Dan Crenshaw Quotes

Details matter. Ignoring them can be the difference between success and failure.

I always ask the question, like what? You know, like what is he undermining exactly? You know what – what democratic freedoms have been undermined? We just had an election where we switched power in the House. Democracy is at work. People are voting in record numbers.

Israel is our most important ally in the Middle East. We must always stand with Israel.

A little perspective can be the difference between spiraling into dark despair and clawing your way back to the light. A brave young woman fought through despair twenty years before, which meant I could do it now, suffering in darkness in a sterile hospital room in Germany. So when the doctors told me I had virtually no chance of seeing ever again, I just heard one thing: Virtually.

In BUD/S the failures are more surprising than the successes. A lot of times, the most athletic, the fittest, the physically strongest candidates were the ones who quit. They should have been able to just crush it, but they didn't. Part of that is because they spent too much time on physical preparation and not enough on mental preparation. They believed that because of their physicality, their athleticism, they wouldn't be so surprised when faced with immediate failure. Those failures happen so fast in BUD/S. Your body fails constantly. That's what the program is designed to do to you. It is not physically possible to do everything that is being demanded of you. So you break down; you can't do every repetition of every exercise. We called them beatdowns for a reason. The instructors want us to break down and run away with our tail between our legs. They keep pressing us to go on, even after you thought that the activity was over. That happens to you over and over again. Your muscles fail you. And the instructors understand that difference between quitting- a failure of the will- and failing- your body giving out when you have already pushed yourself past what you once perceived as your limit. They respect that you hung in there long enough to truly fail. That's probably why you see so much anxiety and increasing suicide in our larger society. We have the most comfortable society the world has ever known. And that's good; I'm glad we do. But it's also made some people weak, and they break down when confronted with suffering. If you want to be a person who doesn't freak out just because you're scared or whatever else you're doing, then decide to be that person. Every time you fall short of that goal, look back on that situation and tell yourself you're going to do better next time. Eventually you will.

Everybody I knew who became a SEAL wanted to be one for a long time. You wanted this. You knew that you were, or wanted to be, an outside-the-box thinker, a sort of renegade or rebel, but also a strictly disciplined soldier. So you became that before you got to BUD/S (basic underwater demolition/SEAL training). BUD/S just made you prove it and then trained you to harness that. You learn how to exist in two different mental states: those of an ultra-aggressive combatant and a chivalrous gentleman. And you can instantaneously transition between the two. That's a warrior.

Don’t kid yourself into believing that’s why we lost. It’s not. I’ll tell you openly. I'm not wrong.

You ever wonder why we are always doing inspections in the military? Why do we obsess over perfect creases, shiny shoes, and crisply made beds? It's simple: If you can't get the small stuff right, you won't get the big stuff right. If you ignore the relatively unimportant details, then you are more likely to ignore the very important details, the stuff that actually counts. This is true of running a town, a city, or a country, but also for running your own life.

Writing this book was the first time I thought deeply about the lessons I'd derived from the SEAL teams, and life in general. It is quite the challenge to examine your own attributes, your failings, and then attempt to extract the lessons from your past that make you who you are today. This book is largely a product of that journey.

In combat, attention to detail is the barrier between life and death. We generally don't like death, so we pay attention to details. We also don't like failure. We don't like failing in our mission and we don't like failing the people who are relying on us. Ignoring the small stuff leads to both of those unenviable failures.

The ability to deal with adversity, to accept pain, to be calm under pressure- these are the traits we look for. Some can be taught, much is innate.

My mother spent half a decade staring death in the face, burdened with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up. She lived day to day in ever-increasing pain. The cancer afflicted her- and the cancer treatments afflicted her, too. Six rounds of chemotherapy on top of radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest constitution. Self-pity is never a useful state. But if anyone had reason to feel sorry for herself, and to complain a bit, it was my mom. She never did.

This is what happens when angry little boys like @alexstein99 don’t grow up and can’t get girlfriends…

Politics is the social manifestation of a set of policies. When I speak to kids, I let them know that there's a crucial difference between politics and policy. If you want to go into politics, then you have to be a representative of other people. To do that, you have to be able to communicate well. So before you decide to run for office, you have to ask yourself a few questions: Do you care about just one policy or issue? Are you good at communicating? Are you able to frame and win an argument? What are you good at? I don't think that all elected officials or candidates think through answers to these, and lots of candidates don't win because they quit on that notion of self-examination. For me, politics happened overnight when an opportunity presented itself. Because the military makes you think you have to be uber-prepared for everything, I thought that maybe I'd have a seat in about ten years. We did it in three months.

The question is: How do we become the heroes we want to be? My answer: Sanctioned intellectual property theft, that's how. No one has a patent on good habits. You can steal them. Identify your heroes, and emulate the character traits that make them more successful than you currently are.