Jose Vargas, Former U.S. Secret Service Officer — Jose Vargas served in the Uniform Division under President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, then wrote The LeadThrough Method, a book about goal-setting that starts with where you are, not where you wish you were. On the Justin Brady Show he argues that people drift into bitterness more easily than into fulfillment, that vision boards without steps change little, and that every worthwhile result has a price most people refuse to pay.
Vargas grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, in a neighborhood he describes as among the worst for crime. In the Uniform Division — once the White House Police, celebrating a century of service around the time of the interview — his job was infrastructure and advance work. Officers travel ahead of protectees, scrub venues, hotels, and routes, and treat protection as a no-fail mission that covers not only the president and vise president but family members, American leaders, and visiting foreign leaders whose safety under U.S. care is a geopolitical stake. “It will be a global crisis if a leader gets hurt under our care,” Vargas said. “That’s our responsibility, our no-fail mission.”
The magnitude of moving the leader of the free world, even a short walk, stayed with him. So did smaller privileges from a Trenton kid’s vantage: washing his hands next to the president, and roaming the White House, and seeing Buzz Aldrin up close. On a military flight to England, he also slept under the presidential limousine known as the Beast, on a thin foam roll he jokes may or may not have been authorized.
The argument of his book is intentionality. Vargas tells the story of a young woman on Chicago’s west side in the late 1980s who finished the bravest plan of her life by putting her children out a kitchen window into an alley, where a relative waited with a car, then leaving money under the last meal she cooked and climbing out herself, never to return. That woman was his mother, escaping domestic violence.
Throughout his life, Vargas has learned every goal must be specific and planned. “You’re not going to be able to just drift there,” Vargas said. “You will most likely drift to unsuccess, or through bitterness, or through unfulfillment. In order to accomplish those big goals that we have in our lives, it takes intentionality.” He calls that living a LeadThrough life: not pretending nothing will happen to you, but taking ownership of the decisions that produce the results you want. Blanket advice like “never give up,” without context about what you are actually trying to build, can keep people stuck in the wrong fight.
Goal-setting fails, in his view, when people visualize the destination and skip the map. At the Trenton police station, where he processed inmates and saw the worst of humanity, he repeatedly talked with a teenager who kept coming back through the system. After one booking he gave the young man a phone call, stepped back for privacy, and overheard him tell his mother, “Mom, I just can’t change. This is my life.” Vargas hears a quieter version of that sentence in nonprofit leadership, law enforcement, and coaching: people look at the company they want to grow or the life they want and, subconsciously, tell themselves they are stuck. He rejects that. Change is possible, but people often treat the destination as easy. “They set a goal and they think it’s going to be a piece of cake to attain that goal,” Vargas said. “If it’s a worthwhile goal, it’s not going to happen overnight.”
The LeadThrough Method starts earlier than a vision board.
The first step is to locate where you are today. “You can’t get to your destination without tracking your current location,” Vargas said. Without that honesty, a spouse may set a goal to be a better partner while never facing that the problem in the relationship is them.
The second step is to dissect what produced today’s results.
The third is to dream what you actually want. Only then comes the hard work: deciding what price you will pay.
Education, sweat equity, a new skill, academy tests passed perfectly, a clean background for a clearance — success is not handed over. “We’re living in a society and a culture now, unfortunately, where nobody wants to pay the price for what they truly want,” Vargas said. “No one is just going to give you success. No one is just going to give you what has cost them tears and blood and sweat.” Past wins do not exempt you from the next price. “For every level, there’s a new devil,” he said.
He lived that sequence with his health. Mid-push-up at the Trenton Police Academy, a captain pulled then Recruit Vargas aside: doctors had found Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, and he could not continue. He moved through denial — young, felt fine, insisted he did not really have it. “It’s this denial stage that will keep you stuck,” Vargas said. Then came contemplation, then, after about two and a half years, Vargas arrived at the decision to have surgery. That path eventually put him in the White House.
The medical setback is not a side anecdote in his telling; it is evidence that locating the obstacle, accepting the cost, and paying it is how the method works when the goal is real.
The LeadThrough Method is available on Amazon. More about Vargas is at reachinghighernow.com.
The original show notes were lost. This summary was written by Ai and edited by a human.
