From Broke to McLaren: A reading from "How The Hell Are You Doing This?"

Discover the extraordinary journey of First Lieutenant Parker McCumber, who transformed from a broke college dropout to a decorated National Guard officer and successful entrepreneur. In this 20-minute deep dive, we explore the principle of "disciplined initiative" through Parker's daily routines, business philosophy, and military leadership experience. 

Follow along as we witness Parker's morning workout routine that mirrors his approach to life and business—methodical, consistent, and purpose-driven. See firsthand how his garage contains not just weights but the fruits of his success: a fire-engine red McLaren 570S and an Aston Martin Vantage. 

This video examines: 

• The discipline that drives Parker's multiple successful businesses
• How military leadership principles translate to entrepreneurial success
• The "disciplined initiative" approach that empowers organizations
• Historical examples of leadership failures and successes in military contexts
• Parker's personal mantras: "You are either getting better or getting worse" and "No one owes you anything. Everything is earned."

Whether you're interested in business growth, military history, personal development, or exotic cars, this intimate look at Parker McCumber's methodical path to success offers valuable insights for anyone looking to level up in life.
 
#LeadershipLessons #MilitaryEntrepreneur #DisciplinedInitiative #SuccessStory #PersonalDevelopment
 

Transcript

 Section one, disciplined initiative. Introduction. You learn a lot about a guy when you work out with him. I'm sure there are other ways to get to know someone camping. Some people recommend, but I hate camping and that would get in the way of my perceptions of the subject I'm supposed to be thinking about.

Gunnery would probably be a good way with this particular subject, but I'm not rated for US army gunnery, and I think the good people of that organization would object to my participation. So instead we lift things. Me and Parker McCumber. To be specific, my lifting partner today is First Lieutenant Parker McCumber of the Utah Net Army National Guard, Charlie Battery, first Battalion 145th Field Artillery Regiment.

Parker also owns a number of businesses ranging from e-commerce to consulting, to real estate investing, and a number of smaller ventures. The masterpiece is applying the system to make money and business in everyday interactions, for example. Flipping cars that I'm gonna drive, trading, watches, coaching, consulting, real estate, et cetera.

Man's new book right off the press, can't even turn the pages.

And in the interest of being thorough, he's also the son of a couple of my oldest and dearest friends. None of that is why I'm in his garage at zero dark 30. Preparing to do back squats or, well, some of it is, but not in the way you might think. Let me tell you about the view from the weight rack specifically to the south of the weight rack, the fire engine red McLaren five 70 s in such perfect condition that I expect it to levitate and glow, like a prettier version of Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine.

Let me also mention the Aston Martin Vantage a MR. Parked next to it, waiting for Q to turn it over to James Bond so he can make $250,000 of shrapnel out of it. Those cars, along with a good deal of other stuff we'll get to as we go are why I'm here, not because of the cars themselves, though. They're pretty cool.

I'm going to need to use my workout towel to wipe the drool off my chin, but because of how those cars and others like them. Scott here and how the man currently stretching on the concrete floor went from being a completely broke college dropout. I was going to type that. I didn't ever think I dropped out of college, but I probably did.

Between failing to complete a degree at the Defense Language Institute, or while I was in Germany, I was attending University of Maryland's global campus online for political science, uh, which I continued into my time at Fort Hood. However, I dropped outta that program. When preparing for a rotation to Korea being scorched earth cleaned out by his ex-wife to being one of the more highly decorated first.

In the extensive gunnery arm of the United States, oldest and most competitive institutions, while building businesses that generate enough money to buy luxury sports cars. I interjected that while the companies could afford to buy luxury sports cars, the cooler thing for me individually was learning how to do it with one car and then creating a separate business entity that replicated that as a self-sustaining way to enjoy exotic cars.

That are routinely featured on the kinds of magazines most people just stare at like Playboy for machinery, but all that can wait. Today we're lifting weights, back, squats, bench, press flies. I haven't done this all that much since college, but my body remembers how and as long as I keep the weight rack to a reasonable level, we're okay.

Interesting to me, Parker does the same. The weight he's lifting is well human. It's not really about bulking up, he says, between sets, I don't want to be large or bulky. That's not the point. The point, point is. Parker's lost over 40 pounds in the last year, and a part of the reason is his willingness to lift is a means of generating lean strength.

He doesn't feel any need whatsoever to show off in front of me, which is one of the things I look for to learn about a fella. I spot him on the bench and he does the same for me, albeit my weight is a good deal lighter, but he doesn't load up for a max. His reps are controlled, even smooth. He's not pushing it well.

Okay. He is, but you know what I mean. The weights area is Spartan clean, organized. There's a wall with a chalkboard on it and the beginnings of some inspirational quotes. Today there are only two you are getting. You are either getting better or you're getting worse. David Goggins and we all must suffer from one of two pains.

The pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Jim Rowan. Now there may be 20 on that wall ranging from David Goggins to General George S. Patton. And in the center of the chalkboard is a personal mantra that I use when coaching youth sports or really anyone for that matter, especially myself. No one owes you anything.

Everything is earned. One of the other things that I look for is commitment. I. Parker's told me beforehand what lifts he's going to do with how much weight for how many sets. Then he does it. It's hard. He's sweating, so am I, but not too heavily, and he doesn't duck. Out of the last few sets, he does them the same as the first few with smooth precision.

He does hesitate before the last set of squats psyching himself up. It's good to know that he's human. All in all, it's enjoyable. Parker's a good guy to lift with. Maybe there are people that are good at lifting buddies, but poor human beings. But I imagine that that number is small. It takes us the better part of an hour to complete the workout.

This is mostly because we're swapping ideas, motivational stories, books that we love. He'll bring up one, then I'll riff off of it. Then I'll give it back to him, and the time flies. We finished the workout with a run about a mile and a half. This is the part that I'm most nervous about. I used to run quite a bit, but haven't for some time.

We take it slow, slow enough that Parker can discourse about his philosophy of running, which he's taken from First Sergeant, now, Sergeant Major, Clint Markland, which was a science-backed method, uh, from Phil Mone and Hal Higdon. In essence, we are working around the thought of you have to be able to run slow to run fast.

The idea is that he wants to get his heart into a target training zone and keep it there no more than that, and not less just a steady work at a particular level, much like his weightlifting. During this workout, I ran with a heart rate of 140 to 145 beats per minute, allowing me to converse freely and comfortably for the majority of the run.

If you do this, you can hugely increase the distance and duration. You can run without having to train over massive distances with intense effort. You're training your heart rate and cardiovascular fitness. He says largely quoting a friend of whom we'll meet in a minute, but in between he tells me a story.

One of the many he served with is part of what they call the Wolf Pack. His name is Morgan Steers. Morgan decided one day that he was going to run a half marathon. Parker had previous to this sworn that he would never run more than five miles again, just less than a 10 K, and this was 13.1 miles. But as his buddy Morgan got closer to race time, Parker decided, what the heck, I'll do it too.

He had one month to train. I watched Morgan work really hard to lose weight, get in shape, and improve on his running. He was doing it by himself. Running was not something that I wanted to do, but especially not by myself, and seeing Morgan's dedication to self-improvement in that capacity motivated me.

One month prior to the race, I signed up to run. I only trained for three to three and a half weeks. Then I took about a week off prior to the half marathon, and then I ran and I finished. We finish two and break four. I'll come over to the office and watch him work a thing I'll be doing quite a bit over the next few weeks.

I already know a lot of what I'm going to find when I get there, though Parker will be meticulous. He'll have a plan and he'll execute according to that plan. He'll work hard but not be pushed to the edge. He'll work consistently and smoothly. Like I said, you learn a lot about a guy when you work out with him, and this time was no exception.

Principle, disciplined initiative definition, the freedom within an organization to take whatever action is necessary to advance the goal or objective of that organization without having to clear such actions with superiors. I believe I was first exposed to this concept in the Camp Jackson NCO Academy, as a sergeant in Korea.

To me, disciplined initiative is the empowerment of subordinates in your organization to take actions necessary at their level to drive the organization to achieve its goals. It requires vision, shared understanding, and trust. Human beings are funny creatures being animals. We have wants and needs related to physical things like food, water, and sex.

Being thinking self-aware creatures, we are capable of denying our immediate pursuit of those things in favor of psychic benefits instead, or of delaying our pursuit of those things because we will believe we have a shot at a greater quantity of them in the future. This has allowed humans to build impressive, durable things like San Francisco.

It has also caused no end of misery as humans. Mistake the short-term aim for the long-term goal and vice versa. Ants do not have this problem. Ants do not discover that their tunneling activities have compromised their food gathering operations to the point that the colony is in danger of starving cats do not oversleep, although that seems impossible sometimes.

And develop heart disease and much more relevant to the principle above herring. Don't build elaborate food gathering apparatuses only to find out that in doing so they've exterminated their food source, but humans do all of those things. Each of us individually has some experience with working so hard to provide comfort and stability that we are permanently comfortable.

Sorry. We are permanently uncomfortable and unstable. We have long histories of setting goals, then pursuing those goals with precisely the kind of activities that make those goals supremely unlikely to be realized. Consider the case of Christopher Columbus. He's become quite the villain in recent times, but as I tell my history students, it's much more valuable to consider what he did and whether it got him what he was hoping for than to stick a label on him as a hero or a monster.

So what did Columbus do? He opened trade routes between Europe and the Americas. What was he trying to do? Open trade routes between Europe and Asia. Right there we have trouble. By the time his third voyage rolled around, Columbus had chained in the hold or was chained in the hold and returned to Spain in disgrace.

Eventually, he would gather enough support to make a fourth voyage, which was not only a disaster financially, but cost him the life of his brother. Butchered on the beach by the Mexico. While Columbus watched from the anchored ship sick and unable to assist, he returned to Spain and died a few years later.

Essentially penniless. Not a single member of the Spanish court attended his internment. Columbus had a goal and he destroyed himself in the pursuit of it. He was nothing if not rigid and inflexible. A product of a whole system that took orders from the crown and passed them down, carved in stone right to the last sailor, bringing rope on the forecast.

For as long as we have historical records, we have accounts of wars, and how those conflicts were managed most of the time, despite what the movies show you, these conflicts were small, involving just a few people on each side. Battles where the opposing troops numbered in the thousands are vanishingly rare, and tens of thousands are practically unheard of anciently given the sizes of the combatant forces.

It was, uh, usually fair, fairly simple for a commander to keep control of his entire army, except in the largest engagements. Every soldier on the battlefield would be in visual range of every other. Complex series of signals, flags, trumpets, drums, et cetera, could tell each segment of the army what to do at any given moment, and those cohorts would be expected to act as a single unit right flank, advance, left flank retreat, et cetera.

As industrial societies advanced, it became impossible. To move much larger numbers of soldiers much more quickly. The generals lost the ability to see everything that was happening on the battlefield. As an excellent example of this is the Crimean War where Britain and Allies verse Russia, 1853 to 1856, where Commanders found they routinely had no idea what was going on with significant percentages of their forces.

For example, the immortal charge of the light brigade. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of death, rode the 600 forward, the light brigade charged for the guns, he said into the valley of death. Rode the 600. Forward. Was the light brigade, was there a man dismayed? Not though.

The soldier knew someone had blundered. There's not to make reply. There's not to reason why their's, but to do and die into the Valley of Death Road. The 600,

the 600, which was really almost 700 were members of the British Light Cavalry, horse mounted soldiers whose chief advantage on the battlefield was their mobility. They could be used to attack gunnery positions, driving off the gunner or slaughtering them and capturing the guns. Which were a huge component of a successfully armed campaign.

At least they had been since the seven years War, known in the United States as the French and Indian War. That was their mission at the time in an engaging or in an engagement during the Battle of Balaclava, or it should have been the British Army Commander, Lord Raglan, saw that the Russians were in the process of dragging off some captured Turkish guns.

Presumably intended to order the light cavalry to attack that position on the British left to keep the Russians from completing this capture through a bungled series of misunderstandings. What actually happened was that the major general James Bruell, the Earl of Cardigan, led the cavalry into an assault on the fortified Russian artillery position in the Russian Center.

All the way at the end of a long Valley with Russian soldiers, artillery, and infantry on each side. This did not go well. There's a reason, Tennyson called it the Valley of Death. The British lost half of their horses and well over a third of their men before they were able to return incredibly. They actually reach their objective or their supposed objective.

The Russian artillery and placements at the far end of the valley. We're driven off because there was no support to consolidate the position. Four weeks later, Alfred Lord Tennyson, immortalized their charge in his poem, quoted above. An argument can be made that until photography, the best way to get your military prowess remembered was to have some right.

A good poem about it. Look at you, Paul Revere. If you want more on this and the whole domino style debacle, that is fascinating. I strongly recommend Tim Hartford's Cautionary Tales podcast, which has an excellent episode on the backstory of this event. For our purposes, what emerges from this story is the apparent inability of cardigan or anyone else to countermand what was obviously suicidal and a stupid order.

There is a moment when one of the captains, Louis Nolan dashed ahead and cut across the formation, possibly attempting to turn the light brigade towards the actual objective of the Turkish guns. Alas, we will never know because he was immediately blown to bits by Russian artillery in the British army of the time, as in all armies of the time and many armies.

Still today when an order was received, it was tattooed on the forehead of fate. If it made no sense, it didn't matter if it was in fact completely counter to the Army's reasonable objective, as in this case, it didn't matter. There's not to reason why. There's not to make reply as the poem goes. It also says there's but to do and die, both of which things they did.

As so often happens in war, the commanders were attempting to fight the new War in which technology has dramatically changed the situation. Using the tactics of old, but because they were rarely doing the actual fighting, they didn't know and they didn't care. World War I is perhaps the most egregious example of this, where new military technology in the form of ranged artillery and machine gunfire, completely invalidated military tactics that had stood for thousands of years, the cost millions of live.

Uh, this cost millions of lives to no significant purpose. I'm currently reading The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, which talks about the shortcomings of command in World War I, largely because they had used tactics and strategy that were too old and failed to account for the modernization of weapons and capabilities.

It's a very interesting read, and I recommend it. Are of course some positive examples as well. Take the story of the USS Texas during the assaults unoccupied France during Operation Overlord. Texas an aging, but still impressive. Battleship provided support for firing troops, landing on the beaches of Normandy, engaging many targets, including the ones pinning the troops on the beach, which meant the guns had to be fired nearly flat with very little elevation.

An unusual and somewhat risky maneuver, but there was more to come on. 15 June, 19 44, 9 days after D-Day, the Texas was ordered to engage a target so far inland. The gunner calculated their guns.