>> The biggest reward I got out of being in the military was the professional
and personal development that I got out of it.
Honestly, I joined the military to kick down doors and generally be, you know,
a boy, shoot guns, that kind of stuff.
And the reality is I didn't probably do as much of that
as I maybe would have theoretically liked.
But what the military does, or at least what it did for me, was it was a very,
very good kind of crash course in leadership, management.
And the military does a really good job of making you look
at your insecurities and flaws and face them head-on.
And if you don't do that, you tend to fail and you tend to fail a lot
and then you find yourself for sort of in very bad positions.
There's a cliche that the military will teach you all the things about yourself
that everyone else is too nice to tell you, and there's a little bit of truth to that.
You have to -- you learn to develop very thick skin, but you also learn to be very perceptive
and sort of open to criticism and critique because more often
than not it's designed to make you better.
And if you take it in that spirit, you will get better and then you'll suddenly discover
that you get less criticism and you're getting more compliments,
and it's more sincere in that sense.