Don’t Quit When You’re Tired, Quit When You’re Done (Most Replayed Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #585

Bill Keefe
The poster was of David Goggins, but it was long before David Goggins was a well-known common name. It was just a picture of him running in the middle of some huge desert, and it just said, don't quit when you're tired, quit when you're done.

Agi Keramidas
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast, and this is another snippet of wisdom, where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Today I have selected for you a snippet from my conversation with Bill Keefe, who is Tony Robbins' fire captain. The snippet is about resilience, and he talks specifically about the experience of the fire team, which is the volunteer crew at Tony Robbins events.
I trust that you will find it insightful.

Bill Keefe
The poster that I saw it on, he was one of these ultra marathon runners, and it was just a picture of him running in the middle of some huge desert, and it just said, don't quit when you're tired, quit when you're done. The minute I saw it, I said, man, that sounds a lot like fire team, because as you know, you had the experience this past year. We do a lot of preparation the day before the fire walk, but on fire walk day, it generally begins about seven o'clock in the morning.
In this case, it was a Thursday, so 7 a.m. on a Thursday, and we don't finish. On a good night, we would finish at 3 a.m. the following morning on Friday, and I think that was about the time that we wrapped things up when we were in Birmingham. Yeah, but this is, if you take the average person that is in a workday world, you've got an eight-hour workday, and because of where we are with technology today, probably 65%, 70%, maybe even more of those people who are doing an eight-hour workday are doing it sitting at a desk, or maybe they're working from home remotely, but they are not outside making a living by doing something physical.
There's a lot of people that do, but they don't. When you combine the fact that we're now asking these volunteers to do two and a half full workdays, and as you know, the hardest part of that workday was at the end of that day from about midnight until three in the morning, where that's where we needed everybody's energy, and we talked a lot about that. I said, we have to clean this place up when we're done, and that's going to be where you got to dig deep.
You've got to find your level of resilience to get the job done, and it's got to be the team that has this mindset, not just an individual, but every individual. If you remember, we also talked about make sure that you are there when we finish, whenever that happens to be. We realized that people have physical limitations, and we talked a lot about this, that we're not asking that people do ridiculous things beyond their physical capabilities.
We're not asking anyone to get hurt. We're not asking anyone to do anything that would cause them, endanger their health, but on the other side of that, the phrase that kind of goes along with don't quit when you're tired, quit when you're done is that concept of 20x we also talked about, that most people really never kind of push and test and see how resilient they might be, and here's an opportunity to kind of test that. I think we had close to 70 volunteers for the job in Birmingham, and you've got a strong team around you, so you've kind of got a safe environment to, you know what, maybe before I sit down and take a rest, and we did encourage everyone to, you know, you're the best judge of what you're capable of and what you're not capable of, but you can take this opportunity to maybe push yourself a little bit farther, see what you've got and just make that decision at the beginning of the day. I'm not going to quit and go home when I'm tired or when I'm exhausted or when, you know, I'm staying until this job is finished, and I'm going to contribute at the highest level and do the best that I possibly can, and most people find that they are capable of a lot more than they had originally believed that they were, and unless the team has that mindset going into this, the whole thing can collapse, especially in those final three or four hours where, you know, we're cleaning that parking lot up or whatever venue we use for the firewalk, and, you know, basically makes it look better than it was when we started the whole operation. So, that's kind of the long answer on that one, but that don't quit when you're tired, quit when you're done also goes, we don't quit when it's raining, we quit when it's done, we don't quit when it's snowing, we quit when we're done. There's a lot of slightly different versions of that that we use based on, you know, what we encounter.

Agi Keramidas
Thank you for listening. You will find the full conversation with Bill Keefe in episode 362. The link is in the episode description.
Until next time, stand out, don't fit in.