The Movie That Sent Me to the Academy
Top Gun has always been my favorite movie. Not in a casual, "oh that's a fun one" way. In a my-entire-trajectory way.
It's the reason I went to the Air Force Academy. It's the reason I wanted to fly jets. It's the reason a kid from a town that wasn't on anyone's radar started believing that the cockpit was a place he could actually end up. I rewound that VHS so many times the tracking lines lived in the picture permanently.
Thirty years later, I'm not pulling Gs above the Pacific. I'm running a business, working with cybersecurity leaders, writing books, and trying to keep my own grip in check. And I am still — still — pulling leadership lessons out of that movie.
Here's the one I keep coming back to.
The Lesson Hiding in the Hangar Scene
The pilots who lose their edge are not the ones who stop trying. They are the ones who start gripping too tight.
Watch Maverick across either film. The version that's dangerous to himself and his crew isn't the cocky one. It's the one carrying so much unprocessed weight — Goose, his father, the institution — that he flies tense. White-knuckled. Reactive. The stick doesn't move with the airplane anymore. He's fighting the airplane.
That is the exact pattern I see in senior leaders all day long. And I lived it for most of my career.
I Stopped Flying. I Was Just Not Crashing.
For years I held on too tight to a lot of things at once.
Tight to being the smartest person in the room — which, by the way, is the title of a book I wrote because that identity nearly broke me. Tight to control. Tight to ego. Tight to the version of me that built the company, hit the numbers, and got the validation. Tight to the story that if I just gripped a little harder, the whole thing would keep flying.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped flying. I was just not crashing.
That's not the edge. That is survival mode wearing a flight suit. From the outside it can look like discipline. From the inside it feels like exhaustion that's slowly being rebranded as commitment. The calendar fills up. The meetings repeat. The metrics inch. And the leader at the center of it all is quietly burning down the very thing they think they're protecting.
The Breakthrough Was Not Pushing Harder
The move that actually changed things for me wasn't another tactic. It wasn't a new framework. It wasn't a productivity system or a sleep tracker or a sixth coach. It was loosening the grip.
Four shifts, in order of how hard they were for me to accept.
Trust the team you hired. If you have to re-verify every decision, you didn't hire a team. You hired a queue. The discomfort of letting a decision go a different way than you would have made it is the actual price of leverage. Pay it.
Stop rehearsing the meeting in your head. Most of the cognitive load great leaders carry isn't the work. It's the imaginary version of the work — the conversation that hasn't happened yet, the worst-case outcome that isn't real, the response you're pre-writing to a critique that may never come. That theater is a grip tax. Drop it.
Let the outcome you can't control go. You don't control the market, the funding round, the FDA, the auditor, the board's mood, or whether the candidate accepts. You control the inputs, the standards, the people, and your own response. Anything past that line is wasted clenching.
Fly the jet you're actually in. Not the one from three years ago that earned you the seat. Not the imagined one with a bigger team and a cleaner runway. The one you're strapped into right now. That airplane has its own performance envelope, its own quirks, its own next move. Fly that one.
A Field Check for Leaders
If you're a leader who feels like you're working harder and getting less, the most useful thing you can do this week is not to add anything. It's to check your grip.
Where are you re-deciding things you already delegated? Where are you running the same meeting in your head three times before it happens? Where are you spending real energy on outcomes you do not actually control? Where are you flying the jet you used to be in instead of the one in front of you?
Loosen your grip on whichever one of those lit up first. Just that one. See what the airplane does.
Leadership at altitude is not about how hard you can squeeze the stick. It is about how cleanly you can move with the machine — and the team — you actually have.
Loosen up. Or get out of the cockpit.
Talk to me, Goose.