PNTV: Staring Down The Wolf by Mark Divine (#418)

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Staring down the Wolf by former Navy SEAL Commander mark Devine. Subtitle. 7 Leadership Commitments that forge elite teams. Staring down the Wolf. This is part three of our four part Navy seal. Hoo ya. Intense wisdom we had. David Goggins. Can't hurt Me. Jocko Willink. Discipline equals freedom. And now we've got Staring down the Wolf by Commander Devine. And then we've got next up, the story of Adam Brown that Eric Blem tells in a book called Fearless. All these books are so inspiring, so great. Mark Devine. I first was introduced to Mark via his work in Unbeatable Mind. I remember reading that in my office back in the day after I had blown up a prior version of Optimize called in Theos. Took the business from a million plus of revenue down to zero because it just wasn't working the way that I wanted it to work. Ah, that left a mark. I needed some mental toughness to pull it to the next level and to really recreate something that I'm proud of, which I'm proud that we've done. An Unbeatable Mind. Mark's book on mental toughness was super helpful at that point. So I loved it. Loved Mark. Then I read the Way of the seal and somewhere in the process, Mark and I connected. I interviewed him for my show, he interviewed me for his. Came up to Ojai a couple times to visit, went on some great hikes, became an investor in our company, Optimize Enterprises, Public Benefit Corporation. Hoo ya Commander. And just a dear friend who inspires me deeply as one of EMERSON'S Heroes. Navy SEALs. Anytime I need to say, buddy, what would a Navy SEAL do? I say, what would Mark Devine do? Or Mark, introduce us to the guys who run SEAL training down in Coronado. Mike Magaruchi. Mags. What would Mags do? What would Commander Divine do? Let's do that now. So when Mark sent me this book, I was fired up to read it. It's awesome. As we discussed, it's all about the seven leadership commitments to lead yourself first to forge elite teams. Now, one of the things I didn't know about Mark that I was blown away by was the fact that when he went through the BUDS training for Navy SEALs, he was 25 years old. I knew that he was a little older. He already had an MBA and a cpa. He was working On Wall street, he said, this isn't my life's calling. This is not my purpose. And he went and became a Navy seal. Aspired to become a Navy seal, which is not guaranteed. You don't say, I want to be a Navy SEAL. And you're a Navy SEAL. He shows up at Bud's Class 170 with 185, what he calls pier studs. These are some of the most well trained, elite performing men of that age in the military, etc. 185 people. You know how many of them made it through that rigorous BUDS training, arguably the most brutal training almost certainly in modern times, and echoes back to the ancient Spartan warriors, etc. 185 started, guess how many finished? 17. Now that's an impressive stat. Mark was the honor man of that class. He was the one that they said, and you among these are the best. As his commanding officer who kind of gave him the honor, said that you are Uncommon, which happens to be the name of his next book, which I can't read. Uncommon. Isn't that an awesome word, an awesome title for book? Uncommon. Now, I'm sorry, it was 19 people. 185 down to 19. Now that's impressive that he was one of the 19 and the best among those 19. But what I found even more impressive and that I did not know, I knew he was the honor man and all that stuff. But when you go through Navy SEAL Bud's training, you are put on a boat crew. And the boat crew is seven people. It's led by an aspiring officer. Right? So there's enlisted, then there's officers. Right. There's an officer that's in charge of the boat crew. Mark was that officer. Now what's most impressive is that out of the 19 people that made it through, out of the 185, every single one of his guys made it through. It gives me tears in my eyes. 7. All seven of the boat crew. Usually people drop off and boat crews are reformulated, not marks. He led them to a place where they all got through. And he tells the story of how he forged his leadership skills and that. And in 25 years of entrepreneurial turbulence, ups and downs and spiraling up, 25 years of meditation, martial arts therapy, all these different things to help us forge our own elite team. So I found that to be particularly inspiring and I'm excited to share what we've got. So we've got the six page PDF, as always, we now have 600 of these at Optimize Me. Check it out if you haven't yet, join over 10,000 people from around the world, including some of my favorite Navy SEALs, Olympic medal winning coaches, et cetera, et cetera. But it's time to talk about our favorite ideas here. So staring down the wolf. This, as you may have guessed, is based on the Native American wisdom that Mark tells the story of perfectly and wonderfully. That goes something like this. The elder says to the young aspiring leader that within you there are two wolves, the fear wolf and the courage wolf. And they're constantly battling with one another. And the young boy or young man asks which one wins? And of course the elder says, the one you feed will win. So the question Mark asks is, which wolf are you feeding? Are you feeding the fear wolf by allowing your anxieties to fester and ruminate and not doing the basic core practices to get yourself strong? Were you feeding the courage wolf by taking care of yourself, doing the basic fundamentals, eating, moving, sleeping, training your mind, showing up as your best self more and more consistently? We got a stare down the wolf. We have seven commitments we can make that Mark talks about in the book to win that. And I loved it because I thought about the two wolves, right? And I knew I wanted to teach this in our optimized mastery series we which is part of our coach program, 300 day program. The second module is on hero ology, the study of a good hero, where I unpack the wisdom of a documentary I'm in featuring Joseph Campbell with guys like Laird Hamilton and Tony Hawk and Deepak Chopra, et cetera. So we spend a month operationalizing the wisdom from that documentary, which you can check out for free, by the way, on YouTube. Finding Joe. It's awesome. Director did a great job. But how do we operationalize that wisdom? And I knew I wanted to share this story of the two wolves. And so I put it on a piece of paper to make a note. And then on that same piece of paper right before, I captured a different idea for this session, which was learned helplessness versus learned optimism, where Martin Seligman talks about the scientific research that shows that you can make a dog, which he used in his laboratory studies, helpless or courageous, depending on whether you give them a sense of agency. If you feel that you have a sense of agency in your life, then you feel courageous. So we need to feed the good wolf. And the other thing I had fun with was you can name your wolves, right? You got the fear wolf, you can name demon, you can name your courage wolf daimon, which is that best version of you that's always whispering there. We just need to pay attention to it. And. And of course, again, demon is just the diminutive of daimon. It's just the little petulant version of you that's always whining and trying to get you to do the less than awesome things. And one more time, the whole game here is don't pay attention to this guy. Close the gap, high five. Your inner daimon. That's the summum bonum of life, et cetera. Another quick thing on courage and fear. It's not about having no fear. So Aristotle talks about this. The virtue is in the mean. You can have too little fear, and that's a vice of deficiency. It's rashness. Of course you can have too much fear. I'm sorry, it would be the other way around. You can have too little courage and then you would be a coward. Or you can have too much courage and then you're rash. The proper relationship is to feel whatever fear is present and then be willing to act in the presence of that fear. But not as an idiot jumping out of an airplane, metaphorically, without a parachute. You want to prepare, but you also want to make sure you're feeding the right wolf, which again, is what the book, of course, is all about. Then we've got vuca. Have you ever heard of vuca? It's a military term. I will share directly from our philosopher's note. Pulling from the book, here's Commander Divine, Entrepreneur Divine, telling us, in the new battleground, the internal terrain of emotional power and mindset is where the creative energy to win will come from. Those require new developmental models to effectively deal with the rapid change in uncertainty. He wrote this before COVID did its thing. You tell me if there's even more rapid change and uncertainty now. After the Cold War, the US Army War College coined the acronym for vuca, which is. I'll write it down in a moment. The volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the world. Vuca, which has gained some familiarity in executive suites since. To win the mission in vuca, leaders will need a next generation compass. One that helps them to navigate the peaks and valleys of emotional, moral and spiritual strength. So Vuca, you can't see that, but we'll just repeat it. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Our world has that today more than ever before. Now, when I was preparing for this PNTV after reading this book quite a while ago, I love the fact that Marx says we need to have a next generation compass to help us navigate the peaks and Valleys, of course, we've been talking a lot about the compass that we're working on, which is the virtue compass. And essentially that's what all of our work again is doing. And if you've been watching these, perhaps you can complete this on your own wisdom, knowing the game we're playing that it all starts with that self mastery. Can you get yourself to play it that game? Well, right now, courage, being willing to act in the presence of fear and then love, which ultimately is what it's all about. And then we got some sub virtues. But that's the ultimate compass that's going to help us navigate the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. Make virtue your primary goal. Of course you have other targets in your life, but make that your primary goal and then keep this in mind. You fall down. Rise stronger. This is from one of the chapters on resilience. Mark talks about his training as a martial artist as, as a young man before he went into the seals, right. And his old school teacher wrote on a chalkboard kind of like this, squeaking with the chalk. Hopefully I'm not squeaking too much. Fall down seven times. Rise eight. And Mark says stronger in the note. I reflect on the fact that Angela Duckworth, the leading scientist studying grit, says if she was ever going to get a tattoo, she would get those words indelibly inked on her body. Fall 7. Rise 8. Stronger. Ultimately, that's what it's all about. Stare down the fear wolf. Have the courage to show up. Be antifragile. Be gritty. Know that obstacles make me stronger. Ohms right, again, we've got our coaches doing that chant at our graduation weekend. And Mark joined us as a luminary visiting faculty in our optimized coach program. Check out his session where he talks about these ideas. Coaches are coaches. One on one. Optimize me coach. For more on that, the next class, Class 3, just launched. We're super excited. We've got over 2,000 coaches in our program from over 70 countries around the world. And I'm all in getting to 10,000, getting to 100,000. We know this is one of the ways we're going to change the world is how do we empower leaders to go be the best version of themselves and boom, ripple out. The next class starts on January 1, 2021, and then one starts every quarter. If that sounds like fun, join us and learn more about Mark's wisdom in that context. And obviously go to unbeatablemind.com and he's got his own coach program, which is awesome. Everything Mark does. You need to check out Semper Gumby is the next idea. So Mark tells us the the Marines slogan is Semper Fi. Always faithful. Just always faithful on the ground, going to battle in the hardest trenches, doing what needs to get done. Semper Fi. Always faithful. The seals are a little counterculture, so they say, playing on that with a nod and a wink and a respectful little elbow tap. Semper Gumby, always flexible. This is another aspect of resiliency and plasticity, being able to adapt to your situation. When life changes, we change. We're not rigid, Gumby. You can twist Gumby into some crazy positions and boing. He'll bounce back. Mark said he felt like that most days when he was serving as a seal. Boom. Life's challenging you. The seals need to be always flexible, always rebalancing themselves, whatever life demands. So when life blows up in front of you, what do you do? Are you brittle and do you break fragile style? Are you resilient and you can sustain it, or are you antifragile and actually get stronger by leveraging your Gumby flexibility? All that leads us to Mark's final point in the book, and I'm actually going to read another passage from him. The question is, as you listen to this, what are you here to do, A B? What do you need to do right now? What's the number one fear wolf that you need to stare down? What is it that's putting the brakes on your momentum, on your velocity, on your soul force power in your life? Mark tells us, to end separation from others, we must first end it in ourselves. We must stare down the fear wolf, wake up to our innate goodness and connection to one another, and reach the integrated fifth plateau of development. He talks about different stages of development. So, yeah, he says, the fate of humanity does depend on you and me. The way to global wholeness is to first become whole ourselves. The fate of the world literally depends on us. If you aren't going to be great, if you're not going to serve heroically and have the strength for two, then who? If you haven't noticed, our world needs heroes today more than ever before. As we always say, we live in a virtuous world. Nothing's new about that. That's why the ancient stories in all philosophical and religious traditions were always vice and virtue. But we need you to put your thumb on the scale of virtue and be the best version of you so we can again change the world one person at a time together. Starting with you and me and Commander Divine. Hoo ya. Today, we hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. Quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.