Maddogsson's Marine Corps Boot Camp deployment has been moved up!

http://www.businessinsider.com/marine-training-psychology-success-2016-3

I am not sure when he will leave, but the Corps seems to want him sometime in March. I told him this was likely since the Corps, along with most other services has higher recruiting rates during the 6 months after the end of school beginning in about June of each year. By March, the recruit pool is dwindling, and the recruiters are pressured to fill slots. He will likely ship in the next few weeks to MCRD San Diego. 

"After General Charles C. Krulak became commandant — the highest-ranking position within the Marine Corps — in 1995, he decided that the Corps needed to change the way it turned young people into Marines.

* * * 

The Corps needed "extreme self-starters," he told Charles Duhigg in his new book "Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business."

But at the time, recruits coming in lacked "any sense of direction or drive," Krulak said. "All they knew was doing the bare minimum. It was like working with a bunch of wet socks. Marines can't be wet socks." 

Digging into research by the Marine Corps (and later work done by psychologists and psychiatrists), Krulak discovered that interior locus of control was a huge predictor of self-motivation and success.

Locus of control comes in two flavors: 

• With an interior locus of control, you believe that the events in your life are the result of your actions. 

• With an exterior locus of control, you believe that the events in your life are the result of outside forces.

Studies indicate that an interior locus is associated with being vulnerable to depression, doing better in school, dealing better with stress, finding more active solutions to problems, greater satisfaction with work, and greater goal orientation.

But locus of control is not the sort of thing that you can hear a theory about and decide to have. It arises when people see the connection between their own efforts and results. 

After learning this, Krulak redesigned basic training so it would give recruits a 'bias toward action."'

This is something most 20 something could use a good dose of. Then begin the tempering process where life experiences, and education temper that bias towards action, with wisdom, and experience to understand when not to act.

The result is a fully formed man, who can act, but who also knows when it is more prudent to not act.