The Way of the SEAL

The Way of the SEAL — Mark Divine

A Tuesday evening in the winter of 1989, thirty-six men stood shivering in the Pacific Ocean at Coronado Island, California. The water came up to their waists, twelve degrees Celsius, and they hadn't slept in three days. Instructors yelled through megaphones: "Give up! Hot soup, hot shower, dry blankets waiting on the bus!" This is Hell Week, the most brutal phase of Navy SEAL training. By Wednesday night, half the class usually sits on the bus. Of those who stay, only one in two finishes the full training.

One of the men in the middle of the water was Mark Divine. A year earlier he was working on the thirty-second floor of a New York skyscraper for Coopers & Lybrand, an accounting firm. He held an MBA, earned fifty thousand dollars a year, and listened to CNBC on the morning train. Then he started going to a karate gym, where a Japanese master named Tadashi Nakamura asked him: "What would actually get you out of bed at four in the morning? Not money — you'd need more than that." Divine couldn't answer. Two years later he sold everything in New York and enlisted with the Navy at twenty-nine, three years under the cutoff. He became a SEAL at thirty-three.

This book is a compilation of thoughts that were born on the third day of Hell Week. After his SEAL career, Divine returned to civilian life and founded SEALFIT, a fitness and leadership program. *The Way of the SEAL* translates the SEAL mental framework for people who will never hold a weapon but struggle with the same internal obstacles as battlefield soldiers.

What you'll get from the next forty-five minutes