different mind, period. And what happens is, the more you emphasize this, that's, see, it's easier to teach. You can teach how to, how to create KPIs. You can have KPI 101, 202 and 303 and 404 in school, and you can have it in your MBA program, and you can have software programs that are KPI focused. And you can have base platforms that are soaking up data from a manufacturing floor or for a distribution system or from a pipeline and pouring all that into templates for KPIs in your ear. You know, one, you're one widget ahead, you're two widgets behind. You know, whatever it is, you can do that easily. What you can't do is teach people how to use judgment, wisdom and to think about the future. Because that's not taught in school. There's almost no leadership, the way I define it, which is dealing with the unknown instead of managing the known. I mean, managing is to me is managing the systems, processes, policies, procedures, and the talent. The way the talent came to you by resume. Two standard, two specs. And if something breaks, whatever, you have a manual, you fix it. You know, you drop, drop some oil, you do what you have to do. It's all very, very controlled and managed and thought out. And that's what managers do. Leading is when all that starts to fall apart, whether for internal reasons. It could be, it could be an internal reason where you decide to do something like we're going to double the size of the company or we're going to double the number of widgets we're going to make and then all the systems and process and policies and talent that were designed for half of that goal fall apart. Or it could be an external thing, it could be a competitor that's eating your lunch, a competitor that's kind of redesigned the way they're doing the work. They say they, they went and got all gigged out. There's only four full time employees now and you've got 200 full time employees and so they can cut their costs and they're killing you. Right. Or it could be something like a pandemic or it could be an economic downturn like a recession. So all those things are out there and they're going to happen to that super optimized KPR crazy organization, but they're not going to see it because what they're doing is they're basically becoming experts or historians or experts on what happened to incredible detail. Right? So if you think of like two different, there's two different conference rooms and in one room you've got somebody who's your classic now classic. It's been about 10, 15 years. This has been a, a mantra of advanced business thought, replacing strategy and vision with metrics. And in the other room you have somebody who's thinking strategically and visionary. If you went into those two rooms you wouldn't realize that those companies are trying to achieve the same thing. They're trying to grow, they're trying to survive and they're trying to be relevant in the marketplace. And maybe they have a higher social objective, delivering something of value in a different way, three dimensional value, etc to a certain population or whatever. Yet in one room, if you were a big thinker, strategist, you'd say well okay, so when are we going to get to what's going to happen? Next week or next month? And they'd never get there because all they're going to do is they're going to say everything that's ever happened is going to happen again and again and again. It's a linear projection. In the other room, if you were somebody who was from the optimization camp, you say when in hell are they ever going to use actual numbers and measure something to confirm any of this is real? So the book basically tries to juxtapose and then balance what you need in an organization. You need both. But I put the kind of the horse in front of the cart. I say you have to have the visionary strategy, strategic plan concept as a goal and objective, whether it's to avoid a threat down the road or to seize an opportunity. And then you create the operational campaign plan and all the optimization metrics and everything as the tail to that, not the other way around.

So does the like. You also talk in the book a lot about the leaders, you know, confidence and charisma and the visionary aspect that you've just been mentioning too. Are those trainable, learnable kinds of things or is it just. That's the table stakes for someone coming into being a successful leader.

The hardest thing is the charisma part, I think. You know, Hollywood spends a lot of money looking at brand new actors and actresses trying to see if they have that it thing. And the it thing is usually the charisma. It's something that, you know, you hear phrases like the camera loves her or him because there's a spark or there's a twinkle or there's something. To me, that's what charisma is. It's. It's hard to have natural charisma. It's hard to achieve charisma. And it's easy if you have it, you were born with it. And I put it in there because charisma is one of those things I think you should strive to attain even if you didn't have it genetically, even if it wasn't part of your, your say, DNA by the time you were 20 years old. The reason for it is because charisma has a lot to do with the way leadership is perceived by those that are following the leaders. It's confidence is to me different than charisma. And we talked about poise earlier. So if you have confidence and wisdom and judgment, you're probably going to be perceived as poised and. But you may not be charismatic.

I mean, yeah, I get it.

Yeah, you may be standing there like a, you know, like a dud in the middle of the storm, saying all the right things and making all the right calls and everything, but nobody would think that you should be a lead in a, in a Netflix show, you know, but the thing about charisma that it kind of helps inform on the morale side is that if you have those other things, if you're confident and you're wise and you have judgment and because of whether with your experience or training, repetitive scenario type training, or actually living the scenarios, you have the poise, having some charisma. It's like a force multiplier because you can move through the audience, you can move through the company, you can move through the organization, you can stand in front of people, and it's just that extra little spark that says this person is switched on and having a good time even in the worst of times. And that is like a little extra icing on the cake when it comes to being able to lead people that are worried and concerned about what's going on.

Yeah, yeah. It gets back to that earlier point to see how the leader, the mom

and dad, whoever it is, is dealing

with that surprise stress. I also just want to say one other thing about your writing and your books, and then I want to shift into a couple of other maybe quick questions if you have time. So I believe in doing research on you, I found that all of the proceeds of your novels go to the Seal Veterans Foundation.

Did.

Do I have my facts straight on that?

Yes.

That's awesome.

The nine novels. Yeah.

Yeah. Tip of the hat. That's. That's really. I think that speaks to kind of the. Your ethos, Marty, and doesn't. Doesn't surprise me one bit. So if you're good for time, I kind of want to talk a little bit more about how you've spent your life dealing with challenges and how one can learn from that in terms of anticipating these crises or black swans or whatever, leading through chaos as well, too. So, you know, by my math, you've succeeded in at least three professions so far, and you ain't done yet. You've dealt with your mom's illness. You've lost a son, you've had cancer twice. Does kryptonite affect you, Marty? Or how does someone go through the kinds of things that you've done? And what are some of the things that people in the audience might be able to use and apply?

Well, I think I had the wellness chapter and Be nimble. There's a. There's an important part of, kind of a pillar of being able to do all the things we've talked about so far, and that's your health. So there's kind of two aspects of health. There's health and there's fitness. So health is that you're not going to die or you don't have a disease. And you know, you're not taking a bunch of pills because you're going to. You have a disease. You're going to have a disease if you don't take the pills. Fitness is Your ability to, I guess, exercise your physical body, moving through, you know, space and time without being or becoming fatigued. So, so fitness to me is important because if you're a leader or you're a business owner, or you're a founder, you know, starting a company or your parent, if you don't have fitness as part of your, your foundation, you are going to run into moments where you burn out way before you could have burned out or you should have burned out. And the psychological aspects, if you think about what I said earlier about the psychological resiliency issue and SEAL training, if you are physically fit and the way you're going to get broken down in SEAL training is through physical fatigue, those that are more physically fit break down later, last longer under the stress before they start to have psychological. There's a psychological impact because of the fatigue and the physical stress. Those that are less fit have it occur earlier. Now, there are still some, some tough people that even though they're feeling it psychologically and even though they're falling behind, the person next to them is more fit or, you know, a better athlete, etc, they still say, oh to hell that I'm just, I'm just going to keep putting one foot in front of the other. But it does have an effect on the human mind. So if you go into some kind of a marathon project or something like when covet hit, where you know, you're in a constant state of reinventing or constant communications or trying to figure stuff out, you will burn yourself out so much faster intellectually and mentally. If you're not physically fit, obviously health, health is also critical here, but you also have to be physically fit. So I use the, I use the analogy, I may have used it one of the books if, if you knew for a fact that in six months you're going to be in a small plane crash up in the mountains and the only way you're going to survive is you're going to have to walk 60 miles out of rugged terrain to make it to safety. Would you do anything different in the way, the way you're preparing yourself for that event? You know, would you learn how to start fires with, you know, just a part of a broken airplane wing? Would you start running and walking trails that build up your leg strength? Would you start figuring out how to navigate using the stars or the sun? Would you start, you know, of course you would. If you knew that was, if you believe that that's what's going to happen and if everybody else didn't do that, the event happens Then the person that's prepared for what's about to happen, which is a 60 mile hike across that rough terrain, that person is going to survive, they're going to make it. They'll be tired, but they're going to make it. And the other people aren't. So if you take that, apply it to leaders and managers and homeowners and business owners and parents, they're in the same boat. So you have to, you have to work out, you have to, you have to do things, you have to walk, you have to get into some kind of a fitness program. You don't have to become a super athlete, but you have to start building up your physical stamina because it, it immediately affects in a positive way your intellectual and mental capacity to handle stress. And obviously the health side, you know, you have to make sure you're, you're getting a physical every year and you're checking on those kinds of things. If you don't have that, it doesn't matter how many books you read, doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how poised you are. At some point you're just going to flop over.

Yeah, right. It's, you know, it's so funny. I mean it's, it seems so obvious and self evident and I do remember that from your book. And it's just sort of like one of those things of, it's, it's, it's so fundamental and for some reason for some folks it's such a difficult thing. You know, it's not part of what they're used to or you know, they, you know, plenty of excuses and you know, just it, it will catch up with some, with you, you know, eventually probably one way or the other. So that's good. So you really feel like the resilience and the ability to do the kinds of things and the hardships that you've, you've dealt with have a fundamental kernel of being fit and being able to, to handle what comes at you. Is that right?

Yeah, it's, to me, it's the triad that the three legs of the stool, you've got fitness, health. And the third one is to becoming a learning machine and to constantly be open minded and grab insight from anywhere and everywhere and everyone. Those, those three things, you, if you have those things worked out and you, you apply them as a discipline in life. I mean, I did peloton this morning at 5:30, you know, I don't have to do, I don't have to do 100 miles. I just have to be Consistent. I have to be consistent in my study habits. I have to be consistent in listening and watching thinkers that have nothing to do with my background or my past experience or knowledge so that I can keep having my, my, you know, my brain cells surprised and blown open with new ideas and concepts.

Yeah.

And I have to, I have to make sure that I'm not sick or I'm going to get sick or I've got to make sure that I'm healthy. And if I can do those three things, I know that I can sustain, sustained the pace that I have, you know, I've had for quite a long time. I can sustain that pace for a long, long, long time.

You are living proof of that. So a couple last questions if you're good for time. Tell us, tell us about Saga Consulting.

Well, Saga Consulting is a company I put together to I guess launch my, my paid professional speaking career.

Again.

I did it, I did it many years ago and then I, I got sucked into the war on terror, so I had to stop doing it. So it's consulting. It's my, my paid, my paid speaking. The, the books Be Visionary and Be Nimble are part of that. At some point in time I'll convert those two books into online learning courses. And you know, I have some other ideas of things I want to do, but my next act, so to speak, is to do those things. Because I love writing both fiction and nonfiction. I like talking to people about the things I believe in. And I like helping people if I can help them see the light a little bit, which is where the consulting, coaching, mentoring kind of comes in. And I basically, in 2017, I wrote down, after I read Tim Ferriss book the Four Hour Work Week, I wrote down what kind of my, what are my, what would I like to do with my life? What are the, you know, one, two or three things? And those were the three things. Okay. I don't have to talk to HR or lawyers anymore. I don't want to manage tons of people. I don't want to have to, you know, suffer the, the ups and downs of business startups. And I, I don't want to deal with boards as a CEO anymore. I just want to do this other thing. So I just started, I started writing Be Nimble as the first step and I just kept advancing that, that to eventually, you know, create Saga Consulting. And in the area I'm talking to you because of that.

Well, that's so awesome. So be Nimble, be visionary. Are you still got more ideas for a third nonfiction or are you Going to lean back into the fiction stories or kind of. Where or where are you in your writing journey these days?

I guess I've got a lot of ideas.

I'm so surprised, Marty.

I come up with. I also come up with movie. I come up with movie titles and book titles. I'll write them down, all kinds of weird stuff. It's almost like a poetry flash. It's like a real cool combination or something. The. On the fiction side, I think I'm going to. You know. So I did five books in the seals. That fifth book, Kandahar Moon, came out June of this year. And all of them are. Are that. That one was the last one and the first four inaudible, too. So. So those books are fun, but I'm ending that because, you know, at some point, it's like taking the same character to the prom for 10 years in a row. You know, you just kind of get burned out with, you know, what am I going to do with this person? Yeah. I have a lot of empathy for writers that get sucked into characters or whether it's a TV show or whatever, you know, because you want to try something fresh and new.

Yeah.

And the time. The Time Warrior sagas, which is this. The Time travel science fiction series. I stopped at four books, and now I think what I'm gonna do is. I'm making. I'm trying to make a decision. I haven't made it yet, Chris. Do I want to have another, like, ex Navy SEAL protagonist or do I want to do something else? Do I want to pick somebody else, you know, somebody that was, you know, an EMT in Miami or, you know, something? They have to have some physical capabilities. I want to make it kind of an action thriller. Yeah, I've got a lot of. A lot of ideas along those lines.

That's great. Well, I. I can't wait. So, Marty, this has been great. I really appreciate your time and your insights today. I've been so looking forward to this. So for the audience, we'll put this in the show. Notes and whatnot. Well, as. As well, too. But what are the best ways to

get your books, learn more about you,

connect, follow you, etc.

Sure. So my. All my fiction books are on Amazon under ML Strong. That's my pen name for my novels and my nonfiction books. I write under Marty Strong. They're also on Amazon, but if you go to Marty Strongbe Nimble.com, you'll get links to interviews. All my books kind of a pass through portal to Amazon from there. And a lot of excerpts from from things. And that's, that's really kind of the hub. Marty Strongbe Nimble.com okay, great.

We'll get that in the show notes then too. So. Well, again, I can't wait to see what comes next. It's, it's been, I've just been so looking forward to this kind of conversation. It's just been so helpful. I enjoy your books, enjoy your content. So thank you again, Marty. I. I really appreciate having you on today.

Well, thanks for having me, Chris. I've enjoyed it.

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