Return to Base: Navy SEAL & Inc 500 CEO Alden Mills on Leadership

This is Return to Base, a Veteran Life podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Return to Base, Episode 2. We're here with Alden Mills. Very excited to present him as our guest today. He's a Division I athlete, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, a Navy SEAL, an inventor, an Inc. 500 CEO, and the best-selling author of books, Be Unstoppable and Unstoppable Teams. Please welcome Alden Mills. Hey, Alden. How's it going? Hey, Cliff. Great to be here. How are you, brother? I'm doing fantastic. It's finally sunny down here in Tennessee. Not too hot, not too cold. Fall's coming, and I like that. You're up in California, correct? Yeah, I'm over in Northern California, Marin County area. Awesome. I have a special place in my heart for California, even though I've lived in Tennessee for a long time. And I don't plan on going back to California, but that's neither here nor there. I'm a San Diego boy. People will say that to you. You're a San Diego guy. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen a ton down in sunny San Diego as well. Yeah, I bet. I used to go down there and watch the SEALs run on Silver Strand and think, man, that looks freaking miserable. So I got all that right. Division I athlete, you were in crew. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. Yep. And a graduate of the Naval Academy. I was reading in your book a little bit about your time at the Naval Academy in crew. And I thought that story was fascinating, actually, because for those who haven't read, shame on you. But for those of us who have, Alden mentions that it was an unorthodox team that ended up achieving great results because of the mindset. Not just the physical framework was there, but there was a certain mindset of those at the Naval Academy. Is that right? It is. You know, what I would highlight on this, and this, by the way, applies to all the service academies, right? Service academies bring people in. There's no red shirting. You're there for four years. You can't bring in people from other countries. They're only Americans there. You have height and weight standards. You have academic standards. So, in the world of rowing, taller people are really helpful, right? People from the Netherlands, from Serbia and Croatia, New Zealand, Australia are heavily recruited to a lot of places that we race against. And they are multiple-year post-grads. A lot of them show up at 21 years of age. And here you have this Naval Academy crew who gets a small handful of recruits, of which I was one of them. But the large majority of the folks in the boat, they don't know how to row when they first show up. And yet, year after year, Naval Academy crew with other sports as well would show up in the national championship and be competitive, right? And so, that was the story. That's the kind of context behind the story. Well, how do these seemingly uncoordinated, inexperienced teams come together and vie for national championships? And that always came down to, first and foremost, that mindset. Right. And I think that it's an interesting sport to participate in, given that you end up becoming a SEAL. Every single person on that boat – it's called a boat, right? Yeah. Every person on that boat has to pull their weight or the mission fails. You fail. And not only that, it's eight oarsmen getting eight blades in the water at exactly the same time. From a teamwork perspective, it is probably the highest form of teamwork you're going to find in the sport. There's no high-point score. There's no real MVP in the boat. Every single person has equal amount of importance, and it's only the fastest boat wins by who can act as one as the better boat. Yeah, that's a fantastic way to look at it. Many people say that football, for instance, is the ultimate team sport because everybody has to pull their weight. But obviously, crew is not as popular of a sport. But I can see crew being way up there past football for as important as working as a team is. Because like you said, one blade out of place, you're not going to win, and there's not another play. It's one race, right? That's it. I want to be clear. From a team perspective, I don't think there's anything higher up there. From an athletic endeavor, we are definitely not the most coordinated athletes. We sit on our butts and go backwards for a long period of time. And what we are really good at is learning how to suffer. Right. It was a perfect entree to go from rowing into the special forces world. Yeah. Mason SEAL team. Yeah. Now, let me back up a little bit. So obviously, you went to the U.S. Naval Academy. That's a process in and of itself. You have to get a recommendation by a congressman, correct? Correct. What led you to consider the Navy and to consider the United States Naval Academy? I was one of these kids that got sent away to boarding school at an early age, right? Not Hogwarts. What? Not Hogwarts. No, no, not Hogwarts. At times, it probably felt like that, though. I grew up on the East Coast, and the schools were going to hell in a handbasket for us. And my parents decided, like, hey, I think you're going to need some discipline and go to a place. And I ended up being that kid who was kind of born with two left feet. Any ball sport, I seemed to only score on my own team. I scored on my own team in soccer and lacrosse and hockey, basketball. It was terrible. But I saw this sport of rowing, and I was like, oh, man, I love this. Like, I just immediately gravitated toward it. And then as I started getting better at it, I started getting recruited. And originally, I thought I was going to go row at some Ivy League school. But I always just kept looking at the Naval Academy, and I kept saying, like, oh, this is a different path. And it was during my time in junior year, I heard about this force called SEAL Team and what SEAL Team stood for and what they were all about. Now, I grew up on the water. I was that kid who got certified scuba dive at the age of 12. I would wear my mask and fins and watch the show Flipper and Sea Quest. Like, I love those things, right? I just love those. I was a water junkie. And at the 11th hour, I ended up getting dropped from this Ivy League school. And the Navy came knocking, and I was like, I'm going to do this. And I was the first kid in a long time from this boarding school to go to the Naval Academy. Wow. I loved it. That's awesome. It was also the best of times, worst of times there. I had some discipline that I had to get used to. But that kind of service really fired me up. Interesting. Now, did, you know, the timeframe that we're talking about is 1990s being in the Naval Academy. Is that correct? Yeah, 87 to 91. 87 to 91. That's an interesting time to be joining or volunteering for the service as changing of administration, the Cold War, crying out loud, being done. And so it's interesting that you chose the SEALs. And we don't need to get into operational specifics, but I'm sure they kept you plenty busy, even though there wasn't the quote unquote, big muscle movement type wars. Yeah, I have this vision. And this really kind of brought us home. We have this trophy room at the Naval Academy boathouse. And in the trophy room is large TV. And the coach said, we're going to stop what we're doing for training for a moment. I want you all to come in here. And this was a senior. I was captain of the crew. Turn the TV on. And we were watching the invasion of Iraq. And he said, hey, you know those guys that you rode with last year? They're right there. They're in that Marine Corps division. You know these guys. They're there. That's why we're really here. Yeah, we're here to win some races. But the real races are those out there. And when that kind of process hit home, it really kind of emboldened you and kind of hit you with the reality like, hey, this is what we're really training for. And so when we went off in the SEAL team, I went headfirst in and I ended up volunteering for this group that drives classified combat mini submersibles. And I did two tours driving these little mini subs all around the world. I loved it. Before I went to a conventional team, which would be, they call it relatively conventional SEAL team too. Right. All right. We did a lot of clandestine stuff. Yeah, that's fantastic. And coming out of the Cold War was a perfect opportunity to show off some of those unconventional skills that, quite frankly, we've gotten away with or gotten away from a bit during the global war on terror, unfortunately. So you finished the Naval Academy knowing full well that you're not going to go be an F-18 pilot. Yeah, that's not happening. How tall are you anyways? 6'3". 6'3". That would be a tight squeeze, but I think you could still do it. But you know, you're not going to be F-18 pilot and you volunteer for SEAL training. Did you have a backup plan as to what happens if you wash out during BUDS or were you just so focused and committed that you just knew you were going to make it? The big first backup plan was whether I was going to get a billet out of the Naval Academy. It was touch and go. I was the last one to get a billet. In part, that's because of my class rank and my number of demerits. I consider myself top 10% of the bottom fifth. So the backup plan there was I was going to go to an oiler out of New Jersey, get qualified as quickly as I could, and then transfer in the SEAL team. I did not have a backup plan if I dropped, quit, got medically dropped from SEAL team. All right. Yeah. And for those who don't know, obviously, there's a significant washout rate in the SEAL team and SEAL training and BUDS from injury. And some folks just not being there 100% mentally. Same with me. I trained with special forces. I went to the special force qualification course and my green beret. And a lot of folks end up just quitting. And you're like, why? But, hey, if that's what you want to do, I'm glad you quit, is the way I looked at it. And that was the same attitude I think everyone else had, too. Right? Right. You only want those that are all in all the time. That's right. That's right. And so let me ask you this. So you're in the SEALs. Obviously, you're an officer. So you enter, I guess, BUDS as an ensign. Correct. And you're expected to lead pretty much right away. Did you ever think to yourself while in BUDS that you were applying some of the leadership principles and lessons that you learned from crew? Because all these things are building blocks, I think, to a total person. And I imagine that you had some lessons in leadership that you learned from your time with the Naval Academy and rowing crew. Cliff, that's all I had. You're 100% correct. Every time I got myself wondering, what am I going to do now? The first thing I would do was think back to, okay, what did I do when I was captain of the crew? Right? Right. There were times where I actually thought about quitting. There's one time in particular during Hell Week. It's Tuesday night. Hell Week is this time period for the listeners who are not sure about it. It goes from Sunday to a Friday. They give you a total of three hours of sleep for that week. Ironically, they think once you go through Hell Week, you're like a Navy SEAL, but it's only the sixth week of training. Right? It's an initial calling process. And our class had gone from 122 down to 18. And there's one officer, me and 17 enlisted, and they pull me aside and they say, sir, why do you think so many people are quitting? It was a winter Hell Week, so I thought, well, it's cold out or whatever. And they're like, no, sir. It's because you are a terrible leader. They're all quitting because of you. I want you to go over here, ring the bell, and we're just going to mold this class and roll it into another class. When you get faced with those kinds of question marks, that's the first thing that you go to. It's like, okay, well, what am I doing wrong? Maybe they're right. And you're so tired already, you're kind of questioning yourself. Everything that I had was going back, not to some book I read, but to what I had experienced or learned from others in another sport where I was being pushed to my limit. Right? Where we get pushed to our limits is where we really learn who we are and what's going to work and what isn't going to work. That's absolutely right. They say iron hardens steel, right? Yeah. Iron sharpens iron. Iron sharpens iron. That's it. In the steel teams, let me back up. You finish Buds having already faced a significant amount of adversity. Yep. Do you feel that conversation from, it was probably a chief or something like that who came up to you and asked you to ring the bell. Can you put a pin in that conversation in your life and say, wow, that might have changed everything? Because it sounds like what he did was he put you to a point where he was giving you an opportunity, a way out, but he was also testing your leadership metal. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There are these moments. I call them pivotal moments where you're at this Y in the road and you have this decision to make. We had this, he was a warrant officer. And right before we started all the SEAL training and he talked in a deep Southern accent. You know what? My job is to create a conversation in here. And he took his index finger, right? Put it up. It's a creative conversation to get you to decide what you're going to focus on. You're going to focus on the pain of training, or are you going to focus on the pleasure that training provides you? Right. Right. Go on and say, you know, 80% of you are going to focus on the pain. You know why? Well, because you want to be a SEAL on a Sunday day. In your country, you don't need SEALs on Sunday days. And I thought about that conversation and I got that conversation a lot. Yeah. Okay. You can put a pin on that particular night because they almost had me for a second. They got me thinking like, oh my God, am I really that bad of a leader? No, I'm an ensign. Of course you're a bad leader. You just start out, right? You know, the best leadership I got was from all my NCOs who had done many deployments before me. And they're like, hey, sir, let me show you how this works over here. They took me under their experience wings and they brought me along. Then there was times where I got forced with a medical drop because they found out that I had been taking asthma medication because I had been declared an asthmatic. And I was sneaking it and I got busted. My lungs started bleeding. And they're like, you shouldn't even be here. They rolled me and they put me back and they gave me another huge out. And I said, no, no. Okay, I'll stop taking the medicine, but I got to figure out a way to get through this. And then there are times where you're thinking, I don't know if I can do this 20 mile run in the middle of the night or this long swim. Those conversations come to you all the time. But after a while, you get used to that voice. In the first chapter of Unstoppable Teams, I talk about that conversation about leading yourself. I call that voice the whiner. And the more you hear that whiner chirping away at you, well, the more you know you're on the right path. You're pushing yourself out of that comfort zone of familiarity and moving forward into a place that's going to make you a stronger, better person. Yeah, that's interesting. You know, you mentioned something earlier, too, about the suffering. I always love that word, suffer. I coach youth sports, for instance, and I remind the kids that there's a few things that we do together. We win, we lose, and we suffer. Yes, I love that. If you ask the kids after practice, the other coach says, hey, kids, what did coach teach you? And they all just said to suffer. But there's something about the suffer, the suck, right, that is almost addictive in a weird way because you start feeling, all right, you know what? I know what that feels like, and I know what the endorphins and everything else that I'm going to get when I get through it. And a leader in the special forces qualification course, one of my NCOs that told me, he said, hey, that sucked, didn't it? I go, yeah, yeah, it did suck. You're welcome. You're going to have so many fun stories because it sucked so bad. If it didn't suck, you wouldn't remember. I love that. I love that. He's right. He's absolutely right. And as a matter of fact, all the fun stories I kind of have throughout my military career, hardly any of them are the good things I want to remember. It's the times I really sucked, and you laugh out of that. Yeah. And it makes you feel alive, right? Yeah, that's right. The pain and the pleasure that comes afterwards, that lets you know you're alive. And how lucky are we to be able to feel these feelings? Yeah, that's a good way to put it. So, I don't want to put you on the spot here, but in your time in the SEAL teams or even in training, do you have a funny little story or something that you remember as, oh, wow, that was hilarious? Oh, my God. Yeah, I got all kinds of them. PG-13. I was going to say. I got some that are way out of PG-13, but, okay, this is PG-13, and it will go to show everybody that we all have moments of weakness. In our week, they decided that we were going to T&E. That means test and evaluate. In our case, that means we're going to be guinea pigs. These tri-shorts. Tri-shorts are nothing more than a pair of kind of like long jockey underwear, right? Like boxer briefs, but they stick to your legs, right? We call them tri-shorts. Are these under the UDTs? Yeah, they're under that. They were under UDTs. They were under your BDUs, because we basically wore our BDUs the whole time. Right. Right, our battle dress uniform, our camis. And back then, we were wearing these World War II outfits. The idea was that we're going to wear these things so we wouldn't get so badly chafed, and everyone wouldn't get cellulose infections in their thighs, and then they would get medically rolled back, and they'd have to go through hell again. But what they didn't appreciate was they never give you time to urinate, so you would just urinate in those tri-shorts constantly. And because you're wet all the time, nobody ever knew that you were peeing in your pants standing up, right? Or you're waiting for the next person, and you're like, oh, you're just relieving yourself the whole time. Until it was Tuesday in the middle of the night where you finally have to go number two for the first time. Oh, Lord. And they bring you in, and they're like, you got 10 minutes to go to the head. One by one, we get into the bathroom, we're lined up, get to the john, and you're just like, oh, my God, I really got to go and rip those freaking tri-shorts off. And when you did, you ended up ripping off huge chunks of skin that had melded into the tri-shorts with all that urine, because it had just eaten away. And then your stomach was now totally raw and flesh, and you'd hear guys one after the other, oh, oh, oh, oh. And they were just crying like little babies, right? We're like, oh, and we're whimpering as we're trying to have a bowel movement in the bathroom. And as they come out, and I got tears running down my face, and I see this guy, and he's in my class, and he's a stud. And he looks at me, and he's got tears all over his face. Sir, when I walk out this door, I am quitting. This is the most pain I've ever had. And they knew exactly what they were going to do next, because there was a guy that they heard what was going on, and they hit the surf zone right afterwards, all this raw, right? And I looked at him, and I grabbed him. It was the only time we got to look at each other, because we got to see a mirror. And I looked in the mirror, and I said, Gary, look at me. I'm in as much pain as you. I've just cried like a little baby. I got no skin left between my thighs. He goes, oh, my God, it's the same thing with me. I go, do me a favor. Just stick it out until the sunrise. That's all I ask you to do. And let's check in. He sticks it out. We cry some more, because we get put right in the surf zone to become the honor man of our class, the number one student of the class, right? And here it is. We all had those moments. Yeah. And there was that moment right then and there that I will never, ever forget. And every time I put my underwear on, I think about that moment. That or every time you have a bowel movement, right? And by the way, it doesn't matter how bad it is, because never as bad as that time. I had that one. That's right. That's right. And hitting the surf with skin ripped off has got to be a bit frightening. For those who don't know, there's a, I don't know if you call it a jet stream or the version of a jet stream in the water, but it goes right from Antarctica and lands directly on Coronado Beach in the Pacific. It was so miserable. Cold as water. It doesn't matter if it's July or August, it's still going to be cold. So yeah, moving on to, you did a few years in the SEALs, held three commands in the SEALs. Is that correct? Yeah, I did three platoons. Three platoons. And eventually you decided to transition out of the military. What led you to make that decision? And what was your plan as you were preparing to make this transition? You know, there are a couple of things that led me to make the decision. One of them had been, I had been so fortunate with these three platoons. I had some other opportunities to go on to some other SEAL teams. So I was like, you know, if I go to these other SEAL teams, I'm going to go in and I'll stay for another four or five years. I'll be there for 12. Then I might as well stay in for 20. And I had felt so lucky to have all these different experiences. I think it's time for me to go and do something else. And it was also at a time where we were still, quote unquote, in time of peace, even though you're doing mostly clandestine work. That was all clandestine work. And I went, applied, went to business school. And I remember sitting in the business school class. I jumped out. I'd done a high altitude, low opening jump on literally like a Friday. And then on Monday, I'm sitting in a quantitative skills review program at Carnegie Mellon, surrounded by engineers. And I'm thinking to myself, good God, what have I done? Because, you know, from 18 to 30, I'd been in the military. Right. And now I'm with these civilians. And I can't understand, like, why they're crying because they think they failed a test when I know I failed a test. I remember telling them all the time, like, you got nothing to cry about. You don't have to worry about your parachute not opening. You don't have to worry about running out of air. You don't have to worry about somebody shooting you or the bomb going off. Like, it's just a test. You know, they look at me like I was a freak. Yeah. Transition. That was a hard transition. I bet. Did you. So did you. You went to business school. Did you think that you were going to leave your military life behind and just kind of keep that in your memory bank? I actually did, Cliff. For a while, I was like, well, I just got to compartmentalize this. And now I got to go be Alden, the civilian. And for a while, I really did think that. And the more I thought that, the more miserable I got. Because I was like a ship without a rudder. I was bouncing around. I was like, okay, I'm going to play a civilian game in business school. And the civilian game in business school was, hey, let's go see how much money we can make and how quickly you can make it. Right. The scorecard went from being the best teammate you can be to how much money can I get for myself? The scorecard in the military and the special forces groups and all these places you and I served, it was all about selflessness. And then all of a sudden, you get thrust into an environment, which is all about selfishness. And I was really miserable. Wow. Like depressed. Right. And made a series of mistakes. I got caught up in it. And I was like, okay, well, if that's the case, I'm going to win at this game. And I'm going to go take this job. And it has all these stock options. I'm going to make all this money and everything. And then I got there. And I'm like, this sucks. This is what this is about. And within, you know, I graduated business school in 2000. By the time, and I moved out to California, and I started the job the end of May. And by September, I had already joined the reserves. I got picked up for lieutenant commander in the reserves. And then September 11th happened a year later. And I'm like, okay, I'm out. I'm done. I'm going back in. So I had my clearances, looked at some other government agencies at the same time. And all I wanted to do is get back to the military. Because I was like, I'm not making it as a civilian was my mindset. Interesting. And we'll get back to September 11th in just a bit. But I do want to ask, because I experienced it a little bit myself. When I went to business school, I guess I'd been in the military, the army for 17 years or so. By the time I got to business school. And what was your experience with being that Navy SEAL?