Building the Asset Mindset with Special Operations Veteran Aaron Love

 In this episode of The Asset Mindset Podcast, Daniel Fielding sits down with Aaron Love, former Air Force PJ and Special Operations leader, to break down what it truly means to live with an Asset Mindset. Aaron shares how mentorship, self-awareness, discipline, and hard work shaped his career and personal transformation. From overcoming alcoholism and imposter syndrome to embracing ownership and service, Aaron highlights how adversity can become fuel for personal growth. This conversation is a powerful reminder that believing in yourself, serving others, and committing to the grind are the foundations of elite performance and lasting success.

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Chapters

 00:00 Introduction to the Asset Mindset Podcast

02:13 The Special Operations Community and Mindset Development

06:28 Mentorship and Its Importance in Special Operations

11:04 Belief and Self-Discovery in Achieving Goals

17:18 Ownership and Accountability in Personal Growth

22:00 The Role of Hard Work and Discipline

27:33 Motivation vs. Discipline: The Key to Success

29:59 Personal Growth and Learning from Experiences

34:16 Finding Positivity in a Negative World

38:51 The Power of Service and Community Engagement

41:36 Advice to My Younger Self

50:00 Facing Darkness and Overcoming Challenges

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Ones Ready Podcast: https://tr.ee/kPgnFaUO00

Produced by Security Halt Media

Transcript

Meet Aaron Love, Air Force PJ

SPEAKER_01 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. Today we have a special guest, Aaron Love, Air Force PJ Ones Ready Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to the show, Aaron. Hey, thank you so much for having me on, Daniel. I really appreciate it. Thanks for your service. Thanks for all you continue to do. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Ditto, brother. I mean, thank you. I love what you're doing. I mean, the Ones Ready Podcast is amazing how you get people ready, how you deal with the mindset, and also you're a PJ. And let me tell you, when I was in airborne school, that was my first um exposure to a PJ. And I was like, these guys are badass because you guys were smoking everybody pretty much at airborne school. So I don't know where it is in your pipeline, but you guys were already studs. So I've always been impressed. I got a good friend of mine that I actually do mission work down in like Guatemala and stuff. He was a PJ and he's a stud too. So it's an honor to have you here, man. And I can't wait to uh let the audience dive into your mindset.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

I appreciate that. Thanks very much. Yeah, that's it's a funny thing, but you know, Pararescuan, unlike other special forces, we attach to special forces teams, right? The physical fitness thing, that's actually part of our culture. It's actually number one. We have a career field education and training plan. And number one is maintain fitness and standards in accordance with, and then it has our regs. But man, you can't be the Air Force guy and walk into a team. You got to be jacked, you got to be tan, you got to be a good shooter, and you got to just absolutely knock your primary skills out of the park. We we take that very seriously. So good on you that you had those good PJs. They were probably annoying at airborne school, I'll tell you that much. Probably too loud, probably talking a bunch of crap, but I love it.

Why Ones Ready Was Born

SPEAKER_01 1:50

They were highly motivated and I loved it. They were inspiring to me because at that point I was coming in as a nobody off the street, and I wanted to be special forces, and then I learned PJs work with special forces, and they had that mindset and that attitude and the professionalism too. Yeah, they were a bunch of wise asses sometimes, but boy, they were hard chargers, and it was it was an awesome thing and definitely motivated me more to want to be a Green Beret and work with guys like that. That's awesome. That is awesome. I love these communities. Yeah, there's nothing like the special operations community. The the mindset of the people that you were working with, they're giving, they're hardworking, they embrace the suck. So let's share some of that because you help mentor people to come into this world. Talk about that. How do you help develop their mindset?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

You know, so you know the the year was 2019. Let me take you back to a far gone, you know, it feels like a million years ago at this point, you know. So I was approaching the end of my career. I was an instructor at the Pararescue Combat Rescue Officer Schoolhouse. That's in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It's on Kirtland Air Force Base. And my friends, there was a there was a group of us, so there were four of us uh to start, three of us now. We basically just all, as is always the thing, you know, we're all on group chats and we were just kind of lamenting, you know, we're answering the same questions over and over again. What's a PJ? What's deployment like? What's the family life like? When you're not deployed, what are you doing? And we all joke that we should just start a podcast and then everybody will have this information in front of them, and hopefully we can help some people out because lots of people know what a Green Beret does, lots of people know what Navy SEALs do, lots of people know what the Mars Oc Raiders do and what the, you know, prior to them, the Force Recon guys did. But not a whole lot of people understand that the Air Force actually has a ground component and the righteous mission that they get after, whether it's combat control, TAC P, being an Air Force PJ or being a special reconnaissance airman, and then they have officer counterparts. So we wanted to sensitize people to that because as as you well know, about 23% of young American males and females actually qualify for military service at that point. So that's right right off the rip. We're losing 77% of the American citizenry out of that equation. Well, that 23%, everybody is sort of fighting for that 23%. Green berets, SEALs, Navy, first responders, fire, what have you, right? And we need the 1% of that 23%. And we decided that there was no way that there's a difference between quiet professional and silent professional. You can be a quiet professional and still talk about the goodness of the Air Force and the goodness of what it means to be a pararescuan, to have that mission of that others may live. You can be a quiet professional about that without being silent. And we decided, even as active duty folks, we were all active duty when we started that we were going to take the risk. We were going to go out there on our real names. We were going to wake up early at 5 a.m. every single weekend, and we were just going to try to reach out to those young 17 to 35-year-old American males and females that think they can do something impossible. And we wanted to be open, honest, transparent, vulnerable, and accessible. We wanted to show people we're not Superman. Special forces operators are not these people that are unachievable and superhuman in any regard. We're normal people, we're dads, we're just guys, we're just, I'm some broke kid from Ohio that had this wacky idea when 2001 happened that I wanted to go and I wanted to fight for America and I wanted to do it in the most righteous career field that I could find, and that was Pararescue. And without us, without you, without Denny, without Peaches, without Trent, without those GWAT veterans reaching down and talking to those people, we were going to lose that experience that we fought so hard in three theaters for 20 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Northern Africa and far flung places worldwide. That younger generation isn't going to know the difference of a bullet that snaps and a bullet that buzzes unless we tell them. And unless we extend ourselves and we put ourselves out there in the most open and honest way that we possibly can. And we really just leaned into it. Five years later, here we are. You know, podcasts aren't supposed to be over a hundred episodes. That's usually where they fail. Well, we just dropped episode 525 and we're not slowing down. We want to continue to help coach and guide and mentor. And sometimes, sometimes you have to have a little team, Sergeant Time, and you got to get a little bit directive with these kids and you got to re-baseline them and give them some good senior NCO input. But we love it. And we've got a big network of folks that we've we've found ourselves to be friends with. And I gotta be honest with you, I get more out of it than I put into it. Hearing these messages, watching these kids achieve something that they thought was impossible, completely undoable when they started the process. Man, it makes my heart happy. It makes me feel good about America, where we're going.

Quiet Professional vs Silent Professional

SPEAKER_01 6:35

That's fantastic. And what a way to mentor. So you mentor all these people coming in. You help shape and mold them. Did you have this in you innately or talk to me about how you learned about mentorship?

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah. So it I, you know, just like any any good little pup, I just looked at the big dogs ahead of me. You know, I I actually just this is a crazy thing to even try to wrap my head around, but one of my mentors that I grew up, so he was a pararescuan that got in way before me. He was my team sergeant at my first assignment, that was where I learned how to be a mentor. We all go by operator initials in the Air Force. We're so small that no kidding, if you if you go to a PJ and you say, hey, do you get you know a guy named Aaron Love? He goes by LX. LX are my operator initials. That's how we communicate to each other when we're downrange. So if you hear LX on a radio, people that hear that and that are PJs know, hey, that's Aaron Love talking. Uh his operator initials were CA. He's actually got a son that lives here in Vegas that's thinking about going into AF-spec war. And I just had a conversation with one of my mentors yesterday, but he taught me what it was, what it meant to be not only a PJ, but to be a mentor, to really give of yourself. I think I might have had that in me at some point, but it was buried down deep and I didn't know how to access it. And he showed me how to access that simply by his actions. We have good leaders and bad leaders in life. And a lot of times you you can get as much from the bad leaders as you can from the good leaders. Because you can look at a bad leader and go, I never want to be that guy. I never want to talk to somebody like that. I never, I never want to make somebody feel the way that guy just made me feel. And I know that's a touchy-feely sort of thing that you don't think about. But intimacy in the special operations community, people often overlook that. I know more about my friends and some of their family members. I I was there when they were having problems on deployment with their wives and their children. And we we have an intimate relationship amongst those teams and amongst the communities. And to have somebody that truly cares about you, in good, bad, or indifferent, CA didn't tell me good things all the time. CA told me some very hard things to hear that I needed to hear. And sometimes he told me things that I wasn't ready for. And years later I heard his words in my head and I finally went, oh my God, that's what he meant. I wasted 10 years. He already gave me this answer, you know. So I I think if I'm being as honest as I can be, I've always I've always been a leader, um, kind of inherently, you know, team captain growing up, doing, you know, when, you know, uh uh achieving things where where people would give me the input, like, hey, you have a natural talent for leading or for public speaking or or for whatever else. But I don't think I had any idea how to actually access that and then use it in a way to serve until that first mentor. That's powerful.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

So do you now understand that role and try and amplify that with what you're doing? That's what it sounds like to me.

Mentors, Culture, And Team Intimacy

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Brother, I don't understand anything. Like any, you know, I I always use this analogy, but imagine, you know, you're 10 years old and you're at your family Christmas party, and you've got your aunts and your uncles and your older cousins, and you look around and you looked at a 45-year-old uncle of yours, and in your head, as a 10-year-old, you go, Oh, that guy's got it figured out. Life has to be great. Meanwhile, that 45-year-old guy is like, I don't know what I'm doing, bro. I'm juggling flaming chainsaws every single day. Uh, there's a word called sonder, and that sonder is the realization that every single human that you pass on a street has a life as rich and as complex and as terrifying and as uncertain as yours inside of their head. And once you realize that in other people, you're like, hey, wait a second, nobody's got this thing figured out. I think we found a space where we could be valuable, and I think we found a lane that we could help people achieve that part of themselves. And from mentorship, that's always where I am. Of course, we always project and we use our own experiences in order to guide our actions going forward. I'm not looking at changing someone's life. What I want to do is I want to give them the information, I want to give them the energy, I want to give them my level best to hopefully get them, just like I did, to realize that they had something in them the entire time. They just needed to realize how to access it. And at our level, it's getting them to realize you can do the impossible thing if you just decide not to quit. If you just decide to show up when you show up every single day, right time, right place, right uniform, something to write on, something to write with in your water carrier, man, you're ahead of 99% of humanity. And if we can just get you to access that, because once you believe it, there's no stopping you. So how do you get someone to start believing in it? You got to lie to them. Any good leader, I had a another mentor of mine that was like, you know, mentorship is basically lying to someone until they believe in the potential that you see in them. And I always love that quote. And of course we don't lie to people, right? But you you have to guide them to a point where they're being introspective and you give them your experience as well. That's why the stories that we tell on One's Ready are so important. We've brought special operators on that were living in their car, eating out of dumpsters, all the way up to people that got in as an enlisted person with multiple biochemistry degrees from Dartmouth and Ivy League schools. That's the range of people that we have inside of this community. You need to hear those stories and you need to hear those voices so that you can see something reflected in yourself from that person. You know, the people, Ivan Ruiz is a giant inside of the special operations community, one of the few living Air Force Cross winners. Ivan Ruiz, if you sit down and talk to him, man, he came from a rough upbringing. He yeah he is a uh Hispanic guy by nature, um, you know, by the grace of God, I think Denny would probably say. Um, but you know, to see something in him, to see that in you be like, wait a second, you came from nothing, but you did everything. You reached the highest heights of special operations. Maybe I could do that same thing too. I think through telling those stories and setting the table for people, and and not everybody succeeds, not everybody's gonna see that. But I think if you can just explain things to people in an open, honest, and vulnerable way and say, this is the good, the bad, the indifferent, the mundane, the terrifying, the traumatic. I think if you can explain that to people where they connect with it, that's that that's lighting that fire. And I love hearing those messages. I love getting that DM. It was like, you said this thing and I didn't know, but I was training today. And I think, I think I got it. I think I understood what you meant. That's what that's transformational leadership. I don't want to be transactional. I can give you all the workout programs in the world. I can give you every single piece of information. I can tell you everything I'm not supposed to tell you about the PJ pipeline or assessment selection or how the job's gonna be. It doesn't matter. I can tell you everything. Until you internalize it, until you understand it, it doesn't matter. You have to make that decision on your own. We want to get you to a place that transformational leadership and mentorship happens. Uh somebody explained mentorship to me as a true mentor will help you walk through a door that they themselves can't walk through. I want to hold that door open for as many people as I possibly can.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

That's fantastic and so powerful, man. I I love the the work you're doing. And I wanna ask now, so you're planting these seeds in people's heads so that they get to grow and blossom. I love that. What's the first thing you try and work on when you're trying to plant a seed or an idea and a concept in somebody?

Belief, Stories, And Transformational Leadership

SPEAKER_00 14:01

That's a fantastic question. I think it's just mindset. I think it's dependent uh depending on yourself. Uh some people call it finding your why, some people find uh, you know, you the mission, what do you connect with? There's people have written tomes and hundreds of thousands of words about this specific thing. But in the end, when you're in that water and you're underneath and you're you're dying for air, your lungs are burning, and your vision is coming down to a soda straw because we are a heavily water-focused assessment and selection program. There's no such thing as teamwork under the water. I can't give you my air. I can't make you go faster. I cannot help you out. The only thing that I can do is I can depend on myself to get this done and then hopefully you get it done too, because that's what a teammate is. But like no other, the Air Force Pararescue pipeline focuses on that individual development with an with an eye towards teamwork all the time. I think the first thing that you have to do is you have to get them to understand that they can believe in themselves, and you find that immutable, unbelievable, unshakeable why. My why was that I wanted to cheat death. I wanted to not only cheat death by jumping out of an airplane, a perfectly good airplane that I should have just rode all the way to the X, you're that's that kills people. I wanted to get in gunfights, that kills people. I wanted to get to my patient. If I could defy death to get to them on their worst day when they were dying, that's one. I get to defy death one time. If I do my job as a pararescuan and I provide gold level trauma combat support to anybody in the DOD that calls for my team, I get to tell death no twice in a single day. And I get to bring home more people than I deployed with. That was always my goal. If I'm deploying with a team of 15 plus support personnel, when I come home, I want a number to be 15 plus N. And that N is people that were supposed to die, but they called us and they didn't.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

That's powerful stuff, man. And it's an honor to have served with guys like you, seriously. I mean you talked about your mindset. I'm the worst. Oh, there's the humility. Oh, I'm not that good, but this is what I do, and I'm an instructor, and I teach people, and yeah, yeah. You know, but seriously, I mean But you're lighting the path. That's the thing. Like, people need to believe in themselves. And you just touched on it with your stories. Like when other people share that, hey, I was able to walk through this jungle and make it out to the other side. People like, ooh, hey, if they did it, maybe I can't. There is hope. There is a chance. And that's what I think is so crucial with mindset is anybody that's really successful, they believe. They know it's going to be hard or things are going to be difficult. And maybe they will fail. Like, hey, sometimes the parachute doesn't open. I've lost people we all know, people that have had horrific accidents in our community. But you do it anyways, and that's life. Like you can die stepping outside on the corner of your street, get hit by a car. You can be at home and have a brain aneurysm. You can choke on your dinner. Who knows what could happen? But getting out there and pushing yourself, that's incredible. So, with this now, I want to key in with you on ownership. So now we're helping people get these positive mindsets. Now, how do you get them to take ownership?

Finding Your Why Underwater

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Another great question. You know, um I think I am the example of how not to do it. But the one thing that I can tell you throughout my my entire career of failures, I I went through indoc four times. I went through three separate hell nights that was spread over a five-year period. I failed remarkably. I quit the pararescue pipeline the first time. I was not emotionally, spiritually, physically ready to complete that pipeline. And I left. I could have graduated. My numbers were there. Fine. I didn't. I had to own that. And by the way, I still wasn't ready. Multiple years later, I didn't even know I was I wanted to cross-train back into a PJ until I got to go to Army Airborne School as a regular Air Force dude. It was just some weird rule that I got to go to airborne school and I just showed up as an airborne guy. I came back from there and I went, holy crap, I gotta get back. I gotta, I gotta put my packet in and I gotta go back in. I think when we talk about ownership, you have to have a realistic, objective view of yourself and you have to be honest with yourself. I know that I am not good at certain things. My pipeline was hilarious. My my team, we make team plaques for everybody, of course, and they put all the plaques up at the schoolhouse. And my team plaque was basically me. It was a cartoon and it was me squatting. It was squatting a whole bunch of weights, and it said I was gonna out-shoot and then shoot was strike through because I was a terrible shooter. I had never touched a pistol before I got in the Air Force. No clue. Almost failed the shooting block. And then it said, I'm gonna out-climb. Nope. I, dude, I grew up the oldest of six kids. My dad was a fireman that worked two other side jobs. My mom was a stay-at-home job. I didn't go rock climbing. I played baseball because a stick and a ball is pretty cheap, right? No idea how to climb. Never tied a knot in my life, wasn't a Boy Scout. So it the climb was whatever. And then we went through every single thing. Out shoot, nope, outclimb, nope, outrun, nope, hated running, wouldn't do it. And it was this lit, and then but finally at the end it just said, I'll just outlift them. I'll outlift the enemy, right? But what I had to do from that is those those things, even on my graduation plaque, those were failures that I was not good at. And I was failing in front of people. Now the choice is yours, whether you're gonna own that. You know what? I wasn't a bad shooter my entire career. I actually got to be a pretty good shooter. And the first deployment that I went on, my team sergeant was like, What do you suck at? I was like, my mountaineering sucks. Guess what I did? Every single day, I owned the fact that I sucked at climbing and I didn't want to feel like that anymore. So I did climbing scenarios and tied ropes and tied systems and tied patients into systems and figured out really complex rope systems for high angle rescue until I couldn't get it wrong. Amateurs practice till they get it right. Professionals practice till they absolutely cannot get it wrong. And that was my goal. But that was from that ownership. That was from an objective, fair evaluation of myself. And it hurts. It hurts to look at people and go, I failed. I failed as an NCO. I failed as a senior NCO. I failed as a leader. I failed as an operator. I failed as a man. But if you can say that out loud, and if you can truly internalize it and say, okay, I failed. I don't want to feel like that again. So I'm going to own it. And that ownership, we joked about the intense self-hate. If you don't think every single time I step up to the firing range, there's a little voice in the back of my head that goes, better not suck at this. You sucked at this before. You know what it feels like to lose a shooting event. That's how you weaponize ownership. Like I like extreme ownership. I like weaponized ownership a little bit better because that actually drives action. Extreme ownership is like, I know I failed in the Jocko voice. Good. I I know I failed at this event. I know. Okay. Okay, you own it. But what are you going to do now? How are you going to use that to move you forward? How are you going to use that to motivate you? Fear of failure is a fantastic motivator. That failure coupled with that ownership, hey, I did this bad thing, don't want to do that again. I refuse to be this bad in the future. Own it. Weaponize that ownership. Live in that feeling of being ashamed, of being beaten, of failure. And then as you're in that moment, think to yourself, I never want to feel like this again. Not one more time. And then you go out. And now you have a path forward. And then you can start figuring out how to never fail again.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Yeah. And I think that leads to doing the work. You know, you can't feel that and just say, Oh, I don't want to feel that way again. No, you take that fire and that anger and you use it. That's a tool. Fuel the work. So that, like you said, you went out there and you kept working on ropes and doing things and climbing. And guess what? You get better. Anything where you're willing to do the work. So can we talk about hard work and tips and tricks or maybe habits to help people stay focused?

Weaponized Ownership After Failure

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Absolutely. And the first one, I'm I'm I'm a big saying guy, especially from guests. So we had Jason Ellis. Jason Ellis is a, I don't know if you're aware, but he had one of the biggest shows on Sirius XM. He had a big kerfluffle with Sirius XM, skateboarder, awesome dude. We had Jason Ellis on uh the Ones Ready podcast super early. I don't even know how we got him. Like we literally just cold called him and he came on. But he said something that stuck with me my entire life. And he said, the hard work is lonely. There's nobody else. Nobody's coming to save you. Especially for pararescuen. I tell my teams all the time, like, there's no one else, dude. They called us because there's no one else that can fix this. Guess who's coming for you? No one. The hard work is lonely. The hard work is early mornings and an alarm that goes off before you want it. The hard work is taking time away from your family to go out and train when you know that you'd rather be just sitting on the couch and not going to the gym. That hard work breeds that grit, that determination. It breeds that unwillingness to give anything other than your level best. And it can be whatever you want. We talk to this, people will ask us all the time, how do I develop grit? Sometimes it's as easy as you said you were going for a three-mile run today. You don't stop at two miles. You s you you made a promise to yourself. Are you a liar? Because you made a promise to yourself. You said three miles. So you run that I don't care if you puke, I don't care if you die, I don't care if you crawl the last 400 meters. You said you were going to run three miles. Because what that translates to is that when I say that others may live, I truly mean that if you call my team, even though I know it might kill one of us to include myself, we are going to come bring you home. That's the solemn promise that we have made to our brothers and sisters in arms. And you can develop that grit through that hard work simply by doing what you say you're going to do. You don't hit snooze on the alarm, you don't leave your bed unmade, you don't miss a training session, you don't go out and drink when you should be sleeping. Are you going to do what you say you're going to do? Do you have integrity? Did you did you make a promise to yourself that you followed through on? Because eventually your teammates are going to depend on your word. And if you can't keep your word to yourself, that's an issue. That's a problem. So the hard work is lonely. And without that hard work, without that sweat equity, you're going to get nowhere. You know, Will Smith has a great, uh, great uh YouTube video you should go look it up. It's the difference between talent and skill. So talent you have naturally. Talent is is given to you by God, and that is something innate inside of you that has the potential to turn into something great. Skill is built from hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft. I was never particularly talented at anything. Look at my pipeline experience. I wasn't talented at shooting, but what I do possess is a ridiculous, sickening work ethic. I will not let you outwork me. I will not let you do more work than me. You might be better than me, you might be smarter than me. That's fine. But if you get on a treadmill next to me and you you think that you're gonna get off uh after me, I'm either gonna die on that treadmill or you're getting off first. And that's Will Smith said that when he was training for Ali. He said, you know, two things are gonna happen if you get on a treadmill next to me. Either you're getting off first or I'm gonna die. That is that is the level of mindset that you need to have. And again, there's no one else in the room. Work ethic is a a purely individual experience. You can develop it, but no one else can help you with work ethic. You have to do the work.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

Absolutely, 100%. And that's one of the things I've tried to convey with anybody that's trying to be special operations, Green Beret, Navy SEALs, PJ, whatever. Everybody that I know that's been successful wasn't like, oh, I'm gonna try. They're like, I'm doing this or it's gonna kill me. Like, I'm gonna end up in the hospital. I had heat stroke, I collapsed, I had an aneurysm, you know, I jumped out and you know, I broke my back on a bad landing. Everybody was all in. And when you go all in, that's a game changer. Total game changer.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

A relentless obsession for success. A relentless obsession to be the best version of yourself.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

I like that the best version of yourself too, because we're all different. So anybody out there listening, you know, you hear now, you're you're not gonna be, you know, Aaron, you're not gonna be Daniel or you're not gonna be Denny or other people. You're gonna be you. But own your power. Be the one to do the hard work. Take discipline in your life and control of it, and get out there and do it and find mentors, you know. Pause right now. Go into the description, follow Aaron Love, man. Like, he's doing awesome stuff. See what they're doing, what's going on. Like, subscribe, find other people. Of course, follow like and subscribe the asset mindset, because we're here doing positive things and positive work and bringing amazing guests on. And you know what? Do us a favor, do something positive, and give us that like and follow and subscribe because you're gonna help the algorithm and you're gonna help us get this message out more to people that need to hear it. So I want to talk now discipline. We talked about hard work. Yeah, you gotta do hard work. Check. Got it. But motivation and discipline are two separate things. Let's talk about that.

Hard Work Is Lonely

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Give me your take. Motivation is fake. I was gonna use the the fake and other word that I'm probably not allowed to say, and it'll get you guys canceled. I don't know how far we are in here. It's fake. It's not real. It's a fugazi. It doesn't exist. Motivation is fleeting. The first time it starts to get a little bit cold and rains out, nobody's really motivated. That that crap is fake. Discipline trumps motivation every single time. Every single time. Discipline will serve you where motivation fails 100% of your life. I'm not motivated to go work. I have a newborn. My newborn is 28 days old. She came out as a premature baby. I have been fighting to try to find ways to go to the gym or even have a second for myself. Unless I am disciplined, I am not getting to the gym. Because I'll tell you what, I'm not motivated. You can look at that whoop data. It's a lot of red recoveries. It's a lot of 10%. It's a lot of two hours worth of sleep. It's a lot of waking up in the middle of the night to help my wife, my gorgeous wife, the love of my life, to help with this beautiful little baby girl and the toddler that's not two years old yet that I got here in the house. Unless I am disciplined, unless I find a way to get to the gym, motivation ain't taking me to the gym, brother. Motivation ain't taking me to work. Motivation ain't taking me to get another, another meeting. But the work is there and the work needs to get done. And unless you're disciplined, and I'm talking, you know, when we talk about inside of the pipeline, great, that's an easy one. Unless you're disciplined in your workout regime and your nutrition and your hydration and your mobility and your durability and your relentless obsession to find out to be a better person in all aspects, you're just simply not going to make it because that motive I can, as an instructor, I can tell you, I can get rid of that motivation in about five minutes. You can come in at the highest of heights. I am a motivation killer. I will put you in the depths of the pain cave and then I will ask you where that motivation is. Oh, we were all, we were all yelling at the beginning of the smoke session. Why are we so quiet? Are we not motivated? Okay. Okay. You know? Um, but I think discipline trumps all things. You know, discipline is at the heart of everything that it is that we do. Am I disciplined enough to do the right thing when no one's watching? Am I disciplined enough to hold high, immutable standards? Am I disciplined enough to look at somebody and go, you know, I didn't make those standards and I need to own up to something? I fell short of this one. And this is what it is. Um, discipline will trump motivation 100% of the time because motivation is a subjective feeling and discipline is a pattern of behavior.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

So growing up, tell me about your growth or learning experiences that helped set you up for this life that you're living.

Discipline Over Motivation

SPEAKER_00 30:15

Oh man, I am I am the model for white privilege, bro. So like let me must be nice. Oh boy. I I love telling this story too because we talk about like, you know, hard scrabble upbrings and all this other stuff, bro. I came from the most stable family. Mother and father were religious. I grew up Catholic. I was the oldest of six kids in a small town in Midwest Ohio, growing up from 1980 to 2001 when I left. We didn't have a picket fence because we didn't quite have enough money for a picket fence, but if we could have, we would have, you know, played sports as a kid, no big trouble, perfect home life. You know, can't say enough. You know, my dad was a fireman. He was in the army for a little bit and got out. We weren't a military family by by any means, but we were patriotic. Both of my grandfathers in the Navy had a great support system. Um, uh, you know, parents raise us to be, you know, patriotic, fiercely independent. My parents always joke, they're like, hey, we have six kids. You know what we're getting you for your 18th birthday? Luggage. Get out of the house. Go do. We're raising you to go be good people and get out into the world. You know what I mean? Uh, and that led four, you know, their six kids, four of us are boys. All four of us actually got into the military. Um, and all four of us actually completed a full career. So I have one brother that's since retired. He works for the FAA now, so he was a pilot. He was an 11 Bravo that ended up going warrant and was a pilot. My other, my other brother Danny, still in Ohio. He's a warrant four. He's gonna be probably the youngest warrant five Ohio has ever seen. He also he went from rotary wing to fixed wing, so he flies fixed wing for the army. My my younger brother Kyle, same deal, right? Something in us was instilled early, and it's all these things that we talked about. And it's those little seeds that you didn't know. You know, watching my dad go to fires and come home, and yeah, I remember sitting distinctly, remember this. I think I was 12 or 13. There was a terrible house fire where like six kids died in Ohio. And my dad came home and he still smelled like fire. And I remember, I'm gonna try to get through this without being emotional because I connect to it. It's something that I I've reached to in dark places. My dad looked at me crying, sobbing, one of the first times I ever saw my dad cry, uh, about how he wasn't good enough on that day. And how he wanted me to never do that. He was willing to have that failure in that moment. Imagine in that moment, a father himself responding to a house fire where children died, and in that moment, he had the ability to look at me and go, Aaron, this is how I feel. I never want you to feel like this. I want you to I want you to work hard. I didn't I didn't internalize that until later. Those words came into my head way later in my life. Way later in my life. But best possible upbringing. But all along the way, those little Easter eggs, those little feelings, those little statements, those little experiences, you reach back to those moments and you go, wait a second. There is truth. There is objective good. I can fight objectively against evil because I know what objective good looks like and I know what right looks like. And that was the gift that my parents gave me. And also my mom is a five foot two Irish hard ass. Uh, we we all all of the brothers are about six foot tall, you know, about 200 pounds-ish, right? We all kind of like cut from the same cloth. Actually, it's a funny story, but girlfriends and wives at family events have often mistaken the wrong love brother, and they'll like grab a butt and they'll turn around and be like, oh, you're not Aaron. Like that's actually happened. That's how what we all like. Well, my mom was my mom was five two, and and she didn't shy away from it. She would actually make you stand at the bottom of the stairs and she'd walk up two stairs so she was taller you, and she'd slap you upside the head. And you just had to, and it didn't hurt. She's five two, 130 pounds. Like she's this little woman. But she would just go, whack, that's not how we do things around here. And it didn't hurt, but it was the point that she was like, no, this isn't how we do things. That was the gift that my parents, that that my upbringing gave me, that I was I was so lucky comparatively to other stories.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Well, good on you for acknowledging and seeing those things. A lot of people get stuck in a victim mentality and be like, oh, you know, you can be like, oh, my parents were too hard on me, and oh, this and that. And to realize, and I think what you're keen on, you called them Easter eggs, you know, like in video games, people say, Oh, Easter eggs. Um, I talk about them sometimes as nuggets, like there's little golden nuggets around that can be life lessons. You never know when one statement is gonna really stick out, or one event like what you just said with your dad hit me hard. Because I'm a dad, you know, I got three kids, and I know also part of being a firefighter, I volunteered before I moved to Nashville. I was in New Hampshire, and I was a volunteer firefighter there. And to know that you could have done better or to save somebody, especially where six kids died. I mean, if you're somebody with a heart and and to share that and to him to have the vulnerability to share that with you, you you're very blessed. And I'm sure you know that. I'm preaching to the choir, so to speak.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

But uh I own it, brother. I love it when people ask me because I'm like, man, you you know that privileged American young Midwest kid you've heard so much about? Hi, it's me, Aaron Love. Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Yeah. But that those little things, and I think people, we need to have our eyes open. You know, don't be so stuck into where is my phone over here? Like, oh, I'm in my phone or whatnot. Look around you, see the people. There's a lot of evil in the world, but there's a lot of good too. That was one of the things that hit me not too long ago with Tucker Carlson. He was talking about it, he was speaking, and he goes, Yeah, we see a lot of hate and this and that. But always remember there's a lot of love too. And I was like, man, he's so right. The people I surround myself with, work with, my peers, people that give, go to other countries and serve for people they don't even know, whether it's in the military, whether it's mission work. So if you're someone that's right now getting stuck with negativity, put that shit aside and look around and surround yourself with some better people because there's a lot of love up.

SPEAKER_00 36:07

Being negative is the easiest low-hanging fruit. It is easy to be contrarian, it's easy to be negative, it feels good, it makes you think catharsis, it makes you feel as if you're doing something you're not. It's a rocking chair. It's a lot of motion and zero progress. There's no reason to involve yourself in a negative cycle. Uh, you know, Mr. Rogers said it best. You know, yeah, there's bad things in the world, but look for the helpers. Look at the people that are doing good things. Yeah, there's tragedy. Look at the floods that happened in North Carolina. I had friends, special warfare training, uh, special warfare operators played a huge role in the floods in North Carolina a couple years ago. And when they showed those videos, I mean, people that would literally commandeer helicopters and just fly in from the Green Berry community, from the PJ community, people flooded, pun intended, to that area to help those people out. So yeah, it was terrible. Yes, Asheville, North Carolina is still absolutely decimated. But look for the helpers, look for the good in every negative situation. And then the next step is be the good, be that good influence when things are negative. Because I'll tell you what, from there's nothing better than having that guy in the team room when things are bad. And I'll give credit to Peaches. I've been in terrible scenarios with Peaches, absolutely life-altering, terrible. And if you look over at that little five foot two fire hydrant, half the time he's just laughing. He, I'm like, why are you laughing? He's like, what else are you gonna do? He's like, the world's falling down on us. Might as well have a good time. Can't get out of it, might as well get into it. And you just laugh. You're like, okay, man, sure. Imagine being that positive light for somebody else.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Yeah, we I think all of us in our community have seen that, you know, when it's really suck fest, horrible situation. You're like, are you friggin' kidding me? All this has gone wrong. I mean, someone looks over and is like, yeah, you haven't fun yet?

Service, Perspective, And Choosing Positivity

SPEAKER_00 37:52

This is good, you know? Oh, good. What else did go wrong? Well, my radio doesn't work and this guy lost his nods. Oh, okay, good. Good. Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted. Good. That's a good Tuesday.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

Yeah. And I think, you know, just that positivity is incredible. And, you know, I'm gonna tote um talk about Tony Robbins again because he's amazing in a lot of ways. But I I just love his analogy that I want to share again. And I think you're gonna love it too, is like if I tell you to look around your room right now, and how many things do you see is brown? You know, you're gonna look around and you're gonna see. Now, if I ask you, oh, what did you see that's yellow? You're like, oh, I wasn't looking for yellow. But there's gonna be things that you saw that were brown that maybe were tan or weren't quite brown, but you counted them as brown. So what you're focused on, you're gonna see more of. It's a thing that happens in the brain. And so if you're focused on positivity or being a good person or giving back or helping, you're gonna see more of that. It actually changes the lens in which you see the world. It's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

It's one of the first things we tell people is people will come to us and, you know, oftentimes the training for these pipelines is long. The wait to get in, if we're doing our job correctly, right? There should be such a line to get in that you can't get into the military right away. It was different for me. That flag went up, you know, 2001. I think I enlisted in the program September 13th of 2001, and I was at basic training January. Like I had two months and I was, I was gone. I was at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, um, before it was called Joint Base San Antonio. I was at basic training January 2nd of 2002, right? It's different now. People lose motivation to let us up. And the thing that we tell them, we tell them right away, we're like, go find something you can do that benefits somebody else. If you want to be motivated, go volunteer. Go to the go to the pool and help with swim club, go volunteer to soup kitchen. You do whatever it is that you can give of yourself to others and break that internally focused negative spiral mindset. Get out of yourself, serve others because call it whatever you want. The I mean, the crazy liberals would call it manifesting or putting that energy out. To the universe, and really what it's doing is aligning to a higher power and being that person that God wants you to be in the world, and that is almost always rooted in service, that is almost always rooted in you giving of yourself to others because the second that you move that focus from internally to externally, life changes on a dot. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 40:18

And then the people that you end up being with only inspire you more. Like my wife and I recently, in the last year, went to Guatemala, and she'd never done a trip like that and helped serve, and we've already gone back again. And the people we go with were just like, these people are incredible. I mean, they're all different types of people. Some of them in the medical field. There's a doctor that goes with us. My wife's in the medical field. Some of them are real estate agents, insurance sales. But you know what? When we all go there, not one person complains. It's hot out, it's nasty, there's whatever going on, bugs, the food's maybe not the best. And everybody is just, what can I do to help? What can I do to help? Go, you need me over here? The smiles, the joy of giving and helping others. Everybody that's gone on these trips, they come back changed. It's like anybody going on their first deployment. You come back, you're changed. You know, there's a culture shock coming back to America after being downrange. I mean, it's real. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's anyway. But I want to now get into what would you tell your younger self? Now, now that you've had all this experience, so if there's someone listening, and I know you deal with younger people, you know, wanting to join the military or join special operations, what would you tell yourself?

Advice To A Younger Self

SPEAKER_00 41:43

Man, I'm gonna try to keep it PG because a conversation with a younger Aaron Love would be a rough conversation. It would not be good. I think I always start with uh, you know, you have two eyes and two ears for and one mouth for a reason. I had a great team uh sergeant of mine that we were uh I was supplementing, yeah, augmenting the task force on a rotation. We had a new team sergeant come in and he looked at me and goes, Aaron, you're really smart. Could you do me a favor? Could you could you quit missing opportunities to just shut the fuck up? Can you just shut your mouth for a little bit? And I'll tell you, like, like, yeah. And it was great, it was one of those just I like I always remember his name is Nate. Nate was awesome, tier one operator, highly vetted, ended up being a chief pararescuan in the United States Air Force, recently retired. But he goes, Aaron, never miss an opportunity to shut the fuck up. And I thought that that was that was exactly what I needed. And then I said that later to people, knowing that I came from the inability to shut my mouth. I I would start there. You know what I mean? Like, um, and that and emulate professionals. Uh, you know, as a younger person, you're always looking for who can I, who can I glom on to without lionizing, without idolizing, without putting people up on a pedestal, find somebody that you want to be like and do the things that they do. If this guy, and it can be a whole host of folks, right? This guy is really good at briefing, this guy is a world-class jumper, this guy works out like a savage and is in the best shape of his life. Emulate what they do. Sometimes you don't know how to get there yourself. So for these younger folks, you got two eyes, two ears, and one mouth for a reason. So maybe just maybe hold those rounds more than you put stuff out. Emulate professionals. Look at someone that you want to be like and do what it is that they do that got them there. And hopefully you can you can start to to make your own way and you can figure out how to do that for yourself. And then number three, just be of service. Just be of service. It's not about you. You're not the main character in your own story, let alone everyone else's story. Maybe it's not about you. Maybe it's not about having this cool beret that everybody in the Air Force is like, I don't even know what to do. Look at all this stuff on your chest. That has nothing to do with you. That beret was worn by people that died doing this job. You might be the only PJ that they've ever met. Ever. Imagine if you besmirched the good name of people that died for their country wearing that same beret because you couldn't get out of your own. Maybe it's not about you. Maybe you be of service. Try to this is a constant problem for me, and this would be a talk with young Aaron. Maybe don't be so narcissistic and humble. Uh be a little bit more humble, you know? Maybe be a little bit more gracious to people. Maybe don't be so aggressive. Uh I still haven't learned any of those lessons, by the way. I'm actually having the conversation with myself as an old guy with myself right now, as we do. It's cathartic, it feels good. But yeah, just sit back and listen. Don't miss opportunities to just shut up for a little bit. That's probably good. Emulate professionals, and then realize that you are not the center of the universe. You you are here to do a job and you're here to do a job well, and it's not about you. It's about what you can give.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

No, that's great. And I had something similar that was said to me is just listen and learn. Because ask questions and you're like, oh, or you're trying to prove and show what you know is just shut up, listen and learn.

SPEAKER_00 45:05

And it's like, oh, okay, light bulb. Right. Well, you know, and you you learn a lot from when somebody is right and you don't need they don't need your help. Like they don't need you to cosign on what they're saying. You should just listen and internalize that and be like, oh, you you crush it. But you actually almost learn more from when somebody else is wrong and you decide not to call them out. And you and you take just a beat and you're like, wait a second. You know, there's a the Indian gates for when should I speak? Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? Those are the Indian gates for how it is that you should approach communication and whether you believe in it or not, that's fine. But it's a good, it's a good framework to sit from. Is it true? Is it necessary? Usually right there we forget about that third part. Is it kind? Do I need to blow this guy up in front of somebody because I have a differing opinion and I may have the receipts to prove it? Probably not. It's maybe it's more gracious to just go, oh, that's hey, two plus two is five. Cool opinion, bro. You want to go get a soda? I only need two dollars from you and two dollars from him because it's five dollars total. There you go. We'll see if it works. Nice, yeah. Why open up a can of worms if you don't have to? You don't have to. You'll get more credit out of that than everybody, especially when other people realize that they're everybody's wrong. You gotta have like those eyes with your friend, and you're like, this guy's crazy, and you just kind of go on with life. It's a little bit better. That's just a personal opinion.

Self-Awareness As A Survival Skill

SPEAKER_01 46:19

And that's leading by example, too. You know, you're you're showing people the way. And I think one of the things I want to touch on now, as we're starting to wind down, is this self-awareness because what you're saying right there, like, oh, I need to shut up more, or I need to listen and learn, like I was saying, that's all growth and self-awareness. How important is self-assessment and self-awareness?

SPEAKER_00 46:44

You'll fail without it. As plainly as I can put it. If you are not willing to have those hard conversations with yourself, if you're not willing to have an objective, fair evaluation of who you are as a person, good, bad, indifferent, unless you can develop that sense of self-awareness, you will fail at whatever you try. You will never be successful. I can tell you that for sure. I think in order to gain a self-awareness or a self-assessment, I think you do need experience. Just like every 18 to 24 year old, I had zero self-awareness. I had zero idea who I was supposed to be or what I was trying to be or what I wanted to be. I think we find that through experience and through failure. But I think once you get to that mountaintop of true self-awareness is that you realize the self isn't that important. My ego and my id, they're important to one person, and it's the voice inside of my head that screams at me all day long, sometimes positively, but most likely negatively. Being aware of that fact that it's not as good as you think you are, but you're also probably not as bad as you think you are. Once you can get to a happy place there where you're just comfortable in your own skin, it's amazing how the rest of the world seems to fall in. Because you can then feel that energy from someone else. When I when I talk to somebody, I'm like, oh, this person has high emotional intelligence and they're extremely self-aware. I know things about them immediately. I know they probably have high integrity. I know that they probably do what they say they're going to do. I know that they're probably disciplined. I know that they're probably rooted in a faith or a spiritualism that helps them see an objective, true, good moral behavior and they they emulate that in their life. And I know that I can probably depend on somebody that's self-aware. Because I know that good, bad, or indifferent, it might be a no. They might tell me I can't do this for you, but I know that that's coming from an objective and a good place, a place that doesn't mean harm. They just can't help me that time. I think once you achieve, and that's what that's what we're trying to achieve all the time enlightenment or becoming one with the universe or being a truly moral person, you're constantly looking for that objective truth within yourself and that projects as self-awareness. Knowing who I am as a person and more importantly, who I'm not, what I'm good at, what I'm not good at, and how you can engage and project those good parts onto the world. But without self-awareness, you're, you know, ignorance breeds arrogance. When you don't know what you don't know, you think you know everything, and that breeds a healthy dose of arrogance. No, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 49:14

A smart person knows they don't know everything. And it's the more you learn, realize I know less than I thought I did.

SPEAKER_00 49:21

It's incredible. My favorite quote on that is a smart man learns uh from their own mistakes and a genius learns from others. That's fantastic. Look at what other people have done, failures, successes, and learn from those mistakes, internalize them and apply it to yourself. You're gonna do way better. No, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 49:39

So I love your mindset. You have what I deem and I call in my world the asset mindset. You know, you are taking ownership of your life, you're surrounding yourself with good people in good positive environments, and then you're being a positive asset to others. So I'm proud of you, brother. And I do want to uh ask a little I don't know whether it's heated or heavy, it's probably more heavy or deep question. So you have this really powerful mindset, you've accomplished these amazing things. When were you tested? And where was your darkest moment where you had to like really dig down deep?

The Darkest Chapter And Sobriety

SPEAKER_00 50:18

I'm gonna have to narrow it down here. Uh let's see if you can share more than one. Yeah, it's it's your code. I have no problem. So uh 2011, I tried to kill myself. We'll put it there. So 2011, I was actually deployed, I was doing a thing, and uh I made the choice that I was going to take a little jump off of a thing that was like 50 feet above a loading dock. Um I don't remember this, by the way, because I also had a problem of being a serious alcoholic for 25 years, which I've uh about a year ago, year and a half ago, I gave that up, quit drinking entirely. So made that change for my life. And oddly enough, everything in my life got better. Crazy, right? Like you stop ingesting poison every single night of the week until you're blackout drunk for 25 years and things get better. Crazy, correlated, not causated. But I was at the lowest point in my life, man. Um, I don't remember the event. I broke my pelvis, 13 vertebrae, five ribs, separated my shoulder, moderate TBI. I actually had crush injuries so bad that my kidneys and my liver were failing. I was aeromedically evacued to Launch Tool Air Force Base, where I spent some time in the ICU before going back to England, and I didn't think I was going to be a PJ again. And that led uh that crystallizing moment led me to a point where I actually had to get a waiver signed by the Surgeon General of the Air Force. They thought that the opening shock of a parachute would actually sever my spine and paralyze me or kill me. So I had to go through the waiver process where I would hold the Air Force essentially harmless to get back into a harness because if you can't jump, you can't be a PJ. And being a PJ was the only thing that I've ever felt called to do. During that time, my relationship with my ex was failing. My relationship with my kids was non-existent. I was I was never really home and I was never really gone. When you're gone and you're deployed and you you want to be back home and you have these talks with your kids and whatever else. And what's the first thing that happens after R and R when you get back? Hey, when's that next trip coming up? When's that next deployment coming up? You fought so hard to get home and you said for so long, I'm deployed, I just want to be with my family. And then you get home, and what's the first thing you're looking for? You're like, oh, been home for two weeks. Uh, when's that jump trip? Are we gonna shooting? Can I get on this next rotation? Is there any way that I can I can hop on there? Um I think through that period, which extended for a long time, um, until I was, you know, about a year later, I was finally able to pass the PT test and get back up on team and get back on team, but you know, the underlying sickness um was still there. And I think that extended until I stopped drinking um way later in my life. You know, I I think getting through, and I hid it from a lot of people. Like this is a story that a lot of people haven't heard from me because I hid it um for shame and for a couple other reasons for so long. Um I think getting through that time period, and it was a long time, the darkness lasted for a decade for me until I was finally able to break out of it. I think I had to look internally and just realize that again, this isn't about me. You know, I have a problem with ego. I have a I I have a problem, like I joke about being narcissistic, but I do just the nature of who I am tend to be or I tend to project narcissism or a or a big ego or overconfidence or whatever that seems. And for a long time, that I mean, that can be useful. You know, it's it's good. Like if I stood up and I gave you a brief as a pararesceme and you'd be like, this guy is gonna come save me and he's gonna make soup out of people in between me and him. I am sure of it. Okay, but there's a time and a place for that. And some of that is bravado and a projection of who it is that you want to be in order to garner the confidence of your of your force, your sister force. That's not necessarily useful. And until it's not necessarily useful in all contexts, until I realized how to really harness that, become self-aware, and find my way out of that darkness. I I really had a lot of learning to do, and I made the same mistakes over and over and over again. And it and now looking back on it, there's no other word to say it, but it disgusts me. The lack of potential, the lack of me right realizing who it is that I could have been, both as a man and as an operator. And the only way out of that was the things we've already talked about. Intense reliance on self, self-awareness, having an objective, clear view of who it is that you are as a person and who you want to more importantly become. How do I become the person that I want to be from here? You do it through discipline, you do it through grit, you do it through constantly being of service to other people and killing your ego and serving other people. Everything that we've talked about here is the only way that I see those as stairsteps as you're climbing out of that darkness until finally you get to a place where you're like, wait a second. I know who I am, good, bad, or indifferent. I own the things that I've done and all these terrible things that by the way, I think about way more than you do, I guarantee. The funny story about, you know, you know how you lay in bed at night and you think about every single cringy thing that you've ever done in your entire life? You're the only person that knows that. That's a collection of everyone you've ever seen, this one cringy thing with this one, or I said this one thing here, or I did this terrible thing here. You know all of those things, and it's easy to look at that as if everyone in the world knows these things about you. That's not true. That's not true. And you need to be able to, you need to be able, just like you can tell yourself hard things, you need to be able to be gracious with yourself as well. And when I finally came out of that darkness, and I mean it took until 2023, 2024, when I finally came out of that darkness and I started living a true, authentic life, that's when I realized that I didn't know how I had to lock in and buckle down and do all these other things, but I looked and I was like, wait, how did I get here? Yeah, I made these small bite-sized changes, doing the things that we already know how to do, and then magically everything else fixed itself. So I think that's probably my answer to the right.

SPEAKER_01 55:58

Do the work, and do the work, and you've been doing it. Um I do want to ask though, you know, what were you battling in the darkness? Because we all battle different things.

Climbing Out: Ego, Grit, And Service

SPEAKER_00 56:08

Was what was your alcoholism, imposter syndrome? Um, you know, the weight of the world was upon me. I am, regardless of what you may see on the internet or how I project my avatar, I'm highly empathetic. People that tell me they're traumas, I actually have to tell people, hey, don't do that because I internally feel them and internalize them as if they're my own for longer than I should. And I think, you know, when you couple in the fact, I mean, you know, when I say I was I was drinking hard for 25 years, that's not a that's not a joke. I mean, it was, you know, blackout drunk four or five nights a week. It didn't matter if I trained the next day. Everybody that I knew would be like, oh yeah, Aaron, he will drink you under the table. He'll show up and work the next day, he won't miss a gym time, he won't miss a showtime. And they they allowed me to do that because the military breeds high-performing alcoholics that we we we select out for the low-performing ones. We're like, you can't handle this, get out, and what you're left with is just the highest performing alcoholics. Um and that was me to a T. Um, I I think I was battling a lot of things, but it was fighting against myself. It was knowing I wanted to become someone better, and I was constantly getting in my own way by my actions. That that addiction was forcing me to be somebody that I didn't want to be, and I got into this negative spiral. Add in imposter syndrome in there. You know, there's that constant fear that somebody's gonna figure out that I'm not as good as people have told me that I am, and that I'm gonna be exposed in front of people. The fear of failure was constantly weighing on me. And I think it was ego management. All those things are your ego and that inner voice that are telling you these things that aren't true. And when you start believing them, then you start going down a really hard path. And I think that's what got me to that place.

SPEAKER_01 57:47

Well, I'm proud of you, brother, for making the changes, man, because it's it's not easy, you know, especially guys like us in our community. And I think that's why there's so many suicides.

unknown 57:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:57

You know, I agree. It's difficult to face your demons. And a lot of us want to just keep it bottled up and hard charger, and I'm just gonna keep going and I'm gonna take on more weight and more weight until it crushes you. And you know, you got really well, hell, you were crushed from your story.

SPEAKER_02 58:18

Yeah, quite literally.

SPEAKER_01 58:19

Um, it just didn't kill you. But I'm glad you uh turned it around.

SPEAKER_00 58:24

Much to everybody's chagrin on the internet. Yes, I am still here. Rumors of Aaron Love's demise have been greatly exaggerated, my friend.

SPEAKER_01 58:31

You know, and you're back better and stronger than ever. Not younger, though. Probably have a little more aches and pains and all that stuff, because Father Time, he's gonna kick our ass. So don't beat yourself up.

SPEAKER_00 58:42

Let him a diesel engine. I am not a Lambo. I am never gonna beat anybody in a foot race, but if you let me warm up, I can pull your house.

SPEAKER_01 58:49

Yeah, I I hear you. That that was my strength too. I was never the fastest guy. I wasn't the slowest, but I was never the fastest guy or the quickest or whatnot. But you know what? You put a lot of weight on me. I'm gonna keep carrying and carrying and carrying and carrying and carrying and carrying. And I may collapse, I'm gonna get back up and I'm gonna keep carrying it. And that that was my strength. I just was too stupid to quit, I guess. But uh it's a great quality to have, brother. Yeah, and that's what you need to do, audience. Don't quit on your dreams, don't quit on yourself. You need to stay focused, have awareness, reframe your thoughts, change. And Aaron, is there anything you want to leave the audience before we go?

SPEAKER_00 59:29

Man, I love this country. Be an active, engaged citizen. You all play a part in where we're gonna go. 250 years is a long time, a very long time for a dynasty to live, especially an empire like the United States of America. But it's worth it. Give of yourself to other people, whether it's in your local community or whether it's online, be a little bit more gracious. And for the love of God, go to the gym and drink your water and get your sunlight. It's the easiest thing that you can do. That's it.

Final Takeaways And Calls To Action

SPEAKER_01 59:56

Love it. Yeah. Take care of yourself. You only get one body. So So definitely go in the description, give Aaron a follow, like, subscribe, check out his podcast and what he's doing and his work. Please give us some love. No pun intended. Well, maybe there was a little pun intended. Give us some love with a like and subscribe and a follow because it's too easy for you to just click the button. And it really does help. It's free.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:22

Yeah, I'll give a comment for the algorithm. It's free. Come on, what are you doing? Come on.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:26

Absolutely. And more than anything, please don't forget own your power.