The Real Source of Confidence | AJ Pasciuti

24:53So there is a moment in the book, right. In 2006, I'm a sniper team leader and I am covering a position, you know, and I'm trying to protect the infantry Marines. And these infantry Marines are my brothers. I've kind of grown up with them, but now I have a different skill set. Well, what happens is the Mujahideen or the organization that we were fighting at the time had kind of gotten in under our nose and they'd implanted a couple of different IEDs and IEDs that hurt other Marines that I was supposed to be protecting. I felt like a failure. I felt like a fraud. I felt like I had let my other Marines down and I was beside myself.

25:32I mean, literally standing, you know, screaming into the void because they had, they were toying with us. Right. And I remember literally like screaming like this guttural, like they're toying with us. Right. And there was nothing that we can do. And Juba and the Mujahideen and these IED emplacers, they felt like ghosts and we couldn't track them down. We couldn't find them. Well, what I had to do was I had to go and separate emotion from decision. We realized, and there's a saying that says, snipers don't believe in ghosts. We believe in patterns. And so what we wanted to do is we now had to say, okay, we've had to separate the emotion.

26:08Don't let that cloud your judgment. Let's work this thing back. Let's look for patterns in this person's, you know, modus operandi. How, how do they, how are they fighting us? One of the terms we use is turn the map around. How would I, if I were this enemy sniper, how would I attack us? And that clarity, that moment of saying, let's take the emotion out of this. Let's be objective right in our analysis of this, that allowed us to be able to get into a position and eventually establish a mission set and, and effectively set up a trap for this person to set into. I am human, just like anybody else.

26:45I feel loss, doubt, grief, fear, rage, right? I feel all of these things, but those can be, they can be very powerful motivators to try to solve a problem. But if you let your emotions get too far ahead of you, then you start willing yourself and you're leading with emotion into a situation. And when lives are on the line, emotion may not be the thing you need to lead with because that can have you make some, you know, poor choices or lead you into a scenario that you don't want to be.

27:15Johnny:i'd love to unpack the turn the map around even further because there's a degree of tactical empathy being employed here where you actually now have to put yourself in the enemy's shoes and think like they would be thinking in a scenario where they're shooting at you and us totally okay so i love you guys right you're using all the words like i love it right like I live in a world that is like hyper masculine, right? And I use words like empathy, like love, like respect, like accountability. I use those terms because they're real and they're tangible. I get asked a lot about what masculinity is.

27:52And to me, masculinity isn't yelling louder, right? Or beating your chest more. Masculinity to me, in a lot of ways, has to do with empathy, has to do with understanding. So when we're trying to turn the map around, I have to take my ego completely out of the equation. I have to take all my loss, all my anger, all the regret, whatever it may be, self-doubt, take that out of the equation. It just becomes a math problem. How would I solve this problem if I were given the same tools and the same resources that this person was? And when you can sit and you can dissect that and you can do that objectively, then you can create a pathway.

28:29And sometimes as a leader, and I've led, you know, I joke, Right. I'm only five foot nine. I used to be five ten, but the Taliban got me in Afghanistan. So I lost an inch of my spine. Right. I got compressed. So I'm not like the biggest dude in the world. And so I was with my partner, Sarah. We were at a dinner last night with a bunch of reconnaissance Marines. And these guys are huge. Like generally reconnaissance Marines come in all shapes and sizes. But there's like this really great like leadership, you know, kind of lesson that I give to people is I there's there's the the leadership says, you know, some types of things that were taught in the services like do what I say, or I'll punch you in the mouth.

29:05Well, I'm five foot nine. I'm 160 pounds. These guys could eat me as a snack that will only get me so far inside of the military. And I can't just go around punching everybody. Right. Especially people that are bigger than me. That doesn't really work. Or I can lead with do what I say because I'm a higher rank than you. All right. So that gets limited returns. What happens is technically, yes, they will accomplish whatever I tell them to do because I am their superior. But what happens is you don't get a lot of buy-in with that. If you are working within an organization, sometimes the most powerful tool, the most powerful phrase that you can say to a group of people that you're trying to lead is say, I don't know how to solve this problem.

29:45Right. And if you bring them into the fold and say, can we solve this together? When we turn the map around as snipers, it wasn't, I didn't tell my team. I've got this, guys. You wait for the plan that I give you. It was saying, well, shit, I don't know how to do this. What do you guys think? There's this moment where we all come together and now we solve this collective problem as a team. And when you do that, you get collective buy-in. Every single person is working to solve that same problem. There's ideas of self-efficacy. There's ideas of people coming together. There's an idea of when people feel they're part of a solution and not just a cog in a wheel, right?

30:24Or in this entire system, they work harder. They, they, they, they, they love what they do. And there's this passion that comes from that. And also a recognition that the best ideas rarely come from the top. And so when we're open, when we're humble, when we're modest, and we listen to people who have their, you know, nose to the ground, if you will, right. We get a lot of really good answers from them. And then being able to listen to them when they, when they speak up, providing that space for them. Whatever your thing, it could be anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing.

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31:22Johnny:So good, so good, so good. Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom Rack Stores now and up to 60 % off. Stock up and save on the brands you love like Vince, Sam Edelman, Frame, and Free People. Join the Nordic Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Well, I think many of us civilians who haven't experienced that culture, and Johnny and I have been fortunate enough to train in that culture, recognize it as, okay, there's rank, there's authority that's granted to rank, and then you follow based on rank.

32:05Johnny:and that's just pounded into us from what we see in culture. But what you're talking about is everyone coming together, the lowest rank contributing, and sometimes the highest rank not being the final word on things. And we find ourselves very similarly now in our career looking at it hierarchically. Like, okay, I've reached this title, so that means the people below me have to just follow my orders. They just have to follow my leadership and I lead based on title, not by what you're talking and discussing. So how does that match up with not only our thought around the military, but then also how often we feel gratitude and gravitas given to us by the titles that we get in our career?

32:48Yeah, right. You know, never fall in love with your rank. Right. Is a big thing. At the end of the day, I used to tell people that rank on your collar is just a piece of tin. It doesn't make you who you are. It is just granting you the constitutional authority to be a commander. And so I would oftentimes remind commanders of that. Yes, people will do what you say because you have that piece of tin on your collar. But how effective you are as a leader has to do with here and has to do with how you treat people. So, I mean, I guess going through, you know, to be vulnerable, I will tell you about one of my failures.

33:20So I was a force recon team leader, which is the pinnacle of the Marine Corps. You know, there's 800 reconnaissance Marines in a 210 ,000 or man organ or Marine organization. So there's not a lot of us. Right. And so, yeah, there's a natural like, you know, I call people sometimes like fart sniffers. Right. Like get to this point where they keep sniffing their own farts and they think their shit don't stink. Right. is this moment of like, yeah, there's a gravitas that comes with that. I was in a place called Aqaba, Jordan, and I was on what's called a MU, a Marine Expeditionary Unit. The Marine Corps is America's 911 force.

33:57And the way that we are the 911 force, and we can be anywhere in the world within 24 hours, is by being constantly forward deployed. And so we have these things called MUs that go out and are constantly forward deployed. We were the special operations team on that deployment. So to backtrack just a second, I had been a reconnaissance team leader in Afghanistan and it threw a terrible turn of events. And I write about it in the book, in the chapter, the worst day of my life, I write about losing my best friend in Afghanistan. And part of that was a lack of control on my part. A terrible situation happened where Matt Ingham, my closest friend, was placed in a no-win scenario.

34:39And what he chose to do was to give his life, his last full measure of devotion, to be able to allow, to bring resources in, to bring airstrikes in, to be able to help his team give them a chance for success. But in that, and after that moment, I was lost. I had lost my closest friend. And through that, I became a fearful leader. and leading with fear is never a good place to be because what I thought I could do was control. I could be an effective leader by trying to control every variable and be a micromanager, so to speak. So I spoke speed of trust. I spoke speed of truth. But what I did in practice was completely different.

35:22So fast forward to 2012. I'm a force recon team leader. I'm at the pinnacle of my career, right? You know, people would, you know, would, would kill to be in that position. And I had my assistant team leader, a man by the name of Aaron Titus. He came up to me, we're sitting in this, you know, this, this, this desert region. We're about to go out on a two week mission, you know, you know, through, you know, training mission through Jordan. And he comes up and everyone called me P, right? Cause nobody can pronounce my last name. And I kind of got over that a long time ago. Right. So he says, Hey P, you know, like, can we have a family meeting?

35:54and I went, okay, you know, and he's like, he's got this like Boise kind of twang and he tries to lift it at the end to make it like not sting as much. A family meeting to us was a Knights of the Roundtable moment where I, as a leader would have a moment with my six man or eight man reconnaissance team at the time where we would take our ranks off and we would sit down and we would flush out anything that was going wrong. It was a moment for us to say, let's put pause on this. Let's take our egos. Let's take our piece of tin out of here and let's have a conversation. Well, I wasn't actually walking to a family meeting.

36:28I was walking to an intervention. My team sat me down and they were in like a horseshoe around me. And I'm sitting there, you know, crisscross applesauce, right? Like sitting, you know, with my feet in the dirt, right in the, in the Jordanian desert. And I, and I listened to my team members, every single one of them went around and told me a moment of where I had micromanaged them, where I had taken their own idea of who they were, their own professional expertise. The junior man in my team was an eight-year force reconnaissance Marine. So I wasn't leading new Marines. I was leading the best of the best of the best.

37:06And each one of them had told me a moment where I had taken something from them, whether it be my sharp tongue, whether it be micromanagement, whether it be second-guessing them. And I sat for two hours while these Marines sat around and told me that they loved me, right? But they loved me enough to tell me I was failing them as a leader. I hadn't earned that position or I was losing that. I felt that by gripping tighter onto control, I could control every single variable. And that couldn't be further from the truth. I had to let them fly. As Aaron told me, I had to give them autonomy and I had to give them trust.

37:46If I didn't trust who they were at that moment, it would be an abdication of all of our training continuum, of all of our schools, of who they were as individuals. I had to learn to be able to let go. And some of the hardest things to do as leaders, when they're, again, I was responsible for everything the team did and failed to do. I was their leader. But by holding so tightly onto control, I didn't let them or I wasn't letting them be as effective as they could be. So I had to learn to let go. And we started reading books. So we had this moment. I listened to them and I said, I'm sorry. I owe you an apology.

38:24Now, remember, this is a force recon team leader telling other force recon Marines, I'm sorry. I owe you an apology. I'll be better. And I said, Aaron, you've got the team for the next two days. I need to go get my head right. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do as a leader is, is, is tell your, you know, the people that work for you, right? I don't know. I'm going to have to go get better on this. And so we did. And so for the next few months, we worked as a collective. We read every single book we could, everything from like the five levels of leadership to, you know, the mission, the men and me by a gentleman by the name of Pete Blaber.

38:57And we learned about, uh, you know, a ton of lessons through there. One of the lessons that Pete Blaber, who was a Delta force commander in, in Iraq, he had a term that he said, trust the guy on the ground. This is a poignant lesson, I think, for leaders in any organization. The further you go up the chain of command, the less fidelity, the less understanding you have of ground truth. How many organizations as a CEO says, we are seeing this, we're going to go this direction, and people at the ground level are going, that's not true at all. That's not how any of this works. The same thing happens in the United States military.

39:33So what I learned to do was trust the guy on the ground. If Aaron was at a specific position, you know, 500 meters or, you know, 10 kilometers away from me, and he said, this is happening right now. And this is what I see. I had to trust him because if I didn't trust him, I would slow our chain of command and the decision matrix and decision authority down. And also I would take his level of autonomy. And the more that I questioned him, the less he ever wanted to be able to make judgment calls. So some of that strength came from letting go.

40:05Johnny:Let's go a level deeper there because many of us have team members where, you know, we've gone through performance reviews. We're readily understanding what their strengths and weaknesses are. And I think for many of us, we are happy to give autonomy to the strengths, but we try to pull back that autonomy based on weaknesses that we identify. And oftentimes that does more damage to the team where they can't actually strengthen those weaknesses, or maybe we've even miscalculated those weaknesses based on the perceived impact of past interactions or past outcomes. And I think as leaders, that's the real struggle with management of like, okay, I hear what you're saying around autonomy, but how are you thinking about that autonomy?

40:46Johnny:Of course, on the battlefield, which I think many of us are obviously not experiencing, but where those weaknesses could mean life or death. Great question. You know, So I think that when people look, so first thing I want to kind of, you know, you know, tackle on this is when people look at the military, they, they look at it with like this sort of like reverence or this idea that we're all, you know, a bunch of bad-ass heroes or whatever that may be. And honestly, that couldn't be further from the truth. We're just human beings. We're just, it's the personnel management is personnel management.

41:18Whether you're at a fortune 500 or fortune 100 company, or you're a force recon team member or you're an infantry rifle squad, you know, fighting through Fallujah. It's just personnel management. Here's what I've learned through my my career is I think I call it my leadership triad. Right. The three things I owe my team, I owe them a very clear intent. I have to tell them what I think success looks like. Then I have to give them autonomy. I have to give them the ability to be able to see my intent and work towards that as best as they see possible. But the third part of that is accountability.

41:55What do we do when that success isn't met? And what do we do if that success is met? So I also, I mean, this wasn't like some like, you know, feel good utopia. Like when people screwed up, right, we held them accountable. But accountability is something that is integral to leadership. It's integral to any single team. Here are the metrics for success. Did you get them? We also say that in which gets measured gets improved. As a leader, you have to give tangible intent, right? Not we're going to increase our profit margin or we're going to be a better team. That's not tangible, right? Like, yes, we want to know what those metrics are.

42:33Get to those metrics. And if we don't get to those metrics, then we have to dissect how did we get there. And there's a very big difference. And I had to be able to gauge this as a leader very much through my career. there's a difference between negligence and a mistake if people make a mistake i handle that and mistakes are good mistakes are a part of growing just as much as as failure is a part of success if a person makes a mistake trying to do something to achieve the intent that i laid down that's okay there's corrective action that we can learn from and we can work towards now negligence if there was if they made a conscious decision to do the wrong thing when there was a right option, we handle that a different way.

43:15And we handle that through accountability and whatever that looks like for your organization needs to be there. One of the things that we saw in this, and the reason why I wrote Dark Horse was there's a lot of theory in leadership writing. And there's a lot of great bumper sticker phrases that are out there. What I saw and when I was going through my own leadership journey of trying to be able to figure out how to be a good leader, you know, through my career. One, it's a constant, you know, it's a constant journey, right? I don't like just get to the pinnacle and be like, I am a great leader now, right?

43:49That doesn't like I have arrived. That doesn't happen, right? It comes from this idea of when I read a lot of books on leadership, a lot of them were based in theory and I had lived practice and sometimes theory and practice didn't co-mingle. They didn't, they didn't work with one another. And so why I wrote Dark Horse was to be able to say, okay, I understand a lot of this theory, but I also understand the real world. How do we bring them together? So Dark Horse was written. You're never going to see prescriptive leadership in Dark Horse. I'm never going to tell you these are my three C's of leadership and that's fine.

44:24And there are plenty of people that do that. And I think that those are great books that I've learned from myself. What I did was I wrote a book that was leadership through allegory. Humans learn through storytelling. any, you know, you know, sacred texts to, you know, to anything that was to passing stories on here, they learned through storytelling. So what I did was I tried to immerse the reader in actual stories that I have experienced through my life, good and bad, and, and had them live through that experience themselves to see what frustration looks like, to see what success in a mission looks like, to see what a leader who is focused on the wrong things does when he cuts down his subordinates in public, what those things look like, and having them feel that.

45:07Because they can feel that, they can empathize with that. And if they can empathize with that, they can say, okay, that's what I want to do or don't want to do. Those become markers for us as we go through our own individual journey itself.

45:21Johnny:Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend. Walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia.com slash VisitScotland. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra$1 ,000 off select top brand appliances like lg plus get free delivery at the home depot tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer and host in style with the fridge serving craft ice mini craft ice cube dice and crushed ice shop appliance savings now through june 3rd at the home depot offer valid may 14th through june 3rd u.s only free delivery on appliance purchases of 998 dollars or more see store online for details i think one of the things for johnny and i that has been the most surprising in training especially the special forces is how much of their life is either in training or you're deployed.

46:32Johnny:And if you're not deployed, you're in training. And what we're doing in training is we're trying our best to define the most likely scenarios and variables, move aside from the chaos and then build behaviors and actions that hopefully in the chaos can actually happen. Unfortunately, as we know, the battlefield is chaotic and those best laid plans and even the things you train on are not necessarily what you see when you're actually there. So I'd love to go deeper on how you're managing the chaos of the team, because many of us, hey, we have goals and KPIs and we think this next quarter is going to be X, Y and Z in terms of outcomes and we can train to get there.

47:10Johnny:But then things happen, you know, as we're seeing right now in the macroeconomic environment, things that we did not plan happening are happening that are impacting our role in our career. So walk us through those moments where you're actually in the battle and you're recognizing that the plan that was given, the things you agreed on in training are not actually what you're encountering. Great. I just you guys are hitting the nail on the head of how to be able to manage through these things. So the first thing I have to say to that is we can come up with the best plan in the world, but the enemy gets a vote.

47:42Right. They get a vote on how on how they're going to react to our plan and they can change that at any moment. So we have this term that we use that's called flex on the X, and it's not an excuse for a lack of planning. Marines are known for our like nitnoid, like, you know, clinical levels of planning and attention to detail. We go through an entire process before we go through any single mission that takes days to weeks on end for anything. But what happens is we have also have the understanding that as soon as that helicopter touches on the ground and my boot touches the sand or the dirt, wherever I'm at, the enemy gets a vote and that plan changes.

48:24So inside of our our culture, we understand that adaptability and ingenuity. Right. And an ability to flex on the X has to be part of that formula for success. We cannot fall in love with our plan. We also can't throw it out the window as soon as we get there. So every single person in the team knows the plan from soup to nuts, right? From the moment that we step off on that mission to the moment we get back on a helicopter somewhere else. However, we have to maintain an adaptability. Where that comes from, and this is what I would implore any leader that has to lead a dynamic organization in a world that is constantly evolving and tumultuous, is you have to give clear intent.

49:09So the difference between and what I've seen in my growth as an infantry Marine moving into special operations is we in special operations, what we do is the fundamental difference between us and other organizations is we teach the word why. We tell our young Marines in special operations to ask the commander why. And it's not that we're questioning their decision. We want to know the reasons why they made the decision in the first place. behind your intent. Why do you have, why do you, what are your metrics of success and why did you choose those as the metrics? And again, it's not to question them.

49:48It's to seek information and guidance because once the plan changes, once we step off that helicopter, I need to know the, the overarching goal of what you want accomplished because in the gray, everybody in the world wants the world to be black and white. There's the way that you want the world to be. And there's the way that the world is. And the world is gray. The first casualty in combat is clarity. And so when you have an idea, an understanding of what the overarching why is, you as a subordinate, you as a mobile, actionable arm of intent can now move and manipulate and adapt to whatever that mission set now demands, still reaching the higher commander's intent itself.

50:33So an ability for flexibility and adaptability. We inculcate decision-making. We inculcate people to be able to see a stimulus and then create a specific response in that. And on an organization that punishes people for making mistakes when they have a bias for action, strips people of their own autonomy, their own individual self of who they are. And then they become habitually reactive. And a reactive organization cannot be a successful organization. You have to be proactive. Because the enemy, the market, you know, the adaptation of technology, it gets a vote. And so your best laid plans will fall apart if you are only reactive.

51:16You have to inculcate a society, an organization of people who are looking to be proactive. And part of that is being able to allow mistakes to happen, promote people when they do make mistakes and say, but you made a mistake in the right direction. You fell forward, right? That's a good thing. Don't be fearful of failure because someone who is in fear of failure is doomed to effectively fail.

51:42Johnny:Change is the only thing you can count on in this advanced world where, you know, 100 years ago, it wasn't the case. and uh for those people who are rigid and certainly with our our clients uh they get really upset when things don't go their way or things don't happen the way they have planned it so uh for us it's they keep that healthy mindset of everything's going to change and nothing works ever and go from there yes completely agree you know the model for us is so we have this principle and i think you know, so I've been, I went to University of Southern California for a business school, right?

52:24I have a master's in public leadership and I'm continuing a PhD in leadership studies at the University of San Diego now. And one of the things that we continue through this through line is this understanding of what I liked, what was, you know, called Moore's law, right? And Moore's law was this idea that very early on in the Silicon Valley kind of age was that every two years, the size of a microprocessor or the size of a microprocessor reduces by 50 % and the operating capacity increases by 100%. Well, we're on this exponential curve, right? And we're seeing this now start to happen. And so in business school, we study, you know, organizations like Xerox or Kodak or any of these organizations that refused to accept the world was changing.

53:09And then they went the way of the dodo. We have to be a, I would say an adaptable organization. You have to breathe and live with that. Also, what we do is when we do, oh, it's one of the most fascinating things. If you have a team and you're trying to solve this really, really big problem, one of the things that we do in the Marine Corps is we break this mission down. So we have our, you know, our, our, our organization that's trying to, I don't know, we're doing a big mission planning. We take a team of people and we set them aside and we have them plan in a vacuum. Their job is to be the enemy.

53:44And so they have the same stimulus, the same information that we have, and they are planning as the enemy would with our technological advantage, with our the way that we see the world. And they're trying to defeat us. And then we have to fight each other when we go through these kind of scenarios. If you have we call it red selling. So it's called a red cell analysis, right? Or red selling, it's turning the map around, it's being the enemy. And if you can have an informed, you know, portion of your team, whatever it is, that's trying to say this, that allows us as an organization to constantly be forward thinking.

54:16So when they come up and they're like, we've come up with sharks with lasers and you're like, shit, I didn't think about sharks with lasers, right? How do I solve for that? The idea of any organization is not to teach people to solve a specific problem. It is to teach people to become problem solvers. And the way that we've adapted in the Marine Corps, I don't know what a young Marine in 20 years is going to see on the battlefield. And if I teach him to solve a templated problem today, he will fail or she will fail when they look for that templated problem. And all of a sudden they're sharks with lasers, right?

54:51Because we didn't teach them how to solve sharks with lasers. But if I make them a problem solver, somebody who has a bias for action, who's OK with making mistakes, not negligence, but OK with making mistakes, we can create these little monsters who are constantly looking at the world and not accepting it for what it is and accepting it for what it could be in the future.

55:10Johnny:Are they even going to be on the battlefield in 20 years or are we just going to be sitting playing with joysticks in a command center? So great question. Great question. The United States and specifically the United States Marine Corps, our competitive advantage will always will always be a Marine and their rifle. At the end of the day, the last hundred yards will always have to be taken by a young infantry Marine. And so our goal in life is to make sure that that Marine has the best chance of success in there. Now, there's going to be a ton of other stimulus, a ton of other technological things that are there, but we can't fall in love with that because at the end of the day, a Marine and their rifle is our competitive advantage.

55:50Johnny:Absolutely. I want to touch on one more important lesson that I think a lot of our audience is feeling and certainly can create a blind spot. And that's the expert paradox. So many in our audience are highly analytical, highly trained, certified, great at what they do. And they don't often recognize the blind spot that that creates. and especially when they're in the leadership role. And that often can lead them to dismiss other people's expertise because they're very adept at the one or two things that they've trained on and they've seen success in their career be rewarded because of that expertise.

56:24Johnny:And you share a great story of how you use math to actually cheat your way through a test and recognize this paradox personally. So I'd love to unpack that because that is a blind spot that many of our audience members and many of our clients are facing. Well, you know, cheat is such a heavy word. So I think that, so remember, so I came from the force recon community, right? Before I became an officer, I was a force recon. I was taught to adapt. I was taught to not see the world for what it always was and try to be able to look into the future. You know, we all know the definition of insanity, right?

57:01You know, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I was failing at a test. Now, part of that comes from education, right? The test didn't actually match the skill set. What they were trying to do was it was a poor example of a test matching the skill set. And I was frustrated by that. And I had a little bit of backing in my own career, enough autonomy, enough self-efficacy to say, okay, I know what this is actually getting at. How do we find a different way through that? So that story specifically is saying, you know, what is the goal of this test? Is it to be able to master land navigation and show a mastery of land navigation?

57:40Or is it to walk in a straight line for a certain number of meters in the middle of the night? I had to be able to think at a higher level and say, okay, what they really want us to do is show a mastery of this thing. And so, yeah, we took this moment where I basically turned it into a math problem. And, you know, and I'm happy to go into a little bit more detail on that if you'd like. But, you know, basically, it was just, it was, I was frustrated, right? There was definitely emotion in there, right? So I'm on the precipice of failure for something that I was like, this doesn't make any sense.

58:10Why are you making me do this? Right? And I'm like yelling into the void, right? On this thing. you know, I could get frustrated or I could get working. Right. And so I chose to get working and do this math problem and, and, and say, okay, you know, we can get through this process, you know, with a little different, you know, a little different measure. When we see a lot of challenges in the world, there are places where we can be blinded by our own success. I tell people two things as they're, you know, as they come to me for advice. First, I tell people when they're like, I don't know that I could, you know, I don't know that I can accomplish this next objective, right?

58:46One of the things I was walking with a young Marine recently, right? Who had achieved a ton of things in his career and he was looking to take the next step and he was in fear of whether or not he could make that next leap. The first thing I did was I told him, Hey dude, do me a favor. Look in the rear view mirror of your life for just a moment, right? Let's, let's be nostalgic for just a moment. Did you ever think that you would accomplish these things? One of the things I like to say is your 10 year old self, right? Would your 10 year old self meet you right now, what would he think? And he was like, my 10 year old self would be pretty stoked and where I'm at.

59:17Like, okay, cool. You're a force recon Marine or you're a sniper, you're whatever it is. Your 10 year old self would be pretty happy. So let's give ourselves a little bit of credit, right? When we take this moment and then let's look into the future. If, did you think that 10 years old that you would be where you're at? No, I didn't. Okay. Well, let's continue that trajectory. Let's be proud of ourselves for a moment. Know that we've achieved things that we didn't think we'd ever accomplished and take that into the next, you know, adventure of where they're going. And the second part of that really comes down to this idea of kind of being hungry.

59:46One of the things that I do tell Marines that people told me very early, like that I was directed very early in my career was to write what I wanted to be the most in the world on my mirror. So every single day when I was shaving my face or brushing my teeth, I was visualizing what I wanted. Now I know that's kind of bumper stickery at some point, And I totally get it. But visualization is a very key part of that because in our world, we have so many examples of people that are more successful than us all the time. People that are doing the things that we want to do. And all of a sudden for me, and I wanted to be extremely vulnerable and extremely honest, I suffer from self-doubt just as much as anybody else.

1:00:25And I still do. Writing a book, this thing could flop, right? I could, I could, this thing could sell two copies, right? Or people could read this and be like, this guy sucks. What a pansy, right? You know, I can't believe it. You know, like whatever it may be, those are real. I'm scared too. But the difference between success and failure is when you are scared, you keep your feet moving, right? And you keep pressing on and trying to accomplish that next objective. And I'm empowered by looking back in the rear view mirror of my life and being like, yeah, I was scared a lot in my life, but I kept going and I've ended up in a pretty cool place.

1:01:02Johnny:couldn't have said it better myself thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom and your service where can our audience find out about the book and the work you do well so thank you very much um so yes so dark horse uh harnessing hidden potential in war and life comes out on may 19th it's available anywhere uh books are sold i also get to do the audiobook uh myself the publisher was kind enough to allow me to do that so you get to listen to me you know laugh at myself i mean i literally like laugh at myself like, oh my God, I can't believe I wrote this. Right. You know, like no one's going to ever think I'm cool because I, you know, wrote about this stuff.

1:01:35Also my website, it's ajpusciutti.com. You can find out anything that you want about me on that. And then also I host the combat story podcast where I interview, you know, military service members or service veterans of service organizations writ large. We don't always talk about combat. We talk about leadership. We talk about stressors. We talk about kind of coming through these things under the lens of service. At the end of the day, what I want people to take from this book is that I didn't believe in myself either. I followed people. People believed in me before I did my own self. And I followed them through.

1:02:14And they gave me the courage to be able to walk my own path. But the best part about success is ensuring that once you achieve that own individual success, you turn around. You follow that social contract that you mentioned earlier. You turn around and you make the next generation better than you. So if a young man or woman or a leader of a company or a middle manager of a company is looking for their own next level of success or how to walk through that, they can find that in this book. You know, I'm looking to do some of my dissertation work on my PhD is looking at leadership from the middle.

1:02:50How do leaders in the middle action intent that they did not create themselves? Because there's a polarity between leaders in the middle. They have to be loyal to the organization above and accomplished intent that they did not create, but they also have to be loyal to the people below them and making sure that they are responsible with their own lives themselves. So I look forward to being able to go through that, having more conversations with you guys in the future and trying to be able to, at the end of the day, make the world a little bit better place. Because if we are, there's enough sun to shine on all of us.

1:03:24And if we have this organization and you can build an organization where people are working for one another and not against one another, there's no telling what we can accomplish.

1:03:33Johnny:Well, we're excited to welcome you back as doctor to share all those lessons from your dissertation. Well, thank you so much, John. AJ, it has been fantastic.

1:04:39Johnny:We'll be right back. When you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.