I Used to Idolize the Oak Tree. Then I Learned What the Palm Tree Knows.

By David W. | Mission Ready Father

---

On August 1st, I stood in front of a room and turned in my clearance for the last time. Most of the people there were from my last unit, six years of this journey rather than all twenty-eight. One had been with me since my Army days, a friendship that carried through into our contractor years together. And then there was family, some who’d caught only a piece of the ride, and my mom and brother, who’d been there for all of it, start to finish.

If you want the short version of what military service teaches about control, it’s this: you have far less of it than you think, and the peace comes from putting your energy into what you can actually influence instead of fighting for what you can’t.

Twenty-eight years since a father dropped his son off for basic training. Twenty of those years, across two branches, count as actual time in service. There was a gap in between, a stretch when I was out of uniform entirely, working a civilian life before I found my way back in. But the eighteen-year-old who left home in 1998 and the forty-six-year-old who stood in that room on August 1st are connected by the same twenty-eight years, whether the paperwork counts all of them or not.

The ceremony itself happened later than my actual retirement date. I was administratively done back in mid-May. I pushed the ceremony to August on purpose, so more of my family could be there to see it. That decision turned out to be one of the better ones I made this year.

I want to tell you what I said in that room. Not because a retirement speech is inherently interesting to anyone who wasn’t there, but because the thing I landed on after twenty-eight years applies to a lot more than a military career. It applies to anyone who has ever built a plan and watched it fall apart for reasons that had nothing to do with them.

---

The People Who Made It Possible

Before I get to the lesson, a short word on the people, because the lesson doesn’t mean anything without them.

My mom wrote me handwritten letters through basic training and every hard stretch far from home after that. My brother and sister both served too, and they understood parts of this life that are hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. My wife carried a demanding career of her own while also carrying everything I couldn’t be there for, every drill weekend, every training rotation, for over a decade. My kids grew up around a version of me that missed things I can’t get back. None of the twenty-eight years that follow happened alone, and I wanted that on the record before the part about trees.

---

What Military Service Teaches About Control

Here’s what I actually said, close to word for word, because I don’t think I could improve on it by rewriting it now.

The military teaches you that the only constant is change. Missions change. Orders change. The people standing next to you change. Something you were told was locked in twelve months from now doesn’t happen at all, because leadership changed, or funding changed, or the mission changed. And underneath all of that is a truth most people spend a career avoiding: we control almost nothing. At best, we influence. Actual control is something none of us really have.

You don’t need a uniform to learn that lesson. Life teaches you the same thing regardless of what you’re wearing. A diagnosis you didn’t see coming. A job that disappears. A plan you built your whole year around that falls apart for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Change doesn’t check whether you’re wearing a rank on your collar before it shows up at your door.

The moment any of us forget that we don’t control the outcome is the moment change starts to cost us. Frustration. Anger. Stress that we carry home and hand to the people who love us, who didn’t sign up to carry it.

When I joined at eighteen, I idolized the oak tree. Strong. Solid. Deeply rooted. That’s what I thought strength looked like.

At forty-six, standing in that room, I told everyone I idolize the palm instead.

A palm tree doesn’t fight the storm. When the wind comes, it bends, further than you’d think possible, and it holds. The oak stands rigid against that same wind, and the oak is the one that snaps. The palm isn’t weaker. It just knows what it is, and it doesn’t waste energy pretending it can out-muscle a hurricane.

A day or two later, that palm is still standing. Fronds a little rougher. Still rooted. Still itself.

---

Why This Matters Even If You’ve Never Worn a Uniform

I’ve spent a career around people whose entire job depended on planning for outcomes they couldn’t control. And I’ve watched, more times than I’d like to admit, what happens to the ones who never made peace with that. The frustration compounds. The stress leaks into every relationship they have. They spend enormous energy fighting a wind they were never going to out-muscle, and eventually something in them snaps, the same way the oak does.

I’ve been that person myself. Early in my career, I mistook rank for leadership and tried to assert control instead of earn influence, and it took years to unlearn.

I don’t think that’s a military problem. I think it’s a human one, and I think most of us are walking around with an oak tree mentality without ever having named it.

Think about the last time something genuinely knocked you sideways. A layoff that came out of nowhere. A diagnosis, yours or someone you love’s. A relationship that ended after you’d done everything you thought you were supposed to do. A kid who didn’t turn out the way every parenting book told you they would. In almost every version of that story, there’s a moment where the real damage isn’t the event itself. It’s what happens after, when you keep bracing against something that’s already happened, as if bracing hard enough might still change the outcome.

That’s the oak. Rigid. Refusing to bend because bending feels like losing. And it holds, right up until it doesn’t.

Here’s the distinction that took me most of a career to actually live instead of just understand intellectually: control and influence are not the same thing, and confusing them is where the exhaustion comes from. Stoic philosophy has a name for this same idea, and it’s worth the read if you want to go deeper on it.

You cannot control whether your company restructures. You cannot control whether your teenager makes a decision you’d never make. You cannot control the diagnosis, the market, the mission changing three weeks before deployment. What you can control is where your energy goes once the thing has already happened. You can influence how you show up the next morning. You can influence whether you make the situation worse for the people standing next to you or better. You can influence what you do with the time you have left inside the version of reality you’re actually in, instead of the one you’d planned for.

The palm tree isn’t passive. That’s the part people misread. Bending under a hurricane takes more strength than standing rigid, not less. It just directs that strength somewhere useful instead of wasting it on a fight that was decided before it started.

I’d also add this, because I think it’s the part that gets skipped: the palm doesn’t bend alone and then pretend nothing happened. It bends, the storm passes, and then it’s still standing there, rougher, but still itself, still rooted in the same ground. That’s the whole point. You’re not supposed to come out of a hard season unchanged. You’re supposed to come out of it still yourself, still rooted, with a little more evidence that you can survive the next one too.

If there’s a single practical takeaway in all of this, it’s a habit rather than a philosophy: when something hits you, before you spend energy on frustration or anger or replaying how it should have gone differently, ask one question first. What here is actually mine to influence right now? Everything downstream of that answer is worth your energy. Everything upstream of it, the parts you genuinely cannot touch, is weight you can set down. Not because it doesn’t matter. Because carrying it doesn’t change it, and it costs you something every day you keep carrying it anyway.

---

What Closes and What Doesn’t

Twenty-eight years is a long time to spend around one uniform. It closes a chapter I spent more than half my life inside of, and it closed on a high note, surrounded by the people who made it possible in the first place.

But the lesson doesn’t retire with the uniform. But the lesson doesn’t retire with the uniform. What military service teaches about control doesn’t expire the day you turn in your clearance. I’m taking the palm tree with me into whatever comes next, corporate career, parenting, marriage, all of it. I’d invite you to take it with you too, whatever storm you’re currently standing in the middle of.

Be the palm. Bend when the storm demands it. Trust the outcome you can’t control, and let go of the rest.

— David W.

---

Filed under: Leadership | Military | Veterans | Personal Development | Self-Leadership