All Episodes
Previous Next
June 22, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
34:34
Leadership Lessons from TOP GUN Maverick
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, I don't know about you, but as you've watched out over the world, the war in Russia and Ukraine is not just isolated to Eastern Europe, it's spread all over the world and you can see it in market instabilities, you can see it here.
People who do not think that that war is affecting you, all you gotta do is look at gas prices, you look at your food prices, you see the global change that has happened.
But you know something that's also affected investments as well, and I've said all along, Legacy Precious Metals is your navigator.
They're the ones that see you through to get to the next level.
The good news about this is, even with market volatility, market instability, you've got options.
And gold prices are rising as investors turn to gold, and gold presents a hedge against this inflation and that protects you against the weakening dollar, which we are seeing.
Legacy Precious Metals is the only company I trust to deal with gold and silver and the other precious metals.
You need this investment.
You need this as part of your portfolio to keep you buffered from what we're seeing in the world.
War and volatility in the market.
This is where you need to be.
Call Legacy Precious Metals today.
Be proactive about this.
Get on board with it.
Call them at 866-528-1903, 866-528-1903.
Or you can download their free investors guide at LegacyPMInvestments.com. LegacyPMInvestments.com, your navigator in a volatile world of investments.
You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Welcome back to Doug Collins Podcast.
Hey, before we go any further, thanks for listening.
Thanks for downloading this.
I encourage you to download it.
Share it with others.
Just, you know, there's that button right there.
Hit share.
If you think about three or four friends you want to share this podcast with, I'd love for you to do so.
Like it.
Comment on it.
We're glad to bring these podcasts to you.
And we're excited to have you as part of the Doug Collins Podcast family.
If you want to ever send me a note, go to thedougcollinspodcast.com, thedougcollinspodcast.com.
There's an email button there, and I get emails from you, and I've enjoyed getting a lot of emails from you on comments about episodes and things that you would like to see in the future.
So please be a part of that.
Today is going to be a fun one.
It's just a quick edit.
You know I'm big on leadership.
You know I'm big on trying to teach and draw out ideas from things that may be Normally you don't think of getting leadership ideas or motivational ideas from.
But today is going to be one of those fun episodes.
Let me give a little bit of background.
Today is going to be leadership lessons from Top Gun, the new Top Gun Maverick.
My wife and I were married in 1988. Top Gun, of course, came out in June in the year of 1986. My wife's favorite movie in all the world is the original Top Gun.
She watches it several times a year.
If there's nothing else on, she'll watch it again.
And like a lot of ladies from the 80s and others who have watched those movies, there's reasons and you can understand they enjoy it.
And the love scenes and the guys playing volleyball with no shirts on.
It's just a great feel-good kind of movie.
So, there was a lot of, you know, trepidation on Top Gun Maverick, which is the second Top Gun movie.
You know, would it live up to the hype?
Now, I'm going to give you right up front, there will be a little bit of spoiler in here, but not much.
Nothing that you wouldn't have seen probably from the trailers or other things.
I'm going to talk about this.
There will be a little bit, so if you've not seen it and you want to hold off on this podcast, just download it, save it in your podcast lot, come back after you've seen it.
So, I'm not going to give a lot of spoilers away, but I am going to give some life lessons and leadership lessons from the movie.
Now, to set this up, this is 30 years.
They actually do sort of a real-time sequence, 30 years in the future, and Maverick Tom Cruise is the character.
Maverick is, Pete Mitchell is his name.
That's his call sign.
We'll use call signs a lot in this video.
Someone from the Air Force and also served a little bit of time in the Navy.
In fact, I served time in the Navy in the early 90s.
Not long after the original Top Gun, which shot up through the roof, the desire for people, for guys in particular to go fly jets in the Navy or in the Air Force, for that matter, either one.
It just, it did incredible for recruitment.
We'll see how this works this time, but I got a feeling it's going to do the same thing.
You get to know these pilots, you get to know the culture, and as someone who's been in the Air Force now for 20 plus years, the pilots are a unique breed.
I love them to death, and especially fighter pilots.
They're They're cocky.
They're bold.
Many of them are just some of the nicest people you ever want to meet.
But just like everybody else, there's some that, you know, probably great on your nerves.
So as I saw this film and I saw the new military part of it, it really captures the fact that there was a career here.
And this is something that I want to just lay out.
As we go through these leadership principles, these apply to anywhere.
They apply not just to a military movie, but they apply to life in general.
And that's why I just wanted to take the Top Gun Maverick movie, talk about some things from it, give you some leadership lessons.
First leadership lesson, first thing I want you to understand...
It came from this movie.
There was a discussion in the very beginning of it between drones and manned aircraft.
Believe me, as someone who's been in the Air Force now for a while, this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue.
There are more and more people out there who believe that we can have, quote, push-button wars.
In other words, not have pilots and planes.
We could have, you know, robo-armies, if you would.
And one of the things this movie brings out is the fact you can never remove the man from the machines.
And think about this.
How many times in your business today, or maybe you're working in a company where they're moving toward automation, they're moving, I mean, you can't even go to a McDonald's today in many places without being forced to go to a kiosk to actually order.
And that human touch is being taken out.
How many of you have ever complained about having to call and you call an 800 number for service and you get a robo-recording?
You say, well, you know, if you really need help, go to our website.
Well, no, if I needed help, I wouldn't have went to the website first.
I wouldn't have called you.
But what this movie brings out, especially when it comes to war and especially when it comes to military, you can never take the man out of the machine.
In other words, there's always going to be an element in which the person, that human, is there making that distinction between a target and a non-target.
Go, no go.
Now, again, it doesn't mean that they're gonna always get it right.
It doesn't mean that the person in that plane or the person with the, you know, driving the vehicle or with the gun in their hand gets it right.
But what it does mean is there's gonna be a human element To things that we cannot imagine if we simply deploy on drones.
And I think when you take taking the man out of the machine, this is where it becomes a false reality for people.
People begin to believe that this is easy.
You know, from a military standpoint, this is easy war.
I can't tell you how many people is amazing to me.
People who talk about not wanting to go to war.
And it was talking about Obama and getting us out of Iraq, which I think is another topic for another time.
But they said nothing about the drone strikes that were being done by the Obama administration, which exponentially grew from his time 2008 through 2016, on targets all across the world.
And again, this is putting somebody who's away from the plane, away from into these situations.
And you may say, well, there's still a man or there's still a woman attached to that.
Yes, but not in the sense of really the fact that you're going to go to all drone kind of warfare in our business in reality.
Folks, I do believe that it's the companies and it's the people who actually can connect with other people that are going to make it farther in life.
Maybe you're out there right now and you're in an industry that...
is getting more automated and moving you further away.
I'll guarantee you that your sales skills, your ability to work, and your life will never separate out the person who's developing those machines, developing, working those machines, and working with that customer because at the end of the day it's going to be about human relations and that's what one of the things or the themes of this movie is human relations.
Human relations still matter.
No matter how technologically advanced our world's becoming, no matter how You know, technologically savvy we are becoming.
You can't separate out the man from the machine.
And that goes through programming.
It goes from social media.
You can't separate it out.
This is also one of the concerns, and I wanted to start with this one because I see this so often that the machine is being Substituted for social interaction.
We see this in social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all of these YouTube platforms, Rumble platforms, all of them.
All are good things when used in proper perspective.
But what we're seeing right now, and probably what envisioned from this movie, Top Gun Maverick, was that when you remove the man from the machine, when you remove the human element out of these social interactions, then people will begin to believe that they're their own They're their own best advisor, their own best interest, and that they know best because they're never challenged.
Because if you can put something out there on the internet and you type a comment or a tweet and you can send it out in anonymous fashion, you're not able to receive the instant feedback.
Like I grew up, when I was growing up in high school, if you had a problem with somebody, you had to tell them you had a problem with them.
Otherwise, nobody would ever know.
You couldn't go to some anonymous electronic site and tweet, I hate or I'm mad at so-and-so.
No, you had to actually confront, and that's where human interaction skills are lacking.
In a leadership lesson, if you want to hear it today, the best leadership interaction I can give you is you can't separate the man from the machine, and you can't separate the social interaction that we desperately need as humans.
And when you do, you start isolating people.
We start seeing the rise of the mental health issues that we've seen.
And we start seeing more and more of a pervasiveness in our culture that is ugly.
And we start seeing it acted out in very terrible ways, whether it be through violence in our streets, through shooters, through other things that we've seen.
You've got to get back to a time, I believe, in which man is able to confront man again.
And we do so in a way that is civil.
We do so in a way that actually is promoting who we are as people.
First rule of Top Gun Maverick, the man, you can never take the man out of the machine.
Second life lesson out of Maverick Top Gun is your reputation, good or bad, follows you no matter where you go.
For some of my younger listeners here on the Doug Collins Podcast, you may not want this to be true because you have issues in your past.
Maybe you had a bad start.
Your reputation is going to follow you.
We see this in Maverick.
Maverick is viewed, and you saw this in the movie.
He's had one of those careers in which his reputation preceded him wherever he went.
You remember the original Top Gun?
He was always arrogant.
He was always boastful.
His reputation preceded him wherever he went.
And it's true even in this movie as well.
After a 30-year career, he had been in and out of trouble.
At 30-year career mark, he was still a captain.
For those of you in the military who understand, he should not have been a captain.
He was reminded of that in this movie.
He should have been somewhere in the admiral rank or out for the most part.
But because of his continued individualism and because he continued to sort of push it in good and bad in his reputation, it followed him.
What's interesting is we have a couple of other newer characters in this.
Rooster, which as many have already heard, is in the trailer.
Rooster is one of the characters, Miles Teller, who is actually Goose, who was Maverick, Tom Cruise's Wingman and Navigator in the original Top Gun, Sun.
And there's a very twisted relationship here.
And there's another character called Hangman.
Hangman and Rooster, again, both come to this in their first meetings together.
They both sort of talked about, and this was interesting, and we do this all the time.
We weigh out people about what we have heard.
So I... Hangman looked at Rooster.
Rooster said, he said Rooster was always too tentative.
Rooster talked about Hangman being too cocky.
You saw in the role of the other characters in this, it intermingled and you saw that their reputations had perceived him.
I ask you, what reputation is preceding you?
When you go to a new job, or you go to a new client, or you go into a new workspace, or you walk into the office, what is the reputation that you have?
Is it good or is it bad?
If it's bad, then how do you fix it?
If it's good, then how do you enlarge it?
I'm going to tell you right now, and you may not want to think this is true, but it is.
No matter where you go, your reputation will always be there, both good or bad.
So the question for all of us in a leadership moment is, is what is our reputation?
What are we known for?
What is the baggage, if you would, we carry?
Or what is the good that we carry forward?
This is what the leadership lesson that I got and saw again in prime display in this movie was that your reputation is good and bad will precede you.
They will get there in time.
And the question for us is, what do we do about that?
I bring this up because I'm often confronted in counseling situations and others with, you know, look, I got off from a bad start.
How do I fix it?
Well, number one, and this may be something, maybe not a leadership lesson, but how about admitting if there's a problem saying you're sorry?
You know, going and mending relationships, which goes back to sort of the first point of Leadership Lessons about, you know, trying to separate man out of the machine, is that we've got to get back to human interaction, which we can admit our mistakes and we actually, you know, try to mend fences and relationships.
And if we do that, especially if we have gotten a bad reputation, And we start doing things that actually show that we're trying to get better or we're trying to change those bad habits or trying to change those.
That's one of the things that you can do.
Even if you've had a bad reputation to start with, even if you sort of pushed it and you went off and got crossways with your balls, I'm trying to give you some ways right now to say, look, work harder, understand where other people are coming from, listen to other people.
Again, your attitude and how you are caring about other people can be changed dramatically when you simply are concerned enough about the other person.
If you're thought of as arrogant or aloof, start listening to other people.
Start asking questions.
Start being interested in their lives.
When you're interested in other people's lives, then your reputation grows as someone who cares, someone who's concerned, and someone who leads.
Leaders cannot be disinterested in the people that they're leading.
So if you're out there and you're in a new first leadership position, Get to know the people you're leading.
That doesn't mean you become best friends.
It doesn't mean that you become, you know, you do everything for them.
But it does mean that you get to know them on a level in which they believe that you actually care.
Reputations matter.
This movie just enhances that even further.
So the second thing is your reputation, both good and bad, will follow you.
The third one is something that I've sort of just learned over time.
And in this movie, Maverick on several occasions, Tom Cruise's character on several occasions, lives this out.
And here's the principle, and I've said it a lot, and maybe you've heard it as well.
And sometimes it's better to seek forgiveness than permission.
Sometimes you're going to be stuck in leadership parts of your life.
You're going to be stuck at a time when there is a decision that has to be made, and you either You know it's going to be no, but you know it's right.
But inside, you know that what you need to do is do it.
And it's just better to seek forgiveness than permission.
Because if you wait around permission, you may lose the opportunity, may lose the moment, may lose the time.
This is important.
Tom Cruise's character on a couple of occasions in this movie does exactly that.
He knows in his heart that it is something is right that needs to be done.
And he does it.
He's willing to take that out.
Here's a key.
He's willing to take the punishment.
He's willing to take the punishment for the action.
I see so many times I see people who want to take action and they know it may be something somebody else is going to get mad at.
Maybe the boss is going to get mad at or maybe their family is going to get mad at and they take it and they do it anyway and then they can't understand why anybody is mad at them.
Don't do that.
If you're going to do it, you have to be willing to take the punishment as well.
And Tom Cruise's character, Maverick, was willing to take punishment in both situations, even if it cost him his career, but he believed in it so much that he was willing to do it and just seek forgiveness in the end, after he proved his point.
Now, sometimes you're going to fail, and you're going to have to pay the price for that issue.
You're going to have to pay the price for doing something that you were told not to do.
These are the kind of things that you have to take.
But sometimes in life, you've got to take a chance.
You've got to take a risk.
You've got to be willing to say, this is in my heart.
This is what I know is right.
This is what I know needs for our business.
And you go try it.
If it works, you prove it.
If it doesn't work, then you're going to pay the price.
You'll pay the price of consequence.
But at least you tried and you didn't sit back and just say, I wish I had.
How many people sit back in life and say, well, you know, I had that opportunity.
I should have took it and didn't.
You know, I didn't actually classify it as a lesson from this movie, but it is a part of it, and that is that you didn't take the opportunities offered to you.
Tom Cruise's character goes back through there, and there's one special individual who's in this movie that was mentioned in the first movie, comes to life in this movie, but it talks about, you know, in a way you just sort of sense the melancholy, you sense the opportunity of times lost.
This is something for all of us.
Life is short.
Whether you realize or not, whether you live to be 90 or 50, it doesn't matter.
No matter where you are, life is short.
And are you doing what you feel like you're called to do?
Are you fulfilling each day in your life the things that you need to fulfill?
To make your life all that it is lived up to be.
To do that, you sometimes have to seek forgiveness instead of permission.
I don't mean to be reckless.
It doesn't mean to go out there and just always constantly buck the system and always constantly break the rules and always constantly, you know, remember our reputation we talked about just a minute ago.
But in this case, I think it's important.
For you to understand, sometimes you just got to take the initiative in a situation.
Maverick did this on a couple of occasions.
It's a great lesson for you to learn.
It's a tough lesson to learn because if you fail, you got to be willing to take the consequences.
But permission sometimes is just not the thing to gain.
Forgiveness is what you look for.
The next thing, and it sort of ties into that previous one, and that is this.
And that is fear of failure will keep you from success.
I mentioned reputation earlier when it came to rooster, and this is The son of Goose, who was killed in the first Top Gun movie, Flying with Tom Cruise.
And his son now is in the Navy.
He's a fighter pilot.
He's a captain.
And a lot of things that he's gone through.
But one of the things that Hangman, who is another character in the movie, pegs him with early on was the fact that he was too cautious.
And you hear this all the time in the movie, that he was too cautious.
And you see it lived out in several of the developments of this storyline.
In which the character, Rooster, wouldn't push it, wouldn't go far enough.
It was almost like, I'll only go to a certain part, but it didn't, you know, the way the Tom Cruise Maverick character described it is that you gotta trust your instincts.
That was the way that, sometimes you just have to trust your instincts.
You can't think through everything, you gotta trust your instinct, which falls into the previous, you know, category of seeking forgiveness instead of permission.
But in this one, it's a little bit different, and I'm gonna tell you why.
Too many of you and too many times in my life, the things that I look back on in my life and regret are not the things typically I did.
Now, sometimes there is, you know, I said stupid things or I did stupid things.
You know, that's life.
We all do things like that.
We wish we had.
But really, the things in my life that I look back on and regret are things I didn't do.
The things that I had the opportunity and I quit are the things that if I had just pushed a little bit harder, would I have succeeded instead of pulling back?
You know, going forward and taking that challenge or not taking, you know, not going to a meeting because you thought it was going to end up bad or not going to an experience with some folks or because you thought you may fail.
How many of you in life are sitting on the corner, sitting on the sidelines, sitting in your home, not finding the ways, the things that you may even know about that you like because your fear of failure or being embarrassed or being laughed at?
Rooster had that same problem.
Rooster would not engage.
He was a great fighter pilot.
He was doing great things, but yet he always had that just a little bit of holding back, that fear of failure that would keep him from actually succeeding.
How many of you are actually having that right now?
How many of you right now in your workplace, your family, your home, your friends, are you letting failure keep you back?
Look, folks, failure is natural.
Failure is something, in fact, if you're not failing, I'll challenge you to say you're not doing anything.
If you're not failing at things, that means you're not trying new things.
You're not trying new ways.
You're not thinking of new ideas.
You're not failing because there's nothing that you're doing that's worth failing at.
And, you know, look, you still may mess up in your regular jobs and you may still mess up in your regular, but are you actually out there pushing yourself or is it fear of failure that keeps you from going to try that next opportunity to take that promotion, to take that new job across country, to make that commitment to that special person in your life that you want to say, I want to be with you for the rest of my life.
Maybe it's taking that step into saying, I'm willing to start an exercise program.
I'm willing to start a diet program.
But your fear of failure is keeping you back.
Folks, I can't tell you.
And if you go see this movie or you've already seen this movie, go back and see this thing.
Fear of failure will hold you back always if you're too scared to fail.
Folks, there's an old movie, as we speak of movies, Risky Business, back in the early 80s, in which, again, Tom Cruise was a character in it.
In which he was afraid to make a mistake.
It ruined his college chances.
And the classic line is he didn't want to, you know, mess up his life.
And his buddy told him, sometimes you just got to say, and I'm going to use the clean version here on the Doug Collins Show, just what the heck.
You know, you just got to take a chance.
Make your move.
And that's true.
Remember, and I'll guarantee you this, if you're honest with yourself, if you're looking deep inside, you're going to know that what you have regretted the most is things you didn't do.
Didn't go to that concert.
Didn't go to that movie.
Didn't take that promotion.
Didn't move across country.
Didn't go to that school.
Didn't take that class.
Didn't go on that hiking trip.
Didn't go on that rowing trip.
Didn't, you know, didn't stick with it.
Why?
Because it was fear of failure or fear of not succeeding.
Folks, get over the fear of failure as best you can.
It's not easy.
But if you're not failing, you're not growing.
If you're not moving forward, you're not growing.
You know, and scientists understand this concept.
They make one science experiment, and if they're trying to get something and it doesn't work, then they just understand what not to do next, and they move forward.
Edison said that, you know, it was not the fact that he had failed 990 times, it was the fact that that thousandth time he got it right.
Why?
Because 999 times before, he actually made progress on what not to do.
So just like the movie, and as you'll see in the movie, Rooster had a problem with...
Failure.
And the fear of failure is the way I interpret it.
Don't have that.
Leadership lesson that you need to hear from here is that you don't need to fear failure.
You need to take proper precautions to do prudent measure.
But sometimes you just got to take a risk.
And if it fails, it fails.
You won't regret it because you gave it all you had.
The next leadership lesson out of Top Gun Maverick is you always need someone to push you.
This one is hard because we don't like this.
In life, you need people to push you to get better.
If you were a single child, then you didn't have a brother or sister to pick on you.
You didn't have a brother and sister to compete with.
You didn't have a brother and sister to say, I'm going to go faster, I'm going to go better than you, I'm going to eat more than you, I'm going to draw more than you, or whatever.
And in life, you get out in life and all of a sudden you've got all these people around you that you need to find people that push you, that make you better.
It's been said many, many times in lessons that if you want to see your future, look at the people around you.
If you want to know how you're going to turn out, look at who you surround yourself with.
If you surround yourself with people who are not challenging, not pushing you, not making you better, if they're dragging you down, then you're going to be dragged down with them.
I don't care how good intentions it is, you will rise to the level that you set for yourself.
And when we understand this, and in Top Gun Maverick, I love this scene, and I love the military so much in my career.
It's the members around you, all these other fighter pilots, and they're young fighter pilots, eager for an opportunity, brought together for a special mission, but they were challenging each other.
They were betting, I'll do more than this.
You don't do this, I'll do 100 push-ups.
It's always that challenge.
You've got to have people in your life to challenge you.
You've got to have people in your life that are willing to tell you no.
You've got to have willing people in your life to say you can do better.
Training partners.
We've seen this in exercise for years, that when you have a training partner, you'll be able to do more and go faster.
Why?
Because you're wanting to keep up with your partner.
You're willing to take that step.
Have somebody that you look up to.
Find you a mentor.
Find somebody that will push you to become better.
This is what we need in this country.
We don't need any more mediocre lifestyles.
We need people who will challenge each other to grow each other, and that is one of the issues that this movie, Top Gun of America, brought out.
When you brought together this group of pilots who fought with each other, they picked on each other, they bet with each other, they made fun of each other, they got to what the...
And there's actually, for me, a scriptural principle of this.
As iron sharpens iron, that's how people are made.
That's how our character is formed.
As iron sharpens iron.
In other words, when we butt up against others and we find controversy and we find obstacles and we overcome those, when people push us past our comfort zones, then we can actually find how to make a difference in this world.
Failure is not permanent unless you make it so.
Failure is not the thing that will take you out.
It is the fear of failure so that you won't go forward and try.
That is what's keeping you back.
Again, I wonder how many of you are sitting out there today.
And you're listening to this podcast.
Maybe you're walking.
Maybe you're in the car.
Maybe you're at your computer.
You're listening to it.
And I've hit a nerve for you.
I know it's in my nerve.
It's been mine for years because I always want to make sure that I'm not embarrassed.
I don't fail.
I want to make sure that it's okay.
That's part of life.
And I've been someone who has done a lot of things.
But that fear of failure is real because it keeps you from doing crazy stuff, stuff you shouldn't be doing.
But when fear of failure keeps you from doing anything, It will keep you back in your career, it will keep you back in relationships, and it will keep you back in becoming all that you have been called to be, and you'll find it anywhere.
Rooster had a fear of failure.
Wouldn't commit.
How about you?
Are you still feeling failure?
If not, maybe it's time to look at it.
The last leadership lesson, though, that I want to just bring to you in this fun episode here of Doug Collins' podcast is One of the more personal ones.
And I think this is the lesson that we need.
Is that you never get far in life without friends.
And you never get far.
You can also subtitle that.
Also, you never get far in life without people who look out for you.
One of the best sequences, and many things have been talked about Top Gun and Maverick, is the homage that it pays to the original Top Gun.
And I just use that in those terms.
It pays proper homage to those who were in the original Top Gun.
It doesn't make like it never happened.
It very much is interwoven into this whole sequence of this movie.
And this issue of having a friend matters.
Now, we remember in the original Top Gun, Iceman, Kazanski, and Pete Mitchell, Maverick, were at odds.
They were competitors that were doing just what I said in the previous, is they were pushing each other, that you always needed someone to push you, someone ever to push you out there and to, you know, to not fear failure, but to actually get out there and do it.
Somebody that'll push you past that point.
You need those mentors in your life.
At the end of that movie, Kazanski and Mitchell, Iceman and Maverick, after they defeated the enemy Niggs and they came back to the deck of the aircraft carrier, they have a hug, then they basically form a bond or friendship about being each other's wingmen.
In this movie, they're reunited.
And the differences in careers are evident.
It goes back to reputation.
It goes back to a lot of issues that we've talked about today.
Maverick's the captain.
Iceman's an admiral.
And he's always watched out for Maverick.
In life, there's going to be two ways that you go in this.
You always need friends.
Now, there's a lot of you out there who have lots of friends, and some of you have actually mistaken the fact that you have a lot of Facebook friends, and you have a ton of friends.
We really don't.
There's only the capacity, for the most part, to have 10, at best, 15, what we'll call really good friends.
The reality is it's probably closer to three to five.
People that you turn to, people that you trust, people that you're constantly involved in.
For sometimes in your life, there's less than that in your life.
There's less of those people in your life, and sometimes there's a little more in your life.
It depends on the phase of your life.
But you always have those people.
And the question is, in each of these relationships, where are you in the relationships?
Is the friend and bond, is someone that you know, that you trust, that you do things for?
Are you looking out for that friend?
Are you mentoring that friend?
You know, for some of us, we have friends who are older that are mentors to us.
We look up to them, and they're the ones that guide us as we go to different phases of our life.
That's a part of Of, you know, having a, you know, friends and having mentors, people who are investing in your life.
You need those people who will look back and say, hey, I see where you're at right now.
You could do it better here.
And then also though, you need to begin to develop that also that friendship, that mentorship with others in your own sphere.
Relationships are what matter.
At the end of the day, It's often said, and for those of us who've been in politics for a long time, they said, how do you get through all those criticisms and all the folks who are mad at you and everything else?
And I said, look, at the end of the day, it only matters to me, you know, what those who will be at my grave actually care.
And that's my family.
The ones that are the closest to me, the closest friends, those are the ones that I care about the most.
And as long as I maintain their respect, their love in our relationship, then that's the most important.
All the rest is just added.
So my question for you today is if In your life.
Your life was not much longer.
You didn't have a lot longer.
Who are those that will show up?
Who are those that will be with you at the end?
You need those people.
You need to invest time in those people.
You need to invest relationship time.
You need to invest quality time, listening and caring.
This is the relationship at work.
And probably the enduring theme of this entire movie, Top Gun Maverick, was this relationship between Maverick and Iceman.
And Iceman could have moved on.
He was promoted quicker.
He made a longer career and a higher stepping career than Maverick did, but he never forgot the relationship that he had.
Have you forgotten some folks along the way?
Or some folks maybe you needed a phone call to?
Maybe they were at a previous job or maybe you got promoted and they're still down or maybe they moved off.
You know, finding those friends in life that are dear to you and keeping them is one of the most important parts of our lives and one of the most important parts that we can move forward.
So if the friendship between Iceman and Maverick made 30 years with Most of the time, probably Iceman looking over Maverick, making sure that he was always there.
It's about seeing the best.
We all need friends.
And the best leadership lesson that I can give you is, is you never want to go through life without your friends.
This is Doug Collins on the Doug Collins Podcast.
I hope these little, uh, lessons from Top Gun Maverick, uh, help you.
Hope you can apply them in some ways.
Hope they make your day better.
If they make your day better, please share them with someone else.
Uh, hit the share button.
Uh, send this to a couple of your friends.
Let them hear these lessons.
Uh, I think we all have these leadership lessons that help us grow in our life and in our families.
This is Doug Collins.
We'll see you again on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Hey everybody, I just want to talk about sleep.
You know why I want to talk about sleep?
It's because I just got out from underneath my MyPillow bed sheets and MyPillow that I keep under my head every night because I like to sleep on my side, I like to sleep on my back, I like to sleep, you know, I move at night and MyPillow is just the best thing that goes under my head.
It keeps me getting restful sleep.
The sheets are amazing.
It's just what you need.
Everybody understands you need seven hours of sleep.
Why not sleep in some of the best products out there?
And Mike and the folks at MyPillar are great folks to do this with.
And you can go to MyPillar.com or you can call them at 800-564-8475.
You'd code word Collins.
C-O-L-L-I-N-S. You won't want to miss this.
If you have not got these Giza...
Bed sheets.
You need them.
They're amazing.
They're soft.
They don't wear out.
You need those to get that sleep against your body at night and provide that cooling, just soothing nature that lets you get the most sleep.
But you know, they're not just about bed sheets and pillows.
They also have the MySlippers.
Amazing.
I've talked to you about it before.
I don't wear slippers, but I do wear MySlippers.
They're amazingly comfortable.
You can wear them outside.
You can wear them inside.
Great products.
You've got towels.
You've got all kinds of stuff.
Go to MyPillow.com.
It's spring cleaning time.
It's spring time to get out there and try and buy new things.
Replace some of your old stuff.
You'll want to replace your towels.
Get some other products for your bedroom.
All at MyPillow.com.
MyPillow.com or call 800-564-8475.
▲
Export Selection