About ten years ago I was in training. It was the ‘selection’ phase of training, in which candidates are pushed physically, mentally, and emotionally in order to see which of them are trainable.
One of the features of this process is sleep deprivation. I would learn later that sleep deprivation makes you particularly susceptible to brainwashing and indoctrination. I don’t think this was the explicit purpose of this training, but it had that effect nonetheless.
So certain moments from that training period, and the messages contained in them, turned into almost permanent fixtures inside my brain.
In one such moment, we were standing outside the chow hall, and our little group of trainees was in a sorry state. Some of the crew had shit their pants many times over, were vomiting from fatigue, or just wore general expressions of anguish and sorrow.
An instructor took this scene in and disapproved of what he saw. So to begin a dialogue that would highlight why we were wrong, he led with a question, “Do you guys know your ABC’s”?
He was not referring to the alphabet. He went on to point out all the various real-time examples in which our cohort was failing to demonstrate knowledge of the ABC’s, which stood for “Always Be Cool”.
His message was that we had a long way to go before we understood even the most basic thing about this whole affair, which was that in order to be accepted, trusted, and to perform, you had to be cool. In appearance, in composure, in conduct, and especially in execution, cold is better than hot.