And the CrazyRanger has done it again. Part 2:
Stop Enabling the Problems? | CRAZY RANGER
So I’m finally recovered (and caught back up at work) enough from a broken left fourth metacarpal (say THAT three times fast) that I can write out another unsolicited Crazy Ranger opinion about leadership and leadership failures. This one has been bugging me for a while, and it’s been torturous not being able to type it out effectively.
What gets me lately, is the subset of people around me who are willing to spend hours creating complex, poorly executed solutions to enable a problem, rather than spending the same time just fixing the problem.
For instance- how many women out there complain about being fat, spending hours of their life adjusting their makeup, selecting different jeans… But won’t add 5 minutes of flutter kicks to their morning routine to actually address what they perceive as a problem?
Oh, but men- you’re just as guilty, twice as obnoxious. Yeah, I went there. You’ll spend $15,000 on rims/tires, speakers, body kits, lift kits, lowering kits, wings, fart can mufflers, lights, etc. on a $5,000 car. You’ll spend thousands on status (things you buy that you can’t pay cash for, to impress people you don’t even know or like) such as cars, houses, crap inside your houses, toys (often including your prepper gear), to try to prove how awesome, manly, gangster, redneck, whatever you are… But you won’t spend 5 minutes doing something to develop your character, to carve a real man out of yourself. You’ll see this phenomenon at its absolute worst in high school. Some boys never really grow up, they just make more money.
And then, to make things worse- when anything (or anyone) challenges the elaborate ways we try to cover over and ignore the fallacies that bother us, we often meet that adversity with anger, and an irrational response. Excuse me? Check your “swag?” Show me the title to that Lamborghini in your little music video, and I’ll let you look at the Ranger Tab/Scroll tattoo on my shoulder…
In Ranger Battalion, when I was in (2/75, 2001-2005), you had to maintain 80% on the Army Physical Fitness Test, shave every morning, have a fresh haircut every Monday morning, never bounce a check, never have any domestic violence, never have a negligent or accidental discharge of your weapon (even if it was caused by a malfunction), nor could you have any alcohol-related incident (even if it wasn’t your fault). You also had to keep a running record of every job you’d had, place you’d lived, contacts/friends/family in foreign countries, all debts, foreign vacations, and have different people who could be reached by phone to verify each one, going back 7-10 years (the minimum secret security clearance requirements). Violation of any of these things was grounds for release to a lesser unit, known as being “Released For Standards,” or RFS’d.
The standards seem high, but the men who actually meet the standards and remain in Battalion year after year are far more hard core. You have to understand that for these men, the standards are not the mark of top achievement, not the 100% goal. They are the absolute 0% goal. The standards truly begin after you beat the minimum thresholds just to stay in the unit. The Rangers exceed every standard by so much, so often, that even on the worst day- going through a painful divorce and custody battle after being deployed to Iraq and dealing with some serious PTSD (and losing all my money and most my stuff in the divorce) while gearing up to go right back into Afghanistan, completely hungover (truthfully- still drunk) in first formation I was able to easily smoke the PT test we had that morning, and keep myself together as a leader through it all during the years to come.
So as a leader- take the task at hand and make the minimum passing requirements (function, timeline, budget, etc.) your functional 0%. This means that you (and your team) were completely unprepared, completely unqualified, and shouldn’t have taken on the job in the first place because you just barely squeaked by.
Restated- If your customer has asked for a certain amount of things by a certain date, within a certain budget, and you completed only those things on the last day, spending the last dollar, you have completely failed, and everything has gone completely wrong.
You should continually build and grow yourself (and more importantly your team, if you have one) so that the things you take on are so elementary, so easy, that your team not only completes everything, but has extra functionality to offer the customer, far ahead of schedule, far under budget.
To illustrate:
•Go take a 2nd grade math test.
•Go take a toddler’s swimming class.
•Go play soccer against a 5 year old.
•Go drinking with a Navy SEAL.
You should win at pretty much everything on that list. But here’s the most important part- just because you can smoke a 2nd grade math test, don’t celebrate, and stop learning math. You’re still an idiot. You have to keep stretching forward and pushing yourself so you are moving the bar up and forward on what is easy for you to do. And with that drive, you’ll do completely extraordinary things.
Stop complaining about your clothing if you think you’re fat. Start complaining about how sore you are from working out to remove the fat, and you’ll start getting compliments from all over the place, and need to buy new clothes. My Ranger Wife rarely wears any makeup, and when she does, it’s extremely light. She works hard to look really good, and doesn’t ask me if her pants make her look fat, because she knows she’s smoking hot. And she’s been pregnant the vast majority of the last 4 years. Yeah, baby.
So there you have it. This is the tip of the iceberg in my head, but I’m tired of typing, so that’s all you’re getting for now. More to follow…
Stop Enabling the Problems? | CRAZY RANGER
So I’m finally recovered (and caught back up at work) enough from a broken left fourth metacarpal (say THAT three times fast) that I can write out another unsolicited Crazy Ranger opinion about leadership and leadership failures. This one has been bugging me for a while, and it’s been torturous not being able to type it out effectively.
What gets me lately, is the subset of people around me who are willing to spend hours creating complex, poorly executed solutions to enable a problem, rather than spending the same time just fixing the problem.
For instance- how many women out there complain about being fat, spending hours of their life adjusting their makeup, selecting different jeans… But won’t add 5 minutes of flutter kicks to their morning routine to actually address what they perceive as a problem?
Oh, but men- you’re just as guilty, twice as obnoxious. Yeah, I went there. You’ll spend $15,000 on rims/tires, speakers, body kits, lift kits, lowering kits, wings, fart can mufflers, lights, etc. on a $5,000 car. You’ll spend thousands on status (things you buy that you can’t pay cash for, to impress people you don’t even know or like) such as cars, houses, crap inside your houses, toys (often including your prepper gear), to try to prove how awesome, manly, gangster, redneck, whatever you are… But you won’t spend 5 minutes doing something to develop your character, to carve a real man out of yourself. You’ll see this phenomenon at its absolute worst in high school. Some boys never really grow up, they just make more money.
And then, to make things worse- when anything (or anyone) challenges the elaborate ways we try to cover over and ignore the fallacies that bother us, we often meet that adversity with anger, and an irrational response. Excuse me? Check your “swag?” Show me the title to that Lamborghini in your little music video, and I’ll let you look at the Ranger Tab/Scroll tattoo on my shoulder…
In Ranger Battalion, when I was in (2/75, 2001-2005), you had to maintain 80% on the Army Physical Fitness Test, shave every morning, have a fresh haircut every Monday morning, never bounce a check, never have any domestic violence, never have a negligent or accidental discharge of your weapon (even if it was caused by a malfunction), nor could you have any alcohol-related incident (even if it wasn’t your fault). You also had to keep a running record of every job you’d had, place you’d lived, contacts/friends/family in foreign countries, all debts, foreign vacations, and have different people who could be reached by phone to verify each one, going back 7-10 years (the minimum secret security clearance requirements). Violation of any of these things was grounds for release to a lesser unit, known as being “Released For Standards,” or RFS’d.
The standards seem high, but the men who actually meet the standards and remain in Battalion year after year are far more hard core. You have to understand that for these men, the standards are not the mark of top achievement, not the 100% goal. They are the absolute 0% goal. The standards truly begin after you beat the minimum thresholds just to stay in the unit. The Rangers exceed every standard by so much, so often, that even on the worst day- going through a painful divorce and custody battle after being deployed to Iraq and dealing with some serious PTSD (and losing all my money and most my stuff in the divorce) while gearing up to go right back into Afghanistan, completely hungover (truthfully- still drunk) in first formation I was able to easily smoke the PT test we had that morning, and keep myself together as a leader through it all during the years to come.
So as a leader- take the task at hand and make the minimum passing requirements (function, timeline, budget, etc.) your functional 0%. This means that you (and your team) were completely unprepared, completely unqualified, and shouldn’t have taken on the job in the first place because you just barely squeaked by.
Restated- If your customer has asked for a certain amount of things by a certain date, within a certain budget, and you completed only those things on the last day, spending the last dollar, you have completely failed, and everything has gone completely wrong.
You should continually build and grow yourself (and more importantly your team, if you have one) so that the things you take on are so elementary, so easy, that your team not only completes everything, but has extra functionality to offer the customer, far ahead of schedule, far under budget.
To illustrate:
•Go take a 2nd grade math test.
•Go take a toddler’s swimming class.
•Go play soccer against a 5 year old.
•Go drinking with a Navy SEAL.
You should win at pretty much everything on that list. But here’s the most important part- just because you can smoke a 2nd grade math test, don’t celebrate, and stop learning math. You’re still an idiot. You have to keep stretching forward and pushing yourself so you are moving the bar up and forward on what is easy for you to do. And with that drive, you’ll do completely extraordinary things.
Stop complaining about your clothing if you think you’re fat. Start complaining about how sore you are from working out to remove the fat, and you’ll start getting compliments from all over the place, and need to buy new clothes. My Ranger Wife rarely wears any makeup, and when she does, it’s extremely light. She works hard to look really good, and doesn’t ask me if her pants make her look fat, because she knows she’s smoking hot. And she’s been pregnant the vast majority of the last 4 years. Yeah, baby.
So there you have it. This is the tip of the iceberg in my head, but I’m tired of typing, so that’s all you’re getting for now. More to follow…
