Book 56 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title - Be The Change You Want To See In The World

Book - Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Book Description: Sent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed “all but lost.” In gripping firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories in SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, they learned that leadership―at every level―is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training that helped forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After departing the SEAL Teams, they launched Echelon Front, a company that teaches these same leadership principles to businesses and organizations. From promising startups to Fortune 500 companies, Babin and Willink have helped scores of clients across a broad range of industries build their own high-performance teams and dominate their battlefields.

Reflection:

My Mission in life is to live a balanced existence and to help others to do the same.

Ironically, the key to unearthing a lot of the key lessons in life to maintain your balance, you first must look to the opposite of balance and to the extremes for lessons. It is in the extreme's when we are at our most human in life, and you are forced to view life through a new lens if you are to survive and endure.

No one wants to ever find themselves in an extreme situation, but if you do, at least you know there will be a big life lesson waiting for you should you make it through. The biggest lessons toward my own quest for balance and learning what I really value in life personally have been learned at the extreme's of my own existence. From the sudden birth of my daughter, the subsequent fight for her life in the NICU, and dealing with crippling panic attacks for 3 years in my late 20's, these extreme points in my life make up the foundation of almost all the learnings and knowledge being shared in this Year of Magical Learning Project.

However, we don't just need to experience all the extreme's ourselves to learn new lessons, life sounds like a cruel joke if so. That is why our words are so important. Through language we can share our lessons at the extreme's to spare others the pain. We can take lessons learned through other's lived experiences to sample from them without ever having to go there ourselves. This is why I love books. We get the opportunity to learn a lifetime of wisdom from others, pass down our own stories, and share hard earned knowledge through the magic of our words.

For this particular lesson we turn to an all to familiar man made extreme of war for our learnings. It is hard to find anything much more naturally extreme than war. War amplifies everything, in doing so, war is sadly a source of a lot of our greatest innovations and personal growth discoveries. The key lesson from the author Jocko and Leif's Navy Seal teams that they brought back from their time at the extreme's of war was...It's Your Fault!

Whatever is going on in your life is your fault! That's it.

Any change you want to see in this world must begin with you. If you are unhappy with your life, job, relationships, results, marriage, anything and everything else...start searching within for answers and improvement before turning to the outside world. It's such a simple and powerful message that was forged in the extreme's of war where a group of people had to be operating at peak efficiency in order to survive and make it home to their families.

For me and in my quest for living a balanced life, taking the extreme ownership lesson means you have to fully know yourself inside and out if you ever are going to find true balance and harmony. You can turn to the outside world for inspiration, but that won't get you very far and you will most likely be more lost than ever. Your quest is doomed from the start until you know why you are doing what you do, for whom, and what values you hold true to your heart. Once that is established, your #1 goal should be to manage yourself to those expectations and ideals. If you do this, balance just might be within your reach.

Question: Do you look within or without first when seeking change?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Extreme Ownership

YOML Bookstore - Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin