Andy Stumpf (78:37)
Winter, Hell week. Yes, for sure. My class was the last Hard Buds class that there ever was documented. It's written somewhere, probably in my handwriting. But the winter, the winter is just, it's just colder and the cold sucks more. As a student when you're going through, you don't get a chance to talk to the guy who is next to you, who quits because they're gone and your training day continues. And especially in like hell week, if that's a five day evolution starting on Sunday and ending on Friday, if they're gone, most of the quitting occurs between Sunday and about Tuesday morning. They're already moved out of the bare, like you'll probably never see them again. So as a student you're just like front sight focus. As an instructor, they're there for a couple of weeks, they have to process out, they get put over in a different birthing place. A lot of times they have medical issues that they're working their way through. And you are around young men who probably a week before you have a conversation with them would have told you that it is their singular goal and focus in life and that they're is nothing that you could have done to make them quit and that they were going to be there on graduation day and that this is the only goal that matters to them. And then eight to nine out of ten of them quit. And you can sit there and you can talk to them about why. And I try to be very kind in talking with them because most of the people who have regret is the largest emotion that just is kind of outpouring. It's. They want to go back. It sucks. I've met students decades later or people who have quit buzz. I'm like, hey, man, I'm not trying to be a dick, but I'm just curious because I have a theory, like, how do you feel about that decision? Regret. Every single time they wish they had been able to see it through because it leaves a really large question mark in their life going forward. So in spending time with the students, I would ask them, you know, well, why did you quit? And in that kind of fragile state, they were really honest with me and they kept saying the same things. There was a couple categories and one of them was huge, huge. The small one was like, life happened, my dad died and I gotta get the fuck outta here. Like, dude, I wish you the absolute best. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the data set that I'm looking for. Injury is another one. Can't control that because that wasn't necessarily a consensual choice. So, boom, they're gone. Everybody else who rang the bell, why'd you quit? And they would all say the same thing. I couldn't be as cold as I was for as long as I thought. Thought I was going to be cold. I would say, well, how. Who told you how long you were going to be cold for? Well, nobody. But I told myself I couldn't be cold for as long as I thought I was going to have to be. Or tired or hungry or the combination of all of those things or in physical pain or it was too hard. What they are all expressing is a moment where they became overwhelmed by the situation that they were in. And they started looking at time. Literally time. How they viewed time was the determining factor on the decision that they made. If they could only see where they were. Like, this is the startup bud's first day and this is graduation, on average, 180 days. And the only thing that they can see is the gap between my two fingers, dude, That's a lot. Especially on your first day when you get your shit absolutely kicked in. And let's say you had a 3M stack of little notes. On the first one, it said 180. And at the end of that day where you're barely able to walk back to the barracks, you rip that off and it says 179. How pumped are you? Not that pumped. So that's a person who became. They're creeping towards becoming overwhelmed. Hell week, the same thing starts on a Sunday, ends on a Friday. But if all you can see is this gap and how far you are from your goal, you're getting into a really susceptible position in a really malleable position from an instructor state. And that, that was literally like, that's the secret sauce. This is the most important thing that I learned in my entire career. If you can identify that that is the main reason why people give up on their lifelong goals. You should be able to reverse engineer that. So how do you do that? You think about everything other than that. So instead of trying to get from here to here and only looking at that distance, you slam these two together. So there is a microscopic step that you can take, and you only focus on that step and then the next one and the next one. And you don't have to keep track of your steps because as long as you keep making forward motion, this bridge will be gapped at some point in time. The muscle that fails at buds is not below the neck neck, it's between the ears. So they focus on that distance. They become overwhelmed when they make a decision that they'll regret for the rest of their life. So the key to that is to chunk your goals into the most digestible piece that you possibly can and then consistently put those one on top of another.
