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Episode 33

Episode 33: Never Quit: Lessons in Resilience

Description

Quitting is an opportunity for self-reflection and growth. It can warn us of our limits, or showcase our resilience. In this episode of Veteran Led, John Berry tells personal stories from his time in training to illustrate the cost of quitting and the importance of pushing through adversity. John will share the ways that leaders are rewarded in the long-term for pushing through challenges rather than taking the easy way out by quitting.

Transcript

John Berry

Welcome fellow veterans. From the tip of the spear to in the rear with the gear, I went from active-duty Infantry to reserve-component logistician. I’m your host, CEO, entrepreneur, trial lawyer, and Lieutenant Colonel Retired, John Berry. The military lessons that I learned helped me grow an eight-figure business that has maintained consistent annual double-digit growth, landing on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America every year for the past seven years and has allowed me to continue to serve America’s heroes.

John Berry

Welcome back, veterans. Who wants to quit? You probably remember hearing this from your drill sergeant or your drill instructor. You probably heard this question many times. And for some of you, you really did want to quit, or you thought about quitting, or you were too scared to quit. I worked with a master sergeant who ran our officer and warrant officer candidate school who used to always say, Sir, attrition is the mission. And what he meant by that was that he would rather have an officer quit in training than have an officer quit on the battlefield or have an officer quit when trying to lead other noncommissioned officers. He was a former platoon sergeant who had a horrible platoon leader, and he wanted to make sure that never happened again.

John Berry

And so he held the officer candidates to the standard, and some of them did quit. Now, some of them verbally quit. They rang the bell and said, I quit. I don’t want to do this. More of them quiet quit, which means they quit because they stopped trying. They stopped putting in the maximum effort when doing physical training. They put in the minimal effort when studying for tests. But at the end of the day, they were not giving it their all, and they quit. The other ones were forced to quit. They gave it their best shot, but we failed them out because they failed a physical fitness test. They failed academic test. They a failed land nav or some other requirement. And what I liked about those people that were forced to quit was that when they came back, they came back with a lot more resilience. They really wanted to be back. In many ways, they were tougher than the first time goes because they had something to prove. But then there were the quitters who surprised me, the combat veterans, the former squad leaders, former platoon sergeant who thought that officer candidate school was going to be easy.

John Berry

It was harder than they thought, and they quit. Or they realized halfway through the school, that they did not want to become commissioned officers, and so they quit. Everybody quits for different reasons, and there are a million reasons to quit anything, but there are only a few reasons to not quit. And I learned this the first time I quit something. I quit playing college football. My sophomore year, I continued to play on the scout team and thought I was going to get some playing time, and then I got injured. I went to the trainer who sent me to the doctor, and the doctor said, I can’t guarantee that you will play football next year, but I can guarantee you will not play for an entire year. Now, at the end of the season, we had to meet with our position coaches, and I went in to talk to my coach and explain to him why I was not going to return the next year. It was heartbreaking for me. It was soul-crushing. I had never quit anything in my life. And here I was, a 19-year-old kid who no longer had a goal and no longer had a mission.

John Berry

That next semester was tough. I had lost my purpose. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I sat through classes and I couldn’t figure it out. And then at the end of the year, I decided that I wanted to become a U.S. Army Infantry Officer. At Fort Benning, I completed airborne school with no problems. Then I moved on to Ranger School, Class 398. I failed my patrols and was kicked out of the school. It took me six months for my shoulder to heal, and I went back and graduated Class 898. Had I failed out a second time, I would have went back again and again because there was no way I was ever going to quit on a goal or a dream again. Now, the next time I experienced quitting was in law school. I never quit in law school, but I was amazed at all the students who did. There were a lot of these young kids that went K through JD, kindergarten through juris doctorate. They had no life experience outside of school. And their entire academic careers, they had received straight A’s. Then their first semester in law school, they got a C, and they freaked out and lost their minds, and they quit.

John Berry

They thought, I can’t make it. I can’t do it. And I’m glad that they did quit because the legal profession is a serious profession. People come to you with their most serious problems. And if you can’t handle getting a C on a test, you don’t belong in that profession. And it’s good that you quit in the classroom because we don’t want you to quit in the courtroom. And when we handle legal matters for people, like people who are seriously injured in our personal injury practice, not only do our clients depend on us, but their families depend on us, similar to our clients who have been falsely accused of crimes. And of course, all of our veterans who have been unjustly denied their VA disability benefits. The bottom line is, in professions like the military or in law, we need people who will not quit. Now, there are also people in my law school class who consistently got Cs and said, I’m not leaving unless They kick me out of here. And their resilience made them great lawyers. They may not have been great students, but they persevered and they showed that they could commit themselves to doing whatever it took to achieve their goals.

John Berry

They didn’t quit. Now, the ironic thing in all this was throughout my college career, I never had good grades. And in fact, my first semester of law school, I got a C. I wasn’t in the top 10%. But by my second year, I had earned an academic scholarship and was on the dean’s list because I didn’t quit, because I didn’t let one bad grade deflate me because my military experience taught me that bad things are going to happen. But as a leader, you have to keep going. My favorite story about the true cost of quitting comes from Napoleon Hill’s, Think and Grow Rich. There’s a story about stopping three feet from gold. There’s a man named Darby, no relation to the Darby Queen obstacle course. Darby traveled West during the gold rush, and he struck gold in Colorado. He rushed back to Maryland to raise money, to get a drill, to drill into this gold vein. As he started to send money back to pay off his debts, the vein went dry. There was no more gold. And Darby feverishly dug around it, hired more workers. They could not find the gold vein. Discouraged, Darby sold the drill for a few hundred dollars to a junk man.

John Berry

The junk man hired a mining engineer who studied fault lines. That engineer determined that Darby stopped mining just three feet from the gold vein. The junk man became a millionaire. But Darby learned a different lesson, and Darby made up his losses many times over in the insurance company. The lesson Darby learned was to never stop selling insurance to someone just because they said no. He was never going to stop three feet from gold again. He would continue to push and push until he got to yes. And great successes come one step beyond defeat. But of course, none of us can go through our entire lives without quitting anything. In fact, often we must quit something to do something more meaningful. Think about sports. Most of us as a kid, we’ve played tons of sports. I played basketball, baseball, soccer, football, ran track, wrestled. I did all the sports. But as I got older, I discovered that I could not continue to do all the sports and excel in the sports that I liked. And so by the I was in high school, I only played football, wrestled, and ran track. By the time I was a sophomore, it was only football and track.

John Berry

I had to quit sports to be better at the sports that I really wanted to excel at. And as a kid, we learned a lot of important lessons in life from our parents when it came to sports. Number one, you never quit during the middle of the season. You honor your commitments. If you quit during the middle of the season, you dishonored your commitments, you dishonored your team, and you failed to keep your commitment to the team. You must not do that. For many of us, those sports seasons are a microcosm of the seasons of our lives. There was a season to get into the military, and there’s a season to get out. We joined the military in one season of our life, and we left the military at a different season of our life. And it’s okay to move on. It’s okay to quit one thing for something that may be better. One challenge that a lot of us have is quitting for something better. Some people reach a season of their life where they should quit to move on, but they don’t. Most of these individuals have job security with promotion opportunities and a 401k and health insurance, and they don’t want to leave that.

John Berry

They don’t want to quit that for the more risky proposition of doing the thing that they really want to do. And in that case, it takes more guts to quit than what they actually have. This doesn’t just show up in our working environments. It shows up in our relationships. We have all quit relationships, and we’re probably all in relationships that we need to quit. If you’re still hanging out with your high school buddies drinking every night, you probably need to end those relationships if you want to have a better life. If you’re in a toxic relationship, you need to quit that relationship. We have to decide when we will quit. We have to be intentional about who we will quit and what we will quit. And we have to understand the cost of quitting and the cost of not quitting.

John Berry

You’ve probably heard of the Sunken Cost Fallacy. This happens when you invest a ton of time, money or effort into a project that you know is going to fail. But because you’ve invested so much of your capital into this project, you don’t want to let it go. You can’t let it go. And so you let it drive you into the ground.

John Berry

I’ve made this mistake time and time again. I’ve invested in initiatives and bonus programs, which got me a little traction in the beginning, but then stopped working. But because the team liked them, I continued to do them, even though there was no real value in doing them. And eventually, I had to stop doing those programs, but it wasn’t until after we sustained a significant loss from continuing to do the thing that didn’t work. One of the things I learned after initiating several bonus program structures was that high performers will always be high performers, and you can’t buy high performance from a non-performer. And to continue to try to incentivize low performers who can never be high performers never works. We end up wasting a lot of time, money, and effort. So I had to kill a lot of those programs. I’ve had to quit entire lines of business to keep the company afloat. At one point, we decided to develop a family law practice and a real estate practice and an elder law practice. All of those practices lost money, and I had to quit them so the company could survive. I’ve also had to quit vendors.

John Berry

And quitting vendors is hard because vendors are in your industry, and you probably have relationships with them. But on a few occasions, quitting the vendor was one of the best things I did. Now, one of my most difficult experiences quitting a vendor came when I had to quit a vendor who had been working with us for several years. And what had happened was the quality of the product kept slipping and slipping and slipping, and we tried to work it out with the vendor, and we just couldn’t work it out. I sought the advice of a mentor who had built a nine-figure business and asked them what I should do. I wanted to keep the relationship with the vendor. The vendor still provided a few valuable services, but most of the services were now substandard, and I could see the company was slipping. And my mentor told me, Well, you need to renegotiate I’ll negotiate the contract and just keep the services that are valuable. And I said, No, I have integrity. I do what I say I’m going to do. I said I was going to pay the contract; I’ll pay the contract. My mentor said, John, that’s great that you have integrity, but your loyalty is to your company, and this vendor is acting outside of integrity.

John Berry

They’re not following through with the deal. You are failing to lead your company by paying the company’s money for services that you’re not getting. I understand that you’re getting a few of the services, but you’re paying for all of the services, and you need to hold that vendor accountable. And if they can’t provide the service that they promised, you need to renegotiate that contract. My response was, I don’t want to renegotiate mid-season or mid-contract. I want to complete the contract on my end. I don’t want to renegotiate mid-contract. This seems like too much work. My mentor told me that if I was going to stay in business, I needed to develop this skill. I needed to learn how to renegotiate contracts. And then at one point, when his company was facing extreme financial difficulty, the only way he could save the company was to renegotiate all of his contracts. And he found that almost 80% of his vendors were willing to listen and renegotiate. And he said that, look, even if you do everything right, John, even if you are in integrity, there are going to be times when you are going to have to renegotiate.

John Berry

He said, If I had not renegotiated those contracts, I would have been quitting on my company. And that is a dilemma we find ourselves in as leaders. We can quit by not doing something, or we can quit by continuing to do the thing that is not bringing us success. But what we should strive to never be is that timid soul who will never start anything because they’re afraid to quit, because they know that starting may lead to quitting, and they can’t live with the pain of quitting. In conclusion, as leaders, we have to know when to quit and when not to quit. There are a lot of relationships that we need to quit for good reasons, but we don’t quit a don’t quit a marriage because it’s hard. We don’t quit a business relationship because it’s hard. We don’t quit our job because we’re struggling. We don’t quit our job because it’s a little bit more difficult than what we expected. But there are times when we must quit doing what we are doing to get the thing that we really want. Because if you leave for something better, you’re quitting for the right reasons.

John Berry

After Action Review, who wants to quit? Number one, everybody quits something in their life. Number two, never quit on your team midseason. Number three, you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything. And to have what you really want, you’re going to have to quit some things. Three down. Quitting hurts, and it should. Number two, the more you quit, the easier quitting becomes. Number three, if an initiative or line of business is not getting you the intended result, quit it and focus on your main effort.

John Berry

Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting veteran leadership in business, strengthening the veteran community, and getting veterans all of the benefits that they earned. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @veteranled on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.

Berry Law

The attorneys at Berry Law are dedicated to helping injured Veterans. With extensive experience working with VA disability claims, Berry Law can help you with your disability appeals.

This material is for informational purposes only. It does not create an attorney-client relationship between the Firm and the reader, and does not constitute legal advice. Legal advice must be tailored to the specific circumstances of each case, and the contents of this blog are not a substitute for legal counsel.

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