The Weight You Choose to Carry

It is about striving for an impossible ideal. About trying to achieve an impossible standard. It is about being what they want and need. It is about giving up what is “yours”—your time, your attention, your energy, your advice, your words, your actions. It is about relinquishing ownership.

It is exhaustion. It is late-night conversations. It is being a steward of knowledge. It is bearing their burdens. It is being their confidence when they have none. It is accepting the failure and relinquishing success. It is being strong when you are weak.

It is striving for the impossible because you know everyone is watching and listening. In the moments of greatest fear, you must be their comfort. You must be everything they trust—without exception. Trust built not in that moment, but in the preceding moments. The moments of given time, advice, words, and actions. It was all you relinquished. It is the trust that you are willing to lead from the front. Willing to relinquish your life for theirs.

Leadership is about sacrifice. It is about shouldering the burdens of the many. It is about striving to be the impossible. It is about making others believe in themselves when they have lost all hope. Leadership is about being invisible in the prestige of success and conspicuous in the face of failure.

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Jake Smith is a law enforcement officer and former Army Ranger with four deployments to Afghanistan.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.