TLDR: Great leaders are selfless and have incredible mission-focus.

As a CTO, being a leader is your job, not being an engineer.

You might be selling still as a CEO, but that’s not your job. Your business card would mean more if said “Leader.”

But it can’t… Why?

What Sisyphus and SEALs have in common

Basic SEAL training is one nonstop kick in the balls. Those aren’t my words. I first heard it described that way by an instructor. And most of us who have been through it agree.

Or as the kids say, that tracks.

Every day brings unique challenges, but you do a small number of things with insane frequency:

• Pushups

• Leg levers

• Swims

• Runs

• Obstacle courses

• And…

That video above shows one of the most exhausting parts of one of the most grueling evolutions in the hardest military training in the world:

➡️ ➡️ ➡️ namely, sprinting up the berms during “Log PT.”

If a SEAL candidate were to think about it like an MBA 🤔, he or she might ask:

“What am I really building with this 11th berm sprint?”

• Whether you succeed or fail, the instructors hate you.

• You’re not meaningfully more fit after doing 2 hours of Log PT than you were before.  

• You can’t bank suffering.

Thus, worst of all, the act has disappeared into the past.

It echoes only in your exhausted memory.

You can’t use what you did to make future berm sprints easier.

It’s not giving you passive income. 💸

And yet, the successful SEAL candidate is connected with the end goal so intimately that the instructors would need to pry his bleeding hands off the log to get him to ring the bell that indicates a candidate quitting.

This is the difference.

Sisyphus knows he must keep pushing the rock up the hill.

But he’s fictitious, so his motivations can’t be trusted.

In contrast, we have the real-world example of ultramarathoners.

And more here:

Successful people are invested so much in the long term — in the mission — that they can do things that seem pointless in the present to the average person.

They are building the habit.

Mile after mile.

Step after step.

This is what it takes. [1]

What Great Leaders Have

Four things:

1. Obsessive mission focus

2. Vision

3. Guts

4. Ability to influence

Selflessness underpins two if not three of the four.

Leadership starts and ends with character.

Not hacks.

Not productivity tips.

Not “10 Ways to Run Your 1:1s That Will Change Your Brain.” 🙄

Character.

🌊 All the way wet

(aka the footnotes)

[1] “This is what it takes.”

In a weird way, David Fincher’s movie The Killer is an incredibly accurate portrayal of mission focus and operational obsession that goes hand-in-hand with being elite.

I thought the movie was amazing.

⚠️ But beware, it’s a slow burn. Don’t let the action-packed trailer fool you.

[2] Watership Down

Apparently Big Wig and Hazel were based on two very different British Army officers that Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, worked under during WWII.

The story is as much a story about Hazel finding his way as a leader as anything else.

Coda

Outro

“Life doesn’t need a soundtrack. Life is a soundtrack.”
—Sri

Seriously, listen to the whole Moon Hooch album.

(NYC folks, I especially liked hearing the subway lady’s voice in one or two of the tracks. Sweetly nostalgic. I heard her in an airport once and froze in my tracks. It was like running into a girl who was the love of my life after years. Except this one talks to me still.)

Cheers

Find me at thewarriorpoet.com and on LinkedIn.

Get unstuck, and crush it. Double period.