Cliff Sims

He called it the attraction of the inner ring.

or the inner circle.

So all throughout life, we are attracted to the inner ring.

When you are in elementary school or in school, you wanna sit at the cool kids table at lunch.

When you get into college, you wanna be in not just a fraternity or a sorority, you wanna get in the good fraternity, the good sorority, you wanna be inside that circle.

When you get into your professional life, you wanna be in the good unit.

You don't want to just be in the military.

You want to be a SEAL.

You want to be on SEAL Team 2.

Oh, and if you can, you know, after we get done with that, you know what?

I think I want to go in CIA.

I want to go get in that unit right there that's doing that classified mission that I can't even talk about.

So in the military aspects of it, there's the way.

And in our professional lives, you want to work your way up.

I remember for myself,

When I would often walk with the president in the morning, he would get down from the residence off of the private elevator on the ground floor of the residence, and I would walk with him out into the Oval Office.

And we'd talk about the news of the day, things that were going on that day, whatever it may be.

And this is when I was a comm staffer before I was at DNI.

And I would get into the Oval and often waiting for him were the CIA director, the chief of staff, the director of national intelligence, maybe the vice president.

And they were ready for him to come in and have his intelligence briefing.