Perseverance Over Endurance: Leading Through Uncertainty With Brandon Young
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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. My guest today is Brandon Young. He's the co-author of a book called Perseverance with a carrot leads to endurance. So I guess perseverance or endurance to perseverance or perseverance to endurance. I'm not sure how to interpret it, but I ask him. So we're going to talk about the five factors of perseverance to achieve no fail missions, whether it's war or business or life or, you know, whatever may have you. So that's what we're talking about today. So welcome and thanks for coming, Brandon. Appreciate it. Hey,

Hey, thanks for having me, Richard. Tell me a bit about, you know, some of the stuff you've done over the years. So, you know, how it's kind of impacted you and shaped your journey up until today, until we get to the book.

Yeah, for sure. I'm happy to do so. So the carrot, by the way, it's perseverance is greater than endurance. And I promise that is the only math involved in the book. I'm not a math magician. So it's about leading with resilience, growing through adversity and winning together. And just to kind of go back, if we take a bit of a wavetops look at the last about 30 years, my business partner, Blaine Smith, and the co-author of the book, and I really cut our teeth

in leadership in the U.S. Army Special Operations world. I came through the U.S. Army Rangers. I was a Ranger for about a decade. I was in the Middle East about eight days after the towers fell on 9/11. Blaine was a West Point graduate. In addition to that, he is a Green Beret. He also has

a rotation in Iraq and a rotation in Afghanistan. Between the two of us, we have six full combat rotations. And we did that for a little over a decade, both separated from service 2009, 2010, got into the commercial side of healthcare for a cancer diagnostics laboratory that was a national footprint. It was a subdivision of Quest Diagnostics. Did that for a number of years and then

Both of us served together at a national veteran-serving nonprofit where when we got there, it was a little bit of an idea and we were kind of just getting up and running. And the intent was to enrich the lives of America's veterans by connecting them to their community through physical and social activity. And we really developed this enrichment equation of health, people, and purpose as an up

upstream intervention before we kind of get to the really nasty downstream post negative or failed reintegration aspects of the veteran experience that for a number of years worked in the child welfare space for a number of years. And then we launched a business called Applied Leadership Rehabilitation.

partners in March of 2020. I can't make this up. We launched in March 17th, 2020. A couple days later, the world shut down for COVID. And our whole mission is to share hard-earned leadership wisdom with leaders out there who are doing their best to navigate growth, change, and diversity. And we just come alongside them, help them be more effective, and help them be more effective for the long haul.

I figured since the experience you've been through was so difficult compared to most people that you guys would be very effective in business. I had a roommate once, you know, right after college, he was in the Marines and moved in. And within like two hours, his entire room was set up as if he lived there for years. And I saw it. I was like, oh my God. So the guy was just so disciplined, like everything set up perfectly, never left the dish in the sink, was like the perfect roommate you could ever have. He met a girl and they went up and got married and

just like amazing you know but the level of discipline was just really cool to see you know and yeah he knew exactly where he was wherever he was and then his uh his girlfriend killed your it sounds like you won the roommate lottery and then she killed it for you i'm sorry yeah but it was just interesting to see you know i felt lazy thousands of millions of times in my life and i'm sure everyone fights against it so i guess that's maybe it's like a side question so after

after having to live with all that discipline and all that hard work, is it just like, like, how do you feel about laziness now in your life? Are you just like, do you feel lazy about nothing or has it been beaten out of you or what do

what do you think the, um, the average like service person that has been in for many years, like what happens to them over time with, uh, their work ethic? Yeah. I mean, I think, I think the, uh, every time you make that decision to choose discipline. So in many ways, Blaine and I talk about discipline is choosing what is good as opposed to what feels good. Every time you make that harder choice, I think the aptitude kind of increases like your, your, your meter for, uh,

capability increases in terms of that. And so I do think that you get more reps at it. I think that you, um,

choose that more difficult or disciplined path as opposed to, you know, kind of what we say is like the path of least resistance a little bit more commonly. But I would also say that, you know, just like adversity, I don't think military folks have any monopoly on adversity. I don't think anybody has a monopoly on adversity. I also don't think anybody has a monopoly on discipline. And that's a big part of

of how we share some of this hard-earned wisdom with others in terms of perseverance is because, you know, when we're going through difficult things, we are going to have to make some difficult choices and we're going to have to stick to our knitting. And we have seen over and over and we share with people that, you know, as you make those decisions, you start to grow in that aptitude. And we do believe that people have, you know, increased their aptitude for discipline.

So over the experience that you've had over the years, what were some of the highlights? Like when you look back, what did you get out of the experience? Like how did it shape you in a positive way? Any examples come to mind? Yeah. I mean, really in terms of sense of purpose, it really gave me a purposeful approach to life. And, you know, I grew up in a pretty chaotic home and my dad took off on us when I was 11. And so I was raised by a single mom. And I think when you grow up in that kind of environment, you realize,

You kind of wonder what's wrong with me. You kind of gain a bit of a sense of worthlessness, I would say. And the military, what it did for me is, first of all, I always knew I wanted to serve. And it gave me a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose that I had not felt before. In many ways, it felt like I had lost

Found my first family, you know, when I got to the 2nd Ranger Battalion. And, I mean, that just happened over and over again throughout my service. I felt that keen sense of belonging, that sense of family, and that sense of purpose and mission focus that transcended all of the difficult times that I experienced. So what makes it, I mean, I'm sure there's many things, but what makes it hard for

for people that come out of service, you know, they separate, they go back to civilian life. Maybe they were doing something really intense, like they were a sniper or they were in active combat. And now they're, you know, it's like that movie, you know, sniper or whatever. They're in a grocery store shopping. I didn't have this, someone reconcile that. The,

those radically different experiences and you know in their head and I don't kind of have a life again well it takes a lot of work um it takes a lot of perspective I think it takes a lot of reframing it takes a lot of help um when you when you first exit the service you experienced a radical loss of identity you know you've you've been in uniform everybody looks the same you're

You talk the same. It's a very homogenous environment, you know. And when I say that, I mean it is a true reflection of our country. You know, there's all different races, colors, creeds. Everything is there in the military, but you're all the same. You're all in the same uniform. Everyone's tracking towards the same mission and you have the same idiom. And so there's immediate loss of that. And that is one of the most jarring things

of that reintegration. And then I think, you know, another thing that I would just say that exacerbates that challenge is that you're in an environment when you're in the military where you're expected to be indomitable. As a U.S. Army Ranger, our mission is to be the, we're America's premier direct action raid force. So, you know, in all my rotations overseas, our job was to kill or capture high-value unarmed

operatives and leaders of the al-Qaeda and Taliban network. Well, you have to essentially be indomitable to do that. You have to learn to compartmentalize, to dissociate in many ways. And so the trick then is when you exit that environment, what you're essentially asked to do is to raise your hand and say, I need help. Well, that's not very rational when you think about people like myself who have been in that environment.

environment for a decade where you're experiencing combat, you're consistently deploying, you're losing friends, you're having all these situations, and then you are supposed to walk out and say, hey, I need help. And so one of the key things is to...

get connected, get connected to other service members who have exited. And by way of that, also get connected to your community because the key community that you have to learn how to reintegrate into first and foremost is your family. It's your spouse, it's your children. And it takes a lot and it's a worthwhile endeavor. And I would also say, you know, it leads into the difference between

about persevering and enduring, that's one of the key juxtapositions that Blaine and I suggest in our book, Perseverance is Greater Than Endurance. It is that, you know, we will all reach the extent of our endurance. All of us will. You know, it doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what you're doing. It doesn't matter what you're experiencing. And, you know, speaking from our experience, you know,

And it is in those moments that we would suggest that we need to persevere as opposed to endure. And, you know, we saw a lot of this in COVID. That's kind of how the thought process started to bring us back to the idea that we need to persevere.

Yeah.

undefined change and uncertainty, much like we're all experiencing today in this era.

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Well, I would guess that endurance is right. You endure a hardship, perseverance, that thing encompasses endurance, but you also have a look ahead. It's not, you know, you're looking beyond the experience as to what's next and what you're going to do when you come out of it. I don't know. That's just my,

my definition, but no, I think that's, I think that's, that's very in line with it, the way that we think about it. And, you know, one of the components that we talk about is that it's very common when we are confronted with, with adversity, with a lot of change and uncertainty. One of the things that we always do is we create false finish lines. You know,

You know, we try to project forward. Well, maybe we'll be back by spring. Well, maybe we'll be back by Easter. Well, maybe we'll be this. Maybe we'll be that. Maybe all these different things. And, you know, it's understandable. The human brain craves certainty. And so when we are confronted with uncertainty...

it immediately brings about this fear and we start to look for ways that we can find certainty again or frame certainty within our environment. And, you know, quite simply stated, I think spending a decade in the special operations community beat that out of us. There is no certainty anymore.

You know, there's it's going to be uncertain. It's going to be asymmetrical. And instead of trying to predict, we would encourage that we prepare. So prepare for an uncertain future that you cannot predict and prepare to persevere when you are confronted with that change in uncertainty that otherwise just doesn't make much sense. Who's the advice aimed at in the book? Because

By the way, thanks for sending me a copy. My wife snatched it up and she's reading it, so I'll ask her later. Who is the advice aimed at? Is it business people? Is it regular folks? Is it former military people?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's aimed at leaders. It's aimed at leaders that want to grow and want to grow through what they go through. And to us, the way that we view that is that, you know, leadership is a verb. It is not a title. We view leadership, our working definition at least, is that it is a relational process of influence that yields results. And it's

You know, you could be leading in a relationship. You could be leading in your family. You could be leading in your church on the soccer field. You could be coaching kids. You could be leading a business. You know, to us, if you are a leader who wants to learn some skills in terms of relationships,

resilience in terms of growth and in terms of achieving those objectives when you are going through some brand of growth, change or adversity. That's who this book is for. What kind of reactions have you gotten from different audiences? Like any surprising reactions like, hmm, that's not what we meant, but I guess they took it that way.

Well, I would tell you that some of the most powerful reactions that we have gotten have been from our teammates, the people who we experienced some of this, some of these experiences with. The way that the book kind of unfolds is that chapters one and two are illustrations of perseverance through adversity. In chapter one, I tell a story about a mission called Winter Strike 2003 in Afghanistan, a

Blaine tells a story about leading in Afghanistan in 2009 in Chapter 2. And then we introduce the five factors of perseverance, which are change, uncertainty, acceptance, choice and growth. And then we descend into the particulars of that and provide some useful frameworks chapter by chapter. And then we kind of land the plane by kind of bringing that all together together.

in closing it out. And I would say that, you know, some of the reactions that we have gotten thus far, you know, for us, like we, we don't particularly love telling war stories. Um, we don't tell war stories for war stories sake, but to tell them and to tell them in a way that, uh,

opens up new windows into old truths that will be helpful for other leaders that are illustrative of what taking these kind of actions can look like when they're persevering through adversity is why we chose to do it. And to have some of our teammates, Rangers who served with me, Green Berets who served with Blaine, come back and say, hey, thank you. You know, you guys nailed it. You represented us well. That's been a really cool reaction so far. Some business leaders have given us some really...

Powerful reactions that really meant a lot to us that are kind of thematically in line with what I just said, which was somebody had written a review that said, what I appreciate about this is that this is no chest thumping former special operations guys telling you how great they are. This is a humble, authentic look at.

at leading through difficult times. That meant a lot. We've also gotten a lot of feedback from folks that have said, I really appreciate how you guys have blended gripping and gritty stories with practical and useful frameworks so that I can actually take this as a handbook and actually helps me get through what I'm going through.

That's great. Because of your training, I mean, what is hard for you or what is hard for your co-author to do? You know, I don't know. What have you noticed that – is there nothing bother you? I mean, is everything kind of like you just do it and there's no resistance, there's no procrastination? Or are you just at a lower level of that than most folks? What's your life experience like after having gone through all these, again, high-discipline situations?

I mean, I would say we well, I guess I'll just speak for myself. I mean, you know, same kind of human, you know, interactions and baits as anybody else in terms of the hardest thing that I have ever had to do. The hardest thing I've ever had to do is come home.

I did not know what that meant and I did not know how to do it. And so I left the army in 2009 to be a husband and a dad and I just didn't know how to do it. So I ran, I went many years with undiagnosed PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, sleep apnea, nerve damage, spinal compression, musculoskeletal issues. And that's a really bad strategy of living a rich life. And so it was really hard for me to truly come home and to truly reconnect

with my wife, my kids, my community. That was one of the hardest things, I think, for me, Richard. Yeah, I guess if everyone's operating in a certain way and you're just totally different and you're just so used to like, come on, let's go, or this is life-threatening or whatever,

Yeah, I mean, I would say that when you live in an environment by which it is critical for your effectiveness in the job to be able to do what you want to do, it's very difficult to live a completely different way once you come out.

to compartmentalize and dissociate, it's hard to come out of that. So I think it's less about speed of life. It's less about, you know, stick-to-it-ness or frustrations or anything like that. I think it's a little bit more about, I don't even know how to connect with myself, let alone anybody else. Is it because there's just not a lot of time for reflection of self because you're always busy or you're always literally under fire or it's always an emergency in those situations or...

Like, what is it? Like, why do people get disconnected from themselves? Because I guess that just everything they do and are has to be a part of the group in order for the group to survive. Yeah. I mean, I think a good way to explain it is think about any neighborhood or building. You can think about a, maybe let's just say, think about a busy street where there are a number of shops. And think about it.

Think about it this way. We're on one side of the street and we're inside a shop and everybody is safe and we're covered and protected and everything. And looking across the street, we know that there is a row of shops where there are enemy in there that are waiting to

kill us. And our job is to leave our covered and concealed position, go across that street, and enter and clear and eliminate the enemy threat shop by shop. That is a wholly unnatural and terrifying thing to even wrap your head around. That's our job. And so you learn to compartmentalize that fear. It's not that the fear is not there. It's there. You learn to compartmentalize the

feelings that you have in order to conduct your mission, in order to do that job. And, you know, it's not in many ways, I don't think it's radically dissimilar from getting some, you know, really scary news. Like, I mean, I know you went through, you know, cancer. That sounds terrifying. And yet you have to make some decisions, right? Yeah. I remember when I sat in the doctor's office, she told me, and like, you feel like your insides liquefy. And I thought...

I just thought, oh, I'll live to like 85 or something and then just peacefully die. And then I thought, wait a minute, I may die like in a few months. Holy shit. What's going on? You know? Yeah. That's, that's like, you know, what do I do with this? And so I think a lot of it, you know, you know, being in combat is a very extreme situation, but I mean, I think, I think there's, there's so many of us who've experienced so many things. I mean, just think about like, you know, having a baby, having a kid, you

You can read all the manuals and things like that. You know, the what to expect when you're expecting, if that's even still a thing. I don't know. My kids are 22 and 20 now. But you can you can read all these things. And, you know, it's all like, you know, baby bumps and belly kisses until you have a colicky baby at three o'clock in the morning and you're pulling your hair out and you're like, I don't even know what the hell is going on here. That's life. And so if in the military.

in that kind of job, you learn how to compartmentalize these things.

And again, what I would say is that it's not that it went anywhere. It's still there. But there's a critical aspect of accepting what you can control and what you cannot control and then making the best choices you can to progress towards what you are trying to achieve. And we talk a lot about that in the acceptance and choice chapters when we talk about this idea of uncertainty, acceptance, choice, and growth, because regardless of where you are, whether you're that

new father or mother, whether you've just received that cancer diagnosis, whether you're about to assault across a street into enemy-held terrain, whether you're navigating a business through rate changes, supply chain issues, all the things that we are experiencing at any given point in time, you know, you do have to accept what you can control, surrender what you cannot

control and start making choices in keeping with your mission instead of getting mired down in the chaos and all the things that you cannot control. And we talk a lot about the trichotomy of control in the acceptance chapter, where there are things that you can control, there are things that you cannot control, and there are things that you can influence. And it's thoughtful for us as leaders to look at each of those components. And then when we talk about choice,

you know, look, nobody really got credit for what they could possibly do. You know, like they get credit for what they do. And so you have to make a choice. And we talk about making a choice that is in keeping with your values, your creeds, your ethos, all the things that you say that you are. You know, we as leaders must make those choices in keeping with that so that we can get to that fifth factor, which is growth in this in this entire perseverance prospect.

So what, I don't know, I don't want to spoil the book for anyone, but is there a sample situation maybe that didn't make it into the book that would employ the five factors or, you know, again, sample situation that maybe a lot of people have had in their life and how would it be handled under your framework versus how they normally handle it? Yeah, sure. That's a good question. I, frankly, I don't mind sharing a little bit of some of the stories that we use to illustrate it in the book, if you're comfortable with that, Richard. Yeah, sure. Sure, go ahead.

Yeah, great. So I'll share just a little bit of...

where I really saw these five factors of perseverance come to life as a young leader in the U.S. Army Special Operations world as a Ranger. And so I'll just kind of go all the way back in the wayback machine here. When the towers fell on 9-11, I was the leader of a nine-man Ranger assault squad. I had been in the Army for four years, and I also happened to be engaged to be married in December. Now,

My mother-in-law to be had cancer and she had had her first round of chemotherapy on September 10th, 2001. So after the towers fell, we were in her hospital room watching the towers fall in New York. I was out in Washington state. She went on hospice care the next day. She had a day of clarity on September 17th, 2001. We called it just as a peace over.

got married in the living room. She died two days later, and then I deployed to the Middle East eight days after that for my first time. So now I'm over in the Middle East. Lots of change and uncertainty is swirling here. I'm over in the Middle East. It was a pre-planned deployment to Jordan, but once the towers fell, anything was on the table. We didn't know. We were the closest to the fight, and we didn't know if we were going to be the ones that would be the first insertion.

So I'm not allowed to call home for about three to four weeks. I finally call home. I finally get a hold of my wife and she says, I'm pregnant. To which I say, of course you are. Yeah, of course you're pregnant. You know, more, more change, more uncertainty. Nine months later, I was listening to our son, Jaden, being born from a satellite phone in Bagram, Afghanistan. And as a guy who grew up without a dad in the picture, the last thing I wanted to be was absent as a father. And that's the first thing that I was. So I'm not allowed to call home.

So I was around for about three of the first 36 months of our marriage. Being a war commuter, it was nothing but chaos. And so come the fall of 2003, I said, you know, I got to take a break. I got to get off the line. I got to get out of the deployment cycle.

And I asked for a compassionate reassignment to go down to the Ranger Regiment headquarters in Fort Benning, Georgia. And I was awarded that. So I was going to be a part of the team that conducted assessment and selection. And I have orders and we're getting ready to go. And I am packing up the house and we're super excited. There's hope on the horizon. And I go to work one morning in October and I come home in December. We had gotten all

alerted the entire 75th Ranger Regiment was sent back to Afghanistan. And we were sent deep up into the Hindu Kush mountain range. So when change strikes, it comes at you fast and often and often without warning, just like this third rotation that came out of nowhere. Brings about uncertainty. You're uncertain in your capabilities. You're uncertain if you have what it takes to get through what you're faced with as you're training up to it.

And uncertainty brings about a basic human emotion, which is fear. We like to use a lot of words to make it sound nicer, like anxiety or concern, but it's fear. And, you know, fear can be that friction that holds us in place where pain or purpose will eventually make us move off that mark. We'll either run from our pain or we will run toward our purpose. And so here I am. I'm a young leader. I'm a young father. My son doesn't even know who I am.

I'm the third ranking man in a ranger platoon of 40 personnel. The number one man, the platoon leader, was brand new. So the guy that I had done all the previous rotations with was gone. Brand new leader. We happen to have a really poor platoon sergeant in the number two position. And so there I am. I'm kind of the guy that people are looking to for leadership to hold this platoon together. And we weren't even supposed to be there. And

I wasn't even supposed to be there. And so it was a really difficult mission, you know, the first three weeks of it, which I'll just talk a little bit about here. We were sent up into the Nuristan province, into the Cantewa Valley. And, you know, the temperatures during the day were in the teens. During the night, it was in the single digits. We were operating at 7,500 feet altitude, climbing up to clear towns and villages at 11,000 feet. And something that you should know about

about helicopters is that when the temperature goes down and

and the altitude goes up, the aircraft lift capability decreases. They cannot carry as much weight, which meant that they couldn't get up to us to give us close air support, and they couldn't resupply us. So they would drop one meal per man per day at the base of this valley, and we would have to send a patrol of rangers down, you know, six kilometers one day to retrieve these meals. They'd go back up seven kilometers to meet the rest of the company. Next day, down seven, back up eight.

all while we were, you know, doing all this clearing operations. So we were down. I had lost 30 pounds. We had to get the boys out of the cold because we would have cold weather injuries. Hypothermia would set in. We'd had to, you know, establish fires. We would get into barns just to get out of the cold. So now we all had fleas. It was a really tough experience. And the thing about it is, is that, you know, it

So it was bad and it only got worse when on November 14th, 2003, we took our first casualty of the war. Sergeant J. Anthony Blessing was killed by a roadside bomb outside Nangalam, Afghanistan. And, you know, I'll tell you, Richard, that when you're confronted with these things that you, you know, you just didn't see coming and it's just one thing after another, this is where acceptance is really important.

Yeah.

One thing that we share with people is that you typically know that you're being called to persevere in life when the very next thing you need to do is the very last thing you want to do. And this goes back to the discipline that we talked about. And in that moment at that night, I kind of did the only thing I felt like I could do, which was put my gear on, turn off the satellite radio and troop the line, you know, walk

from windswept observation posts to duck walking under the fire smoke in mud huts and things like that just to check on the boys. And in many ways, have them check on me because, you know, perseverance is an endeavor best done together and not alone. And so...

You make those choices and you make one choice to persevere at a time over and over and over again. And, you know, on the other side of that is when you really grow. You know, we often say that we don't get to choose the time when destiny calls us to become who we were meant to be and the leader that we were meant to be. But we just get to choose whether to respond when it does. You know, we...

We were able to come out of that mission whole, all of us together. We had a couple of follow-on missions. But what I will tell you is that one mission after another, one choice after another, when confronted with change and uncertainty, you grow. And I felt like it was a formative experience where I grew more into the leader that I was being called to be. And we did accomplish our mission. But not only that is that I learned that

not only could I persevere through these difficult times, but I became a leader who knew how to persevere. And that served me well when I got out of the military, for example, and was in a $7 billion healthcare organization that went through a total restructure. That was really hard. There was a lot of really difficult things about that when you go through an entire organizational restructure and you have to persevere through it and you have to make those little choices.

one at a time. So that's an example from my time in service that I'd share, you know, to hopefully kind of open up a window into those factors of change, uncertainty, acceptance, choice and growth. Yeah, as you're talking, I was thinking again about perseverance versus endurance. And maybe like another facet is like endurance means you have to, you know, go through something and you don't really have many dials or you don't really have much input or ability to change the situation. You just kind of kind of have to endure it.

But I guess if you have tools, mental tools, physical tools, whatever, you can endure and persevere. You can look ahead. You can learn from it. You can, you know, do things inside the space you have still. It's like, well, focus of control. It's smaller, but endurance, I mean, like you have none of that. I think that's a really, that's a good way to talk about it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good way to think about it, Richard, because, you know, in many ways, enduring is kind of just surviving where persevering is thriving. And we wanted to give people some of those mental models, some of those frameworks that they could look at something like this and say, OK, I can see that I have been struck by change and uncertainty.

Let me locate myself kind of on this ridgeline of adversity. You know, am I in the rock slide right now? Am I in a valley? Am I on a climb? Am I on the hilltop? We talk about that as an illustration just to kind of help people wrap their heads around where they are. And then how do I shrink the world down to make one next good decision at a time amidst

All of this change and uncertainty that I'm being struck with. And the truth is, I like how you use the term locus of control, because I think what happens a lot of times is that I think some people feel like their life is happening to them and they have no control. But the truth is, is that you can always control the way that you are viewing, framing and reframing things. You can always control the way that we respond to

two things that are happening around us. And I think it starts to move us out of that endurance mindset and we start to grasp a little bit more of that agency that that locus of control enables us with. And I think that's when we can really start to thrive and we can really start to persevere. Yeah, I was thinking also in a war, like when, you know, a member of your troop is killed

I don't know. I would think like, I just want to kill all the, you know, I want to kill everyone, all the enemy. It just feels like, because if you don't watch out, how could you not grow like full of hate for each person in your troop that they hurt or kill? You just, you get more and more enraged and just want to kill every single one of them. Yes. And, um,

that's one of the stories that I touch on this a little bit in the book. We came back from that mission in Cantewa. We were inserted into another mission into the Chagall Valley, and we had a really, really nasty insertion that people can read about in the book. But a

A couple weeks later, as we're in these sustained operations, and, you know, mind you, this is just a couple weeks after our friend was killed, we get attacked and, you know, we respond. And in our response, we, you know, we start clearing this village.

And Richard, I'm here to tell you that every single one of us felt that rage. Every single one of us felt ready to close with and destroy the enemies of our country, because that is the job of a ranger, is to close with and destroy the enemies of our country. And every single one of us, not a single shot was fired in that village.

because it is a testament to the moral character of the American soldier and the U.S. Army Rangers. You know, our creed demands this of us, that we are mentally alert, physically strong, and morally straight. And every single Ranger was all of those things

that night as we were going through clearing because it's not that you don't feel and remember what I said earlier, you have to compartmentalize, you have to shrink the world down. We were conditioned, trained to be lethal to those who were the enemies of our country, not to innocent civilians.

And, you know, it doesn't get talked about much, but I would suggest that that is something that that I really would hope that most Americans would know about those who are at the tip of the spear of U.S. policy and who are executing out there is the restraint is the story. The discipline is the story. The the

the commitment to being, you know, morally straight is the story because no one was hurt that night who did not need to be. And I'm really proud of the guys. And I do think that that is another sign

Yeah.

trying to liberate oppressed people all over the globe. And far more often, you know, even though you are hurt more than anything, yes, you're angry. It manifests as anger, but you're more saddened. You're hurt by the loss of one of your brothers or sisters. You still must remain, you know, morally straight and in line with your mission. And that's what we did. How do you control yourself when you're in the middle of combat? Like,

Literally when you're being shot at or you're shooting at other people or, you know, you're trying to kill them, but you're also, again, trying to control yourself and not being like this blind rage. It must be a very strange thing to do. Yeah. Well, I mean, you get a lot of training at it.

it. You know, Blaine and I share this all the time that cool breeds cool. So when you start taking fire, the first person that all of the boys are going to look at is the leader. They're going to look to see what the leader does. And if the leader panics and freaks out, then everybody will panic and freak out. If the leader keeps it cool, everybody will keep it cool. Same goes in any

In any business, on any team, watch sports teams. You can see when the team captain freaks out, everybody freaks out. You can see when the team captain stays cool, people stay cool. They get their wits about them. You know, they take the next shot. They do what they got to do. Same happens in business. Same happens in nonprofits. Same happens in just about anything. People are looking to leaders to see how they will respond and they will model how they respond to that. So what does it look like today, Laney? Well,

Is the point of this book to be a feeder for, let's say, a classroom that you and your co-author would run to teach young people or business people? Or where do you see all this headed right now? Yeah. So our business, Applied Leadership Partners, which anybody can check us out at AppliedLeadershipPartners.com.

We do leadership development training with companies all over the United States from Fortune 100 companies to small businesses, local businesses and nonprofits and everything in between. And we use a lot of our experiences both in the private sector and the commercial sector and the nonprofit sector and also in the military.

to articulate some of these lessons learned in leadership wisdom. And so a lot of what we do is we come alongside teams. We do leadership development. We present different modules of instruction. We guide teams through not just the awareness, but the application and the reflection of these things. We also do keynote addresses for large settings, you know, national sales meetings or large conferences. We come in and we do that. The

book is a really nice add-on to that. We oftentimes will be asked to do a keynote that is essentially Perseverance is Greater Than Endurance, where we share some of these insights and stories for the purpose of helping people wrap their minds around that five-point framework. And, you know, that is our all-day, everyday business. We're very blessed to be able to do that. And it is a blast, Richard. It is a real blast. You know, when you work with people, obviously you don't want to, you know,

are they a mess discipline wise? Do they just need a little bit of guidance? I mean, what's the state of people that you work with? Are they all over the place? Like you have a vetting process. We only get like really, you know, disciplined ones that just need a little bit of a nudge to be successful. We work with leaders everywhere.

In industry agnostic, we work with leaders typically who are going through some brand of growth, change and adversity is where we're really well suited. And our experience is that, you know, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I want to suck today as a leader. And so most of the time, what our experience is, is that people really want to do a great job.

They really want to care for their people. They really want to steward their mission well. And they really don't necessarily know how to do...

do it, how to apply some sound frameworks to actually be more effective and be more effective for the long haul. And so the leaders that we serve, they're humble and they're hungry and they're looking to get better. And they just, you know, just like anybody, they just need somebody to help them kind of point the way. And so that's why Blaine and I built our company. And that's why we call it Applied Leadership Partners is because, you know, we're in this era where

all manner of information is accessible at anybody's fingertips. And that's great. That's fine, you know, especially with AI, the proliferation of AI. But information is not the same as understanding. So knowing how to take those data points and apply

apply it to certain settings. And it is certainly not the same as wisdom, which is really the, you know, knowing how to consistently apply right understanding to right situation to yield best possible outcomes. And so most of the time what we find is that leaders, they need a little bit of that help apply

applying all the goodness that they have in their head or what they've read or listened to on podcasts and what they want to try to do. So we equip them with very useful frameworks that are flexibly applicable to a host of leadership environments because at the end of the day, like, you know, scripts don't work. We're not living, we're not all living in a movie where I'm going to say this and then Richard's going to say that.

And then my is going to be this. That's just not the way it works. That's not how human beings are. So we want to give people flexible frameworks. And that's that's what we find more than anything, Richard, is that people really want to do a great job. And it is truly our honor to come alongside some of the most talented human beings and leaders that we have ever come across.

It's an honor. We get invited to be kind of on the trail with them, as we like to say, and just, you know, help them give a little perspective, equip them with some frameworks and kind of walk some hard miles alongside them. So what do you just go on questions? We're almost done. What do you see as like the biggest point of failure for most leaders that haven't had you guys come in to help them and train them? Like, you know, where are people falling down? They mean well, according to what you're saying, and I believe you. But where do they lack? Yeah, it's a good question. I

I would say that a couple of things, and this might sound surprising, but most of the leaders that we talked to initially aren't really 100% sure on exactly what it is they're supposed to be doing. And they're not 100% sure on exactly what it is that their team is supposed to be doing. So that's one, is I would say the clarity. And we talk a lot about that with teams today.

through a framework that we teach a lot, which is empowerment and accountability. Giving people like actual useful frameworks on that. So clarity is one of the things. I think that's why you see a lot of organizations fall into the trap of mission creep or mission drift, where they kind of get a little bit off course. I think that in addition to that kind of

really vectoring into what are the key priorities of work that our department, our team needs to be working on that is in service to the key goals, objectives and mission that we're trying to get to. So again, it's a little bit of clarity and then it's prioritization. And then I would also tell you that another key theme that we see a lot and that we really do a lot of teaching with organizations around this as well is the lack of willingness to have the difficult conversations that need to be had.

And the lack of ability to effectively have those difficult conversations. Blaine and I share all the time, you know, with people. And this is also a key point about what you're going to persevere through adversity. If you're really going to keep your eyes set to that North Star is that we need to be seeking alignment with people, not agreement. Alignment is harmony of effort. Agreement is harmony of opinion. I think a lot of times we get lost in this trap of.

of litigating things point by point and seeking agreement. And I don't think it's nefarious in its onset. I think people genuinely want to get along with their teammates. They would like to be agreed with. Everyone would like to be agreed with. But I think we just need to be okay with alignment as opposed to agreement sometimes and respect the fact that, you know, we don't have to agree on everything to align on anything. In fact, we can walk down the same road towards the same objective and be on two different sides of the road.

but still execute that mission together and still align on a purpose together. And I think that that's just a big thing that we see unfolding, you know, both in a cultural context, but also in organizations all over the United States. Those are some of the key areas that we have seen happening

help leaders kind of move through. And I guess the last one that I would say is just the dealing with the uncertainty is kind of a bit of an umbrella mega theme over all of that is, you know, Richard, like your human brain craves certainty. That's why we drink the same drinks. We wear the same kind of clothes. We frequent the same kind of restaurants. We watch the same kind of shows. The human brain craves certainty and pattern in an otherwise chaotic world. And when all

all of that is kind of peeled back and we're confronted with uncertainty, such as when you experience COVID, for example, or when we're going through, you know, all the things that happen in the world. You know, it's goodness gracious, you know, it's April 25th, 2025, as we're recording this here. And, you know, I got to say, I can read or hear the word uncertainty a bajillion times, Michael, as a watchword right now.

Uncertainty is maddening for human beings. And Blaine and I wanted to equip human beings with this book here as a little bit of a touch point for them to be able to not only navigate uncertainty wirelessly,

but lead others through uncertainty and grow and win together in the process. Yeah, it seems like, I don't know, I guess, well, you're talking about alignment. Let me get back to that for a minute. So I can see that someone would say, yes, I agree with you, but so it means they're agreeing. You have agreement, but you don't have alignment. You know, I see things this way. And that probably never comes out, I guess, maybe because of, you know, two people, there's a different power dynamic between the two of them or one of them just doesn't like conflict or whatever.

They're like, forget it. I'll just go along and get along, that kind of stuff. So as a leader, is it someone's job to discern that in their people? Are they just saying yes to me because I'm the leader? Or do they really agree with what I'm saying and they're bought in? Because I don't want anyone to just say yes, yes, yes. But secretly, they're like, this is stupid. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. And, you know, it's interesting. We hear the...

A lot of people are looking for buy-in. And I think that we would encourage that ownership is greater than buy-in in the sense that let's extend to people the opportunity to actually have a little bit more agency in the process. Candidly, that's what the workforce is looking for right now. You know, we're in an era where in the working world, people are looking for more

out of their organizations and their leaders in this era. And so we say, we use the terms, you know, ownership is greater than buy-in because, you know, think about like a timeshare, like, you know, it's like, yeah, you kind of own a timeshare, but you're more like buying in, you know, like, and as part of that, you know, as part of your buy-in, there's a certain like maintenance component there. So if like the hot water bursts, you know, from the time that you went into your,

condo in Florida one year to the next, you might not have really even known that it got replaced because it's all part of your maintenance budget that you buy into. But think your home that you live in. If the hot water heater bursts, no one is coming. Unless you call them yourself, right? Because you own it.

And there's a pride in ownership. And so extending a little bit of that pride of ownership to some of our personnel, empowering them a little bit more makes the accountability process far more generative and far easier. And it becomes a little bit less of a power dynamic struggle and a little bit more of a...

you know, collaborative process in getting to where we're trying to go. And you know what? Sometimes, though, you know, some people just don't agree and they're just not going to agree. And that's fine. But if we're super clear, go back to what I said about one of the big failure points. If we're super clear on what our priorities are, if we're super clear on the objectives and

on the goals that we are trying to reach and we're off the mark. Look, this is not like a emotional event kind of situation. You know, agree, disagree, you know, all these kind of things. Like in the end of the day, hey, we missed the time horizon on this project. It didn't, we didn't deliver it to market on time.

We need to address the failure points and we need to fix that. Now, we should be going deep into those feedback loops. We should be getting perspectives from those that are closest to the action, people in the middle. We should be getting all of those perspectives so that we can formulate a common operating picture to then move the process forward. But there's really not that much of an argument to be had and no need to wrestle into a power dynamic if we're all working

owners in our portion of the process, and we are all headed towards the same objective. Good. That makes sense. So what's the best way for, first of all, who would qualify to work with you or to go through your programs? Like, does a leader have to be at a certain size company? What attributes do they have to have? Best attributes is be hungry and humble. If you're a leader that wants to sharpen your skills...

come find us. Come to AppliedLeadershipPartners.com. If you're a leader that is going through some brand of growth, change, or adversity, and you'd love a little bit of perspective, come find us at PerseveranceBook.com. You can get Perseverance is Greater Than Endurance wherever books are sold. If you come to PerseveranceBook.com,

And we've got it all in one location for you where you can find link outs to your Amazon, your bookshops, your Barnes and Noble. And if you are a leader in an organization where you feel like some of this stuff resonates and you would like to talk a little bit more about it, then just, you know, reach out to us. We love meeting new people. Hit us up at contact at Applied Leadership Partners dot com. And, you know, let's explore if we might be a good fit for you. Well, that's excellent. Well, Brandon, thanks so much for taking your time.

It's a late Friday evening. I'm sure you got lots of good stuff to do and ice cream to eat and all that stuff. So again, thanks for coming to the podcast. I really appreciate it. Hey, Richard, thanks for having me so much. I appreciate you. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com. This podcast is for information only. No advice of any kind is being given. Any action you take or don't take as a result of listening is your sole responsibility. Consult professionals when advice is needed.