How My Fighter Jet Training Built a $100M Empire

In combat aviation, stakes are deadly, but in business, they're just expensive. What if I told you that the same mental models that kept me alive in the cockpit also helped me build and sell an 8-figure company? I'm Mike Brown, former F-18 pilot turned entrepreneur, and after flying combat missions in Iraq, I took the decision-making frameworks that I learned in the military and I applied them to business. Result? I built an investment firm that generated over $100 million in returns for my partners and my investors. Today, I'm going to share with you the 3 specific mental models that transformed my decision-making, both in combat and in business. You'll learn why most catastrophic failures start with tiny deviations, a 4-step process for making better decisions under pressure, and the counterintuitive reason why slowing down actually speeds up success. I flew F-18s in the U.S. Navy from 2003 to 2012. I was a weapons systems officer. That means I rode in the back seat and I ran the weapon systems like Goose, if you've seen Top Gun. So let me tell you about a concept that I learned in the early days of my military aviation career that I still use in every area my life today. This is the normalization of deviance. Here's how it works. When we create a standard, at some point we're gonna deviate from that standard. Sometimes it's by accident, sometimes on purpose. But here's the dangerous part: if we don't correct that deviation immediately, we're likely to repeat it. And once we've done it enough times, all of a sudden that deviation becomes our new normal. So think of it like the game we used to play as kids, telephone. One kid whispers something to the next kid, and every time they add their own interpretation until the final message is completely different from the original. In business and aviation, the stakes are much higher than just this, this childhood game. So let me give you an example. When I was building my company, we hired our first employee who was an administrative assistant. I was finally delegating, and we created this simple standard operating procedure. You gotta check the mail, sort the checks out, and set aside anything that needs a response. So a few months later, I'm looking for a stapler and I open this guy's desk drawer and inside I found a stack of unopened mail. And buried in that stack was a letter from the oil and gas operator who was paying us $50,000 a month in royalties. They needed additional documentation to transfer the ownership, and by missing the deadline, we lost an entire month's payment, which was basically our assistant's annual salary. So it turns out any time he was getting mail that he wasn't sure about, he'd just stick it in this drawer to ask us about it later. He created his own procedure and he normalized a deviation from our standard that cost us big time. So this pattern shows up everywhere from business operations, team dynamics, even in our personal relationships. So here's an example I love to use. Think about the last time you were sitting in a restaurant and you saw a couple that was just like trading jabs and cutting each other down. There's, there's, you know, you see this all the time. There's real vitriol in the way they speak to each other. And the fact is, they didn't start that way. It began with one small, unkind comment that wasn't addressed, and then another one and another one. All of a sudden, speaking harshly became their new normal. So how do we break this pattern? First, we have to recognize where it's happening. Only way to do that is to follow the process every single time. In the Navy, we called this muscle memory. So no matter how long we had been flying F-18s, we would still break out the checklist and follow the step-by-step instructions and touch the switches in the same order every single time that we started our aircraft. And the reason that we did that that is because if we started hitting a switch out of order and normalize that over time, all of a sudden that one switch becomes four, and now you're so far off from where you originally started. So that is the normalization of deviance. And I would challenge you to ask, where have I normalized a deviation from the standard in my own life or in my business? Speaking of deviations, imagine this: you're strapped into an F-18 Super Hornet, 66,000 pounds, launching off the front end of an aircraft carrier at 200 miles an hour. In just under a second. All of a sudden, cockpit fills with this acrid gray smoke and the electronic displays go completely dark and you're completely blind. So this actually happened to me during a combat operation in 2008. And I understand that most of our business decisions don't involve potential ejection over the Arabian Gulf. The mental model that I used that day is just as powerful in a boardroom as it is in the cockpit. It's called the OODA loop— Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It was created by Colonel John Boyd in the 1970s, and it's the most powerful decision-making framework that I've ever encountered. Here's how it works. First, observe. We gather all of the available information. So in this smoke-filled cockpit, that meant we had to note the kind of smoke. How did it smell? Which systems are failing? Our aircraft's position relative to the ocean. In business, this means taking in all available data before before jumping to conclusions, right? I typically believe that there are only a few numbers that inform our decision-making in business, and we've just gotta take in that data and make sure that we're making data-driven decisions. The second step is orient, analyzing that information based on experience and context. So because of our training, we knew that that gray smoke and dark displays meant that it was an electrical fire, not an engine problem. And this is where pattern recognition becomes your superpower, because If we make a poor decision, if we mistake an electrical fire for an engine fire, now we've compounded that emergency. The third step is decide. We want to develop our own options and then choose the best course of action. So in this case, we had two options: climb and buy time or land immediately. And each one had different risks and benefits. So we made a snap decision to land as soon as we possibly could. It's better to get on deck with critical systems that still worked rather than risking a total electrical failure at altitude and then having to punch out of the aircraft. Craft. Finally, the last step is act. Execute decisively. Once you've made your decision, you have to commit fully. Here's the key: this is not a one-and-done process. Every action creates new information, starting the loop all over again. And this is where I see most entrepreneurs fail. We're really great at the first 3 steps, but we often fall prey to sunk cost fallacy. We view decisions as one-way doors when the fact is that that's rarely true. So my favorite saying from the Navy never fall in love with the plan. That day, we got the aircraft back on deck in under 120 seconds. The OODA loop was running in the background at max processing speed, and it helped us remain calm, assess the situation, and make the right calls under that extreme pressure. And this brings us to the final and perhaps most counterintuitive lesson from my time in the Navy, and that is no fast hands in the cockpit. That means that even in an emergency, moving quickly often makes things worse. So here's why. Imagine that you get this engine fire warning and in your panic to solve the problem, you rush and you shut down the wrong engine. This actually happened in a famous case study from the military. So instead of one problem, now all of a sudden you have two. You have a fire in one engine and you just killed your only good engine. The irony is in most emergencies, you actually have more time to think than you think. The first step in any emergency procedure is to take a breath and assess the situation And the next step is to break out the checklist. It's crazy, right? Like your first step when your plane's on fire is to breathe. But here's where it gets interesting. In my years coaching entrepreneurs, I've noticed something fascinating. The faster revenue grows, the more likely founders are to make rushed decisions that end up costing them big time. Let me give you a real example from my own journey. After I sold my company, I had this incredible windfall. Instead of taking the time to create a solid investment strategy, I started rapidly deploying capital into deal after deal after deal. Angel investments, crypto, real estate. I mean, if it promised high returns, I was totally in. And what happened is I turned millions of liquid assets into illiquid investments that I couldn't access when I needed it most. Had I just slowed down, created a methodical plan, built an investment thesis, and followed the framework, I would have been financially free at 36 years old. Instead, I had to rebalance over the next decade in order to create that same freedom that was right at my fingertips back then. So remember, in business, unlike combat, lives are rarely on the line. We almost always have time to slow down and make better decisions. But here's the challenge. As entrepreneurs, we're wired for action. Our instinct is to move fast, break things, figure it out as we go. And sometimes that serves us well. But the most successful founders I know have learned to distinguish between when to move fast and when to slow down. So let's bring this all together. First, we want to watch for small deviations becoming our new normal. We want to use the OODA loop to make better decisions under pressure. And remember, no fast hands in the cockpit. Sometimes slowing down is actually the fastest way forward. These are the mental models that help me survive combat and build wealth. More importantly, though, they can help you make better decisions in your business and your life. So if you found this valuable, hit subscribe and the notification bell. Drop a comment below. I'd love to hear which of these models resonated most with you. And if you want to take the first step toward financial freedom, make sure you download my one-page wealth snapshot, which is a financial freedom tool for busy entrepreneurs. Keep that rubber side down. I'll see you next time.