Maintain A Vision

Personal Ownership Principle #3:  Maintain A Vision

The Process is More Important than the Products.

A vision is simply a set of goals for the future.  I believe that a suitable vision is characterized by being holistic, realistic, and bold.  Creating a vision for myself is how I got my life back on track after hitting what felt like rock bottom after leaving engineering.  My belief system had fallen apart and I needed to reorganize my energy into a direction that made sense for my life.  Remember from the last article, I was $60,000 in debt, I wasn’t making any money working as a Personal Trainer, and I was being evicted from my apartment.  It was at this time that I asked myself a few questions about finding a new job:  What do I enjoy doing?  Why did I hate engineering?  What did I need?

The answers were simple but important:  at work I wanted a sense of purpose, physical and mental challenges, and decent pay.  As I thought through ideas, the military came to mind.  In particular, being a medic seemed like a good potential fit.  Part of my reasoning for becoming a medic was the opportunity I would have to learn more about the human body.  This made sense as someone who is very interested in fitness.  With engineering I hadn’t thought this way at all.  I never thought about what I truly wanted.  I was focused on what was practical for having a high paying job.  I just followed the path handed to me.  But as I was trying to find a new direction for my life, I was starting to think holistically.

Holistic

A holistic vision is a set of goals that attempts to account for all parts of life.  I believe there are 4 fundamental parts of life:  Health, Personal Finances, Relationships, and Work.  Accordingly, my goals were simple: get in good shape, get out of debt, and do a job where I directly help others.  As for relationships, by the time I was being evicted, I really wasn’t talking much to any of my close friends or family members.  This alone time was extremely important.  I needed the time in isolation to be able to hear and honor my own thoughts.  So much of my life up until this point was about doing what was expected of me by other people.  In isolation I began to incubate the self confidence I needed to go my own way.    

Emotional blinders have been a consistent theme in explaining these principles.  By separating myself from people I was really giving myself a quiet space to evaluate my situation and be logical about what needed to happen next.  A lot of people who had been close to me at the time were so fixated on the title of ‘Engineer’ and the high income that came with it, that they couldn’t see the forest for the trees.  I was a young healthy 23 year old man with a college degree.  There were a plethora of jobs I could have done to get myself moving in a different direction.  Firefighter, Police Officer, Tradesman, FBI, Secret Service… All of these jobs have a physical component and a service component similar to the military.  I never heard one alternative suggestion.  Just go back to engineering.  Which I did do briefly (3 weeks) because I was still listening to other people at the time.  In those 3 weeks working for the second time as an engineer after college I thought, “Why am I doing this to myself?!”  When I quit I went into personal training and decided I was done listening to other people.

Realistic

Eventually I talked to an Army recruiter who offered me a chance to try out for Special Forces.  In thinking about it, I did another thing that I never did with engineering:  I thought about the worst case scenario.  I was very up front and realistic about the risks involved.  Signing up for Special Forces meant I was going to combat.  In doing so, I could be captured by the enemy and tortured to death.  I spent a couple of weeks contemplating this reality.  Mitigating this risk meant taking my training and lifestyle seriously:  good exercise, eating, and sleeping habits.  Managing my money well and paying off debt.  Making sure my will and life insurance information were prepared.  Everything that I could control, I tried to make an effort to control.  I was trying to tip the scales of fate in my favor.  

My approach to joining the military was very different from how I had approached engineering.  With engineering, I never thought to ask myself what would happen if I hated the job.  When I got a 5 year car loan a few months after starting my engineering job, I didn’t think about the possibility of quitting my job and not having the income to pay for the loan.  Every course of action we take has risks both known and unknown.  To not acknowledge the known risks is a strategic error that can have grave consequences.  I had learned my lesson and I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

Again, emotional blinders.  It’s very easy to believe we have chosen a path with no risks when society and everyone around us affirms that path.  It’s a herd mentality, “Everyone else is going this way so it must be safe…”  This is what I had done with engineering.  It’s easy to ignore the obvious problems with a course of action when everyone else is doing it.  The feelings of safety can cause us not to ask very obvious questions that would likely illuminate a more complex truth.

Bold  

Finally, to tryout for Army Special Forces was a bold move for me.  When I entered the military in August of 2007 I had never shot a gun, been camping, or even gone on a hike.  I liked working out but I didn’t possess superior physical traits.  I assumed that the best candidates were physically and mentally superior in obvious ways.  Probably former high level athletes of some sort, military academy graduates, or just guys who grew up in the country living a very physical lifestyle in relation to the outdoors.  I didn’t have any of this.  All I had was the knowledge that I was willing to work hard for long periods of time and the determination to try (remember from the article on principle 1, I was confident about my ability to do hard things).  At the time of signing the initial contract it felt like my odds of successfully completing the training were really weak.  This is what I mean by bold.  A bold vision should create some trepidation due to the potential for failure.  Also, a bold vision is honest.  Sometimes being ourselves is the scariest move we can make.  Something deep down in me wanted to try this and for the first time I was listening to my own instincts.  I also knew that even in failure, with the right perspective I could learn valuable things about myself.  7 Years of trying and failing at weight loss taught me that.

It could certainly be argued that maybe I got emotionally spun up thinking about becoming a Green Beret.  It would most certainly have been easy to fantasize about being this war hero (emotional blinders).  However, I had intentionally spent time thinking about the worst case scenario and thinking about the broad impacts of this path on my life.  I acknowledged the huge potential for failure and death.  This kept me very grounded and sober minded about what I was choosing to do.  

Dive In

Among many skills I didn’t have when I joined the military, I also didn’t know how to swim.  I was terrified of the water.  When I told this to my recruiter he said, “They’ll teach you how to swim in basic training!”  While in basic training I realized that I had been lied to.  This was a tactic used to get me to sign the contract.  However, at this point I was resolute about the task.  If I wasn’t going to be taught how to swim I would teach myself.  Nobody forced me to sign the contract so it was my responsibility to figure it out.  I didn’t waste any time being frustrated about it.  Once I completed basic training, I could read books and watch videos on swimming.  Every base has a gym with a pool for Soldiers to access.  I was confident I could figure it out. 

Upon completion of basic training I met someone who offered to help me with my swimming problem.  His name was Sergeant Smith.  He was a qualified combat diver.  This means he was as competent in the water as a Navy SEAL.  One day Sergeant Smith had me meet him at a pool on base.  I showed up thinking we would work on swim technique but Sergeant Smith showed up to the pool in his normal uniform.  He clearly wasn’t about to get in the water.  He walked towards a locker that was beside the deep end of the pool.  He opened the locker and pulled out a blue brick.  He threw the brick into the pool.  It was 15 feet deep.  My stomach jumped up into my throat.

In short, he explained to me that this was a water confidence exercise meant to help me overcome my fear of the water.  All I had to do was clasp my hands overhead like a spear and dive in.  I would descend to the bottom, grab the brick, push off the bottom with the brick over head, and I would float right up.  At this point, the deepest water I had ever been in was waist deep.  Diving to the bottom of a 15 foot deep pool was a terrifying proposition.  

I turned to a wall nearby and I said a little prayer.  I also did some risk calculation.  If something went wrong while I was retrieving the brick, I had a combat diver, the lifeguard on duty, and a buddy who had come for moral support, all nearby.  All competent swimmers.  I also thought about all the hell I had gone through before joining The Army.  All the people telling me I was lazy, ungrateful, and stupid for leaving engineering.  I thought about all the people who treated me like garbage when I was a kid.  I needed fuel to burst through his obstacle and I dug deep into my bag of trauma to find it.  I turned back towards the pool and I dove in.  I floated to the bottom, got the brick, pushed off the bottom, and put the brick on the edge of the pool at Sergeant Smith’s feet.  

As I climbed out of the water I felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment.  It was a huge turning point in how I looked at myself.  Up until that point I really thought my chances of success in the upcoming training were slim at best.  However, as the Special Forces Training unfolded I realized that success was really about the ability to move forward in difficult situations.  You had to be able to do hard things.  That day at the pool I saw clearly my ability to turn pain into perseverance.  This was something I had learned in all those years trying and failing to lose weight.

Another powerful lesson that was reinforced during this time was the power of story to overcome our apprehension when faced with adversity.  There were many situations in the military similar to this story of diving into this pool.  I’m faced with a task that I am unfamiliar with and have seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against me.  Yes I used the pain from my childhood to motivate myself but I also thought about how amazing it would be one day to tell the tale of this timid obese kid becoming a US Army Green Beret.  A good vision compels us to face our anxieties and fears in order to take action.  When I dove in the pool that day, I still had 2 years of training ahead of me and I still didn’t know how to swim.  But I was able to envision a more self assured and confident version of myself because of facing the unknowns.  No combat and no green beret, yet, this is still my favorite Army story to tell.  Why?  Because I was so terrified of the water.  I had to overcome a massive internal fear to move forward.

Knowledge of Self

As I wrote earlier, It’s fun to tell the story of a timid overweight kid who becomes a US Army Green Beret.  However, I also know that throughout my military service there was lots of luck involved.  I saw lots of people more capable than I get dropped from training for freak injuries.  Whether I had successfully become a Green Beret or not, what’s important is what I learned about myself by trying: Self Confidence and Self Respect by overcoming fears,  confirming my belief that I would thrive in a more physical environment, learning that I wanted to be my own boss.  One of the most profound lessons I learned from military training came as I was leaving the service:  I was calmer after training and after coming home from Afghanistan than when I entered the service.  It was as if a thunderstorm had been raging inside me my whole life and it finally calmed down.  Among the many ironies of my journey I’ve realized that I went into the military with PTSD from my childhood.  The aggressive nature of Special Forces training and combat acted as a relief valve for all the anger that had built up inside of me during my upbringing.  This knowledge of myself is why I still participate in martial arts and lead a very physical lifestyle today.  These activities keep that inner storm calm.

By thinking holistically, being realistic, and choosing a bold course of action, I was able to learn things about myself that have helped me make wiser decisions about the future and further developed my character as a man.  I ended up going so far off course as an engineer because not only did I not know myself well, but I didn’t have the courage to be myself.  While in the service I became debt free and I graduated in the top 20% of my class of Green Berets.  Eventually I would serve in combat in Afghanistan.  These were all fantastic outcomes but it’s the process that these goals invited me into that helped me learn myself.  Knowledge of self helps me choose my direction wisely in accordance with who I know myself to be.  This is why the process is more important than the products.

Conclusion

In this part of my journey you can see all three principles come into play:

• Action Over Time – The Process of Paying off debt and the Process of becoming a Green beret both took significant time and involved plenty of adversity.  But both were worth having so I fought my way forward.
• Understand Your Story – So much of my time in the military was about rewriting my own story of who I am.  Seeing the value of my difficult childhood in making me a tough resilient human being.  Also, paying off debt made me realize how little meaning material things have to me and I realized how important it is for me to live a physical lifestyle.
• Maintain A Vision – To reiterate, chasing a holistic, realistic, bold vision brought me into a process where I got to learn valuable lessons about myself and become a better version of myself.

To be very clear, a bold vision doesn’t have to involve some huge goal like becoming a green beret or the CEO of Google.  What is bold for you will look different from bold for someone else.  However, having a process that exposes you to your limitations and asks you to improve aspects of your character is important.  

Right now, my main goals involve learning to separate my sense of self worth from my job and learning better self advocacy skills.  Both have forced me to take bold steps in my life in different ways. They’re not huge goals but they’re challenging me and helping me to develop a better understanding of myself and the world around me.  This sort of brings us back to something I talk about in principle #1: This is about a posture towards adversity and meaningful goals.

Right now I am pursuing a path as a content creator.  I write and I record video podcasts (podcasts dropping in January).  I’ve been doing this in some form for 11 years and I write often that it may never produce an income.  It’s risky because of the money I could be making doing something else.  I work as a security guard to pay the bills and because it allows me plenty of time, energy, and flexibility to continue pursuing my vision.  However, I’m very sober minded that it may not work out.  In the last 11 years I’ve encountered numerous obstacles in this process.  People have laughed at the fact that I’m a security guard, mocked my content, and marginalized my story.  I’ve been accused of being self righteous and being whimsical for my beliefs.  Often these criticisms come from people close to me at the time, who have never taken time to read or understand my ideas.  When I started this, I wasn’t ready for just how pessimistic and cynical some people are.  My ideas challenge their story about life and as rational as I think my ideas are,  my story didn’t prepare me for just how cynical people are.  Add to this that I have gotten very little attention on my work.  I don’t know that I ever will.  

Why do I keep doing this?  Because no matter how many challenges, frustrations, and depressing moments I have experienced,  this work continues to be worth it to me.  So I focus on what I can control.  I take ownership and I keep fighting.

This is the Third and final Principle of Personal Ownership. Visit this page to recap all three principles.

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