Phoenix Rising

“Once a culture of Extreme Ownership is built into the team at every level, the entire team performs well, and performance continues to improve, even when a strong leader is temporarily removed from the team…. … life can throw any number of circumstances in the way of any business or team, and every team must have junior leaders ready to step up and temporarily take on the roles and responsibilities of their immediate bosses to carry on the team’s mission and get the job done if and when the need arises.”
― Jocko Willink & Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership

“If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“When racing as a boat crew during Hell Week, the winning boat crew’s prize for victory was to sit out the next race, earning a few brief minutes of respite from the grueling, non-stop physical evolutions. They weren’t allowed to sleep, but just to sit down and rest were especially precious commodities. While it paid to be a winner, this rule had a corollary: it really sucked to be a loser. Second place, in the instructor’s vernacular, was simply “the first loser.” But bad performance — falling far behind the rest of the pack and coming in dead last — carried especially grueling penalties: unwanted attention from the SEAL instructors …”
― Jocko Willink & Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership

“The Korengal Valley is sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off.”
― Sebastian Junger, War