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How to Make Decisions Under the Microscope in a High Stakes Environment with Steve Young · Commander's Intent

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oak.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Favorite quote of mine that I learned as a cadet about 40 years ago by Douglas MacArthur when he was superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields and other days, will bear the fruits of victory.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: We're here today with Steve Young.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: He's a family friend of mine, and our parents grew up together.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody knows him as an NFL quarterback, is probably one of the great quarterbacks ever to play the game.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: He was a Hall of Famer, Super Bowl champion, Super Bowl MVP, two-time NFL MVP.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: And probably the most difficult thing he did was to follow Joe Montana in San Francisco when Joe Montana was still considered a very good quarterback.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Very good.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: He was the best.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was kind of good.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was the king.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that's not an it's probably the most difficult thing you did on the playing field.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: But today, what interested me most isn't those accomplishments.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's more about the decisions that you made along the way that got you the success and the failures throughout it all, and what's helped you to be where you are right now.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: On this show, on Commander's Intent, we spend a lot of time talking about good decisions and when and making good decisions when information is incomplete, when the pressure is high, and when the clock is working against you.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there are a few environments where that is more, at least more visible, maybe not as consequential, but where it's more visible than playing quarterback in the NFL.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have to talk about X and O's or great games today, but we are going to talk about football.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: In my mind, and you can counter this, but I don't think you will.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Football is the best team sport that there is.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's I think there are a few sports where one fantastic player amounts to about nothing if he doesn't have a good team around him.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Even a half a dozen good players, if they're surrounded by other team members that are not in sync or they're not playing up to par, they're going to really struggle, especially in a highly competitive market like the National Football League.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: The magic, Derek, is that there's too many people.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: By definition, I guess science has proven that six is the most humans that can work together before it starts to devolve.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the seventh person devolves at eighth geometrically, it gets worse and worse.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time you get to 11 in football, it's nuts.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so the idea that you can take 50 guys on a team, play each other, and there's art in it, that's where the magic comes.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why football is so unique.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And why so you and like I revere the artistry of uh flying planes, and especially in difficult circumstances, like you guys did for a lifetime.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the cockpit and the pocket are actually familiar to me.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Those what what I suspect you go through and what you went through in preparation, and what we go through in preparation, then how you have to actually do the job is similar qualities, is what I would say.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and so football is that's why when I my favorite time when I ever played was in the locker rooms after a game, and especially championship games, where you won, and it's like how did so many people come together?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: How many it's too many people?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's irrational that so many people have come together to do this.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's why the those kind of moments are so memorable, because I think we all recognize that it's chaos, it's too many people, too many interests, too many self-interests, too many disparate interests, and like, but yet coming together, that is amazing.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: I completely agree with you.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: There was at one point in my career where I was going to Afghanistan and we were taking 18 aircraft over there.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: So you have 18 pilots, and then you have an advanced team, and then you have about 400 maintenance personnel that are getting those aircraft together, all so that you can launch in an hour window in the middle of the night, so you can take off and rejoin an air refueling tanker at about 5:30 in the morning and fly in the in this case, you know, the first leg is to the Azores off the coast of Portugal.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the amount of people that it took to make all of that happen, my flying skills were just a small portion of that entire thing.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: I just had to say go.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was leading it, so I just had to say go, but everybody else had to do their job.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, it looked like a clown hat.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's like the expectation is zero defect, and you actually live that out in a way that defies, again, it's irrational that humans don't make mistakes.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: But we have zero defect kind of a standard, and with that, that's how you that's how you do it.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I there's that sounds familiar.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I would not want to, I have no strength, I have no expertise to do what you're talking about.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds amazing.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And what that must feel like when it's done, when so many people have come together, it has to say that feel like a championship football game.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I think.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: It is pretty awesome.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's pretty inspiring to think about it.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: I also compare it to like a forward air controller, a forward air controller is somebody who controls in a close air support fight, they're controlling the battle space, and so they're talking to the ground commander.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: They have to know where all of the soldiers are on the ground, and then they're having aircraft check in and out of their airspace the entire time, and you're acting as an air traffic controller while you're flying your airplane, and also you're employing weapons the entire time, and you're keeping track of who has what weapons, and you're keeping track of who is where in the airspace.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the first time you do it, you feel like you're on the defensive the entire time and you can't catch up and you you can't keep track of all the information.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: But then when you finally sort it out and when people do what you expect them to do, it really is pretty magical.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of quarterbacks through the years have come to me with especially now that the game is more about the dynamic of being able to throw it and run it.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's it's added complexity to the job, right?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I lift that complexity because I had the talent to go run.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so like it made doing the what everyone thought the main job was, which it is, is to sit there and and throw the ball and and deliver.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And people who could run around as the years went on would say, Hey, how did you how did you do that?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because I break the huddle, I go to the line of scrimmage.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think a pretty good chance me holding on to the ball is the best option.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So then how do I force myself to go through the difficulty of trying to refine my skills so that I can become a sophisticated passer of the football, which does not have anything to do with running around.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And and I told him the only way to do that is to go to school.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I always say I went to law school while I played, and the memorization needed for law school was nothing to the memorization that was needed to play great NFL quarterback.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And because the memorization had to be reflexive recall, not take a test, regurgitate it back.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: But like you guys described in the cockpit, like everything becomes a reflex, and you almost don't even remember doing it all because it just comes out of you as you've trained.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so the training that I'm urging other quarterbacks to go through is what I learned from Joe Montana and from Jim McMahon and others that showed me that owning the data and reflexes, being able to recall it in real time is how you were able to now be the best passer, the best athlete, because your mind is calm, it's peaceful, you see things clearly, you're making decisions that are super rational and they're not foggy or portions of decisions that you could make.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's when football gets so much easier, and it sounds exactly like great piloting is that great piloters are intuitive.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's not just, oh, I have intuition, I was just blessed from heaven for it.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, no, you had there is everyone's there's athletic ability.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's athletic ability in every profession.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: The athletic ability might not be as obviously athletic as football, but it's still uh there is people that are built to do it, but they still have to do the training.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why the greatest of all time, like a Jerry Rice, never stopped training, never gave a day where he wasn't ready to go play and get better.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so you combine the athleticism and the preparation and this kind of the relentlessness to it, and that's how you become great at something.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that what was it?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Malcolm Gladwell said 10,000 hours to be to be an expert.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: At least.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: At least.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not 10,000 hours in theory, too.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta be out there flying, you gotta be out there on the field, you know.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: You have to be able to snap the ball and the chaos comes.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And now, what do you get?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: What do you really what do you it's I've I've watched this film, I know this defense, I know their tendencies.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: I I got to a point, Derek and Rob, where I could get to the line of scrimmage, see a defense like the Dallas Cowboys, see the individuals that I'd watched so much, and I'd watch so much so that I could tell it was almost, I don't know, I'm I don't play poker, but it must be the same kind of thing where you can you see something in the behavior of the other person, and you're like, I know what you're gonna, I know what's happening.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's all before you even snap the ball.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Think about the advantage that I gained over time because the expertise that I haven't even snapped the ball and I know what it's as if that was in their huddle, right?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know what you're gonna do.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so now I can respond it really quickly if I need to before the ball snapped, and then as I now drop back, I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's happening.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: I already know what's happening.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And now I didn't have to spend time to worry about my guys because I already I intuitively lined them up and got them all set because I I know the formations, I know the motions, I know everything.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it all happens so that I now can focus on the job, which is throwing the football.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the same thing.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's probably very much about flying.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, like the job is to fly it safely and get it done, but there's just all this going on.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I I going back to the story about the young quarterbacks, so many just didn't have, I'm just gonna say the the it's not desire.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: They had a desire to go and get the information and get a reflexive recall and to do the schoolwork.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: It just was really hard.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it was so hard that I think that what happens, you say, well, I'm a B plus quarterback already.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like the extra work to get to A minus, I don't know, man, it might not be worth it.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so in that way, you I've watched, and and some have come back to me at the end of their careers and go, ah, you told me, and I just couldn't put the time in.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And those that do, you can see the results.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think the real difference, the same thing in flying, just like you mentioned.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: There are good skills, they're natural abilities, but if you don't put in that time, the guy who puts in the time, he's got a second, two, three-second advantage over the guy who doesn't put in the time because he's making decisions beforehand.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: He knows what to expect.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: I remember this flying, you know, basic fighter maneuvers where we would do one-on-one against another aircraft.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: And when I first started doing that, it was all I could do not to black out, you know, from over G and just trying to not get shot.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then as you do it, and all of a sudden you start to see the fight, there were times when I could fight with guys, and I could, they were better than me from a hand-eye coordination, but I would make a decision sooner than them.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew where to expect them every time.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't have to worry about the stresses that I felt earlier on.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I was able to beat them time and time again just because I knew what they were gonna do.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of like what you were talking about.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: You do see somebody on the field and go, I know what you're gonna do next.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: I think again, when you talk about this, I've seen the same thing with young pilots get overwhelmed with all the information that's coming at them in the cockpit.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: They haven't done their prep.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: And the thing is, is it's taking them six, seven, eight checks at something before they make a maneuver.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: Where, you know, Derek and I, after many, many years, I know the two or three key things I need to look at before I make a decision.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's the same thing with you as a quarterback, right?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: You you have two or three keys or cues that you're looking at for each plate to double check what you thought you saw before you snapped the ball.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's the same thing.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: I expect certain things in the cockpit and I do two or three checks.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: I don't have to do six or seven because I'm confident that I know what those two or three I've hit main data that I'm looking for to either confirm what I thought was gonna happen or realize that, oh man, they just fooled me.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there's a lot to be said for that, not just in football in the military, but in the business world as well.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: And see if you've transitioned into the business world where you're trying to make decisions ahead of the competition as well.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: But it's the same thing.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: If you've done your homework and you've got the keys and cues, you're gonna be able to make that decision based on smaller bits of information than somebody who's waiting for the entire picture to coalesce before them.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the training that you're talking about, it's that's why the metaphors work.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: The combat pilots can talk, and the metaphors that come out of it or the analogies that come out of it are all useful in business, in families, in relationships.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, how do we do our job and how we do it well?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: That all works.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think about football, it's like the language that you're using is the language that I want to talk about, like I call it anticipatory throwing.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: The real experts are and like the receiver's not open.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: When you throw the ball, the receiver's not open, but you know what's about to happen.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And because of that, you can anticipate.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I always said in the pros, when you got when I got there in college, it felt like every receiver was always open.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then I got to the pros, and no receiver was ever open.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're like, where do you throw it?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's what was so fun about the job is that it was so hard.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it felt like the field was so much smaller and the openings were so little and s and tight.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that you learned, and I remember one time I I was I messed up and didn't see Jerry Rice, and I got sacked, and I went to the sideline.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: The coach says, See he's wide open.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why didn't you throw him the ball?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, I couldn't see him.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: All the big guys in front of me, I couldn't see.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the quote back from him was like, Well, then you better start seeing him.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, thanks for the tip, you know, like, yeah, I can't wait to see what I can't see as soon as I see it, you know.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I realized to do the job, I better figure out how to deliver footballs that I don't know from my eyesight, but I yet know from my expertise, and I might not be as perfect, but we gotta start doing that, or I'm not gonna I'm not gonna keep my job.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started to practice that because I said to myself, you know what, like you said about piloting, I just saw Jerry Rice, I know where he's going.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, you know where he is, let it go.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And to do that in practice was one thing, and then to do it in games was another, but it's that anticipus.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And once you get to that place, that's when you hear after the play, you know, you're waiting for the call from the offense, a coordinator to come in just back then, you hear it in your ear.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: You're hearing the defense yell at each other, there's they're pit fighting, like you're doing that work because they have no all can do is all they can do now is just yell at each other because they can't figure out what how is this possible?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then what I tell the guys they can move around, and then just in case that doesn't work, you can run around and really that's when they that's when they all just kind of throw their helmets down and say, forget it, we quit, you know, and so but it that I think there's I feel a resonance to what you're saying about the preparation and the expertise and what I call the reflexive recall.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: That in combat, it's obviously lives are on the line, football's different, life is not necessarily on the line, but it does feel as exigent as far as making the decisions, having success or failure, and having 80,000 witnesses see it, and you know, there's something something to that.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And criticize you if you make the mistake and yeah, well, it's always your problem.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's but you that's the other problem.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think pilots are probably the same.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think a pilot would ever get out and go, Yeah, you know, you didn't do your job, I did my job.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like if there's a failure in the system, at some level the ball was in my hands, right?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: So in that way, no matter what happens, there's a fundamental principle that the ball was in my hands, and now whatever happens, I have to at least own as a part of uh of the group.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, no one else in the group's gonna own anything.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: If I come off the field and say, ah, yeah, you didn't block the guy, well, he's gonna immediately say, Yeah, but you you you didn't throw it, you know, you didn't throw it, or whatever.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like no one's accountable until the person with the ball in their hand is accountable.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: But once that person with the ball in the hand is accountable and they know it, they know that no matter what happens, I know my guy, I my quarterback, in the end, no matter what happens, he'll stand for it.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Once you know that, now it gives you the not only the empowerment to take chances and do great, you don't have to, you don't have to have the natural human reaction of victimization that happens when things go haywire in a group.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, not me.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big group, it's a lot of people, a lot of stuff, you know.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: But if you get a big group and they all are allowed to do that, the human nature is then everybody's just sitting there pointing fingers, and that's I mean, obviously you can't even think about that in combat, but but in football, you're dead.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that makes me think about how we handle debrief.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that I teach a lot is is is the debrief.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you're always gonna make mistakes.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: I always say that you expect mistakes, but don't accept them.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: That you're always gonna have a mistake.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you correct that?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: How do you realign the team and how do you realign yourself with where you want to go?
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: In the flying world, we take off the rank, you go into a debrief, you say, How did it go?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And you talk through based on your objectives, what were we trying to do today?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you talk through the results, you look at your truth data, you know, the tape and the scores and everything else, and say, Did we meet our objectives or not?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a very habitual thing.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: It happens after every single flight, happen after every single exercise.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I would imagine that the great teams in football are also very good at the debrief, at sitting down and saying, okay, our plan, it was good.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't go as we wanted to, or it did go as we wanted to.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Why did that happen?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: What were some key learning points and what are some instructional fixes to get us going in the right direction or keep us going in the right direction?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and hold on, the key to that, I think, is something you just mentioned there, Steve, where you said that the natural human reaction anytime there's a failure is to try to shun the blame for themselves and to say somebody else did it.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's one of the things in the debrief that Derek and I have talked about a lot is you've got to take your ego off the table.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_03: Rank and ego go out the door because you have to admit, hey, yeah, I was looking at the wrong thing, or I made the turn too early.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: And once you start to do that, I think it brings out that cohesiveness in a team that's able to make mistakes, but then fix those mistakes.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: Is that similar on an NFL squad?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Percent but reminds me of two things, both the debrief and then the pre-brief.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: So what before the night before the game, the coach, Bill Walsh, and then uh all the other coaches that followed him, even today, who are of the tree of Bill Walsh, whether they're the grandsons or great-grandsons at this point, with all the head coaches that are calling plays in the NFL, they all do the same thing.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: The night before the game, they do the first 15, which is they go over the offense, they say, look, these are the first 15 plays I'm gonna call, right?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then he goes through each play and responsibilities.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: So then you're in your mind, you're thinking, overnight, like I know what's coming.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the number of times that we've called the first 15 exactly in order is zero.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: It never happened.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like things, it's just stuff happens, right?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that knowing that we have a plan and it's gonna have to iterate, and there's gonna be mistakes, as you said, Derek, there's gonna be mistakes, but as long as in real time we can own them and everyone knows that, that's when it really gets powerful.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because in the debrief, we don't there's no like you said, ego is not like that has to be kind of table stakes.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you're gonna come in the next day and film work and somebody's gonna try to victimize the moment to like what wasn't wasn't me.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: It it's such a devolving thing.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't hurt as much when it's a lineman or someone else that doesn't touch the ball every time.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's still damaging though, but it's super damaging when the quarterback does it.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I've always said, you know, talk about debriefs.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you like I've said to people who hey, I don't like football, Steve, so I don't really want to hear these stories.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, look, I don't really you don't have to like football, but l but enjoy one part of football.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: You should be able to now that they stream it and you can find it every postgame in the NFL, 16 games a week, you can go post-game and they and the quarterback for the losing team has to come before the media.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: They get fined.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like it has to happen.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can watch 16 losing quarterbacks every week deal with that, right?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it is fascinating.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the guys that are like masters of that moment are the guys that are the masters on the field.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because they realize that moment is vital because they realize I'm not talking to the fans, I'm not talking to the media, I'm talking to the five guys that are paid to protect me, that are paid a lot less than I'm getting paid, and they've got to go fight next week.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: How do I make sure it speaks to them to let them know I got this?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let's learn tomorrow.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's figure out what we're gonna do better, let's let's commune about exactly what the mistakes were.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: But today, this moment, when all the lights are on and all the Action, I got this.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you watch young quarterbacks flail around as they get the questions as a loser of the game, what happened?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see their language, it like it, it's like leaking oil.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can see the oil on the ground.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like the language of it is they're wanting to say, I I know, don't you see it's not my fault?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like and they just can't help themselves because it's human nature.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so youth, you know, you watch young quarterbacks, and then and then I think you either figure it out, or people say, the best quarterbacks are the guys that make the decisions on the field.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the best quarterbacks of mean are the ones that manage the accountability so that everyone can at least be on the field together.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because the second the accountability breaks down, then all of a sudden everyone on the field doesn't feel connected, and that disconnection shows up like you like you can imagine.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's why I really honor what you guys have done in piloting.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like the errors on the field are legion, the errors in combat, like probably not nearly as much, just because the training is so much more intense, you know.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had an experience, my last deployment where I was a squadron commander, talking about debriefing.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: We would have a pilot meeting once a week where we'd sit down and just kind of talk about how the week went and how the all the missions went and share lessons learned.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I felt like I needed to stand up in front of the squadron every time, and I'd start the discussion out by highlighting a mistake that I made or something that I did that didn't go quite as I wanted it to.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it was almost like the floodgates opened.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Once I said something, the people felt like they could talk and they could be a little bit more vulnerable and open about what their role is and why they weren't 100% in any particular mission.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I found it to be very, very effective.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I it sounds just like you leading a debrief for a team or the coaches or the losing quarterbacks, they set the tone for the rest of the week for their entire team based on how they talk.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Not only that, like all the media the next day, because there's always the aftermath, right?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: So Monday morning or Sunday, whatever day is the next day, all the sports pages and all the podcasts and all the stuff is now pouring out all of this analysis of what's gone wrong.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if the quarterback doesn't handle it up front, all that analysis now gets it's as if it's infected the whole situation for the next now.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: You have seven days, and the infection comes in Monday.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like you by the time you get to practice on Wednesday to install for the next week, everyone's had two days of kind of being infected by what the quarterback didn't handle at the end of the game because they lost.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we we get it, we lost.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's a terrible situation.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get back?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why losing becomes if you watch the sports in general, you know what there are teams that just can't get out of the losing mentality, and they say, Well, I we need better players.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, maybe, but it's it's 100% what we're talking about here.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's interesting.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_03: I want to circle back to something you you mentioned earlier because you said you went into a game, your first 15 plays scripted.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: And two things struck me about that.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: The first was you said that we never ran zero times.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_03: Did you ever run the 15 plays as they were scripted?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_03: Now that reminds me of there's a saying by General von Molk, he was a German general in the late 1800s.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_03: He said, No plan survives contact, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_03: And that's really the hallmark of a good plan is its ability to have enough flexibility to understand the enemy you're going up against.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so, again, it just makes me realize just how much resonance there is between an NFL football team and a lot of what Derek and I did on the battlefield.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: The second thought that comes to mind this, though, is embedded in something larger.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_03: And Derek and I have talked about this a lot on the show.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: In the military, there are three levels of planning that we have to do in order to be successful.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: There is strategic, there's operational, and there's tactical.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: And for those in the audience who may not understand those terms, strategic is kind of the long-term big picture kind of things.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: If we're look talking about an NFL team, the strategic decisions normally are made by the owner or the general manager, which players are going to be on the team, who we're going to resign, who we're going to go fight for, and really what kind of coach we're going to bring in.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: Is that a is it a Bill Waltz coaching tree guy?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_03: Is that the kind of offense we want to run?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: And then operational is more kind of how you work against another team.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: You might look at the team that you're going up against and say, hey, their linebackers are slow.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: So if I can get them running sideline to sideline, we can beat them on the outside.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: Great, awesome.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's an operational field.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: And then there's tactical individual plays that are designed to go after an attack using that operational field.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so Derek and I, you know, one of the questions that come up multiple times is that's multiple levels of decision making.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_03: And that's really what you're talking about.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_03: And some of those teams, and I mean, we could name them, but I won't, that that are continually losing, even though they have the first pick in the NFL draft every single year.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: And and and so, you know, a lot of this we look at those are problems of decision making at the strategic level and the operational level and the tactical.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_03: And so the big question I think that that Derek and I have for you, Steve, is what is the what do you see as the key factor in decision making at all three of those levels that need to be done to have a successful team?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: What's what's one of the key factors that you might see that your GM has to be able to make, the coach has to be able to make, you have to be able to make to be successful as a team?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, going back to your first comment about the first 15 plays, but it was Mike Tyson and I love this guy.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think you've probably heard a thousand times.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, right?
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's so true.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what happens.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that punch in the face is a great metaphor for like this three levels or four levels.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: It really starts at the top top, right?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because the owner, we had an owner when I was playing Eddie DuBartolo, who he had a reflexive reaction to players.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: He thought of them like he thought he was kind of a player.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to be.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a it's like it was part because he wasn't, he really honored what playing was like.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like I honor a player because they're they're taking the risks and he created this family.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he always said, welcome to the family when everyone would join, would join the team.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so when the guy's in charge speaks to you as like, if you're not careful, the owner or the general, right, is so far above the rank, is so far above.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I'm just the I'm the nobody, I'm the chattel in this in this scenario.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you empower people that are underneath you to feel like we're partners in this, and that when things go awry, that's what I say.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: When the ball's if the ball's in your hand, you have to have the ultimate ability, the general or the or the owner to at some level to be able to say into the world at whatever time it's appropriate, hey, look, I'm responsible.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: I own this team, I hired the general manager, I hired the coach, I hired these players.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: In the end, I'm not doing my job.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not getting it done.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: What is a as a player, you immediately say, Yeah, I that could be true, but I I I didn't do my part either.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's to me, that that accountability is so vital to a system of a lot of people.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, the general manager has the same kind of thing.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, like if we lose, hey, look, I'm responsible because I chose the players.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: I chose them.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so this I didn't do my job.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's not the right.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember Bill Walsh, the old coach, the Hall of Fame coach, he'd come in at the end of the season if we didn't make the playoffs.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we always make the playoffs because the culture of what we built and what we've talked about here is so entrenched in what we were doing.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: But if we didn't win the Super Bowl, he'd come in off that last loss, whether it was a championship game or playoff game, and he would say, Look, I didn't do my job.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: My job is to win the Super Bowl, and I didn't get it done.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm in charge of getting you guys ready to play Super Bowl football, and I didn't do it.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: But then he'd also slip in a little bit like there's a sense that, and you're not the guys that are gonna be here when I do it again next year.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: But it was, but the intent was, I think the intent is all accountability is is saying I'm in, I'm part of the team.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and if in a team atmosphere of, you know, and a team can be two people in a marriage or two people or five people in a family or in a little business, or it doesn't matter the situation.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Teams are more than one, right?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in that team spirit, if you can get everyone on the team, especially those in charge, in the key moments to speak accountability into the system, we're gonna go a long way.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be resilient, we can take losses, we can go through tough times.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it really comes down to, you know, in football, you talk about the different levels.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: When you're winning, 90% chance you're winning pretty regularly because everyone in the system, no matter where they are in the system, whether it's owner, general manager, coach, assistant coach, equipment man, everything it all infiltrates everywhere.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh either positive infection, and once you set that system, it's tough to get beat.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: I always felt like we were we won before we even went out of the locker room.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it was Bill Walsh who said beginning every season, he'd say, Look, uh guys, I don't care what play we call, I don't care what defense we run, the only way we're gonna win is shared common experiences with each other and an element of love for each other.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's football.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's a football coach talking about that.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty powerful words, yeah.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's insane.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: But fundamentally, he knew that if we were able to create this system of because shared common experiences makes you more collected, we're more connected, and in that connection, there's more naturally accountability because you the more disparate you are, the more easy it is to say, Well, it's not me.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's all of that basic stuff that in systems that people always like, what makes great leaders?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, people who are accountable, vulnerable, authentic, like pretty good start right there, and then because they're they're training, can anticipate and iterate, and people start to get confidence in the ability that like even when mistakes are made, it's like no, we're ahead of the game.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like all of that that stuff and that kind of loyalty gets built that people linemen will get paid less to go and fight for you.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: People will take chances to defend you and that kind of thing.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: So in that way, football's a light, it's like combat light, right?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like, but the same the same things drive, but I would say the same things drive all human inter relationships.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Those relationships are all built off of the same kind of basics, fundamental.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: When you feel you're part of a team, when you feel that the other people trust you and you can trust them, when you when you see it as a shared experience instead of a it's their fault or it's not my fault.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: It makes a huge difference.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: I've been in in fighter squadrons where it was a bunch of guys, it was a bunch of folks doing a job, and that was it.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then I've been in other fighter squadrons where you were part of something bigger than yourself, and you would do anything for the boss, and you would spend any amount of hours to get it right.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's a magical kind of team to be a part of, to where everybody feels that way, and they will do anything for you, and you'll do anything for them.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's you just described what I described as the law of love.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: The law of love is universal truth.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's true, it's undefeated in human experience.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: Think of a terrible human experience, blah, blah, blah, in all humanity, the law of love is undefeated in this sense that can I subsume my, can I have a natural reaction of subsuming myself and my self-interest into the into the group and can lose some of my natural self-interest because we all are built to make sure that we're breathing, that we're living, that we're eating, that we're it's like it's built for self-interest.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: Can we rise up and create this environment you talk about, Derek, where that's that's the abundance, that's the one plus one equals three.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's what everyone's talking about.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: The theory of all that is actually in this what we're talking about.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like if we took this conversation and distilled it and let Claude or someone or some AI bot try to figure out what we're talking about, this is the universal truth of all relationships.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we you can talk about it for uh a million hours and not get closer to what exactly what we're talking about than than this conversation.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: It just feels like that's what keeps coming around over every time.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: You talk about the linemen getting paid less.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think of my crew chiefs.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had crew chiefs who sometimes they were married, had one or two kids, and they're literally living below the poverty line.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: They're making nothing, and yet they spent 60, 70 hours a week at work fixing my airplane because they wanted it to be right, because they had so much pride in having their name on the side of an aircraft and having and being able to participate in something like that.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: They never got to fly any missions, but the idea that they had a part in a mission going well, it it just ever amazed me that they're willing to do that.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: I have you know, friends who are ground controllers, you know, they call them joint terminal attack controllers.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: And again, they're slogging around in the mud in Afghanistan and Iraq, getting shot at, losing friends.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them were killed, and and they're getting paid nothing to do what they do because they love being part of that bigger mission and they love the the trust that they feel with the crew in the team that they work with.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it always amazed me.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: It always made me want to be that much better myself because of what they're willing to do.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's the superpower of leadership to create that environment.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, figure out your personality and your everyone's different, but how can you create an environment where they people know your vulnerability, your authenticity, and that you're demanding of yourself as much as anybody else, and that you'll stand for it, then people will then it's not just a transaction.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, look, at the end, you either you either devolve, everything devolves in this entropic world to a transaction.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't push the rock up the hill, and you have to intentionally what everything we're describing here is somewhere a group of people have decided to collectively push the rock up the hill and not let it fall back to the bottom, because that's what would happen every time.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the and to me, the most successful, enduring legacies are those groups that just never let the rock fall.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like no matter what happens, what I know that's a stupid analogy, but it's like that's how intentional you have to be about it, or we will all end up in transactional relationships.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I always tell you, transactional relationships are at their core, are at their roots, are self-interest.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Self-interest cannot create abundance, it can't do it.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're damned from this.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone we're talking about here is a spirit of abundance, and you can't find it in self-interest.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so, anyone that's a leader that uses the language of transaction and zero-sum game, you're by definition, you're not gonna get where we're gonna get.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: You look at politics today, very much about zero-sum game language.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's about like it, we no matter what happens, by definition, the self-interest won't allow.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're damned from getting the abundance that we're actually seeking, you know, and so it's funny that in every arena, whether it doesn't matter the arena, sports, politics, in combat, in business, it doesn't matter, pick it.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's universal.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's the human universal experience.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you can watch it, and you can watch it post-game and the losing quarterback and listen for the transactional language of victimization, and uh it's not me, and you're just like, there's the humanness in it.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't blame people, I don't it's like it's very human.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: My experience, I I've had some really intense critical times in my life where I felt that I was in a place in the bottom of a pit, depressed, anxiety ridden, and victimized.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I truly was living out all of that in real time until somebody showed me that nobody dug that hole, you dug it, and nobody pushed you in, you jumped in.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it was one of the most telling parts of my life that I realized and was conversations that allowed me to see the see it clearly that I had dug the hole and I had jumped in, and you would and I would have told you 15 minutes before, that's impossible.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: The truth I live is I've been victimized.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: All of this pain and anguish that I'm in is because I'm not being treated or not being heard or I'm not being, and it's like you you live there righteously.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's the hard part, is that you like, I know that I'm victimized.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, okay, but don't jump in a hole and and don't dig a hole, don't jump in it, because that's what happened to me.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and the sad part and the power of that is that nobody can tell you you're being victimized.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody can tell you that you dug that hole.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: You have to figure it out yourself.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: So grateful for the lightning bolts of perspective that I trust it's because you have to trust it.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: If something's gonna come in and actually change you, you have to kind of have to hit you in a way you're like, well, that's true.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually that hurts, but that is actually true.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a magical place.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the angels in our life, right?
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the people that can literally change behavior, change your truth that you think is so sure.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like that stung in a way that I cannot deny.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to face the fact that, and I'm so grateful because it changed my career in football like dramatically, because I had fallen into the rock had fallen to the bottom of the hill very naturally, and there I was stuck underneath it, right?
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yelling and screaming because I'd been wronged.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, somebody get this off of me.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, yeah, yeah.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then who knew that I had the power to get it off me and start pushing it back up the hill?
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: I hate these analogies.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people listen and go, I don't know what you're talking about.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: But if you do, it resonates.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: The truth hits.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: When you know something's true, it sticks.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm so grateful for that.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: Really, there's two times in my life, two different people that that inadvertently, just because of their expertise, because they've had reflexive training in in what they felt the knowledge about these kind of concepts, could respond and hear me and go, I hear you, but you're you're off.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's not right.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, like even I could just feel the like oh I'm in deep trouble.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: I put myself in a real hole.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's but that's the most powerful thing in the world is to be shown the truth of your life.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's I'm so grateful.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had one kind of a tangent of what we were talking about, but I think it's important when we're talking about decision making, and that is one of my favorite expressions is slower is faster.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean that we should delay decisions until we know everything.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't mean that we have to make decisions quickly.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: It just means we we make decisions at the right time on a football field that can doom you or it can cause a rushed pass.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: It can dramatically change a game.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: But slower is faster is faster.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: The language is amazing.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: You and I, I think the three of us could just we're gonna make butter soon because it's just gonna turn because it was John Wooden had a great quote that is so true.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: It says, Be quick, but don't hurry.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of the same idea that you want to be moving forward and you want to be ready to do things as effectively as you can.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you've put yourself in a place where you're not at like, in other words, the idea that I could be at so much at peace because of my reflexive recall, the full measure of who I am comes out.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so you would say, as we charge down the field and go back, I can't be making quicker decisions.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm making them as quickly as you possibly can because I'm so rooted in what you guys describe as the decisions you make in combat.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden you don't have to take six steps to get there.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like there's the reflexive part, and all of a sudden you're doing the things that is making it so that you're making quick decisions, but they're not hurried because of the preparation, because of the dynamic.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's so much is true.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: I always said my whole coach said there's not an elastic on a football.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's not once you once it's gone, it's gone.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so you want to throw it with purpose.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's the key.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Don't throw it unless there's purpose.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: And once you find that purpose, let it go.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the earlier, to your guys' point, the earlier you can feel the purpose, the better, right?
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like now, because I felt purpose in it.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was ahead of the other guy, I was ahead of the and it's the same thing you guys just described.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: My purposeful decision has been fed by the all the information, and now I'm ahead of the game.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm as quick of a pilot, I'm a quick reflex pilot, but never hurried, right?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of way I think you're describing it.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: So looking at your life in general, you played football, what, 25 years old?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, professionally I I started when I was eight years old.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: So for 30 years I played football.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, obviously little age.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's a big chunk of your life.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: And yet you've got an entire life after football.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: How did those 30 years affect the last 25, 26 years?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: How have they helped you in decision making and leadership and how you raise your family and how purposeful you are?
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: How has it made you?
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: How has football and the decisions you learned how to make on the football field make you a better person?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: And businessman.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: The number one thing, the best advice I got from my old hero who became my friend Roger Staubeck when I retired, his tip for me was to run.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, run where?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, anywhere, just run away.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: His point was football will never leave you, but you need to leave it.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so with that, I started to run and I took his advice.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the truth is, football's never left me.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the lessons that you and I have talked about here for the last forty, thirty-five, forty minutes are the lessons of football with time to ingest them now later, because this wasn't all obvious to me in 2000 when I retired.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the time away and then the in different areas in my marriage, in my home life, in raising kids, in business, in my business relationships, and in strategy and the unique nature of different relationships that there were in the locker room.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: My wife, when I got married, the locker room's a tough spot.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure the debriefs and like it's you know it's a tough, it's a tough environment.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and then I get married and I spoke to her in like as if I was in the locker room.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize how much I was out, and she goes, Look, I and she actually one of the coins says, Look, you're in the locker room, and I cannot, I'm not joining you there.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: So therefore, I could do things like I used to do, but in a different way.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, like the basic principles that we just talked about, the fundamentals of accountability and vulnerability and authenticity, and then leadership, and then what that looks like, and then how you how do you debrief after like all of it is is very much a one-to-one analogy.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that you and I we've met on that, but it's true in almost every part of life.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it took time to deconstruct what happened on the field and then apply it and realize oh my gosh, that football field is truth, you know, and in that way the combat field is there's no lying there, it's all truth.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like the human behavior that you see in those moments is the it's truth coming out.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what can we learn from that?
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so then I just think to myself, in business, it's harder to see the truth, even for yourself and in in response, because there's not 80,000 witnesses, there's no score, there's not a clock.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's just different.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: But yet, can you take the same principles and find ways to make sure that you're constantly aware because you can't fake it on the field because what 80,000 people are like, no, that didn't, that did not happen.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can't there's no fraud.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's and that's why I think young quarterbacks trying to not take responsibility are like, bro, they saw that you had the ball in your hand 80 times in a row.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like you don't have to, so that's foolishness.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's easier to hide and muddy the waters in in less stressful, intense environments.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's harder to find out exactly who who did what and how did it work, and is anyone even accountable, and uh what does that really mean?
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think the years since have been using the truth that I learned there and then applying it in much different situations.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I find myself I know it's funny you guys talk about this, what I could describe as the law of love.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've I've preached this to my kids and to my family, and really to my business.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way to build, that's the way to do it.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: And anytime I do or say something that's not, you know, pushing the rock up the hill, you know, like anything they say, Dad, you you didn't you said, and like I I'm I now I'm I'm now I've got generations of people around me that are holding me accountable, like I can't fake it anymore.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like I gotta stand in there, but it really is fun to see the truth of it all.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I use the example of my my wife coming back from the grocery store and and by the 40th time I came back with everything but the the first thing she said.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: The reason to go, you know.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and she thought she was being punked.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, you're doing this just to frustrate me, you know.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I learned in football that what I said at that moment is, you know what, the ball's in my hands, I screwed it up.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know how I screwed it up for the 40th time in a row, it makes no sense, but I'm gonna go fix it.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I just would walk back out the door and go fix it.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what I didn't do is as a losing quarterback after the game, say to her, Well, you mumbled.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that would go over well.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but it's like I learned, like, you think about the the you know the detail of how to build relationships, especially the more intimate ones.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is the truth, right?
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so like if you can catch yourself and have other people, you know, tell people, I I'm gonna hold myself accountable to this universal law of selfless seeking of other people's healing, like, then what does it look like and what is the behavior of that?
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: What's the language of it?
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the the great warriors of our time, the great battles that that we were able to win were had to be built off of these same fundamentals.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: That you guys can tell that the the joy that comes out of succeeding in really difficult situations is built off of this stuff.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's funny that I could do a podcast talking about this in football, and you could do a podcast doing this talking about combat piloting, and that you know, in real ways, we could all do it in marriage therapy.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like it's all it's all connected.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: Very much connected.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when my dad retired 30 something years ago, one of his friends said to him, and my dad spent 35 years in the Air Force, so it was his life, and he had risen to high ranks.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: And his friend said to him, The Air Force is not who you are, it's what you did.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really stuck with me when I was in the Air Force and since I got out of the Air Force is it who I am or is it just what I did?
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: And did I use what I learned from the Air Force to then become a better person?
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes the answer is I'm I'm taking the Air Force on as who I am instead of using it to become who I should be as a person.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I've always appreciated that advice that it wasn't meant for me.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well said, I'm more interested in your guys' experience.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna have to listen to other podcasts to kind of get more and more of what your experience was because I feel like there's there's connectivity.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: We have connectivity there because of our families, and since the beginning of time, I think my mom and my dad and your dad like were friends like when they were four.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think it was like they literally, you know, I think they got out of diapers together, so we've been together a long time.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was a long time.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think I remember them your dad telling a story about playing sports, and uh, my dad was second baseman.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: Your dad wanted to be second baseball, but Bob Oaks was second baseman, so he had to play something else.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember exactly what it was.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and they Bob Oaks was the general before he was the general.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: And my dad was Bobson, I think nicknamed my dad Grit.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh really oh, so they're like too.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: So then, you know.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've got to run.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: You guys are the best.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Rob, so great to meet you.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, nice meeting you, Steve.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_03: You I literally, man, I watched you as a kid.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_03: My sister was a PYU.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_03: She got there in 1984.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, wow.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: I remember watching.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_03: I was a 49ers fan when I was a kid, a little bit, because you weren't in our division anymore, but I'm a diehard Seahawks fan because I I grew up in Walker.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a great time for you right now.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, oh yeah.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and again, talking about culture and team and all the time.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: You wonder well, how are the Seahawks good?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: Huh, it seems crazy.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, same stuff.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: Everything we've been talking about.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's yeah, it's amazing, but I did have the opportunity one time.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: I live here in Tampa now, and uh I I had the opportunity one time.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_03: I flew John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_03: They had come down for a funeral.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, and I picked them up here in uh St.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: Petersburg, Tampa, and flew them back to San Jose.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_03: So it was kind of interesting, you know, but again, meeting those guys, because again, I have a lot of respect for folks that are able to build a culture of win, right?
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_03: I've got a I've got a buddy of mine that was in the military with, he was a big baseball player.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_03: He gave me this uh this cool thing called the hierarchy of win.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I go back to it.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, it was built, you know, for a coach, but it works for leadership teams as well.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, uh, again, just want to say thank you.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_03: It was a great honor to be able to sit and have a conversation with you.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_03: It does surprise me a little bit how synergistic the experiences on a field and and in combat uh seem to be.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, don't you think like in combat, the truth, there's no the truth, everything you do as a human being in combat is exposes the truth, the truth about you, the truth about others.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and that's a powerful, it's actually a very powerful place to learn.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's huge.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's huge.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Steve, thanks so much.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Best to everybody.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: For everyone else joining us today, thanks for being here.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like, subscribe, comment, and and share with somebody else and continue to join us so we'll all become better decision makers for better results.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Steve.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_03: Appreciate it.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intend Podcast.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_02: Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_02: One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will be entered in the grand prize drawing to win a$25,000 private, exclusive leadership coaching package with Derek Oaks himself.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: So head on over to CommandersIntent Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.