appeared in the door to the office, not seeming so intimidating as before. “Quit if you want. We aren’t going to kick you out. None of us would have gone through three first phases. Now, we don’t know anyone to do four. I personally think you get sick or injured as a way out. You have to defeat that demon before it kills you. I don’t care if you have pneumonia or flesh-eating bacteria in your lungs. Class 199 starts Monday. You don’t have to do the class up test. So show up or quit. The choice is yours,” he said, actually smiling this time.
By the way, no one recovers from pneumonia in five days. And, truth be told, I certainly didn’t recover. I showed up Monday with a fever and barely passed the timed run. For the next several weeks, I just barely passed everything. I was beaten like everyone else who failed or didn’t improve upon previous times. Each night I stopped caring about it all. I made it into Hell Week once again . . . not caring, not sure why I was doing it, and not willing to quit.
On Wednesday night they took me to the hospital with all five lobes 50 percent infiltrated with fluid. They didn’t need to tell me, I knew. I knew it was over. After a week in the hospital, and with no instructor coming to check on me, I knew it all was over. When I reported to the first phase office, they had orders for me to a new command and no one even mentioned training or anything. They had all moved on and I was insignificant to their day-to-day lives.
Completing Hell Week solidified my firm stance on the principle of “honor your word.” I realized in that exact moment of walking away, as you must also realize, that this is the point in life where you either keep on honoring your word or you just quit. Once again, the world did not give me what I wanted in the timeline I had wanted it. Once again, things did not work out the way my brain had perceived events should have. Being cast out again, having to literally lie there in the puddle of mud I had created again, trying to figure out who I was and where I was going, will always be the roughest time in my life. The moment of clarity came when I realized I could actually honor my word and start over.
No one should avoid feeling the gravity of failing or the weight of loss. Both my experience then, and in training leaders now, makes me realize the importance of this transition point. At this transition point, we all have three choices.
The first choice is made by a small group of people for various, truly believable reasons. They decide to simply quit on themselves, go home (and hope and pray), and leave a goal-driven life behind. The gravity felt is too heavy to experience and quitting seems to be the only way out. An observable truth is when this path is chosen as a coping mechanism to deal with failure, it will forever be a means of dealing with every loss or failure. The undeniable fact remains: “How you do one thing, is how you do everything.”
The second choice to be made, the one which most people make, seems the most obvious and least risky. I call it the backup plan. The numerous people who actually pick the backup plan clearly pushes the prevalence as you can find hundreds of books on backup plans and mitigating risk. Millions of dollars can be made mitigating risk of a bad decision and having solid backup plans that keep people from feeling the gravity of failure and loss.
I surely saw both options during my time of feeling the weight of loss once again. Going home to the safety of my father and mother and a small town was rather enticing. Quitting is the sailor’s siren song. Leaving the storm for the perceived safety of a cove is really hard to push away. But sailors and boats are meant to be at sea. I had chosen to be a SEAL; that was my sea.
The backup plan principle will seem to take the weight of loss from you. In hindsight, the backup plan model itself causes loss. The time wasted while you are engaged in securing the backup plan robs the primary plan of any potential to succeed. Most people who have a backup plan will eventually move to it, because the reality of a primary plan is simply that primary plans never work out the first time. I find it tragic to push two plans and always move to the backup plan when the primary plan falters the first time. Maybe I would have taken the backup plan had I had one. I did not have plan B; I had no way out, thank God!
What occurred to me during those months after being kicked out of BUD/S training was the gravity of giving very little measurable value to my word, my original word. I had to ask myself what I had actually lost. I had lost nothing because I didn’t have anything. I had to ask myself what I had failed at doing. I had not failed; I had been kicked out. The longer I let myself feel the weight and not immediately move to plan B or to quit, the clearer my situation became.
If I quit now, I was only quitting on the value of my word. I would be dishonoring my ability to say I was going to do something, anything, and then go and do it, no matter what.
Had I selected something else, I would also have lost all the value of my word holding any power in the world. The longer I carried that weight of loss, the more I began to see the power of honoring your word. I saw that to honor my word meant I had to stay committed. I had to finally admit I had quit on myself at West Point. I had to admit I did let the circumstances dictate the outcome instead of honoring my word and pushing through the circumstances.
Two months after being kicked out of BUD/S training, I committed all of myself to honoring my word to become a SEAL. At that exact moment in time, all the perceived weight, all the drama and depression, all the lack of direction ceased. I got back on point with my job. I had clear direction and wrote out a special request to present to my admiral with exactly what I wanted. I saw in his office for my entire lunch period, every single day, for six months. Each day, he repeated the same answer: No. I was written up. I was punished by my chain of command but I would not give up; for me, there was no other way. The last time I submitted it, the admiral finally relented and signed it despite all the no’s he had given up to that day.
Class 207
We started with 111 students. We graduated 11 of those students. At the end of Hell Week, Mahrer spoke to the class. We were beaten, tired, and didn’t care about circumstances, but we would have kept going had they asked us to. He said these 13 words: “You did what you said you would do! Now you are of value!”
The Process and Method to Honor Your Word
Stories from real people drive the point home when dealing with principles of success. The topics and chapters that follow incorporate the wise old learning method: define the topic, tell a real-life story, and show the detailed process to produce your own results using the same method. My real intent is that when I die, all that I have learned and overcome will not be lost in my passing. Human life must always be shared in its raw, visceral form so those who come after don’t waste their lives treading water, making the exact same mistakes we did.
The American military as a whole learned the value of passing on both the good or bad, in stories and real experiences. Listen and watch the senior leaders, learn skills that have adapted over the past 200 plus years, and evolve. If their examples were not valuable, we would be riding horses and shooting muzzle loaders and lining up in front of our enemy and dying. We no longer use those methods in the military, nor should we rub rocks together and live in caves as clans. Raw stories make us evolve.
The first step in the process to master a six-hour baseline of your life is to learn the three methods of honoring your word and never giving up. The story is merely the context for the visceral learning you must go through yourself. Once mastered, these three methods will transform you. Literally the moment you pass through, you will be different than you are right now.
The entire book is a process. Each step-by-step method is transformative. Each method is simple to engage, yet not easy to overcome. And trust me when I say, “not easy.” You have to pass through each by doing it from beginning until complete. You cannot hack the system. You cannot get someone else to do it for you. You can instead just get to it and do
