What Advisors Can Learn From a Decorated US Navy SEAL Veteran

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Nothing great can be accomplished without sacrifice and hard work. But it's not just about hard work. It's about how smart you are at working hard. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Commander David Sears, who retired from the Navy after serving for 20 years in the elite special operations force called the US Navy SEALs. He's a decorated veteran who planned, led, and executed hundreds of special operations missions in more than 40 countries on 5 continents, ranging from the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq to the jungles of Colombia and the oceans of the world. He was involved in some of the most significant and defining special operations missions of our time. In today's conversation, we discuss several Navy SEAL maxims from his new book, Smarter Not Harder, and how you can use these maxims to think differently and more deeply about everything you're doing in life. You'll look at the world through a different lens, embrace critical and creative thinking, and discover that your mind and mental abilities hold the key to your ability to overcome, excel, and prosper in all aspects of life. So let's get started with Commander David Sears. First of all, I wanna recognize and appreciate your service for our country. You spent more than two decades serving our country in a fine fashion. So I appreciate that. And got a lot of great things that we wanna talk about here today. And where I'd like to start is this idea of operating as a team. So as a Navy SEAL, you operated in a small team, a high-performance team in high-stakes situation. Now you're in the business world. I'd love for you to compare and contrast what it's like to be on a Navy SEAL team to what it's like to be on a team in a business world. What's similar, what's different, what can we learn from you being a Navy SEAL, and how does that apply to being a team member in the business world?

One of the biggest things that happens in the SEAL teams is there's a process that you undergo from training in BUD/S, which is our initial training, Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL school, that begins to coalesce you together, begins to develop trust, and starts to really reinforce the concepts of how important it is to be in a team and rely on others, and you cannot go it alone. The business world often doesn't provide the mechanisms to build that trust. You find a new employee, they get thrown right in. So in standard sort of creative circles, they call it storming and norming, where you get to know each other. Well, building trust is over time, and it doesn't take a lot to destroy that trust. So we have a saying in there that's— this one's not in the book, but it's, you know, one all, Shucks cancels out 1,000 attaboys. So the trust piece in the SEAL Teams is so important. And when a team operates with trust, you get to the point of reading each other's body movements. You know, I know what the silhouette looks like of the guy next to me. I can sort of anticipate his moves because we've worked together for so long and we've been through so many trials and tribulations together that we begin to anticipate, build this trust. So when you work in the business world, there's often not enough time spent trying to instill that trust and build that family relationship. And when you can do that, you see successful small businesses or even larger businesses that build a culture of teamwork, of trust, leading by example. They perform so much better, it's unbelievable. You can walk into an organization, you can tell by their culture, whether they're a team, whether they trust each other, and whether they're family. So there's a lot of similarities in how an elite team functions and how a high-performing team functions, and a lot of those come down to the trust and the connections that they have and the leadership that's guiding them through that.

A few months ago, I did a podcast here for Barron's, and I interviewed a guy named Kelly Leonard. And Kelly was a longtime executive producer for the The Second City, which is an ensemble comedy troupe out of Chicago. And one of the things that he said that I think really applies exactly to what you're describing here about the team is that he talked about how The Second City is an ensemble. And one of the key things about that idea was he said, look, not every one of our performers is perfect every night. There are times when this performer is gonna have an off night, but the fact that we're an ensemble means that someone else is gonna be able to pick up the slack for them. And so he said, we don't have to rely on a star being the star performer. It's an ensemble. And I think this idea of the team is very similar in what you're describing is that we each have each other's back. And he said, we literally, before each performance, before we go on stage, we do an exercise where we will touch another person's back with their permission, of course. That basically says, I got your back. And so if you're having an off night, I'm there for you. And I suspect it's a similar thing with the SEALs and should be a similar thing in the business world with a team as well.

Absolutely. That's exactly what it's about, is knowing that the other people have your back. And it is not an easy thing to develop. And when it's there, You can tell the difference between high-performing teams and those that aren't. You can walk into any domain in any business and you can tell whether they have each other's back or whether they don't and how that team's performing. And I think there's some interesting things happening right now with COVID going on, the pandemic, the work-at-home sort of trend is how do you develop trust in remote sort of environments? How do I get team unity? Because it's not just about the work. It's about how do you interact? You're interacting with people. They're complex beings. And so they have feelings and emotions. And often in the remote field, those aren't conveyed as well. Go back to, you know, 90% of our communication is nonverbal. And when we're doing this via remote or Zoom or people are signing off and the screen's blank, you're missing so much communication that's happening. And I think it's going to be to a detriment to some businesses, the trust that's built and the collaboration that can happen, the creativity that come out of having that trusted environment. And it's going to have some interesting consequences. I don't know what they're going to be, but it surely is.

It could take years before we see what we may have missed out on as a result of the remote. I also would argue though that I think there are some benefits to the remote working that I don't think have been played up a lot. One example would be, I think we've got more time for deep work, as Cal Newport has talked about in his book, where if we don't have as many interruptions as we might normally have in the office, maybe we've got more time for deep thinking, for critical thinking, for working on bigger projects and bigger ideas. So I think there can be some benefit. And one other comment I wanna make here about this idea of the team or the ensemble before we jump into some of these maxims from your book is that if you have built a team, if you have this ensemble idea, you don't have to worry about having superstars on the team because if you have superstars and the superstar leaves, all of a sudden the business falls apart. But when you've got an ensemble, when you got a team that is really working and clicking together, if one person leaves, the other people can pick up the slack and then another person can fill in the slot and pick up from there. So, it's not going to be a disaster if one person leaves. So, I think this whole concept of the team, the ensemble, and the thinking behind that, it obviously works for SEALs, it works in business as well. Let's jump into some of the maxims from the book. So you've published a new book, it's called "Smarter Not Harder," and in it you've identified 17 maxims that the Navy SEALs teach and use and operate from. And I wanna go through a few of these here and get your thoughts. The first one I wanna talk about is called Get Off X. What does that mean?

So in military terms, the X is the ambush site on offense, or if I'm on defense, you know, that location is chosen because it offers me as the person doing the ambush the max advantage. If I'm, say, patrolling through an area and the enemy sets up then I'm at the site of the ambush. The X is the kill zone. It's the area of the highest chaos, the most advantage to your adversary if you're caught on that X. And this happens in life. It's not just military. You can get caught on an X of your own making. External factors can create an X. You can do it internally in yourself. The important thing is when you find yourself in this situation where you're essentially being ambushed by life's events, external, or ambushed by your own internal self. And we can talk about that in a minute, but you've got to get off of that. You have to move off of that or you're dead, figuratively, or, you know, in the military, literally. Chaos can ensue. So you have to take action. You have to move to a better space where you can start to reinstill order and start to cope with whatever external influences or problems are ambushing you at the time. You can be ambushed by, you know, a divorce. You could be ambushed by a death in the family. You could be ambushed by COVID. When you maneuver and get off of that X, don't sit there and freeze. So we have this instinct, you know, fight or flight, and then there's another one is freeze. And we see this all the time in scenarios. One that I talk about in the book is kind of a common one— well, unfortunately, commonly heard of— is this idea of mass shootings. Or the idea of a school shooting. Well, what they find in a lot of these is people freeze and they sit there. You cannot do that in any X. You have to take some action to reinstall order to what is chaos. So in that scenario, you need to take some action. It might be hide, then it might be run, and then it might be fight. But just freezing does nothing. It's going to ensure your demise if you stay on that X. Maneuver off the X, change the situation, think about what's occurring, and make actions to reinstall order. That makes sense.

What I appreciate about get off the X is that, as you just described, it's not necessarily a physical location. Like in the military, it might be a physical location where you're going to get ambushed, but it can also be a mental state that you're in that you get fixated on. And so we've got to get off the X, we've got to take action as you described, and we can't freeze.

Yeah. And a secondary piece of this is the X can be a point of fixation that you have that you're stuck on. So you're stuck on this X. That could be for a business, you're stuck on revenue. You've created some metric that you're stuck on, whether it's revenue, sales. Everybody may have a different metric, And so you begin to sacrifice other things to get to that metric. It's not always the case, but sometimes we see chief financial officers move up to become CEOs. That happens quite a bit. And they forget that their role is no longer chief financial officer. They're now an executive. Every other role in the company, chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, chief technical officer, chief informational, they all have their job title in their name. The one that doesn't is the chief executive officer. He's the executive. He's overseeing the holistic system. And so what'll happen is you see a lot of these CFOs move up or COOs move up and they stay fixated on their last job and they fixate on what they know— operations, finances. I watched this happen with United Airlines. You know, you saw certain guys move up that were CFOs and they fixated on the numbers and not the culture, and they lost the culture of customer service in service of bean counting and revenue, and they ended up with unhappy employees. And so this has led to a cycle. Get off of that by seeking outside advice, seeking third parties, playing devil's advocate, searching out information that disproves your hypothesis or your perception of the world. And when you do that, you gain different perspective and that can help open up your vision and get you off of that X.

There's a word that you said here just a moment ago, and I want to double-click on that because it's a concept that I think has permeated the book as well as I was reading it. And the word that you said was system. And I think it's important as we talk about these different maxims, the importance of systems thinking in terms of if I take action A, what impact is that going to have on E, F, G, X, and Z over there? And so we can't just take a tactic without an understanding of how that tactic is going to affect the overall strategy and affect another tactic that we may want to do over there. So we'll touch on that a little bit more, probably through the course of our conversation. But I just wanted to get that one out there. All right. Let's talk about a second one here, which is a goodie. Two is one, one is none.

Okay, so this comes across first. It's taught to you in the SEAL teams as a physical sort of idea and redundancy in your equipment. So we have, you know, a rifle, a gun, dive masks. You know, in the book I talk about a dive mask and going through dive mask appreciate— they call mask appreciation. Everything that we talk about SEAL training or in BUD/S When it says appreciation, it means pain. We're going to cause you a lot of pain so that you physically remember to appreciate this. So a mask we would take and fill up with water, and they make you lay on your back and you're sucking in this water and have your eyes open, and it's just absolutely miserable. So you begin to appreciate the idea that you need to take care of your equipment, you need to take care of your mask. If a fin strap on your scuba fin breaks you're in for a very long day if you don't have an extra one. This saying of two is one, one is none came about. The idea is I need to have some redundancy built into the physical systems that I'm carrying. It goes beyond that to redundancy and also your mental systems in terms of your planning, so the tangible and the intangible. So when we plan, we try and ask, we try and what if, what if this happens? Two is one, one is none. And it goes with your partners, your dive buddy, all the equipment you have. It carries through, it permeates all sorts of domains and plans, and it's not exclusive to the SEAL teams.

I love this one. And I happen to be a planner from the standpoint that I'm always trying to have a backup in case the original plan doesn't work. So if I'm Recording podcasts remotely, for example, I'll always have 2 and sometimes I'll have 3 sources that I can do the recording in case the first source doesn't work. I had a situation a while ago where I was giving a presentation and right in the middle of the presentation, the electricity went out and I was using a slide deck. I was prepared, so I had a printed copy of my presentation that I put on the lectern before I got up to speak. I put that up there. Just in case something like this would happen. And so I had that and I was able to continue to just glance at that and proceed as if nothing had happened. And the electricity didn't come on until after I had finished my presentation. It went so well that the company hired me again to come back the next year and speak. And they made reference to that situation when the electricity went out and I just kept on going as if nothing had happened. So I'm always thinking about how can I prepare? And I think the same thing with financial professionals is that when you're meeting with someone, you expect, this is how I think it's going to go. But then as you just described, game out, well, what happens if it goes this direction instead of my planned direction? How am I going to deal with that? If it goes this other turn, how can I take that turn and turn it into a positive outcome instead of a negative outcome? So this whole idea of planning, I think, is critical. Obviously, in your line of work, it's a life or death. Situation as well.

There's a saying out there, I think it was Eisenhower, who talks about— I'm going to paraphrase it and probably massacre it, but it's about the plan is not important, it's the planning that's important. A lot of people want to get to— I'll write my plan down, or let's get to the plan. The planning, the thinking process that goes behind this, analyzing, looking at the two is one, one is none, is looking at, in essence, cost-benefit analysis. It's looking at risk-reward ratios. Where can I put in redundancies? Where can I— you can't have 12 backups for your podcast. Hey, I'll make sure I set up my neighbor across the street with the same thing, and then I'll set up a studio down the office. There's a risk-reward, a cost-benefit to each one. And a lot of small businesses have to do this and look at it and go, hey, we live in a world of constrained resources. So it's important to do this and look where are you going to spend your resources in order to institute the redundancies in the most critical parts. So you want to say, hey, what's critical to me? Is your presentation, the PowerPoint, critical to your speech? Or are you speaking in front of the audience critical to your speech? If not, you just ship them the PowerPoint and go, hey, take a look at this. I'm going to leave and I'll go have a drink and I'll be back when you guys— just click every 10 seconds or something. No, the critical part is that you're still able to speak to that. You can let the PowerPoint go and you've thought about this before. So you're also, we're gonna probably talk about this later as well. A lot of these maxims overlap and the ideas they seek to convey and they try and attack them from different angles so that people can internalize them better. Maybe one catches the eye, but you want to have thought through a lot of these mental models and redundancies, the planning They go, now you're more prepared to deal with it when it happens. Okay, no problem. Lights are out. Here you go. What am I going to do if this happens? There's a nuanced piece in here on the redundancies. It's really good if you have something that is diverse from your initial item or initial track so that it can serve sort of multi-purposes if possible. I think in the book I talk about a very simple example of if you carry matches to light a fire, you know, don't carry a second set of matches, carry a lighter because it can do something different, or carry a flint and steel. You're still serving to get to the idea of being able to start a fire and get warmth, but now you have things that don't have the same weak spots or the same points of failure, but they can serve some of the same purpose. So you're trying to ID that as well when you line up your redundancies.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that I love about these maxims and how you've written about them in your book is that we can take a look at these from a surface level and say, okay, yeah, I get that concept. But not only do you do that, but then you go 2 or 3 or 4 levels deeper than that and talk about the nuance, like this example that you just gave here about not having 2 sets of matches. You got 1 set of matches and then you've got a lighter because it can serve a different purpose. And it doesn't have necessarily the same point of failure that matches might. 'Cause if it's raining and your matches get wet, boom, you're done. But if you have a lighter, you could still use your lighter even though it's wet outside. So I think a good example there. So two is one, one is none, I think is critical. I guess the other thing I wanna hit on from what you said is that when you do have these redundancies built in, when something doesn't go according to plan, you don't get flustered. Because you've prepared for it, you've got your backup, and boom, you smoothly move into the backup plan without skipping a beat. The person that you're working with or the people that you're presenting to look at you and they say, "Wow, what a professional," because they didn't skip a beat here when things didn't go as planned. So another great one there. All right, let's talk about a third one here, which is called crawl, walk, run.

This is a training methodology or a learning methodology that we use. And you mentioned before, there is a nuance to a lot of these. So I want to set, set the listener immediately to— it is not linear. So as we're going to move through this, I don't want you to think too much in terms of linear track. The crawl is meant to represent the fundamentals and the basics. So in the SEAL teams, you know, we have various methods of getting to the target. So we have a whole set of problems that we have to go through. We have to not only execute what we want to do on a target, whether it's do reconnaissance, whether it's destroy things, whether it's attack people, ambush, whatever it may be, but we have to have this whole methodology and library of ways to get to a target. And then we have to have what happens at the target, then we have to get off of that target, right? Well, one of the ways that we get to the target or or get within proximity of the target is we skydive in. And so a typical skydive might be, even a training scenario, maybe I'm gonna jump out of a plane at 25,000 feet with oxygen strapped to my side, my rifle strapped to the other side, a 100-pound rucksack with my other gear and body armor and things under my legs, night vision goggles on, helmet on, a 40-pound parachute. And it's gonna be in the middle of the night out of the abyss. So think about, you know, next time you're up in an airliner, look out and go, yeah, yeah, if I just jumped out into this in the middle of the night, how would I feel?

Yeah, piece of cake.

Piece of cake. You're gonna pull your chute for certain scenarios, you're gonna pull it very high almost immediately after you jump out so that you can glide towards the target. You're up in the jet stream. You may be doing 120 miles an hour over ground speed. You're navigating with a GPS or compass. You know, I started off navigating with a compass, then they thankfully— they got GPS, it's got a lot easier. Your night vision, you're with maybe anywhere from 2 to 40 other guys up in the sky all trying to stack up and navigate towards this area, fly in, land at an exact specific point. Your chutes can collapse because it's too much weight, too little weight. You'll have to stay together. There's so much complexities to it. It's amazing. We do it all the time, but we didn't start off that. That is not the first jump that you do when you come in as a brand new guy. You're going to start off with the progression. We're going to teach you the basics, the fundamentals of static line parachuting. They call it dope on a rope. So we're going to hook a rope to your parachute that gets hooked to the plane. As you jump out, it pulls it for you. You basically have to do nothing. Now you just crash into the land. It's going to be a round parachute that just kind of— the umbrella overhead concept, just modified, right? Then we're going to move to square parachutes where you can steer the parachute and you can land it and acts like an airfoil or a wing. We're going to have you jump out at increasing heights. We're going to have you then jump out with equipment on. Then we're going to have you learn oxygen. We're going to have you do it in the daytime. We're going to have you do it in the nighttime. We're going to change the altitudes that you do it from. We're going to change how many people. So we're going to progress up this crawl, walk, run ladder. The important part is we instill these fundamentals very early. There's some very basic sort of concepts that go with any domain that you're in. That's the key to this. As high as you want to build your foundation, the more firm your fundamentals have to be. And if you want to build higher, you have to revisit those and reinforce them.

Yeah. And to me, this is about the idea of, say, stacking, meaning if we want to build a house, we're not going to start by building the third floor first. We've got to build the foundation, we've got to build the first floor, we've got to build the second floor, and then we put the third floor on top of that. And we got to make sure that each one of those layers, starting from the bottom, moving up, is foundational, is strong, and is done well because that sets the stage for everything else that goes beyond that. And I remember a number of years ago, my old business partner and I were having essentially a webinar with a group of financial advisors, and we were sharing some practice management, business development ideas. And then when we got to the Q&A part, an advisor asked a question and said, yeah, this is all great, but 'When are you going to get to the really advanced ideas?' And then my partner says, 'Well, let me ask you this. Have you done A, B, C, and D already?' And the guy says, 'Well, not really.' And then my partner says, 'Well, until you do A, B, C, and D, it's going to do no good for you to try and jump to K at this point because you don't have the foundations in place. You got to get the foundations first before you'll ever be able to take advantage of our K idea here. So I think that plays right into what you're talking about here is we got to crawl, we got to walk, we got to run, put all those in place. And as you say, we're going to revisit some of those, but we got to make sure we got that strong foundation before we can really do these advanced things and really leverage that. So appreciate that one.

Yeah, because you also don't know the future either. So you may have built your foundation to build a 2-story house. But as you get that 2-story house, you start learning more and you make more money and do whatever, you're like, you know what, I'd really like to have a compound and, or I want to make a skyscraper, I want to make an office building. You have to revisit that foundation, shore it up. Sometimes you have to destroy the old foundation and begin anew and it served you well. And often these things don't get exposed until you reach sort of your level of ineptitude. And then it gets exposed.

I think that's a key idea as it relates to business leaders, that as your ideas change, as your ambitions change for what you're trying to create, you may have to start from scratch again. You may have to blow up what you've already built to rebuild it back better and stronger because now you have a new vision.

That's right. Your progression is going to be a lot faster building that foundation when you do start from scratch. So you're going to see that it serves you well, right?

And you can leverage what you've already learned to do it better the next time, for sure. Yes. Great. All right, let's talk about another one here, another gem: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

So this one probably gets the most literal pushback. How can slow be fast? This is really about systems and looking at things deliberately, thoughtfully, seeing them sort of as a holistic piece, right? So we have this thing called drown-proofing that we do, and in BUD/S, that what they'll do is they'll tie your feet together, tie your hands behind your back, and they throw you in the 9-foot end of the pool. And your job is to— begins real simple— you blow air out, you sink down You touch the bottom, you push off with your feet, you come up, you get another breath of air. It's not very hard to do if you think through it deliberately, if you don't allow yourself to get caught up in some noise that happens. And we're going to talk about the noise in a second. You get into this rhythm, and what they're going to do then is they're going to introduce interruptions to that rhythm. They're going to splash water in your face. The instructors are going to ask you to do a flip or throw a mask on the bottom of the pool, so you have to pick that up. And what that's going to do is that's going to interrupt your breathing pattern. And so you need to think deliberately through that, not get caught up in it, not react, but respond. And this is another nuanced sort of point— reaction and response is really different, two different items. So you're going to come to the surface again and you're going to take that same breath, but in order to continue the rhythm, your lungs are going to burn. You got to let gravity pull you back down instead of trying to stay on the surface and get one or two breaths. Because that's going to interrupt the natural flow of gravity bringing you back down. You're going to have to force yourself to come back down. Your breathing is going to get even more interrupted. It's going to start this really vicious downward spiral. If you take for a second the burning of the lungs, just go back to the bottom, you come up, take another breath, a little less burning, do the rhythm again, a little less burning, and pretty soon you're right back to normal. You have ignored the noise of the pain on your lungs. You respond thoughtfully to the situation rather than reacted to it. You get through it and it's fine. It's actually a pretty easy day and pretty relaxing because they're not really in the water with you messing with you. So you're like, hey, once I get into this, I'm good. You can throw whatever interruptions you want at me and I'm good. The same thing happens in life. The information environment today is noise. The amount of data that we have happening and inundating us in every single field is noise. And there's all these talking heads creating all sorts of noise. And then there's Lots of articles out there and everybody has an opinion on everything. That's all noise. You need to go back, revisit your fundamentals, your basics that you know sort of to be true, and that's your back, three, crawl, walk, run that you've established. Say, does this make sense? If I'm lost in the noise, break down and go back to some basic fundamentals and then try to deliberately think and respond.

I think of this one. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, a couple things come into mind. One is this idea of pace. And I think if we establish a deliberate pace, because we always run the risk that sometimes our business can grow much faster than our ability to backfill the operations and the people and the processes behind it, that the business is gonna flop. Probably no different than in the military. If your offensive advances too fast, for your supply lines to keep up, you're going to be in trouble. We've seen that happen time and time again, even going back to World War II. I think Germany had that problem. And so, I think the deliberate pace is certainly a key thing for me. Also, I think about, and maybe you wrote this in your book, is that slow is smooth, but too slow is dead. So, we've got to have some kind of pace here as well. We can't have paralysis analysis type problems as well.

Yeah, the real term is slow, means deliberate. Think about the other way to say it would be kind of deliberate is smooth, smooth is efficient and productive. It just doesn't sound as good.

It doesn't have the marketing spin.

Slow and fast are not necessarily time related. It's about deliberate and it's about efficient at the end of that. So it can be done in a very short time frame. The pace has to be relative to what you're trying to accomplish. So it's not necessarily on a clock. This is where we get to the literal pieces. People are like, on a clock? Slow just means deliberate. You can do things deliberately. But when— this is where it gets important to differentiate between react and respond. So in a lot of sports, in business, Sports is probably the closest analogy, but it exists in business all the time. But in sports, let's take something like judo. What you want to do is you need to get your opponent off balance and you want to throw them to the ground. In boxing, I want to do the sort of the same thing. I want to feint, fake a punch to get you to move. When you move to block that punch, that's a reaction. Now, I've already planned out and I'm punching you on the other side. The good boxers, the good judo people are not reacting. When you push me backwards, I don't push back forwards. I counter in a responsive way, not a reactive way. So when businesses do that or individuals do that, when they react to a situation, that means they're using their intuitive mind and they're using their base instincts and they're not thinking through it deliberately. The market's crashing, sell now. It's going down, here it is, just sell, get rid of everything. Oh, no, it's up tomorrow. No way, buy. I mean, this is a really good way of reacting or acting sort of out of instinct to the market is an awesome, pretty proven way to lose money. You want to be deliberate and thoughtful in it. So it just doesn't come across as good when I say deliberate is smooth, smooth is efficient, and strong. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

We'll stick with that. It has a good ring to it. Well, Dave, I could talk to you forever on this stuff, so I'm having trouble picking which one of these I want to ask you about. Hopefully we can get a couple more in here, and then I've got a couple questions that I'd like to wrap up with. So another good one in here is, the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war. Tell me about that one.

Yeah, so this is all about Preparation and practice. 90% of your time should be practicing, planning, preparing, and 10% is in the doing. So this goes back again to those main themes of thinking. I want to clarify something sort of too nuanced. You know, the title of the book, Smarter Not Harder, it's the overarching idea that I want you to do things deliberately, thoughtfully. I want you to think differently and deeper. I hard work, that is all considered a prerequisite. So you have to work hard. And this is where we say, you know, hey, the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war. Hard work is a prerequisite. I want you to do that hard work smarter, and that will differentiate you. So the idea is that Malcolm Gladwell had published this book Outliers where he talked about the 10,000-hour rule. Well, it's more nuanced than that. You need to do when you practice something or when you're working at getting better at something or improving your fundamentals, it needs to be deliberate practice, which means that it has a feedback cycle to it. I reference this one in the book because it's near and dear to me, is my golf swing. I can do 10,000 swings. That golf swing is not getting better. What needs to happen is I need to have feedback. It needs to be deliberate. What kind of swing am I working on? Why am I working on it? What am I doing? And have a plan. And then it needs to have feedback. And there's a feedback cycle that happens, and it's got to be objective feedback that gives me positives and negatives and says, okay. And some of this can be created by drills in golf and things like that, but there's feedback that says you're doing this right, this wrong, do more of this. We want to usually amplify the positive feedback and tamp down the negative. So do more of this positive that you're doing, do less of this negative. And just doing something thousands of times does not make you better at it. So the important piece is this preparation that goes into everything that we do on the SEAL teams. We're going to rehearse hitting targets, we're going to rehearse different ways to hit that target. And this goes to the second piece of when you do these practices or rehearsals or planning— planning is part of this process, right? The planning, not the plan. The planning piece is about thinking about the problem sets, thinking about all the what-ifs. And the more mental models you can create in your head, the bigger library that you have to access, the less surprised you are when something gets thrown askew and when you're actually in the action doing things. This is why MBAs or business schools very famous for— what do they do? They go through countless case studies of different businesses because they're getting an exposure to different libraries of information, different mental models that they have that they can access and go, "Well, this seems familiar. I've seen this happen," or, "I've seen a derivation of this." Lawyers do it when they go through— they do mock court trials and things like that as they're going through law school. They practice this piece. Really good trial lawyers do it, of course, before they ever go while they're practicing. They call in potential jurors. Politicians do it when they do the mock debate. They get somebody to stand in there as devil's advocate, play their opponent, and they go through these mock debates. There's some people that don't, and you can see it. It's reflected in their performance without a doubt. Those are the good ones. That's what we're talking about. It's that preparation, and then you're ready to go to battle.

Yeah, and I see a lot of people in the business world, I think, could really benefit from this particular maxim in that if we've been in business for 10 years, and let's say we're a financial advisor, and we've had thousands of client meetings and review meetings and prospect meetings, and we think because we've had thousands that we don't need to practice this. And I think what you're saying, and I agree with it, which is it's gotta be that deliberate practice. We don't wanna have the same experience 1,000 times. We wanna work on a variety of different experiences dozens or hundreds of times so that we can nail that experience and move on to a different experience and practice that and be deliberate about it and nail that experience. And so I think as professionals, if we could spend more time in this deliberate practice and identifying what are those areas that Maybe it's a strength of ours that we can make even stronger, that we can leverage even further. Let's practice that. Let's get as close to mastery as we can in that particular area. And if we've got a weakness, we don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time shoring up our weaknesses because then we may end up with a lot of strong weaknesses, which may not be the best thing. We may have to have other people that can do that stuff better than us. But this idea of deliberate practice, I think, is an important piece. And I also like to think about how in real practice or real life, you don't want to experience that for the first time. You want to have practiced that so that you're ready for it. And I know you do that as well in all the training that you've done as a Navy SEAL. I'm going to guess that some of those experiences in practice were probably a lot worse than in the real life situation. Would that be a fair statement?

Absolutely. So you're trying to create a scenario when a lot of targets came down to in the real world were way easier than what you had set up in training. You're trying to anticipate some things in training and throw all these different wickets in, and you have scenarios where, hey, I'm going to make you jump in, drive down the river, stay overnight, recon, live in the woods, attack a ship, dive again, do all— and you're like, okay, if I ever have to do this I'm ready, but that would be crazy. One of the sort of unspoken secrets a little bit about some of the combat or being in war is that it's not all action all the time, and not every target— and a majority of a target maybe— is not some giant chaotic situation. That may be 5 minutes of the time spent doing this days-long mission. May erupt into some chaos, and then it's over, and then it's back to another piece. Or, or nothing ever occurs and you live in this sort of heightened state, but you've seen these different models before and your training's ready. And so when that situation kicks in, you're more familiar with it and you're more apt to go back to the other one. You're more apt to respond than react.

Yeah, so another good one: the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in in war. So practice, deliberate practice, thoughtful practice, so you'll be prepared for whatever life throws at you. All right, I want to wrap up with these maxims with this last one here, which I think will be a good one to really encapsulate what we've talked about here, which is: the only easy day was yesterday.

Yeah, this is the classic SEAL mantra. It's all over our t-shirts and things. That's just bred into you from day one. And this also has a literal piece to it and a nuanced piece to it. The literal piece is the only easy day was yesterday is because yesterday's over. So the way that we kind of want you to look at things is that is in the past. You can learn from it, you can reflect on it, but it's gone. So that was the easy day. What's in front of you are more challenges, and that's where your focus needs to be. Think about the example of driving a car. You don't drive looking in your rearview mirror. You glance in it for some reference, for some reflection on where you've been, but the majority of your time— not even the majority, 99% of your time— is spent looking out the front, right? To the sides, to the front. That the road in back in the rearview mirror is straight does not guarantee that the road in front of you is going to be straight. It can be changing and it will change all the time. So that's one piece of it, right? The other one, they used to tell you all the time in BUD/S, you would be— we'd do this thing called surf torture. And what they would do is they'd line up the class, you all face out at the ocean, you link arms, you walk out into the ocean to about right around knee deep, thigh deep. They have you turn around, link arms, and they say, take seats. And you sit down And then they have you laid out and you just sit there in the San Diego cold Pacific Ocean. And no matter what time of year it is, it's either winter, you're just going to be in there less time. Summer, it's 72 degrees, you're going to be in there more time. So they'll leave you in there until you are freezing. Everybody's shaking, nobody can move. It's absolutely— the cold is a great equalizer. They'll wait till somebody quits. So you're not getting out until somebody quits. Well, that's not always true, but people will quit based on that. And so you go through these different things in Hell Week. They have you jump in and out of the steel pier. I talk about that in the book. Again, exposing you to the cold and things like that. Well, what they'll tell you is that once you leave the training, they'll say You're going to be colder, you're going to be more tired, you're going to be more hungry, you're going to be hotter than you ever were here. It's really hard for you to imagine that while you're in this scenario, but it's completely true. I've been, you know, colder, wetter, more tired, hotter than ever I was in training. So the idea is that that training's in the past, the easy part's in the past. What you have now in front of you are the challenges coming up. And when you learn to embrace it— so this is a mental attitude piece of not— it doesn't mean that it's hard or miserable. You can learn to love challenge and growth. So the one quote that I think I give in the book in this piece is from Lou Holtz, and it's this: if you're not growing, you're dying. That's the essence kind of behind this, is that you need to constantly be growing. Constantly challenging yourself, whatever domain you're in. If it's in sports, you're trying to go to that next level that you want to attain. If it's in, you know, finances, you're learning more about that. What's the next piece that I can learn? What else can I tack on to my repertoire of knowledge? How do I challenge myself? Some people challenge themselves by leaving and going to a different domain, and they go, you know what, I've reached the pinnacle here I want to go do something else, okay? Or the pinnacle that I wanted to achieve, the goals that I set out for myself. Some people may want to stay single domain. Some people go a different one. They say, hey, look, I'm different. I achieved what I wanted to achieve in the financial markets. I'm going to go become a teacher. And you know what? I want to learn about being a teacher and I'm going to start that. I'm going to build a new foundation. I'm going to go here. I'm going to challenge myself. I'm going to constantly be growing. The last piece of it is really there are no silver bullets. There's no algorithm to this. It's about thinking, and it's about navigating the complexities of life. And if you use these maxims, they can help you navigate a lot of these complexities and things that get thrown at you. There is no solution. That's the complex world. If you're looking for the algorithm, silver bullet, or some formula which you see all the time. Just tell me how to— what's the process to become a good leader? What's the process to be successful? You're like, there is no process. There's a lot of fundamental things can happen underneath, and you navigate your way in the best way possible with all these sorts of maxims that encourage deliberate thinking and encourage reflection and things like that.

I want to read a quote from the book that is from, uh, the maxim here. You said, quote, Once a task is finished, it's time to find the next challenge and up the difficulty. The only easy day was yesterday. This is how growth is achieved. Without challenge, there is no progress. Once you've overcome or learned something, it's time to introduce more difficult and uncomfortable tasks, and on it goes. There is no end state apart from constant growth. Continued challenges and even pain are requirements for continued improvement. That's what all our maxims are about. Challenging yourself in order to grow. Getting comfortable being uncomfortable, end quote. And I think that's a nice summary here.

And it—

I was listening to a podcast here recently with a woman being interviewed. She was an ultra distance runner. So she was running like 100, 200, 250-mile runs. And she said that she really broke through once she decided to, instead of trying to avoid the pain that's gonna come from that kind of distance running, to actually lean into it, to actually embrace it, and to view it not as a foe, but almost as a friend. And once she was able to reconcile that, she was able to become an elite athlete. And I think maybe to some extent, that's what you're saying here, that if we do wanna grow through life, the only easy day was yesterday, and we're gonna have to find those new challenges They could be physical challenges, they could be mental challenges, they could be emotional challenges, they could be spiritual challenges. But if we continue to challenge ourself, get ourself uncomfortable, and get comfortable with being uncomfortable, that's where the spice of life is, that's where the growth is going to take place.

Absolutely, couldn't have said it better myself.

All right. Well, Dave, like I said, I could talk to you forever. I do want to ask you one other question here, not necessarily related to the maxims, but it's about your kids. And I know that you have children, and I would love to know, as a 20-year Navy SEAL veteran, all the things that you've learned, all the experiences that you've been through, what are some of the things that you're trying to teach your kids based on what you've learned over time?

Critical thinking is the big one. I mean, this is really where I want them to be. I want them to question, ask questions, question assumptions. Be skeptical of things. I want them to not be satisfied with the status quo. I want them to continually grow and challenge themselves. So that's what we always push towards, is— and we do it as a pair, you know, my wife and I— it's get them to question assumptions, ask what they're doing, present them with as much diversity as I can. So I try and fill them with experiences across the realms. So if my daughter, you know, hey, go look at this. Her friend goes to church somewhere. I think her friend's one denomination. So I'm like, go, go see her church. Go to the synagogue with your other friend. Go see that. Experience these different things. Let's go surfing. Let's go to the ocean. Let's try and go diving. Let's go running. Let's go to the art museum. I want them to have this library of sort of experiences. And then I want them to— and what I try and instill is this critical thinking idea. And it definitely comes through. I get calls from teachers. Teachers are not comfortable with this, and I'm okay with that because they're being— the teachers are being challenged. And I tell the kids, you have to be respectful. The first question I always have for the teacher when they call— they— we get quite a few calls a year— is, was my son or daughter respectful? If the answer is yes, then we move on from there and we start talking about, say, okay, so what happened? Well, we had this discussion in class and I'm comfortable with it, doesn't bother me. Were they respectful? Were they citing facts? Were they asking questions? Where do they find their— and so I encourage them to find different resources and look in different places, things like that. That's what I really want them to do, is be able to think critically and have— and I try and offer them this library of experiences so that they can draw on all those mental models and then where they go. And we'll see. It is a, uh, work in progress. You know, kids are a challenge that, you know, the only easy day was yesterday.

There you go. What a nice way to come full circle there. Yeah, yeah, I know where you're coming from. I've got 3 daughters myself. They're all grown, 2 are married, they're all in their mid to late 20s. So we've been through that, and I guess you're never through it as long as you're alive. You know, you're always worrying about your kids and hoping they're, they're doing their best. Their best and performing well. So it never ends, but it's a joyous journey for sure. So, so Dave, this has been fantastic. Let me just wrap up here with— you do have your new book, it's called Smarter Not Harder. You can find that everywhere, whether you want to purchase it online or go to your favorite bookstore. Also, tell me about your website. What's the best way for folks to stay in touch with you?

Yeah, they go to my website at dcsears.com and just reach out via the Contact Me there, and there's various business lines that I have as well and do some, uh, and I'm opening up a new line of coaching.

Fantastic. Again, all right, Dave, thanks again for your service to our country, and thanks for taking time to be with us here on the Barron's Podcast.

And thanks for having me, Steve.

I always enjoy it. My key takeaway from my conversation with Commander Sears is the importance of practice and preparation. Few people put in as much thought and deliberate practice in what they do as the Navy SEALs. And the more that we can adopt this idea of practice and preparation, the better we can handle anything that life may throw at us. David and I just scratched the surface of what he learned as a Navy SEAL, and I encourage you to get a copy of his book, Smarter Not Harder, where he goes into detail on 17 maxims. I think you're going to benefit from it as much as I have. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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