April 16, 2025 • 46 mins
Ever wondered how a Navy SEAL's mindset can transform business leadership? Join us as we take a dive deep with Marty Strong, a retired Navy SEAL officer turned business leader, author, and motivational speaker.
Discover how Marty's upbringing in a military family shaped his emotional maturity and resilience, key traits that fueled his success both on the battlefield and in the boardroom. Marty shares riveting insights into the SEAL training process, emphasizing mental toughness over physical endurance, and how this mindset is crucial for navigating both military operations and business challenges.
Marty's journey from SEAL to author, penning the SEAL Strike series, is as inspiring as it is informative. Tune in to learn why adaptability, humor, and continuous learning are vital, especially for our boomer audience eager to embrace change and new opportunities.
Don't miss this episode packed with wisdom and actionable advice from Marty Strong! Catch it now and get inspired to tackle life's challenges head-on.
Marty Strong's Bio
Marty Strong is a retired Navy SEAL combat veteran and CEO. He is a motivational speaker, and the author of nine novels and three business leadership books; His latest is Be Different: How Navy SEALs and Entrepreneurs Bend, Break, or Ignore the Rules to Get Results!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Merry Elkins (00:01):
This is the EWN Podcast Network.
Cathy Worthington (00:14):
Welcome to late boomers, our podcast guide
to creating your third act withstyle, power, and impact. Hi.
I'm Kathy Worthington.
Merry Elkins (00:24):
And I'm Mary Elkins. Join us as we bring you
conversations withentrepreneurs, entertainers, and
people with vision who aremaking a difference in the
world.
Cathy Worthington (00:34):
Everyone has a story, and we'll take you
along for the ride on eachinterview, recounting the
journey our guests have taken toget where they are, inspiring
you to create your own path tosuccess. Let's get started.
Hello. I'm Kathy Worthington. Welcome to
(00:55):
late boomers. Our special guesttoday is a retired and decorated
Navy Seal officer who parlayedhis experience in the military
to become a successful businessleader, author, and sought after
motivational speaker.
Merry Elkins (01:10):
And I'm Mary Elkins. Marty Strong's passion
is influencing change. With theworld changing so much as we
speak, I know our boomeraudience will be interested to
hear what he has to say.Welcome, Marty.
Marty Strong (01:24):
Thanks for having me.
Merry Elkins (01:26):
Great to have you.
Cathy Worthington (01:27):
Yeah. You grew up in a military family,
and so you lived in differentcountries. And how do you think
this influenced you and led youto the choices you've made in
your life as a younger man andtoday?
Marty Strong (01:42):
Well, I think and this would be the same whether
you moved around a lot becauseof the military or because your
one of your parents happened tobe, in a business where they had
to relocate a lot. You end upwith a lot of emotional maturity
and kinda psychologicalresilience because you're always
switching friends. In my case,I'm switching football jerseys,
colors of football jerseys andthings. Oh. And you play for one
(02:04):
team, all of sudden, you're inanother high school in another
state, and you're playing foranother team.
And at the time, of course, it'sterrible. You you as a kid, like
most human beings, you'relooking for stability. You're
looking for some longevity soyou can set up relationships and
all that. But you really don'tunderstand how it makes you
stronger for the future becauselater when you're an adult and
(02:24):
say somebody finds out they haveto move maybe just to the other
side of the city, itemotionally, they break down.
It's such a terrible thing.
I I can walk to where I where Ibuy my food. I can I like I like
the neighborhood, and it'sreally a big hit? Right? So I'm
listening to that going like,yeah. Try going from Nebraska to
Japan or from Japan to you know?
(02:46):
And and that I think it's astrength, and I think that that
else that also you know, goinginto the military for twenty
years, I was obviously travelinga lot there too. So you end up
being less attached to just aphysical place all the time, and
you get more a sense ofyourself. Kind of like like
knowing your body in space as agymnast, you kinda know your own
(03:06):
mind and and personality andyour what you like, what you
don't like, your own valuesystem and everything, because
you're not tied down to oneparticular format or context.
Cathy Worthington (03:18):
I love that.
Merry Elkins (03:19):
Yeah. It's a good answer. I do too. We'll talk
about your time as a Navy SEALand also about the rigorous
training a Navy SEAL has toundergo.
Marty Strong (03:31):
Well, so when I when I first came in the SEAL
teams, they were highlyclassified, and there were no
movies or no TV shows. Actually,there were no books. The closest
thing to anything related to theseals was a movie with Richard
Widmer called the frogmen, whichmany of the Vietnam era seals
cite as their reason for joiningthe navy to become frogmen. So
(03:53):
it gives you the choice of thepower the power of the of the
cultural media. So that meantthat I didn't really know much
about it.
I didn't know really what I wasgetting into. It's a volunteer
organization. In those days, itwas mostly word-of-mouth, and
you kind of one person led youto another person who eventually
found out who you had to put anapplication in with. I ended up
(04:15):
showing up because there was amistake in my orders, so I
didn't even volunteer to gothere. And the the master chief
who was talking to me when Iarrived there talked me into
volunteering.
Now I'm I'm eighteen eighteenyears old, so I'm I'm pretty
much malleable.
Merry Elkins (04:33):
Yeah. Especially if somebody's some guy's sitting
Marty Strong (04:36):
there and
Merry Elkins (04:36):
go malleable.
Marty Strong (04:38):
Yeah. I I Yeah. And, you he's sitting there,
he's got a big chest full ofmetals, and he's he's very, very
smooth talker and very fatherly.And and I thought, you know,
hey. If you don't make it, it'svolunteer thing.
You can quit. You're not gonnaget in trouble or anything. And
then maybe he'll send you whereyou were supposed to go in the
first place. So, you know, likea dummy, I said, sure. I'll try
(04:59):
this.
And that's how I got in into theSEAL teams. Now it's a much,
much more manufactured process.It's it's on on purpose because
they need a lot of them. So whenI I made it through training, we
had a 26 guys that that startedmy class, and 13 of us graduated
six months later.
Merry Elkins (05:17):
Oh, boy.
Marty Strong (05:19):
Yeah. And and of those thirteen, two were kicked
out of of their first SAIL teambefore they even showed up
because they got in troubleracing a car or something. And
and so out of my whole 13 personclass, 11 of us actually got to
start being seals as aprofession. So that's a heck of
an attrition rate. We lostanother one during the first
(05:39):
four months of the training atthe seal team I was assigned to,
which is a seal team two.
So now we're starting basicallywith 10 that made it through the
basic, the intermediarytraining, and ended up getting
the the gold eagle badge, whichwe call the Budweiser. And that
just means that you've madethrough the basic intermediate.
You're not really a seal yet. Sothose are those are pretty
(06:03):
pretty tough odds. Right?
Cathy Worthington (06:05):
And what year was that? What year?
Marty Strong (06:08):
I went into training in, I think it was
fall, end of summer of '70 '7,graduated at the end of the
spring of seventy seven, andwent to army jump school in Fort
Benning, which, again, theydon't do anymore. They have
their own jump school. Thenshowed up at SEAL team too on
the East Coast in Virginia. So Iwas there for eight years. And
(06:34):
an interesting thing in mycareer is I was enlisted SEAL,
and at the end of eight years, Iwent to the SEAL training
command on the West Coast, sameplace I'd gone through the basic
training.
And I was the senior enlistedinstructor in that first phase.
It was I worked for thelieutenant who was in charge of
all of it. So one of my mainduties was man managing hell
(06:57):
week, which is whatever he hearsabout as the crucible, you don't
sleep for five days and allthat. And the biggest shock to
me, and this is kind of aninsight to the training, it's it
was conveyed to all of us by theinstructors as we were going
through the students that it wasall chaos, and it was random. We
(07:17):
would be told we're gonna go toa class, then they'd be mad at
us for some reason, tell us toform up out on the beach, they
take us on a nine mile sand run.
And so we so that was thepunishment for being for getting
in trouble. We weren't even surehow we got in trouble, why we
got in trouble, but suddenlywe're on the beach. They'd tell
us we're gonna do, you know, a atwo mile run, and it would turn
it into a 12 mile run. It didUh-huh. It tells us we're gonna
(07:39):
mostly, they're constantlytelling us something that was
not correct, and that was partof the the conditioning, but it
was also part of setting the theexperiment up because they
weren't gonna cause us to tofail or quit or anything.
We were gonna do it toourselves. We were gonna
everybody was gonna have theirown opinion of whether they
could handle this chaos anduncertainty, and people just
(08:00):
started, you know, punching outon their own. They said, I can't
handle this. I don't know what'sgoing on. I can't plan for
anything.
I can't, you know, I can't holdback today for tomorrow because
tomorrow's the day that we'regonna do something. You just
basically had to keep puttingone foot in front of the other
and trying to execute at thebest you could, and I didn't I
thought that was the way it was.So I show up, you know, eight
years later, and the very firstevent that I walk into the in
(08:25):
the instructor office to witnessis a 14 mile run-in combat boots
on the sand. Oh, gosh. They'vegot this big long board going
from one end room to the other,and there's a complete mission
briefing on it, like a like itwas a seal mission, like a
combat mission.
Everybody has assignments. Youknow, radio, primary, secondary,
(08:47):
and tertiary radio call signs,radio frequencies, two different
kinds of radios. There wasvehicles. There was all kinds of
watering points where themedical points were gonna be.
And I'm looking at all this, andI turned to one of the other
guys, and I said, why why isthis so why is this so
overmanaged?
He says, we do everything likethis. It's always been this way.
(09:07):
Mhmm. You just didn't know whatyou were going through.
Cathy Worthington (09:09):
Somebody set that up.
Marty Strong (09:10):
So it was it was like you were yeah. It was like
you were at, you know, WollyWorld, and people just popped
out of a bush in the in theground and grabbed the piece of
trash so you couldn't see whatwas going on. And and then so
that's the first part. Right?That is heavily choreographed,
heavily observed, heavilymanaged, heavily supervised, and
yet it's kinda hidden from thestudents so they don't perceive
(09:31):
that.
The second thing was, I think Ilike most people going in, I
still thought it was mostly aphysical exercise. It was a
physical contest. And as aninstructor, it only took me
about a month and a half till Itill I realized it has nothing
to do with that. It's allpsychology. It's all what's
(09:52):
going on between their ears.
I have a a speech program I callthe the voices in your head.
It's basically all those theinner critic that gets you to
the point where you go from riskcalculation to just fear of
failure, and you just startcalculating how am I gonna get
out of this. You start coming upwith your draft scheme plan,
your draft I quits quit message,and you could watch the
(10:13):
students. You could see it intheir eyes. You could see the
light bulb kinda turning out,and they just look dull.
And you can also kind of comparethat to the students that seem
to be very kind of lit up,energized, not like cheerleader
energized, but just like a softintensity, like like they were
going with it, and they weren'tgonna quit. And the other thing
was kind of a companion to thatwas a sense of humor. Pretty
(10:36):
much every single solitaryperson in the seals, the green
berets, all have an incrediblesense of humor. They're all like
stand up comics, and I thinkthat's one of those. It's it's
an escape mechanism sometimescollectively, but it's also kind
of a personal way of looking atbad things.
Something happens to you, youcan, you know, you can kinda
roll with it and go, oh,whatever. You know? Or somebody
(10:58):
else can say something funnyabout what happened happened to
you, and you're like, can't itjust makes light of it and puts
it in its perspective, you know,and, anyway, it's over, so put
one foot in front of the other.So that's when I learned it
wasn't about the physical part,that the whole contest, the
whole crucible was set up as anenvironment to let these young
men go through and make theirown decisions.
Merry Elkins (11:19):
Ah.
Marty Strong (11:19):
And what you get out of that is or people that
think that way, and are capableof dealing with all that
uncertainty, and that's what youthat's what what you train.
That's the raw material of whatbecomes a Navy SEAL.
Merry Elkins (11:28):
Wow. Well, I've heard that one Navy SEAL motto
is the only easy day wasyesterday. Would you tell us how
that can work as a motto forbusiness leaders? And can you
going we're pivoting here, butcan you give us some effective
business lessons and principlesand pointers on how to address
(11:52):
the kind of change that, youwere referring to earlier and
chaos?
Marty Strong (11:58):
Sure. So one I I I wanna screw this up. There was a
class was before my class, butnot that long, maybe a year and
a half before my class. Andevery class comes up with what's
called a class t shirt. Now thatstarted sometime in the early
seventies, and you would go to alocal t shirt shop.
(12:20):
You couldn't wear it because youweren't a graduate yet, but
those are called your your yourclass shirt. And but you had to
come up with something. Had tocome up with an image, and you
had to come up with a saying.They came up with the only easy
day is yesterday. I have no ideawhat did they took that from a
song?
I don't know where they foundit, but, eventually, it it kind
(12:43):
of encapsulated it's there's twoways of looking at it. One way
of looking at it is it's nevergonna get any any easier. Mhmm.
You just basically have to suckit up because it get worse and
worse and worse. That's one wayof looking at it.
Yesterday was a good timecompared to what's gonna happen
today kind of thing. The otherway I like to look at it is the
(13:05):
way I when I brief when I givepresentations to military guys,
mostly seals, they're leavingthe service. And they're leaving
having, you know, wonderfulcareers, and everybody in The
United States knows who theyare, you know, because now we
have books and movies andeverything. And they're they're
leaving on a high point. Right?
And I have a a presentation Igive to them that's called thank
(13:28):
you for your service, and that'sthe first slide. And then the
second slide is now what?Question mark. And the third
slide is, who cares? Questionmark.
Because Uh-huh. I think the onlyeasy day is yesterday means if
you won the Olympic goldyesterday, you basked in that
yesterday, now you have toprepare for the next Olympic
(13:49):
Olympic competition or the nextrace. Wow. And it doesn't
necessarily mean that you'regonna win. You've gotta keep
putting everything into thisgame.
You have to keep producing. Youhave to keep improving. And and
that's really what I think theonly easy day was yesterday
means is that it's you're on ayou're on a journey of
continuous self improvement,whether it's intellectual,
psychological, physical,whatever, emotional. And there
(14:11):
therefore, it can be kind of amantra, a positive mantra,
rather than it's gonna get worseand worse and worse and worse,
which I think is kind of anegative way to look at it.
Merry Elkins (14:19):
Yeah. Mhmm. The,
Marty Strong (14:23):
you know, the the takeaways as far as
practicality, the everything Ijust said will resonate with
anybody whether they're in themilitary or not. It's Mhmm. I'm
actually just started started myfourth business book. It's not
really a business book. It's afourth book, and it's the title
is ask
Cathy Worthington (14:43):
you can I ask you before that? Because we are
gonna talk about your books, butI wanted to also ask you about
being a UBS investment adviser,and now you are the CEO of a
health care company and a boardmember of two technology
companies. So I'm assuming yourtraining as a seal led you to
(15:03):
form these teams in the businessworld. And what would you say is
the single biggest differencebetween the two paradigms?
Marty Strong (15:13):
So the trend the transition and and the working
title I have is is infinitefocus. It's about personal
development. So it doesn'tmatter if you're a seal, doesn't
matter if you're a businessperson. Doesn't matter if you're
a business person, you'rerunning a health care company,
or you're you're running afinancial services firm, or
you're a participant in in acompany. The the idea of that is
(15:36):
that you are always going to befocusing on your performance,
short range focus, which is whatmost people think of the word
focus, or discipline.
But the other thing is you haveto focus on what the end game
is, what the outcome is thatyou're that you're reaching for,
and that's the long range focus.So there's actually two
different kinds of focus.There's the short range focus
(15:56):
that allows you the discipline,the the habit forming, the
repeat behaviors that gets you,you know, through the productive
part of getting somethingaccomplished or or phases of
things, and then there's thatlong term outlook. What am I
focusing on on the horizon? Youknow, it's a, you know, cup of
coffee way down there.
It's a certain dollar amount.It's whatever it is that you're
(16:17):
focusing on. And thattranslates, and it it translated
as a UBS guy, because I startedfrom scratch with that too.
Didn't have any clients. Didn'thave any rich friends.
And I had ended up after eightyears doing high net worth
management. It was all feebased, and I was a portfolio
manager. And I had to learn itevery single day, kinda like
(16:37):
your own well, you said it wasyesterday thing, but it was all
learnable as long as you had theattitude that my job is to learn
this and get better at this. Notjust most people think about the
numbers, but really it was abouthuman nature, because everybody
treats money differently. Andyou've got people.
Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, people comein there, and they they've just
got their their whole lifesavings was it sunk in a
(17:00):
business. They just sold it, andthey're sitting there with
$2,000,000, and they're shakinglike this. They've never had
that kind of money before.
They had no problem making hardcalls as a business owner, and
they went through all the thestrife and and the journey to to
start a business all the waythrough. But the idea that they
had this money and they mightblow it, they're freaking out.
Mhmm. People that inherit money,same thing. I've never been
(17:21):
around anybody with a lot ofmoney, so I had to learn things
I didn't think I was gonna haveto learn.
It had nothing to do with themarkets. That stuff I kind of
understood, or, like, it'seasier to learn. It had to do
with human nature. Andironically, what they're looking
for in a an adviser, somebodythat's helping them, is
leadership.
Merry Elkins (17:40):
Mhmm. Mhmm.
Marty Strong (17:41):
They don't really need a therapist. They don't
need somebody who's just gonnalisten to them and say, I hear
your pain or, you know, thatkind stuff. What they're looking
for, they're they're looking forsomeone who's going to sit there
and tell them, we've got ahandle on this. We can we can
create something that protectswhat you have, and we can build
on it slowly. We don't have totake big chances.
Let me put together a plan.That's lead you're leading them
(18:03):
towards a comfort or a calmspace related to this fear they
have about money. I never wouldhave thought that. Right? The
second thing is I talked topeople that were self made most
of my high net worth people wereself made millionaires.
Most of them had been bankrupt acouple of times. I thought if
you went bankrupt, you couldn'tdo anything after that. It was
like, you you were done. No. Itwas part of the learning
(18:23):
process.
That's the way they looked atit, looking back at at their at
their lives. They also you'dthink that if you had all the
money in the world, right, youhave $10,000,000 in the bank,
and you got some big house, andyou got boats and everything.
You think that person would behappy, or you think that person
would be in a good place, andyou find out when they wanna
talk to you. They don't wannatalk to you about their money.
(18:45):
They wanna talk to you about thethe son-in-law they can't stand
or the daughter that won'tlisten to them, or it's it's
regular people stuff.
It's just like talking to theguy next door or talking to the
woman at the at the grocerystore. It's regular human. It I
said, alright. So I have tounderstand human nature, and
these aren't seals. These arecivilians.
These are not people I've beenaround for twenty years. These
(19:06):
are a different kind of person.SEALs, you look at them and you
say, are you good? Yeah. I'mgood.
They're not gonna sit there andgo, no. I've got all these
problems. So I went from thatextreme to to normal people,
which to me felt like it was anextreme until I realized this is
the way most people are.
Merry Elkins (19:23):
So you have
Cathy Worthington (19:24):
to Already built into you. You had a very
high tolerance for chaos. It wasbuilt into your training. It was
built into your psychology. Soyou could
Marty Strong (19:34):
tolerate all that change. My family divorce caused
me to get smart about who I was,and a lot of the moving had to
do with the divorce. So I wasable I was a stronger person at
18 years old than a lot ofpeople were, you know, at 24, 20
five because I was emotionallystrong. And then you go through
the training, and you're aroundthose kinds of guys, and they're
(19:55):
putting you through more chaoslater on. They're trying to
trying to trip you up.
They're throwing all kinds ofcrazy stuff at you. Then you
actually go into combat, andit's, like, you know, a tenth of
the the difficulty because theywere prepping you for worst case
scenarios all the time. But ifyou kinda go in there and you're
up against, you know, a a cclass adversary, and you got the
might of the United States AirForce and everything else behind
you, it's not as terrible asthey made it out in training.
(20:18):
Right? So it's all to build upyour your tolerance for chaos,
and then also the judgment thatyou have to have when when
everything falls apart, what doyou do?
You have to plan for what are wegonna do with what we know? What
can we do with what we have? Soall that leads to, you know,
being more effective as a as anadviser to high net worth
people.
Cathy Worthington (20:37):
Right. Right. And and your entrepreneurial
spirit really came out becauseyou now you've published all
these books. You have threebusiness books, be nimble, be
visionary, be different. Thoseare all three different books.
And nine, Seal Strike seriesnovels. Yeah. So you you are
(20:57):
doing it all, but tell us aboutwriting all those books.
Marty Strong (21:02):
Same type of same, I guess, same sort of mantra or
or approach to life. When Iwrote my first novel, I didn't
know how to write a novel, so Istarted reading everything I
could find about it. I went frombeing clearly dumb on the
subject, and so that's fine. SoI'm just gonna start reading and
and studying and looking atthings and do whatever I have to
(21:23):
do and try to get to a pointwhere I can write something and
go through whatever the processis.
Merry Elkins (21:30):
How did you do it? And just just sat down and used
your your discipline and yourtraining to actually Sure. Make
yourself sit there in front ofthe the computer? How did you do
that?
Marty Strong (21:41):
For every one person that's written a novel,
there's about 500 that areselling you a book on how to
write a novel.
Merry Elkins (21:48):
So there's You're right.
You're right.
Marty Strong (21:51):
So there's no lack of how creepy love their people.
Cathy Worthington (21:54):
Mary's writing a novel too. She knows
all about the strain. Yeah.
Merry Elkins (21:59):
So yeah. And I'm not a nigger seal. You know, you
Marty Strong (22:03):
start reading the the the generalist books, and
then you start getting into theniche books, you know, how to
find, you know, how to find a apublisher, how to find a an
agent, how to find an agent inthe subgenre. But you just keep
reading and studying, and youyou listen to webinars and
master classes and all that. ButI sat down, and, you know, and
if you've been writing, thethat's all great. It kinda gets
(22:24):
you in a zone where you haveconfidence you can you
understand the format. And thenat some point, you have to go,
you know, to to to to you haveto start working it.
Right? And and I had to write Imean, everybody goes to school
has to write. I had to write inthe navy a lot under under time
to rest to a certain standard tobe reviewed by senior leaders
(22:45):
and all that. So I I didn't havea problem with the productivity
part of it. Didn't have youknow?
Or even the discipline of it. Ithought, alright. I'll just get
up every morning, 05:30, havecup of coffee, sit down, and
I'll write. But everybody's gota different approach to it that
that works for them. I do astream of consciousness writing
for my novels.
I do a very structured, kindalike a a storyboard approach to
(23:11):
my business books. My businessbooks, I wanna I want to pass
along certain ideas, thoughts,principles, whatever, and I
can't just be all over the placewhen I'm writing those and then
just let it happen. Oh, that'san interesting thing. Think I'll
throw that in chapter three.There has to be some kind of a a
flow to it, to be takingsomebody from where they start
to someplace, hopefully, that'sbetter.
(23:31):
In novel, you don't have to dothat. In novel, you know, if if
Susie walks up to the curb andyou're writing, you can say
Susie takes a step off the curb.Susie, Michael Jackson,
moonwalks back from the curb.Susie, you know, suddenly takes
off and flies across the thestreet and lands.
Merry Elkins (23:46):
You know? You can do anything you wanna do with
Susie.
Marty Strong (23:49):
There's no
Merry Elkins (23:49):
right and wrong way. Creating a whole new world.
Marty Strong (23:53):
It's fiction. You can make Susie Susie a
superhero. Right? You can makeher a sniper. You can make a
sniper her a sniper target.
You can
Merry Elkins (24:01):
Well, talking about that, tell us tell us a
little bit about the steelstrike steel strike series. I
mean, talk talk about the thesubject a little bit.
Marty Strong (24:11):
The first thing, it's not about me. The the main
character is a a facsimile, aprofile of pretty much any young
young officer in any military,doesn't know a whole lot, is
very concerned about their thethe lack of respect of the
enlisted men looking at them,because most of enlisted people
(24:34):
have been in the business for awhile, and the officer is the
one rookie. They, make all kindsof mistakes, rookie mistakes.
They overlead. They underlead.
They they try to become as goodas the enlisted guys, or they
try to dominate them, or theytry to become their friends.
These are all kinda classicthings. You can go back to World
War two movies in the fifties.You'll find the same kinda
(24:54):
characters. It it's just astandard character thing.
Mhmm. I was an officer afterbeing a seal for ten for, yeah,
for ten years, and I was asenior. I was a senior enlisted.
I a chief petty officer, so Iwas not a rookie officer. I
looked like it because I wasreally I looked I've always
looked really young from my age,but as as a brand new ensign, I
(25:15):
had ten years of being a sealunder my belt.
So I couldn't write about thatbecause that would be that
wouldn't be as interesting. Ineeded to have a a character
that had some conflict built in.But then I evolved him. Mhmm. I
evolved him over the course ofthe books.
And Wow. In a natural kind oflogical way, he and he had
setbacks and all that.Eventually, he was he was kicked
(25:37):
out of the knee because of allof his medical problems,
including traumatic braininjury. And then he became
suicidal, and then he gets acall from a friend whose
daughter's been kidnapped inHawaii, and he's begging him to
do something to help him. And sohe ends up getting right when
he's about to, you know, tocheck out, he gets pulled back
into life.
So it becomes a big redemptionstory because now he has a
(26:00):
mission. Now he has something ofvalue. Mhmm. And through that
book, he ends up kinda gettinghis feedback under him and
seeing himself in a differentlight. And then there's a couple
books after that.
So and a lot of that was talkingto seals that have been through
that kind of struggle. Humantrafficking is what he ends up
running into with the with thegirl. There's a seal named Craig
Sawyer that has been rescuingkids down in the Southwest Part
(26:23):
Of The United States for aboutthe last ten years. Wow. And I
called him up, and he told me sothat he gave me their background
research on all that and what'sgoing on globally and in The
United States.
So you don't I don't I didn'twrite the novel because I
thought I gonna end up doing aresearch project, but you end up
if you wanna have somecredibility, unless it's a pure
fantasy. Right. You can't talkabout Boston and not describe
(26:46):
Boston the right way becausepeople have been to Boston, and
then they'll go, that that'sexactly what you're describing.
Yeah.
Merry Elkins (26:53):
Right. For sure.
Marty Strong (26:54):
And it gets really bad when you get to equipment
and things. So it it was freespirited writing on the
storyline and in the characters,but research with you know, if
they use the Kiwi's fivethousand radio, I better make
sure that that actually existedin the time frame. And Yeah. Can
we look at a picture of it andsay, okay. How many other
tanners does it have?
(27:14):
Because I'm gonna have to talkto it.
Merry Elkins (27:17):
Yeah. That's true. Well, you have to do the same
type of research, don't you,with your nonfiction? And, also,
in your book, Be Nimble, youtalk about crisis and chaos as
we we're talking a little littlebit about as opportunities for
leaders and, frankly frankly,everybody to shine. How do you,
(27:40):
aren't those really the hardestmoments for a leader to shine?
Marty Strong (27:46):
It's well, it depends on how you look at
leadership. The the my definiteof leadership is that it's, one,
it's not management. And it'sbeen it's been, I guess, blurred
over the last twenty, twentyfive years. And mostly in
business schools, they they theyact like management is the same
thing as leadership. Andmanagement is what you do when
(28:10):
you have systems and processesand people working as designed
and as promised.
And if something goes wrong,it's usually a system it's just
a snag. And what do you do? Youhave people that either solve it
or you pull out an instructionmanual, you follow the
procedures because the system'sbeen documented. The person's
got their, you know, theirresume. That's the document
documentation there.
(28:31):
Where leadership is different,and you can be a person with
both capabilities. The flip sideof the coin of management is
when you when your system blowsup on you, when you don't have
that system at all, it's not ait's not a fix. You don't go oil
a spot and walk away to starthumming again. It's a complete
failure. If you haven't beentrained or prepared to handle
(28:52):
the kind of the kind ofimplications and consequences of
that failure, you're just gonnasit there on your hands and and
look around it, because you'vebeen given guidance on
everything you've been managing.
Unless you're the inventor ofthe machines you're using I
mean, look at a basic officeenvironment. The copier goes
down. And I don't care how manydegrees you have. We all stare
at each other because we'rewe're all we're all hope we're
(29:17):
all hopeless. Right?
And that's just one littlemachine. You can imagine if it's
something major in yourorganization. Another one would
be, you know, your number onesalesperson, and anybody knows
anything about sales. If youhave 10 salespeople, it's
usually a Pareto thing. There'sprobably one or two that are
bringing in 80% of all yoursales.
Right? So you lose your numberone salesperson. Wow. Okay.
Immediately, you can calculatehow much your your revenue
(29:39):
drops.
Then you get another anothertext. They went to our major
competitor. Oh, man. So you lostmarket share, and you lost
revenue.
Merry Elkins (29:48):
Right.
Marty Strong (29:48):
And you have to place that person, and you can't
just go on the street and say, Iyou're a top salesperson, and
you're not, but I'm a hire youbecause I know you're You put
them in there, you you find outwhether they can do it or not,
because they all promise theycan. So that's leadership. That
sitting in there and reacting tothat impact. Everything about
COVID everything that COVID didto companies, probably more in
(30:09):
the April 2020 time frame whereit wasn't gonna only be two
weeks, and your your mainsupplier all of sudden shut
down. Well, if you only reliedon one main supplier, then
that's manageable.
You can manage your way intoredundant, you know,
capabilities, but you can'tmanage your way out of the
factory having zero. You know?You have to react to that by
(30:31):
leading. Mhmm. You have to comeup with a new plan, new way.
You have to reinvent, reigniteeverybody's imagination,
creativity, and get them in aroom, get them emotionally
stable because everybody'sreacting to it as a crisis, and
that's leadership. To be poisedand controlled, maybe a little
bit of humor, and then getpractical, actually execute
(30:51):
something that's that'sconstructive. Okay.
Cathy Worthington (30:55):
Well, I was gonna
Merry Elkins (30:56):
ask you.
Cathy Worthington (30:57):
How how do you advise people to master
disruption in order to surviveand thrive? That sounds like
this. Right?
Marty Strong (31:06):
Sure. So if you were talking about martial arts,
the way you would teach somebodyto master an attack in a parking
lot would be to prepare ahead oftime by learning martial arts.
Mhmm. You you there's nothing inthe moment that's gonna prepare
you for it. You need to preparefor that moment ahead of time.
So in in combat training and incombat special ops training, you
(31:29):
do lots and lots ofstoryboarding, lot of what ifs,
all different kinds ofcontingencies, what if this
happens, what if that happens?Okay. If this happens, what are
you gonna do? If that happens,what are you gonna do? If you
lose this radio, what are yougonna do?
Do wanna go to the backup radio?What if you lose the backup
radio? And you get all thisstuff, and you're thinking all
the time that probably thingsaren't gonna go the way they're
planned, and therefore, I haveto be thinking one or two or
(31:49):
three steps beyond that firstfailure. Right. And then when
it's all done, if I know whatthe job is, is there a way I can
kind of MacGyver this thing andwork around and get something
together and still get the jobdone?
And that's a mindset that you'retaught to to to follow. Well,
that's not the way people incommercial organizations,
civilian organizations aretaught. They're not taught to be
(32:12):
constantly contingency thinking.They're not having boardroom
tabletop exercises of a What solet's say we lost our number one
salesperson. You see, they'renot living the the potential of
the of the crisis moment.
Right. So it's more of a crisismoment, and it's more of a
crisis because when somebodywalks up to them in the parking
lot and they realize, I don'tknow how to defend myself, and
(32:32):
it's too late. It's too late.That's how you master disruption
on the downside, how to limitthe downside. You prepare for
it.
You think about it. You trainall your leaders to be thinking
about these things in advance,to bring things up bring things
to your attention so you canstart to foreshadow certain
scenarios, and how do we dealwith it at the top? Let's get
three vendors instead of the onewe have. Let's not be so
(32:54):
dependent on the onesalesperson. Mhmm.
The the upside of disruption andmastering disruption is, in
business especially, is thedisruption and chaos that that
are happening around you offer aessentially, a a a a broken
field that you can kinda runthrough where before you
(33:17):
couldn't because there was awhole line of people blocking
you. Everything was controlled.All the players were in place.
All the rules were in place. Andso you couldn't beat them at
their rules because theyestablished these rules fifteen
years ago, twenty years ago, andthen they've been running the
thing, and they're the master ofthe rules.
And then something shakes uplike an earthquake, and now
there's all these little gapsand holes and slots, and and and
(33:37):
you the vacuum can be filled bypeople that are quick weighted,
you know, aggressive enough, andcan think through a different
way to achieve something in thenew the new normal. That's how
and and there's every singlechaotic event in United States
history, every one of the majorstock market crashes, you know,
02/2008 and the COVID twentytwenty being the last two, gave
(34:02):
rise to all kinds of newindustries, new new tech titans
after World War one, after WorldWar two, after the twenty nine
crash. You can go back and andif you look up that particular
subject that way, you're gonnafind all these big name
companies that you remember thatwere powerhouses in the fifties
and sixties. They were startedin some guy's garage, you know,
1934.
Cathy Worthington (34:23):
Yeah. We talked to people all the time
that turned the COVID crisisinto a new career. They pivoted,
and we started our podcastduring that time on Zoom when
people started using Zoom. Andand it was like we talked to
people constantly who have doneall this, you know, have
engineered through it, theentrepreneurs.
Merry Elkins (34:44):
Right.
Cathy Worthington (34:45):
But it's difficult. Right? Yeah. It's
Merry Elkins (34:49):
it's not
Marty Strong (34:50):
It's it's more difficult because it's not
normal to think that way. So itgoes kinda comes down to your
thinking.
Merry Elkins (34:57):
We haven't been raised that way either,
especially so many of us inWestern society have had it very
easy, And, they don't even knowyou were talking about failure.
I mean, dealing with failure, somany people are raised not to
even fail ever. And Mhmm. Talktalk about that. Talk about how
do you how do you managefailure, and also the fear of
(35:21):
it, because you have no ideawhat it looks like.
And then also, what aboutstress? Because a lot of this
disruption causes a great dealof stress.
Marty Strong (35:32):
So it's gonna sound like I'm just repeating
myself, but let's go back to thethe potential assault in the
parking lot. If you are amaster, you know, MMA fighter,
and somebody's approaching youbecause they think they're gonna
be able to beat you up and takeyour money, And your level of
stress on a scale of one to 10is probably a one. Probably more
(35:53):
related to, I hope I don't killthis guy because I don't wanna
go to jail, not a 10 where thisguy's gonna kill me. You know?
But if you're just the averageperson standing there, it's
probably a 10.
The difference between those tworeactions to the same stimuli is
the preparedness. Now some ofit's physical in that example,
but most of it's psychological.So it goes back to what we've
(36:17):
been conditioned to by thesociety, institutions, etcetera,
or to obey the rules, theintellectual rules, to follow
the thought the thought patternsthat have been approved, and to
strive for stability, and thatstability equals safety and
(36:38):
security. Mhmm. And therefore,we've been given kind of a false
hope that the universe, which isnever never static, it's
constantly changing.
Every molecule is changingsomething. Right? We're given
this false impression as humans,because eventually, when you're
running a company, you've gotthat false impression as the CEO
of a company too. If you've beenraised this way and haven't been
(36:59):
trained any other way, you thinkwhat your do is, if you follow
the rules and do all the thingsyou're supposed to do, you've
checked all the boxes, youyou're you deserve stability,
safety, and security. Mhmm.
And so it becomes more of acrisis for that kind of a person
when the world doesn't go alongwith that. What the real world
says, out of the blue, you lostyour job. Out of the blue, you
(37:21):
found out, you know, your yourspouse is cheating. Out of the
blue, you get into a car wreck,and and you're suddenly laid up
in a hospital for three months.Because that's what happens
every day, all around us, inevery every place on the planet.
It's almost like that way ofthinking is a kinda like going,
ma, ma, ma, ma. It's a it's away of trying to ignore the
reality by creating a false afalse reality. So if you so if
(37:43):
you recognize that, then youstep back and you say, alright.
And, military is pretty goodabout training people for this
because the battlefield is isalways chaotic. It's it's
somebody told me one time thatwhen you're planning a a
mission, they give you all theinformation.
Right? So it's kinda like armyman. There'll be two guys in
front of this door. There'll beone guy over here at this tower.
There'll be a road.
There'll be a truck, andthere'll be all that. And and
(38:06):
there's a combat veteran. Hesaid, yeah. You can plan for all
that, and you can come up with aperfect plan on how we're gonna
do this for those two guys, butthis is what it's really like.
Think about you walk in yourkitchen, you turn the light out,
and all the all the cockroachesgo.
And there's no there's nocockroaches in half a second,
and you don't know where theyare. That's how combat works.
(38:27):
Oh. The first time somebodytakes a shot, the two guys in
front of the door aren't gonnabe in front of the door anymore.
The truck that was coming inisn't gonna be there anymore.
The guy in the tower is notgonna. Everybody's gonna do
whatever the heck they wanna do,however they wanna do it, and so
your plan is gonna go go, youknow, go to hell in a
handbasket. So you can't planfor the choreo the choreography,
whatever the movie show you. Itit doesn't work that way. Real
(38:49):
people panic, and real people dodo weird things in all in all
walks of life.
Cathy Worthington (38:55):
So So does does that mean do you do you
believe that people can learn tolead effectively, or is that a
trait people are born with? Ithink I know the answer, but I
wanna hear you. Tell
Marty Strong (39:06):
me. No. No. You can you can definitely all the
things we're talking about is ispsychology that we've learned,
and then psychology we canunlearn. Everything we're
talking about is the reality ofthe world and examples of
crisis, personal or otherwise,and also how you can prepare
yourself or prepare a team forthe inevitability of that crisis
(39:26):
by being conditioned and bethinking in a contingent manner
and be always kind of secondguessing what could go wrong,
and then, okay, if this goeswrong, like that tabletop
exercise, then what what can wedo now?
Either to diminish the impactand consequences if it happens.
Merry Elkins (39:42):
Well, let's talk about taking risks a little bit,
because as a former Navy SEAL,you had to know a lot about
taking a risk. Talk about takingrisks in life and in business.
Marty Strong (39:55):
Yeah. That that's a really good segue. So if
you're let's say you're the thea person that believes in
stability, therefore, thataffects that stability is what?
Merry Elkins (40:09):
Causes stress.
Marty Strong (40:10):
It's a risk. A risk. Right?
Merry Elkins (40:12):
Mhmm. Uh-huh.
Marty Strong (40:14):
And if you're the b person who who has prepared
themselves and conditionedthemselves in a different way,
then there's less risk in lifeand less risk in business, more
opportunity. Right? So if youare a, say, the type a person,
imagine how they can actually bedestructive being risk adverse.
(40:35):
They think they're beingabsolutely, you know,
constructive, proactive, andthey're they're reinforcing
stability, which is all good,good, good, good, a plus grades.
Right?
That person's like a librarianwho, according to the Dewey
Decimal System, has every bookin its place, and the front door
is locked. He doesn't like tolet anybody come in and check
out a book because that isdisruption. It's also a risk to
(41:00):
the stability they created. Theworld is perfect. My job is to
protect this perfection.
Then you have another librarianthat believes in learning and
everything, and throws open thedoor, and is behind them putting
the door the books back wherethey're supposed to be because
there's so many people comingin, and they're just, you know,
loving every minute of itbecause they're seeing smiling
people, and people that are thatare learning through this this
(41:21):
exchange of knowledge and not somuch focused on a library as a
containment zone for the for thebooks. They're inviting
disruption because they thinkthis disruption is the change of
a of a person's mind throughinformation and knowledge, which
it is. It changes your paradigm.It changes the way what what you
think. So the the riskmitigation, from a business
(41:43):
standpoint, taught as a a methodor even as a title in some
places, Really, what you'redoing is you're saying, what we
want you to do while we'retrying to push this company
forward, everything else we'redoing is we're trying to grow
fast, we're trying to get bigand all that.
We want you to focus all yourtime on throwing out anchors and
throwing out drogue parachutesand doing anything to keep that
(42:04):
from happening. Because if we'resuccessful in what we're gonna
do, we're gonna change almosteverything we are. Mhmm. And
therefore, there's gonna bedisruption, and there's gonna be
people freaking out aboutchange. And if you and anybody
else tries to tell everybody inthe company, we can do all these
other great things and stay thesame, well, then you're lying to
them because that's not that'snot what's gonna happen.
(42:26):
So companies that are verydynamic have problems internally
because the people ininternally, if they're told
everything is gonna be staticlike the library that's not
being used, and suddenly, it'snot like that. Suddenly, it's
it's there's chaos, and there'sall kinds of crap going on
around them, and they're saying,we were told the change wouldn't
do this. We're we're told wekeep our jobs. We keep our
titles. We we'd stay in the sameoffice space.
(42:49):
And that was never gonna be thetruth because you can't do both.
You can't try to change and alsotell everybody you're not gonna
change.
Merry Elkins (42:56):
What would you like to have our boomer audience
have as a takeaway today?
Marty Strong (43:01):
I think that the the number one observation for
baby boomers, which isunfortunate, it's also for
younger people too, is Mhmm. Theidea that that success is
linear, that there's a foot afootball play or plan that you
have to do. You gotta follow itlike a model airplane
(43:22):
instructions, and that's theonly way you can be successful.
And that the path that you starton and the vocation or
profession that you get intoinitially is supposed to be the
be all, end all. For somereason, our generation, we were
taught that.
Get good grades. You can getinto college, get good grades,
get a good job, get a good job,stay there for twenty, thirty
years, retire. Right? The worldis so fractured, but it's filled
(43:47):
with so much opportunity. Youdon't have to follow that game
plan, and definitely youngpeople don't.
But lots of young people thinkthat, well, if I don't have the
master plan for the next twentyfive years, I'm a failure. And
in reality, especially if you'rea boomer, if you've lived five
or six or seven decades, youcould have been in a different
profession every one of thosedecades.
Merry Elkins (44:09):
Right.
Marty Strong (44:10):
In in this country, you could have and and
when I when I helped, seals thatare getting out, or I did this
with the Naval Academy group,asked somebody, how old are you
getting out? He said, I'm 39. Isaid, okay. How old will you be
when you get through law schooland become a lawyer? Or how old
will you be when you become anengineer after you get through
engineering school?
He goes, what do you mean? Isaid, well, it takes four years,
(44:30):
so I add it up. Oh, I'll be, youknow, 43. And you kinda looked
at me. Yeah.
You could be a brand new lawyerat 43 or a brand new engineer at
43 or a brand new softwaredesigner or whatever because
it's not about the it's notabout the old plan anymore. And
that that's the biggesttakeaway, I think. Don't lock
your yourself psychologicallyinto there. You had one shot at
(44:52):
it as a kid or one shot at it asa young person, and you blew it.
Look at it as I can do anythingI wanna do.
I'll go ahead and do it. And ifGod comes along and takes me
away while I'm doing it, well,so what? Yeah. Don't sit static
and don't do that.
Merry Elkins (45:06):
Go go to the next. You so much, Marty. That's great
advice. Our guest today on lateboomers has been Marty Strong,
former Navy Seal officer,entrepreneur, and business
leader, author of 12 books, andsought after speaker. You can
learn more about Marty throughhis website, MartyStrong.com.
(45:27):
Thank you.
Cathy Worthington (45:29):
And thanks for listening to us, and please
subscribe to our YouTube channelfor the late boomers podcast and
take us along in the car, andlet us know if we inspired you
to take action. Please follow uson Instagram at I am Kathy
Worthington and at I am MaryElkins and at late boomers. Tune
in next week when we'll betalking to another exciting
(45:51):
guest. Thanks so much, Boomersfans, and thank you so much to
Marty Strong.
Marty Strong (45:57):
Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Mary.
Cathy Worthington (46:10):
Thank you for joining us on late boomers, the
podcast that is your guide tocreating a third act with style,
power, and impact. Please visitour website and get in touch
with us at lateboomers.biz. Ifyou would like to listen to or
download other episodes of lateboomers, go to
ewnpodcastnetwork.com.
Merry Elkins (46:31):
This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple
Podcast, and most other majorpodcast sites. We hope you make
use of the wisdom you've gainedhere and that you enjoy a
successful third act with yourown style, power, and impact.
This is the EWN Podcast Network.
Cathy Worthington (00:14):
Welcome to late boomers, our podcast guide
to creating your third act withstyle, power, and impact. Hi.
I'm Kathy Worthington.
Merry Elkins (00:24):
And I'm Mary Elkins. Join us as we bring you
conversations withentrepreneurs, entertainers, and
people with vision who aremaking a difference in the
world.
Cathy Worthington (00:34):
Everyone has a story, and we'll take you
along for the ride on eachinterview, recounting the
journey our guests have taken toget where they are, inspiring
you to create your own path tosuccess. Let's get started.
Hello. I'm Kathy Worthington. Welcome to
(00:55):
late boomers. Our special guesttoday is a retired and decorated
Navy Seal officer who parlayedhis experience in the military
to become a successful businessleader, author, and sought after
motivational speaker.
Merry Elkins (01:10):
And I'm Mary Elkins. Marty Strong's passion
is influencing change. With theworld changing so much as we
speak, I know our boomeraudience will be interested to
hear what he has to say.Welcome, Marty.
Marty Strong (01:24):
Thanks for having me.
Merry Elkins (01:26):
Great to have you.
Cathy Worthington (01:27):
Yeah. You grew up in a military family,
and so you lived in differentcountries. And how do you think
this influenced you and led youto the choices you've made in
your life as a younger man andtoday?
Marty Strong (01:42):
Well, I think and this would be the same whether
you moved around a lot becauseof the military or because your
one of your parents happened tobe, in a business where they had
to relocate a lot. You end upwith a lot of emotional maturity
and kinda psychologicalresilience because you're always
switching friends. In my case,I'm switching football jerseys,
colors of football jerseys andthings. Oh. And you play for one
(02:04):
team, all of sudden, you're inanother high school in another
state, and you're playing foranother team.
And at the time, of course, it'sterrible. You you as a kid, like
most human beings, you'relooking for stability. You're
looking for some longevity soyou can set up relationships and
all that. But you really don'tunderstand how it makes you
stronger for the future becauselater when you're an adult and
(02:24):
say somebody finds out they haveto move maybe just to the other
side of the city, itemotionally, they break down.
It's such a terrible thing.
I I can walk to where I where Ibuy my food. I can I like I like
the neighborhood, and it'sreally a big hit? Right? So I'm
listening to that going like,yeah. Try going from Nebraska to
Japan or from Japan to you know?
(02:46):
And and that I think it's astrength, and I think that that
else that also you know, goinginto the military for twenty
years, I was obviously travelinga lot there too. So you end up
being less attached to just aphysical place all the time, and
you get more a sense ofyourself. Kind of like like
knowing your body in space as agymnast, you kinda know your own
(03:06):
mind and and personality andyour what you like, what you
don't like, your own valuesystem and everything, because
you're not tied down to oneparticular format or context.
Cathy Worthington (03:18):
I love that.
Merry Elkins (03:19):
Yeah. It's a good answer. I do too. We'll talk
about your time as a Navy SEALand also about the rigorous
training a Navy SEAL has toundergo.
Marty Strong (03:31):
Well, so when I when I first came in the SEAL
teams, they were highlyclassified, and there were no
movies or no TV shows. Actually,there were no books. The closest
thing to anything related to theseals was a movie with Richard
Widmer called the frogmen, whichmany of the Vietnam era seals
cite as their reason for joiningthe navy to become frogmen. So
(03:53):
it gives you the choice of thepower the power of the of the
cultural media. So that meantthat I didn't really know much
about it.
I didn't know really what I wasgetting into. It's a volunteer
organization. In those days, itwas mostly word-of-mouth, and
you kind of one person led youto another person who eventually
found out who you had to put anapplication in with. I ended up
(04:15):
showing up because there was amistake in my orders, so I
didn't even volunteer to gothere. And the the master chief
who was talking to me when Iarrived there talked me into
volunteering.
Now I'm I'm eighteen eighteenyears old, so I'm I'm pretty
much malleable.
Merry Elkins (04:33):
Yeah. Especially if somebody's some guy's sitting
Marty Strong (04:36):
there and
Merry Elkins (04:36):
go malleable.
Marty Strong (04:38):
Yeah. I I Yeah. And, you he's sitting there,
he's got a big chest full ofmetals, and he's he's very, very
smooth talker and very fatherly.And and I thought, you know,
hey. If you don't make it, it'svolunteer thing.
You can quit. You're not gonnaget in trouble or anything. And
then maybe he'll send you whereyou were supposed to go in the
first place. So, you know, likea dummy, I said, sure. I'll try
(04:59):
this.
And that's how I got in into theSEAL teams. Now it's a much,
much more manufactured process.It's it's on on purpose because
they need a lot of them. So whenI I made it through training, we
had a 26 guys that that startedmy class, and 13 of us graduated
six months later.
Merry Elkins (05:17):
Oh, boy.
Marty Strong (05:19):
Yeah. And and of those thirteen, two were kicked
out of of their first SAIL teambefore they even showed up
because they got in troubleracing a car or something. And
and so out of my whole 13 personclass, 11 of us actually got to
start being seals as aprofession. So that's a heck of
an attrition rate. We lostanother one during the first
(05:39):
four months of the training atthe seal team I was assigned to,
which is a seal team two.
So now we're starting basicallywith 10 that made it through the
basic, the intermediarytraining, and ended up getting
the the gold eagle badge, whichwe call the Budweiser. And that
just means that you've madethrough the basic intermediate.
You're not really a seal yet. Sothose are those are pretty
(06:03):
pretty tough odds. Right?
Cathy Worthington (06:05):
And what year was that? What year?
Marty Strong (06:08):
I went into training in, I think it was
fall, end of summer of '70 '7,graduated at the end of the
spring of seventy seven, andwent to army jump school in Fort
Benning, which, again, theydon't do anymore. They have
their own jump school. Thenshowed up at SEAL team too on
the East Coast in Virginia. So Iwas there for eight years. And
(06:34):
an interesting thing in mycareer is I was enlisted SEAL,
and at the end of eight years, Iwent to the SEAL training
command on the West Coast, sameplace I'd gone through the basic
training.
And I was the senior enlistedinstructor in that first phase.
It was I worked for thelieutenant who was in charge of
all of it. So one of my mainduties was man managing hell
(06:57):
week, which is whatever he hearsabout as the crucible, you don't
sleep for five days and allthat. And the biggest shock to
me, and this is kind of aninsight to the training, it's it
was conveyed to all of us by theinstructors as we were going
through the students that it wasall chaos, and it was random. We
(07:17):
would be told we're gonna go toa class, then they'd be mad at
us for some reason, tell us toform up out on the beach, they
take us on a nine mile sand run.
And so we so that was thepunishment for being for getting
in trouble. We weren't even surehow we got in trouble, why we
got in trouble, but suddenlywe're on the beach. They'd tell
us we're gonna do, you know, a atwo mile run, and it would turn
it into a 12 mile run. It didUh-huh. It tells us we're gonna
(07:39):
mostly, they're constantlytelling us something that was
not correct, and that was partof the the conditioning, but it
was also part of setting the theexperiment up because they
weren't gonna cause us to tofail or quit or anything.
We were gonna do it toourselves. We were gonna
everybody was gonna have theirown opinion of whether they
could handle this chaos anduncertainty, and people just
(08:00):
started, you know, punching outon their own. They said, I can't
handle this. I don't know what'sgoing on. I can't plan for
anything.
I can't, you know, I can't holdback today for tomorrow because
tomorrow's the day that we'regonna do something. You just
basically had to keep puttingone foot in front of the other
and trying to execute at thebest you could, and I didn't I
thought that was the way it was.So I show up, you know, eight
years later, and the very firstevent that I walk into the in
(08:25):
the instructor office to witnessis a 14 mile run-in combat boots
on the sand. Oh, gosh. They'vegot this big long board going
from one end room to the other,and there's a complete mission
briefing on it, like a like itwas a seal mission, like a
combat mission.
Everybody has assignments. Youknow, radio, primary, secondary,
(08:47):
and tertiary radio call signs,radio frequencies, two different
kinds of radios. There wasvehicles. There was all kinds of
watering points where themedical points were gonna be.
And I'm looking at all this, andI turned to one of the other
guys, and I said, why why isthis so why is this so
overmanaged?
He says, we do everything likethis. It's always been this way.
(09:07):
Mhmm. You just didn't know whatyou were going through.
Cathy Worthington (09:09):
Somebody set that up.
Marty Strong (09:10):
So it was it was like you were yeah. It was like
you were at, you know, WollyWorld, and people just popped
out of a bush in the in theground and grabbed the piece of
trash so you couldn't see whatwas going on. And and then so
that's the first part. Right?That is heavily choreographed,
heavily observed, heavilymanaged, heavily supervised, and
yet it's kinda hidden from thestudents so they don't perceive
(09:31):
that.
The second thing was, I think Ilike most people going in, I
still thought it was mostly aphysical exercise. It was a
physical contest. And as aninstructor, it only took me
about a month and a half till Itill I realized it has nothing
to do with that. It's allpsychology. It's all what's
(09:52):
going on between their ears.
I have a a speech program I callthe the voices in your head.
It's basically all those theinner critic that gets you to
the point where you go from riskcalculation to just fear of
failure, and you just startcalculating how am I gonna get
out of this. You start coming upwith your draft scheme plan,
your draft I quits quit message,and you could watch the
(10:13):
students. You could see it intheir eyes. You could see the
light bulb kinda turning out,and they just look dull.
And you can also kind of comparethat to the students that seem
to be very kind of lit up,energized, not like cheerleader
energized, but just like a softintensity, like like they were
going with it, and they weren'tgonna quit. And the other thing
was kind of a companion to thatwas a sense of humor. Pretty
(10:36):
much every single solitaryperson in the seals, the green
berets, all have an incrediblesense of humor. They're all like
stand up comics, and I thinkthat's one of those. It's it's
an escape mechanism sometimescollectively, but it's also kind
of a personal way of looking atbad things.
Something happens to you, youcan, you know, you can kinda
roll with it and go, oh,whatever. You know? Or somebody
(10:58):
else can say something funnyabout what happened happened to
you, and you're like, can't itjust makes light of it and puts
it in its perspective, you know,and, anyway, it's over, so put
one foot in front of the other.So that's when I learned it
wasn't about the physical part,that the whole contest, the
whole crucible was set up as anenvironment to let these young
men go through and make theirown decisions.
Merry Elkins (11:19):
Ah.
Marty Strong (11:19):
And what you get out of that is or people that
think that way, and are capableof dealing with all that
uncertainty, and that's what youthat's what what you train.
That's the raw material of whatbecomes a Navy SEAL.
Merry Elkins (11:28):
Wow. Well, I've heard that one Navy SEAL motto
is the only easy day wasyesterday. Would you tell us how
that can work as a motto forbusiness leaders? And can you
going we're pivoting here, butcan you give us some effective
business lessons and principlesand pointers on how to address
(11:52):
the kind of change that, youwere referring to earlier and
chaos?
Marty Strong (11:58):
Sure. So one I I I wanna screw this up. There was a
class was before my class, butnot that long, maybe a year and
a half before my class. Andevery class comes up with what's
called a class t shirt. Now thatstarted sometime in the early
seventies, and you would go to alocal t shirt shop.
(12:20):
You couldn't wear it because youweren't a graduate yet, but
those are called your your yourclass shirt. And but you had to
come up with something. Had tocome up with an image, and you
had to come up with a saying.They came up with the only easy
day is yesterday. I have no ideawhat did they took that from a
song?
I don't know where they foundit, but, eventually, it it kind
(12:43):
of encapsulated it's there's twoways of looking at it. One way
of looking at it is it's nevergonna get any any easier. Mhmm.
You just basically have to suckit up because it get worse and
worse and worse. That's one wayof looking at it.
Yesterday was a good timecompared to what's gonna happen
today kind of thing. The otherway I like to look at it is the
(13:05):
way I when I brief when I givepresentations to military guys,
mostly seals, they're leavingthe service. And they're leaving
having, you know, wonderfulcareers, and everybody in The
United States knows who theyare, you know, because now we
have books and movies andeverything. And they're they're
leaving on a high point. Right?
And I have a a presentation Igive to them that's called thank
(13:28):
you for your service, and that'sthe first slide. And then the
second slide is now what?Question mark. And the third
slide is, who cares? Questionmark.
Because Uh-huh. I think the onlyeasy day is yesterday means if
you won the Olympic goldyesterday, you basked in that
yesterday, now you have toprepare for the next Olympic
(13:49):
Olympic competition or the nextrace. Wow. And it doesn't
necessarily mean that you'regonna win. You've gotta keep
putting everything into thisgame.
You have to keep producing. Youhave to keep improving. And and
that's really what I think theonly easy day was yesterday
means is that it's you're on ayou're on a journey of
continuous self improvement,whether it's intellectual,
psychological, physical,whatever, emotional. And there
(14:11):
therefore, it can be kind of amantra, a positive mantra,
rather than it's gonna get worseand worse and worse and worse,
which I think is kind of anegative way to look at it.
Merry Elkins (14:19):
Yeah. Mhmm. The,
Marty Strong (14:23):
you know, the the takeaways as far as
practicality, the everything Ijust said will resonate with
anybody whether they're in themilitary or not. It's Mhmm. I'm
actually just started started myfourth business book. It's not
really a business book. It's afourth book, and it's the title
is ask
Cathy Worthington (14:43):
you can I ask you before that? Because we are
gonna talk about your books, butI wanted to also ask you about
being a UBS investment adviser,and now you are the CEO of a
health care company and a boardmember of two technology
companies. So I'm assuming yourtraining as a seal led you to
(15:03):
form these teams in the businessworld. And what would you say is
the single biggest differencebetween the two paradigms?
Marty Strong (15:13):
So the trend the transition and and the working
title I have is is infinitefocus. It's about personal
development. So it doesn'tmatter if you're a seal, doesn't
matter if you're a businessperson. Doesn't matter if you're
a business person, you'rerunning a health care company,
or you're you're running afinancial services firm, or
you're a participant in in acompany. The the idea of that is
(15:36):
that you are always going to befocusing on your performance,
short range focus, which is whatmost people think of the word
focus, or discipline.
But the other thing is you haveto focus on what the end game
is, what the outcome is thatyou're that you're reaching for,
and that's the long range focus.So there's actually two
different kinds of focus.There's the short range focus
(15:56):
that allows you the discipline,the the habit forming, the
repeat behaviors that gets you,you know, through the productive
part of getting somethingaccomplished or or phases of
things, and then there's thatlong term outlook. What am I
focusing on on the horizon? Youknow, it's a, you know, cup of
coffee way down there.
It's a certain dollar amount.It's whatever it is that you're
(16:17):
focusing on. And thattranslates, and it it translated
as a UBS guy, because I startedfrom scratch with that too.
Didn't have any clients. Didn'thave any rich friends.
And I had ended up after eightyears doing high net worth
management. It was all feebased, and I was a portfolio
manager. And I had to learn itevery single day, kinda like
(16:37):
your own well, you said it wasyesterday thing, but it was all
learnable as long as you had theattitude that my job is to learn
this and get better at this. Notjust most people think about the
numbers, but really it was abouthuman nature, because everybody
treats money differently. Andyou've got people.
Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, people comein there, and they they've just
got their their whole lifesavings was it sunk in a
(17:00):
business. They just sold it, andthey're sitting there with
$2,000,000, and they're shakinglike this. They've never had
that kind of money before.
They had no problem making hardcalls as a business owner, and
they went through all the thestrife and and the journey to to
start a business all the waythrough. But the idea that they
had this money and they mightblow it, they're freaking out.
Mhmm. People that inherit money,same thing. I've never been
(17:21):
around anybody with a lot ofmoney, so I had to learn things
I didn't think I was gonna haveto learn.
It had nothing to do with themarkets. That stuff I kind of
understood, or, like, it'seasier to learn. It had to do
with human nature. Andironically, what they're looking
for in a an adviser, somebodythat's helping them, is
leadership.
Merry Elkins (17:40):
Mhmm. Mhmm.
Marty Strong (17:41):
They don't really need a therapist. They don't
need somebody who's just gonnalisten to them and say, I hear
your pain or, you know, thatkind stuff. What they're looking
for, they're they're looking forsomeone who's going to sit there
and tell them, we've got ahandle on this. We can we can
create something that protectswhat you have, and we can build
on it slowly. We don't have totake big chances.
Let me put together a plan.That's lead you're leading them
(18:03):
towards a comfort or a calmspace related to this fear they
have about money. I never wouldhave thought that. Right? The
second thing is I talked topeople that were self made most
of my high net worth people wereself made millionaires.
Most of them had been bankrupt acouple of times. I thought if
you went bankrupt, you couldn'tdo anything after that. It was
like, you you were done. No. Itwas part of the learning
(18:23):
process.
That's the way they looked atit, looking back at at their at
their lives. They also you'dthink that if you had all the
money in the world, right, youhave $10,000,000 in the bank,
and you got some big house, andyou got boats and everything.
You think that person would behappy, or you think that person
would be in a good place, andyou find out when they wanna
talk to you. They don't wannatalk to you about their money.
(18:45):
They wanna talk to you about thethe son-in-law they can't stand
or the daughter that won'tlisten to them, or it's it's
regular people stuff.
It's just like talking to theguy next door or talking to the
woman at the at the grocerystore. It's regular human. It I
said, alright. So I have tounderstand human nature, and
these aren't seals. These arecivilians.
These are not people I've beenaround for twenty years. These
(19:06):
are a different kind of person.SEALs, you look at them and you
say, are you good? Yeah. I'mgood.
They're not gonna sit there andgo, no. I've got all these
problems. So I went from thatextreme to to normal people,
which to me felt like it was anextreme until I realized this is
the way most people are.
Merry Elkins (19:23):
So you have
Cathy Worthington (19:24):
to Already built into you. You had a very
high tolerance for chaos. It wasbuilt into your training. It was
built into your psychology. Soyou could
Marty Strong (19:34):
tolerate all that change. My family divorce caused
me to get smart about who I was,and a lot of the moving had to
do with the divorce. So I wasable I was a stronger person at
18 years old than a lot ofpeople were, you know, at 24, 20
five because I was emotionallystrong. And then you go through
the training, and you're aroundthose kinds of guys, and they're
(19:55):
putting you through more chaoslater on. They're trying to
trying to trip you up.
They're throwing all kinds ofcrazy stuff at you. Then you
actually go into combat, andit's, like, you know, a tenth of
the the difficulty because theywere prepping you for worst case
scenarios all the time. But ifyou kinda go in there and you're
up against, you know, a a cclass adversary, and you got the
might of the United States AirForce and everything else behind
you, it's not as terrible asthey made it out in training.
(20:18):
Right? So it's all to build upyour your tolerance for chaos,
and then also the judgment thatyou have to have when when
everything falls apart, what doyou do?
You have to plan for what are wegonna do with what we know? What
can we do with what we have? Soall that leads to, you know,
being more effective as a as anadviser to high net worth
people.
Cathy Worthington (20:37):
Right. Right. And and your entrepreneurial
spirit really came out becauseyou now you've published all
these books. You have threebusiness books, be nimble, be
visionary, be different. Thoseare all three different books.
And nine, Seal Strike seriesnovels. Yeah. So you you are
(20:57):
doing it all, but tell us aboutwriting all those books.
Marty Strong (21:02):
Same type of same, I guess, same sort of mantra or
or approach to life. When Iwrote my first novel, I didn't
know how to write a novel, so Istarted reading everything I
could find about it. I went frombeing clearly dumb on the
subject, and so that's fine. SoI'm just gonna start reading and
and studying and looking atthings and do whatever I have to
(21:23):
do and try to get to a pointwhere I can write something and
go through whatever the processis.
Merry Elkins (21:30):
How did you do it? And just just sat down and used
your your discipline and yourtraining to actually Sure. Make
yourself sit there in front ofthe the computer? How did you do
that?
Marty Strong (21:41):
For every one person that's written a novel,
there's about 500 that areselling you a book on how to
write a novel.
Merry Elkins (21:48):
So there's You're right.
You're right.
Marty Strong (21:51):
So there's no lack of how creepy love their people.
Cathy Worthington (21:54):
Mary's writing a novel too. She knows
all about the strain. Yeah.
Merry Elkins (21:59):
So yeah. And I'm not a nigger seal. You know, you
Marty Strong (22:03):
start reading the the the generalist books, and
then you start getting into theniche books, you know, how to
find, you know, how to find a apublisher, how to find a an
agent, how to find an agent inthe subgenre. But you just keep
reading and studying, and youyou listen to webinars and
master classes and all that. ButI sat down, and, you know, and
if you've been writing, thethat's all great. It kinda gets
(22:24):
you in a zone where you haveconfidence you can you
understand the format. And thenat some point, you have to go,
you know, to to to to you haveto start working it.
Right? And and I had to write Imean, everybody goes to school
has to write. I had to write inthe navy a lot under under time
to rest to a certain standard tobe reviewed by senior leaders
(22:45):
and all that. So I I didn't havea problem with the productivity
part of it. Didn't have youknow?
Or even the discipline of it. Ithought, alright. I'll just get
up every morning, 05:30, havecup of coffee, sit down, and
I'll write. But everybody's gota different approach to it that
that works for them. I do astream of consciousness writing
for my novels.
I do a very structured, kindalike a a storyboard approach to
(23:11):
my business books. My businessbooks, I wanna I want to pass
along certain ideas, thoughts,principles, whatever, and I
can't just be all over the placewhen I'm writing those and then
just let it happen. Oh, that'san interesting thing. Think I'll
throw that in chapter three.There has to be some kind of a a
flow to it, to be takingsomebody from where they start
to someplace, hopefully, that'sbetter.
(23:31):
In novel, you don't have to dothat. In novel, you know, if if
Susie walks up to the curb andyou're writing, you can say
Susie takes a step off the curb.Susie, Michael Jackson,
moonwalks back from the curb.Susie, you know, suddenly takes
off and flies across the thestreet and lands.
Merry Elkins (23:46):
You know? You can do anything you wanna do with
Susie.
Marty Strong (23:49):
There's no
Merry Elkins (23:49):
right and wrong way. Creating a whole new world.
Marty Strong (23:53):
It's fiction. You can make Susie Susie a
superhero. Right? You can makeher a sniper. You can make a
sniper her a sniper target.
You can
Merry Elkins (24:01):
Well, talking about that, tell us tell us a
little bit about the steelstrike steel strike series. I
mean, talk talk about the thesubject a little bit.
Marty Strong (24:11):
The first thing, it's not about me. The the main
character is a a facsimile, aprofile of pretty much any young
young officer in any military,doesn't know a whole lot, is
very concerned about their thethe lack of respect of the
enlisted men looking at them,because most of enlisted people
(24:34):
have been in the business for awhile, and the officer is the
one rookie. They, make all kindsof mistakes, rookie mistakes.
They overlead. They underlead.
They they try to become as goodas the enlisted guys, or they
try to dominate them, or theytry to become their friends.
These are all kinda classicthings. You can go back to World
War two movies in the fifties.You'll find the same kinda
(24:54):
characters. It it's just astandard character thing.
Mhmm. I was an officer afterbeing a seal for ten for, yeah,
for ten years, and I was asenior. I was a senior enlisted.
I a chief petty officer, so Iwas not a rookie officer. I
looked like it because I wasreally I looked I've always
looked really young from my age,but as as a brand new ensign, I
(25:15):
had ten years of being a sealunder my belt.
So I couldn't write about thatbecause that would be that
wouldn't be as interesting. Ineeded to have a a character
that had some conflict built in.But then I evolved him. Mhmm. I
evolved him over the course ofthe books.
And Wow. In a natural kind oflogical way, he and he had
setbacks and all that.Eventually, he was he was kicked
(25:37):
out of the knee because of allof his medical problems,
including traumatic braininjury. And then he became
suicidal, and then he gets acall from a friend whose
daughter's been kidnapped inHawaii, and he's begging him to
do something to help him. And sohe ends up getting right when
he's about to, you know, tocheck out, he gets pulled back
into life.
So it becomes a big redemptionstory because now he has a
(26:00):
mission. Now he has something ofvalue. Mhmm. And through that
book, he ends up kinda gettinghis feedback under him and
seeing himself in a differentlight. And then there's a couple
books after that.
So and a lot of that was talkingto seals that have been through
that kind of struggle. Humantrafficking is what he ends up
running into with the with thegirl. There's a seal named Craig
Sawyer that has been rescuingkids down in the Southwest Part
(26:23):
Of The United States for aboutthe last ten years. Wow. And I
called him up, and he told me sothat he gave me their background
research on all that and what'sgoing on globally and in The
United States.
So you don't I don't I didn'twrite the novel because I
thought I gonna end up doing aresearch project, but you end up
if you wanna have somecredibility, unless it's a pure
fantasy. Right. You can't talkabout Boston and not describe
(26:46):
Boston the right way becausepeople have been to Boston, and
then they'll go, that that'sexactly what you're describing.
Yeah.
Merry Elkins (26:53):
Right. For sure.
Marty Strong (26:54):
And it gets really bad when you get to equipment
and things. So it it was freespirited writing on the
storyline and in the characters,but research with you know, if
they use the Kiwi's fivethousand radio, I better make
sure that that actually existedin the time frame. And Yeah. Can
we look at a picture of it andsay, okay. How many other
tanners does it have?
(27:14):
Because I'm gonna have to talkto it.
Merry Elkins (27:17):
Yeah. That's true. Well, you have to do the same
type of research, don't you,with your nonfiction? And, also,
in your book, Be Nimble, youtalk about crisis and chaos as
we we're talking a little littlebit about as opportunities for
leaders and, frankly frankly,everybody to shine. How do you,
(27:40):
aren't those really the hardestmoments for a leader to shine?
Marty Strong (27:46):
It's well, it depends on how you look at
leadership. The the my definiteof leadership is that it's, one,
it's not management. And it'sbeen it's been, I guess, blurred
over the last twenty, twentyfive years. And mostly in
business schools, they they theyact like management is the same
thing as leadership. Andmanagement is what you do when
(28:10):
you have systems and processesand people working as designed
and as promised.
And if something goes wrong,it's usually a system it's just
a snag. And what do you do? Youhave people that either solve it
or you pull out an instructionmanual, you follow the
procedures because the system'sbeen documented. The person's
got their, you know, theirresume. That's the document
documentation there.
(28:31):
Where leadership is different,and you can be a person with
both capabilities. The flip sideof the coin of management is
when you when your system blowsup on you, when you don't have
that system at all, it's not ait's not a fix. You don't go oil
a spot and walk away to starthumming again. It's a complete
failure. If you haven't beentrained or prepared to handle
(28:52):
the kind of the kind ofimplications and consequences of
that failure, you're just gonnasit there on your hands and and
look around it, because you'vebeen given guidance on
everything you've been managing.
Unless you're the inventor ofthe machines you're using I
mean, look at a basic officeenvironment. The copier goes
down. And I don't care how manydegrees you have. We all stare
at each other because we'rewe're all we're all hope we're
(29:17):
all hopeless. Right?
And that's just one littlemachine. You can imagine if it's
something major in yourorganization. Another one would
be, you know, your number onesalesperson, and anybody knows
anything about sales. If youhave 10 salespeople, it's
usually a Pareto thing. There'sprobably one or two that are
bringing in 80% of all yoursales.
Right? So you lose your numberone salesperson. Wow. Okay.
Immediately, you can calculatehow much your your revenue
(29:39):
drops.
Then you get another anothertext. They went to our major
competitor. Oh, man. So you lostmarket share, and you lost
revenue.
Merry Elkins (29:48):
Right.
Marty Strong (29:48):
And you have to place that person, and you can't
just go on the street and say, Iyou're a top salesperson, and
you're not, but I'm a hire youbecause I know you're You put
them in there, you you find outwhether they can do it or not,
because they all promise theycan. So that's leadership. That
sitting in there and reacting tothat impact. Everything about
COVID everything that COVID didto companies, probably more in
(30:09):
the April 2020 time frame whereit wasn't gonna only be two
weeks, and your your mainsupplier all of sudden shut
down. Well, if you only reliedon one main supplier, then
that's manageable.
You can manage your way intoredundant, you know,
capabilities, but you can'tmanage your way out of the
factory having zero. You know?You have to react to that by
(30:31):
leading. Mhmm. You have to comeup with a new plan, new way.
You have to reinvent, reigniteeverybody's imagination,
creativity, and get them in aroom, get them emotionally
stable because everybody'sreacting to it as a crisis, and
that's leadership. To be poisedand controlled, maybe a little
bit of humor, and then getpractical, actually execute
(30:51):
something that's that'sconstructive. Okay.
Cathy Worthington (30:55):
Well, I was gonna
Merry Elkins (30:56):
ask you.
Cathy Worthington (30:57):
How how do you advise people to master
disruption in order to surviveand thrive? That sounds like
this. Right?
Marty Strong (31:06):
Sure. So if you were talking about martial arts,
the way you would teach somebodyto master an attack in a parking
lot would be to prepare ahead oftime by learning martial arts.
Mhmm. You you there's nothing inthe moment that's gonna prepare
you for it. You need to preparefor that moment ahead of time.
So in in combat training and incombat special ops training, you
(31:29):
do lots and lots ofstoryboarding, lot of what ifs,
all different kinds ofcontingencies, what if this
happens, what if that happens?Okay. If this happens, what are
you gonna do? If that happens,what are you gonna do? If you
lose this radio, what are yougonna do?
Do wanna go to the backup radio?What if you lose the backup
radio? And you get all thisstuff, and you're thinking all
the time that probably thingsaren't gonna go the way they're
planned, and therefore, I haveto be thinking one or two or
(31:49):
three steps beyond that firstfailure. Right. And then when
it's all done, if I know whatthe job is, is there a way I can
kind of MacGyver this thing andwork around and get something
together and still get the jobdone?
And that's a mindset that you'retaught to to to follow. Well,
that's not the way people incommercial organizations,
civilian organizations aretaught. They're not taught to be
(32:12):
constantly contingency thinking.They're not having boardroom
tabletop exercises of a What solet's say we lost our number one
salesperson. You see, they'renot living the the potential of
the of the crisis moment.
Right. So it's more of a crisismoment, and it's more of a
crisis because when somebodywalks up to them in the parking
lot and they realize, I don'tknow how to defend myself, and
(32:32):
it's too late. It's too late.That's how you master disruption
on the downside, how to limitthe downside. You prepare for
it.
You think about it. You trainall your leaders to be thinking
about these things in advance,to bring things up bring things
to your attention so you canstart to foreshadow certain
scenarios, and how do we dealwith it at the top? Let's get
three vendors instead of the onewe have. Let's not be so
(32:54):
dependent on the onesalesperson. Mhmm.
The the upside of disruption andmastering disruption is, in
business especially, is thedisruption and chaos that that
are happening around you offer aessentially, a a a a broken
field that you can kinda runthrough where before you
(33:17):
couldn't because there was awhole line of people blocking
you. Everything was controlled.All the players were in place.
All the rules were in place. Andso you couldn't beat them at
their rules because theyestablished these rules fifteen
years ago, twenty years ago, andthen they've been running the
thing, and they're the master ofthe rules.
And then something shakes uplike an earthquake, and now
there's all these little gapsand holes and slots, and and and
(33:37):
you the vacuum can be filled bypeople that are quick weighted,
you know, aggressive enough, andcan think through a different
way to achieve something in thenew the new normal. That's how
and and there's every singlechaotic event in United States
history, every one of the majorstock market crashes, you know,
02/2008 and the COVID twentytwenty being the last two, gave
(34:02):
rise to all kinds of newindustries, new new tech titans
after World War one, after WorldWar two, after the twenty nine
crash. You can go back and andif you look up that particular
subject that way, you're gonnafind all these big name
companies that you remember thatwere powerhouses in the fifties
and sixties. They were startedin some guy's garage, you know,
1934.
Cathy Worthington (34:23):
Yeah. We talked to people all the time
that turned the COVID crisisinto a new career. They pivoted,
and we started our podcastduring that time on Zoom when
people started using Zoom. Andand it was like we talked to
people constantly who have doneall this, you know, have
engineered through it, theentrepreneurs.
Merry Elkins (34:44):
Right.
Cathy Worthington (34:45):
But it's difficult. Right? Yeah. It's
Merry Elkins (34:49):
it's not
Marty Strong (34:50):
It's it's more difficult because it's not
normal to think that way. So itgoes kinda comes down to your
thinking.
Merry Elkins (34:57):
We haven't been raised that way either,
especially so many of us inWestern society have had it very
easy, And, they don't even knowyou were talking about failure.
I mean, dealing with failure, somany people are raised not to
even fail ever. And Mhmm. Talktalk about that. Talk about how
do you how do you managefailure, and also the fear of
(35:21):
it, because you have no ideawhat it looks like.
And then also, what aboutstress? Because a lot of this
disruption causes a great dealof stress.
Marty Strong (35:32):
So it's gonna sound like I'm just repeating
myself, but let's go back to thethe potential assault in the
parking lot. If you are amaster, you know, MMA fighter,
and somebody's approaching youbecause they think they're gonna
be able to beat you up and takeyour money, And your level of
stress on a scale of one to 10is probably a one. Probably more
(35:53):
related to, I hope I don't killthis guy because I don't wanna
go to jail, not a 10 where thisguy's gonna kill me. You know?
But if you're just the averageperson standing there, it's
probably a 10.
The difference between those tworeactions to the same stimuli is
the preparedness. Now some ofit's physical in that example,
but most of it's psychological.So it goes back to what we've
(36:17):
been conditioned to by thesociety, institutions, etcetera,
or to obey the rules, theintellectual rules, to follow
the thought the thought patternsthat have been approved, and to
strive for stability, and thatstability equals safety and
(36:38):
security. Mhmm. And therefore,we've been given kind of a false
hope that the universe, which isnever never static, it's
constantly changing.
Every molecule is changingsomething. Right? We're given
this false impression as humans,because eventually, when you're
running a company, you've gotthat false impression as the CEO
of a company too. If you've beenraised this way and haven't been
(36:59):
trained any other way, you thinkwhat your do is, if you follow
the rules and do all the thingsyou're supposed to do, you've
checked all the boxes, youyou're you deserve stability,
safety, and security. Mhmm.
And so it becomes more of acrisis for that kind of a person
when the world doesn't go alongwith that. What the real world
says, out of the blue, you lostyour job. Out of the blue, you
(37:21):
found out, you know, your yourspouse is cheating. Out of the
blue, you get into a car wreck,and and you're suddenly laid up
in a hospital for three months.Because that's what happens
every day, all around us, inevery every place on the planet.
It's almost like that way ofthinking is a kinda like going,
ma, ma, ma, ma. It's a it's away of trying to ignore the
reality by creating a false afalse reality. So if you so if
(37:43):
you recognize that, then youstep back and you say, alright.
And, military is pretty goodabout training people for this
because the battlefield is isalways chaotic. It's it's
somebody told me one time thatwhen you're planning a a
mission, they give you all theinformation.
Right? So it's kinda like armyman. There'll be two guys in
front of this door. There'll beone guy over here at this tower.
There'll be a road.
There'll be a truck, andthere'll be all that. And and
(38:06):
there's a combat veteran. Hesaid, yeah. You can plan for all
that, and you can come up with aperfect plan on how we're gonna
do this for those two guys, butthis is what it's really like.
Think about you walk in yourkitchen, you turn the light out,
and all the all the cockroachesgo.
And there's no there's nocockroaches in half a second,
and you don't know where theyare. That's how combat works.
(38:27):
Oh. The first time somebodytakes a shot, the two guys in
front of the door aren't gonnabe in front of the door anymore.
The truck that was coming inisn't gonna be there anymore.
The guy in the tower is notgonna. Everybody's gonna do
whatever the heck they wanna do,however they wanna do it, and so
your plan is gonna go go, youknow, go to hell in a
handbasket. So you can't planfor the choreo the choreography,
whatever the movie show you. Itit doesn't work that way. Real
(38:49):
people panic, and real people dodo weird things in all in all
walks of life.
Cathy Worthington (38:55):
So So does does that mean do you do you
believe that people can learn tolead effectively, or is that a
trait people are born with? Ithink I know the answer, but I
wanna hear you. Tell
Marty Strong (39:06):
me. No. No. You can you can definitely all the
things we're talking about is ispsychology that we've learned,
and then psychology we canunlearn. Everything we're
talking about is the reality ofthe world and examples of
crisis, personal or otherwise,and also how you can prepare
yourself or prepare a team forthe inevitability of that crisis
(39:26):
by being conditioned and bethinking in a contingent manner
and be always kind of secondguessing what could go wrong,
and then, okay, if this goeswrong, like that tabletop
exercise, then what what can wedo now?
Either to diminish the impactand consequences if it happens.
Merry Elkins (39:42):
Well, let's talk about taking risks a little bit,
because as a former Navy SEAL,you had to know a lot about
taking a risk. Talk about takingrisks in life and in business.
Marty Strong (39:55):
Yeah. That that's a really good segue. So if
you're let's say you're the thea person that believes in
stability, therefore, thataffects that stability is what?
Merry Elkins (40:09):
Causes stress.
Marty Strong (40:10):
It's a risk. A risk. Right?
Merry Elkins (40:12):
Mhmm. Uh-huh.
Marty Strong (40:14):
And if you're the b person who who has prepared
themselves and conditionedthemselves in a different way,
then there's less risk in lifeand less risk in business, more
opportunity. Right? So if youare a, say, the type a person,
imagine how they can actually bedestructive being risk adverse.
(40:35):
They think they're beingabsolutely, you know,
constructive, proactive, andthey're they're reinforcing
stability, which is all good,good, good, good, a plus grades.
Right?
That person's like a librarianwho, according to the Dewey
Decimal System, has every bookin its place, and the front door
is locked. He doesn't like tolet anybody come in and check
out a book because that isdisruption. It's also a risk to
(41:00):
the stability they created. Theworld is perfect. My job is to
protect this perfection.
Then you have another librarianthat believes in learning and
everything, and throws open thedoor, and is behind them putting
the door the books back wherethey're supposed to be because
there's so many people comingin, and they're just, you know,
loving every minute of itbecause they're seeing smiling
people, and people that are thatare learning through this this
(41:21):
exchange of knowledge and not somuch focused on a library as a
containment zone for the for thebooks. They're inviting
disruption because they thinkthis disruption is the change of
a of a person's mind throughinformation and knowledge, which
it is. It changes your paradigm.It changes the way what what you
think. So the the riskmitigation, from a business
(41:43):
standpoint, taught as a a methodor even as a title in some
places, Really, what you'redoing is you're saying, what we
want you to do while we'retrying to push this company
forward, everything else we'redoing is we're trying to grow
fast, we're trying to get bigand all that.
We want you to focus all yourtime on throwing out anchors and
throwing out drogue parachutesand doing anything to keep that
(42:04):
from happening. Because if we'resuccessful in what we're gonna
do, we're gonna change almosteverything we are. Mhmm. And
therefore, there's gonna bedisruption, and there's gonna be
people freaking out aboutchange. And if you and anybody
else tries to tell everybody inthe company, we can do all these
other great things and stay thesame, well, then you're lying to
them because that's not that'snot what's gonna happen.
(42:26):
So companies that are verydynamic have problems internally
because the people ininternally, if they're told
everything is gonna be staticlike the library that's not
being used, and suddenly, it'snot like that. Suddenly, it's
it's there's chaos, and there'sall kinds of crap going on
around them, and they're saying,we were told the change wouldn't
do this. We're we're told wekeep our jobs. We keep our
titles. We we'd stay in the sameoffice space.
(42:49):
And that was never gonna be thetruth because you can't do both.
You can't try to change and alsotell everybody you're not gonna
change.
Merry Elkins (42:56):
What would you like to have our boomer audience
have as a takeaway today?
Marty Strong (43:01):
I think that the the number one observation for
baby boomers, which isunfortunate, it's also for
younger people too, is Mhmm. Theidea that that success is
linear, that there's a foot afootball play or plan that you
have to do. You gotta follow itlike a model airplane
(43:22):
instructions, and that's theonly way you can be successful.
And that the path that you starton and the vocation or
profession that you get intoinitially is supposed to be the
be all, end all. For somereason, our generation, we were
taught that.
Get good grades. You can getinto college, get good grades,
get a good job, get a good job,stay there for twenty, thirty
years, retire. Right? The worldis so fractured, but it's filled
(43:47):
with so much opportunity. Youdon't have to follow that game
plan, and definitely youngpeople don't.
But lots of young people thinkthat, well, if I don't have the
master plan for the next twentyfive years, I'm a failure. And
in reality, especially if you'rea boomer, if you've lived five
or six or seven decades, youcould have been in a different
profession every one of thosedecades.
Merry Elkins (44:09):
Right.
Marty Strong (44:10):
In in this country, you could have and and
when I when I helped, seals thatare getting out, or I did this
with the Naval Academy group,asked somebody, how old are you
getting out? He said, I'm 39. Isaid, okay. How old will you be
when you get through law schooland become a lawyer? Or how old
will you be when you become anengineer after you get through
engineering school?
He goes, what do you mean? Isaid, well, it takes four years,
(44:30):
so I add it up. Oh, I'll be, youknow, 43. And you kinda looked
at me. Yeah.
You could be a brand new lawyerat 43 or a brand new engineer at
43 or a brand new softwaredesigner or whatever because
it's not about the it's notabout the old plan anymore. And
that that's the biggesttakeaway, I think. Don't lock
your yourself psychologicallyinto there. You had one shot at
(44:52):
it as a kid or one shot at it asa young person, and you blew it.
Look at it as I can do anythingI wanna do.
I'll go ahead and do it. And ifGod comes along and takes me
away while I'm doing it, well,so what? Yeah. Don't sit static
and don't do that.
Merry Elkins (45:06):
Go go to the next. You so much, Marty. That's great
advice. Our guest today on lateboomers has been Marty Strong,
former Navy Seal officer,entrepreneur, and business
leader, author of 12 books, andsought after speaker. You can
learn more about Marty throughhis website, MartyStrong.com.
(45:27):
Thank you.
Cathy Worthington (45:29):
And thanks for listening to us, and please
subscribe to our YouTube channelfor the late boomers podcast and
take us along in the car, andlet us know if we inspired you
to take action. Please follow uson Instagram at I am Kathy
Worthington and at I am MaryElkins and at late boomers. Tune
in next week when we'll betalking to another exciting
(45:51):
guest. Thanks so much, Boomersfans, and thank you so much to
Marty Strong.
Marty Strong (45:57):
Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Mary.
Cathy Worthington (46:10):
Thank you for joining us on late boomers, the
podcast that is your guide tocreating a third act with style,
power, and impact. Please visitour website and get in touch
with us at lateboomers.biz. Ifyou would like to listen to or
download other episodes of lateboomers, go to
ewnpodcastnetwork.com.
Merry Elkins (46:31):
This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple
Podcast, and most other majorpodcast sites. We hope you make
use of the wisdom you've gainedhere and that you enjoy a
successful third act with yourown style, power, and impact.
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