CZ Lopez

Oh, and by the way, the failure, and this is a cliche, but the failure is always yours because you are responsible.

but never failed to recognize at certain stages of the project or the mission, the people that made it happen.

And it's never about you.

It is just about the people that ended up getting the task completed.

This was late 1990s, early 2000s.

This is before 9-11 hit.

And I was assigned to a SEAL team in Virginia Beach, one of the most elite units in the nation.

And I had this great leader, our boat crew leader.

So the team was broken down, not into troops, but into boat crews.

And I was part of boat crew three, led by one master chief, Jim Henske.

And Hinsky always used to classify people into two buckets, the meat eaters or the grass eaters.

Naturally, the meat eaters were the go-getters, the ones that will make things happen.

The grass eaters were the lazy, complacent, oxygen thieves that never got anything done, that needed consistent guidance and basically hand-holding to get anything out of them.

And that stuck with me because I started paying close attention.

I've always been a student of human dynamics.

I always like to be aware of my surroundings and I started paying attention.

Then I started, it's like, oh, definitely a meat eater.

Oh, bonafide grass eater.

So I decided to go ahead and start sharing with other people outside of the command, basically the Joint Special Operations Command.

And I used that mantra, you know, to help shape culture, right?