Nobody Is Coming to Save You: A Green Beret's Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done

In these divisive and distrustful times, the hardest skill and most important commodity in life and business is knowing how to connect deeply with other people. What are the secrets to moving reluctant people to action, in life or in business?

One Green Beret cracked the code on the rooftops in Afghanistan.

Working in isolated Afghan villages with a population naturally sympathetic to the Taliban and their hardline Islamist worldview, Lt. Col. Scott Mann and his teams were given a mission: connect with the villagers and enlist their support in order to save American lives and reduce Taliban influence and reach.

For years, Mann—a New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed leadership coach—worked in low-trust, high stakes environments where nobody was coming to save him, his men, or the exhausted majority of Afghans they served. There, he learned that the best way to get big sh*t done and bridge vast divisions is to meet people where they are, not where you want them to be. He calls this approach Rooftop Leadership, for it was on the rooftops of these depleted and desperate villages where he and his teams influenced and led people across seemingly impassable trust gaps, establishing true rapport for the first time.

Veterans bring a lot of things home from war, and one of the things Mann brought back was Rooftop Leadership. His bottom-up approach isn’t just for Afghanistan or Green Berets. Wherever you live, work, or play—in real estate, in corporate sales, in HR, for a community volunteer group, in a non-profit, in politics—the hardest thing to find these days is authentic connection with other people. The social trends and fraying of civil society after more than two years of prolonged isolation from Covid, mass technology, organizational strain, and blinking-red stress levels on our emotional dashboards have taken a toll that those of us in our own exhausted majority are only beginning to understand and appreciate.

Nobody Is Coming to Save You shows readers how to navigate the Churn that's dividing us and learn to make new and deeper connections to ourselves, to each other, and to the natural world around us. With inspiring stories about his experiences in the military and candid reflections on civilian life, Scott Mann connects readers to a more ancient, primal aspect of their nature rendered dormant by the modern world. Accessing our primal nature can help us transform not just our society and our relationships, but ourselves. Building human connections is a crucial skill taught to Green Berets that separates them from all other special operations forces. It is the secret sauce to getting big sh*t done when nobody is coming to save you. And Scott is ready to show you how.