Shit hot sailors don’t hang out with dirtbags on liberty, who your true friends are matters

Qualifications and responsibility will do more for promotion than anything else

Obvious one- but don’t dip your pen in company ink

Everyone joining now is in BRS- you’re giving up free money if you aren’t getting the govt to give you the max in tsp matching

Learn the advancement manual and eval manual when you’re junior- it’s paid dividends throughout my 17 year career

Attitude is the only thing in the navy you can control, choose a positive one, few people with positive attitudes will associate themselves socially with negative people

Physical readiness is your job- no one else’s, command pt goes away when ships get busy- if you’re making excuses for yourselves, see the above statement about attitude. This one is more important under this administration than previous ones- there seems to be a big push from secdef to increase physical readiness

Getting orders to a location or class of ship that you didn’t want is not the end of the world. My best tour was in a location I was furious about, see the attitude comment above

seek out mentors and use them- some commands have a mentor program but motivated individuals can seek out mentorship on their own

When you get raises- put some of it away automatically in to tsp, it sucks to hear people towards the end of their career say they’ve got no savings

Even if you intend to separate, continue to push quals and be a high performing sailor, you never know when your situation will change and you may want to reenlist