Navy SEALs Use This 7-Step Process to Achieve Any Goal. Entrepreneurs Can Too.

When we hear about Navy Seals capturing terrorists or pulling off hair-raising rescue missions, we are surprised to see their toughness but let me tell you it is not about being the toughest guy. It's about being the smartest guy. Today if entrepreneurs too start becoming the smartest guy they can overcome any hurdles and start achieving the toughest goals. In a recent Big Think video, Admiral William McRaven was a Navy Seal for 37 years, and was integral in taking down Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Also, Roy explains that while SEALs are clearly incredible warriors, they rely on careful planning and battle-tested approaches to leadership, as much as sheer strength and bravery. Accomplishing jaw-dropping things, Roy explains, is less about innate grit than you probably think, and more about process.

Roy lays out the seven-step approach SEALs use to tackle even the most daunting missions, so you can adapt it to achieve your own biggest, scariest goals. Infact entrepreneurs could relate this seven step approach to their business.

1. Ask clarifying questions. Clearly, in military situations it's essential to be clear about your objective, both so you don't capture the wrong guy and know what winning looks like. But in civilian life, too, its impossible to achieve success, if you dont define it. SEALs ask, "Exactly what do you want me to do? Who, what, when, where, how?" Roy notes. Adapt and answer this sort of questions for your own context, for your own business challenge, and you've taken the first step to reaching your goal.

2. Identify all your resources. The next step is to marshal all your resources and see what you have to work with to achieve your aim. That means not only material resources like money and technology, but also intangible ones like your network and skills.

3. Clarify roles and responsibilities. Before SEALs go into any mission, they make sure each person knows their role, from machine gunner to medic, what each must accomplish, and when. The roles in your team are unlikely to involve automatic weapons or morphine, but nonetheless, it's essential to make sure everyone understands their area of responsibility and how it fits into the larger mission.

4. Focus relentlessly on your goal. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has explained, all good leaders take responsibility for outcomes, whatever the circumstances. For true leaders, there is no such thing as an excuse, because they always keep their focus on the goal and look for ways around each constraint.

5. Think through all possible contingencies. In practice, this means letting your pessimistic imagination run wild to dream up every hiccup and holdup you might face. How can you work around these possibilities? "There's a car accident? OK, I'm going to walk. Well, the roads are blocked. OK, so how do I get around there?" Roy offers as an example. "You need to constantly think about what's the next thing to do in that situation, because again, at the end of the day, you have to be able to accomplish your mission." In short, never quit, there is always a way for every problem.

6. Train until you're stress-proof. OK, you know your aim, you've assigned your roles, and you've talked through everything that could go wrong. Your planning is ace, but there's another essential step to making sure your paper plan actually translates to real life. This is the step where many of us fall down. There is no great accomplishment without day in, day out effort and training. One, because that's how you build skills and a body of work. But also because steady practice is how you teach yourself to handle the stress of struggling for any audacious goal. "When you're a SEAL, you train a lot, you train a lot. You do everything repetitively over and over and over again, because you want muscle memory," Roy explains. "The more you know about what you're doing, the more frequently you train for the mistakes and the problems and the hiccups, the more you're able to do a lot more in a shorter period of time without much effort."

7. After-action review. Reached your goal? Congrats, but there's still one final step left to go. "You do yourself and the people in the room or the people in the organization a disservice if you don't debrief what happened or where the mistakes are at," Roy concludes. This isn't about assigning blame to people. It's about figuring out what went wrong so you can do better next time.