Chapter 4

EXCELLENCE MATTERS

In the second half of 2012, something strange started happening at SOFREP. I say “strange,” because it wasn’t something I’d expected, planned, or intended, or even anything I saw coming. In fact, I didn’t fully realize it was happening until it was already well under way.

We had started out that February writing pieces aimed purely at the Spec Ops community. After all, that was our mission. But by that fall, it was clear that this was not all we were doing. We were also writing about foreign policy, international developments, and other current events. Our identity was shifting; we were changing the core description of what we did. Organically and without our having planned it this way, SOFREP was becoming a hard news site.

In the business and leadership literature, you read constantly about how important it is to have your mission clearly defined, how you need to emblazon that on a sign and hang it on the wall and make sure everyone in your company knows what it is. Apple = “The computer for the rest of us.” FedEx = “The world on time.” Nike = “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”

And that’s great, as far as it goes. But here’s the dirty little secret of business missions: Sometimes you don’t really know what the ultimate mission is when you start. Sometimes you don’t find out until you’ve been at it for a while. In fact, this happens a lot more often than you’d think.

You start out with what you think the mission is. But it shifts and changes, and if you’re paying attention, you follow. You pivot. Pierre Omidyar started his little online gig as a way to sell his girlfriend’s collection of Pez dispensers. Once the thing was in motion, I think we can all agree, the eBay mission grew. (“A global marketplace where practically anyone can trade practically anything, enabling economic opportunity around the world.”)

That’s what happened to SOFREP. Before our first year was out, our mission had shifted. This wasn’t a top-down change; it didn’t come from me; it came from the writers. And it happened because we had a standard, and that standard led us where it wanted to go, not where I originally thought it was going.

That standard was excellence.

•   •   •

It started in August 2012, with the announcement of No Easy Day, that firsthand account of the bin Laden mission, which sparked some controversy about the whole idea of SEALs going public with details of the raid. On September 12, Time published a piece I wrote on the subject titled “A (Former) SEAL Speaks Out . . . About (Former) SEALs Speaking Out.”

That same day, my best friend, Glen Doherty, was killed in the attack on the American consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi.

Benghazi changed my life. Glen was my closest friend in the world. We’d been SEAL Team Three teammates, and we’d gone through Naval Special Warfare (SEAL) sniper school together as shooting partners, three months that forged a lifelong bond. My kids knew him as Uncle Glen. Losing him hurt worse than I had known anything could hurt. It also upped my own sense of commitment, to do my best to live up to the standard Glen set—not just as a SEAL, but as a human being.

Benghazi not only changed my life; it also changed SOFREP. Benghazi was the signal event that really thrust SOFREP into the news business, because it showed us the gaping hole that existed in the conventional civilian media and underlined the responsibility we felt to address that deficit.

If there is one defining characteristic of who Special Operators are and how they operate, it is excellence. Excellence means exactly what it says: you excel. Everything everyone else does, you strive to do better: faster, sooner, more efficiently, more effectively, more reliably, more consistently, and with greater results. You take on the job at hand and do it to the limit of human possibility—and then do it better than that.

What I saw in the latter half of 2012 was American media doing a mediocre job. And it pushed every SEAL button I had.

In the aftermath of Benghazi, the mainstream conversation went absolutely nuts. There was a presidential election happening, and the whole event became ridiculously politicized—on both sides of the aisle. What got lost in the noise was both facts and perspective: what actually happened, and what it actually meant or didn’t mean. Once again, we were the first media outlet to provide a detailed account of the events of September 11 and 12, 2012, from credible sources. Over the following months, we published dozens of pieces that put accurate information and reasoned perspective in front of the public.

At the same time, SOFREP’s cadre of writers was growing. Our writers are all vets, including Special Operators from every branch: not only SEALs, but Rangers, Delta, air force controllers, marine force recon and MARSOC operators, people with high-level intel backgrounds, CIA experience, every type and level of active-duty, in-the-trenches history you can think of, and every one of them had the same kind of top-tier standards of excellence. These men and women were watching what was happening in the news cycle, and they weren’t liking it. Not just about Libya, but in all the trouble spots around the world, from the Middle East to Africa to Europe to Asia to right here in the United States, an awful lot of what was being written in the existing media was bullshit. And this was across the board: Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, everyone—too many people were writing about topics and events plainly without knowing what the hell they were talking about.

Our guys had operated on the ground in all these places and in many cases still had extensive active networks in place in these AOs (areas of operation) that enabled them to give the story to the American public straight, without any spin. They started writing op-ed pieces and commentary on what was showing up in the news. Soon SOFREP writers were offering pointed critiques of everything from the Veterans Administration debacle to Special Operations Command mismanagement to overall foreign policy.

At the same time, we were also breaking stories, beating other outlets to the punch with accounts that were not only more accurate and better sourced but also more timely.

We were the first to report the death of Chris Kyle, when he was murdered on a shooting range in Texas.

When another SEAL from the bin Laden raid, Robert O’Neill, claimed in an exclusive interview in a major newsmagazine that he was the shooter who put the lethal bullet into bin Laden, we outed the story for what it was: a publicity grab. There were numerous holes in O’Neill’s account; we printed them.

We broke the news on the first transgender SEAL, Kristin Beck. We also broke the story on the first openly gay SEAL, Brett Jones, then did a follow-up on Jones’s contract with the CIA and broke the story about the intense and flagrant discrimination against him in the CIA.

In June 2013, we were the first outlet to publish Ambassador Stevens’s personal diary. In our piece, we included reproductions of the last five pages of his diary, written in his hand, including the final page, jotted down on September 11, 2012, with its chilling concluding line: “Never ending security threats . . .”—after which the diary went blank. (Yes, he actually put the dot-dot-dot at the end of that final entry.)

The stories kept happening, and we decided to take our original reporting to the next level. Rather than simply comment from where we were, why not put our guys on the ground in hot spots around the world? We started by deploying Jack Murphy, our editor in chief, to Syria, where he did a series in late 2014 and early 2015, including his report on the YPJ (Kurdish militia) female snipers. (His account of how he physically managed to get on location, let alone what he found when he got there, is well worth the read.)

Then Jack went to Iraq, and then we had Jamie Read in Somalia reporting on Boko Haram, Buck Clay in Ukraine and developments there, others in Iraq and Syria, and still others reporting on the southern borders of eastern Europe. We broke stories on the United States’ supplying funds to rebels who are now ISIS. In 2016, Jack scored an exclusive sit-down interview with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

The conventional media tend to get these things wrong, or they’ll jump on a story without carefully vetting it first. A lot of news sites don’t really know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia, or how Kurdistan works into the whole Iraq mix and the complicated landscape there, with the different ethnic and tribal backgrounds. But people like Jack and Buck—this stuff was their bread and butter when they were deployed there on active duty. That was exactly what they were trained to understand.

For example, we had one of our writers in Somalia when the media reported a “terrorist attack.” What actually happened was that a local warlord blew up a competitor’s place. It wasn’t terrorism; it was business as usual, Somalia-style. This was a significant journalistic error. By reporting it as “terrorism,” these other outlets were stoking the whole public fear machine, and stoking it falsely, based on an entirely faulty premise. We reported it straight, explaining what was really going on. This is one major reason we’ve gained so many new subscribers: we’ve built a strong track record of fact-based reporting without the slant or outside influence that seems to affect the reporting on so many other news sites.

We started SOFREP with a stated mission to provide information for the Spec Ops community. We could have doggedly stuck with that. Instead, we followed our growing journalistic instincts. Our writers were seeing mediocrity in the media, and they wanted to respond with the same level of excellence they had adhered to in the military. They had something to say. I let them say it. Today if you go to SOFREP, you’ll see our mission statement at the top of the page: “Trusted news and intelligence from Spec Ops veterans.”

Excellence, Journalism, and Democracy

After the Stevens diary piece, the rest of the news media could no longer ignore us. Mainstream journalists started reaching out to us, trying to get us to give them our sources. Fortunately, Jack and I were savvy enough to realize that that would have been a very bad idea.

Even from the early days, we would often see reporters copying bits and pieces of our content in other outlets. We might do a really good story, say, about the Kurdish YPJ female snipers, and then a week later something would come out on that topic with very light sourcing; the author had obviously read it on SOFREP and tried to sort of make up his own story about it. We didn’t have a problem with that, as long as authors would credit us and steer readers to our site.

Then one mainstream reporter lifted a story of ours, a story we’d broken just the day before, and showed up on CNN, reporting it and representing it as if he had broken this news himself. It was blatant.

Jeremy Scahill, the investigative reporter who wrote Dirty Wars and Blackwater, saw this happen and went public about it on Twitter. “This is wrong,” he said (my paraphrase, not his exact words), “and you guys need to credit the original source.” Scahill has a good-sized Twitter following. He shamed CNN into doing the right thing. The people at CNN didn’t outright admit what they’d done, but they did credit us with breaking the story first.

Since then, I’ve gotten more than a few calls from major outlets, wanting to use a story we wrote and asking for our sources. Are they kidding? Give them our sources and let them claim the story as theirs?

No thanks.

Sometimes they’ll then say, “Well, how about we contract you, and we’ll give you credit.”

And I say no, that’s not the point. They’re our sources. These are critical relationships we have, often with people in sensitive places. Do these outlets really think we’re going to just turn over our sources to them? There’s a level of arrogance there I find amazing.

As our new role unfolded, I also started getting a firsthand lesson in journalistic ethics and economics, and an eye-opening lesson it has been.

Editorial and advertising used to be separated from each other, like the wall between church and state. In today’s digital world, with the acceleration of the 24/7 news cycle, media are more concerned with sensationalizing whatever trivial thing they can in order to get page views. Journalists are pressured by their content executives to drive page views, so they jump on a story, even if it isn’t accurate, purely because it drives traffic. They’re going to glom on, ride that train, punch up the headline, because each writer is under massive duress to deliver those clicks. When you have those economic incentives in place, journalistic integrity goes out the window. It turns into something like tabloid news, no better than the National Enquirer.

I understand that these media outlets operate with financial imperatives. I understand that they’re a business. So is Hurricane Group. Of course we have to watch our bottom line, just like everyone else. As I mentioned in chapter 3, when we launch a new Web site, I typically give it six months to show enough growth and profitability to justify its existence. If the site can’t make it on its own, even if I love the idea of keeping it open for the service it provides, we’ll shut it down.

But you can’t let economic imperatives control your editorial. And we don’t. On SOFREP, Jack will cover something in the news purely because we think it should be covered. We know that nobody’s going to be interested in reading about a thirteen-year-old American girl being kidnapped and trafficked through Morocco. We know most of our people don’t want to read about that. But maybe, once you’ve put that piece out in the public eye, someone will put pressure on an elected official and get something done to change the situation. Maybe the spotlight will make a difference.

So yes, we’ll do that kind of content, knowing that it’s commercially irrelevant. I have to give due credit to the New York Times here, too; as much as it swings to the left, it also does a lot of good work like that, shining the light on things that need to be seen. It happens here and there in other outlets, too. But that kind of coverage is all too rare, and getting rarer by the month. More and more, what passes for “news” is driven by the dictates of generating as many page views as possible, which means it gets either sensationalized or politicized, or both. And when that happens, truth, accuracy, and perspective are left to bleed out on the battlefield.

The founders of this country knew that democracy works when there is an informed public. If the public doesn’t know what the hell is going on and just runs with its emotions, then you’ve got mob rule, which may be the worst form of “government” there is. A responsibly informed public is the cornerstone of our way of life. And the only way you get that is with excellence in journalism.

Excellence matters.

Why Are You in Business?

It’s no accident that excellence is principle No. 4—third from the front, third from the back, standing smack in the middle. Excellence is the keystone of the arch. Underlying all the other principles detailed in this book is a constant commitment to a standard of personal and professional greatness. Without that, none of the rest works.

If you don’t hold an unreasonably high standard, then violence of action will just create a mess. If you aren’t holding yourself to the highest standard, then your attempts to build total situational awareness will just become diffused attention and a scattered focus. And without uncompromising excellence, front sight focus is just putting on the blinders. Because, how do you know you’re focusing on the right things?

When we were approaching the end of our work on The Red Circle, my writing partner, John Mann, and I started asking ourselves, why were we writing this book? Yes, I wanted to tell my story. But bottom line, what was the point? We decided to see if we could capture the essential message of the whole four-hundred-page book in the last page or two. Here’s what we wrote:

I’ve thought long and hard about why I am writing this book and what I want it to say. I think the message I want my story to get across boils down to two words: Excellence matters.

Throughout my time with the navy and within the SEAL community, I’ve seen poor leadership and exceptional leadership. I’ve seen training that was simply good, training that was great, and training so transcendingly amazing it blew my mind. And I’ve seen the difference it makes.

In political matters I have always been a down-the-middle-line person. When it comes to leaders, I care less about their party affiliation and more about their character and competence. I don’t care how they would vote on school prayer, or abortion, or gay marriage, or gun laws. I want to know that they know what the hell they’re doing, and that they are made of that kind of unswerving steel that will not be rattled in moments that count, no matter what is coming at them. I want to know that they won’t flinch in the face of debate, danger, or death.

I want to know that they excel at what they do.

A free society looks as if it rests on big principles and lofty ideals, and maybe it does for much of the time. But in the dark times, those times that count most, what it comes down to is not reason or rhetoric but pure commitment, honed over time into the fabric of excellence.

Why am I telling you this? Because it matters.

You may never shoot a sniper rifle. You may never serve as part of an assault team, or stand security in combat, or board a hostile ship at midnight on the high seas. You may never wear a uniform; hell, you may never even throw a punch in the name of freedom. I’ll tell you what, though. Whatever it is that you do, you are making a stand, either for excellence or for mediocrity.

This is what I learned about being a Navy SEAL: it is all about excellence, and about never giving up on yourself. And that is the red circle I will continue to hold, no matter what.

That took 367 words, but really, you can compress it down to just two: “Excellence matters.”

After the book came out, we got plenty of great reader comments, on Amazon and on social media. But far and away the thing we heard about most was those last two pages, and especially those two words. Ponder that for a moment: In order to tell my story of growing up and going through a decade of the SEAL experience, we used close to 135,000 words. And what people took away from it, more than anything else, was two words.

I share this because I want you to ask the same question about the business you’re in as we did about our book: What is the point? Why are you in business?

I’m sure you’ll have your own answer, and it will have to do with your own situation, your own interests and values and life experiences. You know your own why. But let me offer a few general observations about that question and its answer.

My belief is that the purpose of any outstandingly successful business is not to make money. The money’s great, but that’s not the point. The point is to do something great, something that blows people’s minds, something that, yes, changes the world. Admit it. Nothing less will satisfy you. Am I right?

I thought so.

So we’re not here to talk about “getting by” or “making ends meet.” If that’s your goal, put this book down right now and walk away. Because we’re here to look at the ingredients of outstanding, world-changing success. We’re here to talk about excellence.

A Thirst for Excellence

When I entered the military, I had a single goal in mind.

I’d like to say I joined up out of love for my country, an irresistible desire to serve, a drive to help right wrongs and bring peace to troubled times, and a sense of obligation to give back to our free society for all the incredible things it had put in my life. Except none of that would be true. To be clear, all those things did develop over time. I have a hell of a lot more appreciation today for this noble, generous-minded, and at times bizarre experiment called the United States than I did when I was a nineteen-year-old kid. Righting wrongs, serving the greater good, a sense of gratitude for the freedoms and opportunity so many of us take for granted? I’m in. But back then? No. Back then there was one and only one gravitational pull that sucked me into Naval Special Warfare: a thirst to be the best.

I’d heard the SEALs were the best. So I joined the navy—but I honestly had no interest in being in the navy per se. I wanted to be a SEAL.

I believe that you, reading these words right now, have the same bone-level attraction to excellence that I and most of my Spec Ops buddies do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have read this far. But—and it is a very big but—I also believe that is not a universal trait.

The desires for food and water, shelter, safety, sex, companionship, recognition . . . I recognize all these as universal. I don’t think there is a person alive who doesn’t want, in some fundamental way, to be happy and to feel that his or her being here on the planet makes a positive difference. We are all, even the saddest and most twisted individuals among us, heroes of our own stories.

But the thirst for excellence? I don’t think that one is universal. Frankly, I believe a lot of people just don’t care. Pretty good is good enough, and average will do. I say that not as an indictment but purely as an observation. If there were no average, if there were no frankly piss-poor, then there would be nothing against which to measure excellence. It’s just the way the world is built. Like the spectrum of visible light, there is a spectrum of achievement, with plenty of people vibrating away, content as pigs in slop, at the lower frequencies.

But that’s not where entrepreneurial success lies. Entrepreneurial success comes into existence at the purple and ultraviolet edges of the spectrum.

Like my friend Nick English.

Nick has been fascinated with intricate machinery all his life. From an early age, he and his big brother, Giles, learned all about the construction of devices, from clock assemblies to yachts to airplanes, from their father, Euan, a Ph.D. engineer and ex-RAF pilot. One day, when Nick was twenty-four, he and his father were flying a World War II–vintage Harvard in a practice run for an airshow, when their plane got hung up in an inverted spin and had to crash-land. Nick broke thirty bones; his father was killed.

Upon recovering, Nick realized life was too short not to spend it doing what he loved. In partnership with Giles, he started Bremont Watch Company, built around their shared love of aviation and their dad’s dedication to excellence. A few years later, Martin-Baker, perhaps the world’s leading manufacturer of ejection seat and related aviation-safety equipment, approached Bremont with the idea of co-branding a watch that could withstand the most brutal of conditions. Nick and Giles developed the watch; Martin-Baker put it through its paces, strapped to ejection seat dummies and blown up and out, over and over—and it still functioned flawlessly. Since then, working with squadron after squadron, they’ve created custom-built watches for air forces all over the world. In the fifteen years since Bremont’s founding, they have become the face of military aviation timepieces.

I know exactly what Nick was seeing when he stared into the heart of complex machines as a kid—and I know exactly what happened to him. He was seduced into a lifelong love affair with excellence. That’s a passion I share, and I suspect you do, too.

Excellence lies at the heart of greatness.

Really, how great could a shoe company be? How excited could you get, could anyone get, about selling shoes? How much more boring could something be than the thermostat that controls the heat in your house? What sorts of business prospects would you see in a cup of coffee, the ultimate symbol of next to worthlessness, as in, “That and a quarter will buy you a cup of coffee”?

Answer: Zappos, Nest, Starbucks.

What do those three business home runs have in common? A thirst for excellence.

Excellence Is a State of Mind

There are people in business, just as in any field, who have an uncanny skill set that seems gifted to them by birth. Like Mozart, who played violin and piano like a virtuoso at the age of six and as an adult would compose multiple pieces in his head at the same time, these business virtuosos possess incredible innate abilities.

That’s not me. Probably not you, either.

If you’re not a born-brilliant deal maker, if you don’t come from a family dynasty of business success stories, if you didn’t enter this world with a native instinct for the boardroom and the marketplace, then how do you raise your game to the level of genuine excellence? The answer is actually pretty simple: you decide to. Excellence, more than anything else, is a decision, a choice, a commitment.

A state of mind.

When I started out in BUD/S, there was a guy I’d known from an earlier BUD/S-preparation course. Let’s call him Lars. This guy might have been the most perfect, athletically built physical specimen I’ve ever met. The dude could crush the most excruciating routine of calisthenics as if he were swatting flies. Lars was a god.

In our first week of First Phase, he quit.

I saw this happen over and over: guys who could physically outperform me and my teammates without breaking a sweat, men who had qualified for Olympic trials and been at the top of their game in pro sports, yet who threw in the towel, rang that brass bell, quit, and went home defeated, while we went on to become SEALs. It shocked and baffled me then, but I understand it now. Excellence is not about inborn talent or natural skills. Excellence is purely a state of mind. A decision.

During BUD/S, I also saw guys like my friend Chris Campbell. Chris was one of the smallest guys in our class, easygoing and unprepossessing, about as “ordinary” and as far from Lars on the spectrum of likely to excel as you could imagine. Yet while Lars quit, Chris not only sailed through BUD/S but ended up becoming an exceptional operator for a top-tier unit. (You know the one I mean.)

It doesn’t matter what your background is. What matters is your commitment to be the best.

Not long ago, I was interviewed for a piece in the Harvard Business Review about how SEALs train for leadership excellence. As we got to talking about my management experience as course master for the SEAL sniper program, the interviewer asked what advice I might have for organizations that wanted to train to “good enough.”

“Sorry,” I said. “That’s a question I’m not willing to answer. I can’t go there. It’s just not in my DNA.” Why would I want to be part of an organization that aimed at “good enough”? Who gives a shit about “competent”?

Shortly after Eric and I implemented our program of mental management in the sniper course, a pair of students came to me before a test and said, “Realistically, Chief, what are you expecting us to do on this first test?”

I told them I expected them to shoot perfect scores.

This was crazy. Nobody shot perfect scores. Competent, yes; very good, possibly. But perfect? Didn’t happen. But that’s what I told them—because that’s what I expected.

They shot 100, 100, 100, and 95. As close to perfect as anyone had ever seen.

We taught our students to put themselves into an excellence state of mind. To see winning and success as inevitable.

Of course, that kind of exceptional performance doesn’t just happen because of your mental state. It also takes a tremendous amount of practice, refinement, and training. But practice and training alone won’t deliver those results.

Any highly successful businessperson who tells you luck was not a factor in his or her success is lying. The good news is, you can create your own luck by working like hell—and cultivating a state of mind that expects and accepts only the best.

Hire the Best

SEALs have a saying for everything. “The only easy day was yesterday.” “Everyone wants to be a frogman on Friday.” “It pays to be a winner.” “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”

But my favorite may be this one: “You can’t polish a turd.”

Yes, people will grow in the job: they’ll grow in experience and knowledge and ability. But you can’t expect anyone to grow into a commitment to excellence if he’s starting out at mediocre. It just doesn’t work that way.

There’s a great line in the film Jerry Maguire, when Dorothy (Renée Zellweger) is telling her sister why she thinks she’s falling in love with Jerry (Tom Cruise): “I love him for the man he wants to be; I love him for the man he almost is.”

Don’t do the Dorothy; don’t hire employees for the team members they almost are. Don’t hire mediocre talent. Hold the standard. Hire people who share your commitment to excellence.

Hire the best.

When you need to hire a lawyer, hire the best. When you need to hire a designer, a writer, a marketer, a customer service person, a CFO, hire the best.

Of course “hire the best” may mean hire the best you can, given your circumstances. Obviously, when you’re starting out, you may not be able to afford the most expensive legal firm or ad agency. But that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, set a standard, and hold it. Hire the best doesn’t have to mean spend the most money. Excellence doesn’t have to break the bank.

In our first year, I realized that if we were going to be creating a lot of original video content, we needed a videographer on staff. Not only that, we needed an excellent videographer on staff. At the time, I was living in Tahoe. It wasn’t like New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago, where you can find first-rate talent on any block. Tahoe was not exactly a metropolis teeming with media talent. Plus, I didn’t have the budget for a position that a major established big-city talent would have commanded anyway.

I went to the local college and asked, “Who’s your best video student?” They pointed out a kid named Nick Cahill. I talked with him and brought him on, at first as an intern.

Good move.

Nick is an amazing talent. He loved the work, loved what we were doing, and rose to the occasion. He’s now media director for Hurricane, and for a media company that’s a pretty serious position. In 2015, one of Nick’s photographs was selected for the cover of National Geographic magazine’s special “Guide to the Night Sky” issue. Excellence doesn’t come much better than that.

Improve Constantly

Strong leaders never ask their teams to do anything they aren’t willing to do themselves. That’s a core leadership principle we’ll talk about more in chapter 7. The corollary is also true: as a strong leader, you need to hold your team to the same standard of excellence you hold yourself.

“Improve constantly” is a mantra that needs to be at the core of your company ethic, not just for you, but for everyone on the team, too.

In practice, this means you’re always looking for ways to do it better, faster, stronger, to an even higher standard. Always pushing the envelope. Always asking those critical questions: How can we do this better? How can we take on bigger market share? How can we double our size—triple it, multiply it times ten?

In the SEALs, we not only train constantly; we also train harder than we expect to have to perform. When you study the great performers—in sports, the arts, business, or any other field—you’ll always find they have undertaken massive amounts of training. And when that training is complete? Then they train some more, and harder than they expect to perform. Why? Training builds confidence and ensures peak performance. Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion; you sink to the level of your training. That’s why we train so hard.

Over the course of the seven months of BUD/S, we performed a huge range of brutally difficult tasks in all kinds of punishing environments (SEAL stands for sea, air, and land—in other words, the capacity to perform at maximum tolerances in any environment). But even with all those different disciplines and fiendishly difficult field conditions, BUD/S was really designed to teach us just one point: that we could perform far beyond what we thought were our limits. That most people are capable of ten times the output they have come to accept as “normal.” Some absorbed that lesson; some didn’t. Those who did went on to become SEALs. In business, those who learn that same lesson go on to achieve success at the top of their field, because they continually expect more from themselves.

Look at a Beethoven or a Picasso: they were constantly pushing themselves. The work they created late in their lives was nothing like what they’d done twenty or thirty years earlier. They never stopped exploring and stretching their own boundaries. That’s what you have to do in business. Get better, smarter, clearer, more attuned. Become a better judge of character. Gain a larger perspective. If you are an excellent CEO, then I should be able to pluck you out of your current business and drop you in the CEO’s chair of any major business in America, and within less than thirty days—hell, less than ten days—you should be not only running that business but already coming up with ways to improve it. Not because you know that particular business, but because you know how to learn.

What’s more, excellence is contagious. It’s your own drive for excellence that motivates not only you but also those around you. Great players want to be on great teams. If you want excellence in your team, they need to see it in you. Change has to start in you before you can expect it in others.

And then, expect it in them.

Never Settle

I’ve had friends in the Spec Ops community whose lives have essentially gone downhill ever since leaving the military. I understand that only too well. It’s hard to fully describe the Spec Ops experience to anyone who hasn’t been there: not only the training and exceptional level of performance, but also the sense of team and community, something that burns so deep it’s hard to put into words. And it’s easy to think, I will never have anything like that again. Once you’ve been part of such an intensely high-achievement community, it’s natural to feel that nothing else you could possibly do will ever come close to equaling that experience. The way these guys see it, nothing in civilian life could even begin to compare with being a SEAL, or Delta, or Ranger, or whatever. In their worldview, the rest of life automatically pales. In a sense, their lives had to go downhill.

You don’t have to be in Spec Ops to see this, or in the military at all. You’ve probably got friends who can’t stop talking about their college football days, or about the old neighborhood, or about the way things were when they first joined the company as young pups. Blah blah blah. People have been torpedoing their own chances of success by their addictive attachment to the “good old days” forever.

There’s a word for that point of view: “settling.”

Fortunately, that’s not what happens for most of us. The majority of guys I’ve known in Spec Ops refuse to accept that defeatist verdict, refuse to entertain the notion that the quality, juice, and excitement of our lives have to decline simply because we’re no longer serving on the battlefield of war. Here in the civilian field, we have our own battle cry: “Never settle.”

Refusing to settle often means you have to make hard choices. You’ll find yourself in a situation where the present course of events is . . . acceptable. Reasonable enough. Not perfect, but pretty good. And who wants to risk rocking the boat, right? So what do you do?

Rock the boat.

When SOFREP Radio first took off, it was going so fast and doing so well that it would have been temptingly easy to overlook the fact that we had a real problem. Our on-air moderator, a guy who’d helped launch the idea, had some serious attitude issues and was starting to make a power grab, cutting out other team members in the process. I had to drop him. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t pretty, but it was critically necessary. If I hadn’t made the decision, SOFREP Radio would sooner or later have foundered and sunk.

In his place, I landed Ian Scotto, an outstanding talent who’d worked with Larry King and was currently doing a gig at Sirius XM with Andrew Wilkow. Ian has done every SOFREP Radio broadcast since that day. One of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

The book you hold in your hands was originally contracted to be published by a different publisher. Good people, and a good house, but they weren’t really a business publisher, and their hearts weren’t in it. At one point, we decided to pull out and look for a different home. We had to pay back the original advance (ouch) and delay publication (ouch again), and it was a royal pain in the ass for everyone involved. But we ended up placing the book at Portfolio, a company that in the business publishing world is excellence personified. Publishing partners don’t get any better than this.

Sometimes it’s better to rock the boat now than see it crash, or take on water and slowly sink later.

By the way, when I say “never settle,” I don’t mean that in legal terms. Any businessperson who claims “I never settle a lawsuit” is an idiot or a blowhard. Lawsuits, unfortunately, are a fact of life in modern business, and settling suits is sometimes both smart and necessary. Other times it isn’t, because the other side is bluffing. I can’t tell you which is which; that’s why you need an excellent lawyer you trust.

There’s a suit right now that my lawyers have urged me to file. Someone has violated the terms of an agreement, and I’m told I could easily win a hundred grand if I would just file. I’m not doing it. Life is too short, too sweet, and too precious to get entangled in that crap unless it’s absolutely necessary. When it comes to lawsuits, I’m with Sun Tzu: the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

“Never settle” also doesn’t mean never compromise. Real life is full of compromise, and so is real business. This is something I’ve noticed former Spec Ops guys sometimes have a hard time learning. SEALs will go through brick walls; it’s what we’re trained to do. But you can’t balls-and-bluster your way through a complex business negotiation. Good business takes sensitivity and nuance, not just supreme confidence and outstanding performance.

“Never settle” doesn’t mean you become a bull in a china shop. It simply means this: you refuse to accept mediocrity. It blows my mind how many people will accept a half-assed job, in others and even in themselves, as “good enough.” I have learned to be a patient man, but that is something I have no patience for.

Thomas Watson, the legendary CEO of IBM, gave this formula for achieving excellence: “As of this second, quit doing less than excellent work.”

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

Put Yourself in an Environment of Excellence

I mentioned earlier that I took a two-year business course, back in 2007 and 2008, when I was working on Wind Zero. It was my friend Randy Kelley (the same fellow SEAL who forced me to learn how to do my own numbers) who got me into that course. Modeled after the GE executive business school program, the course taught some MBA-level content, with some excellent psychology and philosophy thrown into the mix. During the program, they had us all read the book The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. This is one heavy read, a book about cognition, neurology, and philosophical questions about perception—not the kind of book you’d expect in your garden-variety business course.

It had a huge impact on me. One of the things Tree talks about is how biological beings adapt to their surroundings, how organisms go through physical changes, changes in their biology and chemistry down to the cellular level, based on adaptation to their environment, and what the implications of all that are for how you and I learn and understand our world and adapt to our surroundings.

When I read this, a light went on. You have to surround yourself with the right environment, whether that means building that environment around you or moving yourself to where it already exists. If you want to perform at a certain level, you have to put yourself in an environment that exemplifies that level.

Five years after the course ended, I found myself thinking about Maturana and Varela’s book again. A lot. SOFREP was growing like a weed, and I’d now started the Hurricane Group to contain all the other initiatives that were springing up. The business was becoming larger, more complex, and in many ways more challenging. I felt more and more responsible—to my growing staff, to our readership and customers. I needed to keep upping my game.

I wasn’t living in the right place. When I started the business, I’d moved to Tahoe, which was secluded and peaceful. There was only one problem. It was secluded and peaceful.

I was flying to New York constantly to meet with publishers, do TV spots, or participate in some other media-related meeting. New York was the media capital of the country, the hub of all the activity I was increasingly involved with. I began to realize that running a media business and not being based in New York was like being in the film business and not living in Hollywood. Flying in for meetings, no matter how often I did it, wasn’t going to cut it.

I had to move to New York. The media connections I needed would only happen if I were there.

Only in New York would I happen to make friends with Nick Ganju, the co-founder of Zocdoc, the massively successful medical portal company. Only in New York would I bump into Nick getting coffee and have him say, “Oh, hey, you want to meet Matt Meeker?” The guy who started BarkBox, the $200 million subscription box company? Yeah, I would love that introduction. And only in New York would I be having lunch with Matt a week later and end up forming a strong friendship and having him join our advisory board.

You’ll meet Matt in chapter 7, “Lead from the Front.” If I hadn’t had lunch with him that day, he wouldn’t be in this book.

If I hadn’t moved to New York, I’m not sure this book would even exist.

I’m not saying you have to move to New York (media), or Hollywood (film), or Chicago (comedy), or Washington (politics), or Paris (cooking). My point is, whatever you want to excel at, you need to surround yourself with that, and more specifically with the best of that.

Upgrade Your Sphere of Friends

Over the past handful of years, I’ve come to have a great respect for the principle that excellence comes from the company you keep. (So does mediocrity, by the way.) You’d think I would have learned that principle through being a SEAL. And it’s true, to an extent: being part of the SEAL teams was always about excellence. But it wasn’t until I was out of the military altogether and going through my own learning curve in the civilian world of business that it started to sink in.

The SEAL experience provides a lot of powerful lessons, but it’s an incomplete picture. I’ve seen a lot of guys come out of the Spec Ops world and go charging into business with this untempered sort of warrior mentality, and it doesn’t work. The execution may be strong, but you can’t just lash out at people when you meet resistance. You can’t zip-tie, hood, and bag a noncompliant client.

I learned excellent success principles in the Spec Ops world, principles that apply beautifully to business. But that was only half my education. It was only when I started to hang out with master warriors in the field of business that I began to understand some of the finesse and nuance involved in applying those principles to the world of business.

When I got the acquisition offer from Scout Media in 2014, there were a few people I knew I could rely on for solid advice. But I knew I needed more than that. In former SEALs, like Randy Kelley, I had friends who were also accomplished in business. As a whole, though, my circle of SEAL friends was not going to take me where I needed to go in business.

I needed to enlarge my sphere of friends.

One of those I talked to at the time was Brian Margarita, a friend from San Diego who had subleased office space to me back when I was working on Wind Zero. Brian and I had become fast friends. He was also a member of a group called Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) in San Diego. “But it has chapters in every state,” he told me, “and for that matter all over the world.”

He told me to go check out the New York chapter. I did, and it was one of the best pieces of advice I ever got. Joining EO introduced me instantly to a whole new group of friends in New York who were operating at a very high level. I’d tapped into a network of people I’ve since come to view as my Spec Ops buddies of the business world.

EO may not be the organization for you (to join, you must be the owner, founder, or majority stockholder of a business doing at least a million a year), but no matter who you are or where you are, there are organizations and networks that will put you in the midst of excellence. Reach out and swing for the fences. As I said, if you aspire to excellence in your performance, you need to surround yourself with an environment of excellence—and perhaps the most important environment of all is that created by the people you spend time with.

Embody Excellence

I mean this literally. If you want to produce excellence in your performance, then it’s reasonable to expect that you need to embody excellence. That is, in your body.

You can’t achieve your best if you’re not in great shape yourself.

Given my background as a SEAL, you may be expecting that this is where we’ll look at the type of insane, ball-busting regimen I recommend for extreme fitness. If so, you’ll be disappointed. Training to take down a compound of armed insurgents in hostile territory in the middle of the night on the other side of the world is not the same thing as training to be a fit and productive businessperson. We’re not going to go crazy here.

The diets and the fads and the masochistic workouts and the New Year’s resolutions—it’s all bullshit. It drives me crazy how people do these things in the name of fitness. There’s a difference between fitness and intentional self-punishment. In the SEAL teams, we worked our bodies viciously hard, beyond tolerance. But let’s remember the point of that: we were trying to protect our country from hostile forces bent on its destruction. It wasn’t to get healthy; it wasn’t because it was good for us. It was terrible for us. I wore my body out, starting with my back. I don’t know a former SEAL who doesn’t have profound joint issues, back or knee or hip, or some other irreversible damage. That wasn’t a fitness plan; that was sacrifice for our country. It makes absolutely no sense for normal citizens to punish themselves that way.

I’m a strong believer in the impact of everyday lifestyle. You have to have a reasonable, healthy lifestyle and way of eating, something you can maintain in the course of your normal everyday life. You have to adapt your lifestyle to eating healthy and working out in a manageable way. Even if that’s just walking. Walking is excellent.

I have a solid travel routine. If I’m on the road, say in Europe, I walk a lot, every chance I get. If it’s a choice between taking a cab and walking, if it’s practical, I’ll walk. Every morning when I get up, I do a hundred crunches, fifty push-ups, and a bunch of yoga stretches. That gives me a physiological and psychological boost. I know I just got my exercise in, and I’m maintaining a basic minimum level of fitness. I go on hikes when I can.

It’s not complicated. It’s not an elaborate workout. If it’s complicated, you won’t do it. And you don’t need complicated anyway. Life is complicated enough.

At a physical not long ago, my doctor told me that I’d gained thirty pounds. Damn. I was working out, swimming six or seven miles a week, eating good food—but I was eating too much.

I could have gone on a crash program to lose that weight fast . . . and then gone back and done it all over again. Instead, I said, Hey, I’ve got to reduce my caloric intake.

Now I eat a small breakfast, light lunch, and normal dinner. Nothing radical; just consistently a little less than I was eating. I incorporate activities when I can, like surfing and skiing, and I walk in the city as much as possible. I’ll walk ten, fifteen miles a day in New York. I don’t take cabs or subways unless I’m in a serious hurry. I lost the weight and haven’t put it back on. I don’t plan to.

That’s sustainable. Unlike taking a pill, or going on a crash diet, or following some extreme workout program.

More than once, I’ve sat across the boardroom table from a guy who is making really bad decisions, and I can see his health is just crap. I can see it, because he’s talking crap and thinking crap. No doubt, he’s eating crap. I’ve met plenty of people who are making lots of money but are not fulfilled or happy. I attribute this to their not being well rounded, with a healthy family life, active hobbies or interests, and sound health of mind and body. Nothing you do is going to be the embodiment of excellence if you don’t embody excellence yourself.

Strive for Excellence in Every Aspect of Your Life

Excellence matters in everything you do, not only in fitness, but in everything. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the music you listen to. The shows and films you watch. The words and sentences you speak. The quality of your relationships. You should be a connoisseur of greatness.

I’m not saying your clothes have to be expensive or that you should be some stuck-up asshole putting on pretensions. Far from it. I’m saying you should bring those same standards of excellence you apply to your business into every corner of your life. You should be striving for excellence everywhere.

Again, how you do anything is how you do everything.

I think a taste for excellence is something you’re born with. Maybe early childhood has something to do with it, too, I don’t know, but in any case, by the time you’ve outgrown your acne and the early painful thrill of discovering you have hormones, either you have it or you don’t. It’s not something you can pick up in a continuing education class at the annex, and it sure as hell isn’t something you can download.

You can train for it, though. You can hone it, sharpen it, and exercise it, and the more you do, the stronger and sharper and more deadly—that is, the more effective—it becomes.

Your commitment to excellence, or lack thereof, defines who you are as an individual. It dictates how you perform when everyone is watching, but it is also the standard you set for yourself when no one is looking. It’s just how you do things.

You could call it pride in what you do.

When I was first back from Afghanistan, I was deployed as part of a small group called “sniper cell” to teach advanced sniper modules. One of the programs we taught was a rural training, where we would bring new sniper school graduates up to the Washington border near the Canadian wilderness to hunt elk and whitetail deer. While we were up there, we took turns making lunch for the group. Here we were, a bunch of trained killers out in the wild, and if you had watched us trying to outdo each other over the campfire and heard us arguing over who had the best recipe, you’d have thought it was a Food Network show. In those moments, we weren’t snipers, hunters, or Spec Ops warriors; we were chefs, each doing our damnedest to out-excellent the others.

There are some things I’ve always had a feeling for, like athletics and extreme sports. Reading is another. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and being well-read, articulate, and informed is important to me.

But there are also areas where I’ve had to work at it. Give you an example: relationships. Some people are naturally gifted at getting along with others. I had to learn. I’m not natively a “people person.” When I was a kid, I got into a lot of fights. It’s not that I’m insensitive or abrasive. It’s just that being diplomatic is not my native language and I tend to be headstrong. But if I didn’t start out being excellent in this area, or anywhere near excellent, it has been important to me that I learn to be excellent. And I’ve learned from the best.

Glen Doherty was the most naturally gifted people person I’ve ever known. Glen used to say he was there to run interference for me, to let people know that Brandon was a decent guy with good intentions, even if they’d had a run-in with me. We used to laugh about it, but there was a lot of truth to it.

It was impossible not to love Glen. He had more friends than anyone else I’ve ever known. That was no accident; he went out of his way to take care of those relationships. I had to learn from his example, and I have.

Joe Apfelbaum, whom you met in chapter 1, is another friend who is masterful at relationships. “The bigger your business,” says Joe, “the more it depends on relationships. I take my relationships seriously and spend time on each and every relationship that I want to build. Our clients all came from building relationships with them one at a time and growing those relationships.” I’ve learned from Joe, too.

It’s not just that having better relationships serves the business. It’s important for me to be a good friend—period. If I run a successful business and make a pile of money, but my health sucks, my friends are all pissed off at me, my kids don’t know me, and I’m ignorant of the larger questions of life and musings of the world’s great thinkers . . . then really, what’s the point? If you’re living a mediocre life and you get rich, all that extra money will buy is more mediocrity.

Excellence isn’t simply a means to an end. It’s a way of life.

Know That Excellence Comes at a Cost

A few years ago, I was at a serious low point (I’ll say more about this and the reasons behind it in chapter 7), made worse by the fact that some disgruntled former members of the SEAL community were engaging in a smear campaign against me on social media and in the press. It was ugly, stupid, and pointless, but it was also a serious drain on my morale.

At the height of this episode, I happened to be out in California for a meeting with Mark Harmon, the actor and producer (best known for his work on the show NCIS).

I met Mark through Paradigm, the agency that represents us both. The people at the agency told me that when he was preparing for an episode of NCIS that involved snipers, Mark had read a book I wrote with my friend Glen, Navy SEAL Sniper. He loved the book, they said, and then read The Red Circle and loved that, too, and we met to talk about making a television show out of it. (As of this writing, that show is still in development with MGM; who knows, perhaps by the time you read these words, it will be airing.)

Mark, I soon learned, was also a huge aviation fan. During World War II, his father, Tom, had quite a storied career flying bombers. In April 1943, over South America en route to Africa, his plane broke up in a torrential storm, and the elder Harmon gave the order to bail out. He was the last one out of the plane, and he also turned out to be the sole survivor of the crash. Six months later, he was back in the sky again. He was later shot down by a Japanese Zero during a dogfight over China and was ultimately awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.

And did I mention that before the war he won a Heisman Trophy and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame? If there was ever a guy who exemplified excellence, it was Tom Harmon.

Which made it all the more shocking to hear what Mark had to say.

When we met, I guess he could tell that something was bugging me, and I ended up telling him about the smear campaign that was dragging me down.

“Let me tell you something,” he said.

He told me that back in the 1970s, when he (Mark, that is) was playing quarterback for UCLA, some guys came up to him and said, “Your dad’s a freakin’ coward, man.”

His dad. Tom Harmon. The guy I just described. And they were saying he was a coward . . . because they’d heard something about how he bailed out of a plane and survived a crash when others died? Idiots.

Mark really looked up to his father, and hearing this was tough for him. And it wasn’t just these guys this one time; the same thing happened to him repeatedly during those years.

“Here’s the thing,” Mark said. “You’re always going to have people who are miserable in their own lives and just lash out, out of their own insecurities. And they always lash out at the brightest targets. It comes with the territory.”

On one level, I already knew this, but in that moment it was incredibly helpful to hear. Especially from someone like Mark, who is not only one of the most successful television actors and producers around but also universally liked. Hollywood has its share of jerks and prima donnas, obviously. Then there are people like Tom Hanks and Ben Stiller, people who have reputations among their peers as being incredibly likable. Mark is like that: just a tremendous human being. Yet even this guy has to deal with his share of haters.

It felt comforting to have him share that experience, and to realize that I just have to be the best I can be and ignore all the bullshit that goes with it. You never see people who are happy with their lives exhibiting that kind of behavior. Successful people don’t waste their time trying to tear down others—but they are often the targets of others who do.

That conversation with Mark taught me something: excellence comes at a cost. You know what, though? Mediocrity comes at a cost, too, and it’s a much higher cost.

I’ll take excellence.