Message From The Front

Before the Recruiter. Before the Forms. Before all the questions. Do This One Thing First.

Most youngens think joining the military starts with a recruiter.

It sure the heck shouldn’t.

I've worked with over 2,500 people thinking about service, and the ones who walk in steady, clear, and hard to rattle all have one thing in common. They figured out their reason for going before anybody else got involved. Not the polished reason they'd give a recruiter. The real one. The one sitting in the back of their mind, sometimes a lot longer than they've admitted to anyone.

That reason becomes your anchor. And trust me, you're going to need it.

Welcome to the collective.

Let's get after it. 🇺🇸👊

— Ty
Founder, The Warrior Collective

Ground Truth

Your WHY Is the Whole Foundation

Why does your "why" matter so much before you enlist?

A paycheck won't get you through a four-year contract. Neither will the benefits, the bonus, or the job title. Those are good things to have. I'm not knocking them. But they are not enough to carry anybody through the hard parts, and there are hard parts.

Your reason for serving is what carries you. Through basic training. Through your first duty station. Through a deployment. Through the nights you lie there asking yourself what you were thinking.

The youngens who know their why thrive. The ones who don't usually find out the hard way that a paycheck was never going to be enough. All right? So we figure it out now. Before anything else.

Here's something worth sitting with. When the Pentagon asks young people why they'd join, the top answers are almost always pay, money for school, and healthcare. The Department of Defense's own youth polling shows it year after year. And those are real, good reasons. But notice what's missing. Almost nobody writes down the thing that actually carries them through the hard parts. That gap, between why people think they're joining and what actually sustains them once they're in, is exactly why this next part matters so much.

So how do you actually find your why?

You write it down. By hand. And I mean that literally.

I call it the napkin technique. I still do it to this day, and I've had hundreds of students do it too. Now, I know some of you are already rolling your eyes. "I don't use a pen for anything, Ty, I'll just talk into my phone." Bear with me. There's something to this. Just fricken do it.

Here's how it works.

Get away from your friends. Get away from your family. Go somewhere by yourself. A coffee shop. A diner. A booth in the back where nobody knows you.

Bring a pen. Get a Pilot G2 .7 because I'm a pen snob. Grab a napkin.

Then start writing down every single reason you might be thinking about the military. All of them. No filter, nobody watching.

Maybe it's money. Maybe it's college. Maybe it's getting the heck out of the town you grew up in. Maybe it's to make somebody proud. Maybe it's to prove something to yourself. Maybe it's to impress a girl or a boy. I've heard them all, and not one of them is wrong. They're yours. That's the whole point.

Then what?

Then you walk away from it. Give it a few hours, or a day.

And come back and read it.

Something happens when you take all those thoughts spinning around in your head and put them on paper. The noise settles. The real reasons rise to the top. The ones that were really just fear or frustration start to look different in the daylight.

I promise you this. When you're standing in the chaos of that first week of basic, asking yourself "what did I do," that napkin is what brings you back.

That's your anchor. Find it before you do anything else.

Source: U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies (JAMRS) Youth Poll reasons-to-join data. View the report.

Build Your Team

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Your Next Objective:

Once you've got your why on paper, the next move is understanding the whole road ahead. Our free field manual walks you through all seven phases, from this exact moment through MEPS and shipping out. It's everything I wish somebody had handed me before I joined.

Download the free field manual →

Let's get after it. 🇺🇸👊
- Ty, Founder - The Warrior Collective

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