Mindset

Attention

By Craig Weller / April 27, 2020 / 0 Comments

We were standing in ranks on the beach in Coronado, California, in front of the Naval Special Warfare Center. We were about to start an open-ocean swim, and each student was being inspected. Along with the mask and fins, we each carried an SRK dive knife, emergency flares and a UDT life vest. The vests […]

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Every F**king Day

By Craig Weller / April 16, 2020 / 0 Comments

Nearly everyone knows of Demetrious Johnson – the 11-time UFC Champion, and top contender for greatest-of-all-time MMA fighter.  A few years ago we were hanging out with his long-time strength and conditioning coach, Joel Jamieson, who told us a story about Demetrious and what made him so special.  Demetrious didn’t have what you’d call a […]

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Ikigai

By Craig Weller / April 10, 2020 / 0 Comments

Why do you keep going? “The two most dangerous years of your life are the year you’re born and the year you retire.” – Dan Buettner Dan Buettner’s research focuses on the world’s Blue Zones, areas in which people live inordinately long, healthy lives. The Blue Zone with the longest disability-free life expectancy in the […]

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Hardiness personality components in special operations forces

Commitment, Control, and Challenge: How Hardiness Helps Special Operators Succeed

By Craig Weller / March 21, 2020 / 1 Comment

Bodies can be remarkably strong. They’re hard to truly break, and – given the right circumstances – easy to repair. Bodies of SOF candidates are even stronger. So, it should be no surprise that people usually fail out of selection not because of physical factors, but mental ones. The mind breaks before the body. Physical […]

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You Will Have Your Waterloo

By Craig Weller / January 21, 2020 / 0 Comments

By: Craig Weller In the early 2000’s, the Naval Special Warfare program for students who have been successfully screened into a special program and are awaiting formal training was called SCRUFT Duty. It stands for Screened Candidate Reported and Undergoing Physical Training.  I spent six months in SCRUFTLand. We got up at three in the […]

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They All Wound

By Craig Weller / January 15, 2020 / 0 Comments

The ultimate ceiling of what you’re capable of as an endurance athlete is astonishingly high. Evolutionarily, we’re the most efficient runners on earth. Well-trained humans can run animals like gazelles to death in the heat. Your own upper limits are heavily influenced by your mental and emotional perspective, as well as the more obvious factors […]

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The Downside of “Mental Toughness”

By buildelite / August 26, 2019 / 1 Comment

As we cover in our book, the research on mental toughness is pretty scattered and hard to pin down to a single definition. It can be easily conflated with related concepts like conscientiousness or the capacity for delayed gratification. Usually, ‘mental toughness’ is a catch-all to describe a range of other characteristics. It’s kind of […]

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