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 goo… - Dan Crenshaw

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.

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.

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.