What’s at your Crossroad?
You are standing at the crossroad of everything you’ve ever done and everywhere you’ve ever been. You have the prime intersection real estate and can set up any business at this crossroad. What will you sell?
Everyone wants to fade into the crowd.
Whether you realize it or not you just want to fit in. You try to fit in with everything you do. You try to maintain the status quo. You attempt to coalesce into the mass of humanity.
The problem is…
The crowd is full. The masses are tired. The status quo got you into your current situation.
If everyone is doing it…well, it can’t be insane. Can it? It can.
At least if you fail there are plenty of people to get drunk with.
One of my greatest frustrations with my time in the military was that, it appeared to me, that my unique qualifications and intricacies weren’t maximized. I had certain language capabilities that could have been leveraged, I had particular knowledge from my undergrad that would have made me particularly useful doing certain things. I even went to certain schools, that the Marine Corps sent me to, that they didn’t then require me to use in my billeted position.
I would opine: “WTF, they wasted all this money on me and here I am sending emails for a living, in a part of the world I know nothing about, in a job that I had to essentially learn from scratch.”
I didn’t want to blend in. I wanted to stand out.
AND THEN
I left. I determined it was time for me to branch out on my own and do it myself. I had gathered all these great lessons that I couldn’t wait to apply to the civilian world…
But, I spent at least a year, maybe longer, intentionally ignoring and shunning the uniqueness I had gathered from my time on Active Duty. I wanted to “do it myself”.
What an idiot!
I literally did the exact thing to myself that I complained about under my previous warfighting employer.
I tried to do what every other fitness person was doing. I never even mentioned that I was a Marine, ever. I acted like everyone else and hid what set me apart.
But that was only the surface of my blindness. I also ignored my previous education, friends in the industry, my particularly strong skills, my current life situation, and my current proclivities.
Unique situations require unique solutions.
That crossroads I mentioned above isn’t just a mingling of skills that make sense. It’s about taking seemingly unrelated and in some cases polar opposite skills or preferences and combining them into something truly unique.
- I was a member of the top warfighting organization on planet earth.
- I meditate a lot.
- I have an economics education.
- I train people for a living.
I’ve taken those things, smashed them together and now pepper everything I do and teach with an appropriately dosed and incentivized mindful application of warfighting principles.
Do hard things and have the awareness to let them mold you into a more capable person.
That’s a lot better than the typical gym-bro-fuckboy that has become a meme in modern gym culture.
Hundreds of millions of people exercise but, in certain applications it’s making people more vain, more obnoxious, more isolated, or more self conscious. It would be much better if it made people more confident, more capable, and more virtuous instead.
A bunch of people have been taking this hammer, that is exercise, and only smashing windows with it, when instead they should be building houses and bridges with it.
So what are you selling?
My intersection has a gym on it. In it people learn to trust themselves more, put value in what they can overcome, humility, persistence, their scope of influence, and a lot more.
