Nic McKinley

speaker

110 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Nic McKinley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Finding Peak with Ryan Hanley · Former CIA Agent Exposes the Truth About Trafficking · 17 Apr 2025 podcast

but I decided I was gonna be one of those eight. It's that simple. There was no motivation. There was no discipline. It was no, I just decided I was gonna be one of those eight. Getting into the CIA. I just decided that I was gonna go work at the CIA. Getting into Harvard. I just decided I was gonna get into Harvard. And I think when you make the decision that something is going to happen,

And you're not jumping off a cliff deciding that you can suddenly fly, right? When you're doing things that are logical and make sense, they may not make sense to the entire world, but they make sense to you. I think this is every entrepreneur's journey. Everybody thinks you're crazy until until you're successful and then they don't.

So if you are just if you just decide that you're going to go do something, then you will continually move your feet in that direction and you'll stumble and you'll fall and you'll learn from those failures.

failures and you'll get up and you'll do it again i think too many times when people quit the people who quit in my special ops selection class or the guys who didn't make it in my cia selection class They all were people who hadn't really decided what it was that they were going to do. They didn't decide for sure that they wanted to be in the Air Force Special Ops community.

They hadn't decided for sure that they wanted to be at the Central Intelligence Agency. They were just kind of kicking the tires. And that, I think, is the primary reason why they failed. And I think it's the same thing for entrepreneurs.

It makes absolute sense. In fact, I would... I would say it's so simple that people are skeptical of how simple it is. You know what the number one thing you need to do to make it into a special ops program is? The number one thing that you need to do. No. Don't quit. What's the number one thing that an entrepreneur needs to do? Don't quit.

You hear these entrepreneur stories and, oh, look at how this person was successful overnight. What people don't realize is they tried three companies before that that all failed. And the fourth was an overnight success that took 11 years. So so none of it like I've never seen anybody who was an overnight success. You look at the the the work that Kobe put in.

You look at the work that Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or, you know, any of these people put in. Right. That Musk is putting in that Bezos put in that jobs put in. I mean, any of these folks, if you look at the work that they put in, then they just eventually started tripping over success. And and but it's it's they didn't quit and they just continually advanced the ball.

And I think part of the problem that we run into in the business and entrepreneurship community is that we get addicted to fighting battles. So I just put out a sub stack on this very issue. I put it on LinkedIn as well. It. And I know this personally because in my old world as an operator, we got kind of addicted to the fight.

We weren't really thinking about the strategic wins and what was going on. All we knew was, hey, go to this country and go save good guys, kill bad guys, and do that on repeat. And so it was pretty binary because, OK, well, there's a certain set of skills that we need to be able to do that. I do not need to understand computer science and AI to rescue good guys and kill bad guys. Super simple.

But then at the CIA, things kind of changed and it got a lot more strategic because now very, very small teams operating with virtually no supervision. And we were kind of able to do really whatever we wanted and kind of came up with our own mission. So suddenly the strategic objectives became extremely important because instead of having missions handed down from a higher headquarters, we were

We were developing our own missions and doing our own work and deciding what it was we were going to do. And the agency gave us all the rope in the world we wanted. However, they made it very clear that if we hung ourselves, they weren't going to come cut us down. We had to start thinking more strategically. And while in my old world as an operator, right, the hard skills are a lot of fun, right?

The combatives and the CQB and the gun work, right? It's all really fun. It's fun stuff. But that's not what moves the needle strategically. It moves the needle tactically, and that's the foundation. But suddenly, I started saying, okay, I see where the future is going. I see where the... I'm paying attention to the wars that are... rolling out around me when I'm not on deployment.

I'm going to sign up for that computer science course. I'm going to sign up to go learn that new data analysis tool. I'm going to go hang out with the nerds. I'm going to go check out, you know, 12 years ago, this like really cool technology called AI that they were rolling out. Right. I'm going to go learn all this stuff.

Well, here we are 12 years later after making those kinds of decisions and the decisions that I made 12 years ago are what are informing what I do today. So people will say, well, oh, yeah, Nick's this, like, you know, keyboard guy. But then the people who know me from the past are like, oh, no, like, Nick's a shooter.

But then people who know me from undergrad are like, oh, no, Nick was the, like, super nerd. Well, I'm actually all of those things. Each one of those groups of people only got a slight window into who I was. And what that turned into was now I can – I can build whatever it is that I want to build because I put in all the work 12 years ago.

22 years ago, maybe even 32 years ago to lead to the point that I'm at today. And I think the big problem that entrepreneurs run into or that their detractors run into is they don't want to put in that work. And that's OK. We don't need everybody in the world to be launching rockets to Mars or trying to solve the commercial sex trafficking issue. We don't need everybody to be doing that.

But don't demonize the people who are just because they're not living like you are.

And because you were the straight stick to that community.

You were a reminder of what they could be, but they were choosing not to be.

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