Inspire Someone Today
Inspire Someone Today
E146| Navy Seal to Warrior Poet | Andrew Sridhar
What happens when the disciplined mindset of a Navy SEAL meets the strategic thinking of a Harvard MBA? Andrew Sridhar embodies this rare combination, having thrived both in the high-stakes world of special operations and the complex landscape of corporate strategy.
The concept of the "Warrior Poet"—drawing from traditions as diverse as the Samurai's Bushido code to medieval knighthood—represents a powerful balance few achieve. It's about combining necessary toughness with emotional intelligence, decisive action with thoughtful reflection. As Sridhar reveals, this balance isn't about becoming something unnatural, but uncovering the multidimensional qualities we already possess.
One revelation that challenges conventional thinking: SEAL training doesn't actually teach people not to quit. Instead, it identifies those who were never going to quit in the first place. This perspective reframes our understanding of resilience as something deeply internal—a core commitment to oneself that transcends temporary discomfort. Yet Sridhar offers practical ways to develop this resilience through what he calls "micro-experiments" that build a growth mindset: actively seeking feedback, breaking challenges into their smallest components, and creating momentum through tiny, consistent improvements.
Perhaps most valuable are Sridhar's insights into team excellence. He describes three elements from the SEAL teams' brotherhood that corporate environments should emulate: an unprecedented level of trust, treating everyone as family, and an environment where "you raise my game, I'll raise yours." These principles create the conditions where high performance becomes not just possible but inevitable.
For sustained excellence, Sridhar emphasizes cultivating joy (not as a destination but a way of living), taking strategic breaks, and eliminating the small annoyances—the "flickering lightbulbs"—that quietly deplete our mental energy. His message resonates with profound simplicity: "Be you. Be true to yourself because it's your life." Whether you're leading teams, building a career, or seeking personal growth, these insights from the battlefield to the boardroom offer a blueprint for authentic, resilient leadership.
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there's this period during SEAL training, after the stuff you see on TV in our advanced training, and I remember it was um, it was basically a hand-to-hand combat training and I remember the instructor the guy looked like Tony Robbins, like he was the. He was tall, huge, tall, huge, same level of energy, same charisma, same voice and kind of looked like him too. It was remarkable. It was remarkable and so he was a SEAL and I remember he put us through this drill of doing this hand-to-hand combat kind of movement. But he would count these numbers from zero to five, and zero was the calmest you can be and five was the most aggressive you can be. We're talking about a very fundamental essence of someone's mindset and personality and character. To be clear, this is not something that the military is training us to do. Seal training doesn't train people not to quit. It finds the people who were never going to quit in the first place.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Inspire Someone Today podcast, a show where we dive into the stories and insights that has the power to create ripples of inspiration in your life. I'm your host, shrikant, and I'm thrilled to be with you on this journey of inspiration. Welcome to Inspire Someone today. My dear listeners, imagine this you are behind enemy lines leading a mission where every second counts. The stakes Life and death. Now fast forward. You are in a corporate boardroom navigating billion dollar decisions with the same intensity and precision. What does it take to thrive in both the worlds?
Speaker 2:Today we step into the extraordinary life of Andrew Sridhar, a Navy SEAL officer, harvard MBA, corporate strategist and the mind behind the warrior poet From the battlefield to the business world. And this is one of those occasions where Sridhar has mastered the art of leadership, resilience and decisiveness in the most extreme conditions. How does a warrior sharpen his mind as much as his blade? What lessons from combat translate into winning in life and business? Strap in? This is a conversation you don't want to miss, and it's an absolute joy to welcome Andrew Sridhar on this episode of Inspire Someone today. Welcome to the show, andrew.
Speaker 1:Hey, sridhar, thanks for having me, and I have to say at the outset that you give me a little too much credit there. I don't claim to have mastered very many things at all, and leadership in business, as you know, is a continual learning experience.
Speaker 2:Well, that is a humility that each one of us carry, that learning is a lifelong learning process, and we continue to kind of do that Even before we get started. How have you been? One interesting question, thought all of my listeners would have is in your name. Listeners would have is in your name, Andrew Sridhar. Let's start from there.
Speaker 1:Sure, my father is from Bangalore. They lived in Chennai for a little while as well, as he did medical school in New Delhi. They spent some time in Mumbai. I think I'm forgetting a place or two. I think I'm forgetting a place or two, but that was all before early adulthood. And so once he graduated medical school, he went to New York and then met my mom, and the rest is history. And my mom is white for folks who, in terms of family name and given name, when they were in India, in terms of family name and given name, and so my uncles and my father, on their driver's licenses or passports, they all have the same first name but different last names, right, which makes no sense in the American context. So that's how it got flipped, and it's a constant source of confusion and humor in the workplace when I work with Indian folks.
Speaker 2:Well, definitely, that's not what kind of got me you onto this particular show. What got my attention was definitely the warrior poet. The warrior poet mindset, right. So tell us a bit more about what was the genesis of this, why the name warrior poet and how did this come into existence. But what was the genesis of this? Why?
Speaker 1:the name Warrior Poet, and how did this come into existence? The Warrior Poet is a phrase that was implanted in my mind from a relatively early age. I went to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. For those who don't know, this is not basic training. It's an officer candidate program where you are essentially in university for four years, but it's a military university funded by the US government to produce officers for the Navy, and it's the same thing as West Point, which a lot of people are familiar with, much to my dismay. No, there's a healthy rivalry there. So, being in that environment, which is actually very academically focused and also very focused on being prepared for war and especially leadership in war I don't know where I first heard the phrase, but I definitely heard it early on in my time at the Naval Academy or became familiar with it.
Speaker 1:The roots of the phrase are in the Bushido code of the samurai, and the idea is that you can be intelligent and produce creations, maybe art, things like that. You can be a valuable member of the community but also have this traditionally more masculine qualities of being a leader being aggressive when you need to and even at times when you need to stand up for something that's right or defend people, be violent and be effective at that violence. To be clear, I was not saying that women can't lead or anything like that. I don't want anyone to read between the lines there and send you nasty notes there, Sri. And also I should be clear, the idea of the warrior poet also has parallel roots in other areas. I think the ancient Greeks and the medieval knights also had similar concepts, not just the samurai.
Speaker 2:And it's a very wonderful balance if you look at it right the toughness versus the emotional intelligence versus the emotional intelligence, the balance between what you kind of do as philosophy or as discipline versus the self-mastery right. So how do you kind of strike these balances as you kind of look into this element of the warrior core, the balance between toughness and emotional intelligence, creativity, boldness?
Speaker 1:For me it comes rather naturally. A lot of people would ask me after the military, you know, did you have a tough time transitioning? And that's a conversation for another day. There's tons of lessons learned that I have in terms of that transition, but your listeners are not just military veterans, so maybe we skip that. But they would ask me that question and my gut response not that I said it every time was that I was a normal person before and I like to think I was pretty normal when I was in the military, just doing a job that is different from everybody else. But I'm still a human person. I didn't turn into some sort of machine. You know, I think people have these weird impressions of what it's like to be in the military and what it does to you. But yeah, so anyway, my joke to them would kind of be like yeah, like I entered normal, I exited normal, but that's not, that's not always true, right, and we are a product of our environment. Plenty of people in the military have PTSD, things like that. But overall pardon the digression there that mix kind of comes naturally. I've always been creative. I am the oldest of seven children, so family and that emotional side have always been a part of my life and so, practically speaking, as I've gotten older, I've realized.
Speaker 1:There are tools, though, that we can use to try and strike that balance rather than just waiting for that balance to show up. An easy example would be cultivating mindfulness, that balance to show up. An easy example would be cultivating mindfulness the more balanced your mind is, the more you can be intentional about where you want to place your energy, how you want to escalate your energy. There's this period during SEAL training, after the stuff you see on TV in our advanced training, and I remember it was basically a hand-to-hand combat training, and I remember the instructor the guy looked like Tony Robbins, like he was tall, huge, same level of energy, same charisma, same voice like and kind of looked like him too. It was remarkable. It was remarkable and so and he was, he was a SEAL, and I remember he put us through this drill of doing this hand-to-hand combat kind of movement, but he would count these numbers from zero to five and zero was the calmest you can be and five was the most aggressive you can be and kind of escalating up and down this scale as we do these movements.
Speaker 1:You know it's not rocket science, but then again, this was before the whole mindfulness movement. This is ages ago, I should say, before mindfulness entered the public consciousness. It's been a movement for forever, right, but that was a little bit of a eureka moment for me, and it's always stuck with me, is that we can choose where our energy level is and the quality of that energy right. By quality, I mean, you know, in simple terms like happy or angry, and there's a whole bunch of other variants there, and so mindfulness allows us to throttle the level and pick the quality that we want.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we need to be aggressive and sometimes we don't, but the problem is without mindfulness. I'm sure, as you know, sri, that the impulses we have, the scripts, as Robert Cialdini, the author Robert Cialdini talks about them, the scripts that we have, they're total impulse and they're just based upon the habits and we've done before, and the grooves, as he says, like a record, the grooves we've created in our mind. And so, as an example here, if you don't strike that mindful balance intentionally, then you're going to end up angrier than you should be all the time and at a much higher level, right, and we could go through a zillion other emotions and reactions.
Speaker 2:Not every day you get the opportunity to talk to a SEAL and you are one of them and I can't let go of that opportunity to talk to you about a lot of the stuff that we get to see online, but we never get to have those conversations with the SEAL. One such thing, even before we get there. Walk us through your journey of becoming a SEAL. How was it like? How did it happen?
Speaker 1:Sure, I was on the swim team. I was a co-captain of the swim team, my high school swim team. Funny enough, I'll fast forward a little bit. Even though I was captain of the swim team in high school, swimming with fins, side stroke in the open ocean in a wetsuit is very different than, you know, swimming events in a pool. And so I went from being I mean, I wasn't amazing, I didn't swim in college, you know, I wasn't so far from being a professional swimmer but compared to most people like I, was a great swimmer, right. Uh, I went to being one of the most challenged, challenged swimmers in my in my buds class and seal training buds is basic underwater demolition seal training.
Speaker 1:So on the swim team there was a guy who was a year younger than me and my friends and we kind of got to know him. He was pretty quiet guy. We actually got to know him. He was a pretty quiet guy. We actually got to know his stepfather more because his stepfather was volunteering a lot. I guess he retired from the military and had a pretty good work-life balance with whatever he was doing after. So he was around the pool a lot and we got to know him and he was this short little guy you know well, he was strong, he was well-built, but this short guy with this kind of attitude about him, and somehow we start talking to him and he tells us he was a Navy SEAL and kind of. You know, we're asking him about stuff, and the reason I bring this up is because I think that was even though my, my one of my really good friends, and myself had been into the idea of joining the military, especially special operations, you know, being just around that guy and the fact that he was a normal guy, you know, a dad, I think that like made it super real for me, right, and so that was really a huge inspiration for me and motivator and made me believe that like, hey, this guy can do it, I can do it.
Speaker 1:I already had thought about going to the Naval Academy or West Point or something like that, and I was fortunate to get into all three of the US service academies the other one's Air Force, but I visited West Point with my dad, I visited the Naval Academy and there were, I mean, there's lots of great things about West Point. Some of my Navy friends will will rid me for saying that, for admitting that, but you know it's famous for a reason, but ultimately, I think the naval academy is the better school, and, besides being by the water and a nicer campus and funner experience uh, and probably more academic as well. Um, to throw in some some more reasons, I really wanted to be a seal, and that was that was my, that was my number one reason for going to the naval academy. It's like if I, all the other stuff doesn't matter. I want to be a seal, so I need to going to the Naval Academy. It's like all the other stuff doesn't matter. I want to be a SEAL, so I need to go to the Naval Academy.
Speaker 1:And it turns out, though, that after three and a half years of working towards this, I did not get a SEAL billet, as they call it, a SEAL spot that they had available for officers from the Naval Academy at that time. A bunch of other great guys got it, got those spots, and I had to go to a ship. I could have flown airplanes, I could have been on a submarine, all kinds of things, but I chose to be on a ship because I knew, if I went to a ship, that I could do what's called a lateral transfer to SEAL training. And so I busted my butt on the ship to be the best officer I could and to get essentially the milestones that I needed to achieve in order to apply for a transfer. And as soon as I hit that milestone, I had already had the paperwork filled out and I had told my captain that I wanted to transfer, and he was he was shocked and disappointed, but also also very supportive Wrote me a great letter of recommendation. But meanwhile, while I'm on the ship, they had a good amount of officers quit from my time at the Naval Academy and so, funny enough, there was this Discovery Channel documentary. Sorry I'm going long here, but this is my journey. Yes, so there's this Discovery Channel documentary and you can still find it on YouTube.
Speaker 1:I think it was Class 234, class 234. And for anyone who wants to know and get a feel for what that basic training is like, which is the hardest, it was the hardest military training in the world. It's good at putting you in the mindset without you actually being cold and doing all the things. But a bunch of officers quit during that period, which was interesting to me while I'm on the ship and, in what I call purgatory, ended up at at seal training. Eventually, a bunch, a couple officers quit ahead of me and who are more senior to me during hell week and so I became the class leader during hell week. And just for in case anyone's wondering, you do not want to be the class leader because all the eyes are on you and it's a point of pride for instructors to make the class leader quit. I did not quit. I was never going to quit and so I could go into more detail, but kind of that's the. Those are the basics.
Speaker 2:Lovely, fantastic, great to listen to that journey and taking off from there, andrew, what I heard is SEALs train in an environment where failure is a constant. How do SEALs reframe failure? You mentioned about Hell Week. I think, for starters, that itself can be a great context setting of how you kind of overcome failures or how do you reframe failures.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just to give people some background, hell Week is not all of Bud's Basic underwater demolition. Seal training is about seven and a half months, once you count everything, and at the end of it they've only proved you're trainable. You do not even have your seal pin at that point. You have to go through another whatever year, year and a half of training after that and even then you're not even a full seal by the eyes of the guys who have been doing it for a while, because you haven't deployed yet and you haven't done training with them yet. So we're talking about a huge journey. So Hell Week is roughly, depending on the time period, the fifth week of basic underwater demotion through SEAL training and it's six days of perpetual misery.
Speaker 1:You run an insane amount of miles in soft sand and boots. You have chafing between your legs that would make Tour de France guys blanch. You're doing one of the toughest obstacle courses in the world over and over, bringing your boats through pounding surf, shark-infested waters and you are undergoing surf torture which is laying in the cold Pacific Ocean. The ocean was 53 degrees when I was in Hell Week, which was a winter Hell Week, and yeah, the winter part matters. More people quit during the winter, and also there's a whole bunch of people doing ice plunges now and cold plunges and stuff, especially in the bro culture. Yeah, you might get your temperature that thing lower than 53 degrees, but you're not spending hours, and hours and hours in there for days and days and days. You know and you can control when you get out. You have no idea when you're getting out of that surf, when you're in buds. So there's a lot of factors there that make it completely miserable. You also only get four hours or less of sleep the entire week, so you are doing the entire week, the entire week, and that's not even really good sleep. That's I mean we're talking about. Like you're kind of in this what I call a sopping wet fever dream. You are not comfortable that entire time, and so you have to have this idea that you are not going to fail in order to be a SEAL.
Speaker 1:That's something, I think, to answer an obvious question, that can be improved in people, maybe even learned, if we want to say that, or trained, but we're talking about a very fundamental essence of someone's mindset and personality and character. To be clear, this is not something that the military is training us to do. Seal training doesn't train people not to quit. It finds the people who were never going to quit in the first place. The thing is that not everything is like SEAL training.
Speaker 1:So, to take a military example, if we're in an operation as we were in combat operations in Iraq that I was leading I can't have the mindset, as that leader, that we are never, never going to quit. Right, if we're in a firefight, we're not going to surrender or quit trying to win that fight. But there's the wise saying of you have to pick your battles and as the commander on target, I need to take responsibility for everybody, right? We can't just have this ethos of never, never, never, never quit in a stupid way, right? So if we never quit because I didn't decide to do something different when things weren't going our direction, weren't in our favor, and then a bunch of guys get killed, like what's the point of that?
Speaker 1:So there is a little bit of balance, right, but it's, you know, you try, try, not to. You don't want everyone to be feeling that way, right? So it's kind of just the leaders out there I'm not saying other people don't aren't taking responsibility for that and they're aware of the situation, right, but. But yeah, it's a delicate balance. And then in in in business right, if you're starting a company, your business concept might be doomed to fail from the beginning, right? There's lots of business concepts that you shouldn't start and that you actually should quit sooner rather than later, so there's a lot of ways that need to balance that who are listening to this conversation.
Speaker 2:How do you help them to develop some of these attributes that's defined by the SEALs, like about endurance, like about that mental strength? What are some of the techniques that you can recommend that people can look into?
Speaker 1:Sure, as I said earlier, I'm a huge fan of mindfulness. Funny enough, that's not something I practiced before the SEAL teams, so I think in that sense I got a little lucky right. It's not that I hadn't cultivated endurance and grit beforehand, but I didn't use a tool that would have made things even easier to cultivate that. And so really doing that inner searching about who you are, what patterns you exhibit in your mind, and developing comfortable with yourself right, if you have self-worth, then you're quite unshakable compared to everybody else Because you know what matters, you're not worried about what other people think and you're willing to do the thing that a lot of other seals and other your shower or you know things like that. Then that has ripple effects throughout other things that you do. And it's not just physical discomfort. You want to ensure that you're able to endure the emotional discomfort of it all, able to endure the emotional discomfort of it all. I think more people quit things or don't start things in life because of emotional discomfort, not because of physical discomfort Interesting.
Speaker 2:you make that point. Very recently I had one of my guests on the show. He made this point saying when was the last time you did something?
Speaker 1:for the first time was the last time you did something for the first time. I like that. I like that. That's great. That's a great reminder to you know, up the ante on the things we do in terms of being uncomfortable, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, andrew, we've been talking about your entry to the SEALs, some of the techniques that the SEALs do. We'll get into a segment of our conversation which we call it as the Power of Three Round. We are here with Andrew and the Power of Three Round. Andrew, the first of the Power of Three Round if you were to give three piece of advice to your future self and Andrew, five years from now or ten years from now what would that three piece of advice be?
Speaker 1:I would say do less but better. That, I believe, is from Dieter Roms, the designer Dieter Roms, I think D I E T E R, uh, german spelling less but better. Cause I'm trying to do that now, feel like it's it's hard, it's hard to differentiate advice now to advice then, but um, so, but I'll, I'll try. So, yeah, uh, do less but better, and that is the harnessing the power of focus right, um, and and delivering quality in a let's call it a steve jobs sort of way. Remember who you are, going back to the authenticity point earlier and cultivate joy. Wow, nice. The last one is within our control and I think most people don't understand that, and I wouldn't call myself having reached the level of enlightenment in Buddhism, having reached the level of enlightenment in Buddhism, but it was a real enlightening experience for me once I realized that I could do that.
Speaker 2:That's a good start. Thanks for sharing that Three aspects of the Brotherhood Code that the corporate world can embrace.
Speaker 1:The first one is trust. There's a huge lack of trust in the corporate world. I don't think most people in the corporate world have ever experienced anything by but what they're living right now, so they don't even understand what a high trust environment looks like. They probably think they've worked for good teams or in for good companies where they've had that. I could almost guarantee that they can't even fathom the level of trust in the SEAL teams. So that would be number one.
Speaker 1:Number two is everyone is your brother or sister, and not to get into gender spectrum stuff, but we'll just leave it at that for now that is selfless, because ultimately, leadership is not a title. Leadership is selfless. Leadership is something. The title of leader quote unquote is something you earn, not something you're given. And then the last thing is you raise my game, I'll raise yours. In the SEAL teams, you can learn something from every guy around you and they can learn something from you. And it's not just learning, it's also encouragement, feedback, and so it's such an amazing environment where almost every I mean I'm not saying seals are perfect, right but where just about everyone around you is an inspiration and where you're becoming a much better person just by virtue of being around them.
Speaker 2:How beautiful it is. I wonder, what does it take for us to create those kind of environments around us in the corporate world day, for us to create those kind of environments around us in the corporate world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wish I had a short answer. Maybe I'll come up with one and I'll add that to my business offering.
Speaker 2:Good Continuing with that. Three micro experiments that build a discipline of a growth mindset.
Speaker 1:The first one is ask for feedback. I know it sounds cheesy, but there's the phrase feedback is a gift. But feedback is very hard for us all to accept, receive, internalize and, notably, ask for. And I was terrible at seeking feedback proactively for a long time, and when I would receive feedback, even if it was overwhelmingly positive, my body was kind of tight and defensive. The people who raise their game the fastest are the people who know that the only way they can improve is through failure and feedback. You mathematically, like physically, just by the laws of logic, you can't actually be your best. You can't improve without messing up something first, and you could try and observe and learn all of that yourself. But being who we are and our biases, and just being the first person rather than the third person, you can only learn so much. So number one is that ask for feedback.
Speaker 1:The number two is from a book by the author Stephen Guise, g-u-i-s-e. Stephen Guise, and Stephen is spelled with a P-H, not a V. He has a book called how to Be an Imperfectionist and he has this approach in there. He talks about his struggles with approaching women for dates and things like that. So he came up with this approach for himself, or this rule, let's call it, or habit, which was just say hi. And so he wouldn't have to carry on a conversation, he wouldn't have to ask for her phone number or ask her on a date or make her laugh or anything. All he had to do was just say one syllable, two letters and something everyone can say to each other, which is hi, right. And so my point is not about relationships right now. My point is you can apply this to anything in life where you're uncomfortable or you have anxiety. Just distill it down to the like smallest possible thing that you can do, where you almost look at yourself and for you to fight it would be ridiculous, right. And so I think that approach. Whenever I have something where I'm feeling a little stuck or anxious, I come back to that idea.
Speaker 1:And then the last one is not that it's all about getting up early. There's kind of like morning routine industry fetish on the yeah, it's a whole industry, right, and it's kind of insane how much people focus on it. But people like to focus on things they can control. But I don't. Morning routines are important, but it is diminishing marginal returns. But in the spirit of micro experiments, I would suggest people try getting up one minute earlier and just do that for two weeks and so at the end of two weeks you haven't even gotten up 15 minutes earlier, you've only gotten up 14 minutes, but it shows that you can make progress right.
Speaker 1:And just the discipline of getting up on time that first day and then every day just a minute earlier because who can't do a minute earlier, and I think it's people underestimate the benefits you get, in a meta sense, from that success in improving some area of your life. The carryover effects are great. So the next thing you want to improve will be that much easier because you know you've done something else for yourself, right? But the important thing is for yourself that you've done it. No one told you to do it, it's not for your boss, it's not for something else, it's not for something else Like, and I think that's huge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a cool one as well, A very cool micro experiment to do. You gave a recommendation in the form of a book, but I'll ask you for three more. Three book or podcast recommendations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, so I know we're on a podcast, but I don't recommend podcasts, for, you know, clarity of thought. To me, it's like it's almost like standing in a thunderstorm a little bit and there's all this rain coming down and you can't catch all the drops, but you definitely get an impression, and you, there's a few little nuggets here or there that you can get from from a podcast, and so I do listen to them. I have my own podcast and I'm enjoying being here today, but it's not enough on its own. Uh, so the, the books that I would recommend people read, um is search inside yourself by I'm'm gonna probably screw up the pronunciation of his name, but a former Googler named Chade Meng Tan Search Inside Yourself.
Speaker 1:The second one is the Art of Thinking, clearly by Rolf Dobelli. It's not as structured as I would like, and I probably need to reread it. I just remember, though, every chapter having some really great insights, almost every single chapter, and um, there's some things in there. You won't find many places. I would argue. Um with with the. It's very similar in some ways to shane parish's um, farnham street, uh, I don't know if you know that. Yeah, but for people who haven't checked out Farnham Street. Sorry, this is a an honorable mention here. It's not a book or a podcast. Um, he does have a podcast but it's. But Farnham Street is his blog and um, f-a-r-n-a-m Street, the Knowledge Project podcast. He's just got so many mental models in there. It's great, and it's not just regurgitation, he has a lot of original thought in there.
Speaker 1:And then the last one is so Search Inside Yourself, art of Thinking Clearly. And then the Untethered Soul by Michael Singer is a great one and this is kind of a tie. So I had an honorable mention earlier and now I have a tie for third, which is the Untethered soul by Michael Singer, and another one that is kind of similar in my mind in terms of it's a little bit woo. Right Is the the mountain, is you? By Brianna Weist.
Speaker 1:W I E S T the mountain, is you the idea? It's? It's all about self-sabotage, and so for people who check out these last two, they are, they're kind of pseudo spiritual. I would ask you or suggest to listeners just get over it right, don't obsess about they don't believe the thing I believe, or this is woo or this doesn't make sense If you keep going through them and park your kind of spiritual opinions about things, I think you'll unlock a lot of tools, and so either of those, the untethered soul or the mountain, is you. Either one, I think is hugely valuable for anyone, no matter where they are.
Speaker 2:Wonderful, this seems to be a good collection. Thanks for those recommendations, andrew. Well, we have a seal around us and we can't miss an opposite. To ask this question, the last of the power of three round question for you what are three underrated ways to sustain long-term peak performance?
Speaker 1:I alluded to one earlier no, I didn't allude to it, I literally said it which is you can build joy. Now, joy is not a destination, it's a way of living, and there are plenty of athletes and business people who are white knuckling it, as I say, in that they have not found peace, they have not found authenticity and they are just dealing with a whole lot of trauma and in some ways that can motivate people to do great things right by societal standards, but at the end they're just miserable substance abuse problems, other mental health problems, relationship problems and make some poor decisions. And so to me it's a lot harder than to keep succeeding and have that long-term performance without the ability to find peace, heal your trauma and build some joy inside yourself. Now, and that's not. I used to have a little bit of a worry that you know becoming more calm would be handicapping myself, like it's almost like losing your edge. Right discovered, and by witnessing some people in my life in the private sector and friends and things like that, that actually it's not that way. Right, being calm and being able to find that happiness doesn't mean you're doing nothing right, it doesn't mean you're just retiring and not succeeding. They're not mutually exclusive.
Speaker 1:The second thing would be take breaks. I won't belabor that. The second thing would be take breaks. I won't belabor that, take breaks.
Speaker 1:The third thing is fix the flickering light bulb. So I had a few weeks ago this light in my room. I really love light. I don't know how bright it is on screen here, but I come from Florida. I'm a little dark skinned, so I have that need for light from my Indian roots and so I'm not just joking about that. That is scientifically proven, apparently in terms of vitamin D production and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1:But I have some lights that are smart bulbs, but one of them just kept flickering every now and then. It wasn't all the time, but every now, like once every few hours or two hours it would. It would just kind of go off and then it would come back on or just randomly. Sometimes it'd be, it'd be off and then just like come on randomly and I just lived with it for like a month and because it's just every now and then, right. But the problem is it's this background process in your brain all the time. It's like, yeah, I need to fix that thing eventually and it's a thing that interrupts you right and interrupts your flow. So find your flickering light bulbs, find the things that you can just nip in the bud and take care of to free up your brain and your energy and your focus and protect that focus so you can actually do your best work.
Speaker 2:That's a fantastic metaphor, thank you. Thanks for sharing that. You're somebody who has kind of transitioned into multiple roles career shifts right From military to corporate to coaching, podcasting, all of it. So what is the secret, mantha? How do you continuously reinvent yourself? How do you go about doing this process?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm naturally a person who has a lot of interests, sometimes to my detriment, who has a lot of interests, sometimes to my detriment. At the same time, I also more and more believe that we're all more alike than we would like to admit. So when I say I have a lot of interests, right, it sounds like people can probably easily relate to that, because they're like I have a lot of interests too. And there's the phrase I can't remember who said it, right, but it's I contain multitudes. So we have that desire to do more, and maybe I'll borrow a metaphor I think it's a Buddhist metaphor that Brianna Weiss in the Mountain Is you that I mentioned earlier mentions, which is the idea of unblocking the river and letting it flow. Sometimes we feel like we need to push all the time, but sometimes it's about removing the obstacles to producing something. So, and it relates to that kind of white knuckling feeling that I mentioned earlier that plagues a lot of actually a lot of high performers, but in a way that's not sustainable and not ultimately fulfilling for them.
Speaker 1:You mentioned podcasts, right, I mean, when I started podcasting, it was years ago. I took some breaks here and there, so you know I've got about whatever 100 episodes. It was fairly hard. It was a lot harder than it was than it is now. Now it's so easy to do a podcast. The a lot harder than it was than it is now. Now it's so easy to do a podcast. The tools are amazing, right. I'm sorry if I'm outing you, sri, but like you know, I know it's I don't want to underwrite it. It is work right to do.
Speaker 1:Well, you know like, you've prepared a lot of questions, you've got a format, you've got a brand, you've got, you know, a whole bunch of things, the social media. That's not nothing, nothing but like. If you, anyone who wants to start a podcast out there, that process is easy, it's super easy. Right, get on squad cast, which which Sri and I are on right now, squad cast by descript. Or get on Riverside, and I think I think there's free starter plans.
Speaker 1:You can do a couple hours a month and then you can publish it easily, if not from there, then on buzzsprout for almost nothing and just like. You'll get your episodes out there. It's super easy. And then just forget all the show notes, forget the social media and just start and you can. You can literally do this on on your phone, even you don't need a microphone and so but we, we place all these obstacles in our own way. Why do we do that? A lot of times it's because we feel like we need to live up to what other people expect of us, right, and other people don't know what's best for us.
Speaker 1:The people who are going to judge us often don't care about us, and the reality is we overestimate the number of people who are going to judge us as well. Right, most of the people that you think are going to judge you aren't thinking about you at all. They literally don't care. They don't care about anything you do, so just get out there and start doing it and then iterate. But we have these perfectionist tendencies that also is closely related to procrastination that are just taxing, right? And even when I started doing a lot of these things Shree, besides the podcast I was in push mode rather than flow mode. Like, it's not that I didn't experience flow states.
Speaker 1:I don't want to conflate the two, but talking about that river analogy, I was trying to push the stream forward and it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good, right? Because then it's like I have to do the podcast, I have to record it, I have to edit it. Oh, I have to do the social media, I have to do all this stuff and again, if I choose to do it, then it feels better, it feels like an act of creation, right? Rather than I'm a slave to this other, andrew, who's forcing me to do this stuff. But then also, I can do less. I can succeed by doing less. And again, it's all about learning and getting the reps. So it doesn't have to be perfect, you just have to start doing it and start getting the reps and then improve. So it doesn't quite answer your entire reinvention question, but those are some important lessons that I've learned.
Speaker 2:Well, Andrew, this has been one great conversation. I am sure we can have hours of discussions to hear your stories, to hear all of the other stuff, Before we kind of go from here. What's next for Andrew?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm in the middle of ramping my keynote speaking and executive coaching business. Speaking an executive coaching business my executive coaching business primarily targets CEOs, but also, you know, on a case by case basis, coaching VPs and the rest of the C-suite on leadership right, how do you actually get people to do what you would like them to do? It's not easy. How do you build high trust and elite teams and how do you build culture? What actually is culture? Whose responsibility is it and how do I build one that is authentic to me as the CEO but also lines up with the people that I'm hiring, my customers, my industry and what we need to do as a company?
Speaker 1:I also am doing keynote speaking, so you know, I'd love for people to reach out to me on thewarriorpoetcom is my website, thewarriorpoetcom and then I'm on LinkedIn and would love to talk with folks, and that's my main focus right now is ramping that sort of stuff, because I really, really think that the lessons that we learned in the SEAL teams and then the lessons that I've learned in tech right which we didn't talk about today but I've been at Andreessen Horowitz-backed startups, I've been at Amazon, I've been on Wall Street, and so I've put these lessons from the SEAL teams and the Naval Academy into frameworks that work in the private sector, and I'm excited about getting those messages out, you know, so I would love to share them with people.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Wishing you continued success, more glory. This show is all about creating ripples of inspiration. Before we sign off, what's your Inspire Someone today?
Speaker 1:message for all of our listeners be you be true to yourself because it's your life. No one else is going to live it for you, and so do it, starting today be you and cultivate joy.
Speaker 2:I think I will definitely leave this conversation with those two words be you and cultivate joy, and thank you so much for taking time and having this lovely conversation. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Inspire Someone today. This is Srikant, your host, signing off. Until next time, continue to carry the repulse of inspiration, stay inspired, keep spreading the light.
