From the battlefield to the ballot box—meet Jeremy Smith, a former Special Operations leader who’s redefining civic engagement through innovative political technology. In this episode of Success Unleash’d, hosts Zack Ellison and Shawne Merriman dive into Jeremy’s journey from military service to founding Civitech, a startup empowering everyday citizens and aspiring leaders to make a difference. Discover how his groundbreaking tool, RunningMate , is revolutionizing local elections, driving participation, and fostering authentic connections between candidates and communities. Plus, Jeremy shares how his military background shaped his approach to leadership, resilience, and building a mission-driven team. Don’t miss this inspiring conversation on success, strategy, and service!

Success Unleash’d Principles From This Episode

1. Find Purpose in Service

Jeremy’s military background instilled a sense of duty and mission-first thinking, which he has carried into his work at Civitech. His focus on empowering others through political technology highlights how purpose-driven leadership can create a lasting impact.

2. Iterate, Adapt, and Overcome

Civitech faced significant challenges during the pandemic, including a pivot from in-person events to digital platforms. Jeremy emphasized the importance of adaptability and resilience in navigating setbacks and achieving success over time.

3. Lead by Example

Jeremy attributes much of his leadership success to his military training, which taught him the value of leading by personal example. Showing commitment to a shared mission builds trust and inspires teams to perform at their best.

4. Discipline Creates Freedom

Both Jeremy and Shawne stressed the importance of discipline and habits as the foundation for achieving long-term goals. Building structure in your day-to-day life helps you focus on the hard tasks that drive progress.

5. Build Habits That Reflect Your Goals

Jeremy shared his experience of setting small, incremental goals, such as doing 20 pushups a day and gradually increasing them. This mindset of consistent improvement can be applied to fitness, professional development, or any other area of life.

6. Cast a Wide Net and Take Chances

For veterans, athletes, and entrepreneurs transitioning to new careers, Jeremy advises taking a broad approach. He highlighted the value of exploring various opportunities, learning through trial and error, and not being discouraged by setbacks.

7. Surround Yourself with High-Achievers

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Jeremy credits this mindset for his success, encouraging others to choose relationships and environments that elevate their potential and push them toward their goals.

8. Stress is a Motivator, Not a Limiter

Jeremy’s experience in high-stakes environments like Special Operations taught him to thrive under pressure. He believes in using stress as a driver of performance rather than letting it become an obstacle.

9. Success is Built on Repetition

Whether in the military, athletics, or business, repetition is key to mastery. Jeremy highlighted the importance of practicing skills consistently, comparing job interviews and entrepreneurship to training drills in sports.

10. Think Long-Term, Not Short-Term

Jeremy called out the cultural obsession with instant gratification, advocating for a long-term mindset in building businesses, careers, and personal growth. Success is a marathon, not a sprint, and requires sustained effort and focus.

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Watch the Episode Here

Listen to the Podcast Here

Unleashing The Power Of Civic Engagement With Jeremy Smith

We have Jeremy Smith with us, so we are going to hop right into it. Jeremy, do you want to kick it off and tell us what you are doing now?

Jeremy’s Background And Transition To Leadership Development

It’s nice to be with you. Thank you for bringing me on. I come from a military background and grew up in North Texas. I decided early on, the 9/11 boys’ generation, to join the Army. I went into the Army. I was a Marshall Scholar, so I studied overseas and was in Special Operations for a few years. When I got out, I was invited to come and join the National Security Council, which is a set of civilian appointees along with military attaches who worked for the White House on promoting and defending America’s national security abroad.

This is 2016. At the time, all of the Obama appointees were about to leave, and the billets were coming in presumed Hillary Clinton, so I did not get the job, as we all know. However, along the way, I got exposed to a lot of the behind-the-scenes of politics in America and campaigns and realized that there are some big gaps in leadership development and training and skills things that I had a lot of experience with that I began to suspect that maybe I could make an improvement to those. Now, I run a company called Civitech, which does a lot of political technology for governments, nonprofits, political campaigns, and candidates to help them better connect authentically with their constituents and to try to build a better two-way street to develop civic society.

Civitech’s been doing great. Talk a little bit about your success.

The Success of Civitech And Its Impact

We have built a lot of good things as a startup. We have been able to develop a number of ways to both make it easier for regular and everyday citizens to participate and vote, as well as to make it much easier for people to run for office themselves. A very large number of our clients won their elections, and we had a major impact in terms of people who registered and voted using our platform and more than 10 million unique people who are traditionally ignored by most American politics, as well as millions of additional people engaged through the platforms and the tools that we have built. It was a great year for us. We broke all of our records on revenue profitability and impact. I’m very proud of the team. The team’s proud of their work, and it’s been a great experience.

RunningMate Product Overview

One of the things that is very cool is this product you are developing called RunningMate, which can help anybody who’s running for office get elected, and these are mainly nonpartisan positions. Could you talk a little bit about that product?

Something that’s a big misconception in American cultural discourse is the notion of what is or is not an election year and when politics is going on. It’s typically colored by the presidential election or federal elections, which take up most of the oxygen. In reality, there will be more elections in 2025 in the United States. They are happening across hundreds of thousands of jurisdictions or more than 100,000 and across 109 unique days of the year that we know of so far, and in all kinds of local areas. You’ve got the Dallas, New York, and San Antonio mayor’s race. We have elections in Canada that we are supporting federally, as well as local provinces and there are school board races and county races all going on around the country where people are choosing their leaders for the next few years.

The average turnout in local elections in those years is about 4% so about 1 out of 25 people is paying attention to who is running. When we provide RunningMate, we make it much easier for new people to run in the first place, and then it drives an increase in civic participation, which leads to both better outcomes overall but also a happier and more productive engagement for local citizens. RunningMate is designed to be a campaign-in-a-box tool. It is very cheap and very accessible, and it’s built off of a military principle and a military system called the Blue Force Tracker, which is this idea in the military, like in the Army, especially in the Marines.

Every truck, tank, vehicle, every group of soldiers is connected on the Blue Force Tracker.

It allows all of our aircraft, artillery, tanks, helicopters, soldiers, and ground vehicles to coordinate and know where each other is on the map. Everyone is looking at the same sheet of music, and as a result, it empowers everybody to act much more independently. We have the saying that every soldier is a sensor. It’s this idea that each person has a brain, eyes, ears, hands, and can do something, notice what’s going on, communicate it, and decide if you give them the resources, information, and training.

What we have essentially tried to do is to build that same common operating picture and system and dashboard to allow people to use that in a normal political life, which is to enable regular citizens to know what’s going on in their elections and to empower the people running for office to authentically connect, and the goal is to hopefully drive less spam and more actual conversations of substance with the people that they represent.

One of the things I wanted to ask you about is your military background. Playing in San Diego for the Chargers, I spent so much time around the military, and I see a lot of these correlations to make that transition. A lot of the programs I have worked with in the past, it’s like athletes and the military are very similar when it comes to transitioning from one thing to another because when you get done with your duty being in the military, it’s trying to figure out that next plan. That regimen’s gone, everything’s gone. How have you been able to take some of that regimen that you had in the past to apply to what you are doing right now?

Military-To-Civilian Transition And Its Challenges

You hit on a good parallel there, which is that the military and athletes share a reverence for training, for a team purpose, and also that big line of demarcation. When you change careers, it is so different from what other people understand and so different from normal workforce-type things that finding a good fit is something that everyone goes through because it’s not necessarily obvious. My encouragement to people is to say, “It’s okay if the first thing doesn’t work out or if it takes a while.” For me, I was not at all sure. I was in Special Operations, I was deployed overseas, I was on my fourth deployment, and I’m thinking about leaving. I have this invitation to potentially go work still in the military, but now I’m in more of a political oversight role.

That’s interesting to me as a way to learn from other leaders who were of interest, but I knew it was a risk. It might not happen, or it could be much more whimsical or subject to politics. I also was looking at things like, “What are the things that I know where I have particular skills that would be useful?” For me, my background started in removing landmines and IEDs. I had a lot of hand-to-hand combat training, a lot of combat deployment and experience, and leadership and education. I thought, “I’d be interested in potentially taking a look at the FBI and the special agent route. Here’s a bunch of skills that most of society will not appreciate.”

Going from having a locker room, being around the guys, that camaraderie, that teamwork, and then transitioning out was different. It took some adjusting to regular people, and when I say regular people, I don’t mean regular people as in normal people, but we live a different lifestyle. Being able to apply everything that we have learned, everything we have done, to now get to that point where you have to put yourself in a regular environment. For me, that was one of the tough things. I’m used to waking up in the morning at 6:30 every single day, seven days a week, in the gym at 8:00. It’s this regimen and like-minded people around. It was in the locker room, it’s the back and forth, the banter. It was an adjustment period for me to transition to that normal lifestyle. Did you have that at all?

The Importance Of Servant Leadership In Military And Civilian Roles

Absolutely. The big one for me is the difference between having like-minded people and also having people devoted to the team and the cause. People who are invested in their professional development. It turns out most of the workforce is not like that, and very understandably. It’s not a requirement. It’s not necessary for many jobs. It’s a culture shock going from a place where people invest in the same things that you value and you can understand to places where, sometimes, it’s like, “You seem like you are hanging out here, and I want us to be the best at this.” They’re like, “I don’t care about that.” That was the biggest culture shock.

That was probably one of my toughest things because, as far as athletes, we are some of the most disciplined people on the planet. As with the military, you guys are on time everywhere. You wake up with a different mindset. I had to use a different target in life and different goals and aspirations that most people don’t understand. They don’t get it. For me, I had to get accustomed to the fact that everybody is not as disciplined as you. Everybody is not going to take the same steps and push as hard as you, put in the same amount of time. It’s a whole different ball game. It took me a long time to adjust to that lifestyle.

Advice For Aspiring Leaders And Entrepreneurs

I have a question for you and Shawne. Jeremy, starting with you, what advice would you give to other veterans making the transition? I’m curious what Shawne would say to former pro athletes as well, but let’s start with you, Jeremy.

For me, it’s like I was saying earlier, “Cast a broad net.” Start with thinking about the things that you are interested in and also think about the skills that you have that are transferable and where they can fit. Try to find some marriage between those two, and if that doesn’t work, it’s okay to take chances. It’s okay to explore widely. This is a lesson for entrepreneurs or people trying to join the military or professional athletes. You have to take a lot of shots on goal.

The discipline that Shawne was referencing is all about practice and habit, and the same skill in the military. You have to do it a lot to get good at it. Interviewing for jobs is a skill. It’s a skill to explain yourself clearly, find a fit, and create a value trade that works for everybody. You have to do it a lot, and nobody’s out to get you or hold you back. No one else is going to do it all for you. It is a sad truth in many ways, but it’s a real-world practical truth that you’ve got to make a lot of attempts.

The key thing is not to get discouraged when you have something you have your heart set on and it doesn’t work out. You’ve got to keep going. You have to try many things, and along the way, you are going to discover some things both about yourself and the types of places you want to work. You are going to be able to refine that search over time, but it’s iterative. That’s not always satisfying in a culture where we talk a lot about the Disney princess version of life, the magical perfect moments that come together. That’s not how life works. It’s better to be honest with yourself. No one else is obligated to hire you or help you do what you most want in life. You’ve got to find a good, healthy balance.

It’s funny what he said about the repetition. Repetition breeds greatness. You are not going to get great at anything without repetition. For me, to move on to the next step and find that next path in life, it was finding the passion that I had for running out to 70,000 people. That feeling you get running out to 70,000 people, or that big play, that forced fumble, that big hit. People are yelling and screaming, and teammates are hitting you on the head, hitting you in the back. “Good play!” That is the ultimate rush, the ultimate high you can get in life. That’s why so many guys struggle to find that next thing because there are very few things in life that will bring you that satisfaction, that feeling. For me, when you find something that makes you feel that way, you struck gold.

When I played football, it was hard to get out of bed. Your back, your hips, your feet, your knees are hurting, and that passion, that one that made you get out of bed, that’s right before the approach. This was in college when we weren’t getting paid. In high school, we had these two-a-day practices. We weren’t getting paid, so that wanting to get out of bed is because you loved what you did so much, and you had a passion for it.

Everything I’m doing now, like especially with Lights Out Extreme Fighting, and Lights Out Sports TV, like I have that passion. I have that drive. Certain days, it’s a little harder to get out of bed. It’s a little harder to have that positive attitude towards it, but when you do something to give you that same passion, that’s what ultimately, for me, makes me want to keep going.

I love talking to guys in the military. There are so many connections and correlations about what we do. You guys are a little bit more on the edge. It’ll be to the edge, but as far as the mindset and the approach to everything that we do, it’s full speed. It’s full tilt where you are getting our best effort 100% of the time. As you said before, it’s not normal in most cases out here in the real world.

Jeremy, what are some of the habits that you developed that have made you successful in civilian life?

A lot of them come from military training specifically. It’s the idea of leading by personal example, like the mission-comes-first kind, that service duty notion. That lends itself very well to leading and managing others and to giving people a vision to rally behind. In leading a company, like building a culture, giving people a North Star to follow, and then showing them that you are in it with them, those are crucial leadership aspects that I got to learn very prominently at the premier leadership institution. Everything that Shawne and I have been talking about, it’s like you’re getting at this subject, which is a habit.

You asked about habits, and we have been talking about athletes and their habits and soldier habits. Habit is the most useful thing you can do in a world full of distractions. Most industries nowadays seem like they are oriented toward taking some of your time. That is how they make money. You have to do it to build community, for entertainment, whatever the reason, but there are so many interesting things, and there’s so much content and so much going on. There’s endless news as entertainment, and there’s endless stuff.

The key is that habit is what helps you focus on what’s most important and what matters to you to develop yourself and to build discipline so that you can choose to do the harder thing you need to be doing rather than going home and immediately turning on Netflix, pulling out the Xbox, or ordering a pizza or whatever it might be. It’s very easy and very convenient nowadays.

What you probably need to be doing is taking care of your family, taking care of yourself, building yourself, building your skills, building your fitness, and calling family members. There are lots of things that are healthier, better choices, and habits. It’s like your shield and your guard system against lots of very smart, very capable people and computer systems trying to take your attention for themselves. The discipline that comes from that is crucial.

Jeremy, let me ask you, did you see you guys having this much success early? Everybody has these projections and goals, like places they want to hit. Did you see this happen for you guys as fast as it is?

Navigating Early Success And Adaptation to Challenges

It was a mixed answer. I’m very practically minded, so it’s like, what’s clear, what’s an achievable goal that’s tough but winnable, and then like, what’s the stretch? We missed some elements of it, especially because of COVID. We built a bunch of things that were oriented around in-person town halls and community building, and we launched it in February of 2020, got our first big contract, and then everyone became afraid to breathe on each other outside, and it destroyed our product and our approach.

I had some backup ideas we had been building for that. We moved forward very aggressively with them, and we made it. We beat our first projections by double, but then for the next two years, we did worse, and there were some things that we underestimated about the challenges of our market and everything else. Now, we have come back and have grossly exceeded those. We learned, we iterated, and we tried to change quickly.

The answer is no, and we weren’t reliant on a built plan that could succeed at a lower level. Now, we did better than expected, and we moved and adapted along the way. It’s been mixed. I have had it both ways, but I would say I didn’t play spreadsheet games where it’s pure imagination like, “Here’s how we become $100 billion in the next year.”

How did you navigate the lows? How did you get through those tough periods when you were missing expectations, and how did you handle your investors and your customers during that period?

The customer gets to be more than anything else. A customer or team member failing them hurts me. That gets at the root of me, and to a degree, investors are the same. We have an arrangement, a deal, a transaction, and a value proposition that I am bound to uphold, and I intend to do so. It’s frustrating, but we planned well. We built safety nets, and we thought ahead, so we have weathered it for the time being.

For me, motivation has never been a major challenge of it, and I will get into why. The other thing is that this gets said like Shawne talked about earlier with the change from the military. My stress threshold is way too high. My first job was teaching soldiers to disarm bombs, and I went to Sapper school to learn to do that in one of the hardest environments imaginable.

Doing that overseas is about the most stressful and boring thing you can do. It’s mostly boring and then huge moments of stress, which is not great for your body’s habits. People sometimes complain. They don’t feel like I’m stressed out enough about something going on, and I’m like, “No one’s bleeding. Come on.” I feel like I’m very resilient in that regard, but for me, I like people. I like the stories of people. I like engaging with people.

I like learning, and I don’t mind failure. I have a scientific background in education, both for my Bachelor’s and Master’s, and failure is how you learn. You should be constantly failing at something. It doesn’t bother me or eat at me. It’s like, “That didn’t work. Do we know why?” If not, “Why? Can we test? Is that solvable? Is that within my power or my control?” If not, discard it and move on.

For me, it’s like I’m working hard. I’m proud of myself. I’m proud of the people. I’m building, and we are evaluating it constantly, and it’s getting better. I feel confident in a lot of those decisions that younger Jeremy made. They were good. I feel comfortable in my skin in that way. The motivation, even when it’s not working the way I want, it’s not going as well as I would hope, and it bothers me.

Here’s a good example for those of you who have gotten some distance along entrepreneurship. When we closed our Series A, our lawyers told us there would be lots of spurious lawsuits. This is a thing. We have dealt with a bunch of nonsense, from IP trolls that came out of the woodwork to the spouse of a former employee. It’s grating, and it bothers me because I would never do that to someone. It’s so dishonorable, and I can’t compute why somebody would do that. Those demoralize me more than us working hard at a problem and not quite getting it. I’m proud of the motion and the journey as much as the destination.

What was that? Why is he disarming bombs? My stress factor was giving Tom Brady a minute and twelve left in the game with the ball back in his hand. We are still stressed. It’s different, but it sure as hell felt like a bomb was going to go off and be scored because we knew what was going to happen. That’s great for a couple of reasons for people to know.

One of the biggest reasons is a lot of these guys when they come, and like you said, when you haven’t been under pressure because as an entrepreneur, as an owner, you are under constant pressure. When I talk to people, there’s nothing wrong with having a job. We all need people to work, that’s all that, but it’s a different stress level when it’s yours. You are the owner. You are making the decisions. If it doesn’t work out, it falls back on your shoulders.

While people may think that you are not stressing out about it, no. Your threshold is way more than they can ever imagine. I always bring it back to having a military background or myself having an athlete background where you are constantly under stress. They might draft a guy in the first or second round from Florida State that’s right behind you every single day waiting for you to mess up.

Talking about your job being on the line every day, it’s like you go out and you roll an ankle, you miss a couple of plays, and he may come in to get a couple of big plays. Now they are looking at him, and by the way, he’s cheaper than you are right now. There’s a constant factor of having stress in your job. You got to perform every day, which most people aren’t used to dealing with.

That ruthlessness is particularly unique in the world of high-performance athletes and a few particular cultural environments. Netflix famously has a culture deck that’s like if you are not the best team member every year, we are getting rid of you and finding someone else. Even if you are 99% good, we want to. That is a different level of stress and performance that it drives.

That’s not the type of place that I have been. I come at it, but similarly, we always looked at it this way. Al-Qaeda is out there training, and they are training to kill you. It’s up to you. You can go play Xbox, you can go watch Netflix, but here’s this video. We would show videos like, “Here’s them training. They live in a more austere environment, and they deal with more pressures from us and our military being more capable. The ones who have survived and are thriving are very good at what they do. If you don’t want to take it seriously, you are endangering not only yourself but your brothers, your sisters, and your comrades in arms.” That real-world pressure, whether it comes from your job or some other source in life, you have to let it be a healthy driver of your motivation. If you find that it’s not healthy, you need to get out of that job because it’s not a good fit.

Building Resilience Through Stressful Experiences

One thing I will add to this is all three of us have had very stressful jobs. I would rank what you did, Jeremy, as the most stressful because your life was on the line, followed by what Shawne was doing. After all, he had millions of people watching, and a lot of people’s happiness rested on the outcome. When I was a bond trader on Wall Street, it was the same thing in that every decision I made carried serious financial risk with it. You get used to operating in these roles under a lot of stress. The way I always framed it for my team has been you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. When things are good, your antenna should go up and say, “What’s going on here? It’s too easy right now.”

The piece of advice I give to younger people is to get used to how hard it’s going to be and truly get comfortable with that constant stress, that constant need to be better. Another thing, too, Jeremy, that you touched on that I agree with and that Shawne and I have both gone through as well is that when you are successful, there’s always going to be a lot of haters.

Usually, they are a nuisance because some people have nothing better to do, and they are pissed that you’ve made it and they haven’t because you put in the work and they didn’t. To your point, Jeremy, it is bothersome. Now, I’m getting to the point where I can overlook that. I don’t even give them the time anymore. They don’t even have any space in my head at this point because it’s not worth it. I have got much bigger ambition, like you guys do, at this stage.

This is a good example of the way I deal with that famous Teddy Roosevelt quote about being the man in the arena versus the critic. It’s not the critic who counts, it’s the one who steps forward and tries and struggles mightily. That quote is such a useful frame of mind to get yourself into. We printed it out on this huge piece of metal and posted it above our barracks and the work area for all of our soldiers because it is the right mindset to have. I will say it’s frustrating when you can’t mentally do that and a court is requiring you to turn in documents to substantiate some nonsense, but that is how you have to guard yourself in the world.

That’s why earlier I said to find what you are proud of and hold to it even in moments that are tough. It’s okay. Struggling and trying mightily and failing – you are not a bad person you are not doing anything wrong. That’s what almost everyone else is also going through. They are trying to learn some new layers. To Shawne’s point, as an owner of a business, it is very stressful. Not only do you own the mission and the whole thing, but you own the responsibility for payroll and benefits. Somehow, I’m in charge of health insurance, which is ridiculous, but it’s a real pressure and obligation that you feel. No matter what, that’s crucial.

Lightning Round Q&A

Jeremy, in the interest of time, we are going to do a lightning round of important questions. I’m going to kick it off. We are going to keep all these under one minute. The first question is “what’s one thing in the world that needs to change”?

We have got to change this mindset toward immediate gratification that has become sweeping. You hear it from businesses and finance the notion of focusing only on quarterly gains at the expense of the long-term business, especially at the expense of customers. We are exploiting so many people, and that is not going to work out long-term. It might do great for short-term bonuses and everything else, but that is the wrong incentive to build for. Also, to create and make something good in the world.

New entrepreneurs all get this and understand it. Along the way, there’s this pressure to change it, and we have got to push back on that. You see it play out with teenagers needing to be on social media, caring about how many likes, clicks, or retweets they get. That is so unhealthy for a young brain that is forming and doesn’t have defense mechanisms yet. We have got to move people back into this realm of what athletes train for and what, in finance, you think about. You are investing in something to pay off over 5 to 10 years, or you are thinking about developing your body for a decade or a lifetime of fitness. That is crucial. We must keep promoting that and find ways to incentivize it.

You keep talking about entrepreneurs and younger people. What’s the best advice you’ve ever given somebody?

It was, “Don’t marry them.” It was very honestly the correct advice at the moment. The most important one that I was given and is the best lesson I took and the mind-shift change I got was from a guy at West Point in college. He gave this talk, and his name was Dan Clark. He said this thing that stuck with me. “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Who do you want to be like? Surround yourself with those people and be the kind of person who brings up the average of others around you.” That dug deep into my brain and rooted there. It changed the way I spend my time and make quick decisions about relationships, friendships, and other things.

If this has gone along but isn’t a very good fit, or if it’s not the right job or place to be spinning, if I’m encircled by people I don’t respect or admire, I’m getting out and going to find someone who makes me better. I have given that advice tons of times to other people when I’m reflecting on what they are telling me about being unhappy in their relationships, work life, or whatever it might be to give them honest advice like, “You are going to become what you spend your time around.” It’s a habit. That is what the human brain does.

What’s the best decision you ever made in your career?

The best decision I made was to go to West Point, to go to the academy. It was the perfect fit for me. I figured that out early, and I was correct. That’s lucky. It was the place that challenged me, developed me, and gave me opportunities that I could have never had. My family would have struggled to afford college and other things. I had to find a way, and it perfectly matched my interests in physical development, academic development, leadership development, military ethics, and especially the honor code, which is taken so seriously at the academy.

I appreciate it and value it so much. It is a leveling up of a young adolescent child that is so rare to have people put all that money and resources behind. The last estimate I heard is that it’s like $450,000 for society, for American taxpayers, to educate a West Point graduate. I think about that a lot in terms of how I owe that back. I owe that to the United States of America. I have paid for it, but at the same time, it sits with me that people made that investment in me early and that a society can choose to do that. It drives me in the kinds of things I’m doing, like investing in leadership and development and trying to help others climb up the ladder. Turn around and help other people get to it easier, rather than pulling it up behind you. It’s crucial.

You talk a lot about habit discipline. Has there been a mindset or a habit that completely changed everything you’re doing? I hear you talk about habit and mindset so much. Is there something that shifted in you to get here, or have you always been like this?

No, I got to it early, but I wasn’t always like that. It came, but it did come to me, and I was fortunate in this. In ninth grade, I was reading a lot of books like Dune and FOUNDATION, a lot of science fiction, and a lot of books about leadership, military histories, and lessons about military leadership. One of the things that stuck with me was the idea that we read all these storybooks, we watch these movies, we hear these tales, we listen to these shows, and they usually are like morality stories. Be nicer to other people. Don’t assume when you don’t know. Don’t betray your friends.

There are some pretty basic lessons in a lot of this, and you can listen to them and learn them early. You don’t have to have a terrible experience to realize you should treat your family better. That’s not required. All of culture is trying to give you some hard-earned wisdom from people who came before us. Somewhere in my mind, there was this shift where I was bored by the idea of reading books in school or frustrated that I had to read this thing for an assignment or whatever. What changed for me was thinking about it as learning not learning in the sense of education, but learning how to be a better person.

I liked the person I was becoming by learning. An easy early one for me is that I decided to go to West Point. I was on the baseball team, I was on the soccer team, I was doing all these other things, and I thought, “I’m a great sprinter, but I’m going to have to do a lot of running.” I quit my teams, joined cross-country, signed up for Krav Maga, and started boxing. I was like, “I got to get good at some other stuff.” I couldn’t do pushups, so I took a piece of paper, wrote on it, and taped it to the wall. It stayed there for three years. I wrote, “Do twenty pushups a day at night before bed,” and the next week, I wrote “21,” then “22,” and I got good at pushups. I over-engineered the solution, but it was that mindset change of deciding what I was going to do and focusing on it.

It was more fun to be with my friends on the baseball team. It was way more fun to play Halo 2 and do a LAN party, which I still did plenty of, but I changed my approach to focus on what I wanted to achieve. I got good at the skills I would need. I didn’t just want to get into West Point. I wanted to come out as a good soldier who could defend others. I trained that way, and that set me on an early path. That wasn’t invented. I was listening to lots of other people’s life lessons.

The athlete and competitor in me has to know what’s the most pushups you’ve ever done.

In about a 3 to 4-minute period, around 105 or 106 is the best I’ve clocked, but standard, it’s around 72 to 74. That’s me in good shape. High school me, who weighed nothing, had a bit of a cheat because I was 80 pounds lighter back then. I was rail-thin and in cross country. I shot up in height and was like 6’4″, weighing 125 or 130 pounds. I had no muscle development, much less bulk. That’s the best for me.

The athlete in me also wants to tell you I got 117 straight.

That’s pretty good. Hats off to you, too, because you’ve got a lot more bulk to move. For me, it was always about pull-ups. It’s not a fair comparison. I’ve got these lanky arms.

We appreciate it. Thank you for everything you’ve done. I’ve worked with the military. I still work closely with Camp Pendleton, Miramar Base in San Diego, Coronado, and even Andrews Air Force Base back in Maryland, where I’m from. I appreciate it. It’s always cool to have these conversations with like-minded people. Athletes and the military are two separate entities, but the mindset is there. We appreciate you for coming on.

Thank you all for having me. I appreciate your time. It’s great to be with you.

Jeremy, thanks a lot. Congrats on your success with Civitech, and my parting thought is that we need more Americans like you, real leaders giving back. Thanks for coming on.

Important Links

• Zack Ellison on LinkedIn
• Zack Ellison on Instagram
• The 7 in 7 Show with Zack Ellison (podcast)
• Applied Real Intelligence (A.R.I.) website
• Shawne Merriman on LinkedIn
• Shawne Merriman on Instagram
• Lights Out Sports TV website
• Lights Out Xtreme Fighting website
• Jeremy Smith on LinkedIn
• Civitech
• RunningMate
• Dune
• FOUNDATION

 About Jeremy Smith

Jeremy Smith is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Civitech, a Texas-based B-corp that builds data tools for progressive candidates and causes. The tech company’s tools address the problems of engaging voters and recruiting, training, and resourcing candidates for public office. Jeremy is an experienced political leader with work history and connections to the past three presidential campaigns, as well as multiple Senate and US House campaigns, in addition to the dozens of local political campaigns that he has trained, supported, and volunteered on.

During the 2016 campaign, Jeremy managed presidential voter protection operations in Florida. Prior to founding Civitech, he launched the nonprofit Register2Vote, which created new strategies for voter registration methods that helped to identify and support more than 400,000 new voters from 2018-2020. Jeremy has taught dozens of candidates how to run for office, and has pioneered numerous efforts to improve the public availability of election-related information.

Jeremy Smith is a West Point graduate and Marshall scholar. He served five years in the Army, primarily as an Engineer officer leading soldiers who specialize in removing IEDs, landmines, and booby traps. He also served in Special Operations as a leader in counterterrorism and hostage rescue. After leaving the military, Jeremy worked to provide operational guidance and planning for several Voter Protection initiatives, where he helped recruit, train, and coordinate more than 12,000 attorneys countering voter suppression.

Jeremy is a young veteran with broad international experience, who has worked on civic-driven and public service initiatives around the globe for 14 years. Jeremy applied his computer science background from undergraduate and graduate school to implement public health initiatives and international affairs throughout the years.

Jeremy has been a speaker at high schools, universities, public interest clubs, nonprofit fundraisers, political events, and military installations for hundreds of public speaking engagements ranging from dozens of attendees to thousands.