Navy SEAL Commander On How To Optimize Productivity, Leadership & Your Business | Rich Diviney

Hey, what's up, Matt here. And on today's episode, we've got Ridge Devenny. You know, Rich's done a few things in his life, but I'll let him kind of go into that. I actually met Rich for business purposes. I was introduced by a friend of mine from the military, Alex.

Yeah.

And then from there we ended up hiring Rich to go through some of the attribute assessments and sort of figure out because we were always reactively hiring and that created some issues. And then we brought Rich in to help us sort of fix some of these issues of not stop us from reactively hiring, but being able to reactively hire and have more positive outcomes.

Yeah, hire the right people, Right?

Exactly. So tell us, how did you become.

The attributes guy, the current Rich Devini. As you know, I mean, we were both military men. I went into the Navy in 1996. Yeah. Immediately went from getting commissioned in the Navy to SEAL training. So I went to Navy seal training in 1996.

Yep.

Made it through.

That was the first of the easy ones.

That's what I'm told by everybody before me. I subsequently tell that to people after. Mine was the last hard one.

Exactly.

So went to Hawaii as my first duty station until about 2001. Then went to the east coast and of course the war broke out, became very busy. In 05, I went to one of our really specialized SEAL command. And this is a command where you have to do a very specialized selection. So SEAL training, as you know, on its own buds, basic underwater demolition. That's a 90% attrition rate, right? Yep. For this specialized command, it's. You have to have been a SEAL for at least five years. You have to have seller recommendations, you have to do interviews, all that stuff, and then you go through a nine month selection training process. 15, 50% make it.

When did they teach you how to write a book?

College. That was when I asked. But even then I didn't know how to write a book. I learned when I did it, so. Although, yeah, nowadays you'd think it was part of the SEAL training. It's a bit of a prerequisite, I'm happy to say. Mine's not a SEAL book though. Right. So as you know. But yeah, so at this specialized command, I served there, but in 2010, I was put in charge of the assessment selection. One of the things they had asked me to do was, hey, can you help us articulate what we're doing here? Because they weren't. We weren't effectively describing why guys weren't making it through.

So, okay, this is for the specialized unit.

This is for the specialized unit. So guys shall remain nameless. Yeah, shall remain nameless. Right. But a guy would drop out and we'd say, well, he couldn't shoot very well. And you tell a SEAL who's been a SEAL for that long that they can't shoot very well.

I can shoot.

All right. This is a guy who shoots, shoot. Probably shot more rounds in the military than most in the military. Right?

Yeah.

So they said, hey, can you help us figure out what's going on? This is when I really began to separate performance into this idea of skills and attributes and the difference between the two. So I did that at the Commands, retired in 2017, began working in the leadership space and the high performing team space and realized that a lot of businesses and organizations were having trouble articulating performance to the extent that they couldn't hire the right people. So ultimately I decided to write a book. Ultimately, the idea is there's a difference between attributes and skills and. And skills are these things that are not inherent to our nature. We learn them. We're not born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball. They direct our behavior in known and specific environments to tell us when and how to ride a bike or throw a ball. And then they are visible. So they're very easy to assess, measure, and test. Okay. What skills don't tell us is how we're going to show up in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. And this is where attributes come in. Attributes are inherent to our nature. In other words, all of us are born with levels of adaptability, situational awareness, resilience. Attributes don't direct our behavior, they inform our behavior. So they tell us, can you go into that?

What does that mean?

So, for example, my son's levels of resilience and perseverance informed the way he showed up when he was learning the skill of riding a bike and he was falling off a dozen times doing so. Right. So they inform how we're going to show up to a situation and then because they're hard to see, they're hard to measure, how do you assess or measure someone's levels of adaptability or perseverance? Right. So, but the idea is if you are going to build a team that can actually be a high performing team and the definition of a high performing team as opposed to just a team, A team is any group of two or more people working together towards a common goal or objective. That's a team. A high performing team is any group of two or more people that is working towards a common goal or objective that perform not only when things are going great, but also when things aren't going great. That's what the designating factor is for any high performing team. They perform when things don't go as planned and they keep on performing in chaos and complexity. If you want a team like that, you have to look at attributes because attributes are what define our performance in those times. And so I wrote the book on it. I wrote about 25 attributes in the book, have subsequently been doing work with businesses and organizations. The list has grown to 42 attributes. And like we did with you all, we come in, we help an organization understand what their attributes list looks like for their particular organization. Because every team and organization will have their own. The attribute list to make up a great SEAL team looks different than attribute lists to make up a great sales team or a surgical team. Right. So first we determine what that looks like. Then we apply that to all of their roles and positions and then we help them understand how to hire specifically for those attributes. Because looking for attributes is going to be different than looking for skills. And so we help them do that as well.

Absolutely. I think sports are a great analogy, right?

Yeah.

So like to sort of take it away from the military, but you know, like an all star team is terrible. Yeah, they're truly terrible.

The dream team where you pick all the. Right. All the top people and.

Yeah, it doesn't work that way because those are not team players.

Here's a great story. So when I was doing the initial work, I found this guy I was researching. I found this guy named Russell Acoff. Russell Acoff. He had a couple weird titles, right? He is a systems theorist. He was a management science expert and a couple other things. But he used to relate management and leadership to systems theory. And one of the things he used to say is that, hey, if you took. If we took the best parts of every best automobile on the planet, right? So, you know, I don't want to insult anybody, I'm not really a car guy. But imagine, you know, if you disagree with me, okay, but the Ferrari has the best engine, the Land Rover has the best suspension. The.

Even just saying it sounds, yeah.

The Lamborghini has the best carburetor, whatever. Take all the best parts of every best vehicle and put them all together. Would you have the best vehicle on the planet? And the answer is no, because the parts wouldn't fit together. And so he used to say, this system is never just the sum of its parts. It's a product of their interaction. And the same thing goes with a team. A team is never just the sum of its parts. It's a product of how they interact. So you can put together a dream team of all the best parts. If they don't interact, they're going to be a poor team.

Have you heard Elon Musk talk about when they made the first Tesla?

I don't know. I don't think so. Yeah.

So they tried to adapt a Lotus Elise or like a Lotus Salon, I can remember which one. And they were like, that's the platform that we're going to use to build these electric cars. And they outsource to, I think it was a company called like AC Electric or something like that. They outsourced some of the stuff to that and they were going to put them all together and that was going to be the platform of how they create kind of a scalable and replicatable model. But turns out the AC Electric thing didn't really work that well. And the platform, the Lotus, the moment you added batteries to it, it fucking collapsed. Right. So what they ended up, it ended up by the end of it, sharing 7% with any other vehicle. So it was basically, it was a 93% completely bespoke vehicle with 7% shared parts with any other vehicle. And so they basically realized that in order to create this high performance. Because that's when they were creating the Roadster.

Right, Right.

Super high performance, brand new thing, they had to just create everything because everything had to work together.

Work together. Yeah. And that's the key.

They couldn't take a sports car and make it into a better sports car just by adding new sports car things. It just didn't work.

Yeah. And same thing goes with people, it's all about how they interact.

Yeah. So if we sort of take it back to the SEAL teams, I think one of my. If I wasn't sort of informed, I'd be like, well, why does that. Surely the training and the skills matters, like, matters, you know what I mean? So why, if you have a guy who's really good and he's trying to get into this specialized unit, etc. And he's really good, like, why wouldn't you just take them? What was that thing that you couldn't quite describe.

Yeah.

Why was that actually more important? Because I'm assuming you probably took some people who were technically less proficient.

Yes. Yeah, because we. Well, so here's a couple examples. And honestly, the inception of the SEAL teams as. And every spec ops unit has its Own origin story. But the idea of special operations, the SEALs included, is that you are a unit that is designed to go into environments of deep complexity. You're not going to be able to predict what's going on. You're often. Well, maybe not in today's military, but most of history, the Spec Ops unit was under gunned, undermanned out on their own. And their whole thing was to go frustrate, sabotage the enemy and not get caught. Right. Force multiplier. Yeah. And be able to react to situations and environments. Right. So those types of reactions.

There's two NVGs.

That's right, yeah, yeah. Or no NVGs. The starlight scope or whatever. But the idea is that the ability to do that is an attributes based ability. It's adaptability, it's resilience and things like that. And so when SEAL training, I mean, started in the 40s by Draper Kaufman, he started SEAL training, their very first one, with a week long evolution. And basically he started this class and he'd start this class in a week, on a Sunday. And they'd run the whole week and they'd sleep maybe two hours for that whole week. And they'd do simulations and combat simulations and do exercises. And they just exhausted. Right. The whole week. And he didn't run any examinations or evaluations in that week. It was not, there was nothing testing the guys in terms of mental acuity or things like that, things like that. It was all whether or not the guy stayed or quit. Right. And lots of guys quit. Almost 90% did. And that has translated into modern day SEAL training. And so modern day SEAL training, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big heavy boats on your head. Hundreds of hours exercising with 300 pound telephone poles and freezing in the surf zone. Well, when I started this work in 2010, okay, I had already been on hundreds of combat missions overseas. And I can tell you with certainty, never on one did I carry a.

Heavy boat in my head or a.

300 pound telephone pole. So what they were doing to us was not training us in the skills to be seals. They were teasing out these qualities, these attributes, to see if we had what it took to do the job right. And then the last story I'll tell you, because this is really, it was told to me and I remembered it when I was doing this work. But the story goes, and this apparently happened way before I went to the SEAL team. So the story goes, this kid showed up to SEAL training one day and he walks into the instructor's office and says, I want to be a Navy seal. And the instructors say, okay, fine, but you have to do a swim test. And the kid's like, okay. So they take him out of the pool. Easy swim test. 50 meters, 25 meters to one end, 25 meters back to the other. And the kid gets all ready and he jumps in the pool. And when he jumps in the pool, he sinks right to the bottom of the pool. And he starts walking across the bottom of the pool to one end, and he touches that, and he walks across the bottom of the pool back to the other end, and he comes up and he's gasping for air, nearly drowning. And the instructor looks at him, says, what the hell are you doing? And the kid who's trying to catch the breath says, I'm sorry, instructor, I don't know how to swim. And at that point, the instructor pauses and he looks at the kid and says, that's okay. We can teach you how to swim. Right. And why did he say that? He said that because if that kid had the attributes, the qualities to show up to Navy SEAL training.

He got balls on you, brother.

He had everything inside of him to be a Navy seal. Teaching him to swim was going to be easy. And so the idea is, if you have the atrocities buttress. Every level of our performance, every skill we have is buttressed by these attributes. They're the elemental forms of the elemental things of performance, standards of performance that we fall back to. And so if we understand which attributes we have and what attributes we're looking for, we're literally talking about generating teams of people that we know exactly what they're going to do. And we can, in fact, see dark horses. You know, we can spot the dark horses early on. The people who may not look like they have the skills, but they have all the attributes they need. And. And training them in the stuff that we need to train them is going to be a snap, and we're going to have rock stars.

Have you looked into, like, I guess, the, like, the psyche of the person who does quit? Do you guys ever do, like.

Yeah.

Well, so it's always fascinating me because I never understood it because, like, I remember we were sitting there and they were on selection, they did a workout, and they said, this workout doesn't stop until somebody quits, and if you voluntarily quit, you can never reapply.

Yeah, same thing. Yeah.

So you gotta, you know, ring the bell, essentially. We don't have a bell. You just go, I'm pussy. Right. You walk away. Right, right. Type thing. And I remember we were sitting there and we're like two hours into a pretty raucous workout and dudes are pissing themselves, sitting themselves, throwing up. One guy did all three at once. That's the most impressive thing I've ever seen. Right. And I remember this guy gets up and sort of rings the bell and they go, sweet, it's over. And I was like, I could never imagine. It's not because I'm a particularly hard headed or tough person, but my brain always goes, this is such a short period of time in the grand scheme of things. Like, why would I give up? It's only 10 minutes away, 20 minutes away. All I got to do is not be the last one.

Right? Right. They began after I, after I went through buds. This is probably early 2000s. They began to do exit interviews with guys who quit. And now I am not certain that they were able to determine what the list of things is. They're still looking at it. But in the work I've done, I have recognized that I could. There is at least one or two. But specifically one attribute that you absolutely must have to make it through SEAL training or the spec ops training you've been through. And that is compartmentalization. And so what you were doing in that workout is in fact, you were basically in that workout and you did not ever consider the big picture. You deliberately ignored the big picture. In other words, how long is this going to go on? What you did was you focused on small incremental elements. I'm just going to go to the next exercise exactly what I did. Totally. Because that's exactly what you do to not quit. Those people who quit, those people who quit, they are unable to compartmentalize the levels that we are. Right. Because in deep duress, what will happen is they'll just, they just, even though they might start doing it, they just, they can't get over how long it's been or how long it's going to be. So a very common comment or theme of guys who quit is we were doing that. We had done this. We had been carrying boats all morning. We were in a boat carrying. And then they said, we're going to be carrying boats all afternoon or all night. And I just couldn't imagine carrying boats anymore. Then they quit. Right. None of us who made it through ever thought about anything past a minute or two. And we were constantly compartmentalizing, I call it moving horizons. We were picking horizons and moving to them constantly so that we just stepped through it. We never took in the big picture. This is exactly what you and I And our compadres did in combat. And combat requires massive compartmentalization. Because if you're in a combat environment and the shit's hitting the fan and everything's chaos, if you take in the big picture, even guys like us will wilt, right? Because it's just too much. It's too overwhelming. But we don't do that. We've trained. First of all, we come to. We show up to the beaches of buds or the beaches of your training and we have some in us, and then it's just hyper developed, you know, so we come to the table with compartmentalization and we hyper develop it. That's one of the key factors. There's probably a couple other in there that I haven't. I need to think through, but if there's one distinguishing one, that's it.

Yeah, I remember I used to go, you know what? At the top of the hill, I'll reevaluate this and I will see if this is something I want to keep doing.

Yes.

I go to top of the hill and I go, that wasn't too bad.

Yeah.

And I go, let me just go to the next one. I did the same thing when ice plunge.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah. I'm going to go to 3 minutes and 3 minutes to see how I feel. And then I go three minutes and.

Go, so ice plunge, let's just stop there. Because ice plunge, ice baths are actually a really good way to practice this idea of moving horizons. That's why I do it for my son. I did it for my son and my wife, right. So they. So when my son and my wife first got in it, I said, okay, when you get in this thing, the first thing I want you to do, as soon as you get in, I want you to stare at my hand and count to 20, right? They did that. Count to 20. As soon as that 20 was over. Pick another point, pick a number. Boom. Pick a number, count to that. Okay. Pick another point, pick a number, do that. They each got to in the first try. A minute, two minutes. They got to the minute because they're compartmentalizing. So this process and I'm writing about in this next book, right. This process is called Moving the Horizon. And what we're doing is we're basically, we're choosing horizons that are subjective to our experience, that are meaningful enough that they stretch the boundaries, but they're not too easy. Right? But the length of those horizons, the distance is usually relative to the intensity of the experience. Right? So if it's a very intense experience Freezing in the surf zone. For example, I might be like, I'm going to count to 10, right? Or like, I'd be like, you know, I'd sometimes be doing. Be doing push ups. Like, well, there's only so many push ups I can do. Once I'm done, they'll maybe hit the surf or they'll do something else. But that was my horizon. I remember being running with the boat on my head at night. There's a sandburn. I was like, well, I'm just going to focus until we get to the end of the sperm. And what happens there is actually really interesting. And my buddy Huberman, you know, we talk about this idea in neuroscience where if you set yourself a horizon, what's happening is the brain is in fact, the brain figures out the world and makes sense of the world through three factors. They're basically three factors are duration, pathway, outcome. Okay, Duration, how long is this gonna last? Pathway, what's my route out? And outcome. What's the final result? If we are in absence of one or more of those, we begin to feel anxious and uncertain. Okay, so if you have.

So you just create your own.

So, yeah, so if you have one, then you're kind of. If you're absent one, you're mildly anxious, absent two, you're medium anxious, absent three, you're like. That's when all we do, all Moving Horizons does, is you create your own DPO. So we call it DPOs, right? I create my own duration, pathway, outcome. I'm running along the berm, right? And I say, okay, I'm not just, I'm just going to. I'm just going to make it the next, this next. The end of this berm, okay? I've just created duration till I get to end the berm pathway to the end of berm outcome. End of berm. Here's what happens, though. As soon as you hit that wicket, you get a dopamine reward. You've just given yourself a dopamine reward. Right? The dopamine reward allows you, if you're, if you're doing it, to do it again, pick a new horizon. And so what we've done, what we did unconsciously when we first got to training, just hyper developed. We were just constantly moving horizons, creating DPOs. We were giving ourselves dopamine rewards in small bursts all the way through that training. And some people can't, but everybody can practice this concept of moving horizons because it's the secret to getting through any uncertainty.

Yeah, that's. That's fascinating because it's exactly. Okay, that's really interesting. I think one of the other things is, I've got two things on that and I don't want to forget. One is what are the downsides of that scale?

Yes.

Right.

So I would say downsides to hyper compartmentalizing any attribute in extremes is a bad thing, right? So downsides to compartmentalization are probably obvious. You block out the world to the extent, you block out emotions to the extent that things build up. Emotional compartmentalization is probably the worst. And you and I know this, we've talked about this in our private conversation where if you experience something that's very tragic or hard emotionally, you cannot react to it in the moment. Right. When you're in, you have to finish the job. But if you don't understand, come back at some stage. If you don't understand. I know I did this. I think you had mentioned you do this too. There were times when I'd experienced something really horrible. Right. But I had to put it away. I had to compartmentalize. Once everything was done, mission, we were back, all the briefings were in and I was able to get by myself. I would deliberately call that back out and I'd mourn it because I needed to get it out. Because if you compartmentalize too much, it's going to burst out somewhere. And we all know, I mean both of us are married, we have very happy marriages. You can't be in a relationship if you are hyper compartmentalizing everything. It just can't happen. So you just have to be real careful.

And how would you identify that in an employee or a business partner or someone who's taken something that can be a positive attribute and potentially through stress. So stress is an exacerbator, right? You know, like, like I guess. How can you see, okay, so symptoms.

Of someone so over compartmentalizing in the business, the professional realm. And some people are just like this. So my wife, she's guilty of this. She's a self admitted over compartmentalizer, as is Huberman actually. He's self admitted. And what happens is the way this manifests is someone who, they get locked into something, okay. And everything else in the world falls away. Right. The world could be burning down and they won't notice it. They're just there's. And it's very hard for them to pull back out. Right. So so now like hyper focus, is.

That, is that during times, like specific times or does it.

It could be specific. I mean it could be, I mean depending on the person, it could be it could be several hours, it could be several days. Right. But you're just so into this, nothing else is pulling you out and everything else falls away. That's hyper compartmentalization in a, in a professional sense, where it just gets too. It's not, it's not balanced with task switching, which is the opposite. Task switching is the ability to pull out, shift and focus.

And so the extreme of that is like inability to sort of finish and.

Just go, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. That's almost adhd, you know, in terms of the. You're just. You cannot focus on anything. It's just, you're bouncing everywhere. That's.

Have you sort of looked? Because I have adhd. I was diagnosed as a kid and like the medication changed my life significantly. Real, real positive for me. And then it's funny because when I went into the military, I wasn't allowed to take the medication.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then I went, came back on it about a year ago and I actually saw like. Because like, stressors exacerbate things. As the business gets bigger and I get more responsibility, there's more consistent stressors on me.

Yeah.

And so I was, I was displaying some of the behaviors that I had when I was a kid.

Yes.

That I didn't realize. And my mom was like, this is exactly what you were like before you were medicated. I was like, what do you mean? Because I'd forgotten like that I even sort of had it, to be honest. And then like. But the stress, the load of the amount of information I was intaking. Because with adhd, like you do that hyper focus thing, but you're sort of like, you're intaking tons of information all the time. And so when you get home, you're melted.

Yes.

Like you are incapable of having a conversation because your brain is mush. And it also makes you really hyper. Really hypersensitive to criticism.

Yeah.

Of which I'm not like, so. But this sort of like, you know, I sort of look at like an allergy. Right. Like, you know, like histamine levels build up and you don't feel it. And then the moment there's anything over amount, then it's all the symptoms. Right. And so I was like, this is weird. And then, you know, I was like, oh shit, there's a few things here. My mom was like, dude, this is, this is what you were like beforehand. I was like, oh, fuck. Okay. So I went and got medicated again a while ago, figured it all out, the medication stuff. And it made a big difference. But have you had a look at kind of like because sales reps in particular high levels of adhd. Yeah, because I think like it's a very dopamine. Like dopamine hunting is a very common trait for people with like ADHD and add. Yeah, right. And so sales is like literally dopamine hunting. Like you are hunting for sales commission on these sales. Like the rush you get from like hunting it and getting it is very similar. So you get a very high level of people that have it. Have you had explored kind of how that sort of neurodivergent is the new word of saying kind of affects some of those.

So only, only tangentially. So I'll just, I'll speak as a complete layman here. I think, I think one of our interests as we, as we continue to build and grow is to, is to actually sit down and get with some people who could actually help us really study in more depth. But I think the, but, but I think the ADHD thing is a couple of things. It's not just task switching, it's also hyper vigilance. It's a lot of situational awareness. There's a lot of, there's a lot going on. Now you also balance that with high compartmentalization, which is interesting because that's why you got through the training. But I think what happens is you're probably higher on task switching than you are on compartmentalization, which overwhelms. You're also high on situation awareness. So I think what I think in terms of.

By the way, we know this because I've done the assessment.

That's right, yes.

On the attributes.com, isn't it?

Yeah, the attributes.com, yeah. So you can take an assessment.

We'll put the link in the description. You can go and take the assessment.

But the idea is, I think that what's going on is, and I would say like when I've had side conversations, the, the detrimental adhd, the full blown, maybe even more so than you, is a mind that is taking in so many inputs and can't turn it off. Almost like Clark Kent as a kid. Right. And just everything's coming in and the focus just can't. It's just hopping from everywhere. And then also low compartmentalization.

But it also takes, they have elements of hyper focus.

Right? Yeah, yeah.

So.

Well, so one of the. And I don't, I only know I have layman's knowledge of this, but what I've heard is that the solution is to help, is to help a mind kind of track in on something for a little bit and then track in something else, but slow down that process. Right. So it's not hopping right. So, so I think, I think now most of us, you know, most of us have a fairly normal levels of these things and we can start seeing how it manifests in our normal lives. I think, I think military folks like those of us who are in the professions we were in required a high level and balance of all of them. And I think. So let me ask you this. When you were in the military and you weren't medicated, did you see, did it, did it affect you?

So I think like the end, I think the answer is like, because of adhd, I think I was able to get a lot of energy because. And I like, like it's, it's kind of a weird affliction because everyone has elements of it, which is one of the annoying parts of it because everyone's like, oh yeah, I have that too. It's like, yeah, but it's not 100% right. So it's like, for example, if I'm going to look for something under a bed, I'll look six times because I go, huh, huh. Like it's non stop. Right. And so like reading, I can read very proficiently and if you flash words on a screen, I can read at an enormously high rate with high levels of comprehension. But if you put all the words together in a page, it is borderline impossible for me to read.

Yeah. So there's a lot of input.

I don't intake any of it and I have to read the page over and over and over again because I go like that. Whereas they do a test where they flash words and it was like 600 words a minute and I could read the whole thing. It was fine because I see it as sort of a whole. Right. And so it's very interesting and that's like. But it makes you get a pattern recognition.

And that was in some ways fulfilled by what you were doing in the military. Yeah, yeah. Which I see. I mean, I think the profession we were in fulfills that. Again, we were talking offline here about this idea that guys like us come back from combat and we don't. Some of us have ptsd, but a lot of us have ltsd. We have lack of traumatic stress syndrome. Right. Because we get, we're in this environment, we have so much input and there's so much adrenaline. We're on this, we're kicking doors every night we're going out, we're opping we have people shooting at things like that and it's just so exciting and it's stimulating all of our senses and we're putting all of those stimulations to a very precise use, right?

And the whole, when you go into combat, like your whole vision spectrum changes, your smell changes, like everything flows.

There's a use for all of that, right? You're putting all of these sensory inputs to a very precise use. And part of it is because there's a survival mechanism. So your body's like, hey, you must do this or you may die. You come back into a non threatening world, right? And suddenly you're either life is just really boring or most of the time you're so hypervigilant and you can't turn it off. Right? I remember. And I'm not on the spectrum at all, but I don't, I wouldn't think I was, but I'd come home from a combat zone and I'd be walking in New York City, for example, and I just like, I'd be like, okay, I have to, I deliberately have to say, okay, the guy who's walking three feet behind me, I have to deliberately not worry about that, right? Because you're just everything, it's just, and it's just you're not in the same world. So I think environment is a part of this. And I think probably your levels were probably satiated when you were in the military to a degree because of the job, and then you got out and of course then you started experiencing in different ways. But I think it's fascinating. But that's, I mean, again, it'd be really interesting to talk to some psychs about this who understand and maybe give them some of this data and say, hey, how does this relate to, you know.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because like I've seen a psych we talked about before, but she was, you know, she was like, a lot of these things will sort of sort themselves out if you just get medicated. Because she's like, it's the one thing that you can't treat through therapy, right? Like you have to medicate for some of these symptoms. And the most, the main reason why most people who have ADD are ADHD are kind of in a shit spot is because they're called lazy, right? And so like they're called lazy, but it's like a physical incapability of being able to do certain things that most people find very frustrating. Like me and my wife have talked about it. She's like, there are certain things which I'm incapable of doing.

Yeah.

Like, it's very frustrating. I'm fully aware of it. It's very annoying. But if you tell me you must bring this home, there is fucking zero chance I bring that home.

Really?

Absolutely zero. And I can focus on it and I can be like, I'm gonna bring it home. I'm gonna bring it home. There's no fucking way. Yeah, right. And I forgot my homework every single day for school. Every day I forgot my homework.

Yeah.

And you know, like, that causes you to be like, well, it's like, I did it right right now. Then teachers don't believe you. You get caught. You know, you're just lazy. You're lying. That. So you're gonna get called that. And then your parents are like, just remember it. You know what I mean? But, like, if that happens to my kid, I'll go, oh, I know.

Yeah. Have you seen any signs or little.

Bits and pieces, but I don't think so.

Yeah, that's good.

But, like, I would go, oh, he's incapable.

Yeah.

Or she's incapable. Like, so you have to facilitate around it.

That's right.

You can't. Like, the dude, if you have a broken leg, you can't walk upstairs. Right. So you know what I mean?

So let me ask you this, because when we talk about sales folks, right, I want to ask.

That's why they don't do the right well.

But so let's talk about in your. If you can dissect your sales process and kind of that reward system, what are you actualizing in terms of those attributes when you're in the sales process? That is in some ways satiating that. Because if a lot of people have it, let's give them some ideas on how to start naming it, because they can name what's going on, then they can start metabolizing it.

Yeah, that's why when I learned nepq, it was a system, I was like, ah. Because I never had a system before that. I had a way that I thought. But I didn't have a way of bringing everything together. Yeah, right. That's why I love shooting. Because shooting is like, anyone can be an amazing shot.

Yeah, yeah. It's just. You just follow those.

You just have to do the steps, right? It's like my first friend that got shot, right? He came back from overseas and I go, mate, run down, crawl, observe, aim, fire. Which one did you do?

Right?

Because you can't get a shot if you do that, right? That's the system.

That's the system.

Right. Do a center peel in the desert.

So what's happening? There literally is a system. So there's a couple things. The system is creating steps that you can basically DPO through. It's giving you your horizons to move through. And when you have horizons, you're stepping through.

So part of this, you're ticking mental boxes.

That's right. And what's cool about the work we both do, attributes, allows you to name it. And by naming it, it gives you so much information, it gives you so much space from which you can actually start working with the problem. Because now I have some words that I can describe what's going on. And then a system allows you to begin basically creating, giving you those horizons, giving you those DPs.

Yeah. So I'll give you, like. So these are the things that sales reps do wrong.

Yeah.

So the first thing is that they're very focused on the next thing they have to do. So they don't listen to the prospect in real time. Right. So that's the biggest thing. I can usually watch a call and go. I can hear their monologue. Like, I can hear their internal monologue. That's a big thing. Because then you miss all of the.

Important things that are being said.

Things that are being said. Because like most sales at a very high level, you don't actually have to ask many questions. It's just a series of probes and clarifies.

Right, right.

What do you mean by that? Yeah, okay, that makes sense. You'd be like, yeah, I really love more sales. More.

Yeah.

And then they go deeper and deeper. Right. So you end up, you know, because like, whatever I say, it's sullied with the context of being a sales rep. Whatever they say is their words. Right, right. And so most sales reps, like, they are not able to pick up on that because they are very concerned about the next thing they're going to say. Right. And so that's a really big one. And a lot of the reason why they are that way, besides if you take out the fact that they should have just memorized certain things, is that they are simultaneously focused on the next step, but not understanding or focusing on how what they're doing now is a greater part of a whole.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. And so they're focusing on. They end up with like a very segmented series, like sort of like the car that's built from the best things instead of the best car.

Right. Because. Because you're not. You're not paying attention to the transitions that are necessary yeah, exactly. The in between.

Yeah. And so you end up with a jilted, weird conversation that sort of ends up like getting three quarters of the information.

You know what that's like, by the way, just to give people an analogy, if they, if they could, they could probably visualize. This is like Navy seals going from the water. If we're inserting from the water and we're going to a target, it's like me being in the water and the next thing I'm thinking is being on the target and I'm completely missing that. I have to come off the. Come out of the water, transition to another set of gear and keep on moving. Right. So it's that bridge. And the key to success. A CEO used to tell me, even in the military, in these operations, spec operations, the key to success is to understand and master the gaps. Right. The transitions are the hardest part. Part. Right. Because. Because if you don't transition properly, it. You're. You're going to fail. Right. The, the, the stuff you do on the X, that's fine. Right. The stuff you do over here, I can swim, I can dive, I can, I can kick doors. The transitions are always going to be the hardest part. And I think the same thing in a sales.

Yeah. Which is super interesting because like I teach people to have fallback positions to where they're comfortable. So it's like if you're in this realm and you get lost, you go to this question and this is the question that you can then because you can go a little bit up and a little bit down. So you've got like a fallback position. And there's a series of like four or five questions in any PQ process that gave me the ability to never have to re anchor. Yeah. So I could just go, well, just so I can see the rationale behind why you might. And I know those questions, like those are. You could wake me up and I could be like, I just saw, you know, sort of. It's just drilled into you. Right. And so it's important. Like, like, so whenever I'm teaching someone sales, like the first thing I try and do is like understand their process and how they do it if I'm working with them. Like individual, like a team. Right. Because like the worst thing I can do is like, hey, you do it this way now. Because even if it's a better way, it's not gonna work very well because you suck at it.

Yeah.

You know, so it's like, how do we, how do we position some key points where we get key information very easily and conversationally that give that person the ability to just like rest and chill and intake the information easily. Because people, like, I would say most sales end with the salesperson feeling awkward not knowing what to say and booking the next call. And like, they haven't got enough information to make that next call be worthwhile. The person doesn't usually show up or they get sent a quote. Remember how like, when you said, you know, so for the backstory. So like, you sent me a quote and I was like, hey, you seem like someone who can take feedback. Yeah, yeah, right. It was like, this is not. There's not a good way of doing this. It's a great thing, but it's a very different, you know, like an expert doesn't give, you know, like a chef. A chef doesn't allow you to remove the cardamom. Right, right, right. It's like, this is how I've made the broth.

Right? Like, yeah, here's the broth.

Yeah, yeah, exactly like, I'm the chef, you know, and so when you present, like you present, this is how you're going to do it.

Right, right.

If you can't afford it, that is not my problem. Right, right, right. Which is how I present, like larger B2B, sort of like high six and seven figure sales training packages for like, large companies. I tell them, like, mate, I'm the expert. Your budget is not my concern.

Yeah, right.

Like, if I'm not going to try and work way out of your budget, but if you tell me your budget is $100,000 to train 400 people, I will say go over there.

Right, right.

Because how am I going to train that many people effectively for that much money? Like, the amount of resource that I need. I can't speak to 400 people in one Zoom call. Like, it's not going to be productive. So I got to break everyone up into chunks. Then I got to do things differently. And it's like I wanted the new guys and the experienced guys and you know what I mean? So you got to kind of do it properly. And so I've. The mentality that I've taken over the last six months has been like, I will do. I will put together what I think will be the most effective for you and your team. If you can afford it, great. If you can't, high five.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, not my problem. Which is probably a somewhat unique position to be in, which I understand. But it also, like, no one said no.

Yeah, yeah.

And I've. And I've Quadrupled people's budgets. But it's just. They go like, oh, yeah, that will work.

Yeah.

And I go, well, if it'll work, what do you think the outcome will be? And they go, this? And I go, that's just a math equation, isn't it?

Right.

I go, you want to make 10 million, it's going to cost you 400,000.

Right. Right. Some of the attributes that I'm recognizing that are essential for great sales are situational awareness. Of course, you have to be able to take. You have to take in compartmentalization in the sense that when you're listening, you're listening, you're focused in. You have to focus and block out everything else and to include your own head task switching to a certain degree. That's going to be. Most salespeople have that. But also the other one, I would say is discernment. Discernment is one of the mental acuity ones where there's a recognition of detail and refinement that you can actually present that's unique to maybe a customer. So I'd have to look at the larger list, but I'm sure there's. There's more. But. Yeah.

There's actually two. It's actually funny because there are two that on the extremes, end up performing really well.

Yeah.

So insouciance. Right. So lack of. A lack of give a fuck.

Casual indifference to what other people think.

Yeah. Which I'm very high in. That is a great thing to have, but also a crippling need to be accepted is also acceptable.

Yeah. Yeah. So both polarities work in other parts.

But the middle doesn't work.

The middle doesn't work. So being high. So insouciance is the high. So high insouciance is a high lack of indifference to what people think. Low insouciance is basically fear of rejection. Right. I really care what people think. And so I'm going to model my behavior. I'm going to adjust my behavior so that I can actually do that. Which, to be honest with you, Navy seals all have low insouciance. Pretty much all of us care deeply what other people think. At least our teammates. Right. We would rather die than look bad in front of our teammates. Right.

That's why they put cameras in war zones.

Right? That's right. Yeah.

So no one's a coward in front of a kingdom.

Yeah. But. But I think that's a fascinating. That's a fascinating distinction, is that I.

Would say I used to be that way.

Yeah.

And then I actually had a realization Like, I would say it was years ago where I realized that people will create the narrative that best suits their worldview. And as soon as I realized that, I stopped giving any fucks about what people thought. Because, like, I've never taken the low road ever.

Yeah.

Never taken a low road. I've never fucked anyone over. Right. I've always told the truth.

Yeah.

I've never done a scumbaggy thing. And if it's in business or business partners or with friends or with anything, I've always been willing to be the one that takes the L personally in exchange for everybody getting a greater good.

Yeah. Like.

And so, like. And I'm a good friend, a good father, good husband. And so I was like. I sort of realized all these things, and I was like, I've never fucked a single person over ever.

Yeah.

And, like, I've fired people. And those people say I fucked them over, but I gave them seven warnings, you know? I mean, and I was like, hey, man, like, I just can't keep you around. And then. But three months later, even if I go, but I'm gonna pay you a month, right? There was a person recently, and I was like, I'm do all these things for you because I like you as a person, but we just can't have you there anymore. Oh, thank you so much. And then a week later, on social media, I'm fuck with. And I was like. Like, it doesn't hurt my feelings. I go, oh, that's interesting. I go, that's. You know. And like, my best friend is like, look at this. I'm like. And he knows I don't care.

Well, so the question is. Because I feel the same way. And the question is how much of that comes also with just age and maturity.

Oh, tons of.

And being, like, being a. Being a husband, being a father, you know? You know. You know, you're. You're in your 40s, I think. Right. I'm just turning 40, and I'm 50. Right. So. So we're at this where we. And we've done a lot of shit in our lives. Right. And so. So as younger folks, just because we were so malleable and the world is. We're figuring it out, I think. I think there's a higher sense, but I feel sorry for those people who age and don't become more insouciant.

It's a difficult life.

Yeah. It really is. And honestly, you know, a great example of this is a lot of Hollywood. I mean, you think about an environment, I don't know A lot of Hollywood people, but it seems like an environment where it's, you know, people really have to care what other people think for quite a long time. I mean, I think probably the older, the older sets of actors, you know, you know, the high level, like Tom Hanks is and stuff, maybe don't have to anymore, but I just, you know, sometimes environments, I guess, seed that type of behavior. I am grateful that as I've aged, my insouciance has gone up. Now too much insouciance again. Extremes at any level, bad thing. Right. That's someone who, who, who doesn't care so much that their, Their. Their. Their social awareness goes down and they don't want to be. No one wants to be around them.

Yeah.

Right.

So to be honest, I think, like, I actually came pretty close to crossing that line a while ago. And I sort of like, my wife is like, you're being. You're kind of a dick.

Yeah.

And I was like, huh? And she's like, you're kind of a dick. And she's like, you're not mean. You're not any of that, but she's like, you're kind of a dick. Like, you just tell too much of the truth all the time.

Right. You don't have a filter. Yeah.

Okay. And I was like, I was like, okay, I can. I can work on that.

Yeah.

And I was like, tell me when I'm doing it. Trigger word. Right. Tell me what I'm doing. It, like, nudge me if I'm, like, being. Because I'm a very like. Like, I'm naturally a very dominating personality, and I, like, have to try very hard to not.

Yes.

To not do that. Because one of the things that ADHD does or ADD is the way that ADD people show empathy is by having stories of them. So, you know, like, one uppers.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. So the way that, like, usually, like, if someone, like, I have to hold myself back from.

From saying, oh, that happened to me too. Yeah, that's right.

Because that's how ADHD shows empathy.

Interesting.

Right? And so, like, so.

But it, but it's sad, but. But people don't like. Because it's like, what's happening is it's. You're not listening. You're basically, you're. You're immediately turning the conversation back to you. Here's.

It is actually the ultimate listen for them. It's quite interesting.

Yeah, it is. Let me, Let me highlight something that you said because it's really important. The fact that your wife told you, hey, you're being a dick. Okay? This is. This really emphasizes the importance of great teams, okay? Because, again, a team is any group of two or more people. You're on a team with your wife. I'm on a team with my wife. If we have the right teammates and we have teammates that we trust, that love us, that give us candor with care, tell us when we're getting out over our skis, right? That's what we need. Every great team, inside of itself, keeps itself accountable, right? By. By grounding each other. Right? And so my wife's done that for me for 23 years, and I do it for her on occasion. Right. And I'm sure you do it for your wife as well. But we have a relationship where we can tell each other exactly what's going on. Hey, stop it. You're being an idiot. You're being an asshole. Right? Okay. Yes. Got it. And we listen, right, because there's a mutual respect. But this doesn't go for just our marriages. I mean, you and I are lucky. We found women that we get along with quite a bit, quite well. But this goes for business teams, too. When you're building a team, you want to build a team of people who ground each other. It happened for you in the military. It happened for me in the military, where we now. The environment helped ground us, too, because the ocean will kill you if you turn your back on it. But we had a situation where even as an officer in charge, my most junior enlisted could say, hey, boss, what you're doing there is fucked up. And I'd be like, got it right? Because we need to keep each other grounded.

I think also the selection and the difficulty that you've all had to go through, there's such a level of mutual respect that you're all men. You're all there. You can all do the thing, and rank is the thing that we all have to deal with. Yes, Right. Like. Like, I remember I had a. Had a. Like, sort of a very bad relationship with someone who outranked me right then. I was. I was a digger. Everyone ranked me, right, because, like, the. The pathway that I went down. Like, there was no promotions. It was just, that's the job, and that's not a. There's not many people doing the job. You're not going anywhere.

That's the job. That's right.

That's the job. There you go, right? If someone dies, you might be able to go up, right? So and so, like, I remember he was sort of like, hooking into me, and I was like, He's a pretty small guy. I was pretty confident I would beat the fuck out of him if I needed to. And I was like, hey, man, rank is the thing, and I'll do whatever you say, but I feel like we should probably just drop rank, go outside, beat the shit out of each other for a bit, and then come back in and I'll do whatever you want.

Yeah.

I was like, I feel like that would be. That would probably end the tension because at the end of the day, like, we are dudes. We're just guys.

Did it work? You guys could do it.

He really didn't want to. He much preferred to do things the way that he could just yell at me. So I was shit jobs for a few months. That's all right. So I remember you're not going to.

Volunteer for a fight. You know you'll lose.

Yeah, yeah. So I remember we were doing all these exercises with the cops and like, just stuff like that. And it was like we're doing hides. And it was like, oh, yeah, you guys are in the Marriott suite over there. You guys are over here. And then like, Matt, you're. And I was like, Let me guess, underneath the porta Potty? Yes. They were like, exactly. And I was like, yeah, like shit jobs. But it's all right. Yeah, it's. It's an interesting thing. But I think like, the. When you start. It's so interesting, especially when you start learning about the world of attributes and like, it's sort of like a. Oh, you know, like a glass shattering moment when you realize something about something and you go, oh. And you start to kind of see it everywhere. And it's exactly what you said. It sort of informs your behavior. But I think from like when you're building a team point of view, if you can accurately assess yourself, then you can build a team. Because what you don't want is a team of like, I don't want any more. Me's in the business.

Right.

That would be a problem. Yeah, right, Exactly. There's one other me, but he's very young and I think you might have met him. Yash, right?

Yeah.

Right. So Yash and I haven't decided whether or not he'll be my Luke or my Anakin. Right. He's either gonna. I haven't. I haven't figured out yet whether he's gonna be the best thing ever for the rest of my life or whether he's gonna try and kill me.

A Sith relationship or a Jedi relationship.

Yeah. So he's. He's either he's either the villain of my story or the hero of my story. I don't know which one. But we have a really good relationship. But he's very young and so. But he's, he's the most similar in terms of, you know, the way that he operates and stuff like that. But, you know, but, but I think, like, being able to have a look at your, like, like a business partnership, like, you have a look at me, Jeremy and Marco, like, we're very, very different people. I think that we in, in quite a, quite a good way fill in the gaps that we all have. Because, like, I'm in the things that I have, I'm fairly high in.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, like for most of the time. And so, like, I'm sort of a personality that people really like or really don't like.

Right.

Like, I've always been that way. I've been pretty cool with it. Like, it is what it is. It's fine. And so, like, I think that finding people who can round you out and that was the most interesting part about what I thought about talking to you was I think that my perception was incorrect because I think, like, what I was trying to create was like the dream team, but the dream team. I created what I thought was the dream team and it fucking didn't work at all.

Right.

Because, like, there were so many chiefs.

Yes.

And so many cooks trying to cook that broth that it was an absolute fucking shit show. And although everybody knew that I was the leader.

Yeah.

They still like, well, so let me.

Give you this because I think this is. And we've talked about this too. But, but the leadership model. A lot of people are. They don't know exactly what the high performing team leadership model looks like. And I didn't either. I was, I kind of. It hit me when I was in front of a group of executives at one point after getting out of the Navy and I was talking to them and I had a, a whiteboard next to me or a flip chart and they said, hey, Rich, could you draw for us what the Task Org shape looks like for a high performing team? Right. What does that look like? And so I had some models, I had some models in my head that didn't work. I didn't know what I was going to draw. But obviously there's the pyramid model. Right. The leader sits on top. I'm the leader. You work for me. All the word goes down to the bottom and has to go all the way back. The very hierarchical, very bureaucratic, very Military in some cases, but way too slow for a hyperbolic. So I wasn't going to use that. I had the flat model, which is the flat line, okay. And that was a kind of mild rebellion to the pyramid. It's like flatten this thing. No one outranks anybody. We're all in this.

Nothing ever gets done.

Now the problem is it's not too bad. The problem is, first of all, sometimes it's difficult to figure out actually who's in charge. And second of all, what happens with the flat model. The flat line is that something can happen on the right side of the line that's not seen or heard by the left. The information gets siloed. That's not what happens in a high performing team. Information is everywhere. So the third model was the Robert Greenleaf servant leadership model. He turned that pyramid upside down. Leader sits on bottom. I'm your leader. I'm in service to everybody in my span of care. Not too bad. In fact, if I were to philosophically pick any one of them, it'd be that one because it's probably the most beautiful, at least philosophically. However, it's still not the way a high performing team operates. Because in a high performing team, burden is distributed. So what I did, kind of in frustration on the board is I just drew a blob on the board and I said to the group, I said, where do you think the leader sits in this blob? And they said, you know, top, bottom, front, front, back, center. I said, all of you are correct. Okay? In this blob, the leader is wherever the leader needs to be in the moment. And this is a concept I call dynamic subordination. And dynamic subordination implies that a team understands that problems, challenges and issues can come from any angle at any moment. And when one does, the person who's closest to that problem, the most capable, immediately steps up and takes lead. And everybody follows. And then the environment shifts and someone else I also called alpha hopping, right? The alpha position just hops. This is exactly how the highest perform.

Hard that is to do in business.

I know, however, but one of the keys to it, and by the way, I was an officer.

It makes total sense.

I was an officer in the SEAL teams. I was in charge of every single operation I went on. Didn't mean I was always being supported. In fact, most of the time was the opposite. I was supporting other people, snipers, breachers, whatever, right? Sometimes the environment would shift and they'd support me. But the idea is to build a dynamically subordinating environment, you need to have team members with attributes that start to zipper together. So take a two person team. My wife and I, okay, I am very high on patience as a human being. My wife is very low on patients or other words, high on impatience. That's worked beautifully in our relationship because when patience has been required, I step up. When impatience is required, she steps up. And so my patient or her impatience has helped me or helped buttress my procrastination. Moving too slow. My patience has helped her not run into the building too fast. Right. And so when we create teams, just like you're saying when you have a triad where the attributes start to mesh like zippers, right, this is what you're looking for. And you can't get that if you have a bunch of the same people. Attributes allow you to break that stuff down. So you can start actually picking the people who zipper in together and building the best teams that dynamically subordinate all the time. So you can do it in business, but you just have to understand what qualities you're looking for so you can actually zipper them together.

It's fascinating. We actually had a me and my best mate Pat and Ben who works here as well. One of my best friends for a very long time. We actually once a year we go onto the farm, right? We do a bit of hunting, light up on fire, you know, drink some booze and just sit there staring at a fire and silence. And every now and then my fire ass is off. Right. And so. And we've been friends, all of us have been friends for a very long time.

Yeah.

Like, you know, we got a group of probably 10 people that has been very close friends for decades now. And that is very rare and especially amongst like operators because what usually happens is you get together and you sort of leave like that. And we've sort of discussed as to why it is and I think we figured out what it is is because we have exactly that. So there are instances. So first of all, none of us particularly care about alfring anybody else. Like that's not any of our mos. We don't need to be the leader at all times. And we all know that we're very good independently at different things. Like one of our friends, if there's an apocalypse, he'll be the immediate leader.

Everybody's going to him.

Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, immediate leader, Tim. Yeah, right. Everyone knows apocalypse Tim. Right? What are we doing, boss? Right, yeah. I mean if it's like a money or business thing, they will immediately come to me. Yeah, right. And everyone has their own little skill sets, and so it dynamically floats. And everyone is okay with everybody else holding the mantle.

Yes.

Right. If there's a story to be told in a public environment, like, we would default to Pat.

Yeah.

Like, he would be the one to tell it, because he's the most engaging, the most charismatic in that way. And, you know, he's the best at creating stories. Whether they be true or not, they're always very entertaining.

Never let the truth get in the way.

Exactly. You know, and so, like, it's quite funny. And so we sort of figured out that, like, we just do that naturally as a group. And that's why, like, there's never any. We don't argue. There's never any tension, but we can have very serious conversations. Like, one of my friends recently was getting divorced, and he was sort of, hey, man, just go have a coffee. We'll talk about it. And he started saying some stuff, and I said, hey, man, do you want the supportive friend conversation, or do you want, like, the feedback? Conversation is the feedback. And I was like, all right, motherfucker. And, like, I went in and hammered him. And I was like, you know, like, it comes from a place of love. And I was like. I was like, does that make sense? And he's like, yeah.

By the way, let me pause there. Because that's the other thing that happens when you have a trusted, dynamic, instant feedback. But you can give that hard feedback, and someone knows it's coming from a place of love. Right. If you try to do that and you haven't built the trust first, people are gonna feel like just being an asshole. Right. And so you have to build trust first. If you're building a business team. Okay. Build trust first before you start giving that candorous feedback. Because if they don't know it, if they don't. If they don't think and trust you and think it's coming from a of place. Good. They'll just think you're an asshole.

Yeah, that's.

That's.

That. That's my sort of biggest issue is because, like, I'll go.

Because you go in. You go in hard right away. Yeah, yeah.

I try not to. But, like, I just also, like, there's no. In my opinion, there's no point. Like, you can do it respectfully.

Yeah.

But it's like, there's no point mincing this. Like, let's just call it out. Because the faster we all realize it.

Yeah.

The faster we can create. I think one of the issues is a lot of people think that, like, think that someone is upset when they're giving, like, feedback. It's not upset. It's like, no, no, no. Like, it's. I actually care about you getting the right outcome. That's why I'm giving this.

Well, so, so, so great example. Now I'm used to. I came from a world for feedback, right? So when you wrote me that email and you're like, hey, I want to give you some feedback, right? And you just said, hey, this is the wrong thing to do. This is not what. First of all, I was like, okay, that's cool. I was like, thanks for the feedback. Right? But the other thing that you do, what I noticed. And so since I've known this, you always follow that up with kindness, right? And I think if someone is willing enough to stay around you, you will follow it up. You'll show them, hey, I'm doing this because I care. And I think that's. You can earmark or at least sandwich that type of candor. As long as you're showing that caring, you're displaying it. You're displaying. Because then someone gets that, they're like, okay, wait a second, he wasn't mad. He cares about me. Really. It's not. It's just. It's just him. And then they begin to appreciate it. So I would actually imagine those who stick around you trust you faster than normal people because you are immediately giving them feedback and you're following up, hey, I'm doing this because I really care. I really do, you know, but that's a typical. It's a difficult. It's a difficult balance to. Or a tightrope to walk. You've walked it your whole life, so you're good at it. If you're coming into a team, the idea is try to build trustworthy first, because it's a better default, right? It's a safer default if you can do that.

So what's a good company or what's a good avatar of someone who should seek someone like you out or you out specifically?

Yeah. If you are interested in a. Understanding the performance of your organization, what drives your organization at very elemental levels, what does that look like? What are the qualities that go into your top performance if you were to. If you're to look at your top performers or the times you've been performing at your top levels, what are the things that allowed that to happen? What are the qualities that allow that to happen? So if you're interested in figuring what that list is for your top organization, and if you're interested in organizing your team. One, reorganizing your team so that you actually put people in the right positions. Part of what sometimes happens is people's individual attributes don't match the position they're in. And so they're performing at a low level. And, and what, and what they really need is they just need a different position. So, quick example. I was commanding officer of one of the squadrons at this command we were talking about. And when I was commanding officer, I had a supply. A supply cell, Right. My supply cell was about eight people, half of which were doing future acquisitions and future look, the other half were doing administrative log keeping type stuff. We had a sailor who was grossly underperforming in the future acquisitions piece and she was just, she was just not performing. It was bringing down morale. I brought her to my office. I had already done the attributes work because I had already been training officer. And so I had about a 10 minute conversation in about 10 minutes. I realized that her attribute list was completely incongruent with what she was doing, but it was completely congruent with the administrative log keeping side. So all I did was shift her. Right. Just shifted positions. Her performance skyrocketed. Right. She was in the wrong position. So by understanding these elemental factors, you can in fact replace sometimes people or reposition people rather than just firing. Okay. Then of course you're going to have some gaps. Okay. Do you want to be able to fill those gaps with the right person the first time? Every time? Right. We've worked with organizations who have literally come to us and they have a 2 out of 10 success rate in hiring and then they do the work with us and they find out the qualities. They realize, holy shit, we were looking for the wrong things. We tweak their selection process so they're actually seeing the attributes and it's changed it into an 8 out of 10 success process. So imagine how much money that saves. I mean, you're talking about the hiring process alone, the money you spend bringing candidates in, hiring someone, paying them for three months or four months. Yeah, it's hectic and firing them and all that. So if you're interested in taking down those costs and hiring the right people at the right time, we can help you with that. So this idea of understanding the culture of your organization at very elemental levels and placing and hiring people and positioning people directly in line with that culture, and the collateral of that is, yes, it will also allow you to fire more effectively as well. I mean, one of the things I would honestly, this was created from the Firing aspect at the command, speed to.

Fire is an important element.

And the command said, we need you to be able to articulate to guys who aren't making it why they aren't making it. Right.

Otherwise you just breed resentment.

Otherwise you breed resentment, which we were at that time. So you will be able to literally fire more effectively, more considerately and with more understanding and depth, both from the person who's the recipient of the firing and yourself. And that's just to make everybody feel better. And so I think all of those things are reasons why this stuff could be for you.

Yeah, I mean, so what we did is we went through. We had a chat, and from there we did a values assessment. So we had our values and mission division all kind of worked out. And then from there, sort of, you know, the interesting thing that actually was like, we don't want a room of just the leadership team.

No, yeah.

Was having. And I actually think that, like, having me in there might have actually been less productive.

Well, I would have told you if it had been. You didn't talk as much as you. As you. I tried to, very much so, but it's always good. And I, you know, I can read rooms now because I've done this a lot, and people. I didn't. No one was really. I didn't feel like anybody was holding back. We had very good participation from everybody in that room. So. Yeah.

And then it was interesting because we had, like a new ea.

Yes.

We had, you know, myself. We had. We didn't have Marco because, like, he was.

Well, he was on. He was online, remember?

Yeah, he was online. Then we had new people, experienced people, and, like, people from all different departments. And. Because it was like, how do we.

You want a good. You want a good cross section? Yeah. You want a cross section of an organization. And the criteria is the cross section of people who, a. Are invested in the company. Right. They really enjoy it. They understand it to a degree, even if it's in their own circle and they're interested in this type of.

Yeah, and it's also like diversity of thought. That's really what you're looking for. You know what I mean? And so having people of different, you know, different thought patterns, you know.

Well, it's funny because you and I, when we first started talking, you and I started doing it just together. I remember we just. We were on a couple of calls. We're like, hey, let's just start working on this. We were like, whoa, whoa, wait a second. We should probably get some more people in here. It would have been polluted. Right. It's just been one from one mind and we don't want that.

Yeah. And I just. Yeah, I didn't, because I remember I've done a planning session before where we tried to figure some stuff out and it was just like the moment I said something, it was like, well, that's what it is. And so I really sort of wanted to make sure that we didn't pollute that so that we could get to the crux of like. It's actually very interesting to see what people thought.

Yes.

Were important because I didn't agree with everything, but I understood it.

Yeah.

And I was like, huh, that's interesting. Like, what are they seeing?

Yes.

And so I was able to kind of look into different departments and go like.

Which by the way, is the job of leaders. Right. As leaders, our whole job is to have the big picture. And if we are deliberately ignoring the perspectives of some of the people on our team, we're doing wrong by them and by the team.

And if you. And if you're designing a sales department and a marketing department, for example, example, with the same sort of mission, vision, values, like you're using skill sets, they're going to be really odd because especially if you have a single hiring. Because usually you have a single hiring mechanism. Right. You have like HR operations doing the hiring and then segmenting out.

Well, one of the things we do, as you know, is we provide HR departments with the information that allows their hiring practices to diversify responsibly. So in other words, the way that they're going to ask questions for one type of candidate will differ slightly than the way they're going to ask questions for another because it's going to be focused on these attributes and you can ask questions in a way that are teasing out specific attributes. And so it provides HR departments with a myriad of different ways they can hire different positions.

And that's done by the people in the department.

It's created by the people there.

Because like, I just like, you know, I didn't realize that there was such a difference in personality and requirement from sales to HR to ops to.

To admin to CEO. Yeah.

Yeah. And also, and like, you know, the executive function is super funny because, like, you know, like there's a. Like to be the CEO of a company, like, you have to have a very particular personality typing, which doesn't mean you're necessarily the best at everything. Like, that's probably not great.

Yeah, no, I don't think it is. Yeah.

And so because if you're like, you know, so like I'm not the best salesperson in the company, like Jeremy definitely is, like, I'm not the best marketer by country mile.

The only time that actually, the only time that it's not bad. Right. And this is a really good example is in the brand new startup. I mean, the exec team in a startup, the attributes required to do a startup are actually a different. That list looks different than the company that has to keep going long term. This is why you see startups, if they go a few years and they don't turn over their leadership a little bit, they'll take. Tend to start a downslide 100% because the attributes don't fit anymore. Now we're playing well.

You've got builders, right?

Yeah.

So like I, we had to work pretty hard because I recognized that and I was very entrepreneurial and I still am. However, I really had to kind of make a transition into more of a executive, more of a long game, more of a long game thinking. And like, I think it worked. Like, I like it.

You're right. You're able to do that. The serial entrepreneur can't. And that's why the serial entrepreneur will come in, they'll start something and then after a couple years they have to exit. They have to go start something else.

Yeah. There's a lot of shiny things. You know what I mean? And so, but yeah, it's very interesting. Like, see, you know, CEO is a really terrible position.

Well, it is. I mean, it's a very hard position. People, people don't understand when done correctly, it's a, it's an enormously difficult job. Right. When done correctly.

Because it's very lonely.

Yeah.

Because like you, you have to be the one that. It's kind of like the, like the no guy.

Yeah.

Or like the hard guy. And you, you cannot, you, you, you don't have anyone. And you know it from teams. Right. Like, you don't. There's no one that, there's no peers.

That you can go to. Yeah.

Yeah. And so that's the difficulty of the position. And also like, if you're someone who has to be busy.

Yeah.

You will not be a good CEO.

Yeah.

Like you, you cannot let go. Yeah. You have to, you have to. And you have to watch people make mistakes.

Yes.

Which is the most interesting and interesting.

Well, here's, here's the example. Anybody who has kids will understand this and you understand this. I know being a CEO is like being a parent. Right. And being a parent is all about allowing your child, as hard as it is, to make mistakes. Right. If we don't. If we. If we just create a shield around our kids, they are going to learn nothing. They're gonna be. They're gonna be weak, and they're gonna. They're gonna. They're never gonna leave the nest, or when they do, they'll die as soon as they leave. Right. So. So the act of literally letting go of your child as they're learning to ride a bike, knowing they're gonna fall down is one of the scariest acts of. Of a parent. But we have to do it because we're letting them go. We have to let them take their falls. Same thing goes as a CEO. It absolutely goes. We are. We are. Because if we don't do that, we are not creating a team that can act dynamically and dynamically subordinate. We're not.

And you've got to take a few oaths when you're doing that. Like, I remember over the last year, we had a few things happen in, like, the end of Q3. And I was like, oh, that's wrong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was like, but if I fix this, I was like, this is just gonna keep happening. And so, like, I. I said, hey, guys, I think this is happening. I was like, but I trust you.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I watched. I watched from afar, but I was. I knew what was happening, and I. And I sort of was. I put the bumper lanes up a little bit, and I was like that. But I let them make the mistakes.

So. So here's a. Here's a. Here's a Navy SEAL example of that. All right. Which is interesting. So one of our missions at this command was we had to basically be able to drop into any environment with our speedboat, with our big. No, they're basically H sacs. They're like super, super fast. They look like cigarette boats, basically. Oh, yeah, yeah. And we had a couple of these, and we'd have a couple of them in each airplane, so we'd have about four. And the evolution was basically, you're flying at about 2,500ft, 3,000ft. The boats will go out, right? And they're under parachute. And the guys who are driving the boats, they'll go right after the boats. Okay. And then the boats will drop. The guys will get on the boats, they'll de. Rig them. They'll get them all running. They'll line the boats up into the wind while the plane's circling. And once the boats are lined up in the wind, Then the rest of us will jump out and basically jump to our boats. Okay? So anyway, this is our standard thing. We're off. We're in Virginia, right, Practicing. It's a daytime. It's July right in the middle of the day, we're out off the coast doing this. And my jump master, who, for the audience, that's the guy who's in charge of the whole jump, he's going to be spotting. He's going to say, hey, this is when you go, right? It's his first drop, right? And so we're out there. He drops the boats. That's usually the easy drop because you're just dropping. There's no real dz. You're just dropping in the water. The harder drop comes when the boats are lined up, because now you got to get the guys spotted.

Oh, I got to swim a fucking long way, right?

So anyway, so the boats are out. They're getting.

Are you on roundies or you're on squareies?

Oh, no, we're on squareies. Yeah, yeah. We're jumping out, basically counting to four and pulling, you know, so because we have to drive, we have to fly to our boats. We want to land kind of precise. So anyway, we're. The boats are out, they're getting set up, and I'm. And now we're just in the plane waiting, and the ramp's open, right? So I'm just kind of walking back to my jump master's out there. He's looking, and I know we're getting close to drop time. I'm looking, and I'm like, this doesn't really look right. It looks like we're. Looks like we're off, right? And at that point, I have to make a decision. I'm the commanding officer, right? I have to make a decision, and my decision is gauged with this thought process, okay? Except, listen, I need him to learn and understand, okay? Mistakes are a great way to go. Let me just assess risk for a second. It's daytime Virginia, right off the coast. The water is 80 degrees. We can all swim, right? None of us are bad swimmers, you know? You know, it's a soft landing. It's water.

So you got RVs.

Anyway, let me just. Let me just. Let's just see how this plays out, right? So I say nothing, okay? And so ultimately, he drops us. We come out of the airplane, and the boats are fucking like. And they have to turn. They're just. We just. We create a swimmer pool, and they drive to us, right? And so we drive to us. We Go back, we're doing the debriefs like we always do. They're always heavy debriefs. And of course, he's just like. He's the hardest on himself, right? Because he knows he fucked up and all that stuff. So we do all that stuff. Of course, I'm the commanding officer, so I get the last word and I say, listen, if we had gone out there and everything had gone right, we would have learned nothing, right? So we just learned a shit ton of stuff. Well, the next time we dropped, okay. Was a real world drop. Okay? Real world. And he was our jump master. The guys who were on that drop have never seen a better drop, right? He nailed it, Right. And the idea is, as leaders, as CEOs, as part of parents, we have to constantly let our people make mistakes. But we're always gauging risk, right? I'm not going to. Had it been nighttime, for example, cold water things, I may have. I may have said something. I may have said, you know what? Let me get one of my more experiences. Take a look at that before we. Before we drop, right. I might have made a different decision because I am gauging risk to a certain. You're not going to let the company tank, right?

No, exactly.

But you're going to say, okay, let me gauge risk. But. But to the extent that we can let people trip up, we want to let them, because here's the neuro. Let me give you the neuroscience behind this. Huberman and I talk about this. There's a reason why we learn more with our mistakes than with our celebrations or our successes. It's because when we learn, when we learn anything, we create a neural connection and that neural connection is created. And then if it's a skill, for example, what happens is we do that over and over and it myelinates, that connection. Myelinates, right. So it's like a coax, like the wrapping around a coaxial cable. When that wrapping is thin, that energy is going pretty slow. In other words, we have to think about. So this is like driving the stick shift car for the very first time. You have to think about what you're doing as you do it more and more. And it myelinates. You start being able to do it without thinking. That's the way connections are made. The most rapid way to create a neural connection and myelinate like 10 times, sometimes 100 times faster is when three things are present in the environment. Those three things are intensity, novelty and focus. Okay? If those three things are present, you actually create Neural connections and myelinate it rapidly. In other words, you forge information. Okay. This is the difference between being told a stove is hot and touching a hot stove. Core memory, when you touch a hot stove. Intensity, novel flow. I mean, it's immediate. Right. Our mistakes teach us more. Because when we make mistakes, those three things, intensity, novelty, or focus are immediately present, and we're learning. Not the same with successes. Right. So this is the pattern power of making mistakes. Right. We're implementing neurological processes that are forging lessons in faster. As long as we're assessing risk, because that's our job as well.

Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Awesome, man. Yeah, that was good. If you guys want to find out.

Rich, is theattributes.com theattributes.com all one word? Yeah.

Okay.

Check it out.

What about socials?

Yeah. Rich Devini on Instagram, richdevini and. And LinkedIn as well. Yeah. Check us out. Take the assessment. Read the book.

Sounds good. All right, guys, thanks very much. We'll see you in the next episode. Didn't pollute that so that we could get to the crux of, like, it's actually very interesting to see what people thought were important because I didn't agree with everything, but I understood it.

Yeah.

And I was like, huh, that's interesting. Like, what are they seeing?

Yes.

And so I was able to kind of look into different departments and go, like.

Which, by the way, is the job of leaders. Right. As leaders, our whole job is to have the big picture. And if we are deliberately ignoring the perspectives of some of the people on our team, we're doing wrong by them and by the team.

And if you're designing a sales department and a marketing department, for example, with the same sort of mission, vision, values, and like, you're using skill sets, they're going to be really odd because, like, especially if you have a single hiring. Because usually you have a single hiring mechanism. Right. So you have, like, HR operations doing the hiring and then segmenting out.

Well, one of the things we do, as you know, is we provide HR departments with the information that allows their hiring practices to diversify responsibly. So, in other words, the way that they're going to ask questions for one type of candidate will differ slightly than the way they're going to ask questions for another, because it's going to be focused on these attributes, and you can ask questions in a way that are teasing out specific attributes. And so it provides HR departments with a myriad of different ways they can hire different positions.

And that's done by the people in the department.

It's created by the people there.

Because I just like, you know, I didn't realize that there is such a difference in personality and requirement from sales.

To HR to ops to admin to CEO. Yeah.

Yeah. And also, and like, you know, the executive function is super funny because like, you know, like there's a, like to be the CEO of a company, like you have to have a very particular personality typing, which doesn't mean you're necessarily the best at everything. Like that's probably not great.

Yeah, no, I don't think it is. Yeah.

And so, because if you're like, you know, so like I'm not the best salesperson in the company, like Jeremy definitely is, like I'm not the best marketer by country mile.

The only time that actually, the only time that it's not bad. Right. And this is a really good example is in the brand new startup. I mean the exec team in a startup, the attributes required to do a startup are actually a different, that list looks different than the company that has to keep going long term. So this is why you see startups, if they go a few years and they don't turn over their leadership a little bit, they'll tend to start a downslide because the attributes don't fit anymore. Now we're playing.

Well, you've got builders, right?

Yeah.

So like I, we had to work pretty hard because I recognize that and I was very entrepreneurial and I still am. However, I have really had to kind of make a transition into more of a executive, more of a long game, more of a long game thinking. And like, I think it worked. Like, I like it.

You're, you're able to do that the serial entrepreneur can't. And that's why the serial entrepreneur will come in, they'll start something and then after a couple of years they have to exit and they have to go start something else.

Yeah. There's a lot of shiny things, you know, I mean, and so, but yeah, it's, it's, it's very interesting. Like see, you know, CEO is a really terrible position.

Well, it is. I mean it's a very hard position. People, people don't understand. When done correctly, it's a, it's an enormously difficult job. Right. When done correctly.

Because it's very lonely.

Yeah.

Because like you have to be the one that. It's kind of like the, like the no guy.

Yeah.

Or like the hard guy. And you, you cannot, you, you, you don't have anyone and you know it from Teams. Right. Like, you don't. There's no one that.

There's no peers that you can go to. Yeah, yeah.

And so that's the difficulty of the position. And also, like, if you're someone who has to be busy.

Yeah.

You will not be a good CEO.

Yeah.

It's true. Like, you.

You cannot let go.

Yeah. You have to. You have to. And you have to watch people make mistakes.

Yes.

Which is the most interesting and interesting.

Well, here's. Here's the example. Anybody who has kids will understand this and you understand this. I know. Being a CEO is like being a parent. Right. And being a parent is all about allowing your child, as hard as it is, to make mistakes. Right. If we don't. If we. If we just create a shield around our kids, they are going to learn nothing. They're going to be. They're going to be weak, and they're going to. They're never going to leave the nest, or when they do, they'll die as soon as they leave. Right. So the act of literally letting go of your child as they're learning to ride the bike, knowing they're going to fall down is one of the scariest acts of a parent. But we have to do it because we're letting them go. We have to let them take their falls.

Yeah.

Same thing goes as a CEO. It absolutely goes. We are. We are. Because if we don't do that, we are not creating a team that can act dynamically and dynamically subordinate. We're not.

And you've got to take a few oaths when you're doing that. Like, I remember over the last year, we had a few things happen in, like, the end of Q3. And I was like, oh, that's wrong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was like, yeah, but if I fix this, I was like, this is just gonna keep happening. And so, like I said, hey, guys, I think this is happening. I was like, but I trust you.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so I watched. I watched from afar, but I was. I knew what was happening, and I. And I sort of was. I put the bumper lanes up a little bit, and I was like. Like that. But I let them make the mistakes.

So here's a. Here's a. Here's a Navy SEAL example of that. All right. Which is interesting. So one of our missions at this command was we had to basically be able to drop into any environment with our speedboat with our big. No, they're basically H sacs. They're, like, super, super fast. They look like cigarette boats, basically. Yeah. And we had a couple of these, and we'd have a couple of them in each airplane. So we'd have about four. And the evolution was basically you're flying at about 2,500ft, 3,000ft. The boats will go out, right? And they're under parachute. And the guys who are driving the boats, they'll go right after the boats, okay? And then the boats will drop. The guys will get on the boats, they'll de rig them, they get them all running. They'll line the boats up into the wind while the plane's circling. And once the boats are lined up in the wind, then the rest of us will jump out and basically jump to our boats. Okay? So anyway, this is our standard thing. We're off. We're in Virginia, right, Practicing. It's a daytime. It's July, right in the middle of the day. We're out off the coast doing this. And my jump master, who, for the audience, you know, that's the guy who's in charge of the whole jump. He's going to be spotting. He's going to say, hey, this is when you go, right? He's. It's his. It's his first. It's his first drop, right? And so we're out there. He drops the boats. That's usually the easy drop because you're just dropping. There's no real dz. You're just dropping in the water. The harder drop comes when the boats are lined up, because now you got to get the guys spotted.

Oh, I got to swim a fucking long way, right?

So anyway, so the boats are out, they're getting.

Are you on roundies or you're on squareies?

Oh, no, we're on squareies. Yeah, yeah. We're jumping out, basically counting to four and pulling, you know, so because we have to drive, we have to fly to our boats, we want to land kind of precise. So anyway, we're. The boats are out, they're getting set up, and I'm. And now we're just in the plane waiting, and the ramp's open, right? So I'm just kind of walking back to my jump master's out there. He's looking. And I know we're getting close to drop time. I'm looking and I'm like, this doesn't really look right. It looks like we're. Looks like we're off, right? And at that point, I have to make a decision. I'm the commanding officer. I have to make a decision, and my decision is gauged with this thought process, okay? Except, listen, I need him to learn and understand, okay? Mistakes are a great way to go. Let me just assess risk for a second. It's daytime Virginia, right off the coast. The water is 80 degrees. We can all swim, right? None of us are bad swimmers, you know? You know, it's a soft landing. It's water.

So you got RVs.

Anyway, let me just. Let me just. Let's see how this plays out, right? So I say nothing, okay? And so ultimately, he drops us. We come out of the airplane and the boats are fucking, like. And they have to turn. They're just. We just. We create a sliver pool and they drive to us, right? And so we drive to us. We go back, we're doing the debriefs like we always do. They're always heavy debriefs. And of course, he's just like. He's the hardest on himself, right? Because he knows he fucked up and all that stuff. So we do all that stuff. Of course, I'm the commanding officer, so I get the last word and I say, listen, if we had gone out there and everything had gone right, we would have learned nothing, right? So we just learned a shit ton of stuff. Well, the next time we dropped, okay was a real world drop, okay? A real world. And he was our jump master. The guys who were on that drop have never seen a better drop, right? He nailed it, right? And the idea is, as leaders, as CEOs, as parents, we have to constantly let our people make mistakes. But we're always gauging risk, right? I'm not going to. Had it been nighttime, for example, cold water things, I may have.