Ed. Note: In 2021, I did remembrance of 9/11 with a podcast series and accompanying blog post series featuring the personal stories of persons in the compliance field with their thoughts about what the date of 9/11 meant to them, how it changed our profession and their thoughts looking back some 20 years later. The series featured the following:
I concluded this series by visiting with John Lee Dumas, host of the uber-popular podcast Entrepreneur on Fire. On 9/11, Dumas was a senior at Providence College. John had one of the most powerful stories I have ever heard about 9/11.
==============================================================Dumas was also an Officer Candidate in ROTC on 9/11. He said, “I remember waking up in the morning, and one of my roommates said, “Hey, turn the TV on.” We turned on the TV, and we just saw the tower smoking. Shortly after that, the collapse will be live on the television screen. One of my roommates who was also in ROTC, we looked at each other, and we both knew without saying anything that our next four years of active-duty army experience went from being in the peacetime army to looking like we were going to war of some kind. We knew that when that tower collapsed, we would play a very active role as officers in the US Army. Within a couple of hours, we had a real-world briefing at our ROTC headquarters on campus, where the commander of our ROTC battalion gave us a real-world breakdown. It confirmed what we were thinking when we saw that the tower collapsed. We just became officers in the US Army during a time of war.”
We turned to leadership lessons Dumas learned from his time in the Army. He commanded a tank platoon, which was four M1 Abrams tanks and 16 men. Yet, as the tank commander, Dumas was one of the least knowledgeable persons in his platoon about how a tank worked, the best operations, how to drive a tank, how to load the Sable rounds, how to fire the weapon, and even how to navigate. He said, “I was the platoon leader at 22 years old and one of the least experienced and knowledgeable people in my platoon. That’s how the military works. And I learned right at the beginning that I needed to stand upon the shoulders of giants. I needed to go to my platoon sergeant, who seemed like an old man at 37 years old at the time. But it was me, like a little baby.”
Dumas went to Sergeant Walker with humility and humbleness and asked him, “What do I need to know? How can you be respectful in front of the men? How can you respectfully be my mentor?” He appreciated that “I was not trying to pretend I knew what I didn’t know and going to him for advice. That was a big lesson. And I’m standing upon the shoulders of giants and learning from those who have been there, done that with experience.”
Another key leadership lesson for Dumas was that “a good decision now is better than a great decision later.” He said he has seen many people in the entrepreneurship and business world paralyzed, trying to make a great decision. “They are trying to be like General Patton, trying to make the one decision to win the war.” The problem is that if you “try to wait around and wait while the bullets are flying to make a great decision, you and probably other people are going to die because time is everything. Action is everything. Just coming up with a good decision and implementing it right now will be the fraction that separates life and death for many people; I learned that firsthand, and that will always stay with me. I took that lesson from the military and applied it to entrepreneurship. I’m not going to sit around and try to make a great decision on this aspect of my podcast, on that aspect of my business, on this aspect of this; I’m just going to make a good decision and take action. And if I need to adjust later, I will.”
We talked about losing men in combat. Dumas said he learned, at ages 22 and 23, the finality of death. He said, “Somebody you had breakfast with that morning, they were talking about their hopes, dreams, aspirations, what they were going to do when they got back that evening, what they’re going to do when they get back home from combat. And then, all of a sudden, it’s over. None of that is going to happen. None of their hopes, none of their dreams will ever be realized. There’s just such a finality to it. It made me pledge to myself never to forget number one, of course, the sacrifice that these soldiers make, but never forget just the finality of death and how we can all have the best of intentions.”
He learned that if you “don’t take action on them, death can wipe those best intentions away, and you can be left essentially having never done or accomplished anything that you set out to do in this life so quickly. This put a ticking time bomb mentality in my mind, and if I don’t feel like this is the right path for me, I won’t waste any more time fussing around having the sunk cost fallacy.” This led him to his current profession, which he loves.
I concluded by asking Dumas about his reflections on 9/11 and on going to war in Iraq some 20 years later. He said, “My reflections on 9/11 were just travesty, terror, confusion, panic, nobody knowing what was coming next. The major message that I do want to pass across to people today was evident to me living in Iraq for 13 months and living in a world where there was no police. There was no law. There was no cohesion. There were no repercussions. This is a great country and the home of the free because of the brave. And I hope that’s just something that we will always remember.
I hope you will take a moment on this most solemn day to reflect on 23 years after 9/11.
