Mark Divine (@MarkDivine) is a former Navy SEAL Commander, SEALFIT founder, and author of Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level.
The Cheat Sheet:
- Why would a blueblood CPA decide to leave the family business and become a Navy SEAL?
- What does “Earn your trident every day” mean to a Navy SEAL?
- How can anyone — from doctors and lawyers to mothers and students — benefit from training mental toughness like a Navy SEAL?
- How does someone stuck within the rut of a horizontal skillset switch to ascending a vertical skillset?
- Why you don’t have to be born with the warrior spirit — it can be taught to you if you’re willing to learn.
- And so much more…
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Former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine returns to The Art of Charm to talk about his new book, Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level, and explain how anyone can benefit from learning how to think like the world’s most elite go-getters. Listen, learn, and enjoy!
And if you like this one, make sure to check out Mark’s last appearance on the show: Episode 265: 8 Weeks to SEALFIT.
More About This Show
There are probably a few CPAs out there who used to be Navy SEALs, but Mark Divine — author of Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level — may be the only Navy SEAL we know who started out as a CPA.
“I was kind of groomed to be a business guy,” says Mark. “My family has a business that’s been around since, like, 1890. Still cranking today — my brothers run it and my sister’s there. And I’m kind of the black sheep who turned its back and walked away from the flock!”
Always a physical guy who worked out up to three times a day, it doesn’t seem so strange that the office life might bore someone like Mark. So when a Navy SEAL recruitment poster that hinted at a routine more his speed caught his eye — complete with jumping out of airplanes and looking down the scope of a sniper rifle — he had to find out more. And the appeal was instant.
“This is probably better for us,” thought Mark at the time, “than being a professional athlete and getting paid a lot of money. Because not only do we become professional athletes and get paid to do our job — a very cool, physical job that requires us to be on the elite edge of our body/mind system — but we get to go serve the country doing really cool and dangerous things.”
While former guest Jocko Willink told us about growing up knowing he wanted to be a Navy SEAL from an early age, Mark’s time was about twenty years earlier — an era before there was much publicity about the SEALS, and well before the Internet made it easy to find out just about anything from the privacy of home. But both former SEALs would likely agree there’s something about their shared warrior mindset that drew them to excel among the country’s most elite and gravitate toward the job they were born to do — recruitment methods notwithstanding.
“Warriors are constantly striving to improve themselves — to master themselves — to get one percent better every day,” says Mark. “It’s part of our ethos. The ethos statement in the SEALs that speaks to this is called ‘Earn your trident every day.’ The trident is the metal insignia that has now become kind of well known about the SEALs. Earning your trident every day means, hey, whatever you did yesterday, forget about it. Because you can’t rest on your laurels. Check your ego.
“Now today’s a new day and you better start putting out right now. So put out with your physical training, put out with whatever skills you’re going to develop, put out with becoming the best version of yourself — learning how to communicate more effectively, learning how to parachute more effectively, learning how to dive more effectively, learning how to lead more effectively, learning how to be a more effective teammate and all of the things that go with that. There’s a constant commitment to mastering the self, but not in a way that you’re just going to do it so you can make more money, but so you can serve your teammates and your mission more effectively.”
THANKS, MARK DIVINE!
If you enjoyed this session with Mark Divine, let him know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shout out at Twitter:
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