From Combat Zones to Community Hubs: Jake Harriman’s Journey of Servant Leadership
I first heard about Jake Harriman by way of his guest appearance on The Jocko Willink Podcast. Immediately I was drawn to his mission, heart and bias for action. In short, I was struck by his leadership gifts.
Jake Harriman is a former US Marine Commander who spent more than a decade abroad defending our nation from enemies, terrorism and other global threats. But when Jake retired from active military duty and returned to America, in his words, he no longer recognized the nation he had spent so many years defending. Jake quickly saw that Americans were at war with one another. Rather than just lamenting this sad situation, Jake decided to do something about it, and you’ll learn all about that in today’s episode.
More About Our Wise Guest – Jake Harriman
Jake Harriman graduated with distinction from the United States Naval Academy and served seven and a half years in the US Marine Corps as a platoon commander in both the infantry and force recon. Following his service in the military, Jake enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Following his service in the military, Jake enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. While at Stanford, he founded Nuru International to eradicate extreme poverty in the world’s most unstable, vulnerable regions, to help end violent extremism. Jake also played a vital role in drafting, introducing and passing groundbreaking new legislation called the Global Fragility Act of 2019 that equips America with new authorities and resources to prevent conflict and stabilize some of the most fragile regions around the world.
Today, Jake is the founder and president of More Perfect Union, a veteran-led civic organization that works to unite the country and strengthen our communities through social connection, service and civic engagement.
Resources
More Perfect Union website
Nuru International website
Jake Harriman on LinkedIn
Jake on the Jocko Podcast (Ep. 474)
Credits
Editor + Technical Advisor Bob Hotchkiss
Brand + Strategy Advisor Andy Malinoski
PR + Partnerships Advisor Rachel Bell
Marketing, Social Media and Graphic Design Chloe Lineberg
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Episode Chapters
[0:03:55] – Wisdom gleaned in West Virginia
[0:05:25] – Transformed by combat
[0:06:30] – Jake has an epiphany in Southern Iraq
[0:11:23] – Lasting meaningful choices; a life focused on mitigating poverty
[0:13:40] – Jake’s move to Kenya; challenges, establishing roots, making impact
[0:15:55] – A pivotal conversation with Philip
[0:17:38] – Jake returns to America; a heartbreaking realization
[0:25:38] – Jake shares his main thing
[0:30:19] – An all-hand-on-deck time for America and its citizens
Episode Keywords
Wisdom, Servant, US Marine Corps, Annapolis, Naval Academy, Commander, Nuru International, Poverty, Conflict, Military, More Perfect Union, Servant Leadership, Community Engagement, West Virginia, Resilience, Integrity, Combat, Iraq, Battle of Nasiriyah, Force Recon, Kenya, Service, Civics, Trust, Brickyards, Dehumanization
Episode Transcript
0:00:00 – Announcer
Wisdom. It’s an incredibly valuable asset, Some would say more precious than gold. It’s attractive, appealing, admirable. Conversely, a lack of wisdom is the basis of immaturity, blind spots and bad decisions. Wisdom, it can be gained over time, but it can’t be rushed. But wisdom can be shared. That’s precisely what we are here to do right now. Today. We are here to hack wisdom, to distill it, to understand it and to process it. Why? To get better at life.
Welcome to the Main Thing. This is your new wisdom podcast. I’m your host, Skip Lineberg, and I’ve set out to interview the wisest people I know. We’ll see what we can learn from each one when they’re faced with an incredibly difficult, soul-piercing question.
0:00:58 – Skip Lineberg (Host)
Hello and welcome to your wisdom podcast. I’m Skip Lineberg. I’ll be your host today. We have an amazing show for you: a powerful wisdom lesson with a guest that I handpicked.
I first heard about Jake Harriman by way of his guest appearance on The Jocko Willink Podcast. Immediately I was drawn to his mission, heart and bias for action. Jake Harriman is a former US Marine Commander who spent more than a decade abroad defending our nation from enemies, terrorism and other global threats. But when Jake retired from active military duty and returned to America, in his words, he no longer recognized the nation he had spent so many years defending. Jake quickly saw that Americans were at war with one another. Rather than just lamenting this sad situation, Jake decided to do something about it, and you’ll learn all about that in today’s episode.
If you’re a returning subscriber, I’m delighted to welcome you back into this intimate learning space where, twice a month, we gather to study wisdom. If you’re new, wow! I’m thrilled and honored that you’ve decided to join us. You can learn a lot more about this show and all our wisdom resources, including our free newsletter, by visiting our website, themainthingpodcast dot com. Now here’s a bit more about our wise guest.
About Jake Harriman
Jake Harriman graduated with distinction from the United States Naval Academy and served seven and a half years in the US Marine Corps as a platoon commander in both the infantry and force recon. Following his service in the military, Jake enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Following his service in the military, Jake enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. While at Stanford, he founded Nuru International to eradicate extreme poverty in the world’s most unstable, vulnerable regions, to help end violent extremism. Jake also played a vital role in drafting, introducing and passing groundbreaking new legislation called the Global Fragility Act of 2019 that equips America with new authorities and resources to prevent conflict and stabilize some of the most fragile regions around the world.
Today, Jake is the founder and president of More Perfect Union, a veteran-led civic organization that works to unite the country and strengthen our communities through social connection, service and civic engagement.
Jake joined us for this conversation from his home in Washington DC. Now strap in and get ready for a big blast of hope and inspiration. Over the next 30 minutes, you will discover why Jake Harriman is one of the wisest people I know.
0:03:48 – Skip
Jake Harriman, good morning and welcome to the Main Thing Podcast.
0:03:53 – Jake Harriman
Good morning, honored to be here.
0:03:55 – Skip
Jake, I know you and I both grew up in West Virginia.
0:03:59 – Jake Harriman
I grew up in a really tiny place called the Wetzel Settlement. It’s not even a town, it was a group of probably 40 farm families up on top of a mountain in Preston County. Probably by economic standards we would be considered poor everybody in the community, but we certainly didn’t know that. Yeah, we felt like we had tons of choices. We lived off the land, grew everything that we ate, hunted for meat, all those kinds of things, and even though you know folks did struggle, you know, with poverty, we always were able to lean on one another.
And there, you know, some of the folks that I grew up with and learned from, older folks in the community, became some of my heroes. I learned a lot about the power of resilience and the power of hard work and belief in yourself and instilling things like character and integrity, why it was so important and even if you didn’t have a whole lot of material things, those things stand the test of time and they can define who you are as a person, as a leader.
I learned a lot about the power of a tight-knit community, about leaning on one another and serving one another. And I think a lot of who I became as a young man was was formed in those early years up on that mountain.
0:05:20 – Skip
Those are good old West Virginia values right there.
0:05:24 – Jake Harriman
That’s absolutely right. Yeah, you know, West Virginia is a really special place and I started learning that over time, traveling all over the world, but I am very proud to be from West Virginia.
0:05:38 – Skip
Yeah, what a blessing.
0:05:40 – Jake Harriman
Total blessing.
0:05:43 – Jake Harriman
My military career started. I went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD for my undergrad, and I studied systems engineering, which I’ve never used a day in my life.
But I really felt called and pulled to go do something to help serve the greater country, serve my community and help kind of preserve this country we all love so much. And so went to the academy, enrolled. When I graduated, became a Marine. I was an infantry Marine, first at 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. Then I got selected for a unit called Force Recon. I was a platoon commander at 1st Force Recon Company, all based out of Camp Pendleton, California. I wasn’t there very much but that was where we were based.
0:06:28 – Skip
Okay.
0:06:30 – Jake Harriman
And did a few tours of combat in Iraq and a few other places, and it was really during my time in combat where I had this kind of epiphany. I had a lot of intense personal experiences that showed me a lot, but there was one in particular that opened my eyes to this really disturbing connection between the extreme poverty that we were seeing, the desperation in these areas we operated, and how it was fueling the growth of a lot of these groups who were fighting, whether it was Al-Qaeda or eventually ISIS.
The first encounter that really kind of opened me to this connection was in the early days of the Iraqi invasion in 2003. You know, I found myself in a fighting hole facing north along Highway 7, which was the main avenue of approach for American forces during the invasion.
We were one of the lead units in the Marine Corps kind of going straight up through southern Iraq to take Baghdad, and we had just been ambushed and had started taking casualties in what was called the Battle of Nasiriyah, the first major contact of the war.
So we were able to fight through the city and set up a defensive perimeter north of the city where we had to dig in and kind of await resupply. And you know know we were tired and we were hungry. Everybody was scared and you know, southern Iraq at the time was a really poor place. It had been oppressed by Saddam and his regime: terrible food insecurity problem, no access to health care or education for the kids.
What had been happening as we moved through southern Iraq was the Regular Iraqi Army was retreating to make a final stand in Baghdad, while Saddam was pushing his Fedayeen soldiers south. And they were going hut to hut in these poor villages, coercing these poor farmers to fight us, essentially saying, Look, you know, if you pick up this weapon and go fight these guys 10 miles south here, we’ll drop off some food every couple weeks.
0:08:24 – Skip
Oh, wow. They were recruiting farmers to become soldiers?
0:08:29 – Jake Harriman
Poor farmers. They didn’t even know how to use a weapon.
0:08:32 – Skip
And I’m going to guess … Jake, correct me if I’m wrong … but there was not like a take it or leave it offer. I bet there was some strong coercion going on there.
0:08:39 – Jake Harriman
Oh, yeah. You know it was some pretty awful stuff happening, and in the early days of the war we were fighting these guys by the hundreds of thousands. That kind of set the stage for this encounter I had on this morning. So we were in this dug in north of Nasiriyah, and I got up it was about 4 30 morning. I got up out of my fighting hole, started walking the lines to check on my guys—because I knew, as the sun came up they were, they were going to start shooting at us again.
And I looked up on the highway, and a small white car was racing toward our position from the north, and I thought well, it’s a suicide bomber. You know they packed explosives in the car and were going to blow themselves up in our position. So I grabbed three of my guys, took off running to stop his car. Finally, the car stops about 25, sorry, about 50 meters out. The driver hops out. He’s like, waving his arms frantically and running at me. So now I think this guy’s strapped to bond to himself. He’s a suicide … he’s got a suicide vest, and I’m yelling at him in Arabic.
He’s on the ground. He’s not listening and as I lift my weapon and I think I have to take this guy out, I look behind him and I see this large black military truck roll up behind this little white car. Six guys in black jump out, run up to the car and start shooting into the car and this guy stops dead in his tracks, starts screaming, turns around, starts running back to the car.
And that’s when I realized that this guy was just one of those poor farmers, who was trying to escape across our lines of safety with his family because he didn’t want to fight. So I yelled at my guys to take out the Fedayeen who were shooting at the car, and I ran as fast as I could to save this guy’s family, but by the time we got there it was too late.
0:10:19 – Jake Harriman
You know, I looked in the passenger side, his wife had been shot in the face and the chest. She was dead. And he had a little baby in the back whose arm had been shot off. She was shot in the head. And then he was holding the body of his little six-year-old daughter who had been shot in the stomach. She was choking on her own blood as she was trying to breathe.
And you know, for the first time in the war, everything slowed down for me. And I put myself in this guy’s shoes, and I thought: you know, I live in a world of choices—where I want my kids to go to school, what I want them to have for breakfast, what I want them to wear to go to school. What were this guy’s choices when he woke up this morning? You know, he had nothing. He could watch his kids starve to death, or he could pick up a weapon he didn’t know how to use, or make some desperate attempts to cross our lines. He had nothing.
And in that moment I got really, really angry. It wasn’t fair that the GPS coordinates of a person’s birthplace dictate what choices they have in this world.
0:11:22 – Skip
So true.
0:11:23 – Jake Harriman
So that was this, you know, the beginning of a really powerful awakening in me, that really transformed the trajectory of my life. My life since then has been defined by fighting for the freedom of lasting, meaningful choices for everybody, everywhere. I believe that’s what America stands for; I believe that’s what America is. It’s this powerful idea that everybody everywhere deserves that freedom of lasting, meaningful choices.
0:11:55 – Skip
“Lasting, meaningful choices.” Yeah, I just made note of that. I love that phrase. Yeah, that’s what America stands for.
0:12:04 – Jake Harriman
It is. Once I made that connection, I continued to serve in combat in a bunch of other places, but eventually I felt called to try to figure out how to solve that problem. You know, we were going out there and taking out these leaders of these extremist organizations, but they kept growing and it was because they were preying on the vulnerable populations in these impoverished areas. And the AID groups couldn’t reach these folks, because it was too dangerous.
So we hatched this idea like what, if we can make a hybrid organization? You know, where we could take former operators like us that know combat, we can combine them with frontline development professionals who know how to create locally-led sustainable solutions to poverty, and we can embed these teams deep in these gray zones, these conflict areas where others can’t go, and we can live there five to seven years, work with local leaders to build sustainable solutions to poverty and build what we call resilience corridors to stop the spread of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.
And so once we hatched that idea, I felt compelled to try to build that. And so when my time was up in the Marine Corps, I transitioned out. I went to Stanford Graduate School of Business to build a company, to build that. And so when my time was up in the Marine Corps, I transitioned out. I went to Stanford Graduate School of Business to build a company to do that. It was called Nuru International, and I graduated in June of ’08, packed my bags, moved to Africa in September and lived in villages for the next eight years.
0:13:23 – Skip
Before I get any further, I want to thank you for your service in all of the aspects that you described, but especially for your military service defending our nation and your courage to take on this mission that you’re now tackling.
0:13:36 – Jake Harriman
Thank you. Thank you for saying that.
0:13:40 – Skip
You had gotten your business degree in Stanford. You formed a corporation, an organization called Nuru International. And you said you packed up everything you owned, you went from Northern California …
0:13:51 – Jake Harriman
Which was in a backpack.
0:13:53 – Skip
And you flew to Africa. I want to hear a little bit about what that work looked like, getting there into Africa.
0:14:00 – Jake Harriman
I’ll tell you a little bit about my first week. So we started and launched our first project in an area in Southwest Kenya. There was a good bit of kind of uh, organized crime and some Al-Shabaab activity in that region that we were trying to kind of push back on. And it was right along the border. The first week that we were there I kind of came in to this work super cocky, feeling like I was impervious to challenge and I could defeat anything and I was the smartest guy in the world. And I was super tough, coming from the special operations community.
I was a complete idiot. So I go in my very first week … I got really humbled. So I got attacked by black widow spiders and safari ants. I got jumped by a pack of thieves. We had an earthquake. I got malaria. And then the final day of the week, which also was my birthday, ironically, I got struck by lightning.
0:15:09 – Skip
Oh my gosh. Jake, I know you’re a man of your word. This is crazy.
0:15:13 – Jake Harriman
It was. I had a really bad week.
0:15:17 – Skip
I’ll say.
0:15:17 – Jake Harriman
It was a tough week, and I was ready to quit. I’d never quit anything in my life. But I was like, man, somebody doesn’t want me here.
I went over to the hut next to me, who was this older gentleman named Philip Mahochi, who became one of my greatest mentors … Kenyan man, who was growing up in that village. And I said, Philip, I know I promised you we were going to partner, we were going to build this thing. I said you know, but I just I don’t think I’m cut out for this work. I can’t … you know … I need to go back to something safer. I want to go back to Iraq and get shot at. At least I know and understand that.
0:15:54 – Skip
Right.
0:15:55 – Jake Harriman
And I’ll never forget. He looked at me, and he said, “Listen, I understand you’ve had a bad week, but before you go, I want you to think about something.” He said, “I want you to think about this woman that we visited in this village this week. And you know you had a bad week, but they had a bad week too. You got malaria. We took you to the clinic. We got the medicine, and you’re better.”
“Some of those kids in that village got malaria this week too, but their mothers couldn’t even afford to get them to the clinic. And even if if they got in there, they couldn’t afford the medicine. And a few of those kids died. You had one bad week. They have a bad week every week. But if you stay, we can work here with these brave people in this community and create programs so that these folks don’t have a bad week ever again.”
And so how do you turn that down?
0:16:45 – Skip
What a great perspective, what great words. He had wisdom to elevate your thinking on the situation
0:16:48 – Jake Harriman
Yeah, it really opened my eyes and inspired me, so, so we stayed. And despite my flaws and mistakes, early on, my team—Philip and the team—were able to create some really incredible impact over the next few years.
0:17:09 – Skip
Jake, since then you’ve gone on to found and start another organization called More Perfect Union.
0:17:14 – Jake Harriman
I had been living in villages in Africa for about eight years and I had an opportunity to participate in a program that Presidents Bush and Clinton were starting, a leadership program called the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program. But to participate in that, I had to come back to the US, and I hadn’t been based here in 15 years. I’d always been deployed downrange in the Marines and combat, and I lived in these villages for eight years.
0:17:38 – Skip
Yeah.
0:17:39 – Jake Harriman
I remember coming home from this program, and I was shocked at what I saw. I did not recognize the country that we left to fight for in 2000. You know, there was this terrible divide just tearing the country apart, a lot of fear and hatred, Americans hating each other. You had this horrible extremism that crept into our politics, just destroying all value to the American citizens. It really broke my heart, and it made me really sad. Myself and my buddies had been downrange, you know, fighting for the idea of America for so long against ISIS and Al-Qaeda, only to realize it wasn’t going to be them that destroyed us—it was going to be us.
Then I got really angry, and I thought: you know, I’m not about to sit by and let my buddies pay the ultimate sacrifice, while I watch us tear ourselves apart here at home. I have to do something.
So I had some mentors who wanted me to run for office and I thought that was a terrible idea. So then I had some of my donors, who had been backing me for about eight years. They were shifting their philanthropy into a new space to try to figure out a way to help the country heal. A
nd they say, hey look, you were an outsider, you disrupted the AID industry with a model that had global impact. Would you take a look at the political situation in the US, and is there a way to disrupt that and weed out the extremism? Kind of like you weeded out extremism in these conflict areas overseas. And if there’s a market gap, we’ll put together some capital to get you off the ground.
So I put together a 40 page white paper, sent that around to my mentors I had, like you know … Jim Mattis, John Allen, President Bush. And they said you should do this. So I put together a 12 month transition strategy out of Nuru and handed off the reins to the new CEO. I wanted to make sure that we had a solid transition, you know so that mission continued.
In July of 2020, we set up this new entity called more perfect union, and more perfect union is a veteran-inspired organization that is designed to strengthen our communities and unite the country through service, civics and social gathering.
So what we do is we recruit top, servant-minded leaders from across the country to stand up what we call Brickyards, which are our version of chapters. We call them Brickyards, because we’re trying to rebuild the country brick by brick.
0:19:58 – Jake Harriman
So we bring people together from the left and right in communities all over the country to do three types of activities. We do social gatherings to build understanding, and that’s just fun activities. You know we’ll do a fitness challenge, we’ll do a potluck dinner, we’ll do a concert, just have people have fun together.
And then, second, we’ll do community service projects designated by the community. What does the community need? And that’s to build trust. You know it’s really hard to hate somebody if you’re standing next to them swinging a hammer, building a house for somebody in the community. You know?
0:20:28 – Skip
For sure.
0:20:39 – Jake Harriman
And then the final pillar of this we do our civic education and engagement programs and that’s to build ownership in our democracy. The importance of that you know like, as Americans, we have so many freedoms and rights, but also there are a lot of duties and responsibilities that come with wearing that identity of American citizen. So we really work to activate people, get them out of their silos and get them activated to take ownership of their future and the challenges in their community so they can help solve them themselves.
This is a government of by and for the people, so how do we, the people, take ownership? How do we stop waiting on what’s happening in Washington DC and take ownership of our country here at home?
I’ve led a lot of teams through crisis. I made a lot of mistakes along the way. A lesson that I’ve learned is the greatest way out of crisis is action. You’ve got to get people moving and doing something, and I think in this moment we are in a massive crisis as a nation and we’ve got to get Americans moving. We have to get them activated and owning our country.
0:21:39 – Skip
When you have the desired impact that you intend to have, what will we see and realize?
0:21:44 – Jake Harriman
Our vision is to have More Perfect Union, be the next generation of civic organization for the country. We want to be the new meeting place for America. You know Americans are siloed right now. We want Americans physically coming together in small towns and cities all over the country.
0:21:59 – Skip
Crawl out of our bunkers. Yeah get face to face.
0:22:03 – Jake Harriman
A More Perfect Union Brickyard in every small town and city across the country where people, americans, are coming together, not identifying themselves as Republicans or Democrats, but identifying themselves as Americans and solving problems together. And casting vision and dreaming dreams together about what their communities can look like. You know, Americans, our goal was to not just find common ground, but go beyond that to find higher ground. Let’s remind one another what it means to be Americans. You know, there’s so much more that unites us and divides us.
0:22:38 – Skip
I heard the phrase you said that I loved. We need to learn how to own and operate our democracy. We’ve kind of forgotten how to do that. Own our democracy and operate it, which means civil discourse. Which means you and I disagree on an issue. I don’t hate you, I’m not going to try to villainize or demonize you. We just disagree.
0:23:00 – Jake Harriman
It’s very rare in your normal day-to-day operations, in your day-to-day life, where you spend time physically with someone who does not think the same way you do politically. Or frankly, even looks like, you know, looks as someone who looks differently than you do, you know, who comes from a different background. That’s very rare anymore. You know we’ve lost that.
And so it’s important for us to go find someone on the other side of the political aisle. Invite them to a cup of coffee and sit down with them and have a conversation. Get to know who they are and get to know about their family … and get to know about what their vision for America looks like. Ask them why they think that, why do they want this? You know, ask questions and then listen actively and try to empathize with that person and put yourself in their shoes. You know, if we can have real conversations in person, it becomes very hard to hate that other person.
Our political leaders in media have done an awful thing they have dehumanized the other side. We see each other not as human. It’s actually a tactic used in war. So we’ve got to humanize one another again. And the only way we’re going to do that is to come out of our silos and physically come together.
0:24:14 – Skip
Yeah, I said villainize and demonize and that’s bad, that’s really bad. But to dehumanize is the extreme. That’s as far as you can take it. Not only is this person wrong. Their thoughts and actions are criminal, but they don’t even deserve to be alive.
0:24:28 – Jake Harriman
That’s right. It’s terrible.
0:24:32 – Announcer
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0:25:33 – Skip
Jake Harriman, what’s the main thing you’ve learned in your lifetime so far?
0:25:39 – Jake Harriman
Skip, the main thing I’ve learned in my lifetime so far is that real leadership is really about serving other people.
0:25:49 – Skip
Right on, right on. Would you take us through that a little bit deeper and take us through when that became the north on your compass?
0:25:59 – Jake Harriman
I’m a man of faith myself. It drives everything that I do, and I believe that the ultimate servant leader is Jesus Christ. Encountering him at a young age taught me a lot about the power of servant leadership from day one.
And after that I had a chance to learn and witness a lot of different types of leadership. Starting at the Naval Academy was probably where I began to see a lot of different types of leadership. Before that … kind of high school coaches, things like that.
But while I was at the Academy …. The Academy is like a is a leadership laboratory. As a student, you get to lead at a lot of different levels. You try out different types of leadership. And I began to learn some things there. But then, when I got in the Marine Corps, it really kind of took off, because Marines I believe personally … I’m biased …servant leadership’s kind of like breathing for Marines.
Marines understand the power of putting the needs of your men and women first, ahead of your own needs. And I learned a lot from some really incredible leaders while I was in the Marine Corps. The most powerful lessons of servant leadership I’ve ever learned in my life came from people I led and I learned so much from them, both in training and on the battlefield. And then after that, when I was in Africa living in these villages, I continued to learn about the power of leadership. You know, my whole adult life has been about leadership, which just means I’ve had enough time to make every mistake out there as a leader.
0:27:36 – Skip
That’s how learning goes. Yeah, that’s how it comes.
0:27:38 – Jake Harriman
Yeah, it is. And some of these incredible leaders that I worked with in Africa, in these villages, who were on our team, these farmers who came from nothing and desperation to rise above that to serve their communities, and the power that was behind that. The power that came with that, with those acts of service, really inspired me and showed me a lot about the different components … and power in serving other people and what’s possible when you do that.
You know something magical happens when you put the needs of someone else ahead of your own needs. As a leader when you do that, you can unlock potential on your team that you didn’t even dream was possible.
0:28:22 – Skip
Jake, if someone out there hasn’t embraced that yet … that wisdom hasn’t landed on them, and they haven’t internalized it and made it part of their life, what kind of pain points would they be feeling?
0:28:32 – Jake Harriman
Some of the pain points that come with that type of leadership are: many times you’re going to have a team where there’s not a lot of trust. There’s not a lot of trust in you as a leader, not a lot of trust in one another. They’re competing viciously to get promoted, so lack of trust, lack of ownership. It’s very difficult for teams to come together and really own a mission together if the leader is not willing to serve their team.
It can cause challenges in communication and decision-making, again because of the issues of lack of trust. It can cause distance between you and your team. Your team is unwilling to tell you what’s really happening, so you don’t get accurate information coming up, because they’re afraid of you.
0:29:21 – Skip
What’s an action step, or one or two things that they could do tomorrow to start down this path of serving?
0:29:27 – Jake Harriman
Start small. Don’t feel like you got to take on the world. And the other thing if you think about it too we talked about this earlier. And you and I both learned about this growing up in West Virginia is serving other people in your community, and it can be super simple. You got that new person who moves into the house next to you. Take them over a meal, welcome them to the community. Acts of service like that go a long way. You got a single mom in the community. Go offer to watch their kids for an afternoon and give them the day off. So they can just have some space.
0:29:59 – Skip
Cut their grass.
0:30:01 – Jake Harriman
Yeah, cut the grass. Like all kinds of … There’s simple things we can do for one another that just really go a long way,
0:30:06 – Skip
Absolutely, absolutely.
0:30:10 – Skip
Jake, I want to wrap up with this question going back to more perfect union. Someone wants to get involved, they want to support your mission—what can they do?
0:30:19 – Jake Harriman
I’m so glad you asked because, this is an all hands on deck moment for the country. We all need to get involved and I think it’s very simple for us. Go to mpu dot us. Mike. Poppa. Uniform. Dot Uniform Sierra … if you’re military. And click “Join The movement” to sign up.
You’re going to start getting emails from us to tell you about events in your area. If there is a Brickyard near you, go to the Brickyard events. Okay, go participate. That’s the first step.
If there’s not a Brickyard next to you, we can help you start one. And one of the first steps we usually do is we help folks start what’s called a “coffee club.” It’s very simple. You know, we’re going to give you a 50 gift card you take and go out and fight six folks to come together, have a cup of coffee. We’ll give you some conversation cards for ideas to kind of kick off the conversation, but talk about whatever you want to talk about.
The goal is to just start getting people together right all the way up to you know helping to build out these Brickyards in your community, in your state. You know, bringing Americans together to do good things for the community and our families together. By doing that we can begin to really start bridging this divide.
0:31:33 – Skip
MPU dot US. I’ll put a link in the Show Notes. Folks can just click and go straight there. I want to clarify you’re nonpartisan, nonpolitical.
0:31:41 – Jake Harriman
Non-partisan, non-political, no political agenda. We’re the opposite of that. I don’t care what letter you have after your name in your voter registration. That means nothing to me. All I care … what I believe is you have an “A” after your name. You’re an American. And so we welcome everybody. We’re calling everybody to get engaged in this movement.
0:32:04 – Skip
Jake, that’s a great place to leave it. I’ve been just so blessed to spend this hour with you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom, some great stories. Just can’t thank you enough.
0:32:14 – Jake Harriman
Thank you, Skip. It’s an honor to be on the show.
0:32:18 – Announcer
That goes by incredibly fast, doesn’t it? Time flies when you’re hacking wisdom. Thank you for listening to this wisdom conversation.
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Well, that’s a wrap for this show. I’m your host, Skip Lineberg, signing off for now and inviting you to join us again next time for another special delivery of wisdom.
Transcribed by https://podium.page
