Monday Motivation, 8.7.17

Written by: Ben Rogers

I’ve been a terrible reader my entire life. Every time I listen to a podcast, read a blog, attend a seminar…every time I hear or see anything said by a successful person, reading is one of his or her habits. I have excuses, and usually legitimate ones. Time is always the biggest one.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my high school football coaches, Jake Just. He’s a freak of nature – both mentally and physically. Every day, he gets up at the same time, and has the same routine. His routine includes reading and writing. To some, reading and writing might sound cheesy or “nerdy”. But Jake is a bad a*s, and he does it – so I want to do it too. I don’t have any more time to make excuses. I must take ownership of my time and make the most out of it.

He recommended a book to me by two Navy SEALs, Jocko Willink & Leif Babin called “Extreme Ownership”. The timing was perfect. For a quick idea of what these guys are all about, listen to this quick 2-minute YouTube clip. It’ll fire you up.

Here are two of my favorite paragraphs from “Extreme Ownership”:

“As individuals, we often attribute the success of others to luck or circumstances nd make excuses for our own failures and the failures of our team. We blame our own poor performance on bad luck, circumstances beyond our control, or poorly performing subordinates – anyone but ourselves. Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept, and taking ownership when things go wrong requires extraordinary humility and courage. But doing just that is an absolute necessity to learning, growing as a leader, and improving a team’s performance.

Extreme Ownership require leaders to look at an organization’s problems through the objective lends of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans. It mandates that a leader set ego aside, accept responsibility for failures, attack weaknesses, and consistently work to build a better and more effective team. Such a leader, however, does not take credit for his or her team’s success but bestows that honor upon his subordinate leaders and team members. When a leader sets such an example and expects this from junior leaders within the team, the mindset develops into the team’s culture at every level. With Extreme Ownership, junior leaders take charge of their smaller teams and their piece of the mission. Efficiency and effectiveness increase exponentially and a high-performance, winning team is the result.”

I’m not 100% done with the book yet, but I’m almost done. The lessons I’ve learned from it already have changed my mindset so that I, as the Team Leader of The RLT, will take full and extreme ownership of any setbacks we encounter and will attack weaknesses to consistently build a better and more effective team. No more excuses.

Obviously, I highly recommend this book and for the normal reader, it’s a quick read.