Failure to adequately resource our [military] with the required number and quality of personnel can have far reaching and strategic implications and threaten our nation’s ability to defend its national interests at home and abroad.

—Colonel Michael Matthews, United States Army

Shortly after my book Fanatical Prospecting was published, we began to get calls from military recruiting commands. They were ordering as many as 50 books at a time. At first we thought it was an anomaly, but the orders kept coming.

Then, I began getting e-mail and notes on social media from military recruiters and leaders telling me how they were using the techniques in Fanatical Prospecting to fill the recruiting funnel. Entire companies and battalions were reading the book. I couldn’t make sense of why there was so much interest from the military in a prospecting book that was written primarily for business-to-business sales professionals.

A Conundrum

Sales Gravy, the company I founded in 2006, is a global training, development, and consulting company with a focus on business-to-business sales acceleration. We’re known for helping our clients make sales productivity and performance improvements, fast. We’ve built our reputation on shaping and customizing training curriculum around our clients’ unique situations and cultures.

We believe, at the core, that delivering training content in our clients’ language is the most effective way to speed the pace of the assimilation and actualization of concepts and skills in the real world.

So, when the requests started pouring in from military recruiting leaders for Fanatical Prospecting training, we found ourselves in a conundrum—we knew nothing about the military recruiting process and had no foundational knowledge on how the military worked.

We know exactly what we’re doing when civilian companies call us for help. We know the language of business. We speak sales and the sales process. It’s in our DNA. We aren’t starting from scratch.

The US military, though, was a complete unknown. Suddenly we were out of our comfort zone. We didn’t know the language of the United States Armed Forces.

I grew up in Augusta, Georgia, near Fort Gordon. Many of my childhood friends were from military families. One of my best friends joined the Marines right out of high school. Another joined the Navy. My wife’s dad was in the US Army Special Forces. She was an Army brat who was born on base. My dad was a Marine. He used the GI Bill to pay for college and became a lawyer.

Even with these connections, the military might as well have been a foreign country. I was ignorant, and this caused a level of stress and anxiety that I never experience with my civilian clients. Honestly, it is embarrassing to admit how little I knew about how the military worked—especially recruiting.

I was certain, though, that should we attempt to shove civilian sales techniques down the throats of military recruiters, we’d lose all credibility and make little impact. We’d be dismissed as just another group of civilians who “didn’t get it.”

Learning the Language

My “basic training” began at Fort Harrison in Helena, Montana, when Command Sergeant Major Rick Haerter took me under his wing. He spent hours getting me up to speed and changed my entire view of military recruiting.

Over the ensuing months I continued my education. I met dozens of officers and NCOs who were eager to help me learn. Captain Liz Alberton allowed me access to her entire company of recruiters and arranged a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me to jump with the Golden Knights. Command Sergeant Major Shawn Lewis guided my learning and gave me an opportunity to hone the FMR message with his battalion.

I have a stack of napkins filled with notes that I took while learning about military recruiting over beers with leaders like First Sergeant Michael Downing and First Sergeant Christopher Llewellyn, who graciously helped me understand the life of a military recruiter.

I also had the privilege of visiting the US Army Recruiting and Retention College at Fort Knox with Sergeant First Class James Beaty, where I was able to meet the instructors and observe and participate in classes. Sergeant First Class Beaty invested hours, patiently teaching me how recruiting works and how to speak military language.

It was following a Fanatical Military Recruiting Boot Camp in Nashville, Tennessee, when the battalion commander exclaimed, “If I didn’t know the truth, I’d have believed that you’d been a career recruiter” that I knew I’d passed the first test. With the help of many kind people, I was learning the language and battle rhythm of military recruiting.

Military Recruiting versus Civilian Sales

Through my “basic training” I developed a new appreciation for the role the military recruiter plays in building and maintaining strength of force. I gained deep respect for the price they and their families pay for mission. I was also confronted with the unique challenges recruiters and their leaders face. I learned:

1. Military recruiting is among the most difficult tours. The stress and pressure to perform is unrelenting.
2. Most military recruiters and their leaders adhere to an NCO Creed, take their mission seriously, and are eager to learn, grow, develop, and become better at their craft.
3. The various branches of the military invest heavily in training new recruiters. This foundational training helps green recruiters gain basic competencies for recruiting.
4. Despite the upfront training investment, most military recruiters begin their new role unprepared for the demands of the job and are far outside of their comfort zone.
5. Almost nothing in the military prepares recruiters for the emotional rigors, interpersonal skills, time management, and prospecting discipline required for high performance. No one “joins” the military to be a recruiter.
6. Military recruiters and their leaders recognize that they need more than basic recruiting training to perform at a high level. They see the need to consistently build on and improve recruiting skills. For this reason, they gravitate toward civilian sales books like my book Fanatical Prospecting.
7. Commercial sales and military recruiting are not the same. Although there are parallel skill sets between military recruiting and civilian sales, recruiting is a specialized endeavor that requires a specific set of competencies. Therefore, civilian sales processes don’t necessarily translate and thus are difficult for military recruiters to assimilate.
8. Yet, outside of formal military recruiting school, there are few advanced, high-quality training resources designed specifically for the unique needs of military recruiters.
9. More is being demanded of recruiters than ever before. At the same time, the available pool of qualified prospects has decreased significantly,¹ and the competition in the marketplace for top talent, from all sectors, has accelerated.
10. Therefore, to win the War for Talent, today’s military recruiters must operate at a level of excellence beyond anything asked of them in the past.

The more I interacted with military recruiters, the more my mind-set about their role in our democracy shifted. With the entirety of America’s military strength resting on the strong shoulders of military recruiters, I found it abhorrent that the advanced training resources required for recruiters to grow, develop, and excel either didn’t exist or were not readily available.

So, my mission changed. I became obsessed with developing advanced military recruiting–specific training that honors the special and important role played by military recruiters in keeping our armed forces strong and our country safe.

This book, Fanatical Military Recruiting, is the result of that mission shift. It is the first book in a three-book series that will include Military Recruiting EQ and Coaching Military Recruiting.

• Fanatical Military Recruiting focuses on top of the funnel activity—primarily prospecting.
• Military Recruiting EQ focuses on emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, and the human influence frameworks required to engage highly qualified applicants and successfully move them through the recruiting process.
• Coaching Military Recruiting is a field guide for NCOICs that arms field level leaders with the unique tools, techniques, skills, and competencies for leading, developing, and coaching high-performance military recruiting teams.

I believe the timing is right for these new resources because military recruiting is facing a perfect storm. In this new paradigm, recruiters must quickly up-skill and gain new competencies to win the War for Talent.

America without her soldiers would be like God without His angels.

—Claudia Pemberton

The military is no longer, and will never again be, the place of last resort for troubled and low-IQ members of our society. Military service has become an upwardly mobile career choice for the most gifted, talented, and intelligent among us.

Members of the military receive consistent pay raises, enlistment and retention bonuses, recession-proof job security, college tuition, guaranteed retirement income, and incredible benefits including paid housing, free health care, training, and paid education. They also have access to facilities on military bases that are unavailable to most civilians.

From a purely economic standpoint, joining the military is a smart financial move that gives a fortunate few access to a lifestyle and standard of living far above that of most civilians.

Yet deteriorating attention spans have made it difficult to get prospects to sit still long enough to learn about this incredible career opportunity. Meanwhile, fewer young Americans are interested in or even aware of the benefits afforded by a military career.¹

Studies suggest that the majority of those who enlist and serve come from a family in which a parent or sibling is also in the military.² Yet the size of the active-duty US military is at its lowest level in more than 50 years.³ With this, fewer young people than ever before have family members who are in the military or are learning about military life from influential mentors.

Worse, a high percentage of active-duty military members come from just five states—mostly the Southeast—with the Southern states consistently contributing the highest number of new recruits as a proportion of the population.⁴

Despite the incredible career opportunities available in the modern armed forces, military recruiters are increasingly operating in an America where there is a divide between the civilian and military classes.⁵

The pool of prospects with family or geographic associations to military service is steadily evaporating.⁶ With increasing base closures and consolidations, fewer cities have a large military presence. This means young people are less likely to be exposed to military personnel beyond those they see online and in the media.

The connection between civilians and the military is eroding,⁷ making it much more difficult for recruiters to engage prospects and their parents. “We speak a different language. We are governed by a separate set of norms and dogma. We even live apart from each other,” says Phillip Carter of the nonpartisan think tank the Military, Veterans and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security. He describes America’s sprawling military bases as our “most exclusive gated communities.”

This gap has extended to public schools and universities. Increasingly, faculty are ostracizing the military and its recruiters, either overtly or in more nuanced ways. These institutions, despite legal obligations to provide access, make it difficult for military recruiters to engage students, using either passive roadblocks or outright hostility to create de facto no-go zones.

Though the military is among the most trusted and revered American institutions,⁸ in the words of Lieutenant Colonel Remi M. Hajjar, a professor at West Point, “Many Americans consider the military a bit like a guard dog. They are very thankful for the protection, but they probably wouldn’t want to have it as a neighbor. And they certainly are not going to influence or inspire their own kids to join that pack of Rottweilers to protect America.”

Qualification Standards Continue to Tighten

Meanwhile, as the available talent pool shrinks in the midst of this perfect storm, the military apparatus continues to tighten qualification standards, and politicians play games that strain recruiting budgets.

Still, even when recruiters identify qualified prospects who have a propensity for joining the military, they face another, daunting gauntlet. The prospects in this new generation have more power—more information, more distractions, more options, more at stake, and more control over their future—than at any time in history.

With so many options available for talented people, they can afford to wait for “something better to come along.” This, combined with extreme information overload, creates fear and insecurity that often leaves prospects and their parents clinging to the status quo. Doing nothing, making no choice at all, is often their preferred course of action.

It’s no wonder so many recruiters are struggling. It’s no wonder that recruiting leaders are frustrated and more stressed out than ever. And it’s not surprising that most recruiting units are staring down the barrel at 50 percent or more of their recruiters consistently missing mission.

This perfect storm of obstacles creates an existential threat to the strength and readiness of the greatest fighting force ever assembled on earth and may weaken its ability to protect our democracy.

If we’ve lost the benefit of historical family ties to military service, if our education system is a hindrance, if the gap between civilian society and the military is growing, and if young people have more options, feel less inclined to serve, and are ill informed on the benefits of military service—then our only hope lies with our military recruiters and their ability to close the gap.

This is why it is imperative that we arm our recruiters and NCOICs with the skills they need to win the war for talent in this challenging environment.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

—General George S. Patton

Recruiting is a war. Just a different kind of war than the one you prepared for and trained to fight. Recruiting is a War for Talent—for the hearts and minds of the next generation of talent that will protect and defend our country and way of life.

Rather than bullets and bombs, this War for Talent is won through disciplined use of time, intellectual agility, emotional intelligence, mastering your own disruptive emotions, leveraging human influence frameworks, and massive prospecting activity.

But make no mistake: The War for Talent is real. All organizations in America—businesses, health care, nonprofit groups, sports, education, and the military—are in an outright and never-ending battle to recruit and retain the brightest and most talented people.

Smart, competent, and capable people are rare and in high demand. You are competing with every other organization and your fellow recruiters from other armed services branches to gain the attention of and engage this talent. It’s winner takes all. There is no good enough. There is no prize for second place. Once you lose prospects to your competition, the probability that you will ever get them back plunges.

On this highly competitive, ever-changing, asymmetric battlefield you must be at your best—always. If you:

• Allow your discipline to slip, you lose.
• Let your guard down, you lose.
• Whine about how hard things are, you lose.
• Get distracted, you lose.
• Get tired, put down your ruck, take a knee and rest awhile, you lose.
• Are unable to manage your emotions, you lose.
• Are undisciplined with time, you lose.
• Fail to execute a systematic and methodical daily battle rhythm, you lose.
• Fail to maintain focus and attention control, you lose.
• Are afraid to interrupt people and ask for what you want, you lose.
• Don’t talk to enough people, you lose.

On Most Days, Recruiting Doesn’t Feel Much Like Winning

You are a winner. You are the type of person who hits every target you put in front of your sights. That’s how you landed this recruiting tour in the first place—you are among the most talented people in your branch of the military. The top tier. You are used to winning.

Yet on most days, military recruiting doesn’t feel much like winning. You strike out a lot. You are rejected, told no, and pushed aside. When you are used to winning, what seems like almost constant failure can be demoralizing. You feel out of your element and out of control. If you failed this much on any other tour, you’d be removed from the service.

But military recruiting is different. The competencies, mind-sets, and skills required for high performance in recruiting are different from almost anything else you’ve been asked to do in the military. Nothing you’ve done in your military career prepared you for this battle. For a Soldier, Sailor, Marine, Airman, or Guardsman, it is and will be the most demanding and unrelenting fight you will face.

Asymmetric Battlefield

In the War for Talent, the battlefield is nonconforming, ever shifting, and always changing. It is impossible to control and unpredictable. Every prospect, every applicant is different. Every day is different. You must adjust on the fly. You must be flexible. You must be agile.

Civilians

For the bulk of your career, you’ve interacted primarily with other people in the military. These people understand you and your language. There are rules of conduct, tradition, and respect. It’s challenging but comfortable, because you know what to expect. In the military, there is predictability and stability. In recruiting, not so much.

Civilians—and their erratic and irrational decision making—control your destiny. Parents, educators, and especially teenagers don’t understand you and at times don’t respect you. Military recruiters have one foot in the military and one foot in the civilian world. It’s no wonder why you feel like a schizophrenic at times.

Rejection

Before you deployed, the military trained and drilled you on how to function effectively on the battlefield and manage your emotions and behaviors while under fire. You received a weapons kit—a rifle, artillery, tanks, drones, aircraft, boats, grenades, and so forth. You rehearsed constantly to perfect a response to any situation you might encounter.

Whenever the enemy engaged you or you engaged the enemy, you knew exactly what to do. It may have been a chaotic two-way range, but your training kept you in control and in the fight, so you could shoot back.

In this role, you face a different type of bullet. Rejection. Nothing prepared you for the neuro-physical and psychological pain of rejection. No one taught you how to handle being rejected by a teenager, parent, educator, or administrator.

You can’t shoot back, which makes it feel like you have little control. You cannot order people. Instead you must leverage interpersonal skills and/or influence frameworks to get them to comply with your requests.

FMR versus What You Learned at the Schoolhouse

Remember when you went to boot camp? You were transformed from a civilian to a member of the military. You gained a foundational knowledge of your branch, expectations, military life, and working as a unit. But you were not ready or prepared to execute on the battlefield or for your MOS.

It was akin to being in first grade, where you learned the alphabet and how to add one plus two. You began building your vocabulary, but you weren’t ready to write a college essay. It wasn’t until you graduated from advanced training and then learned on the job that you began to master your role and responsibilities.

Likewise, when you became a recruiter, you were sent to recruiting school. At school, you gained the foundational knowledge required to earn your recruiting badge. You learned systems, processes, policies, and expectations. You learned the language of recruiting. You were given a manual. But the schoolhouse is not reality. It is the basics, the ABCs, first grade.

The truth is, it was difficult to learn at the schoolhouse because it was an overwhelming firehose of information shoved down your throat and many times you weren’t actually listening. Most of what you’ve learned so far has been on the job.

Fanatical Military Recruiting begins where the recruiting and retention colleges and schools of the various branches of the military leave off. It’s designed to hone and amplify what you’ve been learning OTJ.

Will many of the things we discuss sound similar to what you learned in basic recruiting school? Of course. The basics and fundamentals are always in play.

Fanatical Military Recruiting, though, is a masters in military recruiting. FMR is real life in the real world. There’s no BS and no theory. You’ll face the uncomfortable truth about why you are missing mission and exactly what it takes to make mission every month, without fail.

It all begins with a fanatical, relentless focus on prospecting.

Let’s keep it 100. If you had a choice between calling prospects and taking live fire, you would choose the bullets.

—Jeb Blount

Ultra-high-performing recruiters are relentless, unstoppable prospectors. They are obsessive about outmaneuvering their competition and keeping the funnel full of qualified prospects. They prospect anywhere and anytime—constantly kicking down doors looking for their next opportunity. They prospect day and night—they ask, and ask, and ask, until they get a qualified prospect to say yes.

Ultra-high performers (UHPs) are unstoppable and always on—fanatical. My favorite definition of the word fanatical is “motivated or characterized by an extreme, uncritical enthusiasm.”

Top military recruiters view prospecting as a way of life. They prospect with single-minded focus, worrying little about what other people think of them. They enthusiastically dive into telephone prospecting, area canvassing, cold calling, networking, asking for referrals, social media, following up on leads, working schools, setting up at school and community events, and striking up conversations with strangers.

• They don’t make excuses: “This is not a good time to call.” “The system is down.”
• They don’t complain: “Nobody is calling me back.” “The leads are bad.”
• They don’t whine: “Nobody answers the phone.” “No one is qualified.” “The other branches are offering a better deal.”
• They don’t live in fear: “What if she says no?” “What if this is a bad time?” “What if his dad answers the phone?”
• They don’t procrastinate: “I don’t have time right now. I’ll catch up tomorrow.”
• They prospect even when mission is made because they know that there is no time to rest.
• They prospect when times are bad because they know that prospecting is the key to survival.
• They prospect even when they don’t feel like prospecting because they are driven to keep their recruiting pipeline full.

Fanatical military recruiters carry around a pocket full of business cards. They talk up strangers on the sidewalk, in grocery stores, at schools, at sporting events, in line to get coffee, in elevators, trains, buses, and anywhere else they can get face-to-face with potential recruits.

They get up in the morning and bang the phone. During the day they are networking at schools. In the evening they knock on doors. In between interviews they prospect with e-mail and text. At night they work social media. While applicants are being processed at MEPS, they grab a list, pick up the phone, and make more calls.

Before they quit for the day, they make even more attempts. The enduring mantra of the fanatical military recruiter is: One more call.

Prospecting is the air they breathe. They don’t whine like babies about not having enough leads or cry about how MEPS is kicking back all of their applicants. Their survival does not rest on the hope for a CAT-4 day. They don’t blame the command, MEPS, the prospects, parents, teachers, schools, news, or society. They get moving, take responsibility, and own mission. They generate their own leads and, through hard work, determination, and perseverance, their own luck.

Fanatical military recruiters are aware that failure in recruiting is not caused by a deficit of talent, skills, or training. Not a poor territory or inferior prospects. Not the other branches of the military. Not “this generation” of teenagers. Not the latest news cycle or the person currently occupying the White House. Not the NCOIC, First Sergeant, Sergeant Major, or anyone else in the chain of command.

The brutal fact is the number-one reason for failure in recruiting is an empty funnel, and the root cause of an empty funnel is the failure to prospect. The foundation of all success in recruiting is a fanatical focus on prospecting.

It’s simple, the more people you talk to, the more people you’ll enlist. The Pipe (funnel) is Life.

The only easy day was yesterday.

—US Navy SEALs

There is no sugarcoating it. Prospecting means facing certain rejection. This is why so many recruiters don’t do it and instead spend their time and energy seeking silver bullets, secret formulas, and shortcuts; or hanging out on social media; or ignoring prospecting altogether until they dig themselves deep into a hole; or wasting time with applicants who are disqualified.

The truth is prospecting is the hardest, most mentally exhausting part of your recruiting day. There will always be something more fun you would rather do, and it will never get easier. But the one thing that separates ultra-high performers from other recruiters is they look rejection in the face and do it anyway.

Here’s the deal. If you want sustained success in your recruiting tour, if you want to consistently make mission, then you’ve got to interrupt strangers—lots of them. The real reason that prospecting is so hard, no matter how you choose to do it, is that you are interrupting strangers. This, by the way, is why so many recruiters protest so loudly and will do almost anything to avoid making an outbound call.

It is difficult and awkward to interrupt someone’s day. You can’t control their response and that unknown leaves you feeling vulnerable and causes fear.

Your prospect’s initial reaction to being interrupted—usually a brush-off or reflex response in a not-so-friendly tone of voice—feels like rejection. Sometimes it is rejection. They attack you, disrespect you, call you a baby killer, and put you down just for doing your job. This is the core reason mediocre recruiters spend most of their time finding excuses not to prospect rather than just doing it.

What they fail to understand is that interrupting and talking to people is the fundamental building block of robust recruiting funnels. If you don’t interrupt strangers relentlessly, your funnel will be anemic, and you will fail.

There Is No Easy Button in Military Recruiting

“Lose weight effortlessly,” the announcer says over an image of models admiring their ripped abs. “With this revolutionary breakthrough pill you’ll never have to worry about your weight again. Eat what you want. Forget about exercise. Just take this pill and you’ll have the body of your dreams.”

If these commercials didn’t work, the companies that run them would quit. But they do work. In his book Spartan Up: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance, Joe De Sena explains that “easy is the greatest marketing hook of all time.”

So companies promise, again and again, that you can lose weight, flip houses, or get rich with no pain, no sacrifice, and no effort. Their phones ring off the hook, even though most people know intuitively that these promises are overhyped and not true. It’s just human nature to seek the easy way out.

It is disappointing to observe how many recruiters have this same attitude—always looking for easy. They whine and complain endlessly about the job, leads, prospects, parents, MEPS, educators, their territory, the bureaucracy, their leaders, taking time away from their family, and on and on. They have somehow deluded themselves into believing that they are entitled to easy.

Here is a brutal truth: Military recruiting is not easy. It won’t become easy. It will never be easy. Whether you volunteered or were voluntold, you have mission and a job to do, and it is and will be the hardest, most challenging period of your military career.

Military recruiting is not a nine-to-five job. There are no days off. No vacations. No lunch breaks. No rest. It’s a single-day deployment times 365 for however long your tour lasts. Ultra-high-performing military recruiters are always on, always recruiting, unstoppable—whatever it takes to make mission. Recruiting is tough, grueling, and sometimes heartbreaking work. The pressure is unrelenting.

Unlike other tours, in recruiting you have one number, and there is no place to hide. You must deliver results or suffer the consequences. In military recruiting, it’s not about who you have enlisted—it is about who you enlist today. The threat of facing discipline because you have a bad month, quarter, or year is always hanging over your head.

Along with this unrelenting stress, military recruiters face endless rejection. You receive more rejection in a day than the average service member gets in an entire year. The fact is, most people wouldn’t last a minute in your shoes. They are so afraid of rejection that they’d rather charge a bunker than make a single prospecting call.

Yet most people don’t understand you or your role. They don’t understand the stress. They don’t understand that to achieve your goals you’re working seven days a week, and on many of these days twelve to sixteen hours. On this duty you never take a knee.

In recruiting there will always be something to complain about. That’s just how it is. Nothing is perfect. There will be obstacles, challenges, rude administrators, indecisive and unqualified prospects, out-of-touch parents, demanding leaders, constant changes to mission and what constitutes an acceptable applicant, and of course MEPS.

There will always be rejection. There will be people who protest against you, hate you even though you protect them, offend you with their words and actions, and never understand your purpose. There will always be changes to mission—usually asking you to give more.

Adopting a fanatical military recruiting mind-set is the difference between making your recruiting tour a rewarding, successful experience or just doing time and waiting for the bitter end. You can sit around and complain and whine, but trust me, you are only hurting yourself, your unit, your family, and ultimately, your country.

Get Better

Developing a fanatical military recruiting mind-set begins with coming to grips with and accepting that military recruiting is hard, grueling, rejection-dense work. There is no sugarcoating it. You have a tough job to do and most of the time it sucks.

So instead of whining about the things that are outside of your control, focus your energy on the only three things you can control:

• 1. Your actions
• 2. Your reactions
• 3. Your mind-set

The first step toward building an endless pipeline of new prospects and crushing mission is acknowledging the truth and stepping back from your emotional need to find Easy Street. In military recruiting, easy is the mother of mediocrity, and in your life, mediocrity is like a broke uncle. Once he moves into your house, it’s nearly impossible to get him to leave.

Author and speaker Jim Rohn once said that you shouldn’t wish that things were easier; you should, instead, wish that you were better. That’s the promise I make to you. When you adopt the techniques in this book, you will get better.

You will become a more efficient recruiter. You will learn how to deliver mission in less time, so that you have more time for your family, friends, and enjoying life.

You will become a more effective recruiter. Prospects enlist with you—then the military. You will learn how to engage prospects in conversations, move them into your funnel as qualified applicants, get them to the floor, and generate more enlistments who ship. You’ll gain powerful skills and techniques, deliver better results, and ultimately become the ultra-high-performing recruiter your leaders trust, praise, and award.

I will not lie or pander to you, though. I am not going to promise to make recruiting easier, take away the sting of rejection, or turn prospecting into something that you will learn to love. The techniques I teach you will not eliminate rejection, make recruiting painless, or remove the emotional pain of dealing with disrespectful teenagers, their helicopter parents, or rude educators.

Only you can make the decision to do the hard work, pick up the phone, approach strangers, and get past your own mental hang-ups. The choice to act, the choice to adopt a new Fanatical Military Recruiting mind-set, is yours and yours alone.

It’s time to stop wishing it was easier and start working to make yourself better.