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I am here with Rich DaVinny, who is an extraordinary former Navy SEAL Commander and author of an incredible new book called The Attributes, the 25 Hidden Secrets Drivers, 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. I knew I'd get there in the end, Rich. Yes, yeah. Drivers, that's what the secret is good to.
Dude, the whole concept behind the book is really incredible. I'm obsessed with, I would have before reading your book, of course, a peak performance. I love the shift that you make to optimal performance. We'll certainly get into that.
But one of the attributes that you talk about in the book that I found really interesting that compelled you as part of the cocktail of your own brain to want to be a Navy SEAL, which was narcissism. In your own words, by the way, I'm not calling you that. And you talk about how some of these attributes may have a negative connotation, but can actually be pretty powerful. Talk to me about what it means to want to be a badass.
Yeah, so it's funny, because in researching these attributes, I had to do, in conjunction with actual research, I had to do some self-reflection, because I really had to ask myself what drove me, especially on the driver attributes. And ultimately, when I thought about the reasons why I became a Navy SEAL, and you asked my friends the same question, and of course, we're patriots. And of course, we love our country, and we want to go do good work. But it was largely because you're young, and you want to be part of a group that is elite, and you want to try something that very few people get to try, very few people make it through.
And it's just that challenge. It can be throw yourself into the challenge. So I think when it came to thinking about narcissism, it was this idea that we all, as human beings, want to, at some point, feel special, feel noticeably, love to be recognized. And this starts when we're infants.
I mean, when we're infants, getting paid attention to by our parents, we're getting bursts of dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin. Those are very powerful chemicals. And that's why it feels good, and that translates to when we're adults, and get paid attention to. So this is a natural feeling to want to stand out.
And again, it's pretty different, though, than wanting to be a badass, fantasizing about being James Bond, getting yourself, wet and sandy, on a beach, saying, getting three hours of sleep over five days. I mean, what you ended up putting yourself through to become a Navy SEAL is insane. And one of the things I find so interesting about SEALs, and if I were to make a short list of the types of people that I would like to corner at a dinner party, I'll put SEALs up there because, man, to be prepared to kill, to face gunfire, or even just insanely dangerous situations in the ocean, it takes a certain kind of person. And so when you openly talk about in the book, I wanted to be a badass.
I wanted to test myself. That resonated with me a lot. Is that something? Because I feel like there's a cultural swing away from, openly saying something like, I want to be a badass.
Yeah. Well, I think you're right. There might be a cultural swing. But I just don't think it's human beings.
Whether you're a guy or a girl, we all want to do something that's really cool and special. And I think whatever the pathway to that is, awesome. It could be athlete, it could be a badass surgeon, it could be a badass teacher, it could be obviously a badass spec operator. But in my case, it was this idea when I learned about the SEALs that these guys seemed to do everything in every environment, and especially from the water.
And I grew up in Connecticut, right on the water. And I was a water rat since I was a kid. I'd spend the entire day on the water. You couldn't get me out.
My brothers as well. And so this idea that the water in the ocean, which is a very hostile environment, bone crushing, pressures, chilling temperatures, obviously can't breathe under there. But the fact that they made this environment their home, the mantra of the SEALs wasn't still is that it always went in doubt head to the water. Because the enemy will never be brave enough or stupid enough to follow you there.
So in the fact that you're the audacity of making this hostile environment your safe haven really appealed to me on, I guess, a elemental level. So my badass desires were happened to be spec ops. But I would say that everybody has their version of badass. And gosh, I really respect anybody who pursues that path, whatever badassery they're pursuing.
That is incredibly kind to people like me, whose badassery is a lot safer than yours. But I'm super interested in the nitty-gritty of testing oneself. So because I grew up soft, and my journey really, truly, unfortunately, my journey to become an entrepreneur was learning to toughen up. And that was the big.
You talk about attributes. That was a big thing for me. I did not have grit. And I had to develop grit.
And it ended up unlocking things for me that I never could have imagined. And so when I now think about, OK, my meaning and purpose in life is to help other people unlock doors in their own lives. How do you end up doing that? And some of the real answers are, maybe they make people uncomfortable or whatever.
But one of them is you have to toughen the fuck up. And when I think about the way that buds, the sort of proving ground for those who want to become Navy SEALs, weeds out people that lack certain attributes, I become very interested in people that want to push through to that. So there's a great book called The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. He talks about how one of the biggest problems in modern society is there is no coming of age ritual.
And it used to be, if you've read Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, he talks about his coming of age ritual where they stripped him naked with four or five other guys at 14 or something, put him buck naked in front of the entire tribe. And then one of the high-ranking men in the tribe comes up with a sharp-ass rock, pull his foreskin. They just cut it off. And no anesthetic, nothing.
You have to do like this warrior cry. And it sounds barbaric. And I get it, man, and I'm glad I didn't go through it. And I would never put my kids through it.
I also worry that not putting people through things like that that make them dig deep and become aware of latent attributes or realize, yo, here's an attribute, like in my case, I am weak. I am soft. And I need to do something about that. What do you think about that?
Like you have kids. Do you think at all about testing them, pushing them? Yes. So first of all, I would have rather done steel training three times than done that ritual.
I think that's so good on probably Nelson Mandela was such a bad ass himself. It's a really good question. I think it comes down to the subjectivity of challenge. I mean, it's really ultimately challenge.
How are you challenging yourself? I think steel training is certainly an extreme version of that. But when I think about my kids who are teenagers now, I think I've always thought in terms of allowing them to find their own challenges. Now, sometimes that happens a little bit more naturally.
Some kids are more predisposed to go and seek challenges and break through them than others. And I see that different sometimes in my own kids. And so I think it was one of the reasons why I wanted to break grit down into its elemental factors. And in the book, as you know, I've broken grit down into four attributes.
Because everybody always talked about grit as an attribute. And it didn't make sense to me that it was an attribute on its own. And of course, Angela Duckworth wrote a great book called grit, and she says kind of the same thing. It's not just one thing.
And so when you look at the four attributes, and I break down a courage, perseverance, adaptability, and resilience, it's really kind of the reason why I want to do that was try to help people look at those four elements and those four attributes and understand that they can practice each one of those separately if they want to together, if you want the whole thing. But even practicing them separately helps with grit. And the good news is, and I would imagine this is the case for you if you really thought about it, most people aren't low on all four of those. You can actually probably pick one or two that you're actually pretty good on.
And you may have to say, well, I need to work on or develop a couple, maybe two of them, right? That really helps that task. It helps come and say, I'm not as bad off as I might be, but human beings are great. I mean, we are just the idea of us going from cave dwellers to space explorers proves that we are.
And a lot of times, we're thrown into challenges we don't expect, and we find that grit. But I would offer, if you are in a position where you have not explored your grit and you want to, or you're in a position where you have kids that you're concerned that they may not be, I would come out from those four attributes. How can you practice courage? How can you practice adaptability?
How can practice perseverance? How can practice resilience? Here's the great news for all of us, Tom, is that we just came out of a year, where all of us practice that. Because I talk about this, seal training is incredibly tough.
The way you go through seal training, and the way you quit seal training is you bring the bell three times, if you want to quit. And of course, a lot of guys, too. It's usually about 85% to 90% attrition rate. So for example, my class back 20 plus years ago, we started with about 160 odd candidates, and we graduated 38.
That's kind of normal numbers. The difference between 2020 and seal training is that none of us volunteered to be in 2020. We were all thrown into it. And none of us had a bell that we could ring to get out of 2020.
So we all actually explored our grit through 2020. And I think I would challenge anybody to look back at their past, their upbringing, their experiences, what I call their antagonists. We all have antagonists, and our lives in our lives. It doesn't have to be a person.
It can be an event, a situation, an illness, a anything that hits us. But honoring our antagonists is a form of grit. If we look back, say, hey, how did I actually get through that? And understand what those things were that allowed me to march through that challenging experience.
And those challenges, you know, and then grow from it. Because I would say most of us have a story that we can look back and say, you know what? That was a horrible time. I would never want to do it again.
But I'm glad it happened because I learned this. I met this person. Something happened, right? That's an example of resilience.
That's an example of antifragility. That's an example of grit. That's an example of someone executing grit to go through a tough situation. So don't you worry that the vast majority of people in 2020, for instance, they didn't have a bell ring to get out.
But they didn't do anything to make it a training exercise. Well, OK. So yes, but sometimes grit, and here's the thing about grit, sometimes grit is not, sometimes grit is not hyper-performing. Sometimes grit is simply just taking step by step.
You know, we talk about, you know, people always said, you see those are the toughest people on the planet. But yeah, I agree. You know, obviously, not on the planet. We're certainly tough.
But I mean, look at the people struggling through cancer. You know, look at the people struggling through poverty. I mean, there are people out there who are very gritty, who have, you know, in some cases way more toughness or mental toughness than any special operator. And it's because their environment has thrown that at them, right?
So this is where we get a kind of peek and optimal performance. You know, everybody kind of thinks about performance as, hey, I want to do my best. I want to kind of peek. I want to kind of be in that flow state.
And that's great. But sometimes performance is not anywhere near peak. And this is kind of how, you know, I started thinking about this. When I was in Hell Week in my own steel training and sitting in the surf zone freezing, right, there's nothing peak about my performance.
I was performing optimally. Optimal performance is different. Optimal performance is how can I do the very best I can in the moment? Sometimes that best looks like peak.
It's flow states. It's excelling. It's growing. It's training.
Right. Sometimes that best is simply, I'm just head down and I'm taking step by step. I'm living minute to minute just to get through this. The people who win, they're not smarter.
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Conditions apply. There's nothing wrong with that. How do you, how do you, because I love what you're saying in that it gives a lot of hope to somebody who right now is just sort of stumbling forward. Now how do you turn that stumble forward into I'm going to be better next time.
I'm going to have a deeper well of resilience or whatever attribute, you know, going forward that's going to serve them. Yeah. Well, the first thing, the number one thing is that afterwards, one must recover. All right.
So recovery is a huge part of this process. Any type of challenge stress, whether it's in the gym and we're lifting weights or whether it's thrown at you because you have a disease like COVID or it's a bad financial year, there has to be a recovery period. Our bodies have to be able to recover and kind of rest from that period. And then there has to be a reflection.
There has to be a looking back and saying, Hey, okay, what did I learn? And so, so one of the concepts I talk about all the time is this idea of asking questions. Okay, we are as human beings, question, answer machines. You know, our brains are wired that way.
So our brains are constantly asking questions about our environment, usually unconsciously, right? You know, that's bouncing off our hippocampus. We're kind of, we're kind of comparing things we've seen before. That's usually a process we don't even think about.
When we consciously take charge of that process and lodge a question into our forebrain, our brain immediately begins coming up with answers. Okay. So I do this, I do this drill when I teach classes and I talk about this concept. I say, Hey, write down this question.
How can I double my income in the next six months, right? And I give them 30 seconds. I say in 30 seconds, write down every single thing that pops into your head. Okay.
And they write down for 30 seconds. Usually they come up with a list of maybe six or seven things. And I say, listen, how many answers do you come up with? And really that's the point of the drill.
And they usually come up with that, you know, a list. And I say, you know, the reason why you came up with those answers is because you lodged a question in your brain. Now some of those answers were ridiculous. You know, you know, selling a kid needs not a good idea.
Winning a lottery is probably not going to happen. But some of those answers start to be practical. And if you do this enough, your brain is going to start coming up with answers. Now, what most people do without thinking about it is they ask themselves the wrong questions.
They say, why am I so bad at this? Why does this stuff always happen to me? You know, why are they out to get me? Okay, as soon as you ask that question, as soon as you lodged that question in your forebrain, your brain starts to answer it, right?
And those are disempowering answers. The trick is, the tool here is to reverse the process, right? Change those questions into something that's actually empowering. How can I grow, right?
How did I grow from this? You know, what did I do right? What did I learn from this? You know, how am I better than I was before?
You lodged those questions in your forebrain, your brain will begin to come up with answers. And the trick is to do that. And keep on, and once you get that initial list, just say, okay, what else? What else?
And that's how you start creating an empowering mindset and that's how you start recovering and becoming and growing from an experience like that. Okay, that's really interesting to me. In the book you talk a lot about the difference between skills and attributes. Skills, basically anything that I can train you to do as a skill, anything sort of innate or born is going to fall into the attribute category.
But what you're just talking about is how we really can still mold our attributes as well. I think it's a deadly simple formula to begin to shape what I call your frame of reference, but basically you're getting there by molding some of these attributes. And it's frame of reference. It's what you just said.
It's repeating a new story about that thing. It's focusing your energy on not, okay, let's say I did 99 things wrong, but I did one thing right. It's instead of asking to do the list of the 99 things you got wrong, you hone in on the one you got right. Do you have an official training program that you work with companies to help develop people's attributes?
Well, yes, I've developed a program where I help companies and teams first figure out their attributes. So step number one is figure out the attributes. Now, I would say if we're talking at an individual level, we all have all of the attributes. The difference in each one of us is how much of each attribute we have, right?
So you say, if you say you're on a level of one to 10, where one is low and 10 is high, you say you're a level say four or five on courage and I might be a level seven on courage, right? And there's no judgment there. It's really just how we show up. Okay, so as an individual, where do I stand on my attributes?
When we start off with businesses and teams, it becomes much more contextual because the list of attributes required for a seal team, for example, is going to be different than the list of attributes required for an HR team or a sales team or a group of nurses, right? So step one is figure out what attributes are you need for that team. And then step two is say, okay, where are gaps? Which attributes do we place in high importance?
And which of those ones do we need and which ones do we need to develop, right? So that's step number one. And then if you want to develop, so obviously that gives you a great opportunity to hire specifically for those attributes, which is a great thing to do. And then you also can develop and you can put yourself into situations, great environments, where you kind of train and develop those.
Training and development attribute can't be done the same way as a skill. It's going to take self-direction, it's going to take self-motivation, and it's going to take a deliberate step into discomfort because you're going to, you're going to have to step into a zone where you're kind of wired not to go. If someone wants to develop their patience, for example, because they're in patience, they're going to have to place themselves deliberately into situations that test and develop their patience and have to get conscious effort. So developing attributes takes work and it has to be self-directed.
Like a skill, I can sit down and teach you, Tom, how to shoot, right? It's shooting the skill. I can teach you how to shoot in a bullseye within probably a half day. Okay, that's a skill.
I can't sit down and teach you courage or I can't sit down and teach you adaptability. That's something you have to decide. I want to learn and then throw yourself deliberately into those environments. Because the process is like what you outlined, it's exposure and reframing, and that's why it can't be taught.
Well, I say exposure reframing and deliberate effort, right? So in other words, if I want to develop my courage, I need to deliberately expose myself to things that make me afraid, right? Because there can't be courage without fear. So things that deliberately can afraid, reframe it so that I can actually accept it better, and then move into it, and then kind of do that over and over.
So I think it's those three things. That's interesting. How does that tie into? I know you've looked deeply at PTSD.
I don't know if you've done work in that or worked with those people, but I'm very curious to know if you're aware of like, is there a way to back people out of PTSD through a similar exposure? Like, one of the things that I know to be true about fears, anxieties, phobias is that what you're not trying to get to the point where you've experienced so much that you aren't fearful anymore. You're trying to get to the point where you're brave in the face of that fear response. And so I don't know if there's anything like that.
I play at PTSD if PTSD is his whole own animal, but that seems like something has gone completely haywire. How do we use this process to back out of that? Yeah, PTSD is more difficult and certainly nuanced. And so I'll speak to just a piece of it that I can.
And I know there's probably a lot more. But I know that one of the techniques for PTSD is to help someone reframe an experience. You can do that through very effective visualization. And we talk about very effective visualization.
It means really putting yourself back into an environment and then trying to, in that environment, reframe it from a different emotional perspective. And then you begin to inoculate yourself to an extent to that old feeling and start to absorb that new feeling. That is a very difficult process. And I'm certainly not.
When I was still in the teams, we were looking at that to a degree, but really it was left to the professionals to really help people who were hurt. I was just going to say, do you have a sense of what the attributes are that makes somebody prone to PTSD? So I would say the attributes that I would say, gosh, boy, that's a really good question. I don't want to be presumptuous here.
So if we look at the mental acuity attributes, for example, the mental app, they go situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability. So just to break that down for the audience, situation awareness is absorbing all the information that's coming in. What do I pay attention to? Compartmentalization is OK.
What is my goal here? What do I need to focus on? And I'm going to block out everything else. Task switching is my ability to move in between or jump inside of context or two different things.
And then learnability is how do I process all that stuff. Seals are hyper, hyper-good compartmentalizers. All right. Part of this election process takes care of that?
Totally. It's because you can't get through seal training without being able to compartmentalize. Be able to say, hey, and not necessarily block it out. I'm like, hey, I'm not going to think about this.
But say, hey, what do I need to focus on in the moment that's specific to my outcome and my objective? And then block out everything else. First of all, you can't get through training unless you're really good at that. And then just your subsequent training and of course combat really hones that in.
If you are too good at that, you are at risk, I think, of PTSD. Because what happens is you're basically so good at saying, hey, I don't need to think about this. I don't need to think about this. I'm just going to focus on this.
And so sometimes those things that are traumatic may not, if they come into your sphere, you're really good at saying, oh, that's not my focus right now. And you never get to release that. So I think part of the kind of PTSD healing process is to be able to let that stuff back in and then experience it and mourn it or emote on it the way you need to, because we all have to have that release. That's part of the recovery.
If we're not able to get over the emotion of a situation, we are not really truly fully recovered. Full recovery means I can look back at an event and say, hey, listen, I'm good. Now, obviously, the real, real trauma will always have a little bit of emotion, but I'm talking about debilitating emotion. Can we look back and say, okay, I can look back at that, honestly.
And of course, I always have a little bit of emotion, but I'm not facilitated by that emotion. And that's real true recovery. But if you are a really, really good at compartmentalization, you may find yourself having issues with that. All right.
So if we've got in the book, you outline five sort of buckets of attributes, and then there's sub attributes, you've walked us through a couple sort of top line and then what feed into those already, we've got those attributes. One, I think it is worthwhile sort of quickly just to recap what the five buckets are for people so they can begin to orient themselves. And then I want to know, get a sense of like, how flexible are we talking? Like, if it's all the scale of one to 10, let's say, if we're two, can we go to a six, can we go to a 10, like, how malleable are these?
Yeah, the five buckets are the attributes of makeup grit. And those are courage, perseverance, adaptability, and resilience. The attributes that they cut mental acuity, which is really how our brain processes the world and kind of affects that. Those are situational awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability.
The attributes of makeup drive, which is our kind of ability to kind of see an outcome or a goal and move towards it to its conclusion and make it happen. Those are self-efficacy, discipline, open-mindedness, cunning, and narcissism. The attributes of makeup are great leadership. And again, to what I talk about, leadership is really a behavior.
It's not a position. You don't get to self-designate as a leader. It's like saying, I'm handsome or funny. I don't get to decide that.
Other people decide that. And it's all about these behaviors. If I behave like a leader, then people will then say, ooh, that person is a leader. So those behaviors often come from attributes.
The attributes are outlined in the book, because I think are really my experience, but the most essential ones for really great leadership are empathy, selflessness, authenticity, decisiveness, and accountability. And then finally, the attributes for team ability. That's your ability to kind of be a great teammate, be part of a team, because again, you don't get to self-designate as a great teammate. Either other people have to designate you a great teammate.
So one of those behaviors, those are integrity, conscientiousness, humility, and humor. And then I outline three others in the book that I call kind of the bi-directional, which are attributes that I found when I really put them to the test of being low was probably not necessarily that good and being higher was probably good. It did make sense to me. And so those attributes seem like no matter what the polarity, they were actually effective for optimal performance.
Those were patients and then patients. In other words, they're very, very successful people who are patient, and they're very, very successful people who are impatient. Fear of rejection or insusience to what people think. I don't care what people think.
So they're very successful people who have a fear of rejection. So they push themselves because they don't want to look bad. And then they're very successful people who are like, I don't care what I think. I should do my own thing.
And then finally, competitiveness and non-competitive. So very successful people who are competitive. And they're very successful people who are non-competitive. So those are kind of the bins.
Those are the 25, really. In terms of developments, I would hypothesize, and I have to just hypothesize because everybody's different. But I would hypothesize that if you are, no matter where you stand on an attribute, if you are committed enough, I believe you can get as high as you want to be. It just takes, like I said, it takes some real work and effort.
And it may not, you may not get to be unconsciously competent. You may have to always think about it to really make it work. You may not get to be automatic. But I think you can get pretty high on any one of them as long as you put the work in.
So speaking of the work, what do you think the role of core values is in having the determination, the stick-to-itiveness, whatever the right attribute or where it is for that, to actually see it through to dial up an attribute. Because when I think about somebody actually making change, I think about beliefs, I think about rules, behaviors, but I think about core values a lot. And the biggest changes in my life have come when I change my core values. And I once got asked, I forget by who, and they were lamenting their kid, like, do you ever think they're going to be able to get it together?
They were struggling profoundly, and they were very worried about their future. And they said, do you really think there's any way to help them? And I said, the answer is yes, but you're not going to like what the answer is. And the answer is, if you let me kidnap them, take them to a desert island and surround them with people.
And the funny thing is, in my head, when I'm doing this desert island trick, I'm always putting people in Navy Seals. So if you let me take five Navy Seals and your child and put them on the island with these guys, they will want to earn their respect. They will want to be a part of the group. And the only way to do that will be to adopt their value system.
And when they adopt their value system, then their behaviors are going to fall in line. And all of a sudden, they're going to do all the things that they have to do to toughen up, to have self-respect, all of that. And I think that will work not frequently. I think it will work every single time.
Because what that will do to your core values just to fit in. Do you think I'm crazy? Does that make sense? No, it totally makes sense.
In fact, I would say that one of the things I've always wanted to do, and it seems like it's been like this since I was in high school, is I've always wanted to try to surround myself with people who I thought were better than me. And in doing so, it allowed me to really up my game. And I never thought about it in terms of changing my core values. That's a really cool theory that I probably have to think about a little bit more.
But I do know just on an elemental level, this idea that I did want to fit in. I did want to succeed. And so it was kind of like there were people you could model. And it's almost like we play a video game and you start at level one.
And as you get better, you get to level 15. And then suddenly you die and you have to go back to level one. And level one seems easy. And it's because you've just gotten used to the pace and the speed of level 15.
And I think that's what's putting yourself around people who are better than you. And I say better. You can define that in any word. I mean, people who humble you, make you feel like, oh my gosh, I got to step up my game.
And I tell you, that happens to me all the time. It still happens to me. I mean, I'm constantly looking at places and people saying, okay, I'm throwing myself into this thing. I don't know a lot about it.
And these people know so much more than me. Even when I was doing the teams, it was happening all the time. And whenever I feel that way, I get excited. Because I know, I say, you know what, I'm going to learn something.
I'm going to get better. I'm going to step up. And so I think it's a really powerful tool and technique. And yeah, if it happens to, I have to really think about it, if it changed my values, or did I maybe take my values and allow me to amplify the ones I hadn't been using?
I would say you're probably at a point where your value system is already so constructive that you probably don't need a shift of core values. That example, the desert, I haven't had examples about somebody who's core values are so disturbed, they're so ineffective that that's the core change that they need. But I don't think anybody is beyond sort of getting our head around a set of values, beliefs, identity statements that will point them in the right direction. But I'm not surprised that you sort of can feel maybe there's value in there somewhere, but that's not exactly what's happening to you anymore.
That's really interesting to me. When you were going through that, and I was like, is he about to say that he gets excited? Is it when you, you know, me people that know so much more than you? Or you don't buy that?
That to me is a pretty big litmus test for whether people are going to struggle in life or not. Because if when you're the sort of lowest on the totem pole, you realize this is a huge world and you get excited about, whoa, I can add to my potential, I can grow. Obviously, that's going back to Carol Dweck's book, Mindset. She talks about people that need a challenge with excitement.
They're going to do a lot better than somebody who meets that challenge with apprehension. Are there other little markers like that? Like you, given your time in the seals, given that you spend a lot of time helping the seals develop training to identify who is going to work and obviously the book attributes are sort of born of your analysis of what makes some people succeed and some not, are there like core attributes that lump into something like the universal attributes of success? Like, is there a small cocktail of things that we should all go like, hey, these five and get good at these?
So again, a great question. I think there's so many different genres inside which one can be successful. I think one of the first things to remember is one of my favorite Einstein quotes is that it goes something like, you can, everybody's a genius, but if you ask a fish to climb a tree, he'll spend his entire life thinking to an idiot. And this speaks to this idea that we all have lanes that we probably excel in.
We just have to find those lanes. So in lieu of that, I would say one of the most important success attributes is open-mindedness. Because open-mindedness also breeds curiosity. And if we are open-minded and curious, we are generally in a great position to find those lanes inside of which we will excel.
Now, I'll be honest with you, there is nothing about my attributes list that would allow me to excel on a football field or, you know, on a basketball court or in the, you know, in the medical team as a surgeon. Okay, it just, those aren't my lanes, but the curiosity and the discovery process allowed me to find my lanes. And I think if people, if people have open-mindedness and curiosity first, they're in a great position. So that's one.
I think courage is a key one because our ability to step into fear, right? So the fascinating about courage is that, is that it, courage can not exist without fear. And fear is really the combination of two things. It's a combination of uncertainty and anxiety.
You can have either one of those components on their own and you're not going to have fear, right? So you can be anxious, but not uncertain. That's like, I'm nervous about the presentation I have to give in front of the boss, you know, next Wednesday or whatever. That's, you know, I'm anxious, but I have to give a presentation, I know the presentation.
I'm just, you know, I'm just anxious, right? So, and there's no fear there. You can have uncertainty without anxiety. Well, that's every kid on Christmas Eve, right?
So, but when you combine the two, you create fear. Now, when fear starts to show up, you know, we've all learned about the fight flights, you know, the autonomic response, the amygdala kind of kicks in. And what happens is we're left with these two choices. Do we fight, which is move into the fear, or do we fight, do we retreat from the fear?
Freeze, you know, it turns out is really just an oscillation, you know, between the two. So it's really those two. If you choose to step into your fear, a specific, a specific switch in your brain gets clicked, right? And when it happens, you get a dopamine report, right?
Which means, which means we get a flood of, hey, this feels good to step into this fear. Now, this doesn't mean we've reached our goal. It doesn't mean we're complete with it. It means every time we take a step, we're getting this dopamine report.
So, so I think those people who have who are higher on the courage scale tend to step into that fear, excuse me, tend to step into that fear a little bit more often than someone who's a little less. And they understand, they feel that, they feel that excitement, they feel that, that pleasure of doing that, of taking the steps. So I think courage and open-mindedness. And I, if I were to pick, if just keep it three, because I think three is good, if I were to pick a third, I would say, I would say humility is one as well, because humility allows us to kind of understand that we're, we're always learning, you know, there's always something to, there's always something more we can learn.
We're never, we're never the best. It keeps us out of that kind of the blinding arrogance zone. And so I think, I think that humility is what allowed me, for example, to be around my peers and be like, man, these guys are just awesome. I need to step up my game, or even getting out of the Navy.
And I started working with a leadership institute. And I started speaking in front of crowds and teaching. And I was, I thought abysmal, compared to these, the people I was working with, I made these people are awesome. I need to step up my game.
So that humility allows for us to continue to progress. Right? There's a three, I think you and I could probably dissect several more, but I think that was a real abort. Man, it's really incredible.
The way that you've bucketed this out into attributes to give people a roadmap for ways that they can shape their own lives to do, you know, whatever it is that they want to do to work backwards and say, okay, the thing I want to do, what attributes does it take? And then to, you know, give them that path to go out and do it is incredible as somebody who spends almost all of my waking hours trying to figure out ways to help myself and other people develop themselves so that they can accomplish the things they want, man. The book is a pretty incredible roadmap. Where can people get the book, the insider scoop, follow you online?
Like, what's the, what's the way? Yeah, absolutely. So the attributes.com is you can learn all about the book, you can get the book. You, I'm on, I have Instagram, so you can find my Instagram on there, you know, rich, divinity, Instagram, and then the attributes on Instagram and LinkedIn.
The cool thing about the website is that we also offer a free assessment tool. So you can go to the website and you can take an assessment that tells you, you can take grits, mental QD where we should drive, drive should be up, you know, now as well. But grit, mental QD, you can take an assessment and it tells you it'll give you some scores as to where you fall on each of these attributes. Now, the caveat to that is it's going to be a snapshot, right?
What we did is we set up these questions, we polled about 1,000 people globally. So we have about 1,000 people's worth of data. So when you get that result, if you're like a six on adaptability, that six is as compared to 1,000 people. So someone has to get those scores and then really do some self reflection and say, okay, does that, what does that mean for me?
Does that fit with that experience? But you can at least get a snapshot of where you stand on the attributes. And then also some, some workbooks that you can get that allow you to want to develop an attribute, some, some guided guides you on how to develop each attribute. So, so they can get all that on the website and check it out.
But yeah, I certainly appreciate the, the kind words and support. No man, for sure. And I highly recommend that people do that. And thank you for taking the time to write this stuff out.
Obviously hard one knowledge. So that you share it and make it easy for others. It's really pretty extraordinary. Guys, speaking of things that are extraordinary, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe.
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