One outcome of self-education is “out of sample” connections. School’s structure favors efficiency and repeatability, not connecting dots. But those dots are out there, it’s just up to you.
And it’s worth the work.
If something is true in more than one condition place, or time it’s going to be true a lot.
Walk in My Combat Boots is a collection of soldier’s short stories. Each runs a couple of pages from training to deployment, from the mundane to the disastrous.
One theme is that military life is hard. Training is hard. Deployment is hard. It’s hard physically, mentally, and emotionally. The weather sucks. The gear is heavy. Our normal ambiguity aversion is supercharged.
But everyone pushes.
“I love the challenges.” wrote one soldier, in a reflection common to every story, “I love proving people wrong. And I love proving myself wrong, too—there are plenty of days when I hang my head and think, Man, I can’t do this. But then I wake up the next day and push myself more and more.”
Our normal state is not to push.
Pushing takes fuel.
How?
“The first thing you have to do,” Dan Rose said of successful leaders “is you have to articulate why it is that you’re so insistent on this thing that you believe is so important. And that articulation has to resonate with the people who are going to go build it, and it has to resonate with people who are smart and thoughtful and are ultimately credible enough to make that happen.”
For the soldiers it was patriotism. That resonates. That’s fuel.
When I taught in schools the hardest question was: When are we ever gonna need to know this? It was a hard question because I couldn’t articulate a resonating answer. The kids didn’t care.
So, are you ready to push?
The Waiter's Pad 