The Leader Who Commits His Reserves First Has Already Lost

In Afghanistan back in 2008, I was a battle captain and an aviator in an aviation task force. I was on night shift so I could plan the next day's missions while my team ran operations.

That worked fine during the winter until the passes thawed in the spring.

Operational tempo spiked when it started to warm up. Suddenly I was managing live operations all night and trying to produce a full day's worth of mission planning. Something had to give. I'd come off shift scrambling to finish plans the morning launch was waiting on.

My shifts just kept getting longer.

One night, a young radio-telephone operator with no aviation training and no idea what half these documents even were, asked if she could help. She wasn't very busy. She was just paying attention.

I almost said no.

I showed her one task. She had it down cold in a couple days, better than I'd been doing it, honestly, because she could put the time and attention into it that it required.

So she trained another soldier. I handed off another task. Weeks later, my team was running most of the planning I used to guard as "mine"... the stuff I thought only I was qualified to touch.

I kept a few pieces, enough to where I still knew everything that could affect my crews or operations. Everything else, I let go.

And suddenly all the work was getting done without relying solely on me.  But it wasn't just done on-time with less errors... they improved parts of it too.

Here's what that summer taught me: it doesn't matter how disciplined, hardworking, or well-intentioned you are.  You cannot do it all. And if you're in a leadership role, a real chunk of your time has to stay unclaimed: held in reserve for whatever the day actually throws at you.

That means giving up work you'll be judged on. Work only you're trained for. If you don't, you have nothing left to react with.

There's an old military maxim: the commander who commits his reserves first has already lost.

That's true of armies. It's just as true of you. If every minute of your day is spoken for, you've lost the fight before it starts because you have nothing left to give when it matters, and no time left to lift your head and look at the horizon.

I didn't learn that from a manual. I learned it from a good team who took pity on an exhausted captain.

And I still appreciate that they did that for me.