Guitar Gear

That is the slogan of the Navy Seals, but it certainly can apply to life in general. It’s not necessarily about struggle, but facing life head-on. It’s making the choice to do the harder thing instead of taking the easy way out.

I had the privilege to listen to a great speaker this week, Admiral Ray Smith (ret.), who is a leadership and peak performance speaker. The Admiral led the Navy SEALs, and was its longest termed commander in the history of that elite fighting force. He covered a lot of things in his talk but one thing he said really struck home, and that was when he was talking about the extreme mental and physical challenges each SEAL prospect has to go through just in order to get into the SEALs in the first place.

“Normalize the abnormal,” was the phrase. And he described that trainees go through serious mentally and physically challenging situations to remain calm, no matter what may come their way, and always go back on their training. For instance, they have a pool activity where they have to dive down then tie a rope a certain way. Not a problem. Then they have to do the same thing blindfolded. Then they have to try to tie the rope while blindfolded and an instructor tangles up their SCUBA hose, and then turns them around a few times to disorient them. The idea is to increase the levels of stress to see if they can remain relaxed. If you tense up, then you can get into serious trouble.

When I heard that, it immediately reminded me of performing last week. While not nearly as stressful as the test above, I had a similar situation while at a gig last week. Here I was, just happily strumming along, and a gust of wind came up and blew all sorts of dust up which unfortunately, landed in my eyes. I couldn’t see damn thing, and I was in the middle of a song! I panicked a bit at first, but kept on playing, then just squinted my eyes closed and relied on my memory of the song.

Like I said, not nearly as stressful as that SEAL training, but if I let that little bit of stress get to me, I would’ve completely blown the song, and that wouldn’t have been acceptable to me. So I gritted my teeth, finished the song, then immediately flushed my eyes out. Besides, it was a good time for a break… 🙂

Following on the title of this article though, that’s a really profound statement. In my book, you can only REALLY appreciate things you acquire whether they’re skills or material things if you earned them. It’s a value I always share with my kids: There’s nothing more satisfying than something you’ve earned. That takes putting energy into what  you’re doing to acquire the thing you want.

Mind you, I don’t look at that saying within the context that everything has to be a struggle, but if you really want something or you want to be successful at anything, you have to work for it. It shouldn’t be easy. I look at my many years of playing guitar. Yes, I’d like to someday be at the level of some of my guitar heroes, and over the years, I’ve acquired the skills as some of them, but it hasn’t been without work or even struggle at times. And  my learning process hasn’t become easier, it has become harder. Ten years ago, I used to practice MAYBE 15 minutes a day. But now, I practice at least an hour, and most times up to two hours. And as things have gotten more complicated, my rate of skill acquisition has slowed. But that’s how it should be.

The SEAL slogan really hits home with me. The only easy day really is yesterday…