Elite squad shows how failure breeds success
New Zealand’s Special Air Service (SAS) is among the most elite fighting forces in the world. Every year candidates form the army, air force and navy and even some civilians attempt the SAS selection course. They all want to become part of this elite unit.
But it’s not for the fainthearted. The selection course has an 88 per cent failure rate.
The interesting thing is you can’t predict which candidates will make it through selection by looking at them.
Qualities we would think are important, such as athletic ability, fitness, size or years of military experience, are not good indicators of success.
In fact, successful applicants are often the least likely looking people. They come from all backgrounds and come in all shapes, sizes and personalities.
But having said that, there is one attribute that is a reliable predictor of whether a candidate is likely to pass selection.
If a candidate has this one attribute, they are considerably more likely to achieve NZSAS selection. This attribute is that they’ve failed selection before.
Most of us will never go through something like NZSAS selection. But I think we can all be elite at something.
We can gain some insights from the SAS candidates to help us to reach elite status for something in our lives.
Selection is designed to remove the mask that we humans all wear and expose the real person and their real motivations. It’s designed to test candidates mentally and physically. It’s designed to find out who will do unreasonable things powered only by their own self-motivation.
There’s no yelling on selection. There’s no encouragement and there’s no discouragement, either.
Candidates are told what they are expected to do and told the time frame to do it in. They either do it or they don’t.
The physical challenges increase daily, the food decreases, and the sleep is almost non-existent.
The days of unrelenting physical exertion give the candidates plenty of time to consider if this is really what they want to do and if they really have what it takes.
It’s a lonely experience filled with uncertainty, pain and fatigue – all the while getting no reassurance from anyone.
If the blisters, sore shoulders and self-doubt are not enough to handle, the directing staff are busy adding psychological tests, such as shifting the goalposts.
They might say: ‘‘In two hours the trucks will pick us up.’’ Candidates start counting down the hours and then they count minute after painful minute until the two hours is up, only for the directing staff to say: ‘‘Oh sorry, my mistake. I was supposed to say three hours. We’ve got another hour to go.’’
It’s at this point candidates are asking: ‘‘Is it really worth it? How much do I want this? What are my alternatives? Am I even cut out for this?’’
Many give up when the pain of selection is greater than the pain of not being in the NZSAS. Most of these people have quit by the halfway mark, though.
The candidates who fail after that usually do so because they don’t make the checkpoint in time or have missed some other requirement.
Some of these candidates who fail go home and continue to train. And return for the next selection course, knowing full well what they are getting themselves into. But they do it anyway. They come back better prepared and with more knowledge.
When I think of the SAS soldiers I know, almost all of them failed their first selection course.
When I ask them why they kept going and how they got through selection, they all have similar answers. They wanted to be useful or competent, and they wanted to be able to contribute and make a difference.
But all of them also said they couldn’t imagine themselves doing anything else. They couldn’t face not being in the NZSAS.
I find it interesting that when the mask has been removed the driving motivation or core value of the successful candidates is to be useful to others and to make a difference to others. Those are quite unselfish motivations.
I wonder if we remove our mask in our quiet moments. What’s the core reason driving us in our projects?
Is it a selfish motivation, like riches, respect or popularity? Or is it to make something better or to make a difference?
Also, what are we doing that we can’t not do? That’s probably the thing we can be elite at.
Unfortunately, just like the NZSAS candidates, failure is the attribute most likely to predict our success. Failure is part of being elite.