NO LIMITS!
BY SHANNON ROBINSON
The Story of Robert Garcia - USAF – E7 Senior Master Sergeant
From the rural logging town of Eureka, California, Robert Garcia’s family didn’t provide the most structured upbringing. “Ninety percent of my family were drug addicts or alcoholics,” he said. He failed out of high school and left home at 18. After an attempt at continuation school, Robert moved to Phoenix at 19 and enrolled in DeVry University. He loved the mechanics behind electronics, but his learning disability made it impossible for him to focus on Algebra or higher mathematics.
After a year of slugging through school, he remembers losing his job and getting kicked out of DeVry in the same week. He joined the military because he “couldn’t afford food. Dead serious.” Penniless and sleeping on the floor, he took the ASVAB. The recruiter, noticing he tested highly in electronics and was living off of nothing, brought Robert a paper bag full of frozen foods to help him out. “I will never forget that act of kindness on his part.”
What Garcia needed was structure and discipline. At 21 years old, he arrived at Lackland Air Base in San Antonio. The first few days were a complete culture shock. He was a bit older than the other guys at Basic. He remembers some boys “crying in their pillows like they were in prison,” but remarks that it was just 6 weeks and, for him, more like a summer camp where he knew he was going to be torn down a bit. “Maybe I just didn’t have the right amount of give a care, but nothing really got to me.” With a “wretched life” up to that point, he had nothing to lose, so he shut up, enjoyed the ride, got yelled at like everybody else, and learned to “be the shadow.”
He enlisted Determined Contract and went into bomber avionics. Nine months of intense electronics training was a high order for him at the time. If he failed two tests, he would have been reclassed to Open General. Similar to his previous experience in school, he struggled with the tests and was called stupid all the time. At the end of the day, he tried to have fun with it and successfully completed training.
Garcia was sent to Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana for three years, working as a Bomber Technician. He was responsible for maintaining the plane systems, such as radar, monitors, or the occasional barfed-on keyboard (the B-52s shook so much, the training lieutenants often couldn’t handle the turbulence). It was at that point when he really got into achievement. Robert decided to go to night school and achieved his bachelor’s and two associate’s degrees.
His enlistment was up in 2002, and he drove to San Diego where, with all of his training and degrees, the only job he could get was as a tow truck driver. $6.75 an hour, 12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. Within a month, he enrolled in the University of Phoenix to get his MBA. That’s when he started the long climb to success.
He doesn’t know quite how it happened, but in 2005, Garcia got a job teaching Engineering at a low-income high school. For the first two years, “there were no expectations.” On the far end of campus with little chance of running into an administrator, Garcia hit up the beach bars, slept in his car, and stumbled into class hungover; he didn’t care about anything. However, by the end of five years, he had done a complete 180—he was running the Academy of Engineering.
His methods? “Ninth grade, there’s a formula. You go full Drill Sergeant for two weeks, you scare the living shit out of them, and you establish dominance. It’s just like prison.” Eventually, he eased up with the Juniors and Seniors, but this kind of tough love and discipline earned him a reputation of absolute terror along with a nomination for Teacher of the Year.
While he was teaching, Robert joined the Reserves, finished his MBA, and then pursued his Doctorate. During this time, the school lost funding for the program, and he was let go. It was after this, from 2006 to 2013, that he describes his life like being in a tunnel.
He found technical writing and bounced between companies for eight years while still working on his Doctorate. Robert earned his Doctorate of Education degree at 37 and became an enlisted PhD.
ROBERT GARCIA - USAF
He realized that the corporate environment didn’t have the zeal that he was looking for; he wanted to work for himself. So, he focused all of his extra energy outside of tech writing on building up his own businesses. He started SHIFT Magazine and his own business consulting company, The Warrior Strategist.
It was in 2018 that Robert’s life took some major turns. He volunteered for a six-month tour at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. His mother had terminal cancer when he left, but since she was doing well and had already passed her three-month life projection by two years, he figured six months wouldn’t be a risk.
Robert was working at the busiest air operations center on earth in the most high-stress job he’s ever had. Suddenly, he was told that his mother was in her final days, and he should probably give her a call. He got off shift and called her home. His aunt answered and said she hadn’t spoken in three days, but once his mom found out it was Robert on the phone, she started speaking.
“She was choking on blood and every word was a struggle” Garcia describes in an article he wrote for LinkedIn. He talked to his mom for an hour and a half, and said “I didn’t focus on anything negative because I knew she was dying. There was a lot of anger, a fucking lot of anger, and I let it go. I reversed the roles and thought if I was dying and it was the last call with my kid, how would I want it to go? It was very emotionally hard.”
The next day, Robert’s aunt told him that she died in her sleep. He was offered a flight home, but he said no because there wasn’t really anything he could do. He quietly cried through the next couple days at work, and all he received was a hand signed card the Commander had a flunky run down to him. While his Reserve Unit supported him well, he didn’t receive that support in Qatar. So, like he learned back in Basic, he put his head down, went into “turtle-mode” and got his work done to finish the mission.
When he returned to the States, nose to the grindstone, Robert started building up his businesses. He withstood a mental breakdown where he called the Veteran Hotline from pure, debilitating exhaustion. He put his energy into The Warrior Strategist, helping veterans and business owners command the entrepreneurial world with practical, straightforward techniques. He’s published eight books and helped several clients achieve business acumen and success.
Tenacious and resourceful don’t even come close to completely describing Robert Garcia’s journey.
“One thing I’ve learned is the military augments who you are. If you’re a real piece of degenerate garbage that makes bad decisions, the military is going to make you tenfold. If you’re a good person who is highly motivated, the military is going to turn you into a dynamic leader.”
Robert Garcia truly molded himself into the latter.