The Power of Choice

I want to tell you about a morning in the Mojave Desert I have never forgotten, not because of what I saw, but because of how I chose to look. It was springtime. I was working at a camp in the desert, and every year, when the season turned, we gathered cattle that had been set out to graze across several hundred thousand acres of government land leased by the ranch. The Mojave is vast and quiet, and the cattle have a way of wandering, sometimes miles in any direction. We never really know where they will end up. Some years, it takes a long, hard day in the saddle just to find them, let alone drive them back. On this particular morning, the wranglers were saddling up to ride out in search of a herd we suspected was grazing in a stretch of land we called Section 21, a wide valley behind a row of rocky mountains running east to west across the desert floor. They were not towering peaks, but they were mountains all the same: bare rock and ridgelines, no trees, no cover, just stone rising out of the sand. I was not raised as a cowhand. Spending a full day in a saddle was not something my body particularly welcomed. So when the group started gathering their horses, I offered a different solution. I had access to a dirt bike, and I was comfortable on it. My idea was simple. Instead of riding around the mountain range to reach Section 21, I would take the bike up a ridge trail and climb straight to the top. From there, I could look down into the valley and see whether the cattle were there. If they were, I would radio the wranglers so they would know exactly where to ride. We would save hours. The group agreed. We grabbed two-way radios and set off, the wranglers moving at a horseback pace across the valley floor, threading through sagebrush and dry riverbeds, and me out ahead on the bike, carving up the ridge trail toward the summit. It was not long before I reached the top and killed the engine. From there, you could see for miles in every direction. The desert stretched wide and still below me. Far off in the distance, I could just make out the wranglers, tiny figures on horseback moving slowly across the valley. I sat on the bike and took it in. There is a particular kind of quiet at the top of a desert mountain, and for a moment, I was simply present in it. Then the radio crackled. “Look up! Look up! Look up!” It was one of the wranglers, her voice full of urgency and excitement. Out in the Mojave, you never quite knew what you might see, military convoys on the roads, fighter jets screaming overhead in mock dogfights. Whenever something extraordinary appeared in the desert, word traveled fast on the radio. I tilted my face upward and scanned the blue. Nothing. I turned and scanned again. Still nothing. But I could hear something, a low, steady rumble, almost felt as much as heard, coming from somewhere below. And then it occurred to me. I was not on the valley floor. I was at the top of the mountain. My vantage point was completely different from theirs. So while everyone else was looking up, I looked down. There, hugging the desert floor far below, was a B-2 stealth bomber, flanked by two fighter jets, one on each wing, flying so low it seemed to skim the surface of the earth. The B-2 was still relatively new at the time, shrouded in secrecy, rarely seen by the public. And here it was, this massive, bat-shaped aircraft gliding silently across the desert in the morning light, flanked by its escorts, bearing down on the mountain where I was sitting. I watched the whole thing unfold in a kind of suspended stillness. From my position above, there was almost no sound yet, just the slow, cinematic approach of something extraordinary moving across an empty landscape. And then the aircraft hit the base of the mountain. The three of them came screaming up the face of the ridge, engines tearing the silence wide open, clearing the summit so close above me that I felt it in my chest. The world was suddenly all noise and wind and the shadow of wings. In the cockpit of one of the fighter jets, I could see the pilot clearly. He glanced down, spotted me, some guy sitting on a dirt bike on top of a desert mountain, and gave a crisp little salute. And then they were gone. I’ve thought about that morning many times over the years, not just because it was extraordinary, though it was, but because of what nearly happened. The moment would have passed, and I never would have experienced it like I did. What changed everything was a single recognition: I am not standing where they are standing. My position is different. And because my position is different, what I need to do is different. That is leadership. Not the title. Not the authority. Not the loudest voice on the radio. Leadership is understanding that you occupy a different vantage point and then choosing to use it. It is the willingness, when everyone around you is reacting in the same direction, to pause and ask: What do I see from where I am standing that they cannot see from where they are? This book is built on that question. And it is built on the conviction that the answer, how you use what your position allows you to see, is always a choice.