Kill and Survive: A stealth pilot’s guide to excellence

U.S. Air Force pilot Bill Crawford is a stealth pilot, someone who has risen to the very top of an extremely challenging field. But to hear him tell it, it can all be chalked up to a very simple secret, a secret that will sound familiar to anyone who has served in the military.

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His trick is becoming the best in the world, studying and refining himself and his processes until he's above whatever cutoff he needs to clear. And that includes the time in college when he learned that the Air Force was cutting fighter pilot training slots from about 1,000 a year to 100 per year. In order to make sure he cleared the cutoff, Crawford became the best.

Not the 100th best, not the 10th. He received a scholarship that year for being the single best.

And he wants everyone to have the chance to be the best in the world at whatever it is they do.

In his TEDx talk, Crawford talks about bombing Baghdad, conducting inflight refuelings, and, most importantly, conducting the post-mission debrief. The after-action review.

And, yeah, that's a big part of Crawford's secret. As anyone in the military can tell you, all the branches have some sort of process for reviewing mission performance and success (two different things) from any operation. Crawford's version from his Air Force career is asking five questions:

1. What happened?
2. What went right?
3. What went wrong?
4. Why?
5. Lessons learned?

The Army had a slightly different version. What was supposed to happen? What did happen? Why? What should we, as a team, sustain about that performance? What should we change? But all the branches have some version of this process.

And this self-review is key to understanding modern military success. If you look at old articles from the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, plenty of hand-wringing in the West was about the pain, death, and destruction Russia inflicted, but many military leaders worried about Russia's review process after the invasion.

That's because the most successful organizations and individuals define their processes and actively assess whether or not they are doing it the best way they can. Russia hadn't historically reviewed their successes all that deeply. But they decisively won the war on the ground in Georgia in five days, then they reviewed their success for how to do better.

And that meant that they wanted to improve their processes. Crawford wants everyone to learn to do that process in their own life just like the American military has for decades, and Russia now does as well. And the process is simple.

But it's also hard to do. Crawford and his team had to do their debrief from bombing Baghdad right after they landed. So, right after completing 40-hours of flying and bombing, they had to go sit in a room and discuss their process, their success, and what they could do better.

But if you can make yourself do all that, you're more likely to get better. And if you keep getting better, you'll be the best.