Desire, not Circumstance! A Podcast about Boot Camps, Mindset, Heaven, and Progress

What Boot Camps Actually Reveal About Your People (And Why That Is the Point)

After running roughly 35 week long boot camps, plus a significant number of one and two day events and masterminds, Jason Schroeder has noticed a pattern that he used to find troubling and now finds clarifying. About five to fifteen percent of participants do not make it through. Some disengage quietly. Some leave midway. And a small number walk out completely, then turn around and criticize the program to their managers without ever sharing that feedback directly.

For a while, Jason spent energy trying to figure out how to screen those people out before they arrived. That thinking turned out to be the wrong question. Because boot camps are not failing those people. Boot camps are revealing them. And that revelation is exactly what organizations need.

The One Variable That Explains Everything

The dividing line is not personality type. It is not introversion or extroversion. It is not age, role, or time in the industry. The dividing line that predicts who thrives in a boot camp and who unravels is the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset.

A fixed mindset person defines themselves by what they already know. Challenge feels like an attack. Feedback feels like criticism of who they are. Failure feels personal. These are the people who, when pressed to grow, tend to disengage, blame the program, or leave. They have arrived. They are done learning. They want the comfort zone and nothing else.

A growth mindset person defines themselves by what they are learning. They take feedback. They embrace difficulty as a natural part of progress. They celebrate others growing rather than feeling threatened by it. When pressed, they push back harder in the right direction. These are the people who come up to the instructors at the end of a boot camp looking like something shifted inside them, because it did.

Both types show up on job sites every day. Boot camps make the distinction visible in a way that three years of routine project work never will.

The SEAL Parallel That Changed How Jason Thinks About This

Navy SEAL BUD/S training, the basic underwater demolition course, is famously demanding. Historically, around sixty percent of candidates do not complete it. The program is not designed to make every person into a SEAL. It is designed to reveal who already has what it takes and who does not. The training does not manufacture mental toughness. It surfaces it, or surfaces its absence.

The instructors do not apologize for this. The high attrition rate is not a flaw in the program. It is the program working correctly.

Elevate Construction boot camps operate on the same principle. They are not designed to be comfortable. They are designed to be a circumstance that shows people who they are. As James Allen wrote, “Circumstance does not make the man, it reveals him to himself.” A week long boot camp is a concentrated circumstance. The people who come through it with a growth mindset flourish. The people who do not have one find that out about themselves. And that information is valuable for everyone involved, including the person who did not make it.

What You Can Already See on Your Job Site

Here is what Jason has observed after years of running these programs and touring the projects of the people who went through them: the results are not subtle.

In a large organizational transformation program, eighty percent of participants chose to pursue their certifications after the boot camp experience. Twenty percent did not. When Jason and his team toured the certified group’s projects afterward, they found something remarkable across the board: clean sites, strong cultures, functioning Last Planner systems, Takt planning huddles working at a high level, workers approaching during tours to talk about how things had improved, and owners flying people in from other locations to see how a project was supposed to be run.

The twenty percent who did not certify? Their projects were still dirty, still running late, still operating on crash landings and reactive chaos.

One program. Two groups. Dramatically different outcomes. The boot camp did not create those outcomes. It identified the mindsets that would produce them.

Here are the signals you can already see on any active project:

• People who are learning, asking questions, taking feedback, and staying curious even when things are hard are operating in growth mindset mode 
• People who have stopped learning, avoid feedback, protect their turf, and compete instead of collaborate are operating in fixed mindset mode 
• People who cannot work alongside others without tearing them down are a different category entirely, and they belong in a direct conversation about organizational fit

Boot camps organize these observations into a single intensive window instead of spreading them across years of slow project work.

What Your Organization Owes Every Person in It

There is a principle underneath all of this that Jason holds firmly: people should not be condemned by circumstance. A worker who spent three years on a poorly run project with bad leadership did not fail. The system around them failed. That person deserves the opportunity to be seen in a fair environment, to be given the tools and the challenge, and to choose who they want to be.

This is one of the deepest arguments for structured boot camps and organizational training programs. Without them, promotions and development opportunities get allocated based on who was on the right job with the right boss at the right time. That is not equity. It is circumstance masquerading as merit. A growth mindset person who was stuck on a broken project for two years should have the opportunity to show who they are in an environment designed to surface it.

Boot camps create that environment. They give every participant, regardless of their project history or prior circumstances, the chance to demonstrate their mindset, their adaptability, and their commitment to getting better. The people who have it shine. The people who do not reveal that too, and that clarity allows the organization to make honest decisions rather than circumstantial ones.

The System That Builds Toward This

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow. The companies that invest in structured development programs are not just training people. They are building a system that surfaces their best people, identifies who needs support, and creates the organizational clarity that sustained performance requires.

The inverse of that is an organization that runs everyone through the same routine project cycle and then wonders why it cannot identify its next generation of leaders. If you have never put your team through a real diagnostic, you do not actually know who your growth mindset people are. You know who was lucky enough to be on the right job at the right time.

The Challenge for Your Organization

If your company does not have something like a boot camp, build one. It does not have to be a week long. It does not have to replicate everything Elevate Construction does. But it should be structured, challenging, and designed to push people past their comfort zone and into their growth zone. It should create the conditions for people to show who they are.

Then pay attention. Watch who rises. Watch who disengages. Watch who blames the program for their own discomfort. The data those observations generate about your people is more valuable than anything you will learn from three years of routine project reviews.

As James Allen wrote in As a Man Thinketh, “Circumstance does not make the man, it reveals him to himself.” Give your team the circumstance. Let people choose their path. Then build the organization around the ones who choose to grow.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset in practical terms on a construction project?

A fixed mindset person on a project tends to protect what they already know, resist new systems, avoid feedback, and treat challenges to their methods as personal attacks. They are often the last to adopt new planning tools, the most resistant to coaching, and the quickest to point blame outward when things go wrong. A growth mindset person on the same project asks questions, tries the new system even when it feels uncomfortable, takes feedback as information rather than criticism, and tends to improve measurably over the course of a program. The distinction shows up in behavior, not attitude surveys.

What should a company do with the five to fifteen percent who do not make it through a boot camp?

First, recognize that the boot camp revealed something important that may have stayed hidden for years otherwise. Then have an honest conversation. Some people in that group may be in the wrong role, not the wrong organization. Some may need a different kind of support or a second opportunity in a smaller setting. And some have simply made clear through their behavior that the organization is not the right fit. Treating that clarity as useful information rather than a failure of the program is the right frame. The boot camp did its job.

How do you design a boot camp that is genuinely revealing rather than just difficult?

The difficulty has to be purposeful and connected to real skills and real scenarios. Arbitrary difficulty reveals nothing useful. The best boot camp designs push people into situations that require them to make decisions under pressure, give and receive feedback with their peers, think through problems they have not encountered before, and collaborate with people they do not already know well. When those conditions are present, the fixed versus growth mindset distinction surfaces naturally. People cannot perform their way through it. They have to actually engage.

Is it fair to use boot camp performance as a predictor of long term performance?

The data Jason has observed across dozens of programs says yes, with an important qualifier. The predictor is not whether someone struggled during the boot camp. Struggle is expected and often a good sign. The predictor is how someone responds to the struggle. Someone who struggles and keeps engaging, who takes feedback and adjusts, who stays in the room even when it is hard, is showing the growth mindset that tends to produce strong long term results. Someone who disengages, blames external factors, or refuses to participate is showing the fixed mindset that tends to stagnate regardless of what the organization provides.

What if leadership has a fixed mindset? Does a boot camp still work?

It works at revealing the problem, but it cannot fix it from the bottom up. If the leaders who send people to boot camp return to a fixed mindset culture when those people come back, the growth that happened in the program will erode quickly. The most effective organizational transformations happen when leadership goes through the same kind of diagnostic experience as the people they lead. When the superintendent and the project manager have also been pushed, have also been challenged, and have also chosen growth, the culture they come back to sustains what the boot camp started.