Mark Esper

I mean, hard work is really the only path, certainly in these types of endeavors.

And that is the challenge, generating that type of intensity on a daily basis to achieve a goal.

For many years, right.

It doesn't happen overnight, unless you're extraordinarily gifted.

And there are people out there that have been given those God-given gifts.

But for the most part, for the average person, at least for me, it's a lot of hard work, a lot of effort, a lot of successes, a lot of failures.

And you learn more often from those failures than successes.

Yeah, look, to me, leadership always begins with integrity.

And that is you have to have a core set of values that begin with honesty and putting your people first and folks understanding what is truly your goal, your aim, the ability to articulate ideas, empathy, judgment, extremely important.

And when you're in a smaller organization, you have your company now, 130, 140 people.

When I was a company commander in Italy, a rifle company commander, I knew everybody and they could, on a daily basis,

get to know me, talk to me, judge me, and vice versa.

But when you run big organizations like the Department of Defense, which is, what, 2.8 million people, so much of it then has to be conveyed in other ways.

It's your presence, your appearance at certain sites or operations or exercises or facilities.

It's how you convey that publicly.

And it's conveying a sense of your integrity and your goals and your interests and your concerns and how you place those priorities so that people understand the authentic you.

At the end of the day, it is actions speak louder than words.

And so you have to not just talk about those things constantly and persuasively, but you have to live that life and demonstrate it.

Because otherwise, when times are tough, when maybe the situation is unclear, you want people to know who you are before those situations happen so they have trust and

in your authenticity and to who you are, because they're going to have to rely on you at those points.