Fighter Pilot Reveals Why You Never Hit Your Goals

how can this be done a little bit better? You're 95% of our decisions are based on our own perceptions, which means that they're not based in reality. And the great thing about an execution gap is it's an emotion-free space for you to get curious as to why it exists. People believe their opinions and ideas outway reality. Lead is often just give a vomit of stuff that needs to get done to their team. You can only solve one problem at a time. The thing that gets in the

way is feel, not a gun.

Christian, dude, it's incredible having on the show. I'm very excited about our conversation today.

Thanks Ryan. It's an absolute honor to be here. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to talk today and see if I can share some insights for your audience. Yes, when we were talking

“in the green room, use this word that I think it is the obstacle of our day, at least in this moment”

and it is uncertainty. I think that most of the stress, anxiety, you know, you'd also use your panic and the green room. I think it one of the cores, if not the core root cause of so much of this idea with is uncertainty. So maybe break down with your clients, with your life, with your experience, where is this uncertainty coming from that I think everybody who's listening to this show in some regard feels every single day of their life and is dealing with in hopefully positive ways,

but I think unfortunately there's a lot of negative ways that we're dealing with this uncertainty as well. Yeah, look, I think uncertainty's been there for hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, if you're a caveman and you're running out hunting, there was no certainty that I would find

“something and be it's not going to bite you back. So I think uncertainty's been a factor of humanity,”

which is why some people thrive and grow and build empires and businesses within that uncertainty and others kind of get crushed by it. I would say the only kind of radical change in the last 10 years as we just talk about it more and we talk about uncertainty as if it can be teamed. In my overbook coming out in September, it's called a flawless leadership. And the premise of flawless leadership is to understand that perfection, which has its origins in Latin and in scholarly texts,

is an environment where basically you can control everything. For something to be perfect, it has to

be completely controlled and delivered both internally and externally. The way that I define a flawless leader is a leader who understands that perfection's unattainable. And even the origin of the word flawless comes from Vikings. It's a warrior word. And it means that my stone is not broken and it's more about what you can control. So when we look at uncertainty is human nature is geared towards survival. We tend to project externally all about problems like it's the world

rather than internally, which is okay. The world is going to be uncertain, it's a given. But what I need to be focused on is how I respond to it and building the structures, the systems, the thought patterns, the philosophies that I have as an individual to view uncertainty as an opportunist rather than as a threat. With AI, you know, I'm like everyone else. I didn't know anything really. I've been using AI since GPT1 and having it right my emails and everything. And

then I joined a program run by Dan Martell and he had this wonderful advice, which is if you need help from AI, I ask it how to help you. And ever since I've done that, you know, we're built. And I love that because it harnesses one of the core philosophies of my former what I call career

one point O, which was as a fighter pilot, which is you're always curious. There's always this

how can I use this tool better? How can I use the airplane better? How can I fly it better? You're always asking questions based on today's uncertainty as it crystallizes into reality. You can carry some of that forward. And with AI, obviously, it's not really a fixed state. It's the acceleration

“of the acceleration of technology. And I think what we need to shift as humans, which are largely”

our thought patterns are largely linear. And by linear thought patterns, what we're really saying is I need to get there and here I am. So what do I need to do? We need to embrace iterative thinking, and iterative thinking is engineered as a cognitive model that deals with uncertainty very well.

to know something different tomorrow as the world changes around me. In the learning model that

AI uses is an iterative learning model. It has a go, it attempts things. And then it gets it right or wrong. And then it learns. The thing about AI though is it learns an awful lot faster than

“a human being and has a memory of a steel trap. So it's think of it. I think of AI as like a wingman,”

I think of it as an alternate intelligence source of me. And the more it knows about me, the more it knows about where I'm going. And this is what we need to understand with AI. You ask it to do something that you're already doing. It's just going to do. It's not going to be that helpful. It's just going to do whatever you're doing now more useful. But if you have a conversation

with AI and you use it as a tool to say, this is where I'm going. How do we get there? How can you help me?

And ask me as many questions as you need to understand the scope of a project. A little bit like you would if you were using an external window with your building a house and you're talking to an architect and architect is an expert at architecture building homes, understanding how all the systems work together. But you don't just tell an architect, I want to build a house and when they come back at you and it's a crappy design, you say, you're a bad architect. You have to have a

“conversation. You have to scope it out. You have to talk about your feelings. What feels good?”

How do you want the room to flow? And what I love about the bite of pilot way of thinking and

working is everything we do and you have to understand that a fighter pilot basically a reprogram

human being. Because everything that we're programmed to do is a human to survive is the opposite of the skill sets and the mental models you need to be a fighter pilot. So what we understand is everything in the world of a fighter pilot you start with the target, work backwards, and then you iterate your actions to get there. Whereas a human being does the opposite. A human being says, he's who I am and what I do and this is where I want to go, which means that you're really not

going to transform yourself or involve yourself into the person you need to be and risk right now is anyone in the intellectual space, anyone who is in the leadership space. Because if you start, if you keep approaching leadership as you do today, which is managing what exists three years from now, you're not going to have a job because AI needs direction. So in an ironic way, we've gone through this phase where technology is dehumanized us to some degree. We were talking about it before we

got on the podcast about how technology is making us neurotic because we really only do things based on what the technology tells us to do, whatever the message we receive, whatever the email that's just being sent, whatever our job tracking software tells us. So we've actually gone backwards into being these really reactive leadership models. And AI needs the opposite. It needs us to be

“deeply human because that's what it can't do. It needs us to go back into the critical thinking”

structures of the brain. It requires us to get creative, it requires us to understand the emotional impact that we need the intelligence to deliver. So I'm kind of hopeful that, and that's my job is to help people with this, is to help you reconnect way more at the human layer to be more free to go back into those models of building relationships, talking about emotion, being being engineered towards making an impact on the world and the people around you

rather than being effectively the doing side of what your technology is telling you to do today. Lots of dig in there. So one, I did not know the genesis of the world flawless and I love the fact that it means, what is it? My stone is on broken. Is that what she said? Oh, is it? Yeah, my rock, my rock is not broken. Yeah, I love that. I love where the words come from. I want to dig in maybe a little bit into this idea of iterative thinking because there's a quote

from the Valravicanum, huge enough off in and he had this, he built on Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours and he said it's not about putting in 10,000 hours. It's about achieving 10,000 iterations that gets you to mastery. And that to me resonated so much more in my life than 10,000 hours because there's things that I feel top, top 5% top 3% top 1% efficient in certain tasks. And I certainly haven't put 10,000 hours in them, but I have absolutely probably put 10,000

iterations. So that really spoke to me. And I will say after doing 450 plus episodes of this show, the idea of curiosity is pulled through almost every one of these high achieving guests like

And I think iterative thinking and curiosity kind of go together. So let's say I'm sitting here, I'm listening to this show and maybe maybe curiosity in this idea of iterating, it just hasn't been programmed into me. Maybe I came up through corporate world where it was just task, stamp, swipe, task, stamp, swipe. I was actually penalized for thinking iteratively, for being curious about things. Stay in your lane, do your job, do what you're told.

This is what I pay you to do, right? There's so many people who are now, I feel like in the way the world is today and that all the entrepreneurs that's out there and the access to entrepreneurial opportunities that AI is creating, their brain is starting to open up. Maybe I can be an entrepreneur, but they've been almost like programmed for most of their life to stay in their box, to stay in their lane, to incremental improvements. You know, one step at a time kind of stuff. How do you

recommend to your clients and the companies that you're working with that they can maybe break

“three of some of that linear thinking and get into a more iterative curiosity-driven culture?”

How do you start to build that if it doesn't exist inside your organization or yourself today? Well, iteration is really the talent that an inventor has. The talent, I think entrepreneurs are bad word now because there's more people that are entrepreneurs that aren't. I prefer to think of founders. People that found something that wasn't ever the able for founders. I really like to work builders. Yeah, and they found a problem that needed to be solved. You know, I think one

of the, you know, the, again, the challenge with an entrepreneur is when you approach entrepreneurialism with a linear mindset, you say, I have a product, everyone needs this, but you haven't actually asked anyone. And then you wonder why it doesn't work. Whereas, you know, founders who do do very well,

they're always curious about is, is this fulfilling a need that's meant? And they're always

“challenging that and testing it. So the best way to think iteratively is, which is what the”

effort gets you to do, is use a system that is iterative. So follow some steps that automatically create an iterative mindset. In the world of fighter pilots, we codify it as the debrief. And it's interesting in my own journey was a fighter pilot for 11 years, a business founder for 20 years, and what was interesting is I always thought debriefing was a ritual. It was a meeting, but what I've realized in the last few years is that it's actually the entire way, it's an entire

way of thinking. It's, it's a way of viewing the world. And I came upon this before I talk about debriefing, I'll tell you a story, which where there's had the aha moment. So here we are in Boston, actually working with a large group of insurance brokers, and we went to get a coffee before they had been started. So we go to the coffee shop around the corner and we're sitting in the queue and there's five people in the queue. And we noticed that there's five people behind the counter,

as well. So we're sitting there and like, well, how can there be five people behind the counter if five people in the queue and maybe hasn't moved for five minutes? And then we started to deconstruct it. My wingman, guy called Balls, X, United States Air Force, if 16 pilot, and then he flew the first lady around as the, in the presidential flight up in Washington. And we're sitting there and I'm like, start to deconstruct what this person's doing, what that person's doing, how they

“can be more efficient. We've got our coffees and we sat down and we're like, what is it with us?”

What is it about a fighter pilot? It's no matter what you see or where you go, you're always

thinking, how can this be done a little bit better? And that's when I realize, you know what, that that is us. So this whole idea of debriefing, which is reflection on performance, becomes reflection on everything and you start to effectively have the iterative view of everything in life, your relationship, your children, your business. Like you did, it's like an itch that you can't help but scratch. It's like, oh, this could be a bit better.

We can do a little bit better with this process. We can shave 30 seconds off the way we talk with our clients and immediately we can tweak this, we can tweak that. So what the debrief is, it's a four step process called orka. The same is a kill a whale. I have another story about debriefing kill a whale, which if we get time, I'll tell you it later. But what it stands for is objective result cause an action. And when people see fighter pilots and we work with organizations,

they're always like, are you guys like robots, mission objectives? And it's like, no, it means an

objective view of the world. It means you don't bring your biases, you don't bring your opinions, you're creating a picture of the future that's completely objective. We know where it is, we know how to measure it and we believe in our soul that it's achievable. So that's the first step

And we create, we create these objectives in another system we'll talk about later. The R is the result or reality. And if you look at the neuroscience on how human beings make decisions, you're 95% of our decisions are based on our own perceptions, which means that they're not based in reality. So when you do anything in life, the only moment in time that really supports

“your decision making in the future is being very honest about your reality, right? If you want to”

get healthier and that's your intention, but the reality is you're reach for a bag of chips with

every meal, you're tromping a snickers bar after dinner every night, then that's your reality is out of culture with your intention, right? So between objective and reality, lives a gap. And we define that as the execution gap. And the great thing about an execution gap is it's an emotion-free space for you to get curious as to why it exists. And that's what the C is stands for, curiosity, or the cause of this gap. And what's really important about this process in the way

the human brain works, if you go to a museum and you see those plasma balls, the big glass balls, and they have like electricity going everywhere inside of them. And if you put your hands and all your fingers on the glass ball, you'll see the electricity dancing around everywhere. It's kind of weak and sip it and it's just, if you put one finger on the glass ball, you get this incredibly intense piece of electricity flowing into your finger. There's no, it's not dancing around everywhere,

it's locked in. The brain is a plasma ball, it's just electricity. And when you reflect on something, if you reflect on 10 things, you can't access the deep recesses of the memory and you're working with a assumption, not reality. So what happens is the objective is the finger on the ball. The reality is the electricity and the curiosity is, well, why is there a gap in between? So you get this really

powerful, focused ability to access the full structures of the brain. So it's deep, meaningful,

intentional reflection. And it's in the context of what good looks like in the future,

“rather than why am I a bad person and why am I loser and why is it not working?”

When we look at the, when we get curious, we're just looking for one thing, one root cause, that's within my control. And once I understand what it is and I can control it, the A is the action. What do I do tomorrow morning or what do I do right now to close the execution gap? So when there's one really neat conversation, you're connecting to the future, you're assessing it versus today, you're looking over your shoulder at yesterday, which is the only real thing that's

happened. And then the action projects you into the future, every meeting and every business, every conversation with your wife, your children, your family, if you structure it with Orca, then everyone understands that we're having a conversation where we win at the end, because every conversation is anchored with what is your objective. And now I've got something that I can control. I'm evolving into this flawless individual, this flawless person. I'm

focusing on what I can control and iterating and adapting very quickly to everything that I can't. Yeah, I love that framework. And one of the things that I've found doing the show is whenever I have someone who has at some point in their life, operated in a space where life and death was part of the, part of the job, right? Like, you mess up, go and mock to 30,000 feet in the air, you're in big trouble. I'm assuming,

right? Like, there's there's serious consequences to, to, to, you know, misaction. And what, one of the things that you mentioned multiple times throughout working that framework is this idea of operating in reality. And one of the core things that I like to teach and, and I work through in my own life and try really hard, because you said that we don't bring our biases, we don't bring our beliefs, perceptions, we, we, we, you kind of operate, and what's in front of you, what you're

looking at. That feels like one of the most important aspects of success, if not forever,

certainly today, with all the delusion of information and opinions and biases and misinformation

“from this side, but it's real information on that side and who should I trust and where should I go?”

It's like, it seems like a lot of people get lost in the way they would like the world to be

stay grounded and and what's actually happening on the field? What's, what, what, what are the real

results repercussions, you know, um, uh, a collateral that comes out of your action, because I feel like when we lose the path, it's because what we, I, this should be happening or I wish this was happening. And unfortunately, that's just not the game. That's, and that's what we're seeing and, and we get off track, hoping things will happen, or believing that they should happen, but it's, it's not what's actually going on in front of us. Well, it's, I mean, that's what's

“survival looks like. That's why 80% of our biases tend towards negativity, because if I think”

bad things are outside the cave, I'm going to survive and stay inside the cave. Like, it's that simple. Uh, that is the program. And if you, uh, I call them the three bees, the biases beliefs and behaviors, and we are driven by biases, which are all subconscious. They, they're the autopilot of a human being. And the autopilot is programmed by all the experiences you have through life. So if you're brought up in a dysfunctional home, you're, you're a bias to believe

that there's no such thing as a functional home. If you're in an environment where conflict is how problems are solved, you will bring conflict into the way you solve problems. And you won't, you won't think you're doing anything wrong. And you will think everyone else is doing something

“wrong, because that's what biases do. And that's why the world is in the state it is today.”

Because we're in an environment where we're fed on our phones, information that feeds into what we are, our biases already are. So then, then our biases become conscious. And when we become conscious of our biases, it becomes a belief. And we do, we behave in a way in what we believe in. So, you know, it's a, the Ted Lasso story. You put believe in the, in the change room. And all of a sudden, the team believes it's a championship team. I love that documentary rexom

where Rob McLean and Ron Reynolds have bought that Welsh team. And they've just absolutely monstered it through the league from absolutely nothing. That's a great iterative story. So you can't tell someone they're biased. And you can't tell someone they're beliefs wrong. And you can't tell someone to behave differently. So to really unpeak all of that,

“you need to have iteration as a practice. Because there's a fighter pilot, I'll tell you right now.”

We are biased towards action. We are biased towards success. I mean, we win 99.1% of the missions that we fly. And all of those biases are reprogrammed because the system reprogrammed them. We have an incredibly high standard. And everyone in the organization wants to meet those standards. To become a fighter pilot, you fly roughly 400 missions. And every mission is incrementally harder than the mission before. We're talking about a program that takes young men and women off the street with

absolutely no skills in what the job is. And you think of how businesses recruit businesses recruit skills. The Air Force recruits mindset. It recruits a recruits kids who believe they can be anything.

They recruit a belief system. So here you go, your flight first mission. And your first mission

is literally in an airplane. Push forward and you go down, pull back and you go up, push left, you bank left, push right, you bank right and hit the right of pedals and you're over and the land. The last mission you're flying is a four ship and contested airspace to 2000 pound bombs under your wing and you go to drop them on a target when you're flying. So throughout that process of iteration. And this is what we've worked with 19 NFL teams at Afterburner. And the reason

we did that is the first NFL team we worked with, one of Super Bowl. And what you find is to often within these systems, people believe there are opinions and ideas out way reality. And another great is the book money ball on the movie, which was a very fact-based reality driven methodology that delivered success. And even though we have all of this evidence and even though we know

that we make better decisions on my grounded in reality, the human bias always tends towards

I know best. This is easy then it's going to be. And if we just do something new it's going to be better. It's a little bit like if I just find you washing machine, I'm going to fix the broken one's going to be fixed. But the reality is where you can probably just fix the existing one and you don't need a new one. So we've moved into this world of hyper velocity, not only hyper velocity of

So effectively, you book an Uber, you book a waymer, you know, audio Uber eats, you know, your

“expectation is that within five minutes I get an Uber within 20 minutes I get my meal. And anything”

outside of that elicits an emotional response you get up very upset. This speed of expectation delivery is subconsciously now programmed into every leader inside organizations, bigger small founders entrepreneurs, businesses with four people, businesses with 400,000 people and we work with all of them. And a big part of working with leaders is to say hey look, you're setting expectations that take months to achieve in your anxious because you're not achieving them on the

first day. We need to start getting really good at expectation management and daily setting of expectation.

When we talk about daily setting of expectation, very rarely does anyone wake up in the morning and right down the three things they need to achieve today. People wake up and have their coffee, their brains all over the place because we're coming out of, you know, our REM sleep and our

“expansive default mode network and we've got to switch into the task positive network and the”

brain which is the getting stuff done. And usually what that means is you open your emails and it's starting going through your emails. So you're pushed around by the technology. So a big part of execution and getting things done, let's use an NBA player, right? And NBA players, some stages a child, they decide they want to be an NBA, right? That's called an intention. And just because you're want it doesn't mean you're going to get it, right? So we start with intention and then we

have to think about setting a destination. And when we talk about a destination, think about the same way as when you fly on vacation. So we're going to can't come and you get on the airplane and the captain says, welcome aboard ladies and gentlemen. Our goal is to get to can't come today. That would go. Imagine if you heard that as a passenger on the airplane, you'd be getting

“off the airplane, right? Again, we are biased to believe that a goal is nice to achieve even a destination.”

I must arrive at. So we have to reprogram ourselves as a leader to say, well, if my intention

is to be an NBA player and I'm 12 years old, my destination is to get on the first team.

Now, like I've got to get on, I've got to hit the destination today. Then we're going to want to object. So destination might be my destination is to make the team. But there's a whole bunch of stuff I have to do there, which is understand the plays, train, practice, improve my jump shot, improve my three pointers. So the objective then is the layer of that defines action. So my objective is to get four from ten from the, from the three line. That's my objective.

And my actions are to practice that until I get there. Now, importantly, if you do that without a coach and without the external view of what you're going to do, you're going to start to believe your own storytelling. I can't blow three flows, I keep going to the high, keep doing this. Because you can't physically see your hand, you can't physically see your arm, you can't see your body language, you can't see where eyes are looking when they're looking at the wrong place.

So this is where what a coach does, a coach debra helps you debrief because it brings the perception outside of it. So all of a sudden what you see, and this is why a kid makes it to the NBA from the age of 12, is they're doing this debrief in a nation, naturally. Some people can just do it naturally. They're already doing that. If you look at, I just watch the documentary on the weekend about Fernando Mendoza. And just the all of vaiding being throughout his life from every coach's

parents, yes, he's thirst for knowledge. He was talking to the coaches at six o'clock at night, after every session after the, after the coaches ran the reviews, he would seek them out for more personal guidance. So he wasn't a fighter pilot, he didn't follow orca, but he's naturally doing it anyway. He's very clear around, I want to be in the NFL. My destination is to get on the high school football team, then the college, do you on athlete, then then then and he's doing

the intentional practice to get there, the intentional iteration of the practice. And it all boils down to taking big intentions and translating them into those three things I need to achieve today. To almost liberate yourself from the to do list, because when you set a chief list, the doing just kind of looks after itself. You're a smart human that I've done. You know, we're pretty good at figuring out what to do. And this is, you apply the, the framework to what

you're doing your team's doing. And AI just becomes another player. Once you want to achieve three things, you, hey, AI is what I do every day. Hey, Claude, this is the three things I want to

achieve today. How can you help me? Here's what I can do. Here's what I need from you. And

three things by 9 a.m. Well, if you like me, you start working. And there's no distraction.

“You can just, you can just power over 30 years will have to better and working with almost 4,000”

businesses. When we start debriefing, the vast majority and we quantify it in around 80 to 85 percent

of organizations don't know where they're going. They don't know what they need to achieve. And it's a constant guessing game each and every day as they run around urgently reacting to reality rather than getting ahead of reality and doing the work that has meaning rather than just doing the work. So I love the, I love this concept of, if the pilot of your flight your time says our goal is to get to Cancun today. You're going to get off the plane because I

I completely agree. As soon as you said that my first thought was like, that's not the language, but that's the language everyone uses in business. Everyone uses in life. No, that hit me.

That hit me like a sack of potatoes. I love that and I completely agree. I've always had this,

“personally, I've always had this very love-heat relationship with the idea of goals because”

I would consider myself a very hard worker like yourself. I'm up early. I'm working, constantly thinking about, you know, whatever it is that I'm doing. I coach little league. I, I have been accused many times in just most of the time of, of breaking down the swings of 12 year olds to a, so I play college baseball. I'm enamored by the body mechanics of the game and really sports in general and a big fitness guy. And like I could tell you,

from a body mechanics standpoint, what every one of my guys, what, what their thing is. And like,

I spend a lot of time thinking about it and it's just a microcosm of this is kind of the way I've always

been. It might might, and why I've struggled with goals is if I'm always kind of breaking things down and I'm always working as hard as I can and I'm always pushing forward and, and what is the purpose of the goal? Like, I'm going to get as much as I possibly can get from whatever I'm doing

“every time because I believe I'm giving max effort in whatever thing I come in myself to,”

then why is the goal important? And to your point, so often we set these goals and we're like, well, you know, set a, set a 120% goal and if you get a 105% that's better than you would have gotten anyways. And I'm like, but you didn't achieve the nothing he put on the piece of paper. So I even put that piece of paper to begin with because I could have just put the 100% goal and then felt amazing when I got to 105% if that same amount of effort was going to get me there.

But this idea of a cheat, like, what do I want to achieve versus like some arbitrary goal to me makes a lot more sense? And, and then connecting this entire thought and getting to my next question is, you said so many of the organizations that you've worked with don't know where they're going. I believe that 100%. It's been my experience as well with the organizations I've worked in either bed and executive of or, or, or, or consulted with as well. How do you figure out where

you're supposed to go? Like, if you're, if you're, let's say you, you get hired in and you're in the executive suite. You're brand new to a company and you sit down in your first meeting and you listen to the CEO talk and you're like, oh my God, we're just kind of like getting through every day, like to your point. Just react into problems. How would you start to, how do you start to focus that organization when you're sitting down with someone and go? Let's figure out where you

actually need to go versus just reacting to the last problem that came up or the last email that hit my inbox. How do I actually figure out where it is that I need to go, whether it's personal goals or a business goal? So all of a sudden you're pursuing exclusivity. Okay. You would think in someone's brain, you would say, if we've gone from delivering a business model that serves everyone in the world who's a child and then we get them as a child and then, you know, the McDonald's

model, the Happy Mail and we've got them for life and then all of a sudden we want to be Louis Vuitton and the whole thing collapses, right? So then what happens is all of a sudden everyone realizes, oh, we've lost the grassroots, we need to go back there. But it's too much of an admission of failure for the leadership to go back. So they're sitting there saying, no, no, it's not that, it's not that. And it's like, well, it's, how can it not be that? You know, we, we went from

providing a really good product to every retailer in the world, our sales team around at the

billions of dollars in supporting tier one athletes, it's, it's not going to work. So what happened

there was the company decided it wanted to be something else without thinking about what's the

“effect of that in, in, in, in the real world. So, so this whole idea and it's very important,”

you know, you're, you're urban certainty and the fickle nature of a consumer is you've got a constantly start with, well, what effect do we want to achieve in the world? Once we know the effect we want to achieve, then what's our objective? So in, and I use this example in, in my book afterburner advantage. And if we want every person to be an athlete, then we need to build a business strategy that enables every person to be an athlete, not just supreme athletes on the planet.

But we need to do both because we want to inspire and, and it's for anyone to feel like, you know, I'd like to be like Mike, you know, we have to have both. And then you start doing the work. And then all of a sudden as you go right, we want to, we want to, we want to make everyone an athlete. How do we do that? Wow, we've got a lot of work to do now. When we were exclusive, it was like fun, sexy work. But now that we're going out to everyone, it's like, but let's connect it with meaning.

“Let's connect every four, five, six, seven year old and inspire them without clothing to be”

a potential athlete. And the coaches who are our enablers, let's reconnect with them. And I was in a room with a coach of one of the most successful college teams. And we're having a conversation and the conversation was like, what happened to you guys? Six years ago, you used to come and see me like three, four times a year. You get us all all the coaches together and you're coming, we just go off site for two days. I haven't even heard from you guys for six, six months.

And you're, and you're wondering why we're all going with a different brand. So the first place to start your strategy is outside your eyeballs on the other side of your eyes. Then you reframes, what can

we do to meet then? I built an entire multi-million dollar business with this. I had a business

that had no products, no services at all. It didn't even exist. It was a brand new company, me and my best friend started it. We had an industry and the industry started as providing security and post-war-torn countries and then at morphed into humanitarian services because we iterated in the field. And what we would do is we would, and this wasn't conscious, by the way, this is how strong biases are, that bias towards curiosity and the bias towards doing things a

little bit better meant that we were doing that orchid thing with everyone in town and this was specifically in Kabul and Afghanistan. So we flew to Afghanistan with nothing, sweat equity, meager retirement savings from being a fighter part for 11 years and we just had coffees and beers

with everyone every single day. We were always out with the people doing the work.

And we would ask, hey, G'day, I'm boo, what's your name? I'm Mike, what are you doing here? Mike, I'm building, I'm with this company. We're building a road from Kabul to Candahar. Ah, awesome. That's, that's going to really change things up here. That's going to be a massive

“contributor to economy. You must really enjoy the work. Yeah, I do. It's really challenging.”

How's it going? It's going really well. Now we're doing this, we're doing that. You know, we're dealing with a lot of the challenges and we, and we've done our homework and we had this conversation a few times and we'd learn that it's Afghanistan. No one's nothing's easy, right? And the biggest cost that we could understand in that part of the world was labor. So we're sitting there and we're like, oh, okay, you know, we understand that it's difficult to

secure the environment, you know, that there's terrorists and IEDs and all this sort of stuff. I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's as costing as an absolute fortune. So that's, that's, so the result is it's costing us a lot of money, all right? And actually the project's starting to fall behind. So we're curious about, you know, why is it cost a lot of money? Where do you recruit the people from when we go through this whole iteration? We said, what if we could get people that

were just as capable on half the salary, would that be of use? And they'd like, yeah, that would really unlock a lot of potential for us here. That would be because we can have more people and we can do more work. And we said, okay, let's we'll get back to you by Friday and we'll come up with a plan together. So we went away and we knew that, you know, India, Nepal, Philippines, you know, there's very capable people there and because of the cost of living in those countries, they're

a lot more affordable. So we had some friends in Nepal and we we found all of these extra British Army Nepalese Gurkans and we managed to rustle up 60 of them in four days. And we went back and we said, look, we can have 60 highly capable intelligent people here at half the cost and by the way for them, it's rock star wages. They can pay double anywhere else they would

We'd have to be useful. We'd be fantastic. And before we know it, after three months, we land our first

“$6 million contract and we're in the hundreds of millions of a few years later with $6,000 star.”

Because we just solved other people's problem and we invested in what we could control. The quality of the people, the fact that the people that we're working for us knew that we value them, that anything that we can do for you to help accrue your wealth and look after you, we will do. And if there's a low quality or toxic person that we recruit, we're not aware of it, we will get, we will weed them out within two weeks. And then we just had the reputation for solving

problems, not theoretically, actually. And then that expanded into setting up ambulances,

hospital clinics, morturies, our camps. We would recruit lawyers, accountants. We were writing

legislation, whatever a country that needs to be rebuilt from nothing needed. We could do it because we understand implicitly the scope and we put that into the contract of the people that we hired. And then we had a clause which was, we will iterate this contract once it starts. And every two weeks we're going to meet, we're going to review against the scope and you're allowed to change the scope. We're not going to walk you in and we'll absorb some of it. But if it's markedly increased in scope,

then we're probably going to have to charge you a little bit more. And everyone was fine because they felt they were in control. And we were in control of what we could control. And then I applied that into property development, building a hotel, into publishing, and now three years ago, I bought this company afterburner, which is a 30 year old company that's been using fight-up pilot cognitive models and ways of working. They help businesses and sports,

professional sporting teams win. So my whole life was just ran full circle. Here I am,

“like almost a embodiment of the company. And I'm fortunate because I believe in what we do,”

not only because I've seen it work with our clients, I've done it myself. The challenge is for most leaders is believing it. It can't be that simple. It can't be. I run a complicated business. It doesn't work in my sector. It works in every single thing. Because all you're doing is replacing a generic objective with yours, a generic result with yours, curiosity around your objectives and your reality, and your actions to do it. It's agnostic as to the problem set. It's just a way of

problem solving. So yeah, so it's often the solution to complexity is more simplicity. And particularly when you're dealing with large groups of people. And with your little league, it's, if you're coaching a kid through a baseball swing, iterating one thing at a time, and you might be debriefing the same action. It might take a little while. But it's one root

“cause, one action, not 20 root causes and 20 actions. And the poor kids sitting there trying to”

we got to put my feet in the right spot, I got to put the bat in the right position, I got my eyes in the right place. A human is engineered to do one thing at a time. And that includes thinking or doing. You can't be thinking through your swing in the act of the swing. They're two completely different structures of the brain. So, you know, leaders often just give a vomit of stuff that needs to get done to their team. And here they are. They're trying to improve their golf swing,

and they're trying to improve the swing, thinking of 20 things at a time and wonder why they're not getting any better. Yeah, I know it sounds right talking about all the complexities of business and solving problems through teaching a little league or how to hit a baseball. But what you just described is the number one lesson that I took away through that process. So, you know, I play college baseball, I played a little baseball after college, you know, hitting was my thing. I knew how to do it.

I never really had a great hitting coach. I pretty much figured it out of my own. And when I first

started trying to teach my kids and their teammates, how to hit a baseball when they're seven, I did exactly what you just said. It was, you know, low turn, oh, you know, I'm just barfing all these things that they need to do to get to, you know, making the contact that they're going to be happy with. And the biggest lesson that I learned, and I was actually putting us in the practice last night with my younger son, because he's been struggling a little bit, is that you can only

solve one problem at a time. You can only solve one problem. And even if you can see, like, that there's multiple things going on in a process. In this case, you know, in the example we're using is hitting a baseball, you know, maybe they're doing a few things wrong. If you give them more than one thing to think about at any given moment, they will not capture any of the things

new bad habits that are still not the path that they need to be on. And it is only through

“like this building block methodology of, hey, let's set your foundation first. Let's, let's just”

get a solid stance. Are you, are you grabbing the ground with your feet, right? Which is a concept that most people don't even understand. So let's talk about, what does that mean to grab the ground with your feet to have a steady base that where you can take a small stride and not fall over the plate or fall backwards or fall, you know, we're, okay, now we can do that. Now we're, we're loading properly. We're landing. Okay, now we got that down. Now let's move to the next thing.

And to your point, it feels like, you know, and this is where I want to go with this question.

What, what's so much of what you have described as the, we'll call it the, the, the, the negative

side or the, the more complex side or the problem side of what people face. I feel like so much of it the reason they aren't curious or don't embrace their curiosity or don't operate through an iterative thinking or work backwards to a problem or to a, to a, to an activity set from it from an

“outcome. All the things you described, the personality trait that I believe holds so many back”

is ego, right? When I look at everything from a 12 year old to, you know, why, I have a client who's in his early 50s and he runs a, a well, a successful company that has been successful despite chaos and he's, he's burned out from the chaos and we're, we're trying to remove the chaos, right? I can pinpoint both the kid who won't change and the CEO running a successful, but highly chaotic business to ego. And the fact that they, there's, like you said, the fictitious company that

you were describing, right? They made this pivot from everybody's an athlete to exclusive, but they didn't want to go back because of ego because they didn't want to look wrong, they didn't want to look like they didn't have the answer, they didn't want to look like, hey, you know, someone somewhere is going to write an article about us because we made this pivot back to where we were at the beginning and what's that going to make us all look like. One, do you believe that ego is, is one of

the, can be, I mean, ego can be very positive too, but can be one of the more toxic qualities that that holds us back. And how do you break the negative aspects of ego down so you can harness the positive aspects and get to do the things that you've actually described in your different

“methodologies and frameworks? Because there's no doubt that you're a fighter pilot, you have to”

have an ego, right? You have to believe when you hit launch or accelerate that you are going to execute that mission and you're going to do it the way that it needs to be done and you're going to bring all your guys home and the mission will be like you have to believe that that's ego, but at the same time, if you're up there thinking you have every answer and every way you do it's going to be exactly right, you're most likely going to run into problems too. So how do you marry those things in the

highly successful, high functioning, high performance world that you live in? I think people get confused about ego, which is just self. And when we say the word ego, it's just how I view myself. And we think that ego means big ego. Oh, you've got an ego. We all have an ego. It's just our self perception. So some of some people have egos that are negative and some people have egos, big egos, which really they're saying I have a strong sense of self. I'm confident

and I'm capable. The thing that gets in the way is fear, not ego. And the fear is that if I do something wrong and people are aware of it, I am not a worthy person. I am a loser. And what we're actually attacking is identity. And when we talk about identity, what we're talking about, the behaviours that accumulate in us, that defined who we are. And as James Clea talks about his book of topic habits is, you're not going to change your habits until you change the identity, which is the

the forward leaning mindset part. A lot of, or the biggest challenge when it comes to iteration is the personal attachment to failure because you got something wrong. And these are, again, just their biases. The survival mode is, well, I need to be seen to be good at everything or else no one will follow me and help me kill mammoths and say, but two tigers. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of, you can't also mention, as well, the 120% goal and I got 105. I was just working with another,

you know, the biggest video conferencing company on the planet. And every year, the finance

team sets targets that they never achieve. And then there's this perception that they do better each

year. So it must be because we keep sending these unattainable targets. But the science is the

all this dopamine, oxygen, serotonin, and dolphins in the box. Like with, with forgotten that, you know, you don't have to win massive all the time. You can win small. And when you set achievable goals and then also set a stretch goal. So if I just, if I work at 60% I achieve my, I achieve my objective. But if I want to unlock the extra 40, I go further and you ride the energy and the positivity of the small wind to get you to the stretch wind. Because no one likes to

“constantly lose. But that's what most business is feel like because 99% of programs run”

late and over budget. So we're always in crisis mode. We're always, you know, full of cortisol. We're

as men we're carrying bellies at the age of 40 and 50 because we're just holding on all our stress down there because we've never set ourselves up to win. So a big part of understanding ego is understanding how you see yourself. So again, if you look at those 400 missions, every one of them is incrementally more difficult than the one before. But through iteration, we've learned that, you know, fighter pilots can handle this rate of growth. And that rate of growth

is what we call pushing out the comfort zone. We don't operate outside the comfort zone because when you're outside the comfort zone, you experience what they call the amygdala hijack which is effectively the body thinks like an animal. It doesn't think like an intelligent human. So when you're outside your comfort zone, you're learning regressors rather than grow. So sometimes in a business, you'll see organizations like, right, let's embrace the guys, let's get outside our comfort zone.

It's like, okay, let's do that and go backwards because it's a really great idea. What you want to

“do and let's go to the little league is how long is the little league season? What three months?”

Yeah, it is. I mean, unfortunately, if you play travel, it's 12 months a year, but yeah, they actually play games about three to three four months depending on how the weather goes. Okay, so let's look at that. We've got 12 iterative cycles, right, within that, within that window. Within those 12 iterative cycles, we have, if you're really motivated, kid seven cycles per 12. So, so a kid might need 12 things fixed on their, on their swing. So week one is just one.

All right, all right, it's better down. There's nothing wrong with betting it down in three days. I'm pulling things forward. There's what he's saying business. It's like, there's nothing wrong with building a quarterly plan and then achieving stuff early and bringing it forward. What we don't want is a 12 month plan, 12 week plan, where we're constantly late. And so for example, as you start the burner, about three weeks ago,

Google made the biggest change in search engine history when it went from SEO to generative engine

optimization. So if you Google something now, the first thing you get is Gemini giving you an AI

response. So, everyone on the planet has spent trillions of dollars building SEO content on their website to rank on a search engine. I was talking to Gemini about it when I read the news and I'm like, oh, yeah, SEO is still going to work and I'm like, hey, look, I'm a fighter pilot. We use nameless and wrinkles debriefing. We want radical transparency and honesty. Tell me the absolute truth about this. And they, it doesn't really work anymore when it comes

to Geo. So we, we set four iterative cycles for weeks to transform a 35,000-word website into a 650,000-word geo-optimized website. There's an awful lot of other stuff we need to do in this business. But right now, everything else we've made a decision is going to suffer as a result of our revenue is going to suffer. Our bounds are going to suffer. Everything's going to suffer. But if we try and do this and everything else, it's going to suffer along with everything else

a little bit later. On Friday, we finally launch our new Geo website, which we built with Gemini,

and caught, we, what better platforms to say, hey, people are going to use you to find us right everything on our website that enables you to find us easily. So this is the, the whole idea. Like, even if within our, within our organization, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, every day has a theme. So if we, if we have a, if we want to modify something on our CRM, because we discovered it on a Monday, it just gets parked in our AI agent and we come to it on Thursday,

because Thursday is our bottom funnel day. Tuesday is our top funnel day. Wednesday is our operational day, and Friday is day, hey, if we didn't, if we missed something on the other four days, we've finished it off on Friday. So we, every, every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday morning,

“Thursday, it's like, okay, what do we need, what do you need to achieve by Friday?”

And I don't have to run that as a leader. The team comes on, this is what I need to achieve

we debrief, and if we didn't achieve it, we're like, cool, is it just to go into a Friday's bucket,

“or is it that urgent that we're going to have to put in an extra hour tomorrow?”

No, it's, it's that urgent. Okay, I'll get up on five instead of six and I'll do it. Because that's my job as a leader. My job is to pick up the overflow, not to do the work. So this, it's all these little, I got diagnosed with ADHD three years ago, and I had to go through an assessment because my son was struggling at school and the school thought he had ADHD. And as part of their assessment, they're like, we need both parents to go

and get an ADHD assessment from a, not just get online and doing online, you know, ADHD test, but do the self-assessed test, go to a psychiatrist and get a formal diagnosis. And both other, and I have ADHD. So for the last three years, I've been an average student of ADHD. And what you learn about ADHD is, you're not that different from everyone else. There's just a few things that I amplify. So you learn a lot about how the brain works. And one of the, one of the interesting

“elements about the brain is that the way in which it structures time, it, it only has two buckets”

of time now or later. So if we don't get intentional around later, we just end up with this big bucket full of later stuff. And now just becomes whatever's in front of me. There's no intention

ality. So there's a really simple way, you know, even with your little league team is you can basically

theme out the 12 weeks and you can theme out each day. And you can theme out the homework for the kids, because what's going to happen is they're going to have a problem with their swing and you're going to focus on their, on their footwork. And then they're going to go home to their dad and their dad's going to be talking about a whole bunch of other stuff. So, you know, the, the true embodiment of a coach is not just coaching the player. It's coaching the environment that the player is in as well.

So all of a sudden, it becomes a lot less stressful being a coach, because you just let the just let the position of the back. Hey, just let that fly. That's, that's weeks free. That's, that's not even important right now, right? And hitting the ball and getting a home run, it's not even on the objective list right now, because this kid, by Friday, I want you to explain to me your own words. What it feels like to be gripping the ground. And when you can explain

that to me, that's the wind for the week. And all of a sudden, the kids like, oh, I'm liberated from being the home run kid. And I'm Friday, I can really feel my feet in the ground. Or some next week,

we're going to look at where you hold in the bat. It's very powerful when you bring intentionality

to action. And when you start to be disciplined around how you allocate future time buckets. If the kid on Wednesday tells you, man, I'm gripping the ground. I'm going, okay, cool, let's

“bring the bat swing bit forward. And that's where you're going to, that's how you tailor it, right?”

So part of pilot, that's our DNA. There's not an hour of the day. There's not one minute of the day that isn't projected out to six months. So we know exactly what each mission needs to be, what the deliverable of the mission is be, how that accumulates into the competency of the squadron at the end of the six monthly cycle. So every action within the mission delivers an objective that arrives the squadron at its destination at the end of the six months cycle. That does not exist

anywhere in the 30 years that we've worked with businesses. I would challenge to think that apart from the bees, ulcers of the world and the betterers and the web serene or Venus Williams, that most of us just exist. We don't bring awareness to time. We don't bring awareness to intentional activity. We just do whatever we want to do. That's a problem. And there's a study that proves this. Back in 2014, there was a study called Just Think. And the premise of the study

was if we put individuals in a white room with a white chair for six to 15 minutes, we want to assess whether that's an enjoyable experience or not. So just be left with your thoughts. And the study was a very broad spectrum of age groups from 18 to up to 80. And overwhelmingly, the response was mostly negative. It wasn't an enjoyable experience. So this ecologists thought, "Oh, it must be the environment. No one wants to sit in a white room and put it on the six minutes."

So they reset the study and they got them to sit at home for the same time period. So everyone went through the study again. They sat, did nothing. And they didn't enjoy the experience any more or less than just sitting in the white room. And when they were reviewing each of the candidates on the study, one of the gentlemen admitted to cheating and turning on the television. So this gave them another thought and they went back to the white room with a white chair.

And this time they said to them, "Look, we're going to put a button on the table and if you hit it, you're going to get an electric shock. How much would you pay us to not get an electric shock?" And the average was $5. I'll give you $5 to not shock me during this study.

shock, rather than just sit there and think. And 17% of the people on the study could at twice,

“and one guy hit at 190 times. So what you discover here is, or what they discovered,”

was this propensity to be busy, even doing something harmful for yourself, rather than sit for six minutes and think. And this is the paradigm that we're trying to break with afterburner in the work I'm doing, is bring awareness that busyness feels fulfilling. It feels like good work.

But the reality is, the measurement is the result that you're delivering and achieving within

time within budget without burning yourself out. So this awareness of missionisation of creating

“the long-term destination, the short-term objectives that drive the action, is what liberates us”

from that overwhelming sense of doing everything everywhere all the time and really start as the power through the work and for the work to translate from meaningless work, into meaningful activity.

There, I can talk to you all day long. I love this stuff. This is like a masterclass.

The book is coming out in September. I'm assuming pre-orders are up. We can, people can start ordering. Yeah, the pre-orders are being out in a couple of weeks. Again, we, everything got shifted a month,

“thanks to Google. So the pre-ordials will be kicking off in July. Great. Okay. We'll time this”

around the launch of the pre-orders, so we make sure everyone who's listening, because I know I know my audience is going to be salivating to get more of you. So in the meantime, pre-orders, well, we'll make sure we time it with the pre-orders. Where else can people connect to go deeper into their, your world? I know I have a lot of corporate specialists in that are going to be very interested in afterburner as well and your work. How do people get deeper into

your world and follow along? There's really three channels. Just type my last name into Google, be OUC, OUSIS. I'm kind of the only one out there. My website is callmebu.com and my company, which is manned by over 25 phenomenal former fighter pilots, all of them from Brigadier Generals that worked in the White House all the way down to Squadron Commanders, could come in and inspire your people to truly believe that there's this untapped potential in each of them. And that

we can live in existence that embraces awareness where we get more done, make more impact, and it takes less effort to get there. I absolutely love it. Thank you so much for sharing your time today. I appreciate the hell out of you and I hope that we can have another conversation again in the future. This was phenomenal. It'd be a pleasure, Ryan. Thanks for having me on the show. It's a real honor.