Elite Team Quotes

In 762, to symbolize and propel the new order, Al-Mansur decided to build the grand new capital of Baghdad as a massive round city. The caliph assembled an elite team of the empire’s top engineers, architects, and visionaries—notably including Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews, such as Mashallah Ibnul-Athari.

Thinking too much about what happened and what is about to happen will wear you down. Live in the moment and take it one step at a time.

If you’re not certain of the value of mentorship, think of how many elite athletes or professional sports teams train without a coach. Zero. How many of your favorite films are made without a producer or director? Zero. How many of the best schools in the world function without teachers? Zero. It’s safe to say that every great leader, in any field, first had a great mentor. Finding a mentor who inspires and guides your growth is a life-changing experience. Mentors help us to transcend the limits, or perceived limits, of our abilities. A mentor can be anyone who teaches us and helps us to grow in ways we couldn’t have on our own.

When the Navy sends their elite, they send the SEALs. When the SEALs send their elite, they send SEAL Team Six.

College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice.

Whether you’re an elite or a first-timer, that’s the magic of marathoning, the recognition of your own potential that had been there all along.

I sent you, my elite team, and you couldn’t handle a nerd and a piece of machine. What kind of mercenaries are you?

What developed in Somalia was things such as hunger and fighting.

Race day is fun, but training gives you moments of the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Then she walks out of the room. David calls after her, “I’ll call you when I get a job at one of the elite teams! You can be my assistant coach!” The woman’s response from the corridor is as obvious as it is confident: “You can be my assistant coach!

Lean UX advocates a team-based mentality. Rockstars, gurus, ninjas, and other elite experts of their craft break down team cohesion and eschew collaboration.

Bad leaders have hopes. Average leaders have quotes. Elite leaders have systems.

Neither side has been aware of it, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been wearing different uniforms on the same team—the Fantasyland team.

She heard the muted cries of the security team outside. Cries of agony. Then a smatter of gunfire. No more cries.

College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What

Jesus, keep it in your pants and behave! I swear to fuck I am running a fucking crib in the red light district of Soho, not an elite team of Special Forces operators.” Shaun jumped at Noble’s voice right behind him. Dammit, he had been so busy watching the bobbing up and down of Zenko’s Adam’s apple when he swallowed that he hadn’t noticed him there. Shit! Some operator you are, dude!

Baseball is known for superstitious players and cursed teams—and at the root of every curse there’s a story. Boston’s curse was to trade Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Cubs fans claim a billy goat is responsible for their futility. And Cleveland’s curse? The club struggled after its Pennant-winning 1954 season, but it was rich with optimism just two years later as an onslaught of new talent promised to lift the club once more to the ranks of baseball’s elite—and by 1959 the club was contending for the Pennant again. And then GM Frank Lane traded Rocky Colavito to the Detroit Tigers and cursed everything.

There is a theory about human behavior called the 10-80-10 principle. I speak of it often when I talk to corporate groups or business leaders. It is the best strategy I know for getting the most out of your team. Think of your team or your organization as a big circle. At the very center of it, the nucleus, are the top 10 percenters, people who give all they've got all the time, who are the essence of self-discipline, self-respect, and the relentless persuit of improvement. They are the elite- the most powerful component of any organization. They are the people I love to coach. Outside the nucleus are the 80 percenters. They are the majority- people who go to work, do a good job, and are relatively reliable. The 80 percenters are for the most part trustworthy and dutiful, but they simply don't have the drive and the unbending will that the nucleus guys do. They just don't burn as hot. The final 10 percenters are uninterested or defiant. They are on the periphery, mostly just coasting through life, not caring about reaching their potential or honoring the gifts they've been given. They are coach killers. The leadership challenge is to move as many of the 80 percenters into the nucleus as you can.

As a manager in the Ivy League, I discovered that the upper management team were seriously undermining my ability to manage my own staff. It was so bad that I eventually left. I now advise people not to work for the Ivy League.

1. Recruit the smallest group of people who can accomplish what must be done quickly and with high quality. Comparative Advantage means that some people will be better than others at accomplishing certain tasks, so it pays to invest time and resources in recruiting the best team for the job. Don’t make that team too large, however—Communication Overhead makes each additional team member beyond a core of three to eight people a drag on performance. Small, elite teams are best. 2. Clearly communicate the desired End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status. Everyone on the team must know the Commander’s Intent of the project, the Reason Why it’s important, and must clearly know the specific parts of the project they’re individually responsible for completing—otherwise, you’re risking Bystander Apathy. 3. Treat people with respect. Consistently using the Golden Trifecta—appreciation, courtesy, and respect—is the best way to make the individuals on your team feel Important and is also the best way to ensure that they respect you as a leader and manager. The more your team works together under mutually supportive conditions, the more Clanning will naturally occur, and the more cohesive the team will become. 4. Create an Environment where everyone can be as productive as possible, then let people do their work. The best working Environment takes full advantage of Guiding Structure—provide the best equipment and tools possible and ensure that the Environment reinforces the work the team is doing. To avoid having energy sapped by the Cognitive Switching Penalty, shield your team from as many distractions as possible, which includes nonessential bureaucracy and meetings. 5. Refrain from having unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction. Create an aggressive plan to complete the project, but be aware in advance that Uncertainty and the Planning Fallacy mean your initial plan will almost certainly be incomplete or inaccurate in a few important respects. Update your plan as you go along, using what you learn along the way, and continually reapply Parkinson’s Law to find the shortest feasible path to completion that works, given the necessary Trade-offs required by the work. 6. Measure to see if what you’re doing is working—if not, try another approach. One of the primary fallacies of effective Management is that it makes learning unnecessary. This mind-set assumes your initial plan should be 100 percent perfect and followed to the letter. The exact opposite is true: effective Management means planning for learning, which requires constant adjustments along the way. Constantly Measure your performance across a small set of Key Performance Indicators (discussed later)—if what you’re doing doesn’t appear to be working, Experiment with another approach.

The more I recognized these tactical styles, the more I saw the ideal as a balance. Despite the contradiction, a recon [team leader] had to be part wolf and part rabbit--selectively bold or cautious--but few men can agilely switch back and forth.

The better I understood my education, the angrier I became that most working-class and poor people are denied one. Why are the children of doctors, lawyers, and engineers taught the mysteries of existence while the children of janitors and waitresses are taught fear? I developed a preoccupation with my own inadequacies, aided by a few professors of elitism. To combat my growing anxiety, I began to envision myself a class spy. I would soak up all of the information they could give me and run reconnaissance for my team.

This style of teaching reflects the business community,” one fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan public school told me, “where people’s respect for others is based on their verbal abilities, not their originality or insight. You have to be someone who speaks well and calls attention to yourself. It’s an elitism based on something other than merit.” “Today the world of business works in groups, so now the kids do it in school,” a third-grade teacher in Decatur, Georgia, explained. “Cooperative learning enables skills in working as teams—skills that are in dire demand in the workplace,” writes the educational consultant Bruce Williams.

PJs use parachuting skills to raid into enemy territory to rescue and save lives; army rangers parachute onto the battle field to kill enemy soldiers and capture ground, while a Green Beret will infiltrate a remote, hostile area to teach the local populace how to fight and defend themselves against an enemy. Recon marines can sneak into enemy territory and learn all their secrets. SEALs are small direct-action-oriented teams that can infiltrate areas by sea air, or land to accomplish their objectives, such as capturing or destroying high value targets. Air force combat controllers call in airstrikes, help seize enemy airfields, and use their air traffic control skills to orchestrate everything from large-scale aerial invasions to small insertions of American planes and soldiers. All of these elite units consider themselves exclusive brotherhoods. Members of these outfits live at the most dangerous extreme of human experience and entrust their lives to each other. They focus on a common mission and share unique experiences of adventure and danger.

Ronan Astor. An earl’s son with a Prince Charming complex. Nicknamed Death for his position on the team. He doesn’t know that death isn’t a title. Death is the beginning of every war, and I’ve already started mine. I stole his will, his future, and soon enough, his life will follow. I have a secret, I’m a thief. Ronan Astor is my next target. As well as my future husband.

...[A]s you read opinions and history in school about 2004... I want you to know... that going to this war was right. No matter what you hear 20 years from now by elite media and historians, things get distorted... Just like Vietnam, I fear OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) will be abused in the same way. Just as you hear more about American soldiers in Vietnam raping women and children and shooting unarmed men, today the media is focused about this detainee debacle for two weeks solid, in contrast to American Soldiers being dragged in the streets and dismembered, which was covered for less than 72 hours. I am part of the Special Operations Forces elite... We are harder than anyone at these detention centers and let me tell you, we treat these guys with the utmost professionalism. We do not hit them, we don't humiliate them or cause them any bodily harm for the purpose of entertainment. As a Christian, one assumes great compassion... This is WAR and treated very seriously. People are being killed and it is our job to get information... The humanity in me wants me to warm them, tell them their family is okay, feed them, and even embrace them in a loving way... Most, even in my stature, feel the same way. This is the American Soldier.

I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers shipped in from Namibia. Seeing the World Cup in person would have sounded unreal to them, and besides, they did not like the topic. North Koreans still seemed to feel great shame over their team’s loss, despite the fact that in the world’s eyes it had been an admirable effort. But for them failure of any degree was not tolerated.

Assault isn’t just for criminals. Elite military teams, hostage rescue, SWAT, and entry teams use this mindset as much as criminals do. They don’t want to be tested or find out what their limitations are, they want to get the job done and go home. The mindset is implacable and predatory. They use surprise, superior numbers, and superior weapons—every cheat they can, and they practice. On the rare, rare occasions when my team made a fast entry and someone actually fought, the only emotion that I registered was that I was offended that they resisted, and we rolled right over the threat(s) like a force of nature.

Whatever the motives out of which they were established, the old WASP admissions criteria actually meant something. Athletics were thought to build character - courage and selflessness and team spirit. The arts embodied an ideal of culture. Service was designed to foster a public-minded ethos in our future leaders. Leadership itself was understood to be a form of duty. Now it's all become a kind of rain dance that is handed down from generation to generation, an empty set of rituals known only to propitiate the gods. Kids do them because they know that they're supposed to, not because they, or anybody else, actually believes in them.

He got thrashed in every one-on-one situation, lost every drill, but he kept coming back. At the end of the summer David drove over to see Filip's mom, sat in her kitchen, and told her about a study that showed how many elite players were never among the five best in their youth team, and how it's often the sixth- to twelfth-best juniors who break through at senior level. They've had to fight harder. They don't buckle when the setbacks come. "If Filip ever doubts his chances, you don't have to promise him that he'll be the best in the team one day. You just have to convince him that he can battle his way to twelfth place," David said. There's no way he can know how much that meant for the family, because they have no words to express it. It only changed everything.

The cooperative approach has politically progressive roots—the theory is that students take ownership of their education when they learn from one another—but according to elementary school teachers I interviewed at public and private schools in New York, Michigan, and Georgia, it also trains kids to express themselves in the team culture of corporate America. “This style of teaching reflects the business community,” one fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan public school told me, “where people’s respect for others is based on their verbal abilities, not their originality or insight. You have to be someone who speaks well and calls attention to yourself. It’s an elitism based on something other than merit.” “Today the world of business works in groups, so now the kids do it in school,” a third-grade teacher in Decatur, Georgia, explained.

WAY OF THE SEAL DRILL Making Variety a Habit Make a list of all the routines in your daily and weekly life. What time do you wake? Do you brush your teeth before or after taking a shower? Do you check your e-mail before brushing your teeth? What ritual patterns of thought can you detect? We are good self-deceivers, so why don’t you ask your best friend or spouse what your routine habits and thoughts are? Armed with the list, make a parallel list of ways you will break these routines. Get up at a different time every day. Take a different route to work. Do not check e-mail first thing, but only twice a day. Fast for a day or do a juice cleanse. Make a new routine out of shaking things up. This will forge new pathways in your brain, help you to avoid blind spots and rutted thinking, and spice up your life in general. You can easily apply this drill at a team level, also.

During the same hours of 1993 when the chopper crews in Somalia were slowly being overpowered and gunned down, there were twenty-four young boys back in the United States who would grow up to be future players in that African struggle. They had no way to know anything yet about the unique fighting group every one of them would eventually strive with all his determination to join. They also couldn’t know, though they would one day find out in person, that this particular battle corps is so elite, the candidate must first be a Navy SEAL just to attempt to get through the training - and even then, three out of four of those superb warrior-athletes fail to qualify. The group has had numerous military names during its long rise from the murky history of the early “frogmen” swimmers, to the black operations of the Underwater Demolition Teams whose only calling card was to render their targets dead, to the latest appellation as the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group - or DEVGRU, for those who prefer names ugly and short. But the group is better known to the general public as the near-mythical warriors of “SEAL Team Six.” Their complex training supports a brilliantly simple task: to be the very last thing their opponents see, if they are ever seen at all.

The Illusion of Choice” — A lot of times we feel as if we have choices to make about where we want to go and WHAT IT TAKES to get there. — The REALITY is that what it takes to succeed is not REALLY a choice. — WE GET tired of talking about it. — I get tired of talking about it. — I know we all do—but we are going to talk about it until we RESOLVE it. — ANYONE who runs a marathon will tell you that miles twenty to twenty-six are the hardest. — AND ANYONE who quits running at mile twenty-two will tell you that they immediately felt better—and IT’S TRUE. But days later when they read about the people who finished ahead of them—who kept running—they will have instant regret. — MY point is that THE ONLY CHOICE YOU HAD was to come to this school. — ONCE you chose that, you said, “I’M GOING TO BE ELITE.” — If that’s true, then the FORMULA is the FORMULA. — YEARS from now when they look back at this ALABAMA team, all that WILL BE LEFT is WHAT WE DID. — NOT what WE COULD HAVE DONE, if only this or this happened. — IF we are ELITE—IF we are a team who BELIEVES BIG—then WE DON’T have a “choice” about how we finish this SPRING. — NONE. — THIS game rewards people who DO IT RIGHT. — THIS game has demands—YOU DO them and succeed or YOU DON’T do them and you struggle. THERE is no middle area. — MY point is we don’t “have a choice” about how we are going to do things if we are going to STAY TRUE to the goals WE ALL made to start this year.

By the time Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somalia on October 25, 2011, the twenty-four boys back in America who had been so young during the 1993 attack on the downed American aid support choppers in Mogadishu had since grown to manhood. Now they were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and each one had become determined to qualify for the elite U.S. Navy unit called DEVGRU. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy and undergoing their essential basic training, every one of them endured the challenges of BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, where the happy goal is to become “drownproofed” via what amounts to repeated semidrowning, while also learning dozens of ways to deliver explosive death and demolition. This was only the starting point. Once qualification was over and the candidates were sworn in, three-fourths of the qualified Navy SEALS who tried to also qualify for DEVGRU dropped out. Those super-warriors were overcome by the challenges, regardless of their peak physical condition and being in the prime of their lives. This happened because of the intensity of the training. Long study and practice went into developing a program specifically designed to seek out and expose any individual’s weakest points. If the same ordeals were imposed on captured terrorists who were known to be guilty of killing innocent civilians, the officers in charge would get thrown in the brig. Still, no matter how many Herculean physical challenges are presented to a DEVGRU candidate, the brutal training is primarily mental. It reveals each soldier’s principal foe to be himself. His mortal fears and deepest survival instinct emerge time after time as the essential demons he must overcome. Each DEVGRU member must reach beyond mere proficiency at dealing death. He must become two fighters combined: one who is trained to a state of robotic muscle memory in specific dark skills, and a second who is fluidly adaptive, using an array of standard SEAL tactics. Only when he can live and work from within this state of mind will he be trusted to pursue black operations in every form of hostile environment. Therefore the minority candidate who passes into DEVGRU becomes a member of the “Tier One” Special Mission Unit. He will be assigned to reconnaissance or assault, but his greatest specialty will always be to remain lethal in spite of rapidly changing conditions. From the day he is accepted into that elite tribe, he embodies what is delicately called “preemptive and proactive counterterrorist operations.” Or as it might be more bluntly described: Hunt them down and kill them wherever they are - and is possible, blow up something. Each one of that small percentage who makes it through six months of well-intended but malicious torture emerges as a true human predator. If removing you from this world becomes his mission, your only hope of escaping a DEVGRU SEAL is to find a hiding place that isn’t on land, on the sea, or in the air.

In January 2016, KPMG issued a public statement after the ‘considerable exposure’ its report had received, which, according to KPMG, should not have happened ‘as the work was being conducted under strict rules of confidentiality which were clearly articulated in our letter of engagement as well as in our findings’.23 According to the statement, KPMG submitted a number of drafts to SARS on which they received feedback and their last report was submitted to SARS on 4 December 2015.24 ‘Our mandate was to undertake a documentary review and did not include interviewing individuals named in the report, nor were they given sight of our findings by us.’25 The KPMG report, which had cost the state R23 million, was therefore not a comprehensive forensic investigation but merely a ‘documentary review’. I also wonder how they could claim they didn’t interview anyone named in the report, when I met with the KPMG team on two occasions, at their request. The report contains sweeping statements, is factually incorrect and there is little or no substantiating evidence in too many instances to mention here. The following examples should give the reader an idea, though, of how taxpayers’ money was spent on a KPMG ‘investigation’. Take, for instance, the following finding: ‘We found no evidence indicating that the Minister of Finance, at the time, new about the existence of the Unit in SARS.’26 Firstly, the word ‘new’ means something entirely different from the word ‘knew’. Secondly, since that ‘unit’ was established there have been three ministers of finance and three deputy ministers and two SARS commissioners and deputy commissioners. Which particular minister was being referred to here, and why leave out the deputy ministers and commissioners?

Matt Espenshade confirmed that in spite of the deaths of so many of the kidnappers, many more are still at large, including their leaders. Those men might hope to be forgotten; they are not. The FBI has continued its investigative interest in those involved with the kidnapping. The leaders, especially, are of prime interest to the Bureau. And now the considerable unseen assets in that region are steadily feeding back information on these targeted individuals to learn their operational methods and their locations and hunt them down. The surviving kidnappers and their colleagues are welcome to sneer at the danger. It may help them pass the time, just as it did for Bin Laden’s henchmen to chuckle at the idea of payback. If the men nobody sees coming are dispatched to capture or kill them, the surviving kidnappers will find themselves dealing with a force of air, sea, and land fighters s obsessed with the work they do that they have trained themselves into the physical and mental toughness of world-class athletes. They will carry the latest in weapons, armor, visual systems, and communication devises. Whether they are Navy SEAL fighters, DEVGRU warriors, Army Delta Force soldiers, Green Berets, or any of the elite soldiers under United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), they will share the elite warriors’ determination to achieve success in their mission assignment. The news that they are coming for you is the worst you could receive. But nobody gets advance warning from these men. They consider themselves born for this. They have fought like panthers to be part of their team. For most of them, there is a strong sense of pride in succeeding at missions nobody else can get done; in lethal challenges. They actually prefer levels of difficulty so high it seems only a sucker would seek them, the sorts of situations seen more and more often these days. Impossible odds.

Jones, along with the US military attaché in Indonesia, took Subandrio’s advice. He emphasized to Washington that the United States should support the Indonesian military as a more effective, long-term anticommunist strategy. The country of Indonesia couldn’t be simply broken into pieces to slow down the advance of global socialism, so this was a way that the US could work within existing conditions. This strategic shift would begin soon, and would prove very fruitful. But behind the scenes, the CIA boys dreamed up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the famous anticommunist collection The God That Failed.33 And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. The Agency boys knew that Sukarno routinely engaged in extramarital affairs. But everyone in Indonesia also knew it. Indonesian elites didn’t shy away from Sukarno’s activities the way the Washington press corps protected philanderers like JFK. Some of Sukarno’s supporters viewed his promiscuity as a sign of his power and masculinity. Others, like Sumiyati and members of the Gerwani Women’s Movement, viewed it as an embarrassing defect. But the CIA thought this was their big chance to expose him. So they got a Hollywood film crew together.35 They wanted to spread the rumor that Sukarno had slept with a beautiful blond flight attendant who worked for the KGB, and was therefore both immoral and compromised. To play the president, the filmmakers (that is, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry) hired a “Hispanic-looking” actor, and put him in heavy makeup to make him look a little more Indonesian. They also wanted him bald, since exposing Sukarno—who always wore a hat—as such might further embarrass him. The idea was to destroy the genuine affection that young Sakono, and Francisca, and millions of other Indonesians, felt for the Founding Father of their country. The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.36

- I’m a normal kid, I was raised by television. The secret to great barbeque: only Oscar knows it. Life should be so simple as enjoying ribs, farting, crapping, pissing, fucking and drinking, and maybe smoking too, but anything other than that is too complicated, life should be simple. It is not. - Work? You would go to work even if there’s a chance your job’s imaginary? Imaginary or not, the questions Max poses remain as relevant for Frank, Sam, and Oscar as they are for us. A slight hangover won’t be best friends with any kind of daylight and while this one wasn’t particularly hazardous, they wouldn’t be having any of it. "...the lunatic is on the grass." Surely if you see a bunch of people having a picnic in a park that would turn your head wouldn’t it? How normal a picnic really is? When was the last time you saw one happening? Not in a movie, in real life. If a man’s hat falls to the ground, said man is expected to pick it up. That’s the premise. I’m not some pissy little kid who stopped believing in God because some priests rape kids. I don’t believe in God because I can’t be sure of its existence. I’m not some pissy little kid who stopped believing in God because the church raped kids. I don’t believe in God because I can’t be sure of its existence. Nothing is wrong. You don’t take another man’s hat, another man’s ride, or another man’s woman. Those are universal laws. - You do not take another man’s hat, another man’s ride, or another man's woman. Universal laws, Rosa. - Jesus, no. That won’t be necessary Mr. Coyote. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through the course of my life is this: loaded guns make pretty compelling arguments, and it’s not like I was the star in the debate team in high school. A lot of dinners are joined by assholes, people that don’t matter, and good friends too, but breakfast are kind of elite. You have breakfast with fewer people in your life and most of the time those people you have breakfast with are the good ones. - That’s the thing: I don’t know. I’m aware of the fact that guns might not be the ultimate protection when what we’re facing is the truth, we’re coming to terms with our reality, but we don’t know what we might find out there and if by god there’s an imaginary monster or something waiting there for us, I’d rather have ammo than luck No gun will ever protect a man as he prepares to meet his maker. Personally, I think half a burger is something you can have regardless of how hungry you are. Air conditioning is a marvel of modern science, how could we have lived without it? In the end, there was no greener grass than Texas.

Then, decades later, in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “hurt, pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster. In a sense, it was Buteyko’s Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater. Counsilman used it to train the U.S. Men’s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history. Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in the 1980s and 1990s argued that it had little to no impact on performance and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers reported, must have been based on a strong placebo effect. In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. Woorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer. Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were the same: a profound boost in performance.* Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone. Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.

„– Alex… – Sunt aici. – Dacă nu m-aş simţi de parcă ma călcat trenul, ţi-aş trage un cap în gură. Te-am crezut mort toţi anii ăştia, reuşi să spună Ford înainte ca ochii să i se închidă din nou. Ford devenise partenerul lui Alex aproape imediat după recrutarea lui în organizaţia Elite. Prietenia care se legase între ei încă din primul moment se adâncise tot mai mult, Ford devenind singurul suflet căruia Alex îi destăinuia cele mai intime secrete. Lucraseră împreună, îşi salvaseră viaţa reciproc, împărţind momente dintre cele mai brutale pe teren, încrederea pe care o aveau unul în celălalt pietrificându-se de fiecare dată când priveau moartea drept în ochi. Alex zâmbi cu tristeţe. – Dacă te faci bine, îţi dau voie s-o faci.

cult followings based on sports teams or rock stars, science fiction fandom was rooted in an essentially solitary activity: reading. Traits typically viewed as pathological or pathetic in the mainstream (like obsessing over trivia while accumulating vast hoards of treasured ephemera) were rewarded in the community as signs of “trufan” commitment. Fandom offered what every homesick space child yearned for: membership in an elite society of loners united by their belief in the future. For those who had felt like exiles their whole lives, forced to live among strangers, becoming a fan was like finally coming home.

Now, I’ve got a few things to say. You’re on your way to First Phase, so make me proud of you. After Hell Week, those of you who survive will still have to face the scuba pool comps in Second Phase and weapons practicals in Third Phase. I’ll want to shake your hand at graduation. When you get there, I want to think of you as one of Reno’s warriors.” There’s another roar from the class. Reno is very popular with Class 228. While he has frequently made them suffer, the trainees know that Reno and the other Indoc instructors have tried to give them what they need to survive in First Phase. “Be on time. Be alert. Be accountable for your actions in and out of uniform. You officers, look out for your men and your men will look out for you. Your reputation is everything in the teams. Remember this if you remember nothing else. For each of you, a chance to build on that reputation begins on Monday morning at zero five hundred in First Phase.” He looks around the class; every eye is on him. “For those of you who do get to the teams, I want you to take this on board. The guys in the teams are a brotherhood. You’ll be closer to them than you ever were to your friends in high school or college. You’ll live with them on deployment and some of you may even die with them in combat. But never, ever forget your family. Family comes before teammates. Most of us will grow old and die in bed, and the only people who will be there to help us die will be our family. Put your family first. I want you to never forget that.

Axe was holding the tribesmen off, leaning calmly on a rock, firing up the hill, the very picture of an elite warrior in combat. No panic, rock steady, firing accurately, conserving his ammunition, missing nothing.

An extra year of play against players younger than you is a huge advantage. Your body becomes bigger, stronger, and faster every day, giving you an opportunity to truly stand out from your birthday-handicapped peers. This extra developmental time predisposes you for selection onto more elite teams, which in turn leads to more ice time and better coaching, which advances your abilities even further.

The entire death squad Operation 40, a strict secret team founded by George Bush, Richard Nixon and Allen Dulles initially formed to eliminate Fidel Castro, was present at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.[87] Members of this death squad are also responsible for killing Che Guevara, Salvador Allende (President of Chile), Jaime Roldós (President of Ecuador) and Omar Torrijos (President of Panama). Later on, this death squad was also responsible for Operation Phoenix, the greatest murder scheme in Vietnam. Kennedy’s death was welcomed with relief by the FBI and CIA. Both organizations have always been an instrument of the global elite.

A closer parallel to the Rolling Stone article may be much of the media’s breathless coverage of members of the Duke University lacrosse team who were accused of gang-raping a stripper in 2006. Like “A Rape on Campus,” it was a story that seemed to conform to a lot of the public’s worst ideas about the behavior of privileged young men at elite colleges. “It was too good to not be true, and that’s what’s going on in this case as well,” said Daniel Okrent, a former public editor at The Times. “You don’t want women to be gang-raped in a fraternity house, but you want to believe this terrible thing is happening and therefore you can expose it.” On the most basic level, the writer of the Rolling Stone article, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was seduced by an untrustworthy source. More specifically, as the report details, she was swept up by the preconceptions that she brought to the article. As much casting director as journalist, she was looking for a single character with an emblematic story that would speak to — in her words — the “pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture” on college campuses. Journalists are often driven to cover atrocities

Ngo Dinh Diem was a selection and creation of the CIA, as well as others such as Admiral Arthur Radford and Cardinal Spellman, but the primary role in the early creation of the “father of his country” image for Ngo Dinh Diem was played by the CIA—and Edward G. Lansdale was the man upon whom this responsibility fell. He became such a firm supporter of Diem that when he visited Diem just after Kennedy’s election he carried with him a gift “from the U.S. Government,” a huge desk set with a brass plate across its base reading, “To Ngo Dinh Diem, The Father of His Country.” The presentation of that gift to Diem by Lansdale marked nearly seven years of close personal and official relationship, all under the sponsorship of the CIA. It was the CIA that created Diem’s first elite bodyguard to keep him alive in those early and precarious days. It was the CIA that created the Special Forces of Vietnamese troops, which were under the tight control of Ngo Dinh Nhu, and it was the CIA that created and directed the tens of thousands of paramilitary forces of all kinds in South Vietnam during those difficult years of the Diem regime. Not until the U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam, in the van of the escalation in 1964, did an element of American troops arrive in Vietnam that were not under the operational control of the CIA.

It was the CIA that created Diem’s first elite bodyguard to keep him alive in those early and precarious days. It was the CIA that created the Special Forces of Vietnamese troops, which were under the tight control of Ngo Dinh Nhu, and it was the CIA that created and directed the tens of thousands of paramilitary forces of all kinds in South Vietnam during those difficult years of the Diem regime. Not until the U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam, in the van of the escalation in 1964, did an element of American troops arrive in Vietnam that were not under the operational control of the CIA.

In the August 7, 1971, issue of The New Republic, the Asian scholar Eugene G. Windchy says, “What steered the nation into Vietnam was a series of tiny but powerful cabals.” What he calls a sense of tiny but powerful conspiracies, this book puts all together as the actions of the Secret Team. That most valuable book by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross calls this power source “The Invisible Government,” and in the chapter on the various intelligence organizations in the United States they use the term “Secret Elite.” The CIA did not begin as a Secret Team, as a “series of tiny but powerful cabals,” as the “invisible government,” or as members of the “secret elite.” But before long it became a bit of all of these. President Truman was exactly right when he said that the CIA had been diverted from its original assignment. This diversion and the things that have happened as a result of it will be the subject of the remainder of this book.

Still another abstract benefit of playing for Pulaski: The experience is so different from traditional high school football that the Bruins’ players feel as though they’re part of something unique, an elite unit amid regular cadets. The team bonds have solidified; the offensive and defensive players consider themselves kindred spirits, bracketed together by their singular coach.

No one was expecting the six-man team of elite SAS officers to storm the prison, but that is exactly what they did do. Hurling stun grenade and tear gas canisters, they entered the jail through a skylight before freeing the terrified prison warder.

One of the misconceptions in minor hockey is a belief that players have to get on “big city” teams as young as possible to gain exposure when being identified by major junior clubs. For example, the Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL) has long been considered a strong breeding ground, with three or four elite AAA teams each year producing some of the top players for the OHL draft. However, on the list of players from Ontario since 1975 who have made the NHL, only 16.8 percent of those players came from GTHL programs while the league itself represents approximately 20 percent of the registered players in the province—that means the league has a per capita development rate of about –3 percent. What the research found was that players from other Ontario minor hockey leagues who elevated to the NHL actually had an edge in terms of career advancement on their GTHL counterparts by the age of nineteen. Each year several small-town Ontario parents, some with players as young as age eight, believe it’s necessary to get their kids on a GTHL superclub such as the Marlboros, Red Wings, or Jr. Canadiens. However, just twenty-one GTHL “import” players since 1997 have played a game in the NHL in the last fifteen years. This pretty much indicates that regardless of where he plays his minor hockey from the ages of eight through sixteen, a player eventually develops no matter how strong his team is as a peewee or bantam. An excellent example comes from the Ontario players born in 1990, which featured a powerhouse team in the Markham Waxers of the OMHA’s Eastern AAA League. The Waxers captured the prestigious OHL Cup and lost a grand total of two games in eight years. In 2005–06, when they were in minor midget (age fifteen), they compiled a record of 64-1-2. The Waxers had three future NHL draft picks on their roster in Steven Stamkos (Tampa Bay), Michael Del Zotto (New York Rangers), and Cameron Gaunce (Colorado). One Waxers nemesis in the 1990 age group was the Toronto Jr. Canadiens of the GTHL. The Jr. Canadiens were also a perennial powerhouse team and battled the Waxers on a regular basis in major tournaments and provincial championships over a seven-year period. Like the Waxers, the Jr. Canadiens team also had three future NHL draft picks in Alex Pietrangelo (St. Louis), Josh Brittain (Anaheim), and Stefan Della Rovere (Washington). In the same 1990 age group, a “middle of the pack” team was the Halton Hills Hurricanes (based west of Toronto in Milton). This club played in the OMHA’s South Central AAA League and periodically competed with some of the top teams. Over a seven-year span, they were marginally over the .500 mark from novice to minor midget. That Halton Hills team produced two future NHL draft picks in Mat Clark (Anaheim) and Jeremy Price (Vancouver). Finally, the worst AAA team in the 1990 group every year was the Chatham-Kent Cyclones—a club that averaged about five wins a season playing in the Pavilion League in Southwestern Ontario. Incredibly, the lowly Cyclones also had two future NHL draft picks in T.J. Brodie (Calgary) and Jason Missiaen (Montreal). It’s a testament that regardless of where they play their minor hockey, talented players will develop at their own pace and eventually rise to the top. You don’t need to be on an 85-5-1 big-city superclub to develop or get noticed.

Jong-Il’s elite team of bodyguards was one of the most sinister, intriguing aspects of his way of life. He kept 120 of them and preferred them to be orphans; once hired they were not permitted to visit home or to ever leave the Leader’s side. If they wanted to marry, they were only allowed to marry a typist or secretary from a specific unit of the Party, and the matchmaking procedure itself was bizarre. A bodyguard had to apply to his supervisor for marriage, and if the application was approved—likely this decision was Jong-Il’s—the bodyguard would be called to his supervisor’s office on the Third Floor. Twenty photographs were placed on the supervisor’s desk, facedown. Blindly the bodyguard would pick a picture, which the supervisor would then flip over. The woman in the photograph would be the man’s wife. If the bodyguard refused to marry the stranger, he would have to wait another two years before being able to reapply—and this time he would have to marry the girl whose photograph he had blindly drawn, whether he liked the look of her or not, at risk of being dismissed.

Cong and VC sympathizers used to warn of American presence in the area. For example, they’d place

elite entrepreneurs respond quickly, put their business first, consult with mentors often, hire the best team, create an environment of stressful urgency, use time wisely, and so on. The

In all of the elite companies studied, Level 5 Leaders were in charge when they made the leap from good to great. Level 5 Leadership refers to a type of leader who is not only a highly capable individual, team player, and manager, but also embodies two essential traits: personal humility and the will to do whatever it takes to get results. Level 5 Leaders are quiet, modest, self-effacing, even reserved. They lack over-sized egos or inflated sense of self-importance. Level 5 Leaders are driven to create great results. They are not afraid to make difficult or unpopular decisions if it will better their company. While Level 5 Leaders demonstrate tenacious ambition and will to succeed, they do not devote this energy for their own benefit but instead drive it towards the company’s success. In contrast, the outsized egos and self-serving nature of the “control set” executives contributed to the deaths of their own companies. When good results happen, Level 5 Leaders credit good luck. When results are disappointing, Level 5 Leaders blame only themselves and take responsibility. Other leaders credit themselves when good results come and blame luck or other people for failures. Level 5 Leaders make sure their companies maintain excellence by setting up competent successors who will push their companies to even greater heights. In contrast, other types of managers often leave gaping holes in leadership once they retire. An unexpected finding showed that a majority of the great CEOs were home-grown. In contrast, “celebrity” executives brought into a company have shown to cause more harm than good. It is incredibly detrimental for a company to elect an ego-driven and self-serving CEO instead of a Level 5 Leader. Potential Level 5 Leaders are all around us, and it is possible for one to become a Level 5 leader by embodying their basic traits.

Getting a job done fast is fruitless if it isn’t done right. Individuals and Teams must constantly evaluate their progress. If an individual or Team starts to lose focus, they must take a step back and review.

Their plastic smiles were so deeply ingrained it would probably take an elite demolition team to remove them.

Think about it. How could white nationalism not be on the rise, when movement conservatism has depended on white resentment to win elections despite following policies that benefit a wealthy elite at the expense of most Americans? How could the paranoid mind-set of Trump followers not emerge from a political movement that sees everything that doesn’t confirm its preconceptions—from the reality of climate change to low inflation—as the product of vast conspiracies? And although people tend to forget it, the corruption and cronyism of the Trump administration were prefigured in the Bush years. In many ways, what Trump has done to America since 2016 is similar to what the Bush team did to Iraq in the disastrous first year of occupation. And

Hardly anyone knew what country had first landed men on the moon, despite the fact that they were science and technology majors. Asked what year computers had been invented, most had no idea; it was only after much consultation that one team ventured a guess: 1870.

The SEALs represented an inherent contradiction. For all their specialized training and elite capabilities, many struggled with foundational, almost rudimentary, ethical actions: to not steal, to obey authority, to tell the truth. They were ill-equipped to confront failures and the accountability that came with them.

The SEALs represented an inherent contradiction. For all their specialized training and elite capabilities, many struggled with foundational, almost rudimentary, ethical actions: to not steal, to obey authority, to tell the truth. They were ill-equipped to confront failures and the accountability that came with them.

At Elite Aesthetics and Wellness, our friendly, skilled, and knowledgeable team stands out from the rest! We pride ourselves on providing each of our clients with individualized, outstanding care, helping to revitalize and rejuvenate the look and feel of their skin. No matter what your anti-aging and skincare goals look like, we can help to make them a reality!

Bahira Shami is a young CEO tasked with ensuring the successful operation and growth of Beauty Elite Group. It's her mission to keep every department focused on their task and to her high standards. Bahira Shami plans to continue her growth with this company, gathering a team of like-minded professionals. She is proud of the company culture she has fostered at Beauty Elite Group. Bahira Shami got named Woman of the Year by the Houston Major.

At Elite Sprinkler Repair, we are one of the leading and most trusted names in the sprinkler repair and installation industry. Our team has years of experience repairing and installing sprinklers of all types. We also provide professional maintenance to ensure that your sprinkler system, not just the sprinkler heads continues to operate optimally. Our vans are stocked, which allows us to handle most issues on the spot; we can also handle the most challenging sprinkler system repairs right away.

but much of the elite team the ISIS leader had assembled was still on the loose.

You created this lie. We were never a team. You exhaled false promises and I inhaled your bullshit. You ran the show and I danced to your tune, trapped in this elite bubble of lies you created.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that change starts when good people refuse to stay quiet.

During their brief history the newly formed Special Operations Forces had already achieved a notable record, but they had yet to tackle a major rescue of the magnitude of the Lady Flamborough hijacking. The orphan child of the Pentagon, the Special Operations Forces were not molded into a single command until the fall of 1989. At that time the Army's Delta Force, whose fighters were drawn from the elite Ranger and Green Beret units and a secret aviation unit known as Task Force 160, merged with the top-of-the-line Navy SEAL Team Six and the Air Force's Special Operations Wing. The unified forces cut across service rivalries and boundaries and became a separate command, numbering twelve thousand men, headquartered at a tightly restricted base in southeast Virginia. The crack fighters were heavily trained in guerrilla tactics, parachuting, wilderness survival and scuba diving, with special emphasis on storming buildings, ships and aircraft for rescue missions.

I started to suspect that the real reason we can't agree on a formula for elite team leadership is that we've overcomplicated things. We've been so busy scanning the horizon for transformational knights in shining armor that we've ignored the likelier truth: there are hundreds upon thousands of potentially transformative leaders right in our midst. We just lack the ability to recognize them.

Throwing even more fuel on this fire was Alibaba’s record-breaking 2014 debut on the New York Stock Exchange. A group of Taobao sellers rang the opening bell for Alibaba’s initial public offering on September 19, just nine days after Premier Li’s speech. When the dust settled on a furious round of trading, Alibaba had claimed the title of the largest IPO in history, and Jack Ma was crowned the richest man in China. But it was about more than just the money. Ma had become a national hero, but a very relatable one. Blessed with a goofy charisma, he seems like the boy next door. He didn’t attend an elite university and never learned how to code. He loves to tell crowds that when KFC set up shop in his hometown, he was the only one out of twenty-five applicants to be rejected for a job there. China’s other early internet giants often held Ph.D.s or had Silicon Valley experience in the United States. But Ma’s ascent to rock-star status gave a new meaning to “mass entrepreneurship”—in other words, this was something that anyone from the Chinese masses had a shot at. The government endorsement and Ma’s example of internet entrepreneurship were particularly effective at winning over some of the toughest customers: Chinese mothers. In the traditional Chinese mentality, entrepreneurship was still something for people who couldn’t land a real job. The “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment in a government job remained the ultimate ambition for older generations who had lived through famines. In fact, when I had started Sinovation Ventures in 2009, many young people wanted to join the startups we funded but felt they couldn’t do so because of the steadfast opposition of their parents or spouses. To win these families over, I tried everything I could think of, including taking the parents out to nice dinners, writing them long letters by hand, and even running financial projections of how a startup could pay off. Eventually we were able to build strong teams at Sinovation, but every new recruit in those days was an uphill battle. By 2015, these people were beating down our door—in one case, literally breaking Sinovation’s front door—for the chance to work with us. That group included scrappy high school dropouts, brilliant graduates of top universities, former Facebook engineers, and more than a few people in questionable mental states. While I was out of town, the Sinovation headquarters received a visit from one would-be entrepreneur who refused to leave until I met with him. When the staff told him that I wouldn’t be returning any time soon, the man lay on the ground and stripped naked, pledging to lie right there until Kai-Fu Lee listened to his idea.

The truth is, running often attracts a personality type that gets high off extreme discipline.

This is the playbook the Obama team is using today to create the appearance of “issues and problems” and a general sense of desperation among Millennials so that people will “feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless” that they turn to them for solutions.

Epstein’s Little Saint James “Lolita” island (also known by locals as “Pedophile Island” and “Orgy Island”), where an endless supply of minors was transported by a team of child abductors and forced to partake in debauched ceremonies involving

When a woman tells the truth, she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” —Adrienne Rich

This is attractive to people considering partnering with the 2020birmingham. Individuals involved in a church plant—from a sending church, as a planter, or as part of a core team—can believe church planting is possible for them rather than only the domain of an elite group of super-Christians. When they face a huge task together, attitudes of “it won’t work” can quickly become “we will each play our parts because we aren’t on our own.

It destroyed me, but I loved the feeling of doing something like that again completely on my own terms.

Broszat then assembled an elite team of historians to work on a major six-volume work entitled Bayern in der NS-Zeit (Bavaria in the National Socialist Era). The ‘Bavaria project’, as it was called, examined resistance to Hitler’s rule in everyday life.9 It concluded that Nazi rule was much less

In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)

Everything about his life that wasn’t about being an elite badass was imploding. There seemed to be only one sane option: get the hell away from other human beings. Amundson took a leave of absence from work, bought an Airstream trailer, and leased a parcel of land in the mountains near Santa Cruz. For two months, he lived in the woods and rolled back the tape on the last fourteen years of his life as a SWAT team cop, Army reservist, DEA gunslinger, and husband. He wrote an after-action review of his marriage, Your Wife Is Not Your Sister, a self-critique so detailed and unstinting that it could have been subtitled Confessions of a Knuckle-Dragger. The book, lovingly dedicated to his ex-wife, is filled with recollections of moments when he thought he was justified but later realized his behavior was thoughtless, myopic, toxic. At the end of each chapter are concrete “Action Steps” to prevent fellow knuckle-draggers from repeating his mistakes. It’s been well received in the law enforcement community.

Everything about his life that wasn’t about being an elite badass was imploding. There seemed to be only one sane option: get the hell away from other human beings. Amundson took a leave of absence from work, bought an Airstream trailer, and leased a parcel of land in the mountains near Santa Cruz. For two months, he lived in the woods and rolled back the tape on the last fourteen years of his life as a SWAT team cop, Army reservist, DEA gunslinger, and husband. He wrote an after-action review of his marriage, Your Wife Is Not Your Sister, a self-critique so detailed and unstinting that it could have been subtitled Confessions of a Knuckle-Dragger. The book, lovingly dedicated to his ex-wife, is filled with recollections of moments when he thought he was justified but later realized his behavior was thoughtless, myopic, toxic. At the end of each chapter are concrete “Action Steps” to prevent fellow knuckle-draggers from repeating his mistakes. It’s been well received in the law enforcement community. At the end of his two-month woodland retreat, Amundson realized two things. The first was that it doesn’t matter how much of a firebreather you are if you can’t cut any slack to the important people in your life. The second was that all his macho law-and-order jobs had defined him, and if he wanted to stop being That Guy, he couldn’t work that kind of job.

The early Iditarod dogs were tough and hearty and so were the people who ran these teams. The first races took many days/weeks. During these early Iditarod runs, there were no headlights, no booties except the rare hand-sewn seal-skin bootie, no reflective trail markers (spruce boughs if anything), no quick-change runners, and no pre-race drop-bags assigned to each checkpoint. The mushers that ran were experts in survivalist arctic living and elite dog-men; many times these individuals were the trail-breakers as Iditarod was a trail and not a highway at that time. I remember air dropping dog food to the mushers at Poorman, they were snowshoeing in front of their teams. Mushers camped ang rested at night. The dogs were more trap-line dogs than anything. Today's Iditarod dogs are trained better and selected for more speed. (From the foreword by Terry O. Adkins)

After spending time at [Camp] Wilson, which felt like we were at war, Kandahar Airfield looked like an ugly American city filled with lots of European tourists. Soldiers from a handful of nations, thanks to NATO—the Netherlands, the UK, Canada—walked around unarmed and apparently unfazed by the war that was being waged around them. Overhearing their conversations, I got the feeling that their most serious concern was a shortage of coffee at the French PX. But for the guys who were having to do without, like the soldiers at Camp Wilson, a PX run was a treat. Parking the trucks, the team peeled off their gear and bounded across the street into what can only be compared to a Walmart at home. The warehouselike building was filled with junk food, sodas, magazines, and even obnoxious T-shirts advertising Operation Enduring Freedom. Only Americans would make T-shirts for a war.

Afternoon practice was roughly two hours on the mats, along with a run or skill workout in the morning. Usually, I returned to the room in the evening to get a lift in, sit in the sauna to recover from the day’s work, and prepare my body for what was next. They were long days, but they had to be. If I wanted to make the starting team and a difference in the program, there was no other option.

Deep-rooted good habits must be formed. It’s the long-term, sustained commitment that turns normal into special. Show up and give over and over. I tell my team to develop a two-word sentence that calms the mind from unraveling during tough things. It’s a mantra. Mine was, keep working. Keep working.

Coach Dan Gable walked over to where I was sitting and asked who I was. I told him my name, that I would be enrolling in school in the Fall, and would like to walk-on (no athletic scholarship) to his team. I was free for the program, but free is only useful if it has substance and can hold over time. Wrestling as a 150-pounder, Coach Gable didn’t need me because sophomore Doug Streicher had placed fifth in the nation. A homegrown Iowa boy, he’d just earned All-American honors placing fifth in the nation that March. He was a great mat wrestler, with a challenging style of wrestling. I respected him as a team member but also as a tough opponent who I was likely to battle for the starting spot. We both had two years of eligibility remaining. Coach Gable’s next words were, “Okay. Well, you’re not going to get any better sitting there. Why don’t you jump in with the Steiner brothers over there.

Afternoon practice was roughly two hours on the mats, along with a run or skill workout in the morning. Usually, I returned to the room in the evening to get a lift in, sit in the sauna to recover from the day’s work, and prepare my body for what was next. They were long days, but they had to be. If I wanted to make the starting team and a difference in the program, there was no other option. With all the talent on the team and only ten weight classes for forty men, most of the team desired Elite-ness. If I wanted a spot on the team, I had to step it up.

Looking back, I wasn’t ready for coaching as I was immature and unable to lead anyone. I could wrestle hard, and I understood many important aspects of the sport, but I wasn’t too sure about who I was and what I wanted. As a team, we fought for respect. I fought to shrink the empty feeling I carried. I needed to make sense of my life. I stayed for two years, just long enough to create an opportunity that would bless me a year later. Indiana gave me the coaching experience I desperately needed. During the second year at Bloomington, I met my wife, Lynette, and her one-year-old son, Jordan. They changed my life in many ways. She was beautiful and honest. I wasn’t ready for this in my life as my core wasn’t quite strong enough. Jordan, who I eventually adopted, was amazing. He was so smart and made life better.

part of something that made us feel uncommonly accomplished, enjoined in our mission to enable my success. We were a team dedicated to a single player’s performance, confident

With his “winged words,” as his diligent administrator of death, Adolf Eichmann, put it, Himmler transformed his men’s gruesome work into a grand and secret mission that only the SS elite were capable of fulfilling. “The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening an organization could ever receive,” Himmler told the leaders of his killing teams. He knew how to appeal to his men’s sense of valor and vanity, telling them, “To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.

If it were up to me, you’d be fucking mine in front of the entire world, and yes, I would be planning to put a football team worth of babies inside you so you’d always be glued to my side.

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There was a pecking order among them, the five-warrior team who made up the triarii—the most elite of all the Imperial Legion units. Micah’s little cabal.

On the main foredeck, two more crewmen readied diving gear, while inside the main-deck saloon, seven men pulled on neoprene suits. The operators were crowded, but they were accustomed to living and working in close proximity to one another. As members of the elite and secretive Zaslon (Shield) Unit of SVR, this very team of paramilitaries had helicoptered across eastern Ukraine and Dagestan on direct-action missions. They’d killed terrorists and kidnapped local rebel leaders in Chechnya after sitting huddled together in the back of armored vehicles for hours on end, and they’d parachuted into Syria to assist with the escape of a Syrian Army general from a position being overrun by rebels

Other members of Manhattan’s real estate elite preferred anonymity and usually disdained slapping their names on their buildings. They didn’t buy football teams or airlines or casinos or beauty pageants. They simply built, waited patiently to get rich, and donated huge sums to philanthropies. For the most part, no one in this crowd considered Donald a peer, either in terms of his tastes or his accomplishments. The Rockefellers, assessing Donald at his peak, dismissed him.

any country which failed to live up to its international responsibilities and allowed terrorists to use its territory was likely to be a target of US special operations forces. “Those responsibilities include the requirement to stop terrorism within its borders,” O’Connell said. “And if you can’t do that as a sovereign nation, you can expect the United States to have to respond.

When that grenade blew me over the cliff, it probably should have killed me, but the only new injury I had sustained was a broken nose, which I got when I hit the deck semiconscious. To be honest, it hurt like hell, along with my back, and I was bleeding all over my gear. However, I had not been seriously shot, as two of my team had. Axe was holding the tribesmen off, leaning calmly on a rock, firing up the hill, the very picture of an elite warrior in combat. No panic, rock steady, firing accurately, conserving his ammunition, missing nothing. I was close to him in a similar stance, and we were both hitting them pretty good. One guy suddenly jumped up from nowhere a little above us, and I shot him dead, about thirty yards range. But we were trapped again. There were still around eighty of these maniacs coming down at us, and that’s a heck of a lot of enemies. I’m not sure what their casualty rate was, because both Mikey and I estimated Sharmak had thrown 140 men minimum into this fight. Whatever, they were still there, and I was not sure how long Danny could keep going. Mikey worked his way alongside me and said with vintage Murphy humor, “Man, this really sucks.” I turned to face him and told him, “We’re gonna fucking die out here — if we’re not careful.” “I know,” he replied. And the battle raged on. The massed, wild gunfire of a very determined enemy against our more accurate, better-trained response, superior concentration, and war-fighting know-how. Once more, hundreds of bullets were ricocheting around our rocky surroundings. And once more, the Taliban went to the grenades, blasting the terrain around us to pieces. Jammed between rocks, we kept firing, but Danny was in all kinds of trouble, and I was afraid he might lose consciousness.

If you don’t have the revenues to hire a team and to replace yourself, your business isn’t profitable,

group) because when the ages were checked on January 1, you were still fourteen years old. An extra year of play against players younger than you is a huge advantage. Your body becomes bigger, stronger, and faster every day, giving you an opportunity to truly stand out from your birthday-handicapped peers. This extra developmental time predisposes you for selection onto more elite teams, which in turn leads to more ice time and better coaching, which advances your abilities even further.