He Gave Up Flying Fighter Jets to Lead People #009

Yeah, mentorship has been huge for me.

And I don't think I really received what I would call quality, obvious mentorship until I was about 10 or 11 years into my career.

It wasn't until I was a major really in that, you know, long walks with God.

I was telling you about earlier as I was trying to figure out what I was going to do in my career where I met my first legitimate mentor.

And it was a one-star general that I was executive officer for in the deployed environment.

Fabulous man.

Up until that time, I thought that being a fighter pilot kind of matched up with some of my ideals and my ethics and moral codes and all that stuff, but not all the way.

And so I had this feeling of the kind of person that I wanted to be morally, ethically, spiritually didn't line up exactly with what it meant to be a successful fighter pilot.

And so I met this guy and he was a fighter pilot, but he was also All the things that I wanted to be as a high integrity guy, high energy guy, very effective at his job, but highly successful and treated people well.

And so just watching him go about his day was educational for me.

That was passive mentorship.

But then he called me into his office one day.

I'd only been his executive officer for about a week or two.

And he's like, hey, schedule yourself for an hour with me.

We're going to sit and talk about you.

I was like, oh, that's a lot of time for this guy because he was blocking his time off in 10 to 15 minute sections.

So I sat down there and for a full hour, he just got to know me and he wanted to hear what I wanted, how to deal with ego.

One of the things that he said to me that was pretty amazing is, He said, Hey, don't fall victim to pride.

You're here to serve.

Like you'll do 20 years in the military.

And if you retire as a tech sergeant or a major, you've had an honorable career.

Everything that comes after that is a combination of opportunity, national politics, how good of a writer your, your bosses are.

You can't control all those things, man.

So don't fall for the, he goes, everybody gets out of the air force.

disappointed that they didn't make the next rank except for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.