I Didn't Know He Was a Navy Seal Until I Googled Him

I had a friend for years before I found out, by accident, that he was a Navy Seal.

He never brought it up. I found out doing a random web search on his name while looking for extreme fitness training in Austin. Compare that to how most people manage the first five minutes of meeting someone: name-dropping, credentials, the highlight reel. Whose approach earns more respect?

I asked him what was harder, Seal training or the missions he ran in Vietnam. Training, without hesitation. Dropout rate around 75%. Hell week means hours sitting in 55 degree water. The real lesson wasn't a skill. It was finding out his body could do things far beyond what he thought it could.

Almost nobody finds their actual ceiling on their own. We stop well before it, because the first wall we hit feels like the real one. It isn't.

For a long stretch of my career, I held myself back wanting to know I could succeed before I tried. When I started Mass Relevance, I'd never raised money before. But I'd done plenty of other things I'd never done before and gotten through them, so intellectually I knew I could figure this one out too. I got a good lawyer for the complicated parts and raised the round fairly quickly.

The limit was never really about capability. It was fear wearing the costume of uncertainty. My father has repeated an Emerson line to me my whole life: "Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain." Most limits that stop people are just a fear line pretending to be a wall.

One more thing I learned from that Seal friend: if a shark comes straight at you underwater, don't cut it. Grab your knife by the sheath end and hit its nose with the handle. They hate that and swim off. I don't have a clean way to connect that to leadership... but I think about it more than I should.