Chapter 2

TOTAL SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

As the high-speed train sped through the French countryside on its way to Paris late in the day on August 21, 2015, a man slipped out of the bathroom to make his way back into the crowded passenger car. His mission was simple: kill as many people as possible, and he was well equipped to deliver on that promise. With an AKM assault rifle slung over one shoulder and plenty of ammunition, plus a loaded handgun and box cutter as side weapons, he was fully armed and ready to deliver another massacre on European soil in the name of jihad.

Except that it didn’t work out that way.

Two Frenchmen who happened to be nearby and saw the guy emerge from the restroom tried unsuccessfully to subdue him. At which point a group of three American friends—two of them off-duty military men—launched a split-second counterattack. Spencer Stone (air force) slowed the assailant down by grappling with him, sustaining multiple slash wounds as he struggled to get him into a choke hold. Alek Skarlatos (national guard) grabbed the rifle away from the guy and slammed the muzzle into his head, immobilizing him. Their friend Anthony Sadler helped hold him down and tie him up with another passenger’s T-shirt.

There was a lot of blood and a lot of panic—but nobody died.

Nobody died. Think about that for a moment. In these days of mass shooters and rampant acts of terrorism, a jihadist armed with an automatic rifle and nine magazines totaling 270 rounds launches himself into a crowded train carrying more than five hundred passengers, intent on unleashing a massacre—and fails to kill a single person.

Here’s what I find remarkable about this. Stone and Skarlatos were not there on patrol or acting as security forces. They were not there in any official capacity, and they certainly weren’t focusing on this guy. They were on vacation. They were focusing on fun and sightseeing. (Hell, Stone was sleeping when the attack began.) There is one and only one reason this situation didn’t become the tragic bloodbath that it so easily could have been: these guys had a particular kind of training.

They were trained to be situationally aware.

One year after that foiled train attack, almost to the day, I landed at JFK after a few weeks in Europe. I had just cleared customs and was waiting for my luggage when I heard a scuffle of people running and half a dozen officers burst into the area shouting, “Shots fired! Active shooter! Everyone run for safety—RUN!”

I immediately took cover behind a concrete pillar (concealment is something that hides you visually but can still be penetrated by gunfire; cover is something that protects you both visually and ballistically) and began assessing the scene. I saw a mother running for her life with a baby in her arms. A man crying because he was separated from his wife and children. Hundreds of people pouring through alarm-wired security doors searching for safety. Nobody had any idea what was happening. No police or TSA agents or security personnel showed up to tell everyone what to do. Pandemonium. The noise level was insane. It felt as if I were back in Afghanistan or Iraq in the middle of some op—only nobody’d been briefed.

Leapfrogging backward, using whatever points of cover presented themselves, I found an exit that was open. Another wave of panicked people was headed my way. Someone had to take charge, so I shouted, “Follow me!” and out we went, down the stairs, out onto the tarmac, and to a fence that separated the airport grounds from a parking lot. Throwing my rain jacket over the top of the razor-wire to create a passable avenue of escape, I helped a few people over and out. Some officers saw us and were not happy with me. But someone had to have a plan. The place was such total chaos it’s a miracle nobody was trampled to death by the stampeding herds of terrified passengers.

As it turned out, there was no shooter. The whole thing was a case of panic over nothing. Someone put forward the theory that the sound of people cheering on the televised Olympics was somehow mistaken for gunfire. Sounds like a bullshit rumor to me, something someone concocted to cover his ass. Way more likely is that it was an accidental gun discharge. But whatever it was that triggered the panic isn’t the point.

The point is this: Nobody was prepared. Nobody was situationally aware.

In the wake of mass-shooting incidents around the world, many of us from the Spec Ops community have been called upon to help train citizens on what to do in the event of a sudden shooting rampage or other unexpected attack. We’ve written about it over and over on SOFREP. Of all the advice and perspective I can possibly offer, the single most critical element in safety, prevention, and defense is the combination of skills summed up in the three words at the top of this chapter.

Total situational awareness.

You need the same skill set to survive and thrive in the world of business.

Plan, Look, Listen

When I was a kid, there was a railroad crossing not far from my house that sported an old wooden sign with three words on it. You’ve probably seen one like it. It said, STOP • LOOK • LISTEN. That’s a great piece of life advice, too. But it doesn’t quite work on the battlefield, because when trouble hits like a hurricane, there isn’t time to STOP and think. The LOOK and LISTEN part is spot-on, but if you have to STOP first to do it, then you’re already too late—and someone’s dead. Maybe you.

You have to do the thinking ahead of time. You have to PLAN.

Total situational awareness is what you achieve when you practice forethought and thorough preparation, combined with a state of moderate vigilance.

The forethought and preparation aspect means that by the time you’re in the situation, you’ve already asked questions like “What would I do if XYZ happened, or something like it?” You’ve visualized unexpected problems, run scenarios, created contingencies. You can’t anticipate everything that could go wrong, but you can anticipate enough so that you at least have a plan of action, or the bare bones of a plan of action, for when the shit hits the fan.

At JFK, nobody had a plan. And the guys on the train? They didn’t have to STOP to come up with a plan, because they had training. They’d run scenarios. Not exactly like this situation, but close enough that they could move right into action. If they’d had to STOP and think about it, there would have been dozens of fatalities on that train, probably starting with them.

Then there’s the moderate vigilance part. This isn’t the same thing as being hypervigilant, that all-nerves-tingling state you go to in the midst of an actual emergency, where adrenaline floods your system, your senses become acute, and time slows down to a crawl. If you maintained that kind of vigilance for any length of time, you’d go nuts. Or suffer adrenal exhaustion. Or both. Moderate vigilance means that even as you go about your business, a part of you stays on mild alert, tuning in to what’s going on around you.

Americans by nature tend to be among the least situationally aware people on the planet. When I walk the streets of New York, it amazes me how many people stroll along glued to their phones, barely seeing where they’re going themselves, let alone noticing what other people are doing or how they are acting. These blissful unawares don’t have a clue who is in the crowd around them. If an active-shooter situation suddenly broke out, they would be completely lost.

Total situational awareness means you never let yourself get too comfortable. The truth is, most of us in the modern developed world live very sheltered lives. For a lot of people, most of the time, maybe that works.

In business, it’s sure death.

Pay Attention

Let’s try something. Think about the last time you went shopping. Not online, I mean the last time you actually walked into a physical store. Drugstore, convenience store, supermarket, whatever. Got that clearly in mind? Okay.

Now take a piece of paper, and write down a list of every single person you saw while you were in that store, describing each person’s face, manner of movement, and your overall impression.

How’d you do?

If the police knocked on your door tomorrow, sat down in your living room, said they were investigating a recent crime in the area, and asked you if any of the people you passed in the store when you were there had acted oddly in any way, how much information could you give them? How useful a witness would you be?

In sniper training, we have an exercise we call KIM, or Keep in Memory. There are dozens of variations. In one, instructors might drive you through the streets of a city to a destination and, after you get there, quiz you without warning on every car you passed along the way. In another, you go through a field course where objects are hidden out in the woods along the way. You’re supposed to remember them all, which means that you have to have noticed them all, even though nobody told you that you’d be tested on this later. Those students always had to be “on.” Always vigilant. Sometimes, to push the limits of our students’ memories, we would wait a few weeks after they’d been through a given course to quiz them on what they saw there.

The point of these exercises is to train our students in how to pay extreme attention and cultivate total situational awareness.

It surprises most people to learn this, but being a sniper is not principally about shooting or marksmanship. As a sniper, a relatively tiny percentage of your total amount of time in the field is on the gun. You spend most of your active time in observation. A sniper is first and foremost an intelligence asset. Snipers are a field element’s forward eyes and ears. Reconnaissance and surveillance are the bedrock of our skill set.

The same is true in business. Do you make important decisions? Of course. Do you pull the trigger—hiring and firing, writing checks, launching initiatives? Of course you do. But not most of the time. No, the great majority of what you’re called upon to do is learn, watch, absorb, think. Reconnaissance. Paying attention.

Those three weeks I was in Europe, just before finding myself in the middle of that phantom-shooter incident at JFK? I called it a vacation, but that isn’t really what it was. To be fair, I did a bunch of sightseeing, saw friends, flew some planes. I’m a big believer in the “work hard, play hard” philosophy. But the real purpose of that trip was to do some fact-finding. I wanted to get a firsthand read on what was happening with the economy in Europe, how our own forthcoming presidential election might affect markets over there, and what was going on globally. While I was there, I met with people whom friends from home had hooked me up with—entrepreneurs from Berlin, Australia, Russia, all over. Reconnaissance. Paying attention.

I consume a steady diet of industry periodicals for the media business and read a ton of books (which I’ll say more about in a moment), but it’s not enough to read what’s on the page or the screen. You have to be constantly reading the world around you.

Next time you’re out walking around in public, ask yourself, if someone suddenly mounted an armed attack, where would it most likely come from? What would be your best escape route?

Now ask those same questions about your business.

Practice Using Your Peripheral Vision

As I said, an expert military sniper is not simply an expert marksman but a highly skilled observer. Therefore, a significant part of sniper training has to do with how to see. For example, in sniper school you learn that looking directly at something is not necessarily the best way to see it. Sometimes your peripheral vision serves you better than your dead-on-target focal vision.

Detecting color and movement are the two most important factors in observation. The central area of the retina, called the fovea, is not very good at seeing those. The fovea is excellent at detail in black-and-white, which is what you pick up when you scan a page of text with the center of your eyes: the black-and-white details of letters and words. Peripheral vision, on the other hand, is lousy at detail but far more acute at picking up color and movement. Terrible at reading static words on the page, but superb at noticing something—or someone—moving out in the woods at the edge of your field of vision.

Try this: Hold your hand out straight and make a thumbs-up gesture. Now look at your thumbnail. That covers about 2 percent of your field of vision, the total area that your foveal receptors encompass. That tiny hole in the center of your field of vision is the detail peephole you use to scan back and forth on a page when you read. It also represents the scope of your brain when it’s trying to bear down on a problem by focusing. Lots of detail. Hardly any depth or context. No color.

Now, as you continue staring at your thumbnail, don’t move your eyes or change your focus, but just become aware of everything in your field of vision other than your thumbnail. The first thing you’ll notice is how much more there is to see! That’s a vast ocean of visible information—none of which you can access, or at least not very well, when you try to focus on it.

Focus, in other words, isn’t everything, as important as it is. That’s the paradox of the sniper’s craft: you have to be totally focused on your target as if you were shutting out the rest of the world—but you’re not shutting it out. In fact you have to be keenly tuned in to what’s going on in the rest of the world.

Business is like that, too. You can’t live in a silo. And it’s not only danger that may come at you from the periphery; it’s also opportunity. Whether you’re a small-business owner, entrepreneur, solo practitioner, or department manager for a monster firm, you can’t afford to say, “Oh, I don’t need to know about that business over there; it’s got nothing to do with what we do here.” Because today it might not, but you never know if tomorrow it suddenly will.

Blockbuster video didn’t think the online digital world had anything to do with its business model, any more than the big-box bookstore chains did before Amazon came along. You can’t afford to bury your head in your own sandbox. You never know when something in the periphery will assume central importance.

In 2011, when I was licking my wounds from the Wind Zero meltdown, there were two proven paths where a guy with my background could go to work and make serious money: consulting to defense companies, and farming himself out overseas as a contract security agent. I’d done both, and I wasn’t interested in making either one my future. There were also lucrative executive opportunities in the corporate sector. Did that too; also not my future.

But . . . blogging? I mean, seriously? The idea that someone like me could build a multimillion-dollar media empire starting with a blog site was so out in left field it would have been easy to miss completely.

But there you go: “out in left field” is the very definition of peripheral vision.

Sometimes, while you’re busy taking aim at the target directly in front of you, there’s a much better idea floating at the periphery of your vision, something you hadn’t thought of and never would have in a million years. And if you keep your eyes staring straight ahead to the exclusion of all else, you’ll miss it.

Stay Thirsty

On February 1, 2012, we put up our first few posts on SOFREP.

On February 2, I wrote a post saying, “Thank you for checking out the site and all the great feedback yesterday. We’re still working out some bugs, and I’m tracking all your inputs to make sure we have the best site possible. As we say in the navy, welcome aboard—and please help us spread the world about SOFREP! Brandon out.”

My brand-new business had now been up and online for twenty-four hours. It was official: I was now the CEO of a media business.

Wait. A media business? What the hell did I know about media?

In the course of my SEAL sniper training, I’d gone through a ton of study: not only self-defense and all the obvious combat arts, but also math, physics, ballistics, digital communications, intelligence, history, psychology . . . the list went on and on. To become a SEAL sniper instructor and course master, I pushed my studies even further: education theory, curriculum design, and more. While in the service, I’d dabbled in real estate, so I’d pursued some self-taught business training, too. And the years working on Wind Zero had been a crash course in investment finance, commercial real estate law, and a lot more besides.

But advertising? Media? Sure, in the past year I’d taught myself a bit about digital media while helping build up a site for the company I blogged for part-time. Still, I was certainly no expert.

I knew I damn well better become one, though, and fast.

Yes, SOFREP was essentially a blog, and we were in business to provide good readable content. But the business itself was about a lot more than writing content. The economic lifeblood of the business was advertising. I needed to understand how advertising worked, both so I could speak our potential clients’ language and so we could help make sure they got results on our site. And I needed to understand how marketing and media worked so I could manage the effort to drive more readers to our site, because the value your Web site offers to your advertisers (and thus how much you can charge them) depends directly on the volume of your traffic.

It was really three businesses rolled into one: generating content, driving traffic, building advertisers.

Which is not atypical, because no business is a solitary thing. All businesses are inherently complex and multifaceted. Being a business owner is a lot like being a Special Operator in the field: you may not be the designated sniper, or breacher, or intelligence guy, or comms operator, but you sure as hell better know your way around any and all of those disciplines, and more. You have to be prepared to be anything and everything. I might not have been a marketing guy when I started SOFREP—but now I had to be a marketing guy, and I had to be one now.

I threw myself into the study of marketing, advertising, and media. I read voraciously, all the best books on those topics I could find. I started chowing down three, four, six, a dozen books a week. Five years later, I’m still doing it. About once a week, when I’m in New York, I go down to Alabaster Bookshop near Union Square and say, “Okay, what have you got for me?” They know what I like, and whenever I show up, they have a stack of books waiting for me that they’ve picked out, the best reads on advertising, marketing, and design, from the 1950s through today. At this point, I’ve read just about all of them, at least the titles that matter.

Right now, as I write this, I’m looking up from my desk in my little place in New York City and looking over at a stack of books I’ve read (or reread) in the past few months. From the floor up, the stack stands almost as tall as I am.

Mid-Century Ads

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose

The Next Convergence

The All-American Ads books

The Best American Infographics

Ogilvy on Advertising, probably the best of them all. I’ve been very strongly influenced by Ogilvy; we have his famous quotation on advertising emblazoned on our Hurricane Web site: “If it doesn’t sell, it’s not creative.”

Born in 1842: A History of Advertising

A History of Graphic Design

100 Ideas That Changed Advertising

Understanding Media, Culture Is Our Business, and all the rest of Marshall McLuhan’s stuff

Reality in Advertising, by Rosser Reeves, one of the best out of all I’ve read

Bill Bernbach’s Book; Bernbach was the guy who created “We Try Harder” for Avis, “Think Small” for VW, and the kid Mikey for Life cereal; brilliant guy.

How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie, an old standby, and still one of the most valuable business books I’ve ever read

I’m skipping over some titles; there’s a bunch of military, economics, and general history in there, too. Because I run a media business, the majority of what I read are books on media and advertising, but I also like to keep absorbing knowledge in a broad swath. You never know what you’ll need to know.

People sometimes ask me what kind of training it takes to become a SEAL. But that’s not really how it works. How it works is, you train like hell, then become a SEAL, and that’s when you really start training. SEALs are notorious for this: training, training, always training. The more you sweat in training, the expression goes, the less you bleed in battle. (Which is true, except that SEALs often bleed in training, too.)

That obsession with training has its counterpart in business, which is the constant and relentless quest for knowledge. Become a ravenous observer of everything in your field. Know more than the other guy. Stay thirsty for knowledge and more knowledge, perspective and more perspective, grasp and greater grasp.

Know More Than You Think You Need to Know

I am constantly amazed at how many people I run into in business who seem to think they can succeed by knowing just enough to get the job done. The curse of mediocrity.

Just enough is never enough, not even close to enough. In the SEALs, we train to extremes, because conditions on the battlefield will always be worse in some way, tougher in some way, far more difficult in a hundred ways, than you expect. There’s a famous expression in the military, coined by the Prussian army chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke, the father of modern military strategy: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

In other words, nothing ever goes according to plan: first rule of combat, first rule of business.

Which means that if you are absolutely and completely prepared for things to go the way you expect, you’ve already lost. Don’t get me wrong: you have to be absolutely and completely prepared for things to go the way you expect. But you also have to be ready for them to go sideways, moments after you pull the trigger.

In early 2004, my SEAL Team Three teammate John Zinn (whom I mentioned in chapter 1) and his Green Beret buddy Ron were nearly killed in Iraq when their retrofitted American SUV crapped out on them. Back in the States, the two developed their idea for an armored vehicle manufactured to fit the needs of combat. Partnering with a race car manufacturer, they built a prototype, showed it to potential clients, and soon had a $10 million contract lined up. Everything looked great—until John and Ron learned that their manufacturing partner had gone behind their backs to deal with the client directly and cut John and Ron out of the contract. They immediately sued and won, which was all well and good, but they still had a $10 million contract to fulfill—and no manufacturer to build the vehicles for them!

This is exactly the kind of unplanned circumstance that has put many an entrepreneur out of business. Except John understood the principle of total situational awareness and knew that you have to plan for the unplanned.

John had never expected or intended to become an automaker himself, but because he had read so much, studied so much, paid so much attention to that world, he already knew exactly how to do it, what resources they’d need, what the process looked like, and what it would take to tool up. Which is exactly what he and Ron did. Overnight, they became a manufacturing company and built the damn things themselves. A few years later, John and Ron sold Indigen Armor to the Defense Venture Group for eight figures.

In business, as on the battlefield, everything is in flux. You cannot count on any conditions to stay stable while you enact your carefully thought-out plans. Because they won’t. What worked last week, yesterday, five minutes ago, may not work right now. And there is never time to take a step back and catch up before you act; you have to be aware of what could happen before it does happen.

Which of course is yet another paradox: you can’t know what you don’t know, and you can’t be fully prepared for the unexpected. But you can develop the habit of knowing more than you think you need to know, and that will give you the edge you need to succeed when everyone else falls short.

Learn from the Best

There’s a principle in psychology called illusory superiority, also sometimes called the Lake Wobegon effect, from Garrison Keillor’s fictional midwestern town where “all the children are above average.” Illusory superiority is the weird psychological wrinkle that allows the majority of people to have the sense that they are in some way better than average. Smarter than most, luckier than most, more ethical than most, more deserving than most. Mathematically it makes no sense. How can the majority be better than average? (I think it’s related to the idea that violence could never happen here, in our neighborhood. Also known as denial.)

I pay attention to the opposite principle, which I think of as the Law of Most. The Law of Most says that by definition most businesses are not exceptional. (If they were, the word “exceptional” would be meaningless.) Most marketers, most consultants, most realtors, most lawyers, most writers, most designers, are not at the top of their field. It’s just how things are. “Top” only means top when it stands in distinction to everything else.

This is why you should not believe everything you read. Because the Law of Most applies to experts, too. By definition, most experts are mediocre.

There are experts, and then there are experts. Just because someone wrote a book and sold a bunch of copies doesn’t mean he is right or that he knows what he’s talking about. Among all those books I’ve read on marketing, I’m sure there isn’t one in which I didn’t find something valuable I could take away from the reading. But I’ll go through fifty books before I find one that makes me go, “Okay—this guy really has figured it out.”

How many books have I read on marketing? Two hundred, maybe three hundred; maybe more. How many do I rely on daily, do I consider my North Star, my 100 percent trusted go-to guides? I can count them on one hand.

This is the reason I eventually formed an advisory board for my business: to surround myself with people who can help me read the world, experts whose experience, knowledge, and judgment I can trust absolutely. But in that first year, I didn’t have an advisory board. I barely had advisers, period.

A few months before launching SOFREP, I took out a VA loan and bought a little place in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, so I could get out of the insanely high tax burden of Southern California and start my new business in a no-tax state. It was a good move, but for much of that first year in business I lived like a monk. I worked with my small team and stayed connected to friends I respected and could ask for advice when and if I really needed it. Mostly, though, I was on my own.

Except that I stayed in constant touch with my lawyer, Michael Zinn. This is a guy I knew well and could trust without reservation. Not only was he a decorated Vietnam vet, but he was also the father of my SEAL Team Three teammate John. When I say I would not hesitate to put my life in his hands, that’s not a figure of speech. Mike was like an advisory group of one, a mentor and resource I turned to more than once to help me out of a tight spot or make a difficult decision.

In the course of that year, I learned something invaluable: when you find even one person whose expertise and judgment you can absolutely rely upon, you’ve found something more valuable than all the start-up capital in the world. Because that one trusted adviser’s perspective contributes significantly to your total situational awareness.

Don’t Trust Conventional Wisdom

When my SEAL memoir, The Red Circle, was in production, our publisher sent my writing partner and me some sample files it had recorded for the audiobook version, with a voice actor reading the text.

Hang on a sec, I thought. Were audiobook rights part of the contract I’d signed? I didn’t think so. I asked our literary agent; she checked; nope. Just an oversight, we were assured. We could do a quick addendum to the contract to sign over the audio rights. No problem.

Wait. Were we sure we wanted to do that? We hadn’t actually sold those rights yet. What if we held on to them and produced the audiobook version ourselves?

No, no, no, I was told. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want that headache! These guys are professionals. They know how to get it done and out into all the retail channels, and besides, they’ve already recorded the whole thing.

I thought about that. This is how it’s done, I get that. But does that mean it’s how it should be done?

I did some quick research to see roughly what it would cost to pay an audio producer to hire the voice talent, do the studio work, and edit the thing into a final product. I ran some numbers. We’d have to spend a few thousand bucks out of pocket up front, but we would make a hell of a lot more money doing it this way than taking the meager audiobook percentage that is standard in New York publishing contracts.

I talked it over with my writing partner. At first he thought I was crazy to take on the added burden of production, but when I explained the numbers and logistics, he was in. (He’s an entrepreneur, too.)

“Tell them sorry but no thanks,” I told our agent. “We’ll do it ourselves.”

I hired an audio producer. As a bonus, I wrote and recorded a special introduction to each chapter, a feature not in any other version of the book. We produced the audio version and marketed it ourselves through Amazon’s Audible.com. We made out like bandits. Even today, years later, that self-produced audiobook is a steady stream of decent monthly income for us.

When you hear “This is the way things are done,” or “This is the way things are,” don’t believe it. Conventional wisdom is not always wrong—but it’s always suspect. The assumptions and givens most businesspeople operate on are reflections of that telltale adjective, “most.” “Most” means average, and average means mediocre, and mediocre is the opposite of what we’re talking about here. What we’re looking for is outstanding.

Know Your Business’s Numbers

In chapter 1, I mentioned Wind Zero, the business I worked on for a few years when I first got out of the service.

Wind Zero was an ambitious plan. The place was designed with shooting ranges, tracks for driving instruction, indoor classroom space, lodging and dining facilities for up to two hundred people, plus two helo pads and an airstrip. We would be able to embed actual buildings and cities that we could dress up so we could run large-scale urban-environment exercises, such as riot situations and other high-threat scenarios. We could facade the area out as an Afghan village one week, an urban downtown the next. A lot of California race car clubs were telling us what a market there was for a racing facility, so we added in a full Grand Prix–style double race track where we could hold private sponsored race car events, along with facilities for storing cars in between events. The thing would cost something like $100 million all told. By the end of 2006, I had found my property, a thousand acres of raw land in the Southern California desert. The parcel cost north of $2 million; I plunked down three hundred grand—my total savings—and began working on raising the rest.

When I started work on the project, a friend and fellow former SEAL, Randy Kelley, let me work out of his office space. In those days, I was completely intimidated by business financials. I didn’t know how to read a balance sheet or a P&L statement. Not only that, but I really didn’t want to know how. As far as I could see, Randy was brilliant at this, so I asked him to help me work up my business plan, which he did. Whenever I had to revise my plan, I would ask Randy to do the numbers for me, which he would generously agree to do.

Finally he said, “Listen, man, you’re always asking me to do the numbers, and I’m happy to do it. But you know what? I shouldn’t be doing it. You need to do it.”

“Man,” I said, “I really don’t want to do the numbers.”

He nodded. “Right. And it’s because you don’t want to do the numbers that you need to do the numbers.”

Randy forced me to get over my fear of the unknown and learn the goddamn numbers. The funny thing about it is, today I love doing the numbers. What I discovered is that reading a business financial is not at all complicated. It isn’t as if we were doing calculus or advanced trigonometry here. It’s just basic arithmetic.

I was talking recently to a friend who’s getting out of the military and looking to start a business. “You know,” he said, “one of the first things I want to do is hire myself a good CFO. I’m just not a numbers guy.”

I had to laugh. He sounded just the way I must have sounded to Randy.

“Listen,” I told him. “People steal from business owners with that attitude. As a CEO, you better know those numbers. Otherwise, how are you going to know if your CFO’s even doing a good job, when you do eventually hire one?”

If you want to get somewhere significant, you have to become familiar with your basic financial documents. They’re actually pretty simple. The sheer volume of numbers, the columns and rows, can be intimidating, but once you get past that, there is absolutely nothing difficult or complicated about it. It’s basic math, nothing but adding and subtracting.

I thought exactly the same way this guy was thinking, and I’ll be forever grateful to Randy for forcing me out of it.

Stay Flexible

My first major mission in Afghanistan, we were supposed to be out in the field for just eighteen hours—but that isn’t what happened. We were out there for more than a week. Which was why I didn’t have my sniper rifle or range finder with me in the scene I described in chapter 1. And this was not an exception. This was the rule. In the Spec Ops world, missions change constantly.

The same thing happens in business.

If the first principle is all about maintaining an unwavering focus in one direction, this second principle is all about the complementary behavior. Staying focused doesn’t mean that focus won’t or shouldn’t change. It has to change. This is the real world, not some theoretical construct in business school class. Circumstances are changing all the time, constantly.

Think of your focus as a building of steel, not concrete: flexible enough to bend with the wind without crumbling.

This is why we train our sniper students not only on moving targets but also on unpredictably moving targets. Sometimes the situation you’re observing changes, and you have to make a judgment to shift to a different target. You can’t always radio in to command to get new orders when things suddenly change. That’s a central part of Special Operations training: we’re groomed to be able to make those judgment calls in the field, on the spot, in the moment.

This can happen, and will happen, in your business. You think you’re selling X, and suddenly you learn that your market wants Y and has no use for X. Or, you think you’ve nailed the right demographic for your X and suddenly find out that it appeals to a whole different demo. Or that your business model is fundamentally flawed, or has become obsolete.

Make Sure You’re in Love with What You Do

This may sound like a strange business directive, but it’s essential. In chapter 1, I mentioned that total focus is something that comes from having a near-obsessive passion and dedication for what you’re doing. It has to. When you decide what you’re going to focus on, you better damn well make sure it’s something you love, because if it isn’t, there’s no way you’re going to master it. You’ll get bored. You’ll be distracted, easily knocked off your game. And when you face the big challenges, the really brutal ones, the ones that threaten to knock in your teeth and kick your feet out from under you, you’ll just back off and fold your tent.

To run a business effectively, you have to stay on top of an enormous amount of information and material about myriad different aspects of your business. You have to become an expert on your business. How do you do that? There’s only one way. It has to be something you really, genuinely enjoy doing. I love writing, I love marketing, I love being engaged in the conceptualization, development, production, and promotion of media. Because I have a passion for every aspect of this business, it doesn’t feel onerous or laborious to me. It’s work . . . but I love it!

On the other hand, it’s hard work. If I didn’t genuinely enjoy it, to be frank, it would suck. And this is a mistake I see a lot of businesspeople make: working hard at something they don’t wholeheartedly enjoy.

In school, my buddy John, the armored vehicle entrepreneur, was never more than a mediocre student. He had no love for academics, and it showed. But once he was in business for himself, he became a voracious student of anything and everything that related to his work. His father, Michael, remembers him sitting on the couch one Christmas morning with several three-inch-thick binders of federal regulations spread out around him, soaking up the information while his daughters played with their presents.

A few years ago, we hired an agency to begin some aggressive paid-acquisition advertising on Facebook. It came really well recommended, and it was clear that the people there knew what they were doing. I could have just written a check. I didn’t need to know how the sausages were being made, right? I mean, that’s why we hired them.

No. I went down to their office and spent half a day with them while they trained me on Facebook in exactly what they do and how. Not so I could do it, but so I could understand it and manage our end of it better. I did that because it fascinates me. It’s not simply that I have to know it; I want to know it.

A year later, I hired a guy who is a whiz at this stuff to come work for us and took the whole process in-house. Now, instead of paying an outside agency to do it, we pay ourselves to do our social media campaigning. We could not have done that if I hadn’t taken the time to educate myself so that I understood the process in detail. You can’t manage what you don’t understand.

Remember that person I mentioned in chapter 1, the woman with the graphic design business? I know why her focus is constantly being distracted by other business opportunities. She doesn’t genuinely enjoy the work of running her shop. It’s like a burden for her. An albatross around her neck. How is that ever going to work?

I love what I do. Because of that, it’s no problem for me to read a dozen or two books a month that could help me expand this business. You might have heard the expression “If you love what you do, it doesn’t feel like work.” Let’s be honest: that isn’t true. Work is work, and it takes effort, and sometimes it’s excruciatingly hard. So, yeah, it still feels like work. But it never feels like drudge. It feels exhilarating. It’s work, and you feel great doing it. Because of that, you naturally want to dive deep and learn everything about it that you possibly can.

Which is good—because that’s the only way you’ll survive and thrive.