5 SOF Truths and their application to your daily life.

5 SOF truths and their application to your daily life.

One set of principles I had drilled into me from the first second my totally inappropriate yellow Adidas running trainers touched military soil were the 5 SOF truths.?

1.????Humans are more important than hardware.

2.????Quality trumps quantity.

3.????Special Operations Forces cannot be mass-produced.?

4.????Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.?

5.????The majority of special operations require non-SOF support.

The US teams and my housemates would beat me with these truths in some guise on a daily basis, on one occasion I got sat down and tested on what the 5 truths were and if I knew what I was helping to build here.

“Tell us what the 5 SOF truths are. You need to know what we stand for if you are going to have any part in building this project.”

I heard these 5 truths or paraphrases of them pretty much every day for 3 ? years. They have stuck to me like glue and I want to share how you can translate these into your everyday lives be that the boardroom, sports field or your personal life.

1.?????Humans are more important than tech.

Seek human interaction, engagement and get to know the human operating the hardware. The outcome of anything will only ever be as good as the input, which is invariably provided by a human. What does that human need to thrive? What keeps that human fulfilled, satisfied and high performing?

2.?????Quality trump quantity.

Buy the best you can afford. Do something to the best of your ability, sweeping the floor, washing up, a work project, it doesn’t matter what it is just commit to it and do your best. Will 10 words have a greater impact in a conversation than 50? Will a 500-word article deliver your message more effectively than 1000?

3.?????You can’t cut corners.

Trying to get 50 units out of a system that is designed for 10 is going to dilute quality, which will eventually lose the edge which you’d worked hard to build. Scale and build at the rate your system can handle and focus on delivering what you said you would deliver.?

4.?????Be proactive, not reactive.

Try to plan ahead and mitigate risk, it is much easier to prevent than it is to cure. This goes for your health, finances, scheduling, work distribution, you name it. Also, consider reactive responses can often be led by emotion which can mislead you in the moment and betray you.

5.?????No one is self-made. We all need support.?

Get a strong support network behind you at home: partner, family, friends. Professionally: colleagues, manager, mentor, coach.??Know what you get and need from each different stakeholder and be proactive.??To go fast go alone, to go far go together.?

I am a massive proponent for learning lessons from all environments, sport, military, corporate, and extreme adventure activities. BUT. Just as I have done above, the lessons need to be translated to be applicable to your environment, there is no cut and paste from special forces to board room, it just doesn’t work.

For those in the military space, how else have you translated the 5 SOF truths into daily life?

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