This Military Concept Can Change Your Civilian Life

What Special Forces can teach us about success

When we aim to achieve something, it’s quite useful to set goals. That goal must be crystal clear. Vague objectives cannot be achieved. Imagine boarding a boat without a clear final destination. You wouldn’t do that, would you?

Or imagine a group of Special Forces Operators being sent to a dangerous area without knowing exactly what they are supposed to do there. It makes no sense, right? Their goals are clear, and not just their goals — but also their “end state”.

What is an end state?

An end state is what military personnel aim to achieve at the end of a mission. It can be seen as the ultimate goal. It encompasses a situation such as how they want things to look when everything is finished. This is extremely important to be clear about, as it helps in planning and executing military actions so that everyone knows exactly what they are trying to achieve.

The beauty is that not only military personnel can apply this, but civilians too. Civilians with a personal mission. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you’re a writer on this platform, think about why you’re writing.

What is your mission here?

The problem is that for many of us, the end state will never be achieved, simply because we don’t make the goal clear. Especially not when we’re under pressure, whether due to external circumstances or because we impose internal pressure on ourselves. Then we just do something haphazardly.

Besides having experienced this back in 2011 when I was part of the 11th Airmobile Brigade, I’ve seen this so damn often in my current job in IT. Something goes wrong, and like headless chicken, people are digitally running around, frenzied. They’re trying random fixes in the hope of stumbling upon a solution.

They rationalize this behavior under the guise of “At least I’m doing something!” a peculiar form of optimism that assumes any movement — no matter how directionless — will eventually lead to the destination. Perhaps you’ve witnessed similar patterns in your own line of work, where action is prized over strategic thought.

Wrong mindset!

Let’s switch back to a Special Forces Operator. The sudden onset of chaos doesn’t provoke them into aimless running. Can you even imagine? Such behavior would not only threaten their lives but also compromise the whole mission. The key difference lies in their training to maintain clarity and purpose under pressure, focusing on their ultimate objectives — their ‘end state.’

As a civilian with a personal mission, you also endanger your mission if you just mess around. Clarity is what you want. Take a step back, and focus.

Perhaps it’s wise to start with a plan.

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”

I think almost everyone knows this quote from Benjamin Franklin. Currently, I plan too little in life. Especially when it comes to achieving my goals. This is a point I’m actively working on (again) at the moment.

How can I succeed in my personal mission if I don’t plan?

Through spiritual journeys I’ve taken, I often surrendered to life. To a certain extent, I still do that. There are many things we have no control over. For example, I have no control over weather conditions, what other people or animals do, the past, what happens inside my body, etc.

Because of this, I often didn’t see the point in planning. I’ve experienced it often when I planned something private, and suddenly something was up with one of my children, leading to the cancellation of whatever it was I planned. Or my wife was longer with our horses than expected because something didn’t go as it should. And don’t even get me started about plot twists on the job. It happened more than once that I had something important planned and then the system suddenly went down. Bye plans, hello overtime.

So my ‘nonsense’ about planning also threw a wrench in the works with achieving my goals. Even more so: for a while, I didn’t see the point of setting goals at all. Just living life, and what happens, happens.

It sounds so simple, and maybe it is. Yet, there’s something inside me that resists this. If I “just live life,” I feel like such a drifter. When I did achieve a goal, it gave me a lot of energy. And then there’s also the fact that my life doesn’t revolve around me alone. I have a family for which I take responsibility. Isn’t that a beautiful reason in itself to give it your all and live to the max?

As you can imagine, living to the max for me doesn’t mean not caring about anything and going crazy. I don’t need to go to lots of parties, travel to every corner of the globe, or work my ass off. Taking big uncalculated risks is not in it either. I don’t need to ‘go harder,’ but rather slow down. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with stepping on the gas and going hard at times, but the bow doesn’t have to be always strung for me.

Living calmly, consciously, and intentionally is important to me at the moment. Planning then also goes way better. When you set a goal with a calm mind, an intention arises. From that intention, you act. Because you need clarity, informed and deliberate planning becomes the initial step in achieving your personal mission.

What exactly is needed to achieve your goal and how long do you give yourself?

As far as time is concerned, it’s good to plan realistically instead of procrastinating. We have no control over time, and you too have an expiration date. When you truly realize this, a certain urgency feeds your intention.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” — Seneca.

When you realize this, your priorities shift. You come to the conclusion that you don’t have forever. We are mortal.

How does that thought influence your end state?

“Memento mori”

This Stoic concept reminds us that we are mortal. It literally means “Remember you must die”. Death is inevitable. We never know when it will come. This brings a degree of unpredictability.

According to the Dutch government, the average Dutch man lives to be 80.1 years old, and the average Dutch woman is 83.1 years old. If I look at what this means for me, I come up with the following:

My current age is 36 years (in May 2024). The average life expectancy for men in the Netherlands is 80.1 years. To find out how many years I theoretically have left to live, I use the following simple formula:

Expected remaining years of life = Average life expectancy — My current age.

That brings us to an expected remaining years of life = 80.1–36 = 44.1. According to this calculation, I have about 44 years to go. It sounds like a long time, but it’s a reminder that every day is precious. An invitation to think about how we spend our time, chase our dreams, and create meaningful moments. It underscores the importance of living intentionally.

It’s not about how you found the world, but what and how you leave it behind.

And I understand that we can’t plan everything, but we can steer and adjust. It’s about determining the direction and dealing with the setbacks we will inevitably experience. How we do that, we do have control over. We can choose what our next action will be.

What’s yours? Perhaps defining a clear end state?

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