 I have found through working out, lifting, running, whatever, that 99.9% of the time, you mentally quit before you physically quit. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back to talk about Minuteman Teams and specifically organizing a team challenge, I'm just going to call it that because I don't know what else to call it, event for your team. So I've been thinking about this a lot, past, I don't know, a month or two or whatever, but when you think about special forces units, right, the SEALs, the Army Special Forces, the Marine Recon, whatever, pick your poison, okay, the British SAS. What separates those units from just everyday grunt, ground infantry guys? Like what is it, what really separates them? And you could say, oh, you know, I mean, it's all the fancy toys, right, they got all the cool gear and the quads and, you know, the stuff and the submarine insertions and they can jump out of airplanes and they have all the cool toys. You could say that, you could say they have all the specialized training, right, like they're all trained as medics and radio operators and they're able to network better because they have people skill training and, you know, whatever, like you could say, they have all this specialized training, but at the end of the day, really what I would argue, it comes down to is those people do not quit when everyone else does. They have trained themselves, they have been selected to be people who never quit. They just don't quit, they just keep going, they will not quit, right. That's why they have SEALs, you know, sit in the surf for hours in like the 50-degree bay in San Francisco or whatever to weed out the quitters. Who's going to quit and who's not going to quit? Who's going to go well beyond what they could ever imagine doing? That's why they have these like selections, these final selection tasks of like rucking 40 miles with like a 60-pound pack. They go through these ridiculous inhuman rucks, not because they want you to be physically fit enough to do that because it really doesn't matter how physically fit you are. At some point, you're going to be in pain, right? Being a fit helps, but because they want to know who's going to quit and who's not going to quit, that's what they want to know. We need people who are never going to quit ever. When all hope is lost and when we're all going to die here, it doesn't matter, you're not going to quit, you're going to keep going. So, thinking about that principle. Now, I'm not a full-time military guy, you're probably not a full-time military guy. We can't devote hours and days and weeks and months of just full-time training all the time. We can't do that, right? We have normal lives, normal jobs. So how can we take that principle? That principle of selecting people who don't quit, of challenging ourselves beyond what we think is possible so we learn not to quit. How can we take that principle and apply that on a minor level in order to get value out of it? And that's where out of that idea, I come back to the team challenge idea for your Minuteman team. And it's real simple. It's doing some kind of arduous physical challenge in order to mentally challenge yourself. It's that simple. See who's going to quit and who's not going to quit. See when you're going to quit and where you need to go beyond, right? That's the whole purpose of a team challenge event. So, for me and my guys, we organized a 10-mile ruck with 30 pounds of gear plus water and did a night hike. I didn't call it a hike. It's not like we were in the woods. We were on a paved path and just a 10-mile ruck. I think it ended up being like 10.8 miles all in. And we rocked the whole thing, started just before the sunset and kept going until we completed it. And for me and my team, that was our challenge. Now, some of you might look at that and say, 10 miles, 30 pounds. I mean, come back to me when you're really doing rucking, Dylan. And okay, I mean, yeah, you know, whatever. But for me and my crew and how much rucking we normally do, that for us, that was a challenge, right? That was beyond the scope of what we normally do. We spend most of our time out in the woods, you know, doing the shooting and the moving around and the patrolling, whatever. But to just have like a 10-mile pure ruck in order to figure out where our mental stop point is was very helpful. We all made it. It was good. Next time, I'd like to go further, I think, to, again, I want to find that point. For me personally, at about mile, I don't know, eight, mile nine somewhere in there, I got to the point where I was mentally like, okay, I'm ready to be done. I no longer want to be here. It is now work in order to complete this, right? I had some blisters for a couple of days. I had some weird severe muscle pain on the side of my leg from like my T-band, which I don't know, I didn't see that coming. I was prepared for like my quads and my glutes, but not the side of my leg anyways. You people who ruck a lot probably know more about this than I do. Point being is that we decided to do something that was physically challenging in order to get a mental challenge out of it, right? In order, I want to see on my team who's going to be uncomfortable, who's going to complain, who's going to quit, who's going to start, you know, whining about how we shouldn't be here. And this is a terrible idea. Who's going to show up? Like, these are the things I want to start finding out now, rather than, you know, once China invades or whatever. When you look at like Navy SEAL training, for instance, I remember as a kid, I read this thing about how Navy SEAL training is 90% mental and 10% physical. And if you look at like what they actually do in Buds, you can be like, ah, that doesn't make any sense because it's ridiculous like four mile beach runs and a couple mile ocean swims. And at one point they do like a 16 mile run. And, you know, they have Hell Week where they're basically awake for five days in a row and all this stuff. And you can look at it and say, well, that's extremely physically challenging. And yes, it is. However, the people who designed that understood something, right? They understood that you mentally quit before you physically quit. And so we are going to push things to physical insanity extremes in order to find those people who mentally just give up, who just can't do it anymore. Because it's not as much about how much in shape you are, although, hey, that's a baseline. You have to be in shape in order to accomplish those things. It's really about who is going to be mentally prepared to make it, right? Who's not going to quit. And so with that principle in mind, the principle of we want to train ourselves to not mentally quit. I suggest that you would do a team challenge with your guys, right? Whatever that is. It could just be you and your buddy. It could be you and a couple guys. But organize for yourself some kind of team challenge. It could be something as simple as a ruck, which is what we did. Maybe for you it's different, right? But find something that's going to be physically exhausting and challenging and hard and have your team do it together. One, again, find out who's going to quit, who's not going to quit. Find out where your quit point is. Two, it's just a team building experience, right? It helps you function as a team under some mental and physical stress, which is always going to be good to be able to function better with as a team under mental and physical stress. So that would be my idea to you. Let me know how it goes. Let me know if you have any other brilliant team challenge ideas because, you know, I'm always open to new team challenge ideas. Hope this was helpful. Hope it gives you something to think about. I hope it gives you something to do. And that when your day comes, you are prepared to meet the challenge. Not because you have this miracle rise of ability where an angel blesses you and you just have magical abilities, but rather because you put in the work, you prepared. And when the challenge comes, it's a walk in the park because you've done harder things before. Do break dates and endure.