Fighter Pilot Reveals Why You Never Hit Your Goals

Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Ryan Hanley

Fighter pilot and leadership expert Ryan Hanley shares how iterative thinking, curiosity, and structured reflection can help individuals and organizations thrive amid uncertainty. He emphasizes moving beyond linear mindsets to embrace adaptability, especially in the age of AI.

Key takeaways

• Uncertainty is a constant; growth comes from embracing it.
• Iterative thinking beats linear planning for innovation.
• Debriefing with objectivity reveals execution gaps.

Transcript preview

What is it about fighter pilots no matter what you see or where you go you're always thinking how can this be done a little bit better your 95% of our decisions are based on our own perceptions which means that they're not based in reality and the great thing about an execution gap is it's an emotion-free space for you to get curious as to why it exists people believe their opinions and ideas outweigh reality leaders often just give a vomit of stuff that needs to get done to their team you can only solve one problem at a time the thing fear, not ego. is the obstacle of our day, at least in this moment, and it is uncertainty. I think that most of the stress, anxiety, you'd also use the word panic in the green room, like, I think it, one of the cores, if not the core root cause of so much of this heightened tension we deal with is uncertainty. So maybe break down with your clients, with your life, with your life, experience like where is this uncertainty coming from that I think everybody who's listening to this show in some regard feels every single day of their life and is and is dealing with in hopefully positive ways but I think unfortunately there's a lot of negative a lot of negative ways that we're dealing with this uncertainty as well. Yeah look I think uncertainty's been there for hundreds of thousands of years I mean if you're a caveman and you weren't out hunting there was no certainty that you'd find something and B it's not going to bite you're So I think uncertainty has been a factor of humanity, which is why some people thrive and grow and build empires and businesses within that uncertainty, and others kind of get crushed by it. I would say the only, got a radical change in the last 10 years is we just talk about it more, and we talk about uncertainty as if it can be tamed. I have a book coming out in September. It's called a flawless leadership. And the premise of flawless leadership is to understand that perfection, which has its origins in Latin and in scholarly texts, is an environment where basically you can control everything. For something to be perfect, it has to be completely controlled and delivered, both internally and externally. The way that I define a flawless leader as a leader who is, understands that perfection is unattainable. And even the origin of the origin. of the word flawless comes from Vikings, it's a warrior word, and it means that my stone is not broken and it's more about what you can control. So when we look at uncertainty as human nature is geared towards survival, we tend to project externally all about problems like it's the world, rather than internally which is, okay, the world is going to be uncertain, it's a given, but what I need to be focused on is how I respond to it. building the structures, the systems, the thought patterns, the philosophies that I have as an individual to view uncertainty as an opportunist rather than as a threat. With AI, you know, I'm like everyone else, I didn't know anything really. I've been using AI since GPT1 and having it write my emails and everything and then I joined a program run by Dan Martel and he had this wonderful advice which is if you need help from AI, ask it how to help you. ever since I've done that, you know, we've built and I love that because it harnesses one of the core philosophies of my former what I call career 1.0 which was as a fighter pilot which is you're always curious. There's always this how can I how can I use this tool better how can I use the aeroplane better how can I fly it better you're always asking questions based on today's uncertainty. You can carry some of that forward. And with AI obviously it It's not really a fixed state. It's the acceleration of the acceleration of technology. And I think what we need to shift as humans, which are largely, our thought patterns are largely lineal and bylennial thought patterns. It's, what we're really saying is, I need to get there and here I am. So what do I need to do? We need to embrace iterative thinking and iterative thinking is engineered as a cognitive model that's. deals with uncertainty very well because it says at this current point of time this is what I know but I'm probably going to need to know something different tomorrow as the world changes around me and the learning model that AI uses is an iterative learning model it has a go it attempts things and then it gets it right or wrong and then it learns the thing about AI though is it learns an awful lot faster than a human being and has a memory of a steel trap so it's think of it I think of AI as like a wing man, I think of it as an alternate intelligence source of me, and the more it knows about me, the more it knows about where I'm going, and this is what we need to understand with AI, you ask it to do something that you're already doing, it's just going to do, it's not going to be that helpful, it's just going to do whatever you're doing now more useful. But if you have a conversation with AI and you use it as a tool to say, this is where I'm going, how do we get there, how can you help me, if you're using an external vendor, if you're building a house and you're talking to an architect, an architect is an expert at architecture, building homes, understanding how all the systems work together. But you don't just tell an architect, I want to build a house and when they come back at you and it's a crappy design, you say you're a bad architect. You have to have a conversation. You have to scope it out. You have to talk about your feelings, what feels good, how do you want the room to flow. And what I'm, and what I'm the fighter pilot way of thinking and working is everything we do and you have to understand that a fighter pilot we're basically a reprogrammed human being because everything that we're programmed to do as a human to survive is the opposite of the skill sets and the mental models you need to be a fighter pilot so what we understand is everything in the world of a fighter pilot you start with the target work backwards and then you iterate your actions to get there whereas a human being does the opposite. The human being says here's who I am and what I am and what I am and what I am and what I do and this is where I want to go, which means that you're really not going to transform yourself or evolve yourself into the person you need to be. And at risk right now is anyone in the intellectual space, anyone who is in the leadership space. Because if you keep approaching leadership as you do today, which is managing what exists, three years from now, you're not going to have a job. Because AI needs direction. So in an ironic way, We've gone through this phase where technology has dehumanized us to some degree. We were talking about it before we got on the podcast about how technology is making us neurotic, because we really only do things based on what the technology tells us to do, whatever the messages we receive, whatever the email that's just being sent, whatever our job tracking software tells us. So we've actually gone backwards into being these really reactive leadership models. the opposite. It needs us to be deeply human because that's what it can't do. It needs us to go back into the critical thinking structures of the brain. It requires us to get creative, it requires us to understand the emotional impact that we need the intelligence to deliver. So I'm kind of hopeful that, and that's my job is to help people with this, is to help you reconnect way more at the human layer to be more free to go back into those models of building relationships. talking about emotion, being engineered towards making an impact on the world and the people around you rather than being effectively the doing side of what your technology is telling you to do today. Lots to dig in there. So one, I did not know the genesis of the world flawless and I love the fact that it means what is it? My stone is unbroken. Is that what she said? What was it? Yeah, my rock. My rock is not broken. I love that I love where these words come from I want to dig in maybe a little bit into this idea of iterative thinking because there's a quote from Nival Ravakon I'm huge Nival fan and he had this he built on Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours and he said it's not about putting in 10,000 hours it's about achieving 10,000 iterations that gets you to mastery and that to me resonated so much more in my life than 10,000 hours because there's things that I feel top top 5% top 3% up 1% efficient in certain tasks and I certainly haven't put 10,000 hours in them but I have absolutely probably put 10,000 narration so that really spoke to me and and I will say after doing 450 plus episodes of this show the idea of curiosity pulled through almost every one of these high achieving guests like yourself who've been on the show. It's like a it's almost like a core tenant of achievement is is curiosity and I think iterative thinking and curiosity kind of go together. So let's say I'm sitting here I'm listening to this show and maybe maybe curiosity in this idea of iterating it just hasn't been programmed into me. Maybe I came up through corporate world where it was just task. stamp, swipe, task, stamp, swipe. Like I was actually penalized for thinking iteratively, for being curious about things, you know, stay in your lane, do your job, do what you're told. This is what I pay you to do, right? Like there's so many people who are now, I feel like in the way the world is today and all the entrepreneur, that all the entrepreneur, in the entrepreneur that all the entrepreneur that's, and the access to entrepreneurial opportunities that AI is creating, their brain is starting to open up. Hey, hey maybe I can be an entrepreneur, almost like programmed for most of their life to stay in their box, to stay in their lane, to incremental improvements, you know, one step at a time kind of stuff. How do you recommend to your clients and the companies that you're working with that they can maybe break free of some of that linear thinking and get into a more iterative, curiosity-driven culture? How do you start to build that if it doesn't exist inside your organization or yourself today? Yeah. Well, it's, you know. The talent that an inventor has, the talent, you know, I think entrepreneurs are bad word now because there's more people that are entrepreneurs that aren't than are. I prefer to think of founders. People that found something that that wasn't ever there before. Yeah, or builders. I really like the word builders. Yeah, and they found a problem that needed to be solved. You know, I think one of the, again, the challenge of an entrepreneur is when you approach entrepreneurialism with a linear mindset, you say, I have a product, I have a product, everyone haven't actually asked anyone. And then you wonder why it doesn't work. Whereas you know your founders who do who do very well, they're always curious about is this fulfilling a need that's met and they're always challenging that and testing it. So the best way to think iteratively is which is what the Air Force gets you to do is use a system that is iterative. So follow some steps that automatically create an iterative mindset. In the world the fight pilots, we codify it as the debrief. And it's interesting in my own journey, I was a fighter pilot for 11 years, a business founder for 20 years. And what was interesting is I always thought debriefing was a ritual. It was a meeting. But what I've realized in the last few years is that it's actually the entire way of thinking. It's a way of viewing the world. And I came upon this, before I talk about. debriefing. I'll tell you a story which we had the aha moment. So here we are in Boston actually working with a large group of insurance brokers and we went to get a coffee before they had been started. So we go to the coffee shop around the corner and we're sitting in the queue and there's five people in the queue and we notice that there's five people behind the counter as well. So we're sitting there like, well how can there be five people behind the counter and we haven't move for five minutes. And then we started to deconstruct it my wingman my wingman my wingman, Air Force F-16 pilot and then he flew the first lady around as the in the presidential flight up in Washington and we're sitting there and we're like start to deconstruct what this person's doing what that person's doing how they can be more efficient we got our coffees and we sat down and we're like what is it with us what is it about a fighter pilots no matter what you see or where you go you're always thinking how can this be done a little bit better and that's what I realize you know what that is us which is reflection on performance, becomes reflection on everything and you start to effectively have the iterative view of everything in life, your relationship, your children, your business, like you did, it's like an itch that you can't help but scratch. It's like, oh, this could be a bit better. We can do a little bit better with this process. We can shave 30 seconds off the way we talk with our clients in a meeting. We can tweak this, we can tweak that. So what the debrief is, it's a four step process. called Orca, the same is a killer whale. I have another story about debriefing killer whales, which we, if we get time, I'll tell you it later. But what it stands for is objective result cause and action. And when people see fighter pilots and we work with organizations, they're always like, are you guys like robots, mission objectives? And it's like, no, it means an objective view of the world. It means you don't bring your biases, you don't bring your opinions. You're creating a picture of the future. You're creating a picture of the future completely objective. We know where it is, we know how to measure it, and we believe in our soul that it's achievable. So that's the first step that most people aren't very good at. Everything in the future is generic and subjective. And we create these objectives in another system, I'll talk about later. The R is the result or reality. And if you look at the neuroscience on how human beings make decisions, you're 95. of our decisions are based on our own perceptions, which means that they're not based in reality. So when you do anything in life, the only moment in time that really supports your decision-making in the future is being very honest about your reality. If you want to get healthier and that's your intention, but the reality is you reach for a bag of chips with every meal, you're chomping a snickers bar after dinner every night. kilter with your intention, right? So between objective and reality lives a gap and we define that as the execution gap. And the great thing about an execution gap is it's an emotion-free space for you to get curious as to why it exists and that's what the C stands for, curiosity or the cause of this gap. And what's really important about this process in the way the human brain works, if you go to a museum, you see those plasma balls, the big glass balls and they have like electricity