Rebuilding Through Adversity: A Green Beret’s Guide to Ownership

In this episode of The Asset Mindset Podcast, Daniel Fielding sits down with Green Beret and Green Beret Racing CEO Nick Merrick to break down how mindset, ownership, and accountability shape success. Nick opens up about his identity crisis, rebuilding his life through discipline, and the power of community and competition in personal growth. From leadership lessons to the legendary “Wet Socks Theory,” this conversation delivers practical tools for staying resilient, learning from adversity, and taking full ownership of every outcome.

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Produced by Security Halt Media

Transcript

Meet Nick Merrick

Identity Loss And Hitting Bottom

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Welcome to the Asset Mindset Podcast, where we don't wait for opportunities, we create them. I'm your host, Daniel Fielding, former Green Beret and author of the Asset Mindset. Each episode we dive deep into the mindset, habits, mission-driven thinking that turn everyday people into high performers and real life warriors. This isn't about motivation, it's about transformation. If you are ready to stop playing the victim, take ownership, and start building the life you were meant to lead, then let's gear up because your mindset is your greatest asset. Let's go and meet today's very special guest, Nick Merrick, Green Beret, and Green Beret Racing CEO. Nick, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me on, Daniel. Appreciate it. So let's dive right in. I wanna obviously you've been through so much stuff and things in life. What was that big event or defining moment in your life that you realized your mindset was so important or your focus or an obstacle that you overcame that you realized how you think actually changes your outcome?

Choosing Four Goals And Action

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Man, there's no like going out to dinner or anything first. We're right past foreplaying into it. I appreciate that. Boy, the the thing that that first comes to mind on that, I was I had just I ruptured my uh my L4, my L5 disc uh in between. Uh, and I was going through a divorce, and I had relied heavily on my identity as a Green Beret to make myself known. You know, it was the typical joke that we make about Texans that they'll say that they're a Texan before they say their name. Um, I felt very much that way. That was who I was. I was a Green Beret, I was a father, and then I was a husband. And going through a divorce and losing my my physicality, I'm not a small person by any means. And I was no longer able to put that out there as, hey, I'm I'm bigger than you, I'm stronger than you, and I'm faster than you. I I didn't have that anymore. And when my my wife left me, I had no longer had my kids. So here I was in this giant identity crisis, not in a good place for anything. And I found every negative coping mechanism that I could. And I I remember driving back from Texas where my my daughters live. I come to Colorado and I had divorce papers in my passenger seat. And I'm in West Texas, and and for those of you listening that haven't been to West Texas, I don't recommend it. Um it stinks, it's not nice. There's nothing to see, so I only had my you know, my misery, my failure to sit there. And I'm I'm in tears. You know, I'm four hours into the drive. And I remember this song coming on uh by Rob Bailey and The Hustle Standard. Um, songs that I listen to to work out all the time. And he always has these sometimes good, sometimes bad interludes in there where he's given motivational advice. And uh he says, you know, I I did the nine to five. I had the 401k, I had the house, I had the fence, everything that I'm supposed to do. And I always thought, like, this feels fucking stupid. And here I am, I have the you know, the tabs and I have the badges and the deployments and the medals and all these things. And and I didn't feel fulfilled by it, right? It was always, oh, you know, if I get to this school or I do that deployment or I get this award, you know, then then I'll know that I'll make it. And the problem with being in that kind of a mindset is that there's always another level, right? There's always another school to throw on your your accreditation because we're in a world of high performers. And, you know, you you finish Sephardic and you're like, oh dude, I'm it. And then you show up to the Crif and everybody has Sephardic. And you'd be like, oh man, now I need a free fall, right? Or I need to get siphsick, or I need to go to this school or that school, and there's always another one out there because then you meet the people that do it. Um and at this time in my my career, I'm I'm in the CRIF and I'm surrounded. We had distinguished service crosses in our in our troop, multiple superstars, guys with multiple silver stars, bronze stars of the V, or you know, a stone's throwaway. Um, we had a guy with a J-com with a V, which I didn't know that was a thing. Those are tough enough to get by themselves, but he got one for Valor in that environment. And you know, everybody is just high performing and doing it. So losing my identity in that environment was was terrible. And I remember thinking to myself as that song came on, it kind of snapped me out. And I said, you know, I'm at a crossroads. I can be the has been, the guy that goes to the VFW, or you run into and you know, you just finish a deployment, and I immediately go to, oh, well, in my day I was this, or you know, we we've all met them. And then like, oh well, I used to bench press this and I used to shoot that and whatever. And it it didn't appeal to me. That that didn't seem like that's where I should be sitting. So I I came up with four four things. And this was not like a quick coming, it was like a seven and a half hour conversation with myself. I mean, I was answering myself, so maybe I should have sought mental health for that, but um I I put rules in place for it and I said, okay, I'm going to find things that I want to go do that I can't rely on other people. Right. And I say, you know, I can't say I'm gonna go be the CEO of Ford. There's too many other things in place for that to say, like, okay, this is a goal. 30 years from now, different story. But hey, I want to achieve this in the next two years. So uh I decided, all right, I'm gonna re-enlist. I'm 15 years into my career. I might as well. Um, I wanted to buy a house. I'd never done that before. I wanted to become a warrantic, and I wanted to start a business. And I knew nothing about any of that. So I went back right away, went to retention, re-enlisted, used the money to buy a house, and I just started getting on Google and researching, and I started a business. I knew guns, I knew how to shoot, I knew how to instruct for Greenberg, all made sense. Uh, so I started a firearms uh training company, got my FFL, got it off the ground, landed contracts, and pretty soon I was getting a little bit of a follow-up recognition, landed some contracts to train some some police departments. And it was, I was like, this is really cool. And I started this burning passion to do things all of a sudden. And two years later, you know, I'm I'm walking across the stage as a ward officer, and I had achieved more in that two years than I feel like I had in the previous 15 because I didn't really know what I was going for. But when I put these goals in front of me, I started to realize, wait a minute, I'm putting my energy in the wrong place. I'm caring about the things that didn't matter. And it's almost as if when I started seeking things that weren't necessarily in uniform, I became more successful, got more opportunities, and achieved more in uniform because I had a different mindset. I had a different way of looking at the world. And I don't know what changed, but I started getting emails and phone calls and questions of, hey Nick, can you come up to group? We got uh we got an idea we want to run by and want to get your opinion. I'm gone. I'm a W1. What do I know? Right? I don't even know if I work at this point. But you know, it's it was a very different place and it it snapped me out of a very dark, dark spot in my life.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

So getting back to that drive, you said there were like four things that you came up with. Can you share those four things?

Accountability And Ownership

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Yeah. Um re-enlisting, starting a business, uh, going to the one officer course, and buying a house. And I really felt like those things were nobody else could really get in my way. I mean, I needed signatures here and there and stuff like that. Obviously, it's not completely void of anybody else's interference, but I I felt like these were attainable through my action and I couldn't blame it on anyone else. And we're very much in a culture where we like to try and blame someone else for things that happen. You know, if you're on your phone looking down at it and you weird in somebody, you get mad at that person because how dare they stop there, right? You know, look at yourself and say, oh man, I probably shouldn't have been texting right there. And that society that we have, I didn't want to, I didn't want to sit in that place and blame others. You know, I had I could blame so many people for the stupid actions that I took and places that I I ended up being in. But at the end of the day, you know, it's you have some, you know, some stake in it. And as much as everybody wants to jump up and say, hey, I I did this. This is me. Look at the medals that I have, we should equally be there and stand up and go, you know, that's on me. And and that was kind of the lifestyle that we lived in the troupe. Is we would, you know, we'd do hot runs in the house and you know, we'd walk back through the rooms and we would check every single shot that was taken. And we would point to one, hey, you know, was the cell leader? We'd we'd point to it on the paper and be like, who did this? And if nobody could figure it out, we went and we rewalked the house again and again until somebody says, That was me. Yep. And then they would be chastised for it because you don't know where your shots that you took. And then you know, we'd have cameras rolling. And when guys would argue, we'd break out the camera footage and this would tell us a lot about them. And you know, and they would react to it and go, Yep, it's my fault. I did that. That's just something completely different than the guy that's like, no, no, no. I even if it's on camera, I don't believe that. Well, I don't want you around. If you can't take you know accountability for your own actions, then what are you doing when we're on a team? You're gonna come to me and tell me that I'm the reason you can't shoot, I'm the reason you're not scoring as high on these these tests or the NPT is Is it sorry, man? You gotta take accountability for yourself.

SPEAKER_02 10:01

I love that. I love that you're you're really keying in on ownership. I don't think people realize owning your life and taking ownership, becoming the captain of your ship, how important that is. Like that, like you gotta own your life. I say all the time, you gotta own your power. Can you speak to ownership some more and like how that changes you or anybody?

SPEAKER_00 10:24

I I'm a really big believer that you have to take part in your own success. Right? There's millions of movies and books out there that talk about trust funds, right? Trust fund kids and how they are they don't live up to to their parents and and whatnot. And we hold this in our society that, oh, if you don't work for it, you know, you don't appreciate it. That old cycle that that goes something like, you know, uh hard times create, you know, hard men, hard men create, you know, easy times, easy times create weak men, weak men create hard, or however the cycle goes, I'm I'm mismanaging that. But the the idea behind taking ownership of your own story, as you were saying, your own success playing a part in it, you're not going to get anywhere if you think somebody's just going to hand you the things. And even if they do, you know, you you lose it. It's why 90% of lottery winners, with statistics up there somewhere, fall back into poverty. It's because they didn't work for it. They don't care about it. And it's why immigrants coming to this country succeed so well because they have this dream in front of them. They're more patriotic, they're more driven, they are they're more successful because they didn't they had to work for it, where we walk into it and go, Oh, yeah, of course, of course I'm owed this. I'm owed that Big Mac, or I can celebrate with this Coke and sit on my butt for three weeks because Call of Duty just came out, but then also turn around and complain that things aren't falling your way. Well, of course they're not falling your way. Success or luck is opportunity meeting preparedness, right? If you have the ability to capture or to seize upon the opportunity, people look at it as luck. No. Right? The the oh, I mean the ad is got to have money to make money. That's that's opportunity with the ability to act on it. Every all of us walk around, we're walking past houses that are for sale that could be fled, businesses that are for sale or ideas. And if you don't have the the ability to act on it, then it it just goes to the the graveyard with you. So you don't prepare yourself for it. You don't take ownership of your own actions, your own ability to go and do stuff. Well, no kidding. Life's passing you by. One or two steps with it.

SPEAKER_02 12:32

No, absolutely. And luck favors the prepared mind. You know, the more you're prepared, the luckier you are. We know that in training, you know, the the more you're the battles won before the actual battle takes place. Even in sports, you can say that. You don't win the Super Bowl, you know, on just the day of the Super Bowl. It was preseason, it was during the game, it was adjustments you made, it was all through the playoffs, learning and studying and practicing. Like, there's so much work that's done for that, even the chance to have the luck of winning the Super Bowl or the luck of being the winner of whatever event. Absolutely. I I I like that you're driving that home. We're getting to share that with the listeners because that is so important. You need to do the work, you have to have good habits. If you don't have good habits, you're not gonna have shit. I'm sorry. You know, like you just talked about. If you're, you know, eating Big Macs and ooh, a new video game came out and you're you grinding on a video game to get to this next level or this boss, I'm sorry. You're gonna get fat, you're gonna be out of shape. Other things are gonna fall off to the wayside, and you're not gonna have opportunity. So this is great stuff. And this is why people need the asset mindset philosophy to realize that they need to take ownership of their life, surround themselves with good people, you know. And let's, while I'm talking about that, let's talk about your Greenberry racing, because there you're surrounding yourself with good people, like-minded people, getting motivated. Please share that with the audience.

Habits, Preparation, And “Luck”

Birth Of Green Beret Racing

Community Through Competition

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Boy, Greenberry racing has been a thing in my life now for for about five years. Came out of nowhere. And oddly enough, on the back end of that success story of finding my way, I had achieved all my goals. And I tried to take the same approach. And I said, Well, man, I I need to I need to come up with something to do because now I'm not driving towards anything. I did it. And I tried to come up with things, and they were all bullshit. I couldn't get motivated by it. And through a little existential crisis, if you will, feeling that I was going to fall back into just despair and not have anything. And there was about a six-month period that that what a friend called me up. Uh, it was actually my battalion commander at the time, and he goes, Hey, Nick, you want to come up to my office? Uh I was like, Yeah, sure. What's going on, sir? Get up there and he goes, Hey, there's a an opportunity to go to an event. It's something with motorsports. I don't know what. Um, but I feel like it's right in your lane. And I was like, sure, I'm in. Um, so I was I was working for the Special Forces Foundation at the time. And I uh I called up Gary and I was like, hey man, I'm gonna go do a thing. Um, I don't know what it is, but I can you know I'm gonna give me some stickers. I'm gonna go rep it on whatever vehicle I'm racing and a place to do the thing. And he connects me, my battalion commander connects me with uh with a guy that he went to naval postgrad with, and I'm talking to this dude, no clue who he is, right? And I'm just calling him by his first name, just chatting this and that. We're talking about motors for about three weeks goes by, and finally I was like, dude, what do you do? And he goes, Oh, I'm the the commander of Marsok. And I was like, Oh, like currently, like the dude. And he's like, Yeah, I'm the dude in the seat. And I was like, Oh, shit, sorry, sir. And he's like, You fuck that man. We're we're racing. Like, this has nothing to do with that. Still one of my close friends. I I've slept at this dude's house. We just ripped dirt bikes a couple weeks ago in North Carolina. Wonderful human, where you had put this idea together to get just a bunch of dudes together, go race in the desert, calling it the military challenge. Um, so I went down there, called up my uh a buddy of mine who uh I was deployed with. We were in Africa a few times. He had just retired, retired as a team sergeant on a 3rd battalion, 10th group, and we we do the race. Somebody else's vehicle, someone else, someone's running the pit. We have someone giving us gear, they paid our entry fees, someone's taking care of our hotel, right, and our rental car, all that stuff. It's a wonderful experience. But we didn't know what we were walking into. And this is the largest off-road race in North America. Um, 68,000 people came through that year, right? It's huge. Like a thousand teams and whatnot. And we're racing in this special category called the military challenge. So they have a bunch of nonprofits out there being represented. And we get in the vehicle, and it is old, rickety. We started up in 2019 Polaris. Um, one it was uh 1000 XP, so not turbo, nothing fancy on it. And all of the other teams start up their vehicles and they have brand new turbo models, and their vehicles have an active shock system on them, so they all lower this and that. And we're like, oh shit. We'd never touched this vehicle before. We're like, yeah, we're in trouble. We're not gonna win this. Um, but through some just tenacity, um, we stayed in it. We blew a belt 24 miles in, 28 miles in. We uh broke our front drive axle, blew five fuses. With uh fifth group was on the course on their dot ones, and they actually pull us into the pit, um, which is allowed by racing rules. Um we ripped uh the front drive shaft out, get the the fuses fixed, get back on like 12 hours later, we finish in third place in our the military challenge class because everybody else broke. Um so it wasn't because we were amazing or anything like that, but it was a really fun thing between him and I because it was a mission. We're paying attention to things, we're driving, and then in some of the slower sections, and we're just talking about life. He's one of my closest friends. Guy's been at my wedding, like he's just a good human. And we sit down to breakfast the next morning and he goes, dude, I I needed that. And in my mind, I'm I'm looking at this man that's a retired team sergeant, he's been married for 20-some years. He has kids in the military, kids that are in college, right? He's working for Glock, he has his own business. I'm like, this is it. He's he's figured life out, and I need some roll him. And for him to say that, I was like, What do you what do you mean? And uh he's like, I don't have this this thing, this drive to to stay in it with the team that we have when we're on a detachment. You know, I'm still on the test. And there's always that thing. It's the the training event, the deployment, the whatever. And you're waking up and you know what you're going for. He's like, I didn't I don't have that. I wake up, I punch a clock, I teach a bunch of people how to shoot guns or or whatnot, you know. And he goes, but I don't have the same thing. So we sit in there, giant stack of pancakes in front of me at some roadside diet or in Las Vegas. And I was like, Well, let's do this. Like, if this is it, and and I'd heard this before from a another friend of mine shortly uh before that, that had gone to the VFW. And I was like, I laughed at him. We're sitting down for a beer and I was like, why would you go to the VFW? Uh and he goes, You don't get it, man. You're still in it, right? You I don't near any veterans, I don't work with any veterans, nobody understands what that's like. He's like, so I have to go there. And we kind of hatched this idea because of that that says, hey, let's build a little bit of community, let's get guys into desert racing. This is really cool. And then we figured out how much desert racing was going to cost, and we were like, okay, so maybe we don't do desert racing. Um, so COVID hit shortly after that. Plenty of time, you know, nobody knows what the hell's going on. So I'm kind of working through the idea, buy a dirt bike, um, go out, do some racing on that, get some guys with me. And I'm just having I formed an LLC and I was like, hey, maybe this, maybe this will do it. And I'm soliciting funds for people to help support, right? Not come into the business, but just going like, hey, I got guys that want to enter this dirt bike race. Can you chip in a few dollars for the race fees or for fuel or or whatever it was? Can you give us some gear? And people were, you know, I I guess they were they they liked the idea. Like, hey, this is kind of cool. Let's get some guys on to do it. And then I randomly got a phone call about jujitsu. Uh-huh. And I was like, that's it's not racing, but I guess you're racing to submit, right? You're you're racing. Um and I was like, fuck it. Sure, let's do it. And the mission slowly started to migrate from let's get veterans into racing to a complete flip. So I I applied for my my nonprofit, and in October of 21, I was actually in Ukraine watching the buildup start. Um as the the so I was a softly there. And I I'm granted my nonprofit status, and we started prepping for a bigger race and going to get this stuff out there. But it kind of dawned on me in the middle of it that you know I'm 6'4, 220 pounds. If I can run, but if you told me if I came to you and said, hey man, like the only way to excise your demons is to run marathons. My demons aren't getting excised, sorry. My knees aren't taking that, right? It's just it's just not gonna happen. And if you don't have another path to offer me, then I'm either gonna fuck keep going down that dark path or I'm gonna try to find something else. So we we flipped it, and instead of saying, well, come do desert racing, we say, Well, what do you want to do? And the mindset changed from let's go race to let's find you something to compete in. Right? I don't care what you want to compete in. That's not my place. I can tell you how much I love working on cars, working on dirt bikes, you know, hitting jumps and whoops and having a great time with my guys, but if that's not your thing, you're not gonna buy into it. And in the same thought of buying into your own success, you have to buy into your own recovery. You have to. If you don't see a problem with your actions or something that is worth sacrificing whatever those actions are, you're not gonna go into it. You know, if you're an alcoholic and I take away all of your beer, right, it doesn't mean you're not an alcoholic. It just means you don't have beer. So what we're that's where we we look at this whole thing, I believe, wrong in our society, that we just try to remove it, place it. I want you to look at this, and this is a morbid joke that that we say within within GBR. Like, look, if you're gonna kill yourself, do it tomorrow, but we need you today. Like, just put it off one more day, one more day. And and I have dozens of stories of guys that have called me and said, man, I I needed this. Like, I needed to get out. I had I had one Greenberry is on active duty, called me up, just crying. He's like, dude, my marriage is in shambles. I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do. Like, I need help. Right? Cool, dude. What's up? It's like 7:30 at night. And I was like, cool, what's up? I barely knew the dude, and here he is just pouring his heart out to me about all the things that are wrong. And I was like, okay, are you you a gearhead? And he says, Yeah. Like, I absolutely I love wrenching on my truck, this and that. And I was like, how would you like to go down to Las Vegas and work with the trophy truck team? Right? I can get you in the pits. I know I know a bunch of dudes on these, and people that aren't familiar with the trophy truck, it's an absolute feat of engineering. They uh they do but it's about 1200 horsepower naturally aspirated, which is a ridiculous number. Uh, they hit bumps that most cars can't take and they'll do it at 90 miles an hour, and you're just sitting there as it's floating. They are amazing, amazing pieces of machinery. And he stopped, he's like, when? And I told him, right around this time. Uh and he goes, I'm plugging my calendar. Absolutely. And it was it's stuff like that that I'm seeing guys go, okay, life sucks. Like this is terrible. I lost my job, you know, my wife left me, my knees hurt, I can't do this. But whatever you're telling me, that might be it. I'll off myself tomorrow, but let me see what this is about today. And the more they see that as hope, the more benefit they see in taking a step back from whatever that thing is and going, hey, that's a light. That's a light at the end of the tunnel. So we now, our our entire mission is to build community through competition and camaraderie. That's it. I I don't specialize in sending you to get rehab stuff, right? I'm not writing your resume. I'm not trying to find you a job. I'm not sitting you down on a couch going, oh, what did what did your mother do when you were growing up? There's plenty of them out there that do that. We stick cleanly to you wanna you want to compete? Because it's a thing you and I did in the you know in the cue course when you went to selection. Somebody in front of me, I'm gonna catch that son of a bitch, right? Right, and you're feeling tired and you've got that guy coming up behind you, you're like, nope, not today. Not today. And you do that over and over, and then you make it to a team and you show up to the flat range and you're immediately looking left and right and seeing what those guys are shooting, and you're making sure that you're tightened up, or if you're heading to Thor to work out, right? Or you're going downrange on a deployment. You can't let yourself not be prepared because one, you're not letting your buddies down, and two, you're not gonna be that guy. And when you don't have that in your life, that thing that's holding you accountable to your actions, to the things that you're doing, well, yeah, no shit you're drinking. Yeah, you're of course you're gonna find drugs and women and you know, all this like of course. Of course that's where you're gonna go because you have nothing else to hold you accountable. And the way that I I kind of address this is we don't we don't necessarily have a wonderful way of success when it comes to addiction and suicide, right? It's either you're not an addict and you're completely clean and you're a monk now, or you ode'd, right? Like there's no in between. And and I think that's a wrong metric and it's a terribly tough thing to figure out. But if you came to me and you said, hey man, I I'm an alcoholic, dude. I'm drinking a ton and I need to find some other thing. And I say, well, cool. And you're let's say you're interested in dirt bikes, you know, okay, cool. I have a dirt bike team. I have a lot of guys that ride. And let's get you out and let's teach you. We have donor bikes, here's the gear, right? And you get out there and there's a couple other guys that don't really know how to ride that well. And we get you on a course and you're you're putting around, you're kind of figuring it out, and we give you a little bit of time. But as you start to find how to do this, you go into a turn on the last, the last turn of the track, and you see dust from a dude that you've never been able to keep up with. And your mind, you go, holy shit, like I'm I might actually be figuring this out. And you go home that night, and let's say you crush a 12-pack every night, and you're looking at that 12th beer in your hand, and you go, you know what? Nah. I'm gonna hold off on that one. Bro, we just we won. Like you're consciously making a decision to better yourself in the pursuit of something that's not you, right? Something that you're not good at. You're becoming vulnerable, you're you're putting yourself out there, and you're finding a reason to change your YouTube algorithm, to change what comes through on your Instagram, what books you're ultimately looking at, how you're eating food, what time you're going to bed. You're giving yourself a reason to go to sleep because you have something to wake up for. And when you don't have that reason to wake up, yeah, you're in your underwear, you're in your chonies eating Doritos off your desk, playing Call of Duty at 3 a.m. and wondering why all of your friends have left you, right? Wondering why you can't catch any breaks, why nothing is going your way. Well, I can tell you like eight or nine different things in that scenario of why. So we're we're not after making you sober, right? We're not after getting that job of that six-figure payment. We're after you making the conscious decision to change what you're doing in pursuit of that something, that purpose beyond profession. And that's our that's our whole core mission. It's just stupid simple, it's fun, and it's really fulfilling. It it takes up all of the time to have the the guys call me and go, like, holy shit, man, I I needed this. Like I seriously needed this, and not not getting it as like that, hey, good job, man. Yeah, this was fun, and they never go away. They could they keep coming back. I don't know why. Our first mint, we had something like 15 guys down there. The first one that we fully paid for. And I worked them literally 18 hour days. We were getting back to the the house about 11 p.m., 10, 11 p.m., and we were up at 5 a.m. Then we did it for six straight days. They didn't go to the strip one time. We had to weld a whole new cage on a vehicle, get it completely race prepped, all this kind of stuff, get the dirt bikes wrapped and all that kind of stuff. We had street fest that was going on. We were just presenting this entire image. And Saturday night when we buttoned everything up, it was uh it had to be 10 o'clock and uh at night, and case of beer for everybody, and I was like, hey, I want to thank you guys. Like, no, dude, thank you. This was awesome. I was like, let me get this straight. You came to Las Vegas, and I worked you for 18 hours a day with no pay. You received no compensation for this. And you guys are thanking me, and they're like, dude, this was amazing. We absolutely worked our balls off, but it was for a reason. It was that team environment that I need to be up because this car is not leaving the pit without me. You know, the the same thought that we all have. So why not represent that in a different stage of your life?

SPEAKER_02 29:06

No, absolutely. And I think you're you're nailing it passion, purpose. Right there. If you have passion and purpose, you're that's a game changer. When you don't have those things, there's a void in your life. And you're like, uh, and then just like you said, you're filling the void. Alcohol, food, women, going out late. Some people video games. I am not the video game generation, but um, yeah, so but yeah, filling the void with the wrong things, that's not good. It's not gonna help you. So you given passion and purpose, brother. I'm proud of you for what you're doing. Um, I can see why the guys are like, thank you, thank you. Because just like your buddy there from Marsock, you need that, especially when you get out. I mean, that was one of the struggles for me. I was blessed. I got out and I did some team stuff in a sense with a new team. It just happened. To be Kid Rock and his band and touring crew, but that was a tight-knit crew. And so I went from one group, you know, my ODA, and then I got that team. So you need to find that. And I can see why guys, yeah, they'll work 18 hours. Hell, we work 24 hours straight with no sleep on a team where you're with the right guys and the purpose and the mission. So I love what you're doing, brother. And I want to somehow figure a way to be involved. Um, I am good friends with somebody that does moto. Um, I don't know if you saw the episode I had with Davy Millzap. He's an amazing person. Uh, he's motocross champion several times. He was the most winning amateur ever, but I think he's out in um Lake Havasu. I should probably connect you too. Um, he's got a lot of connections. He's now a coach for racers. So, you know, it's something I'm sure you guys would hit it off a lot. And I just love the concept of supporting people and their passion because the struggle is real for everybody. Like when you get out and you don't have that thing, you're gonna struggle. I don't care who you are. Like you talked about it, you know, you know, you big badass Green Beret, all these schools, all these medals, whatever. If you don't have purpose, you're gonna struggle. It doesn't matter at all. Yeah, it doesn't matter at all. Yeah. So if somebody wants to uh know more about Green Beret racing or what Nick is doing, please hit pause right now. Go into the description, look up his info, reach out to him, connect, donate, participate, whatever you're feeling called to do, do it. And of course, follow, like, and subscribe, the Asset Mindset podcast. Give us a like or share this with somebody that needs to hear what we're talking about, because there's some good lessons here in life. So, Nick, what else would you like to share with the audience?

Battle Of The Branches Concept

SPEAKER_00 31:49

Well, now that they've unpaused and have actually done the subscribe and the follow and went to my website and checked things out. Yeah, we're kind of branching out now. So when I first started Greenberry Racing, it was I don't know how to run a nonprofit, but I know green berettes. And the the joke that I like to say with this, I don't know what a submariner does. Right? Sure, they get in the tin can, they go under the ocean, they don't get sun for a while, and they probably hit their head on the bulkheads, but I don't know what it's like to be in that position. To be away from the family, sure, you know, to be, you know, at the the tip of the spear to do stuff. Absolutely. But that profession, I don't know what it's about. So I started this with the thought of I know Green Berets, I know soft, I know what we go through. And I've always wanted to branch out and bring this to everyone else. You know, I was talking to Danny on his podcast podcast about this, that conventional guys go through some stuff. When I was in the infantry, man, we we didn't have the Gucci gear, we didn't get all the cool support. Uh, you know, when I got shot, I we did the same circle seven times in a row, and on the seventh time I got shot. Well, no shit, right? Like you're just out there stirring it up, like the like the definition of movement to contact. Go out there, be dumb, let them shoot at you, and then see if you can get them. And just because they don't have a trident, a tab, uh an eagle, whatever we put out there that says you're better than someone, doesn't mean that you're not going through something. And we don't get training in the military of how to deal with any of those demons. They they give the habitual, hey, see something, say something, and you know, take this training right here, and all of us know how to lie on it. No, I'm you know, one to two drinks, you know, at a time, no more than twice a week. I've never had six at any time ever in my life. I get eight hours of sleep every single time. I've never thought of hurting myself. I concentrate on everything that I do. I feel great because leaving under any of those auspices is no. Like it's blasphemy. I cannot do it. I I worked for two years to get here, uh, to earn this tab, to be on this team. Nope. And I'll suck up every injury, every problem, everything. I'll put every relationship on hold to stay here. Well, and then you get out and you have, you know, 10, 20 years of shit to deal with. And it's no different when you're dealing with an imagery guy, you know, a tanker or a person that loaded bombs on a UAB. So what we're we're looking to do, uh, we're actually started, we got our second vehicle, uh, looking to do uh the third and the fourth this week. We're we're taking four Crown Victoria police interceptors. We are jacking them up and making them a little bit more Mad Max style, and then I've assigned one to each of the four major branches, so our Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, and we're gonna go race these in the desert uh three different times next year in a head-to-head battle of the branches, just us four shit talking, season-long. Season-long competition. We'll call it Battle of the Branches. We've got a lot of support behind the thing right now, with March 5th or 4th through 9th being the launch date for the Mid 400 in Las Vegas. And the entire premise is, you know, if I sent you out on a deer hunt and I put you up in the stand and I give you the rifle and I, you know, I make sure everything's correct, I put the bait out, you can shoot the biggest deer that's ever existed. Your name is in the world record book. You didn't learn anything, right? You just you could be pissed drunk sitting in that that stand and do it. What we want to do is give you something over an entire season, right? At least a year's worth of activity that gives you something to look forward to the next thing. You know, you're in the deer stand, you might be looking forward to it, but once you get the deer, you don't. It becomes last week and then last month and last year, and the next thing you know, nothing has actually changed for you. You still have the story, but that doesn't change anything. So we're trying to pivot that and instead say, hey, we have the next race. And you know, I'll be damned if the Air Force beats me. Absolutely not. They don't even drive, right? They're supposed to fly. They can't beat me in a desert race. But I want to bring that kind of camaraderie, that kind of trash talk to all of the branches and say, look, we're we're doing this and we want you to show up, find a reason to support your team. And whether it's through donations or bench turning or we get you behind the wheel, we ultimately want to see this same community and camaraderie through competition be built for everybody, but we want to really, really, you know, highlight the inner like inner service robbery and trash talking that we have. You know, we we've been on plenty of deployments where we have Air Force guys with us and Navy EODs with us, or maybe we have a SEAL platoon attached to us, or raiders are with us, or maybe it's all of us, or it's flip. Maybe we're attached to some rangers or whatnot. Level of trash talk that we do to each other is absolutely amazing. And it's tough to understand on the outside, but we truly get it. And the the great thing about it is I've never once been in a firefight when I've had another branch next to me and gone, I don't know if I can trust this guy, because you don't look at him in that light. This is all fun highlight stuff afterwards and before. But when it comes down to doing it, you that's your that's your brother or your sister in arms. So this whole thought of competing against each other, well, we're gonna do it on the course. And when those things come in, we're gonna make sure that, hey, maybe that's the Navy car. Doesn't matter. I'm gonna get them back out there as quickly as we can. We need parts for it, got it, because we're gonna beat them out there, not you know, in the in the pits, and then we're gonna trash talk and have fun and really just see where it goes. The year after, we're gonna expand, bring in the the two wannabe services.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Space Force?

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Yep. One of my CEO buddies calls them the puddle pirates, uh, the trekys coming in. Um, and then I I'm in contact with a lot of law enforcement agencies, and we will bring the uh the law enforcement element to this too, because that whole front line is as I like to call it, not you know, the home front or the foreign and domestic thought, but we all try to serve and do roughly the same thing just in different environments, and they go through that stuff, the fire department, the EMS, and what not, we want to bring them in and we want to do the same thing and and have fun. And I kind of have this idea of us all sitting around a campfire, you know, maybe it's the army and it's the the Marine Corps sitting there trash talking each other. And then the Navy walks in and we immediately start throwing shade towards the the Navy, and we look at the Marine Corps and we go, Hey, your dance partner's here.

SPEAKER_01 38:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

Now in the Air Force, oh, everybody has to talk trash on them, and we're all going back and forth, and then in walks the cops, and everybody just gets quiet. Right? And it's just fun stuff that we are about, that we know that most people don't don't truly see. They they see the fun rivalry stuff like the Army Navy game. But the the actual rivalry, fun trash talking that we is something that I I want to highlight for all of our guys, make us make them feel that community, that sense of belonging, and that that larger purpose that's there.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

No, I love that. And it's so important to have that, you know, surrounded with good people. And yeah, you're pushing each other. And it's tough love, it's giving each other a little bit of shit. But like you, I mean, I had an Air Force JTAC, I had a marine dog handler, you know, and I was downright. So, like, yeah, we're all the same, but boy, did we give each other some shit? But it's good for laughs and humor. You know, people don't understand how good it is to laugh. You know, embracing the suck when you're in a suck situation and you can just make jokes. I mean, we've been doing it here a little bit in the podcast, you know, and even prior before we went live recording. Like, humor is very important. You want to talk a little bit about that as far as how that can change the dynamics of an event or something that's going on? Yeah.

Humor As A Coping Tool

SPEAKER_00 39:29

Uh the the first story that that kind of comes to mind, that same softly gig uh that I was doing in Ukraine, we had a uh a SEAL platoon uh attached to the task force. And I had just finished a uh a naval free fall course with uh a couple SEALs. And there was also a couple other naval elements that were there, but the SEALs and us, we linked up. There's only three of us for me, or two of us, two SEALs and three GBs that were there. Um nationally, we migrated towards each other, we're you know, drinking beer and talking trash and all that kind of stuff, and we we had a pretty good bond. Fast forward, um, one of their chiefs ended up being in Ukraine. And I have to liaison with them because they're doing plenty of stuff, and I'm just trash talking to no end to the SEALs, and they're firing it back and they're having fun. Well, one day I'm I'm in the uh the team house, I'm down in the basement, I'm talking to some of our guys, and I get a phone call from uh one of their LPOs and he goes, Hey, are you at the house? And I was like, Yeah. I was like, Can you come up here? And I was like, Yeah, sure. And I walked up and the whole platoon was there, right? And their lieutenant calls them to attention and presents these mocked-up orders for a trident to me, and they give it to me, and they're like, You're a fucking honorary seal now, because we can't have a non-SEAL talking as much shit to us as you are right now. And I was like, dude, I can't take this. Like, this is going like that's stolen valor. I'm not a I'm not a seal. And they're like, Yeah, we're not fucking Green Berets either. So, you know, deal with it. Because it was just this level of trash talking as we're watching the Russians build up a ton. We don't, and we're not getting any orders at this point. We're like, are we leaving? We got extended, like we were supposed to leave just before Thanksgiving. We didn't leave until fucking damn near February. Um, and so with this big place of ambiguity where we have a real arm the side of the border. We know that they probably don't want to do anything to us, but we also know they have Cold War technology. Um, you know, they're shooting, might as well be shooting scuds, is accurate as some of the stuff is. Uh, and we didn't know. Are we sitting with our Ukrainian special operations partners and are we helping them repeal invasion that we know is coming? Or are we leaving? What are we doing? And there's just this big ambiguity while everyone is away from their families and not knowing what's going on. And these guys were like, you know what? Fuck Nick. There is no way we're gonna accept this from this dude. And setting up all this fake stuff. And it was great. Like, I would go out and drink beer with those dudes and all that kind of stuff, and it's the humor, the ability to look at the thing and go, like, okay, this is what we can control. We can control our personal interactions with each other. We can find make light of a situation because I can't control what the president's doing. I can't control what the joint chiefs are saying or the secretary of war now or anything. So why don't we control what's within us and and have fun with it? And that I still talk to those dudes. I talked uh to actually that guy just two days ago at NBS and about that stuff. So it's it's a it's a form of communication, it's a form of getting you know a little bit of energy, whether it be nervous or or whatnot, out and and into the environment and use it. And we we see it this when we we get out of gunfights, right? You can always tell how the the patrol went or the mission went by how we get back to the the base. When we get back there, if we are laughing and joking, we did our job, right? Because it's that energy that we're we're blowing off. If we're quiet, if we're somber, something didn't quite go right. And then we'll find ways to you know to get that out. It's a workout, it's you know, whatever, whatever that becomes. But humor within our culture, you know, is often looked at as you know, a very morbid and dark sense of humor, but it's a coping mechanism for us to look at, hey, I need to find something that I can control, I need to laugh, I need to feel something that's a little bit more positive, puts a smile on my face so that I can deal with whatever the hell is over here. And when you get to that place where you can kind of forget, like, yeah, we lost our buddy, right? Um in 2011, we uh we lost a guy in the task group, and we all sat around a fire in Afghanistan passing uh a couple bottles of Johnny Walker around, and you got to tell a story. And here we are, this person that was uh an absolute legend within our unit at the time. It's actually his uh anniversary was five days ago. Um, and he we would tell stories and they were never somber stories, right? You have grown men that are in tears crying about a person that they in in all true intense of the word loved, are telling stories while they're in tears and laughing about, oh shit, do you remember when this asshole came in and did this and did that? And everybody is there laughing, absolutely having a hole in their heart, missing this individual, and finding ways to to lighten the mood and be like, no. He wouldn't want us to be this way, right? He wouldn't want us to be laughing and joking and telling stories, and it it turns into this really weird place that a civilian funeral isn't like that. Um and you're not you're not gonna experience that. So yeah, humor is is our absolute way of coping with situations that we can't grasp, we can't understand, or we at least can't control.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

Yeah, I think it's a great way also, you know, as far as a coping mechanism, but it also helps uh change the dynamic uh that you're feeling or the energy within. Because when you laugh, you smile. And when you smile, it just does things. There's science behind that, you know, for all those muscles to go, and that's almost like the fake it till you make it as well, you know, like just laughing it. But there's really science behind that. You start laughing and smiling, even in the worst things, it's gonna make you feel better. Now, is it gonna make the pain go away or the sorrow? No, but it will make some changes, it will help change the energy within you. I know, you know, I had that because I've dealt with loss too. Um, luckily, no, nobody in my team. We've lost people in the company, whatnot. Art Lily, God bless you. And he was a gearhead. I don't know if you um ever went out by Uari and did anything with Jeeps or whatnot, but there's a trailhead, Master Sergeant, Art Lilly. He's got uh he was a great gearhead. Man, his Jeep, and we'd bust his balls all the time, like, oh, there's a toy. But you know, it's just good stuff, great stuff. And I think people, you're listening, try and do that. Laugh at the suck. You know, laugh at it, find jokes, memories, twist it around, make yourself laugh. Because you know what? The struggle is real for everybody. You're gonna struggle in life. You know, Nick struggled, I've struggled, we're Green Berets, we've run through all kinds of shit, but guess what? You still have stuff to deal with. Firefighters, first responders. Hey, you're a nurse working in the ER. You see trauma and things happen. You know, you're a regular person just going to the office, you get in a car accident, shit happens, there's trauma, whatever. It's part of the human experience. Get over it, reframe it, figure it out, find passion and purpose, just like Nick has. And I love what you're doing, brother, because I'm proud of you. You're helping others find their passion and purpose. Absolutely. And when you do that, how fulfilling is that when you're able to help others?

SPEAKER_00 46:39

It's what keeps it going. You know, it's I think it's the difference between that cubicle, punching a clock, nine to five, I'm earning a paycheck, and actually investing in something. And one of the the stories that that really kept me in this is I I was walking into a big global gym and I saw uh a guy in the locker room. It's like 7 30, he's getting ready to leave. I'm walking in for my workout, and he has this sniper-oriented shirt on, right? I recognize it as marine stuff. Uh, and I looked at him and I was like, hey, are you a pig or a hog? And he his head popped up and he looked at me, he's like, uh, I'm I'm a pig. And I was like, hell yeah, dude. Like, you know, I'm I'm in the army, but you know, I'm I'm equivalent of one of your hogs, right? And he kind of was like, dude, hell yeah. And something told me, I was like, I need to tell this dude a little bit about the mission. Real quick, elevator pitch, handed my business card. He was on the way out. What I didn't know is that he was going through a particularly troublesome period of his life. You know, he'd gotten out of the core, he had moved, he was nowhere near his friends. Um, he didn't have a support network, he hadn't found employment yet, none of his disability claims had come through, and he's struggling. And and he later confided in me. He was like, Yeah, I sat in my car and I was really contemplating the next steps. He's like, I don't know where that was going, but it wasn't good. And he goes, and then you handed me your card. He goes, and I put that card in my in my pocket, and it felt like I had a weight in there, like I had to reach out to you. And he uh he sits there, he he texted me this fucking novel, War and Peace, right? Came on way too strong. But we were, I had just gotten back from a deployment. We were prepping for uh the biggest race uh that we had that year, and we were opening a headquarters, you were doing merchandising and setting everything up. We were in full swing, and I absolutely spaced responding back to him. Uh, about a week and a half, two weeks goes like goes by. And and he told me, he's like, dude, I was I was wondering what the hell was going on, right? I need something. Like, and I'm he's like, I'm continuing to go down a path. And he goes, and I on a whim, I reached back out to you. And I saw the text and I was like, oh shit, I didn't say anything to this dude. And we're almost done with the construction, the stuff uh of the headquarters, and I was like, hey man, uh, this is the address that we're at. You know, if you bring any tools, you know, it'd be cool if you come by and help. And he shows up, tool the 10 man tailor, full belt, all the tools in the vet. Dude was ready and motivated, and we didn't really have anything left. Like literally, the paint is drying. Um, so we find a couple things to do, and it's me and two other green berets and him. Um, and he was, what do you say? He was an 0352, um, which whatever the hell that means to a Marine. Uh, they probably couldn't add those numbers together, but they have them. Um I hope, yeah, I hope he's listening. And we go out to lunch and we uh we go right down the street, we sit down, we have some beers, crayons are on the table, we naturally throw them at him, you know, we're and we're just trash talking. At the very end of lunch, he goes, guys, he gets a little teary-eyed and he goes, hi, I need this. Like, I don't have anything. Um, we're like, dude, come on. Like, we don't care. You know, you're you'll be our our cromie. We know that you're a little, a little slow, but we got you. Like, come on in. Um he said shortly after that, he he went home and opened his mailbox and he had his full disability rating and the back pay for the check. And it was a huge weight that came off. And we had given him just a tiny bit of hope to say, well, maybe tomorrow I'll do it. And who knows? It's not my place to say. It's not he doesn't even know. But had that interaction not happened, had that not stepped up and said, hey man, we can help you, who knows where where that could have gone. And to think that just a little bit of outrage, just to, hey, come get beers with us, you know, could have potentially saved this guy's life. You know, that's that's stuff that that keeps you motivated to say, man, I do not want to write another sponsorship email. I do not want to correspond to another corporation and go through all of the discovery and figuring out if they're worth their time, because it's a big drain on me. But then stuff like that happens and you're like, you know what? This is this is worth it. This is why I'm putting my personal time into this organization to make it happen. It's just small things because you you never know, right, who you're who you're gonna run across. And I'm sure we've missed dozens of opportunities, whether, you know, I'm tired and just didn't have the motivation to to talk to somebody, or we didn't have the funds to help out, or or somebody just didn't hear about us. Um, so it's it's really that kind of stuff. Waking up, being like, okay, we got a thing. And to your point, as we started this being organized, you know, I download my day every day in my notebook about the things that I failed, where I need to do better the next day, and I come up with my like itemized priority list. And a friend of mine asked me, she's like, How do you do this? Right? Like, you got so much stuff going on. And I was like, Well, it's really simple. I make a list. And she said, and then what? I said, I do the things on the list. Like I can't break it down any simpler.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

That's uh I got lists and lists, and I love sticky tabs, you know. I get the the the other ones here, the blue ones, like that that you know the team rooms littered with them or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 51:55

Like, man, people don't realize the power of just write shit down. Write it down, check it off one by one.

Service Stories And Small Saves

SPEAKER_00 52:04

Yeah. I I break my my list into three different things. I have my priority, this is what I will get done today. Right. And whether that is GBR-related, financial, or it's hey, I have an anniversary of my wife coming up. This is my priority. I will get this done. And then I have my this is going to become a priority, but if I can knock it out today, I'll I'll get that done. And then I have, you know, probably five just quick hitters. You know, I'm in between calls, you know, I have a good break point. Hey, I wanted to look up this thing. I wanted to know something about that. And then I'll do that real quick. And I'm making progress. And it's nice to see X's, you know, get put on the list, but it turns almost into uh a manic desire to achieve the things that you're writing down because you look at the list and you almost judge how well you've done that day by how many things you've gotten done. And you go, oh shit, I haven't I haven't got that many things done today. I need to I need to put social media away, right? I need to not sit over here and and look. I I mean I got went down a rabbit hole about the suspension on these crown picks for like four hours about swapping socks and lifting this. On phone calls about it. But I looked at my list and I was like, um, I got two guys specifically dedicated to just working on the suspension of these vehicles. I need to let them run. I need to let them do it. And I think the the thing with leadership in in all of this is hire people to do a job and then let them do the job you hired them to do. And that is so lost on so many people because they look at it and go, well, you're not doing it as well as as I could. Well, of course. It's your passion, it's your idea, it's your dream. You're going to put more energy into that. But if you can get 10 people to do the job, different jobs at 50% of what you can do, you've now achieved 500% more than what you were you were trying to do. So let go of the perfectionism in them, let them take some ownership in it and find a way to advance the things that you have as a leader within your organization, within your business, or within your life to say, this is it, right? If you just start with kids, you tell them to clean the room, you're going to clean the room better than they are. Flat and simple. Right? You're better at this, you know what you want, but you don't walk back in there and go, stop. I'm going to clean your room for you because you're not doing it well enough. You tell them, you give them corrections, left and right limits. No, the dirty clothes don't go under the bed. They go in the hair burn. Right? No, your towel does not stay on the floor after you take a shower and you're done drying off, you hang it up so that it dries. But we don't apply that often to the business mindset of going out and hiring people. We want to get in there and nitpick these little things. Oh, I think you should change this verbiage. Well, does it meet the intent? Did you tell them what to do? Are they doing it? Okay. Well, if it doesn't break anything that you're trying to do, let them do it. And that leads to the two big rules that we have in the organization. Do what you say you're going to do and tell me when you can't. And I can't fault you if I'm not paying you for not making time for me. Right? It's your motivation and your passion to do stuff for me and your word. And if you tell me, I can shift people within the organization to kind of help. But if you come back with the excuse of, sorry, man, I got busy. Cool. You don't shit? Or is it that you're playing on social media when you do that? You know, is this because it all comes down to priority? Doesn't matter if you're your Elon Musk or a homeless student on the side of the street, you have the exact same number of hours, you have the same exact same ability to put, you know, whatever your passion is or whatever your attention goes to into what it is that you want. And if you don't discipline yourself and you play on social media and you wonder why you didn't get anything done, well, there you go. So for us, and I've let a lot of people go in the organization because they come back with that. I I was actually deployed my second trip to Ukraine, and I had a guy go, Yeah, man, sorry, I got a little bit busy. I'm like, I'm getting shelled by the Russians right now. Like, and you're telling me you're too busy? Or like, are you kidding me right now? Like, I don't have time for that kind of an excuse. Uh so I've taken up this leadership style of, hey, go do it. If you need correction or you need advice, let me know. But this is my left and my right limits. I develop uh a duties, responsibility, and expectations, a two-way expectation. This is what I expect of you, this is what you can expect of me. And go, and then I'll give you a right and a left. And it's it's been great. I kind of learned that on my my last deployment as a team lead. Only only a couple guys in the country, and we had the the Secretary of State coming in. Um no, no, it was it was the Sec Def was coming in, and my guys were getting ready to go and be the direct guards for um the UConn commander, who I didn't know at the time, knew exactly who we were, knew us by first name, came in, wanted just specifically to talk to us. But I remember I'm sent those two out, and I'm senior enlisted, and we are getting ready to just provide not QRF, if you will, but hey, you know, we need a parking spot at this place because that's where they're going. Cool. We're gonna jump ahead of you and and we're gonna park there, and then when you come in, you'll have a front row spot to it. Or hey, dude's getting tired. Yeah, we'll go get coffee. Sure. And we did this bounce back and forth, but the first day they were up, and it's two E6s, right? Go in a meet with the senior commander, the supreme highlight commander of Europe, right? This dude has more stars than I had dots as a warrant, right? More rockers than any of my guys have. Actually, more rockers than three of all of them combined. And I'm sitting there, remember I'm sitting on the toilet and I'm sending out a text, and it was this obligatory, I'm in charge. Hey guys, don't forget, you're professional, you're representing us, don't do this, don't do that. Remember, we talked about this. And I remember halfway through it, I was like, I fucking hate when I'm told this stuff by command. I'm not gonna be that guy. And I remember I just threw my phone across the room. And we come back and they have nicknames from the commander because of how well they did. Right? They just knocked it clean out of the park and I trusted them and I had no reason to send them some arbitrary guidance on stuff that they already know. I hired them to do the job. I hand selected them for that position and I put them in the place to do that specific job. Why the hell do I need to call them and be like, hey guys, make sure you do the thing that I brought you in to do? Well, no shit. Right? Nothing is changed. Right? Why are you talking to me? You're wasting your breath and you're wasting my time. So I I've really tried to, I've shifted my leadership style in that sense and go back to a little bit more of like, hey, this is what I need you to do. What are your questions? Right? I'll answer. My phone's on. You can call me when you need, but what I need from you is A, B, and C. And I think there are two different types of leadership styles in this sense. I can tell you, I need you to get to D, and you're gonna do it A, B, and C. Or I need you to get to D. Or if you do it, you know, C A B and you still get to D, cool. But if I prescribe the second set, get to D, I don't care. I don't get to come back and criticize you for not doing it A, B, and C. You did it. Right? We can talk about the approach, all that kind of stuff. Hey, what were your thoughts on this? Whoa, okay. I see it differently. And when you're a a young team guy, you know, and and you're told to be in charge of something, hey, 18 Bravo, go put us in a machine gun position up there. If the team sergeant is over his shoulder saying, nope, not there, right? Put it over here because that's where I would put it, you're not teaching him anything. You're not letting him lead. If it doesn't violate any of the fundamentals, he has clear lines of sight, he has the ability to do any kind of fire that he needs, everything is there, okay. Well, let him put it there. And then talk to him after. Let him learn, right? Yeah, that's gonna suck. That that climb's really not gonna be fun. I would probably put it over there, but you're you're gonna learn. And that is a completely different thing. And not to to belabor this point, but in one of my my favorite green berets that I've ever worked with, uh, retired. Um see, I think he's the Eusis, was the USAS Oxar Major, or maybe he was getting ready to be there. His name's Ted Monter, came out of 10th group. He was the Operation sergeant on my first deployment with SF, and this dude was fucking awesome. And I didn't know the story at the time, but he went out with an ODA, and they were going into the Corangal Valley and heading up, and they're going to support the SAS on a mission. And they come under fire, and it's the junior Bravo in the company. I don't just mean the team, I mean he's the junior Bravo in the company, 18X revived, one other GB, and then you have this sober star, Purple Heart recipient, Sergeant Major, behind him. And the the way that the guy tells the story, um, he says, Yeah, I'm right there. We get into a firefight, and I'm looking at the Junnies, and I'm like, hey, I need fire here, and I need this here. So then I get to the sergeant major, right? And I go, and I start to move on. And he goes, and in that moment, Ted looks at me and goes, fuck that. Where do you want me? Right? You have this guy that has all of the clout in the world and the absolute ability to go, my firefight, I'm running this, looking at the most junior dude in his first firefight and just saying, run with it, do it. He can step in, he could have taken it, but in that moment, that is such a valuable lesson as he popped his rucksack quick releases to go lay down fire as a Bravo right rifleman, instead says, lead it. And that guy shot up through the ranks. He became a stellar leader, still is, he's a sergeant major himself now, but in that moment, Ted let him do the thing that he was hired to do and only was there. I mean, if Ryan, if you would have went wrong, he would have absolutely stepped in and be like, I got this, check, we need this. But he let him do it. And we have this feeling as leaders that, oh, we can't fail. No, fail. That's the way that you learn. If you're going into an operation and everything or a business plan or a proposal or a job interview, and you don't think that you can fail, you're either not taking it seriously enough or it's not good enough for you. Right? It is well below you. You should be going in and double checking, man, I need to I need to double check this. But when the deck is stacked in your favor, not because of the opportunities that you presented, this the passion and the drive that you have, but because some outside entity is making that happen, you will not appreciate any lesson that you have. You will not take anything away from that other than, yeah, we did it. Cool. Right. So hire the people, let them do the things that they do. They're not gonna do it as well as you, unless it's like accounting and you're not an accounting guy. Yeah, take that all day.

Lists, Focus, And Leadership

SPEAKER_02 1:02:23

But sorry, fully for that point all day, man. No, that's great. And I really, Nick, man, I I'm proud of you. I love what you're doing. I love what you just shared. I think the audience is gonna get so much from this. I mean, not to micromanage, to let people go, the things with passion and purpose, your organizational skills with your list and like prioritizing, like, hey, I gotta get this done. Like, there's so much knowledge here that you're sharing. I want to thank you again for coming on and being a part of the asset mindset for being someone that takes the positive mindset and making change in the world. Brother, you you know, I I can't give you enough kudos or attaboys, you know, sustains the things that we would say, like just keep going, keep doing it. If I can be an asset in any way, I want to. Uh, I think I might have to maybe get an asset mindset sticker somehow, some way on one of your vehicles. Or maybe I don't know if I can work up my schedule. I'm pretty good at turning wrenches. I was a Charlie, but you know, I've I've replaced uh back in the day I had a um Chevy Blazer, the hard top back came off. It was a 19 uh 1991, I think. Oh no, and I changed that 350 engine in five and a half hours by myself. Yeah. Now listen, it was the second time because I was a dumbass and put the flywheel in backwards. Bit you learned with the size of every single thing. I was so pissed too.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:52

Like, damn it, I put the it won't start a flip.

unknown 1:03:56

Fuck.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:57

So I go in and I'm like, that's it, I'm fixing this tonight. And I just went nonstop and every bolt was already cracked and loose. So that's why I did it. But I can still say, yeah, I took an engine out and put it back in in five and a half hours by myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:12

The first time it took me a couple days. That's everything that you're you're talking about there. The lesson that you learned and paying attention, dedication to it, the hard work that it takes. That drove home and I drove it home. And I'll bet you when you drove that blazer around after, you were far more proud of that car than you were before. You're like, I did this. This engine is with me, right? Not some mechanic. You'd drop that off at a shop and they'd have done it in two days, charged you four times the worth of the car, right? You'd be like, cool, yeah, I have a blazer. This thing is really cool, right? But you did it. And that's a very powerful message that that you can take to anything else in life. When you build it, when you put the work in for it, you don't just learn from it. You now have a passion for it. It's your thing. And when we get guys behind wrenches, when we get guys on racetracks and stuff like that, guys that they don't know shit about cars when they start. And we start them off with grease markers on just the lug nuts. Hey, go draw a line on the lug nut and onto the rim. And when this thing comes into the pit, I need you to walk around and look at every single one of those lines and make sure they they're still tight. And if they're not, if it's out of out of place, call us and we'll fix it. And then they start learning the other parts of it and getting into it. And they're like, oh, okay. And then look, they'll call us up and they'll be like, hey, so I just bought this shit box on Facebook Marketplace. You know, could you guys help me out? Absolutely. Let's work on this thing, man. Let's have fun. And to that, that same point, it's doing it yourself. You're you're showing up for yourself to make yourself uncomfortable, to learn, to figure it out. And you get so much more from it. You're gonna grow.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:39

Absolutely. So, um, what would you attribute your biggest success or what message would you like to leave the audience?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:46

I call it my wet socks theory. Right? When you go to the field for the first time, that the field problem just starts. The most important thing that you have is your dry feet. And you will do everything in the world to keep them dry. Right? You will find different ways around little ponds and and creeks and all that kind of stuff. But the second it happens, you can take one of two things. And I take the, well, this is gonna be a story now approach. I could sit there and hang my head and be like, ah shit, I need to I need to hurry up and get my socks changed and powder my feet and all this kind of stuff. Or I can focus on the stuff that's coming up and go, this is gonna be an experience. I I'm about to learn something from this. It may be a lesson that gets reinforced in my head, or it may be something new because it's just the start of where that thing goes. When you have bad things that happen in your life that you're not prepared for and you can't control anything about it, you need to be ready to learn and look at it from a student's perspective and not a victim's perspective. You just lost your job? Yeah, that sucks. Take some time to figure that out. But guess what? What now? What skill can you go learn? What can you pursue? What differences in your life can you learn to make that'll that'll change that? You just lost your your girlfriend or your your wife? Okay, dude, that that sucks. What's next? Right? Become the student that's looking forward. Look at your wet socks as a lesson for what is to come, what can be, instead of, well, my feet are soggy and life sucks. You know, there's uh an old cartoon that goes around, then it has uh an inframan, a ranger, a green beret, an aviation guy, and an Air Force dude on it. The infantry guy has a ruck on a sack and it's raining, and he goes, This sucks. Gets over the ranger and he's just in a pond. Right. And he goes, I like the way this sucks. Gets to an SF guy and he's biting a snake and he goes, I wish this would suck more. Gets the aviation guy and he's looking down at everybody and he goes, Man, it looks like it sucks down there. And then it's the Air Force guy, and he has his feet kicked up, watching TV, and he goes, Oh man, the cable's out. This sucks. It's all a perspective of how you're looking at it. And each one of those different things is a fun look into the life of it, but it's how you perceive the thing that just went wrong that's going to define you going forward. Learn from it.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:05

Absolutely. Build a positive mindset, have a strong mindset, embrace the suck, adapt, improvise, overcome, surround yourself with good people, do all the things and own your power. I love it, man. Thank you again for being here with the asset mindset. Don't forget to follow, like, and subscribe, and definitely go in the description and find out more about Green Beret Racing, and it's not just racing. So, one more time out there, audience, do not forget own your power.