A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business

6 ACTIVATING EMOTIONS

How to fuel tenacity on the journey

THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES ON:

1. Why are mindset and method alone insufficient to make constraints beautiful?
2. Why is emotion such an important motivator, and how does it help?
3. What is the range of emotions that seems to be most prevalent among people transforming constraints, and how do they differ in their power and effect?

Military special operations are carried out by teams of elite soldiers with very specific, targeted missions. The teams are small (U.S. Navy SEAL platoons consist of sixteen soldiers operating in eight-man squads, or four-man Fire teams) up against much larger conventional forces, and operate in highly constrained situations—having very little time to complete an operation, for instance, far from base, without backup.

Admiral William McRaven, Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, has led at every level in U.S. special operations, including leading Operation Neptune Spear, which led to the death of Osama Bin Laden. His thesis at Naval Postgraduate School was The Theory of Special Operations, which later became the book Spec Ops.¹ In it, he developed the six core principles that make special operations successful, illustrating them with case studies ranging from the sinking of the battleship Tirpitz to the rescue of Mussolini from a hotel atop the Gran Sasso Mountains in Italy.

One of the six principles is the concept of purpose (bear in mind McRaven was writing long before the word became fashionable ...