Leadership and Prioritizing What's Important In Life

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

Today we're going to be talking about the why of Contribute.

Now.

Individuals with this why yearn to be part of a greater cause, something greater than themselves. You do not want to be the cause, rather contribute to it in a meaningful way. You want to make a difference in the lives of others in an organization or a cause that you believe in. You love to support others and relish the success of the greater good, the company's growth and the victory of the team. Now people with this why seek to add value in all they do to do their part and help in whatever way possible. You are often behind the scenes looking for ways to make the world better. When you show up in a more public forum, it is often to trumpet a message or support a movement. People with this why are go to people, the ones you look for when you need help with just about anything. Virtually every organization must have contributors in order to operate successfully. They act as the glue that holds everyone else together. They use their time, energy, resources and connections to add value to others. And so today I've got a great guest for you. His name is Craig Weldon. Now, Craig's leadership journey started when he became an Eagle scout at age 14. Thirty years later, he was the youngest general in the US army, combined with another nine years as a member of the Senior Executive services with the US Marine Corps. He has over 17 years at the highest levels of the US military. Along the way, he picked up dozens of lessons on leadership and life, both good and bad. Hear him convey these in a compelling, inspirational and sometimes very personal way. A master storyteller, he uses lessons from life to weave together takeaways on improving life, work, leadership and interpersonal habits. Other topics include 9, 11, A Personal Reflection, Implications of a rising China, the evolution of the US Military since Vietnam, and much, much more. Based out of Bluffton, South Carolina, Craig is available for both live and virtual events. Craig, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Gary. I appreciate the invitation.

As we mentioned before, I'm almost uncomfortable calling you Craig. I feel like I should be calling you General.

But if you do that, I'll call you Doctor.

Okay, that's a deal. So you started in the Eagle Scouts. Now, you know I was never an Eagle Scout. So take us through your journey. Go back from, okay, when you were the Eagle Scouts, and then where did you go after that? Where did you go to school? And then how did you end up in the military?

Yeah, so I started my journey about 11 years old, I guess, when I joined Boy Scouts. And what I saw was an opportunity to kind of climb a ladder to the pinnacle of Scouting, which was to become an Eagle Scout. So I started that journey, and at age 14, I became an Eagle Scout. And people turned to me at that point and said, okay, you're now an Eagle Scout. You're at the top of your game. You need to be a leader of other Scouts. And quite frankly, that was a bit of a shock to me. It probably should not have been, but it was. Because attaining the rank of Eagle Scout for me was all about the journey. It was all about the destination. It was all about climbing the top of the mountain. But once I got up there, I didn't really know what to do with it, but it was thrust upon me because of the position that I had achieved. And from that point on, going into high school, going into college, 30 years in the army, another seven years in the private sector, then another nine years with the Marine Corps as a senior executive, I had I don't know how many opportunities to practice leadership, to observe leadership, and to take those things that I saw that were really, really good and put them in my backpack and carry them with me throughout my life, but also to pick out those things that weren't so good and put those in my backpack to remind myself not to repeat what I had witnessed or seen others do. That was a poor example of leadership.

So define for me leadership. What is leadership?

So when I started to think about retirement from the military after 40 years combined between the army and the Marine Corps, somebody asked me, what do you want to do next? And I said, I want to give back to the next generation things that I have learned over many, many decades. And that's the legacy that I'd like to leave. And they said, well, then you need a book. And I said, a book? Are you kidding me? I can't write a book. This was another big tall mountain in front of me at age 67, I think I was at the time. And well, to make a long story short, I did write a book. It's called Leadership the Art of Inspiring People to be Their Best. And it's done very well. It's a top Amazon seller, number one seller in five countries. It's won three national awards. It's been downloaded or purchased thousands of times across the world. I use it frequently when I talk to groups about my experiences because it's kind of a yin and yang. They go together. And leadership is really inspiring other people not to do your bidding, but to do the bidding of the goodness of your pursuits perhaps. I remember when I wrote the book and I came out with the first manuscript. I didn't really know what to do with it then because I had never written a book before. So I hired an editor, slash publisher, a fellow out of California, and I asked him to read through the book. And he said, I said, tell me what you think. And after he read through it, he said, nobody's going to read this. And that was a bit disheartening. And I said, why in the world is that? He said, because this is a memoir. This is not a leadership book. It's a story of your life. And I said, well, I'm a storyteller. And he said, I get it, but you're not Michelle Obama and you're not Amoroso, you are not famous and you're not infamous. If you were one of those two, if you were a celebrity, if your name was well known, people would buy your book whether it was good or not, because of who you are or what you were about to tell inside your book. So because nobody knows Craig Weldon and you originally intend this to be a leadership book, we need to do a little work. And I said, well, what do you suggest? He said, you have got lots of leadership nuggets in this book, but they're buried in the stories. Go find them, pull them out, make them chapter titles, and then fold your stories underneath to support those leadership nuggets. I said, okay. So I, figuratively speaking, took a yellow highlighter, went through the entire manuscript. Every time I discovered a leadership nugget that I thought was worthy of making a chapter, I. I highlighted it in yellow and I ended up turning a 14 chapter memoir into a 24 chapter leadership book just by kind of turning it on its head. And I'm glad that he gave me that very, very frank advice then, because I think I probably would not have sold very many books had I just left it as it was, which essentially was a story of my life. And then he said to me, what's the most important aspect of leadership? And I said, strong character. He said, then that should be chapter one in your book to emphasize the importance of that trait. And so if you go to chapter one in my book, it's titled Character Leadership's Basic Foundational Block. I talk about character, and I tell stories about people who have had strong character. Character is so important to strong leadership that at the end of the chapter in the book, I even refer to two other books that people could study even further if they'd like to take a deeper dive.

So what do you mean, strong character? Give us. Give us a story or give us an example of somebody with strong character.

Well, character is multifaceted. It involves having perseverance.

Dedication, humility.

Strength, integrity.

Leadership qualities that inspire people. There's a whole raft of definitions that are kind of rolled up into character, and I think that each and every one of those are important for strong leaders. What I have seen, what I have observed over the years, is that if you don't have that foundation of a strong character, that eventually your leadership flaws will expose themselves. Typically, when you're under pressure, that's when they sort of come undone. So when.

Large, pressurized situations face a leader and they are able to hold their own and continue to move forward and hold the organization together and achieve the objective while staying in the boundaries of rightness instead of wrongness, to use simple terms, that demonstrates to me that that leader has strong character. And we've all seen people who are leaders who have flawed characters and have fallen off the pedestal. There's a story about a Roman general who had a huge victory, and when he came back on his chariot into Rome and all the people were on either side of the street yelling and screaming and telling them how much they beloved he was. His slave, which is riding on the back of the chariot with him, whispered into his ear, memento mori. And that's Latin for remember you are mortal. And that gets to the issue of humility, which is one of the characters of a great characteristics of a great leader and a component of a strong character. Remember you immortal basically means you are not above the law. And think of it in modern terms. Think of it in terms of the senior leaders in our country right now, in the military and so forth. When People get elevated positions of influence and power and leadership. Sometimes their character starts to undo them and they start doing things that they wouldn't otherwise do. And we've seen that time and time again.

Wow.

So this is very pertinent for me as well. I'm about to leave my. I have about two more days of being a dentist and then I retire and then I'll be put in a different position, you know, of leading the Y Institute. And so leadership is. Can be scary, right? It can be challenging. It's not something that. I guess that's going to be my question to you. Is this something that is innate in certain people or is it something that can be learned?

It's both. It's both nature and nurture. I think there are people who are born leaders, but there are people who have less innate skills. But they can be taught. And I know that when the military in particular recruits people, recruits senior leaders like officers, they look for skill sets that suggest that people have the basic tenets of strong leadership and character. And then they build upon those through education and training and experience throughout their career. Let me tell you about a course that I attended a couple of years ago when I was working for the Marine Corps as a senior executive. They sent us to one professional development course each year. And in 2013, I went to one called Leadership at the Peak. It was called that because it was in Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak was right there. And that's the reason they called it. It was run by the center for Creative Leadership, which is an international leadership foundation and firm. Very small group of people focused on C suite people, CEOs, COOs, CIOs and the like. There were only 12 students in our class, and I was the only one that was from the federal government, much less from the military. So we had 11 others in the course who were C suite individuals, some of which I think four of them were from foreign countries and the rest were Americans. In the buildup to this course, in the months before, they had us do what we call 360 degree evaluations, identifying people that had worked for us, people who had worked with us, and people we had worked for several dozen. And they did surveys to assess me, my leadership, my character, I mean, just about everything. I mean, it took several hours sometimes to fill out these surveys, but they also had me fill out the survey as a student. And when we arrived on the first day of the course, they had the profiles on the wall. Now, they didn't have a name next to any of them, but you could quickly see whether there was a difference or similarity between how you graded yourself and how others viewed you. And it was shocking for some of these students to see the wide disparity between how they viewed themselves and how others viewed them, even though they were already C suite individuals, either the leader of their company or one of the senior leaders. The whole purpose was to expose the frailties, the weaknesses, the shortcomings of each of the students, do a little self reflection, and then the next. The rest of the course was all about, okay, how do we close these gaps? Your listeners, I'm sure, have heard the term the emperor has no clothes. I mean, it's a classic example of that. Most of the students in this course didn't know that they were naked because nobody would tell them until these anonymously filled out surveys came to this course so that there would be no retribution. Obviously, they were anonymous and there were many of them, there were several dozen that provided input. So the individual, the only one you could determine who it was, was your boss, because your boss was asked to do this as well. But everybody else, people who worked with you and people who worked for you, submitted their input candidly and anonymously. And I'm hopeful that at the end of that course, some of those folks that had wide gaps between the way they perceive themselves and the way others perceive them would close that gap because it's important. That's another one of the character traits is have a strong self or self awareness. Understanding how other people view you is a good trait to have as a leader.

How important do you think it is to know your why? In order to know yourself in order to be a great leader?

Yeah, you know, I, I took your Y test a couple of weeks ago, and I'll be very honest with you. I'd never heard of the Y Institute until I was invited to take the test. And after I took it and I learned that I was in the contribute category and I read the definition, as you did at the beginning of this podcast, of who are in the contribute category. I thought, yeah, that's like looking in a mirror. I recognize all of that. That's me. That's exactly me. It's kind of like Myers Briggs. I don't know if your listeners know Myers Briggs, but that's a personality Test. I'm an ISTJ in Myers Briggs. There are 16 different profiles in Myers Briggs, and I understand the importance of the contributions of each of them. Just like Myers Briggs, I think the different why categories that you all have identified are important for leaders to understand. What they are and what their rest of their team is as well. Because you want to draw the strengths of each of the individual for the collective good. I once worked for a three star general. He was the consummate gentleman, never raised his voice in anger. He was, he was an istj. He was very, very organized. He made a list of everything he was going to do and he checked it off at the end of every day, had a new list for the next day, sharpened his pencils, lined them up on his desk. I mean, I'm being a little bit anal here, but you know, he was, he was an introvert and, but he was revered. And a colonel came up to me one time, I was the guy's deputy, the general's deputy. And he said, you know, General so and so is the toughest guy I have ever worked for. And I thought, really, why is that? And he said, because I never wanted to disappoint him. And I thought, wow, how powerful is that? If everybody in this organization feels like you do about the leader of this organization and gets up every morning, not just trying to do the best job they can for themselves and the organization, but, but not to disappoint the boss. You got a good thing going. You got a really good thing going.

How do you think that general was able to create that type of a feeling or an atmosphere? What do you think he did to be able to make that happen?

Well, first of all, he wasn't a screamer. He didn't put his finger in people's chest and scream in. He encouraged the team. He took blame when anything went wrong. He gave credit when anything went was right. He had a strong sense of humility. He understood his roots. He knew that 30 years prior when he was a second lieutenant in the army, that there are second lieutenants today that are doing the hard work of the United States Army. And without them we would have some real great difficult times. So he would, as I often did, would go seek out people who were at the lower end of the hierarchical organization to let them know how appreciated they are in their contribution. You know, I learned that a number of times when I was a tank battalion commander. I had 58 tanks and about 50 other vehicles, about 1,000 men in my organization. And typically we would go fire our tanks twice a year. We called it gunnery, the ant, the semi annual gunnery exercise. And I had grown up in an environment where when you fire your 58 tanks and you score them and you get different levels of accomplishment and so forth, you recognize each of the best Tanks, the best platoons, the best companies, the best sections and so forth. And you would have a ceremony afterwards and you'd tend these accolades on their chest or give them a trophy or whatever the case may be. I realized when I became a battalion commander and I had 1,000 soldiers that it was more than just the tanks and the tank crews. It was the people who put fuel in the tanks, it were the mechanics that fixed the tanks, it were the cooks that cooked the food for us, it was the administrative, administrative people that took care of all the administration, it was the supply people that got all the supplies that we needed. It was a total team effort. And if any one of those weren't contributing the way they should, then we'd have a chink in our army that would need to be repaired. So after our gunnery exercises, I changed all of that from my experience. And I had a best mechanic, a best cook, a best fuel supplier, a best admin thing. And so standing next to the tankers after tank gunnery would be others in the battalion so that everybody understood that.

Everything counted towards the whole.

Appreciating people and recognizing them.

Yeah, one more story. When I was a two star general army two star general, I was the chief of staff of a Navy joint task force. And we used to do exercises out in the Pacific Ocean on a command ship. I worked for a four star admiral. And when we went out into the Pacific Ocean and we did these exercises.

One of the things I like to do was break away for about two hours each day when I could. When it was going the exercise was slowing down a bit and I would just wander around the ship and I would go to the far reaches of the ship, to the very bottom where the engine was, to the fitness center, to the mess area where they actually made the food and so forth. And I would make myself seen this army two star general which was strange for sailors to on a Navy ship. And I would just tell them how much I appreciate one providing the ship, keeping it underway safely for all of us so that we could practice our craft of the exercise. And I would tell them a little bit about what we were doing because too often people at the far reaches of the organization really don't know what they're doing. They're just told to do their little part. And it helps for people one to understand what the total organization is doing, but also the contributions that they are providing to that total effort are appreciated.

What's interesting about what you're saying there Craig, is that.

You'Re articulating what the Essence of the why contribute is, which is to use your time, your money, your energy, your connections to bring other people up. And one of the most successful, probably the most successful person I've ever worked with was the CEO of a company called T. Rowe Price. And he had about 6,000 employees. And I asked him one day when he took it over as a $12 billion investment firm, and when he retired, it was $565 billion investment firm. And I asked him, why do you feel like you've been so successful in your career? And he said, I believe the secret to my success is that I personally know, interviewed everyone that works for me and I've got 6,000 employees. He said, I know a little bit about each one and when I can help each person do a little bit better, then we all do a little bit better. And that's the essence of that. Why, which you just did while you were in the military, right? I can't imagine that every general thought the same way that you did.

I would hope that the good ones did. I certainly learned some of the, what we call tactics, techniques and procedures in the military, ttp. I certainly learned some of that from people that I worked with, people I worked for and people that worked for me. I mean, I've, I've, I'm a people watcher and I watch and I tell this story about life's journey. You know, life in a profession, life in general is like walking down a path. And the path has got rocks along the path and as you walk down the path, you're going to experience these rocks. And each of them represents an experience or an observation. What I tell people is when you see something that's really, really good, pick up that rock and put it in your rucksack because you want to use that. You say to yourself, wow, if I ever get into a position like that, I want to be able to do it just like that. The same thing applies to those rocks that represent the bad things. Pick those up and say, you know, I want to remind myself never to be like that. I saw when I was a major, which is a mid grade officer in the army, I watched a two star general berate a superb lieutenant. He didn't even know him. But it was, it was, it was just very, very sad to watch this general treat this young lieutenant and, and that's the kind of treatment and behavior that actually drove that lieutenant who was superb. And I could even see then he had the potential to be a general one day himself drove him out of the army after his Commitment of five years. He got out, he went off to do something else. Now he's very, very successful. And I don't remember exactly what he's doing. I've stayed in touch with him throughout the years, off and on, so forth. But if you are a senior leader in any organization and you treat your people bad, they're going to go find something, they're going to vote with their feet, they're going to go find something else to do, they're going to go find somebody else to work for. But if you imbue that sense of loyalty not just to the organization, but to yourself because of the way you treat them, you've got a pretty powerful incentive for people to stay and to do good things for you and your organization. So treating people right, no matter who they are, is an important characteristic of strong leadership. If you are in the military, you have to realize that a private, today there's a private out there somewhere that if he stays or she stays in the military, will be the sergeant major of the entire army someday. You want to encourage that young person to stay in the organization. By the same token, there are lieutenants who are obligated only for three, four or five years, depending on the type of the commission they got. That would be superb. Senior leaders someday as general officers, as the chief of staff of the army, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But if we don't treat them right, we're going to drive them out. They're going to go back into the corporate world, make a lot of money, and we will have lost that. So people, power is something that I've never forgotten.

While we take a moment to give our guest a quick break, I hope you're hearing how important it is to know your why. If you're ready to put an end to your frustration and unlock the code to your personal and business success, then after the show, make sure to head to why institute.com and discover your why today. It only takes about five minutes. Let's get back to the show.

How have you seen the lessons that you learned in the military translate over into the business world today?

Yeah. So.

Yes.

Yeah. So there's a misconception that the military leadership is nothing more than ordering somebody to do something and then they comply. Well, there's a certain aspect of that, because if you violate an order, you can be thrown out, you can be punished, certainly. But quite frankly, if you do the same thing in the corporate world, you can be fired or you can be punished in some respect as well.

There's a statue in front of infantry hall at Fort Benning, Georgia. And it's a statue of a leader, an infantry leader with all his battle gear on, carrying a rifle. He's got a helmet on and he's leaning forward and he's got his arm facing, waving towards the front. And on the front of the statue, it's about 10 or 12ft tall. On the front of the statue is inscripted the words follow me. Now as you think about that, this statue of this leader and it could be a sergeant, could be a lieutenant, could be a captain, doesn't matter who it is, it's a leader of men and women in the army.

He is turning his head slightly so that the people behind him can hear the words follow me. He's going into battle and he's saying follow me. But he's not behind them saying I'm following you or I'm following you and I got a bayonet at your back or I've got a 45 pointed at you. Like so many times in history we've seen that kind of poor leadership. He is an inspirational leader and people are getting out of the trench and moving forward and following him because they trust him, because he inspires them, because they would do almost anything and they're willing to put their life on the line for him, their leader. And so I go back to that three star general story of that colonel telling me the last thing in the world I'd want to do is disappoint. General so and so that's the kind of inspirational leadership that we all aspire to is that people follow us not because we tell them to, but because they want to. Because they want the organization to succeed. They want to please the boss and they, they want to be part of a winning team. And it's sort of the same with, you know, I know many of you listeners have probably heard the stories about basketball teams and how 5 average basketball players who work as a team can be more successful than five individual teams superstars who don't work as a team. The same principle applies to the military and applies to the corporate world as well. There's no magical.

Silo just for military. We're all people and we're all inspired by similar things, I think so I think when I wrote this book one of the things I tried to make sure I did was write it in such a way that would be easily digestible by civilians who had never seen served in the military. Yes, there are military stories in there, but they're not overdone and they're told in such a way as I hope I'm trying to do today with some of these stories that people will say, yeah, I get that light bulb just came on and, yeah, that's a rock I want to put my rucksack to.

I love that. So when you talk about the art of inspiring, what does that mean, the art of inspiring? How do you inspire. Inspire somebody?

So at the beginning of my book, I say, in the. In the prologue, I think I say words to the effect of, you will find leadership suggestions and tactics and techniques and so forth. In here, you will also find stories that you'll wonder, does this have anything to do with leadership? And sometimes it doesn't. It has things to do with life.

And you will. You need to take what is of value, discard what isn't of value, and hopefully pass on to others whatever you think is worthy. So.

Inspirational leadership is all about.

Establishing an environment with the people that you work with.

Such that, like the three star general, you don't have to do very much because they respect and appreciate you as their leader. They are inspired. And all you have to do is really point and say, that's the direction I want to go. The captain of a ship, a large ship, really doesn't drive the ship. He establishes the parameters. He's responsible for the entire ship. But he says, this is the direction we're going. This is the speed.

This is the criteria by which I want to be awakened in the middle of the night, so on and so forth. And then he or she goes throughout his ship like I did in that Navy ship years ago, and make sure that everybody who's contributing to that total effort understands the importance of their contributions. So it's hard to put a black and white definition on inspirational leadership. It's more a feeling than a thing.

But when I think people experience it, they know it. They are, you know, when you're inspired, I mean, you have a feeling. It's sort of like.

You know, when you're excited or when you laugh at a joke or something. It just happens when you are inspired by somebody or something, you know it.

And what I try to do is give several dozen examples of what I consider to be inspirational leadership. Those rocks that I put in my rucksack and said, I want to carry them through. When I was a base commander, tell you another quick story. When I was a base commander in Germany, I had about 3,000 employees. We served about 45,000 people in the community. And I went into the organization knowing zero about Running a base, because for 20 years, I had been a tanker and a cavalryman, and I had trained to go to war, to fight America's war. And all of a sudden, at the rank of colonel, which is a pretty senior level in the military, they said, now you're going to be a base commander. And I thought, wow, what do I know about running the base? Paying electrical bills, running daycare centers, holding town halls, doing employee.

Meetings and so forth. I went from 100% military, all male environment, to 90, probably 98% civilian employees, half of which were females, half of which were German. Completely foreign environment. In terms of the kinds of people that I would lead and the kinds of things that I had been doing, I was a fish out of water. But one of the things I thought I did have a pretty good sense for was.

A judgment on people's character. And I went into that organization, I said, look, I trust all of you until you demonstrate that you're not worthy of that trust. And what I ask of you is to help me be a better base commander by telling me how I can help you. Show me where the tough spots are. I will intuitively see the good things because I'll be drawn to them. They will jump out. But I won't necessarily see the rust that's underneath the paint. If we need to fix, replace the metal because of the rust in the paint, you need to tell me about that, and I need to do what I can to provide you the resources to fix that. When I first got there, my engineer officer in charge of all the construction and maintenance of all the buildings that we had in this large community, he came in and he gave me this. And if you can see, this is a water pipe. And this water pipe was taken out of the barracks of one of the infantry battalions that lived in my community. And what he did was he turned it on its side. And if you can see here, it's full of calcium, you can't see anything. He said, this is what happens when you don't take care of the buildings. The water pipes fill up with calcium in such a way that you can't even see through the other side. Let your legacy be not putting a gazebo in front of the Osters Club, but with your name on it. But let your legacy be that you don't allow the pipes to look like this for generations that follow. You know, plant a tree under which you don't expect to gain shade, somebody once said. And so I took that to heart. That's a rock I put in my rucksack. I said, you know, I want to. And you can see this was 30 years ago. And I still have this pipe that I carry around. It's got a little worn out label on it. It says, Colonel Weldon, 230th BSP Hot Water Pipe Building 10 Con Barracks, 3 June 1991. So this is almost 30 years ago I was given this pipe. And this is a rock I've carried in my rucksack to do the things, you know, pick up the trash that you see on the floor when nobody's even looking. Do the right thing when people aren't watching.

You said, And I was trying to write it down, so I'm guessing the listeners were too our audience. And you said, I trust all of you until you show me otherwise. And then you said, teach me what I can do to provide you what? Couldn't get that second sentence.

And so tell me how I can help you. Tell me you know better than I do. Because I, I've never been a base before, so I don't really know where the cracks in the dam are in the water starting to seep through, to use a metaphor. You know that because you're there every single day in your functional area, I need to make sure that I provide you the assistance, the resources, the help, the top cover to help you fix those things that you anticipate are about to break.

Gotcha. You know the other thing that you said there, that, or I guess the analogy that really hit home for me was when you started talking about the leader of the ship and what that person actually does versus maybe what you think you have to do to be that leader. Right? They're not the one pulling every lever, right? Not the one that's the best at everything that can be done on the ship. But there's somebody who is in that position to give direction and know there's a lot more to it and a lot less to it. I think most people think, yeah.

So the captain of a ship and think of an aircraft carrier, an aircraft carrier's got somewhere between four and five thousand sailors on it. And so if you're the captain of the aircraft character carrier, you've got duties that you're required to do, obviously, and meetings to go to and all that. But you're probably not going to find it very easy to get to every corner of that ship every day, every week or every, maybe even every month. So you got to say to yourself, all right, when do I have the time to focus on areas that I may not even know need attention. And that's how the trust between you and your team comes into play. So the military is a hierarchical organization. You've got a senior leader at the top, and then it's like a pyramid goes down. Corporate America, a lot of corporate America is like that as well. And so there's a first level and a second level and a third level and a fourth level of supervisors that are below you. And if you are the one person at the top, you have no more time in your day than the people at the bottom have. You've got 24 hours in the day. So that's one of the resources that as a senior leader you don't get any more of the more senior you become as your responsibilities broadening greater and greater than they were yesterday when you had a lesser position. You still have the same amount of time in your day. And so you'll hear people talking about senior leaders needing to set aside time for everything from maintaining your health, getting enough sleep, exercise, your family, the list goes on and on and on. So all of that stuff cuts into your time as well, reducing even further the amount of time you have to focus on the organization. Let me tell another quick story. I had a friend who went to West Point, which is the military academy that produces army officers. And West Point graduates have reunions every year and they go back to meet with the classmates that they were in school with. And typically this is retirees after 25, 30, 35, 40, you know, forever. And they do that a lot. They're very good about going back to reunion. So my friend was a retired colonel and he went back to reunion and he said to me, he said, I was back at a reunion and I saw one of my classmates over at the bar sitting there by himself. He was nursing a drink and his back was turned to us. So I went over to him, we'll call this fellow John. And he said, hey, John, how you doing? He tapped him on the shoulder. When John turned around, his eyes were misty. And my friend said, I couldn't tell whether he'd had too much to drink or something was wrong. So I said, hey, you okay? And John said, Now John was a retired three star general, so he had been a hugely successful career. John said, you know, I busted my tail for 36 years. I did everything the army asked of me. They rewarded me with promotions and commanders and wonderful assignments. And along the way my wife left me and now my kids won't talk to me. And so as you, as you reflect on that story, you've got to say to yourself, all right, let's back up and get a redo now. Let's back up 20 years, 30 years and say, all right, we're going to do this over again. Did this officer prioritize his day, his life, his is what's most important to him in the right way? And maybe the answer is yes, that's exactly what he had planned to do. But I suspect the answer was no, he didn't plan to lose his wife and have his kids not talk to him 36 years later when he was retired from the army. It gets to the story of and some of your listeners may have heard this. There's a professor, he's standing at the front of his class. He pulls out a big glass jar and he sets it on the table. And then he pulls out a basket of rocks and he takes each of the rocks out of the basket and he puts it in the jar until the jar fills to the top. And he turns to the class and he says, is the jar full? And they all go, yep, yep, yep, jar is full. So then he pulls out a bag of sand and he pours the sand in the jar and the sand granules go down amongst the rocks, go down to the bottom and gradually go up to the top of the jar and until the jar is full. And he says, is the jar full? And they go, well, you fooled us the first time, but yeah, now the jar is full. So he pulls out a pitcher of water and he pours the water into the jar and the water goes among the grand mules of sand and the rocks and goes to the bottom, then fills up to the top. And he turns to the class and he says, is the jar full? Now nobody knows what to say because they can't imagine what else he can put in the jar. So they don't really know. And he says, well, I don't have anything else to put in the jar, but the moral of the story is to put the rocks in the jar first. The rocks represent what's most important in your life. It could be your career, it could be your family, it could be your faith, it could be your health, it could be your bucket list, it could be whatever making money, whatever it is that's most important in your life. Put those rocks in the jar first. Because if you put sand and water in the jar first and that's the noise around your prioritize priorities, then you're going to leave a rock or two out. They're not all going to fit in there. When I heard that story, I said to myself, in the wake of my sister's suicide, which I talk about in chapter 19 of my book, I need to reflect on what's important in my life. Because when my sister committed suicide in 1999 on Christmas Eve, my daughter was 13 years old. And I reflected, I took a step back and reflected, do I have my priorities right? My daughter was not at any risk at that time like my sister had been. And there were signals leading up to her suicide. But I wanted to make sure I did everything I possibly could to put the boundaries in place to ensure her success or she had the opportunity for success. So I told the army, at 28 years, I want to retire when I get to 30 years and go on to the next chapter of my life because my priorities have changed. I want to make sure the rock I put in my jar first is my family rock. And I will have spent 30 years serving my country in the Army. And I think that's enough. And the army tried to talk me out of that, but I persevered. They allowed me to retire at 30 years. I went to Celebration Florida, the town that Disney built. My daughter went to Celebration High School. She went to the University of Central Florida, commuting from home, living at home while she was a college student, got a part time gig at Disney World, turned it into a full time job after graduating cum laude from the University of Central Florida. And she's had several promotions. She's happily married, owns her own home, travels all over the world. I can't imagine her life turning out better than it did. And I give 98% of the credit to her, not to me, but the 2% credit I give to me is because I made a decision and shortly after my sister's suicide that I was going to rearrange my priorities and make sure that what's most important to me was put first. And my daughter was one of those things that I wanted to make sure I put that rock in the jar first.

Wow, I love that. A lot of great lessons, a lot of great. We could talk all day. I have a feeling, and I would love to, as a matter of fact. But Craig, if our listeners are wanting to get a hold of you, they're wanting to find you, follow you, learn from you, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Well, I'm very easy to find. They just type my name into Google, they'll find my website, they'll find all kinds of information about me, my LinkedIn connection. I'm open to connecting with anybody on LinkedIn. My website is really a window into my soul. I like to tell people, you can learn more about me and what people think about me, both my speaking, my book, me personally on my website. Because there are dozens and dozens of testimonials about all of that on my website. So I'm really in the mode right now of trying to give back what I've learned over almost five decades of leadership and life lessons to the next generation. And if I have a legacy that I'd like to leave, it's that he helped people who came behind him.

Love that. And that is exactly the essence of your why, like we talked about, to be that pebble that starts the ripple that goes on and on in the lives of other people. So, Craig, thank you so much for being here today. And I look forward to following you on your journey to help more and more people be successful leaders. So thank you so much for being here today.

And thanks, Gary. Thanks. And best of luck. In two days, you're going to have a new journey yourself.

Yes, I'm excited.

All right.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez, and I'll see you on the next episode.