28: “Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts, BJJ SOP’s, Going Back to College, Leadership, Who’s Standard to Follow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDhikAvewEY&feature=youtu.be 0:00:00 - Opening 0:05:39 - Book Review, "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts", by David Hackworth 1:24:24 - Dope Internet/Onnit Stuff 1:27:26 - Relating SOP's and BJJ Training 1:36:56 - Waiting for input hindering fast decisions. 1:44:22 - Advice for Those Going Back to School 2:06:08 - Peer Leadership with No command structure 2:15:56 - How would Jocko handle WW1 Trenches? 2:20:07 - "Tough" VS "Smart" 2:26:47 - Who's Standard Should you measure Yourself By when GETTING AFTER IT? Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast, number 28, with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  He was a mate, a real good mate he was, a friendly sort of fella, liked to joke. And if it had to happen, it's a shame it had to happen to such a decent bloke.

• 0:26Jocko Willink?

  But ah, fair dinkum, don't it make you wonder what God in heaven's thinking about up there? The way he chooses who to sacrifice, to me, it doesn't quite seem fair.

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  You'd think he'd want a bloke, to take a bloke like me, who'd be no loss to no one here on earth.

• 0:50Jocko Willink?

  But no, he always seems to pick the best, whose life amounts to 10 times what mine's worth.

• 0:59Jocko Willink?

  Now, there's a sort of aching here inside. I can't quite put my finger on what's wrong, but a soldier can't afford to feel this way. He's gotta grit his teeth and carry on.

• 1:16Jocko Willink?

  So how's a bloke supposed to deal with this? I know they trained me well, I can't complain.

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  But this is something you don't learn about, when they teach you how to play the soldier's game.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  They teach you how to shoot and how to kill, you even learn which enemy to hate. But nowhere in their training do you learn how to live with the loss of a real good mate.

• 1:51Jocko Willink?

  Good evening, Echo.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 1:55Jocko Willink?

  That is an excerpt from a poem called "He Was A Mate", by a man named Lachlan Irvine, who's an Australian guy, served in Vietnam as part of the 3 RAR, the 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  And you know, you look at the Vietnam War and there was definitely some major advances in terms of technology because they had now things like helicopters and better radios and they had the beginning of night vision and they had jets and better communication. But even with all those technological changes, the basic principles of combat remain the same. They always do. Cover and move, keep things simple, prioritize, and execute decentralized command. But in addition to those technological changes, there was differences now with the people.

• 3:02Jocko Willink?

  Obviously, in Vietnam, there was a massive anti-war movement in America and around the world. And in America, a lot of the troops were draftees. Now, this is something I have to explain all the time and I have explained it on here before, and that is that SEALs and soldiers and Marines are not robots. They're people. And even though SEALs, for instance, have always been a volunteer force and today, all the military in the US is all volunteers, they're still free-thinking individuals. They're people.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  They're humans and you have to lead them. But what's interesting is when you look at the leadership principles used to effectively lead troops today, it's the same leadership principles to effectively lead the draftees in Vietnam. Draftees or volunteers, conventional forces or special operators or civilian teams and companies, an organization, the fundamental leadership principles used to actually lead, they do not change at their core.

• 4:28Jocko Willink?

  And there's a great example of this. And again, we're going back to a guy by the name of Colonel David Hackworth, who wrote About Face. We've talked about him before in this podcast. That book is, it's actually my favorite book of any category. But definitely, within the realm of combat and combat leadership, About Face by David Hackworth, Colonel David Hackworth is at the top of my list.

• 4:58Jocko Willink?

  But he actually went into even more detail about one particular episode of his career. And that was when he took over a battalion in Vietnam that was in pretty rough shape. And he wrote about that particular experience in more detail in a book called, "Steal My Soldier's Heart."

• 5:22Jocko Willink?

  And it is about the, the subtitle is, "The Hopeless to Hardcore Transformation of U.S. Army 4th Battalion 39th Infantry in Vietnam."

• 5:39Jocko Willink?

  And let's go ahead and jump on in.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  "Three times before 1969, I'd made the same 18-hour trip across the Pacific to Southeast Asia. Nothing had changed. The plane was full of FNGs, fucking new guys. 19 and 20-year-olds, pink-chicked, dry-mouthed, wide-eyed, eager but scared. One more load of fresh meat for the Vietnam grinder. I couldn't help wondering which one of them the KIA Travel Bureau would be bagging up for their return trip home.

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

  Even the lucky ones, the ones who made it out alive, would never be the same."

• 6:34Jocko Willink?

  And he talks about arriving, so he gets to Vietnam and he talks about arriving in, in, in the headquarters. Guy named General Yules Headquarters. And you've heard me talk about this before, about how some of the bases in Iraq, they were really, really nice. All built up, they had Starbucks on them, they had swimming pools, they had nice gyms, they had movie theaters. On bases in Iraq, I know, it, it sounds crazy for people that didn't go there. But that's what America does, we have awesome logistics, we have awesome support, we have a really well-funded. And you know what, we're gonna build a big base over there, we're gonna make it pretty nice. And it's the same thing here that Hackworth rolls into in, in Vietnam. And here we go, back to the book.

• 7:17Jocko Willink?

  "I walked off the pad and jumped into a jeep with a kid behind its wheel waiting to run me over to General Yules Headquarters. The ride was an eye-opener. Nearly ten thousand rear echelon motherfuckers. Remps to the grunts out on the line. Were stationed in Dong Tam, surrounded by all the creature comforts. I saw a miniature golf course and a swimming pool. I caught a glimpse inside of barracks, decked out with clean beds under mosquito nets. These guys pulled down the same combat pay as the soldiers in the bush who lived in the mud, watched their feet rot, burning leeches out of their crotches and laying down their lives."

• 8:01Jocko Willink?

  So that's a common term is remf. Comes from Vietnam, rear echelon motherfucker, obviously. Leif and I named our business Echelon Front, cuz we wanted to be, that, we wanted to be perfectly clear to everybody, that we were not talking about leadership from the rear. We were talking about leadership from the front. So Hackworth goes in, he spends a half an hour with, uh, General Yule. And he kinda gets told what's what. And then he, he kinda gives his assessment of what he's heard, he says pragmatically, "I could do nothing about the chain of command and the tactical operational stupidity of Dong Tam. I'd be out of Yules and Hunt's eyesight soon enough.

• 8:40Jocko Willink?

  And worrying about how to co- how combat operations were being handled from above was a waste of time at best and got men killed at worst. There'd be ways around that."

• 8:53Jocko Willink?

  The reason I highlighted that paragraph is because a lot of times I get asked questions from troopers out there that say, "Hey, you know, I got this issue with my boss. My boss is doing this. My boss is doing that." This is what I try and tell them. Look, it doesn't really matter. You know, you gotta get out there in the field and you make some space and then you execute how you execute. You know, I'm not saying you're gonna disobey, but people can't control you. And as long as you're accomplishing the mission, you're finding the best way to do it, you're gonna be fine. So don't get all caught up in exactly what the boss is saying. Let's figure out what the spirit of what the boss is saying. Let's see what they want to get accomplished, and then you go out and make it happen. Because no boss should be telling you something that's

• 9:35Jocko Willink?

  completely out of sync with what your goals are. I mean, damn sure in the military, you shouldn't be getting told something like, "Hey, get your guys killed," or "Give up sensitive information," or "Lose the war." No one's gonna tell you to do that. They're gonna tell you to keep your guys alive. They're gonna tell you to make progress on the battlefield. So when you get that, sort of, when you pull that commander's intent out of people, and you know what it is that they want you to accomplish, go forward and accomplish it. Don't get all caught up in the little details that you might not agree with. They're not gonna make that big of a difference out there.

• 10:14Jocko Willink?

  Now, as I said, this book is actually about the transformation of the 4th Battalion 39th Infantry. So he's flying out, and he talked about this in About Face, and we actually covered it on the podcast. This is a little bit more detail, so I find it to be more, cover some details that's needed. But he's flying out to this battalion, which really was having a hard time. And the guy brought him in, the general brought him in, because they knew that Hackworth was a hard ass, and that he was a good performer, that if anyone could get this battalion turned around, it would be him. So they brought him out there. So now he flies out, and this is his first impression of the base where he's heading.

• 10:57Jocko Willink?

  When I landed, I couldn't believe my eyes or nose. The whole base smelled of raw shit and rotting morale. Toilet paper blew across the chopper pad. Machine gun ammo was buried in the mud. And troops wandered around like zombies, their weapons gone red with rust. These were the sloppiest American soldiers I'd ever seen, bar none. Uncamped, unwashed, unshaven, their uniforms ragged and dirty. Hippie beads dangling alongside their dog tags, their helmets covered with graffiti.

• 11:36Jocko Willink?

  Not exactly what you're looking for in a good, squared away military organization.

• 11:42Jocko Willink?

  Now, one of the guys that he brings in, he brings in one of his guys to be the senior enlisted there to be his, command sergeant major, and it's a guy named Robert Press. And here's what he says about, about Robert Press. "We also served together in the States as well as in Vietnam and our partnership went all the way back to the same unit during Korea. Lean and mean, Press would be my new battalion sergeant major. The non-com's chief ass kicker and new role model." You get a, you get a good impression of what that guy's like. This is a, this is a gunny highway scenario.

• 12:21Jocko Willink?

  And here's what Press had to say about the local, about, about the troops. I, this is from Press. "I looked around and see no one wearing helmets, no one carrying their weapons. Everybody in the CP," that's a command post, "group was sleeping above ground." Sleeping above ground means if they get bombed, they're gonna get killed. "I didn't see a foxhole anywhere. Sir, this outfit stinks worse than we thought."

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  So that's their first impression going into this, obviously, bad, bad situation.

• 12:55Jocko Willink?

  Again, these are draftees and it's even I gotta keep reminding myself myself that too. Because the whole time I was in the military is all volunteer military. And sure, you get some slackers and some knuckleheads, but at least people had volunteered at some point to be there. These people are being pulled against their, I mean, I think you're a better better example of this than me, Echo. Echo, imagine when you were eighteen years old. I mean, when I was eighteen years old, I was already signed up. I was in. Imagine when you were eighteen years old and them coming at you. Where were you when you were eighteen? In the University of Hawaii?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:28Jocko Willink?

  Playing football?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:30Jocko Willink?

  Now, what if they came to you and said, hey, Echo?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  You gotta go to the military.

• 13:33Jocko Willink?

  You have to go in the military. You're going to Vietnam. How would how would you feel about that?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, yeah.

• 13:38Jocko Willink?

  It'd be rough.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:39Jocko Willink?

  And and you as a disciplined football player, that's an athlete. You're gonna be ten steps above someone that's, you know, out on the streets of, you know, hate Ashbury, smoking dope.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:53Jocko Willink?

  But that's who these people were. It's a cross section of America.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 13:56Jocko Willink?

  So sure, you would get some kids that were getting drafted from, you know, Iowa, a farm kid that's like, hey, it's my turn to fight. I'm gonna go do it. And then you're gonna get, you know, you're gonna get every cross section.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  That's the worst, when you just don't wanna be there. Then every word out, like someone telling you what to do or something that, you know, that you gotta go do. Everything, every little thing.

• 14:21Jocko Willink?

  Yes, and you can't have that attitude. You have to shift that. Like when I went through Officer Candidate School, Officer Candidate School is like boot camp, but it's a little longer. And I'd already been in the in the military for eight years when I went to Officer Candidate School. And you know, they're yelling at me about the way my underwear is folded and yelling at me about looking at my food when I'm eating and yelling at me about my about my socks not being rolled upright. So I'm a grown man, been in the SEAL Teams for like eight years at this point. And this happened, you know what I did? Loved it. I said, oh, really? My underwear is not measured four by four inches when it's folded up? I will correct that now and make it four by four inches.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz deep down, couldn't you kind of recognize the value that this is, this is somehow valuable in my goal? But man, if you're there against your will and they're like, do this or whatever, I don't even wanna be here.

• 15:08Jocko Willink?

  You also like you like, I made it into a game. I made it into a game that I played with my full intention of winning. Right. You know, for instance, they make you yell everything at Officer Candidate School. You have to yell every word that you say with the drill instructors or with your friends or whoever. It's not your friends, but with the other candidates, you had to yell everything. Yeah. They call it a ballistic tone. And so I made everyone yell one, because I was the class president. I made everybody yell one hundred percent of the time. So for instance, the upperclassmen had a little closet that they would sell food out of. You know, candy bars and sodas, right? And we had to line up if we wanted to buy something.

• 15:51Jocko Willink?

  So I I told all my people, you know, you, when you go in there, you ma- you maintain your ballistic voice at all times. So they're they're, so my whole class lines up and they're going in and everyone is yelling at the top of their lungs like, I will take one Coca-Cola and one Snickers bar, please, sir. And it it took about ten people going through and finally the upperclassmen came out and they said, hey, you guys, when you come in here, don't be ballistic. And of course, I said, request permission to speak.

• 16:24Jocko Willink?

  You guys are not maintaining the standard of Officer Candidate School. We are supposed to maintain ballistic tone at all times. And they just were looking at me like they wanted to kill me, but they couldn't say anything because I was correct. Yep. So that's the kind of thing. And and and that was a victory for my class, you know, because that was the upperclassmen. That was like a cool victory for the class. Yeah. And everyone was all laughing and fired up, you know, like, we're gonna be so perfect that people are gonna get angry with us. So that that's what I did.

• 16:57Jocko Willink?

  Now, going back to the book here, he kicks this one off. This is directly out of about phase two there. And it's also, well, this one says, there are no bad troops, just bad officers. In the in the book Extreme Ownership by Leif and I, we have a little chapter in there called, No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders. So it's the same thing. And that axiom goes back to Napoleon, who said, you know, no bad regiments, only bad colonels, or something along those lines.

• 17:25Jocko Willink?

  So then he talks a little bit about the guy that was previously in command, a guy by the name of Colonel Lark, and that's a pseudonym, so, but here we go. "After six months under Colonel Lark, the 439th had suffered the equivalent of nearly forty percent casualties without ever meeting a significant enemy force in open combat. Rockets, mortars, booby traps, and friendly fire had done most of the damage." That's, same thing in Iraq, that's what most people were facing in Iraq. Rockers, rockets, mortars, booby traps, which is IEDs, friendly fire, that's where you're getting most of your casualties from.

• 18:07Jocko Willink?

  Of course, in Iraq, it was mostly IEDs, but then mortars, rockets, and then you get your gunfights. You know, blue on blue definitely makes up a section, not a huge section. And, but of course, obviously, it's something that, that we experienced. Back to the book here. "All armies prefer high ground to low and sunny places to dark," Sun Tzu wrote over twenty-five-hundred years ago. "Low ground is not only damp and unhealthy, but also disadvantageous for fighting. If you are careful of your men and camp on hard ground, your army will be free from disease of every kind, and this will spell victory."

• 18:50Jocko Willink?

  I don't think General Wes Moreland or the US commanders running the war in Vietnam knew Sun Tzu from sunny and cher. Then here he talks about what the damaging effects were of being in the low ground. "In just forty-eight hours in soaking jungle boots, foot rot set in. Mosquitoes zapped them with malaria, leeches sucked onto their balls, and even up dicks, and morale vaporized before Charlie fired one shot." Luckily, we've covered Sun Tzu on here, so no, nobody that's listening to the podcast is ever gonna be out there thinking, without thinking about the basic principles that Sun Tzu taught.

• 19:31Jocko Willink?

  Most of the 439th soldiers knew that each time they took a step, they risked the ugliest of wounds. A bullet makes a hole, a chunk of shrapnel may take off an arm, but a mine turns a soldier into a splattered, shrapnel-punctured basket case. Many troopers in the battalion had concluded that waging war consisted of crossing a field, hitting a mine, calling for a medic, patching up the wounded, getting a medevac, then moving out again and hitting another mine. They also did the math and figured out that not many of them would be lucky enough to make it through 365 days it took to rotate home. It's a horrible view of war. You know what we're gonna do?

• 20:15Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna walk around in the bush until we hit a mine. Some of us are gonna get blown up, we're gonna call in a medevac, we're gonna get them out of there the best we can if they're not dead, and then we're gonna keep walking until it happens again. Back to the book. The wounds were vicious. Young men blinded, legs and arms and dicks and balls ripped off, bodies punctured with dozens of bleeding holes. For the VC, mines and booby traps were economy of force weapons, easy to deploy, cheap to produce. Besides causing heavy casualties, they produced a lot of psychological stress. Soldiers never knew when they would lose a foot, a leg, or a life.

• 20:56Jocko Willink?

  And the frustrating part was, there were few ways to fight back. Cause who are you gonna fight against? The bomb goes off, there's no one there, it's a victim-activated IED. Which means, you stepped on a pressure plate, or you pulled a tripwire. Something that you did made it blow up, there's no one to fight against, no one to shoot back at. The tally of, back to the book, the tally of needless death in the 439th was well-established before Colonel Lark took command. Lark's immediate predecessor, a gung-ho lieutenant colonel, drove the troops like indented servants.

• 21:42Jocko Willink?

  One steamy day, a company working its way across a rice paddy was plodding through several feet of water and muck while overhead in the command and control chopper, the Colonel kept screaming faster, go faster. It was never going to happen, the troops were already moving at max speed. In a lather, the Colonel landed, jumping out of his bird, he sprinted to a paddy dike and then leapt on top of it to make his point. A supreme Mekong Delta no-no. And when the almost instantaneous explosion blew him twenty feet in the air and he died immediately and needlessly, the ultimate ego trip. I was told the grunts cheered.

• 22:21Jocko Willink?

  So, the reason I highlighted that is because when we start talking about Hackworth and what he does, you're gonna see that he's gonna, like, the terms he uses here is, uh, gung-ho lieutenant, drove the troops, right? You're gonna hear, you're gonna hear Hackworth doing the same thing, but there's a difference in the way that he does it. He understands what he's doing. He's not just doing it out of ego and out of pressing the guys for no particular reason. And then the other side of the spectrum, you get this guy Lark. When Lark took command, he knew that he had to turn things around and he worked hard

• 23:03Jocko Willink?

  to do so, but with zero combat experience and not enough time with the troops, his good intentions meant less than nothing. Even the basics were ignored. He wore an army green baseball cap instead of a steel pot. Really cool. Except that the troops who followed his model and neglected their helmets wound up in Doc Hollis surgery with their brains running down their necks. He was a, he was into good guy fraternizing to build morale. A well-intentioned notion, but it made for bad news in the field. So you see the two extremes. You get the, the super hardcore guy, that's just a maniac pushing everyone hard, you

• 23:45Jocko Willink?

  must do what I say, and then you, then the next guy comes and he's on the other end of the spectrum. Hey, I'm everybody's buddy, let's, you know, don't worry about wearing a helmet, hey, I know, I know that thing's uncomfortable.

• 24:00Jocko Willink?

  Lark sent his A Company on a three-day sweep of a wood line completely empty of VC, but a ho-chi-min wet dream of booby traps and mines. That was the day Sergeant Tom Aiken lost seventeen of the twenty-nine in his platoon without hearing a single shot.

• 24:24Jocko Willink?

  "All we were doing was tripping booby traps," he recalls, his voice trembling slightly. "There wasn't enemy, there wasn't any enemy in there, no gooks at all. We knew it, but Colonel Lark kept saying, 'Sweep the wood line, sweep the li- wood line.'" More than thirty years later, Aiken made a list of the men in his platoon killed under Lark's command. When he finished writing it, his wife asked him, "How could you remember all those names after all these years?" His answer was simple. "How could I forget them?"

• 25:11Jocko Willink?

  Now here's another incident that takes place just before Hackworth arrives and takes over. The VC had planted an American-made Claymore mine alongside the road. "The world blew up suddenly in smoke and fire," Evans recalls in Doc, Platoon Medic, that's another book, his blood and guts memoir of life with the 439th. "A wall of super-stonic steel balls blasted the passengers, shredding metal and flesh. From the bush, rockets swooshed down, lifting the Jeep and trailer up into an expanding fireball that tossed mangled soldiers all over the road.

• 25:56Jocko Willink?

  Automatic gunfire stitched every square foot of the road as those few GIs still able to ma- made a run for an adjacent water-filled ditch. Those left behind screamed and wailed and cried out. They crawled and pulled themselves around in the middle of the road like crushed bugs with limbs and pieces of their bodies missing."

• 26:22Jocko Willink?

  Teddy Creech used his elbows to claw his way across the road like a mangled worm.

• 26:29Jocko Willink?

  His hands were mutilated beyond recognition. His leg had been severed from the hip, except for a tether of bloody skin and flesh.

• 26:39Jocko Willink?

  The jagged end of the detached bone kept digging into the road and staking him in place.

• 26:46Jocko Willink?

  He fumbled out his knife, and, in the way that a trapped animal will gnaw off his own foot in order to escape, cut himself free of his own leg.

• 27:00Jocko Willink?

  Richard Forte lay with a bullet hole in his belly. His bloated gut signaled heavy internal bleeding. His face was the color of old ivory, and that's something I've seen before where someone's gut shot. There's not a lot of blood coming out of him, but you can see their stomach starts to fill up because they're internally bleeding and they turn super pale. Because it's like they're bleeding out, but they're just bleeding inside of their own stomach and it's really obvious what's happening to them.

• 27:28Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. "It's alright. I'm okay, Doc," he groaned. "Doc, the others, they need you. Go help my buddies, Doc."

• 27:39Jocko Willink?

  "Where did the army get such men?" Evans wondered. Thinking of others when they themselves were dying.

• 27:48Jocko Willink?

  "And what did they get in return?"

• 27:51Jocko Willink?

  "The VC picked us off one by one," he recalls, "one by one, day after day." "The 439th was helpless and demoralized against a superior army of ghosts that could do to us what it wished."

• 28:11Jocko Willink?

  So that's the situation that the 439th was in.

• 28:19Jocko Willink?

  Just an absolute disaster. And can you imagine what the morale is like day after day you're going out? As we just said, going out, walking through the bush, just in order to get blown up.

• 28:34Jocko Willink?

  So... That is when Hackworth comes in to take over and here's the...

• 28:42Jocko Willink?

  Here's the situation when he comes to take command. A scraggly bunch of battalion soldiers assembled for the change of command ceremony. Undisciplined and dispirited, wondering what was gonna happen to them next, they stood like characters in a police lineup where every participant was a perp.

• 29:02Jocko Willink?

  With silver blades gleaming in the sun, a flock of brightly simonized Hueys dropped from the skies over Dizzy, Dizzy is the area where they're staying. One by one, starched army brass with an entourage of photographers strutted across the LZ. General Yule, leading the way, their fatigues pressed, their sleeves precisely rolled up above their elbows into four inch folds, their shoes polished to grade ground perfection. To the grunts, they must have looked like aliens from outer space. I stood soldier straight and watched those from on high pay absolutely no attention to the assembled troops.

• 29:47Jocko Willink?

  The men from their battalion, their division. For them, the boys on the line were beside the point. More pawns to be ignored. It disgusted me. In the 9th Division, the gap between the brass and the grunts looked unbridgeable.

• 30:10Jocko Willink?

  So if you remember, Hackworth was a grunt. He, he came as an enlisted guy. He was a junior army person and he came up through the ranks. So when he sees this behavior of these senior leaders, which he already knows that they're back with miniature golf courses and pools, and now he sees them show up, they're in their starched camis, they're looking all perfect, and they don't even pay attention to these troopers. Even if they were to say, "Look, you guys look like crap. What is wrong with you? Get it together." Even if they were to say that, at least it'd be, it'd be recognition.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:46Jocko Willink?

  But to just ignore them.

• 30:54Jocko Willink?

  So he takes over and he says, "Time for shock therapy. As I, as planned, I fired the incompetent S3, that's the operations officer, and the heavy drop battalion sergeant on the spot and replaced them with Bumstead and Press." Those, one of the guys I talked about earlier, Press, and Bumstead's one of Hackworth's other kind of prodigies. "A thousand other changes needed to be made, but I didn't want to bury the company commanders or our staff on the first day together. If I ordered all shortcomings squared away immediately, I'd have sent these leaders into overload, blown all their circuits. No one would have gotten to anything right.

• 31:37Jocko Willink?

  So I approached this conversation from slackness to soldiering the same way I'd train a pup, just a few tricks at a time. "Starting now, starting now, we're gonna follow the two-rule plan," I said. "I'll tell you what the two new rules are and you make them happen. Once your troops have mastered the first two rules, we'll add two more and we'll keep doing that until we're squared away. First, we'll crawl, then we'll walk, and then we'll run. Just stay with me, because we're gonna run faster and faster every day." They shot me a "prove it" look. So you can see Hack, he's going into a little prioritize and execute, right? He knows that people can't, he's not gonna change everything immediately.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  He's gotta do it in some steps. And that's the same thing you do with any, any situation that you face where you've got multiple problems that are, that you're looking at. You can't, you can't change them all at once. You can't fix them all at once. You pick the biggest problems, you start with those.

• 32:37Jocko Willink?

  And here he's starting to establish himself and his men and his and his leadership team as to what their attitude was with the troops. A few days later, after finding a very small soldier who told me his feet were killing him because he couldn't get any boots to fit him, they were all too big. I had a little conversation with the good S4. S4 is the supply element uh uh in the military, in the army. Hack went ballistic, Johnson recalls. He chewed out his chain of command from his squad leader to his company commander, and then he got a hold of me. He made it very clear that I better get that man a pair of boots, or all kinds of horrible things were gonna happen to me. The army did not make a men's boot small enough to fit this little guy. We scavenged

• 33:19Jocko Willink?

  the country and found a pair of women's boots that fit the bill. This taught us all an important lesson. That Hack cared for the lowest of soldiers, and he expected his commanders and staff to damn well look after them.

• 33:37Jocko Willink?

  This is how Hack goes on a campaign to change people. The little things build up.

• 33:47Jocko Willink?

  Now, he's continuing. He's starting to tighten things up more. "I finished my first session with a set of orders that stunned the commanders." "Here's the drill," I told them. "We're shrinking the perimeter tonight. I want you to recon your new positions. When it gets dark, each company will pull back. You'll maintain your old positions with half your force, and by midnight, I want those holes filled in. I want nothing left that the enemy can use, particularly holes that the VC can hop into if they attack. All your people will be at 100% stand to, ready to fight in the new positions by midnight. I expect total light and noise discipline. Remember, nothing happens, other than reconning, until after dark."

• 34:33Jocko Willink?

  You've gotta, you've gotta always remember that the enemy's out there in the bush watching our every move. And he's always looking for a weak spot to knock your cock stiff and close down the show. "You call me at midnight from the new positions." Midnight, understood? The commanders went out to brief their troops. My orders went down like an iron kite.

• 34:56Jocko Willink?

  Preparing a fighting position is hard sweaty work. Moving a fighting position is even more of a bitch because you have to fill in the old hole before digging in again. It sucks in any circumstances.

• 35:09Jocko Willink?

  They hated my guts.

• 35:12Jocko Willink?

  And now he does the same thing with his, with the, with the leadership element. Which works in the, what's called the TAC, the Tactical Operations Center. He says, "And all the TAC personnel, regardless of rank, were ordered to dig in individual foxholes around it. They'd live there when not on duty. My TAC order had a two-fold purpose. Having a bunkered command post made it much harder for Charlie to take out the battalion ops center with a one well-directed round, which remarkably, he hadn't already done. And if Charlie hammered the battalion with incoming fire or penetrated our outer line, we'd have an inner perimeter of staff we need to hold off the enemy while we fought the good fight and called in supporting fires.

• 35:56Jocko Willink?

  Plus, the staff would be setting a positive example for all the line soldiers. We'd live exactly like the grunts. We'd sleep on the ground like Stonewall Jackson did during the Civil War. No one would have a plush deal anymore."

• 36:13Jocko Willink?

  Common theme, we've heard that one before.

• 36:18Jocko Willink?

  Then that night, so after they pull their perimeter back? And they've cha, basically changed their positions to what the enemy saw during the day, during the day the enemy saw where they were, once the, once it got dark, they moved to new positions, they dug in, they filled in their old holes. Night comes and guess what? They get attacked. Mortar rounds, recoilless rifle, rifle fire, machine gun fire. "An RPG round screamed in, Chum Roberts recalls. Then all hell broke loose. Strobe lights, they'd just become an SOP at HAC's commanders meeting that afternoon, flipped on around the perimeter. The VC were hitting us hard, but we were ready now. Wow, I thought. Stay close to this guy and you'll be alright."

• 37:02Jocko Willink?

  Then another guy, that hack overheard as they're getting this attack and they survive it and they do well. No one gets injured. He hears a guy say, "He's a mean son of a bitch, but he knows what he's doing." Again, this is part of the campaign.

• 37:19Jocko Willink?

  Dawn, back to the book. Dawn was breaking and press walked the perimeter. "Sir, some of the troops are saying that you have your shit together," he reported. "They're talking about how you pulled them back." "Maybe I'd made a few converts that night, "but I knew I was a long way from convincing the grunts that they could hit Charlie harder than he was hitting them." "Over the next four weeks, I talked to every swinging dick in the battalion. "I told all the soldiers, all the sergeants, all the lieutenants and captains in each platoon and company, "what was expected of them and why we were going to be the best."

• 37:57Jocko Willink?

  So, so just to reiterate what he just did. He's going around and personally talking to all the leadership and all the soldiers, everyone, personally talking to them all and telling them what was expected of them and why they were going to be the best.

• 38:15Jocko Willink?

  This stuff just doesn't happen. You have to make it happen when you're in a leadership position. Back to the book. "When I spoke to the troops, "I promised I'd take care of their butts and be right out there with them when things got hot. "I wanted to get it into their heads that by stealing a page from the enemy's book, "we could take the war to Charlie rather than waiting for him to strike."

• 38:41Jocko Willink?

  Now he talks a little bit about the VC. He says, "The VC were very detailed planners, "but strict adherence to their plan was also their Achilles heel. "They almost always stuck to the scenario even when things turned to shit."

• 38:58Jocko Willink?

  So, that's great. You're a good planner. That's great. You came up with a really solid plan. But when things start going sideways and you maintain that plan, "you don't make any adaptations, you're going to get crushed." And that was, he's saying, the VC's biggest weakness.

• 39:16Jocko Willink?

  I also had all our leaders read a pamphlet of combat rules and tips from articles I'd written that I put together as the Battalion Combat Leaders Guide. I wanted them to get in their heads both how Charlie fought and thought, and how I fought and thought. I wanted to build an offensive team to make Charlie react to us instead of calling the shots as he was doing all over Vietnam. I stressed how we'd find him by being hardcore and agile, using stealth and cunning, and how we could turn his very own tactics against him.

• 39:52Jocko Willink?

  Then that's, I breezed over this, but the other things that he had all these people read was Mao's Little Red Book, which was the communist, you know, sort of manifesto about fighting. And then Vietnam Primer, which is another book that Hackworth put together. So he'd have everybody, he was educating the troops, he was educating the leadership, not just on how he was gonna do things, but on how the enemy thought. And this is a rehash from About Face, but let's just go ahead and rehash it.

• 40:33Jocko Willink?

  I brought back saluting, a sign of military discipline that had been swallowed up by the rice paddy mud. Then I added a twist. When a soldier saluted, I required him to sound off with a loud hardcore recondo, sir, to which the officer would reply, "No fucking slack." The salute, discipline aside, also built unit pride. The name recondo, a combination of reconnaissance and infantry doughboy, came from the rugged, hands-on training of the 101st Airborne Division practiced at Fort Campbell, training modeled after the British Commando and American Ranger courses.

• 41:14Jocko Willink?

  Hank Emerson had named the first brigade the Ricondo Brigade to make the unit feel elite, like an airborne outfit. Hitchhiking on this idea, I named the 439th, the Hardcore Ricondos. Bob Press hired a machine shop in Saigon to make small black metal Ricondo arrowhead pins, which the men quickly began wearing. We painted the Ricondo insignia on the sides of our helmets and on all of our vehicles just below the windshield, along with a large, white Hardcore. We painted the same insignia on company and battalion signs at the firebases and back at our rear area in Dong Tam.

• 41:55Jocko Willink?

  We also had sharp-looking Hardcore Ricondo Stationery printed up and gave it to the troops, and all outgoing mail was stamped with the Ricondo logo. All of this said, "We're different. We're not just plain old infantry, we're the best. Hardcore Ricondos." We drove the point home that in infantry combat, the team, the squad, platoon, and company was the primary instrument and inspiration. We stressed pride in itself, pride in unit, and never let a buddy down. Rifle company designations were changed from the conventional Alpha, Bravo, Charlie,

• 42:37Jocko Willink?

  and Delta to Alert, Battle, Claymore, and Dagger, which went down as Mickey Mouse until the troops got into it and began to think it was very cool. Now that's something that I completely ripped off, emulated, stole from Hackworth when I was a task unit commander, and the, you know, the designations for the task units are Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta sometimes. Sometimes Delta, when I was in it was Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. And so, obviously, I said, "We're not going to be Bravo." We were assigned the name Bravo, but we immediately changed that to Bruiser.

• 43:25Jocko Willink?

  And then we lived that way.

• 43:30Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, hardcore soldiers wouldn't look like bums anymore either. They'd shave every day, wear their gear properly, and always be in camouflage when on ops. And the leaders made it happen by setting the example and being hard but fair. This was all viewed as chicken shit at first. And I was considered to quote Doc Holly, "The original G.I. Joe lifer sent from hell to burn their hides with fire and brimstone." So, if you don't know this, lifer, the term lifer in the military, especially during Vietnam, you know, that's the opposite of a draft, you know, a draftee that does, just wants to do his time and get out. The opposite of that is a lifer.

• 44:14Jocko Willink?

  Someone that's totally into it, someone that's totally gung ho and fired up. And they call him the original G.I. Joe lifer.

• 44:24Jocko Willink?

  As Claymore Company's Jim Robertson put it in a February letter to his parents, "Our new Colonel is nuts. It would take a week to tell you all the nutty things he's done, so I'll make it short. Line companies are offering $1,600 for his dead body. He won't last long, he'll get zapped, he's stark raving mad."

• 44:51Jocko Willink?

  "Nobody liked Hack," Alert Company's Tom Aiken recalls. "I remember the guys from B Company talking about, 'We're gonna kill the son of a bitch and we're gonna put a bounty on him.'" "And I'm telling you the truth, if I've ever told it in my life, I turned around and glanced at one of them said, at one of them, and I said, 'I'll throw in the first $20.'"

• 45:13Jocko Willink?

  "But each time they saluted, they gave themselves a little subconscious commercial of brainwashing that they were hardcore, and after a while, I knew they'd begin to believe they were the meanest mothers in Vietnam." "The men of soon to be Hardcore Battalion hadn't seen anything yet. Threats or no threats, I continued to issue them a d- daily, basic, brown shoe, army ass kicking, and tightened both the discipline and standards more and more." Of all the many traits needed to survive and win on the battlefield, discipline is number one. Without absolute discipline, you lose.

• 45:51Jocko Willink?

  And these guys still had virtually none. And again, I gotta point out that the original, remember the original guy that was super hardcore and trying to impose this discipline? It's very similar to what Hacks doing. Very similar. The difference being, number one, he cares about the guys. And they just haven't seen that yet. They don't understand that the discipline that he's teaching them is gonna keep them alive. And when they recognize that mentally, he knows he's just gotta push that through that point. He's not making them do things just to make them do not, he's not ma, he's not using

• 46:35Jocko Willink?

  discipline just to be authoritarian and prove that he can make them do it. That's not his goal, that's not what he's doing. He truly is, he's the reason he's trying to impose discipline on them is to keep them alive because he cares about those guys.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:50Jocko Willink?

  And it's gonna take a little bit of time for them to recognize it, but once they recognize it, they're gonna be on board. Here's what he told his, uh, battalion leaders. The, the leadership inside the battalion. "If you take care of your soldiers, they'll take care of you." According to Battle Company's Lieutenant Carl Olson, an OCS draftee who was sharp as a Hinson custom knife. "The rules were simple. Check weapons, check feet, show that you care, and let the troops know if we get into deep shit, help will be on the way."

• 47:31Jocko Willink?

  "I used every second, every day to train and instill discipline, beginning with something as basic as making sure every man wore his steel pot and carried his weapons at all times."

• 47:44Jocko Willink?

  We trained in the firebase, we trained on the ambush patrol, we trained sweeping a large patch of jungle, we trained searching for Charlie. I stress to all the unit leaders that all of the drills must be executed over and over again until they become automatic. I wanted these soldiers to roll into a firing position or take counter ambush action even in their sleep. Close combat allows little time to think. Do it right in training and you'll do it right when the incoming slugs flash by. Training and discipline, discipline and training.

• 48:25Jocko Willink?

  The men groaned and moaned, but sacrificing and suffering together gave them pride in taking all that crazy bastard could throw at us, as Lieutenant Toller described it. So now you're starting to get them unified a little bit just in fighting against the man, you know, against Hackworth. That's very similar to what happens in boot camp or in officer candidate school. The drill instructor or the drill sergeant sort of becomes the enemy that you're fighting against. You know, you want to, you want to, you want to beat him.

• 49:07Jocko Willink?

  You don't want him to find dirt, you want your room to be squared away, you want the platoon to be squared away. And so you start to unify as a team, but the only reason you're unifying as a team is because there's someone to unify against.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Right. Is that on purpose?

• 49:21Jocko Willink?

  Kind of, yeah. Yeah. And then eventually you realize that he's doing, it's the same thing that's being talked about here. Eventually you realize that he's doing this to make you a better person and make your unit stronger.

• 49:36Jocko Willink?

  Hot Chow, routine under Lark, was now a blurred memory from softer days. My idea of looking after the troops was not to spoon-feed them, but to make them as hard as forged steel, deadly in their kill-or-be-killed trade. Eating sea rations, everyone knew could easily, everyone knew hot food could easily be flown in, made the point better than ten lectures. The ways of the past were over, that's something I didn't talk about, Lark would fly, would have hot food delivered on a daily basis. And there's risk, and there'd be convoys that would get blown up in Hackworth, no. We're gonna eat field food.

• 50:21Jocko Willink?

  The ways of the past were over, stay alert and stay alive. You can't make a unit proud by praising it, and you can't make a soldier proud by telling him how tough or good he is. That's superficial stuff. No pain, no gain, they had to earn it. The standard was perfection. And not just for the grunts, all the battalion support personnel, cooks, clerks, supply, drivers, were to be soldiers first.

• 50:59Jocko Willink?

  Important stuff. Your unit doesn't become good just by you telling them that they're good. In fact, I always think that sets them back. You're good to go, oh, you're doing great.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Cause they get that little bit of satisfaction there.

• 51:12Jocko Willink?

  They get the satisfaction, and their ego starts to think, "I'm doing great."

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:16Jocko Willink?

  "I'm doing great, yeah, I don't need to train as hard."

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Right, even, just for one day, you know, they, "I'm doing great, I'm ahead of the game or whatever."

• 51:24Jocko Willink?

  Take a little day off.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:26Jocko Willink?

  Not good a plan.

• 51:30Jocko Willink?

  Regardless of my heavy schedule, I made sure to talk to every replacement to welcome them to the hardcore before they went out to their units. At night, I'd come back from operations late and Sergeant Major Press would have the replacements assembled and waiting. I stretched to each new man how important he was, how important it was to follow the basic fundamentals of the infantryman's trade. With the zeal of evangelist, all hardcore leaders drilled into new guys that when they joined the hardcore, they were joining a special brotherhood. I made the code for the, these leaders, simple and clear. Fight smart. Never be in a hurry. Lead from up front. Set the examples.

• 52:14Jocko Willink?

  Take care of the truth before you take care of yourself. Keep the good commo going. Follow the Vietnam Primer and the Battalion Combat Leaders Guide. That's it. Simple, clear instructions for his leadership. Many combat vets come to think they know it all and start taking shortcuts. They blow off the basics and neglect the little things that keep them alive because they get cocky or think it's better for their men's morale. They build a fire at dusk, smoke at night, walk on trails, don't carry their weapons,

• 52:57Jocko Willink?

  goof off on security, don't safe their grenades or weapons, wear mosquito repellent on ambush or patrol, don't send out flank security on operations. Shortcuts get you killed. The troops continued to bitch, but that changed when they saw the tough love was for real. One day, Murdner, one of his leadership, one day Murdner saw a soldier wearing jungle boots with the toes worn out and immediately gave him his own, a pair of his own, which happened to be the right size. The story spread like wildfire. Finally, someone cared. Not long afterward, Murdner went down in the CNC chopper to pick up a wounded soldier,

• 53:41Jocko Willink?

  a soldier wounded by a mine. As the medic slipped the wounded man on the chopper floor, he looked up at Murdner, grinned, saluted, and said, "Hardcore recondo, sir."

• 53:54Jocko Willink?

  A new gung ho attitude started to take hold.

• 54:04Jocko Willink?

  And that's the opening of the book and then you get into the combat that they went through, which was

• 54:15Jocko Willink?

  just a great, great stories and lessons you can learn from understanding the tactics that they used, the leadership, the pressure situations that they went through.

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  And it's definitely a book that you should get and read. So you can absorb all that information. But I'm gonna go to the end of the book, to the afterword. And it's something that Hack wrote, basically, right after he had got done.

• 54:51Jocko Willink?

  Right after he got done being the battalion commander and he'd let him through a bunch of combat. He changed him from the hopeless to the hardcore. It's a fantastic display of leadership.

• 55:05Jocko Willink?

  Then it's, you know, it's like the boat crew story in our book. You know, when they changed the boat crews from the boat crew six team is in the last place in all the races and boat crew two is winning all the races and they just switched the leaders and all of a sudden, boat crew six starts winning the races. It's the same thing here. You have a battalion that's horrible, that's one of the worst, that's got the worst record in Vietnam. And sure enough, you put in a new leader and they become the best battalion in Vietnam. Leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield.

• 55:38Jocko Willink?

  So from that experience, he goes into this.

• 55:46Jocko Willink?

  I could never figure out army logic. The command of an infantry or tank platoon is the most demanding and dangerous job in the armed forces, yet the army's senior brass consistently fail to recognize this reality and provide lieutenants with practical, hands-on training they need. As a result, platoons too frequently wind up under the command of the least qualified, most inexperienced leaders in the military. The average infantry lieutenant who joined hardcore in 1969 was simply not prepared to lead a rifle platoon. Because the army's approach to training had failed to ready him for the reality of combat in Vietnam, he was extremely weak in troop leading,

• 56:29Jocko Willink?

  practical knowledge, and small unit combat operations. And was almost without actual field experience. The old saying, "Good judgment comes from experience and experienced is gained from bad judgment", was certainly applicable in the hardcore. And this is something that if you're a leader, in a leadership position, you have to let your subordinates lead and you have to let them exercise their judgment and you've got to let them see the consequences of bad judgment. If you don't, they're never gonna learn.

• 57:06Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, besides technical and tactical incompetence, the next biggest shortcomings of new infantry leader replacements were a failure to be demanding and a reluctance to ensure that their men carried out the basics that would keep them alive on the battlefield.

• 57:23Jocko Willink?

  Lack of discipline. One of the reasons for these deficiencies was that many of the social values were diametrically opposed to what's expected of a combat leader. To take a single case in point, I had to constantly deal with a civilian-instilled value that drastically conflicts with the combat leadership principle: popularity.

• 57:49Jocko Willink?

  By the time these young men entered the army, they'd been brainwashed for at least 20 years about the importance of being a nice guy. After four years of college, ROTC, Military Academy Training, or about a year of basic infantry and OCS, they were supposed to be well-prepared leaders who always placed the welfare of their troops just below the accomplishment of the mission. Wrong. The average new lieutenant who joined the hardcore had an almost Pavlovian instinct for being popular. So the definition of welfare was up for grabs. Because he had to be a good guy, he'd become a joiner instead of an enforcer. Instead of a leader.

• 58:33Jocko Willink?

  Become part of the pack. Need to step up and be a leader. In Vietnam, good guys let their people smoke at night and take portable radios to the field. Good guys allowed night ambushes to be set up in abandoned hooches so they wouldn't get wet and left only one guard by the door so everyone else could get a good night's rest. They let their men leave their boots on for several days and didn't inspect their feet, resulting in immersion foot. They didn't make sure their men kept their weapons and magazines perfectly clean or protected themselves against mosquitoes or took their required material, uh, malaria pills.

• 59:17Jocko Willink?

  Good guy lieutenants ended up killing their men with kindness. And you gotta ask yourself, even, I mean, this is, you know, we're talking about combat here, but if you're in a leadership position in a business and you're not helping your troops by enforcing, by teaching, by holding the line, by disciplining them, if you're in charge of a group of people and you're not doing that, you're, they're not gonna perform the way they're supposed to perform. They're not gonna, then that means your business isn't gonna perform the way your business is supposed to perform. That means your business is gonna go down. So you're actually gonna take the job away from the person because you're not gonna be able to afford to pay them anymore.

• 1:00:00Jocko Willink?

  So because you didn't hold the line, because you wanted to be nice, because you wanted to be a good guy...

• 1:00:06Jocko Willink?

  You're, you're actually doing the worst thing for them. You're killing them with kindness.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Right. Is that kinda like how, how you said, um, something about your kids? Like if I'm helping them on the third day?

• 1:00:15Jocko Willink?

  If I'm helping them, I'm hurting them.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:00:17Jocko Willink?

  That's very similar.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Jocko Willink?

  Cause if you're, if you're letting your, let's say you've got salespeople and you say, oh, you know what? Don't worry about making some phone calls today.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:25Jocko Willink?

  You know what? I don't wanna push you too hard. Would, would you rather just go for lunch with me? Would that be nice? Would that make me a good guy?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  What should the, what should you be doing if you're a good leader? Should be saying, look, get on the phone. You got bills to pay. You got a mortgage to pay. You got kids you wanna send to college? Get on the phone and start dialing. Make it happen. Let's go. Let's do this.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:45Jocko Willink?

  Are you, are you a better leader if you do that? If you go, well, let's just go ahead and go to lunch?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. I understand you're not in the mood. I know how that feels. Yeah. Let's go eat lunch and have a laugh.

• 1:00:55Jocko Willink?

  That's a great, a great twist on that term of killing people with kindness. Cause I actually use that, you know, when someone's being a jerk. Oh, what should you do? I always say, oh yeah, no, kill them with kindness. And I literally mean it. But this is a different way of doing it.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's obviously a whole different thing. It's just the same phrase.

• 1:01:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Jocko Willink?

  While the, back to the book, while the run-of-the-mill lieutenants had a vague idea of what was required, he didn't have the experience or good sense to enforce the rules. When push came to shove, he preferred to turn his head the other way rather than come down hard on slackers. He overlooked deficiencies such as dirty weapons and ammunition, improperly safe weapons and grenade, incorrect camouflage technique and the improper use of terrain, not using natural cover to provide protection from small arms fire. And without an ass-kicking company skipper or demanding NCO, the soldier's habits became sloppier and sloppier.

• 1:01:54Jocko Willink?

  Carelessness ruled. And of course, the result was casualties that could have been prevented had the lieutenant demanded the small things be done well.

• 1:02:04Jocko Willink?

  My own experience has been that soldiers in combat will do only what's required of them.

• 1:02:11Jocko Willink?

  Under weak, nice guy leadership, they'll try to get away with everything they can, violate every basic rule in the book. At the same time, because they know they're wrong, and that this behavior is placing their lives in jeopardy, they'll respond to the demands of a positive ass-kicking leader. The result will be fewer casualties and developing respect for the leader who cares enough for his men to make them do it right.

• 1:02:41Jocko Willink?

  So that's important to think about. This is not... Some people hear this kind of talk that I'm saying, and all of a sudden they want to turn into a super, hyper-aggressive person that's going berserk on everybody and trying to enforce every little...

• 1:02:55Jocko Willink?

  Every little order and every little discipline so hard that it breaks the guys down. And again, that's why I focused on that in the beginning. That guy, the first guy was super hardcore. You could imagine that. He probably had people saluting him in the field too. He probably, you know, was, "Hey, you come to attention when I walk in the room." He was probably super hardcore on stuff, but it was stuff that didn't matter. It wasn't the important stuff. And so there's a fine line, and he makes a great, a great point here of pointing out that your troops, they know what's right. They know that you're there to help them. They're gonna take the easiest way possible. But when you actually step up and lead, and you explain to them why this is important, and you explain to them why this is, why this is gonna keep them alive, and why it's gonna make the company more successful,

• 1:03:41Jocko Willink?

  then you will actually get traction. And you will get loyalty. Because when you keep these guys alive, they become loyal to you. When you get your salesperson to, to sell more and do more, they're gonna be loyal to you. When you get your manufacturing team to produce more and do it faster, they're because you push them a little bit harder, they're gonna respect you. They're gonna thank you.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:04:07Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna follow you.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Yep, yeah, it's that, that's um, it's real clear there where when you show them some results, they'll, you know, they'll, back to that, remember that movie The Boiler Room I brought up before?

• 1:04:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  So he said, he'd mentioned something along those lines where he's like, show them a small return and they'll, I don't know, I forget what he said, like they'll give you their firstborn or something like that. Same thing, you show them just a little bit of results, like um, like Karate Kid, remember Karate Kid, when he's making them so?

• 1:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, wax on, wax off.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he's making them do that, he's making them sand the floor, paint the fence, all this stuff, he's mad, but he, he starts off with a little bit of trust in him, you know, cause he, he saw him, you know, he's a Karate guy, and then when he saw the results, he was like, oh man, Mr. You know, Mr. And he.

• 1:04:56Jocko Willink?

  Mr. Miyagi.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Mr. Miyagi was real, he was real loyal to him.

• 1:04:59Jocko Willink?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Same thing.

• 1:05:05Jocko Willink?

  Another, back to the book, another serious shortcoming was the failure to teach leaders the importance of supervision and the techniques of supervising. The average small unit leader in 1969 seemed to take for granted that his will would be done and that he didn't have to follow up.

• 1:05:25Jocko Willink?

  You gotta follow up, you gotta inspect. Especially in the beginning till you get the tone right, till people understand what it's about, what you're about as a leader.

• 1:05:39Jocko Willink?

  The nature of combat in the Mekong Delta and how we operated in the hardcore greatly extended this problem because small units normally operate on a widely decentralized basis in bitching terrain. This restricted regular visits from the company and battalion leaders prohibiting more experienced senior officers and NCOs from checking the platoons and passing along tips of the trade.

• 1:06:03Jocko Willink?

  Without an experienced, demanding leader, these carelessly led platoons were headed for a world of hurt. The infrequency of heavy combat compared to World War II or Korea in 1950 and 51, and the prevalent "all is cool" attitude, had a tendency to lull soldiers and leaders into a false sense of safety. The more alertness and security went slack, the greater the danger of an enemy attack became. We played right into the enemy's hands, as Sun Tzu put it so well. When the enemy is weak, attack.

• 1:06:44Jocko Willink?

  So in World War II in Korea, you know, 50 and 51 in Korea, they were fighting so often that everyone knew they had to be squared away. But here, you might go some time, you know, nothing happened yesterday, nothing happened the day before, nothing's happened for the last week, maybe I don't need to clean my weapon tonight, maybe I don't need to dig into a new fighting position, maybe I don't need to wear my body armor.

• 1:07:08Jocko Willink?

  You do.

• 1:07:12Jocko Willink?

  I had to inculcate the hardcore leaders with the burning need to keep their people alert and never let down their guard. I had to instill in them the need to supervise the troops 24 hours a day to make sure that the fighting positions were adequate. Soldiers knew the mission, the situation where the LPs were, proper field sanitation was being practiced, all battlefield debris was destroyed to deny the enemy a source of supply. The troops were all sleeping undercover and protected from first-round hits and fire support bases or camps. Subordinate leaders were heads up and demanding that their men were alert and tightly controlled. And never-ending list of the little things.

• 1:07:58Jocko Willink?

  Rifle magazines cleaned, weapons test fired, grenades safe, LPs and claymores out, sectors of fire known, salt tablets, malaria pills, jungle rot, all monitored by the medics, stand twos frequently conducted.

• 1:08:14Jocko Willink?

  I had to get every leader to follow this adage. The best fertilizer in the world is the boss's footsteps. They make things grow. So just, I mean, that was just a giant list of all the little things. And you know, we talked about this when we talked about Chechnya. And some of the lessons learned there and how it all started to fall apart for the Russians when the when the guys stopped shaving. And this is the same thing that Hackworth is saying. You gotta hold the line on the little things. And I will tell you this. You need to hold the line. And you need to hold the line by explaining to the troops why it's important. You can't expect just to say, hey, I told you to clean your weapon.

• 1:09:00Jocko Willink?

  Because if I'm not coming back for another week. You know that. You're gonna clean it on the sixth day. One time. What happens if you get contacted on the fifth day? And your weapon's not working now. So I gotta explain to you, hey, look, this is what's going on. This is why it's important. You could get contacted at any time. You need to have your weapon ready at all time. Most important thing to me, Echo. Look, I wanna take you home. I want you to get home to your family. And the only thing that's gonna keep you alive in a firefight is this weapon you have right here. And although we may go two days, three days, five days, five weeks. Without getting in a firefight, we don't know if it's gonna happen in the next thirty seconds. So you gotta keep that weapon ready so you're ready at the moment of truth. You understand what I'm talking about?

• 1:09:46Jocko Willink?

  That's when you explain people why they're doing what they're doing. Because now you say, that's gonna be back in the back of your head.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:55Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna be thinking like, you know what? Jocko told me I better get this thing cleaned. This is important.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:00Jocko Willink?

  If I wanna stay alive, I need to keep this weapon cleaned. Boom. Guess what you're gonna do? Break out your field cleaning kit and you're gonna get it done.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Clean your room. Why? Cause I said so.

• 1:10:10Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, not gonna work. Not gonna work.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Jocko Willink?

  Not gonna work. You know what? It'll work for, for two days. You know?

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:10:22Jocko Willink?

  Maybe.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  I can do the bare minimum.

• 1:10:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you might do the bare minimum slack.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Jocko Willink?

  Just do a little bit. But if you explain to people why, I mean, in your room, why you gotta clean your room? You know what? I have guests coming over, the R family. It needs to be represented well. If you're looking like a slob and I have one of my clients come by and they see that my own kids can't be disciplined enough to clean their room? And you think they're gonna hire me to come straighten out their company? No, wrong answer.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Brush your teeth, that's a big one.

• 1:10:54Jocko Willink?

  Get out the rug. Get, get out the vacuum and get that thing cleaned.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, when you tell your kids, "Go brush your teeth when they're young," you know?

• 1:11:01Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  "Go brush your teeth." "Oh, they don't wanna brush their teeth." Like, why? Your teeth will fall out.

• 1:11:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta show them the nasty dental pictures. People that don't brush their teeth and see how that turns out for them.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Jocko Willink?

  And then you tell them, you know, "That's what you're gonna look like." When they're five years old, then they, then they turn into like, uh, obsessive compulsive with teeth brushes. So use caution. Use the medium level of, uh, of nasty looking teeth rot. Just the medium level. Don't find the crystal meth people that, that have their teeth falling out. Don't show them that. It's a little too extreme. They'll, they'll brush their teeth too much.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Jocko Willink?

  Just find the cavity situations.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Or just tell them, you know, I don't know.

• 1:11:43Jocko Willink?

  Just tell them what?

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  That their teeth are gonna rot out if you don't brush them.

• 1:11:47Jocko Willink?

  The kids are visual, most of the time.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Do you want your teeth to rot out? They'll say no.

• 1:11:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 1:11:56Jocko Willink?

  Maybe that could work. We'll check out the dental hygienics here in a few years on the, on the children's.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Jocko Willink?

  We'll make a decision. Back to the book. "The principle was to learn so that we didn't keep making the same mistakes again and again. To do this, we copied the VC technique of ruthlessly examining every operation. An ex- exercise that was a lot easier for the VC because they weren't as rigid about rank as we were. When rank rules, people say yes, sir, when they should say no fucking way."

• 1:12:31Jocko Willink?

  I wanted to instill a particular cert of insubordination. Don't get me wrong, when I told the men to do something, I wanted it done, but I also wanted an atmosphere where no one would be afraid to sound off and speak the truth. This is the dichotomy, this is the balance. You don't want, and even Hackworth, as strict as he was, and he wanted everyone to do all these, to keep all these small things, he wanted them to have a rebellionist-ness in them. To say, "You know what, Hack, I don't think we're doing this wrong." Or, "You know what, Hack, I think that's the wrong way to do it." Or, "You know what, Hack, I think you should have pushed us over there, or left us back over here." Or, "We're not gonna do this, it's stupid." That's what he wants.

• 1:13:15Jocko Willink?

  And that's something that a lot of military people have a hard time with. Cause they get offended by someone of junior rank stepping up to them and saying, "Hey, boss, this is wrong." You can't have that attitude. You've got to welcome and encourage people to check you and test you and question you. That's what you want.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, when they take it personal.

• 1:13:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  That's, that's pretty much it, when they take it personal. Like, he stepped to me. He didn't step to like, the order, or the, you know, the little scenario that I painted. He stepped to me with it. Unacceptable.

• 1:13:51Jocko Willink?

  Ego, yeah. Check your ego. Back to the book. After every operation, we'd sit down at the squad, platoon, and company level and work up a detailed critique that spared no harsh words. It was, "Tom, you had your machine gun in the wrong firing position." "Bill, you're right, you're, you triggered the ambush early." "Hank, your go-to-hell plan sucked." War is so simple, yet the military school system tries to make it so damn complicated. Probably, they need to promulgate a mystique in order to protect their turf. But the bare bones, bottom line to winning in battle is simply to sneak up on your opponent

• 1:14:33Jocko Willink?

  and belt the shit out of him from behind as hard and quickly as you can, before he figures out you're in the neighborhood. And then beat it the hell out of there. We should train our small units in, not in the classroom, but in the bush, where warriors can be taught the gut fundamentals of infantry combat.

• 1:14:54Jocko Willink?

  Rommel said, "The best form of welfare for the troops is first-class training, for this saves unnecessary casualties." First-class training means hard work and sacrifice. General Bruce Clark's adage, "The more we sweat on the training field, the less we bleed on the battlefield," is one I've followed ever since I was a teenager, and I'm convinced it keeps the casualty list short. Everybody knows those two. Does everybody follow them? Not always. Not always.

• 1:15:35Jocko Willink?

  You see it with the military, with police, with fire, with salespeople. Are you putting your troops through realistic training? That's hard, and making them sweat, and making them think. Are you doing that? You need to. Cadets and new leaders who show ineptitude and little leadership ability, such as that walking atrocity Lieutenant William Calley of the My Lai massacre infamy, should be immediately eliminated. And I left this in here, because this is an important part. William Calley, he's the guy that did the horrible massacre of My Lai in Vietnam. Murdered a bunch of civilians.

• 1:16:20Jocko Willink?

  Calley was recycled three times at Infantry OCS after being found wanting in leadership before finally being commissioned in order to show a low attrition rate to higher headquarters. A bad mistake with big consequences. They had a guy, they knew he was a weak leader. He was showing weak leadership in his position, going through Officer Candidate School. And what do they do? They recycle him three times. So he failed three times, they keep pushing him through, keep pushing him through, keep pushing him through, they finally make him through, he goes out and commits a horrible atrocity. Because he's a weak leader. You cannot lower the standards.

• 1:17:04Jocko Willink?

  More than any major enemy victory, the shame and horror of My Lai caused the American people to withdraw their support from the war effort. Once they saw what Calley had wrought, they said, "Enough is enough."

• 1:17:25Jocko Willink?

  In small unit leaders, confidence like fear is contagious. Troopers can feel it, see it, and smell it. And it will rub off on shoulders from a platoon to a division as quickly as a good rumor rumbles out of the latrine. Confidence produces courage. Most leaders or soldiers aren't born with a double basic load of guts. The average leaders are scared as the next guy in their first or 100th firefight. But if they are confident that they're tactically proficient, that their unit squared away, team motivated by a strong sense of duty to accomplish the mission, the courage that's needed to do what many will view as impossible will be there.

• 1:18:08Jocko Willink?

  Mouths may go dry, guts may churn, and hands shake, but when the slug starts snapping, the prepared leader will be as cruel on the outside as Clint Eastwood. And no one will know he's really scared out of his brain. So if you're going into combat and you've never been there, you're in a leadership position or not, you're nervous. It's okay. No big deal. Be nervous, do your job. Besides being one hell of a job, leading men into battle is the ultimate responsibility. On the battlefield, decisions such as go left, or go right, or go straight ahead, or

• 1:18:52Jocko Willink?

  made in a split second, and, right or wrong, good or bad, people get killed. Leaders carry the scars of those decisions for the rest of their lives. Later, battle scenes play back, deep into the night like an old movie. Why didn't I wait? Why didn't I bring in more fire? Why didn't I go myself? Why didn't I go to the left? Questions that will haunt the blooded combat leader until he's six feet under.

• 1:19:26Jocko Willink?

  Good preparation, training, knowing your job and attention to detail will keep the nightmares and any casualties to a minimum.

• 1:19:38Jocko Willink?

  To be a combat leader in the profession of arms is one of the most noble, most deadly jobs going. It's rough and tough and its rewards are few.

• 1:19:52Jocko Willink?

  But if at the end of the day, the troops say, "He's a good man", as opposed to "He was a nice guy",

• 1:20:01Jocko Willink?

  that's pretty much as good as it gets.

• 1:20:10Jocko Willink?

  And I know that's something that, something that I definitely felt

• 1:20:17Jocko Willink?

  through my whole career, especially once the war started, was I always felt like everything I, I need to do everything I can to have these guys ready. Everything I can to have these guys ready. And when I was in charge of training and I was sending platoons overseas, I felt the same way. This training is what they're relying on to keep them alive.

• 1:20:40Jocko Willink?

  And do you sit there and look back and say, "Oh, you know,

• 1:20:45Jocko Willink?

  why didn't I wait? Why didn't I bring more fire? Why didn't I go myself? Why didn't I go to the left?" All those questions, yeah. You're gonna have those questions, but those questions are quieter if you know that you did everything you can to prepare the guys for the situations that they're going into.

• 1:21:07Jocko Willink?

  This book, obviously, like, like most of the books we bring on here, I mean, there's just so many lessons to learn, there's so much knowledge to gain. And...

• 1:21:19Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I wish, I wish I would have learned them. And you know, I think part of it, and you, you talked about this the other day. You were talking about how, when you know jujitsu,

• 1:21:33Jocko Willink?

  if you know jujitsu, then you can, you have a certain context that you can learn jujitsu. So if you know jujitsu already, you can make sense out of things. Like you can watch a YouTube video, or you can read a book, and you can look at it, you can say, oh, okay. I, I can do that, you can, you can apply it.

• 1:21:51Jocko Willink?

  But if you have no experience with jujitsu, it's very difficult just to look at a YouTube. You can do it, but it's gonna take a lot longer, cuz you don't have the context of the moves. And so you're gonna need somebody to show you, you're gonna need to experience it yourself, so that you can understand it. And, and that's one of the things that I kinda think of why people like this podcast, and it's sort of like what I have to offer, is I've seen a lot of these things from a leadership perspective. From being in platoons myself, from growing up in the teams, and then going into combat, and then training platoons, and then going into the corporate world,

• 1:22:34Jocko Willink?

  and seeing what leadership is like there, in the context of that. And I think, I think one of the reasons that people like this is because I can just sort of help them put these things into context a little bit better. And then they can take them and put them into context in their own lives. But it's nice to have that little bit of help, but you can do it yourself. Everybody has been led. You've been led by people. And most people are, have been in some kind of a leadership position. Even if they're in charge of one other person, or five other people, or a hundred other people. But you've either led, or you're being led. And so you do have the context to put these things in.

• 1:23:20Jocko Willink?

  But you just have to, first of all, do the work.

• 1:23:26Jocko Willink?

  Get the books out, open them and read them and then when you read them, try and read them from a perspective of balancing or, or not balancing, but try and read them from the perspective of overlaying your own experiences on top of them. And that will, that's what I do. I'm trying to kind of explain my process and what my process has been over the past 20 years. When I see something, I see a leadership situation. I overlay my own experiences on top of it and compare and contrast to it. So that way I can learn something from it. I just don't sit there and blindly watch a YouTube video about jujitsu without putting context over it.

• 1:24:10Jocko Willink?

  So that's what you gotta do with leadership, in my opinion. So, great book, Steal My Soldier's Heart, Hearts by Colonel David Hackworth.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  And I think we can roll on to questions before we get it all into the interwebs and the questions therein. Why don't you talk about how the interwebs can actually support this podcast, Jibo.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  Okay. Ways you can support this podcast and at the same time support yourself, which is just as important, in my opinion.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  Supplementation. On it, supplements are the best ones by far, the only ones I take.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the only ones I take, only ones you take. I recommend AlphaBrain.

• 1:25:07Jocko Willink?

  I'm taking some AlphaBrain right this second.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  There you go. Boom, proof is in the pudding.

• 1:25:12Jocko Willink?

  AlphaBrain, the instant, instant.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  Instant, right. Fast results are better than slow results. No, but sometimes you need delayed results. For, you know, anyway, um, Warrior Bars as well, I would recommend.

• 1:25:26Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Do yourself that favor, big favor. Um, you can get 10% off.

• 1:25:30Jocko Willink?

  Just have a box of Warrior Bars in your house. Because when you're hungry and you don't want to eat something junk, you just open up a Warrior Bar and you're basically eating a, a, a Snickers bar. It's as good as a Snickers bar, if not better, and it's got protein in it.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:47Jocko Willink?

  And it's good for you.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  It's different though, it's different than a Snickers bar. It's not a dessert.

• 1:25:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's because it's not, it's not disgustingly sweet. Yes, you're right. It is sweet though.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's like a meal sweet. You know how like you eat like a teriyaki chicken, how that's sweet?

• 1:25:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  But it's, it's good.

• 1:26:01Jocko Willink?

  Hawaiians.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Bro, I'll tell you what you do. You know, you, you say, just keep a box of Warrior Bar. You do the, on it has this thing called Stay On It and it's like a, you know, the recurring one with the Warrior Bars.

• 1:26:13Jocko Willink?

  That's a good call. Echo, that's a good call. Did you say onit.com slash Jocko?

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for the, for the 10% off. Cause why pay 0% off? When you can pay, or pay with 10% off the price. Anyway, onit.com slash Jocko. Also, another way you can support this podcast is by, at times when you're about to do amazon.com shopping, go to jacopodcast.com first. Click on the Amazon link.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Then go to Amazon, then do some shopping. Then Amazon will give us like a little percentage, like a referral fee.

• 1:26:51Jocko Willink?

  You buy what you actually need and you support the podcast.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also at jacostore.com, there's an Amazon link. So boom, yeah, buy what you're gonna buy anyway. Uh, just click through there first. You can support that way. And of course,

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  I would say arguably the best way. No, that's not the best way, but a really good way to support this podcast is go to jacostore.com and get a shirt or two, or a coffee mug, or a bumper sticker.

• 1:27:21Jocko Willink?

  Good stuff.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  Yep. There you go. Boom. Support in one of those ways.

• 1:27:27Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate the support.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Yes, very much so. Okay. Question number one.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  How do you relate between SOP, which is standard operating procedures, and jujitsu training? Could you say that the basics and fundamentals are the SOPs of grappling or something like drilling, your specific game, well?

• 1:27:51Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, this is a, this is a pretty, actually an obvious question, right? Standard operating procedures, when you're talking about those with me, yes, they exist in business, yes, they exist in companies, the way companies handle situations. For me, I'm just gonna bring it back to my roots in the military. You have standard operating procedures for things. You have standard operating procedures for many of the things that you do as a unit or as a team. You have the standard way of doing them. And what's good is you drill, and just like Hackworth just talked about this, you drill those standard operating procedures, and you train, he's talking about how you train. You train this, you train this, you train that, you train the other thing, and you keep

• 1:28:32Jocko Willink?

  training it until he says they're gonna roll out of bed and be able to react to a combat, to an ambush. You react with standard operating procedures. So, how do you get good at them? You train them and you drill them. Now, the same thing exists inside of grappling. Someone starts to mount you, you have a standard operating procedures to begin to escape them out. Someone starts passing the guard, or gets past the guard, you have a standard operating procedure of the procedure that you're gonna take to get out of there. You're gonna get the underhook, you're gonna come up to a single. You know, if someone mounts you, you're gonna immediately put your elbows in tight, maybe try and shift your weight a little bit, shift their weight a little bit, get their knee light, you're gonna try and put them back in the half guard. So, these are all little, if someone starts to arm lock you, what are you gonna do?

• 1:29:17Jocko Willink?

  You put your weight down on them if they're trying to arm lock you from the guard. You're gonna have standard operating procedures. Just like when you're on the battlefield, you want your team to have standard operating procedures, definitely in grappling, you're gonna have standard operating procedures as well that you're gonna use. Now... The way you get there is by doing repetition, that's through drilling. But, in both situations, you don't wanna have people so strict in drilling, that they lose the ability to think. You, if you have a person that, all they ever do is drill in jujitsu, they actually won't be able to apply it in real life. When someone's trying to resist, or when the

• 1:29:58Jocko Willink?

  the technique isn't exactly what they expected, or it's with a person that has a different body size than what you're used to dealing with, you have to

• 1:30:08Jocko Willink?

  encourage and you have to train for creativity and adaptation. Again, something that the military can sometimes overlook, jujitsu people can sometimes overlook it. You have to train for creativity and adaptation, so if you're gonna drill, don't just drill the way you think it's gonna be, drill the strange variations that it could possibly be. You know, you know what else is a good way to do this? You fight using imposed restrictions on yourself. So hey, the only thing I'm gonna submit you in, is a uma plata. So, even if the guillotine's wide open, I gotta give that up and throw an uma plata on you, it's gonna make me, it's gonna force me to be creative.

• 1:30:50Jocko Willink?

  To bring about the different position that's not so obvious. Rolling with different people, better than you, worse than you, the same as you, bigger than you, smaller than you, taller than you, shorter than you, every different variation. When you're working standard operating procedures in the field, guess what? You wanna put yourselves in different positions, mix the squad up, mix the platoon up, put guys in different locations. Then you wanna get contacted. You know what? Contact front, contact left, contact right, contact rear, those are the basics. Guess where you're actually gonna get contacted from? You're gonna get contacted from the right rear, and at the same time, another guy over on the left a little bit.

• 1:31:33Jocko Willink?

  So that's what you wanna drill. You wanna get that creativity working because things are not gonna go as you expect them to go. So, yes, standard operating procedures are important in anything that you do, in a business. But in a business, like you have a, again, we've been talking about sales today, you have a, you have a standard thing that customers are gonna say when they call you. And you can drill through all the standard responses that you're gonna give them. But you also have to drill your people that, against a customer that you have no idea that's acting crazy, or that has a point that you've never dealt with before. You know, any of those responses, that's what you wanna deal with. You're, you're, in any business, things are not always gonna go perfect the way you want them to go.

• 1:32:17Jocko Willink?

  So you gotta drill your leadership so they can handle the adaptation, that they can be creative and still figure out solutions.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it seems like, get good at the SOP stuff. Like, I know in Jiu-Jitsu, if you just get really good at it, at the SOP stuff. But instead of practicing SOP in Jiu-Jitsu, just be mindful of SOP. Re- a lot, all the time, be mindful of it.

• 1:32:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I had a guy on Twitter ask the other day, you know, hey, I'm, I'm in the basic, I can't make it to the beginners' classes. So I'm only in the advanced classes and now we're not drilling anything, I'm not making progress. And he's saying, should I keep training? Brother, keep training, definitely keep training. But, I think more important is, just, you don't have to, you can, you can find the time to drill on your own. I mean, it's a mount escape, look it up on Google, look it up on YouTube. See the mount escape, if that's a basic that you wanna work on, and then grab your girlfriend and say, here, sit on me like this. I'm gonna do some movements with my hips. It might seem awkward at first, but I'm gonna do it anyways, honey. And then do it. That's drilling, you know? Or, once you get to class, show up to class, or stay class a little bit later.

• 1:33:28Jocko Willink?

  Spend ten minutes drilling the mount escape, ten, spend five minutes doing arm locks. Such a, how many arm locks can you do in five minutes? I mean, you can do enough to drill, trust me. You don't need to drill for half an hour. So just know the movements, learn the movements, and then just go and and do a little bit of drilling. And you'll get there. But even if you didn't do that, and you just rolled, and you took the advanced class, and you learned the advanced moves, eventually you're gonna figure out the other stuff too. It's it's like being immersed in a language, you know? Just because you went and got immersed in a kindergarten class, doesn't mean you would learn faster than if you got immersed in a in a real-life college, you know, or or open, just normal life situation.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's true. So if you get good at these um standard operating procedures, and you can mind them all the time, and at the same time, like how you're saying, you exercise your creativity, then you can you can stick to them, but at the same time, you can know when to break the rules, so to speak, you know?

• 1:34:30Jocko Willink?

  Well, Dean, Dean is really good with some of the basic movements.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Jocko Willink?

  Like, he's really, really good at them. And he can almost force them. Whereas Jeffy Glover, he's really good at the basics too, but he he's more, in my mind, he's more apt to do something creative. Whereas Dean is like so good with the fundamentals, that he doesn't even have to be creative sometimes. Of course, he is also very creative, that's why he's uh, you know, done so well in the world. But both those guys have crazy, I mean, not just Dean and Jeff, but any really good jiu-jitsu player is gonna be awesome at the basics. And then they're gonna be creative, that's what makes a jiu-jitsu champion.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep. It's like um, actually Jeff has this this drill that he

• 1:35:20Jocko Willink?

  He's got crazy drills.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  I think he just thought it up on the spot, too. It seemed like he did, but I don't know. But it's it's basically you, he'll be he'll be like, he'll he'll yell out a position, then you gotta get to that position, kind of, not the fastest, like, oh, the quickest you can do it physically, it's more like the with the least steps, you know? So if you're like, hey, half-guard, now do a knee bar. Now do, or he'll say a submission, he'll say a um a different position, he'll be like, half-guard, now take his back. Now, you know, and you have to, like, how do I take you guys back from half-guard? And you have to kind of, you know, so it exercises not only your creativity, but thinking fast with it, you know? So after a while, you start to be like, oh, I didn't know there was a knee bar from here with only like two steps, you know, that kind of thing. I was like, dang, I really like that drill. And he was like, yeah.

• 1:36:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and Dean, one of Dean's drills, Dean will have, Dean does these same thing. He'll just call out, but he'll call out like a leg, he does it with me with leg positions.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:12Jocko Willink?

  He'll be like, you know, four eleven, then outside, then kakareiko, he'll just go through and we'll just sit there and do them.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:20Jocko Willink?

  And what's cool about it too is you get to learn like little defenses.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Also, you're doing it and defending.

• 1:36:25Jocko Willink?

  Not, not, not hardcore defense.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:36:27Jocko Willink?

  But you're making that little adjusty.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Being mindful.

• 1:36:29Jocko Willink?

  Yes, yes. So, yes, SOPs, learn them, drill, but be creative.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, yeah, man, it seems like that's a one hundred percent translation right there. Like, you know, the, kind of like when in doubt, go, go to the SOP, when in doubt. You know, you're in someone's garden, he's all wild, it's like, go to SOP, mind your base, mind your posture, mind your, your elbows or whatever, is, is, there's, like, all these things that are when in doubt, you do.

• 1:36:55Jocko Willink?

  It, it, it is a one hundred percent translation.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Jocko Willink?

  It's a hundred percent.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's crazy. Next question, Jocko. When does asking for input up and down the chain of command, as discussed in episode twenty six, hinder the leader's ability to make timely decisions, especially when gaining the initiative is critical?

• 1:37:18Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, this is a question that I asked and I got a, uh, answer for you, TJ,

• 1:37:24Jocko Willink?

  who asked the question. When you are, we, okay, so the, the situation is a little bit different. If you're in an administrative situation, or you're in a planning situation, meaning neither one of those are restricted by time, then, of course, get the input. And by getting the input, of course, your, first of all, your plan becomes better because you're getting input from people, you have more brains working on it. You also, when you get input, you're building a little bit of a relationship. You're building a relationship. The, the relationship, what, what are relationships are based on trust. And so, trust is a requirement inside of leadership. So.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  That's what you want to do. If you have the time, and it's administrative scenario, or you've got the time to plan, then just go ahead and take the time to plan. Take the time to get the input. Now, there are situations where you don't have time to discuss or debate a decision. And there's, you know, or times where maybe you have time, but it's going to affect or impact the ability to make an immediate execution. Which is what oftentimes you're looking for. You want to gain the initiative, and sometimes gaining the initiative takes precedence over gaining consensus from everybody.

• 1:38:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and it takes precedence over coming up with the best possible plan, because we want to do the best possible plan, but sometimes, fast action is going to take precedence over that. And, and Patton said, uh, something along the lines of a good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed sometime next week. So, what happens is, in those situations, yeah, you're going to have to make the call. You're going to have to be decisive. You're going to have to make the decision. And because you've built trust with your team, then, when you do need to make that call, it won't be that big of a deal, and people will execute it.

• 1:39:31Jocko Willink?

  Now, I've told this, I've said this before, you know, Leif and I were having a conversation with some of our clients, and, and as, they were kind of talking about the same thing, about, you know, giving people orders, and they're not listening, and what do you do? And, and I asked Leif, in the middle of the thing, I said, "Hey, Leif, how many times did I tell you, 'Hey, Leif, this is a command, I'm telling you to do it, I'm ordering you because you work for me, do it now.'" And Leif was like, "Zero times."

• 1:39:59Jocko Willink?

  Now, that being said, that being said, although I never in an administrative or in a planning situation ever said, "Leif, you will do this now, I'm ordering you because I am the senior man in the situation."

• 1:40:16Jocko Willink?

  In tactical situations, where we were in the field and we had to do things, we had to make things happen quickly, I definitely said things to him and said, "Hey, go do this now."

• 1:40:28Jocko Willink?

  Like I would've said, you know, "Take that building down over there, hey, move the Humvees over here," or whatever. And he would do it, because he knew we didn't have time to discuss it. Now, what's interesting about that is it didn't just, it wasn't just me that was telling Leif. Sometimes Leif was saying to me, "Jocko, get the Humvees moved over here," or "Jocko, you need to get the Element up on that high ground over there." And you know what? We had trust, we had a relationship, and I did it. Even though I was senior to him. We didn't care who was senior to who. That wasn't the important thing. He saw something, he was making a tactical decision. I knew he wouldn't be telling me to do something unless he needed to have it happen. So if he told me, "Hey, move the vehicles down the road," I'd be like, "Roger, moving."

• 1:41:15Jocko Willink?

  And, and that doesn't mean that we're, if you take us to a situation where we have the time to debate...

• 1:41:23Jocko Willink?

  Like, he would call me up and say, "Hey Jocko, I think it might be a good idea to push the vehicles down the road." "Oh, why? What's going on?" "Well, we're starting to see some movement out in the hinterland over there." "Okay, got it. I'm gonna track it, I'm gonna push two vehicles down there." "Cool." Right? That's a normal conversation. But if all of a sudden there was gunfire, and Leif was like, "Push the vehicles down the road to the north," I'd say, "Doing it." You know what I mean? Yeah. So, there are definitely times where you don't wanna sit there and sit around and debate and figure out what the best plan is. There's a time where the leader, or the follower, or the person that has the most vision of the situation needs to make a call and make it happen. So, again, the better relationship you have, the easier this is gonna be, because you're gonna have that little mental unification of the commander's intent and of the task and purpose,

• 1:42:08Jocko Willink?

  and you're gonna, you're gonna be able to be thinking along the same path. And when you're doing that, everything gets a lot, a hell of a lot easier. So... When you got the time to take the input, take the input, have the debate, have the discussion. That builds the relationship so that when it comes time to be decisive and give a command, you can give it and people react up and down the chain of command without a bunch of hesitation. And you can go back later and say, hey, here's what I was talking about. Here's why we need to do this. And that's it.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. That trust is so critical, yeah? Like, so are you saying build that relationship or whatever? And even at the time where it seems valuable, sure, trust, but it's times like this where that trust is gonna shine even more, you know? When you can just say to do it. You don't even have to say why to do it, because you just know. You know it's a good reason.

• 1:43:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, while we're on this subject, I will tell you this as well. Because the more time you spend, if I was always giving orders to everyone and not actually discussing, I was just ordering everyone to do everything all the time, you're burning up your leadership capital.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:19Jocko Willink?

  Like when I, you know, when we're out in the field and when I was out in the field with the platoons, I seldom gave an order over the radio because I wanted my guys to lead. When I did say something, the guys would just do it. Because it was me and they knew that if I was saying it was something that had to be done.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:38Jocko Willink?

  So if I said, hey, everyone get in building 34 now, guys would be like, hey, we're going to 44, everyone would get there.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:45Jocko Willink?

  Whereas if I was trying to give orders the whole time on every operation, on every little thing and every little detail, eventually you're just the, what is it, the boy that cried wolf.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:54Jocko Willink?

  And you want to give every order and people stop listening to you. Even though we're in the military and even though there's a chain of command and even though they're supposed to listen to me, you abuse that thing and people will stop listening to you. The less you, the more you talk, the less people listen. And the less you talk, the more people listen. So I reserved my actual directives in the field to be the most important things that I needed. And if I didn't have to say that, I wouldn't. I would let my troopers lead. Let my leadership, let my subordinate leadership lead. I wanted them to.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Quality, not quantity?

• 1:44:27Jocko Willink?

  Affirmative.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Next question. Many vets are getting out of the military and going back to college, myself included, or to college for the first time. What advice do you have?

• 1:44:43Jocko Willink?

  I like how you're doing sort of like the newscaster thing when you get done with the question.

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  Keeping it.

• 1:44:47Jocko Willink?

  I like that. I like that. So you're going to college for the, either back to college, you're been in the military. Okay. Number one, out of the gate, crush it. That's what you should do in college. You should crush it. You should study hard and you should crush it.

• 1:45:03Jocko Willink?

  Now, uh, in order to do that, you gotta get a mindset. Cause guess what you're gonna be thinking when you get out of the military? You'll be like, oh, this is no big deal. And oh, this does, this doesn't matter. You'll be like, hey, I was in, I was in Iraq. Eight months ago, or I was in Afghanistan. Six months ago, and now you're sitting here telling me to read a book and write down words on a piece of paper. This doesn't matter.

• 1:45:28Jocko Willink?

  That's an easy. That's an easy path to go down. It's pretty easy to say. You know why? Cause it's actually true. And what you did in combat has more gravity and more consequence than anything you're gonna do in college.

• 1:45:46Jocko Willink?

  And if you wanna go down that path and be this stuff doesn't matter, this isn't important compared to what I've done, so I'm gonna blow it off. That's a path you can go down if you want to. I don't recommend it. What I recommend you doing is straight up crushing college. That's what I meant, recommend you doing. How do you do that?

• 1:46:05Jocko Willink?

  Cause everybody, if you make that decision that you wanna crush it, if you wanna make the decision that you're gonna prove to people. That you know what? Yeah. I was overseas. I was in combat. Now I'm coming back and your little games that you're playing, I'm gonna beat you in your own games. So how do you do that? Number one.

• 1:46:24Jocko Willink?

  Do the reading that you get assigned. Do the assignments that you get tasked with. Do everything. Let that be your new job. These silly little games that they're putting, let that be your job. Just like I was talking about OCS. When I went to OCS, I made that like a game for me that I was gonna win.

• 1:46:44Jocko Willink?

  So do that with college. And then on top of that, make it a game, yes, but then on top of that, as a deeper commander's intent, make it that you're gonna not just do well there as a game, but you're gonna do well so you can get smarter. So you can really actually learn information that's gonna make you a better person and give you better ability to dominate in the world. That's what you should be doing in college. Now, these kids that you're gonna be going to college with, they're not gonna have this attitude. They're gonna be, you know, hey, what do I need to do to get by? What's Sally doing tonight? I'm more concerned about that than I am about going out dominating this course so that I can get an A,

• 1:47:29Jocko Willink?

  so that I have knowledge, so I can go and crush some, some vocation later on in life. So, don't just do it as a game. You gotta play the game a little bit. I mean, you gotta, for me, I get the game mentality going, but I, the game mentality is rooted in something deeper, and what it's rooted in is gaining knowledge to be smarter and better as a human. Now, a couple of things about college and the actual tactics, techniques, and procedures to dominate. Cause when I went to college, I did dominate. And when I went to high school, I did not dominate. When I went to high school, I didn't care about high school. I was like, whatever. God, when can I go in the military? Like, can I go now?

• 1:48:14Jocko Willink?

  So, but when I went to college, I had a new attitude, which was, I'm gonna dominate. I'm in, I'm in a battle against these people here. I'm gonna beat them. So, this is some of the things that are important. Number one, college is all about time management. Getting ahead of the curve, cause it's so easy. That's what happens with kids in college. That's why they don't do well, because for the first time, there's no one tracking them. No one's imposing discipline on them. You have to have, in order to do well in college, you have to have self-discipline. Cause no one's gonna tell you to start that paper that's due in six weeks. No one's gonna tell you to start it tomorrow.

• 1:48:50Jocko Willink?

  You can just blow it off. You can blow it off for five and a half weeks and then you've got to write a thirty page paper in two days and it's gonna, it's not gonna be quality.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Yep. No one's gonna ask you, have you done your homework before dinner?

• 1:49:01Jocko Willink?

  That's right. So you need to get the time management going. You need to get a disciplined time management schedule. You need to get ahead of the curve as early as possible, right? You know, when you want to, when our papers do a thirty page paper, do, you need to write it in chunks. And it makes it so easy. I mean, it was a joke. When I was going to college, I would have my papers completely done like a week out. Like a week out, I would be done with a thirty page paper.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Jocko Willink?

  And then I would just be reviewing it and getting it all completely dialed and I'd turn it in two days early and then move on to the next one.

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:49:37Jocko Willink?

  Same thing with studying. You don't want to study. You, you do want to study hard right before the day of the test, but you want to have knowledge already absorbed in there. So you want to, you want to study leading up to that. When you do reading that I talked about, highlight. Break out the highlighters. That's what I do in all these books that we're hammering through right now. We don't always, I always send out pictures of them. They're all highlighted and marked up. That's how I'm getting the good information out of them.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:01Jocko Willink?

  So highlight and then another little trick is to make the flashcards. I used to highlight and then I would make flashcards about what I highlighted.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:09Jocko Willink?

  Turn everything into a question.

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:50:11Jocko Willink?

  And then you go through the flashcards and you're gonna, you're gonna memorize stuff.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:50:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, here's a big one. This is really obvious, but guess what people don't do? Ask questions. Ask questions. I used to raise my hand. I would sit in the front row, first of all, in college. I sat in the front row. I was twenty, was I twenty? I think I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old going to college. I would sit in the front row. In the little desk and I look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in like a little kid's desk. I'd, then I'd raise my hand all the way up, like all the way up over my head. And they be looking at me, you know, cause in college, they kinda stopped raising their hand, but I did it anyways. Just to be.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Be you.

• 1:50:57Jocko Willink?

  Just to be, yeah, just to, just to do it. So I'd raise my, and, but you ask questions, cause guess what? The college kids, they don't ask questions and, and guess what? Adults don't ask questions. Why don't they ask questions? Cause they got an ego, they don't wanna look stupid.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  Right, yup.

• 1:51:09Jocko Willink?

  I don't care. I want, I'm here to win. Exactly. Oh, I, oh, you don't think I'm smart? Let's check out the GPA, homeboy. You know what I'm saying? So, ask questions. If I, and, and ask questions as soon as that, as soon as the knowledge, as soon as the understanding train starts to get derailed a little bit, ask the question right then. Maybe give it, maybe give it a minute to see if you can get it back on track by yourself. But the minute you realize you're not understanding, raise your hand and say, hey, you know what, teacher? I don't understand that. Can you re-explain that? Because I'm not understanding.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't wanna miss that train.

• 1:51:43Jocko Willink?

  I don't wanna miss the train. You don't want to go too far off course. And then you're just lost.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Yup.

• 1:51:48Jocko Willink?

  So when you feel it coming off, try and catch up real quick, you know, take a look, and then just raise your hand. Put your hand all the way up in the air, sit in the front row, put your hand all the way up in the air, and look at the teacher with, with a dead serious face, and they're gonna look at you all nervous and be like, yes?

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:03Jocko Willink?

  That's the only, when I went to college, they called me John. Because, because that's what the attendance sheet said, cause my real name is John, and that's what the attendance sheet said. And so they'd, yeah, I'd be sitting there and they'd say, uh, y- yes, John? And I'd say, yeah, I don't understand that. Could you re-explain it, please?

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  Hey, when they called you John, did that fuel the fire?

• 1:52:23Jocko Willink?

  No, not at all. It's, it doesn't matter to me, but it's the only time, cause like, I didn't know these people. Cause normally if I'm gonna work with someone, when I introduce myself, I'll be like, hey, my name is John, cause that's what everyone always calls me. But these people would call my name in attendance, and I didn't wanna have this, you know.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  Adversarial releasing shit?

• 1:52:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so I'd say, oh, yes, John, that's me. The other thing is, you know, do some psychological warfare. You know, I would line up my pencils. I do it on the podcast, you boi, right here, I line up pencils. It's a, it's a, it's also getting into character.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  Right, you're priming yourself.

• 1:52:56Jocko Willink?

  I'm priming myself. I'm looking at the teacher like, I am so ready to take notes, that if I have a downed pencil, it will not cost me a single letter. I'll be back in the game.

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  Oh, your contingency passes.

• 1:53:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, contingency passes are standing by. And then, so sit in the front row, line up your pencils, have your notebooks ready. Personally, challenge the teacher. You want it to, you want your personal challenge to be to pull every piece of knowledge out of them and then go beyond what they know. I was, I was, I was competing with the teachers. I was trying to learn more than they actually knew. And then they bring their little tests or little exams to you and you just crush them and smash them. Now, the, the thing you gotta be careful of here is this can get political. This can get political and if you start being offensive with the way you act, if you start rubbing it in their face, then guess what? That can affect your grade.

• 1:53:52Jocko Willink?

  And part of the game here is to get a good grade. So you actually, it's a time for you to start building your relationship building skills, time to start building your leadership skills, cause you're gonna start manipulating the teacher. Right? You wanna make them think that you're actually super interested in the stupid crap class that they're teaching. I want them to think that. Now, now, some classes you're gonna love and they're gonna, you're gonna learn a lot from. Like if you're into English and you get to take advanced grammar and syntax, you're gonna be sitting in there like, yes, this is rocks. But there's gonna be some classes you don't wanna take. But you gotta get in there and make your teacher think that you're super interested and super fired up to learn that thing and that you're not just interested in the grade,

• 1:54:37Jocko Willink?

  but at the same time, they gotta know that grade's important to you too. So you wanna get along with them and again, go into college. And if you're a veteran, you're representing all of us out there. So you should be going in there and just smashing college. And that way, we have a better reputation, not just for being tough on the battlefield, but for being smart and academically sound as well.

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and in a way. If you go to college later, you kinda in in this weird way have an advantage.

• 1:55:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, not even a weird way. You straight up have an advantage.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:13Jocko Willink?

  Especially after you've been in the military.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so much, man.

• 1:55:16Jocko Willink?

  Cause you've got the discipline.

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:18Jocko Willink?

  But the only thing that'll screw you is if you have the discipline, but you don't apply it because you think, oh, this doesn't matter. This is nothing compared to combat. That's what I started off by addressing.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:28Jocko Willink?

  This is important.

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:29Jocko Willink?

  You just have to make it important.

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you it, cause, okay, you pay for college and this is the part that I think, well, I know I just couldn't connect the dots on this. Even no matter how many people said it, I just couldn't connect the dots that you're going to college, it's worth, oh, you know. This is, it's all up to you. These people are here to give you an education and all this stuff. You can do whatever you wanna do. You don't even have to choose a major right away. You can do whatever you wanna do. You're gonna have an education to do it. And then to me, it just didn't register. It just seemed like the same thing as high school, except no one was monitoring your grades. And there was a way, a lot more going on. So really, it was the same thing. You play football.

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  You're one of the cool kids. There's cool parties on the, you know, and you, but the different thing, which was better than high school, is you had your own place to stay. Other people were staying around you that were your peers that were hanging out and didn't have to go to bed at a certain time. So if you're not that into grades and stuff in high school, and you don't see that clearly, like how you would if you were like twenty seven, twenty eight years old, coming back and seeing like the real value of education in college and stuff, brother, all it's gonna look like is just one big party.

• 1:56:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  Then maybe have some class or something going on during the day. I don't know. And then, and you make your own schedule. You're like, hey, choose this class at this time and this thing. You're like, you almost, it's almost like.

• 1:56:51Jocko Willink?

  One of the biggest tests in college is if you can pass everything that you just talked about.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:57Jocko Willink?

  If you can go and you can get the discipline, you can get the time management, you can go to the classes, you can study the stuff. That's one of the tests in college. And military personnel shouldn't fail that test. The only reason they, I'm telling you, not, not, I'm sure there's other reasons. But definitely the, the fact that they're not taking it seriously is, is what's gonna cost them.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  Like, like what they've been through is like way more impactful than this lame stuff.

• 1:57:19Jocko Willink?

  And you know what? That's true. But again, we're not trying to, we, we wanna win.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:26Jocko Willink?

  You know, I want, if you're a veteran and you're listening to this, I want you to dominate. And it shouldn't even be fair. I mean, honestly, when I was going to college, it it wasn't even fair.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Jocko Willink?

  I mean, because I was just ahead. I was just working. I was concentrating. I was focused. And I was making myself focus.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Jocko Willink?

  And, yeah. So that's what you gotta do.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  I remember I had the, and you know, at U H, there's like, you know, there's there's the smaller classes and there's lecture classes. So I remember in the lecture classes, like criminology or something, I happened to be taking. And there was this guy front, he was basically you, except a real like more nerdy type guy. Uh, and he'd be right in the front, not like just in the front row, right here in front of the teacher. And there was like a projector thing that he'd kinda, he's right next to that. And man, this guy, if he had a question, boom, he was on, he would monopolize the whole class. He didn't care. And I'm in there like, man, this guy is motivated. I don't know why. Maybe this is his major, but he is not ashamed or nothing. And so one day we had these, um, like speeches, like you you have to like read up on something and then present. Yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't remember. I think I did it. Maybe I did it. I don't know. I forget. But I remember when it was his turn and it's the auditorium. So you have a little mic, you know? Uh, teacher had a mic. He gives you the mic. He say your speech. So that this it's this guy's turn to go up and the teacher, you know, gives him the mic. He's like, I don't need that. He goes, can you guys hear me in the back? And I was like, damn, this guy knows, you know, he's into this thing. He gives his speech and he had, he might as well have been the teacher, this guy. And he was an older guy. He was maybe, you know, I'm like eighteen years old. This guy's like probably twenty five or so.

• 1:59:02Jocko Willink?

  Maybe he was a veteran, actually.

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  Man, it wouldn't surprise me because this guy was there and he was there to win.

• 1:59:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  And thinking back as the older guy, um, man. I wish I just had that attitude.

• 1:59:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  Because I had the capability, man, the the classes that I liked, like I I took a a musculoskeletal anatomy class. And I got an A in that one. I think I got like ninety seven percent and I was pissed, like, fuck, did not last three percent. But so thinking like really my whole just outlook on that class, like I was there, but it was a little bit different than yours. I was straight up interested in it.

• 1:59:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, and there was classes that I was straight up interested in too. You know, and those classes are easier to get through because you like them. You enjoy them.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but man, that attitude of like.

• 1:59:42Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna win.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  Like whatever, like the test was like this, almost a way to just show off how powerful I am.

• 1:59:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  This little thing.

• 1:59:50Jocko Willink?

  That's exactly what I, that was, that was my attitude.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Man, I.

• 1:59:54Jocko Willink?

  You you know, I I one one thing, one more thing I want to add is when I talk about concentrating and focused. I would set up the time management, you don't wanna try and, cuz I know everybody, everybody that's, you know, been overseas, it's like, oh, I got trouble, I have trouble concentrating, right? So, so, so what you wanna do is you wanna chunk down your time so you're not trying to force yourself to concentrate for six straight hours, you know? You wanna, hey, I'm gonna bang out an hour and a half right now, and I'm gonna get into this, then I'm gonna go roll jujitsu, and when I come back, I'm gonna do another hour and a half, and then I'm gonna do a workout, and then I'm gonna come back, I'm gonna do another hour, then I'm gonna hang out for a little bit, eat some dinner, and then I'm gonna go and, you know,

• 2:00:36Jocko Willink?

  finish up and review stuff at the end of the night, so that's just one way to overcome the attention span disorder that we all have of, hey, I can't concentrate on this right now. One way to overcome that is to try and do stuff for short periods of time. Even when I was writing the book, I didn't write for ten hours at a time. I wrote for an hour, you know? Fifty minutes, but I did it every day consistently. And that's how you, so you wanna chunk this stuff down so you don't have to sit there and focus. Sometimes you have to.

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:09Jocko Willink?

  But you don't wanna have to sit there and, and focus on something for six straight hours. It's difficult.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 2:01:16Jocko Willink?

  Give yourself a rest.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  How are you saying like, um, and this comes from a lack of perspective. I mean, to not be able to do this, or to choose not to do it, or whatever. It comes from, again, a lack of perspective that an eighteen-year-old would have. But going back, how you can get smarter and understand that you're using that to be like, more educated, a better person. So if you're kinda, call it gamification, what you're doing, like, I'm gonna make this into a game, right? So, use that, like, okay, let's say I learn about whatever, X, Y, Z. I'm gonna use that, what we learned today, I'm gonna use that like on a, like, back to a video game where, um, you know, you choose your guy, or you're, okay, there's this game called Super.

• 2:01:50Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna try and use it in a real scenario. You're gonna apply it in real life.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, fully, but, um, like, okay, there's this game called Super Off-Road. You get a truck, and you race, and if you win, you get these points to add acceleration. You get to add turbo boost, you get whatever you gotta add, and you only have like, so basically, you're doing that, so you learn X, Y, Z, and think, boom, now I'm, now I got X, Y, Z in my, in my little brain. You know, now I can take on the world with this X, Y, Z I just learned. And you just keep it like that. That's actually how I feel when I read now. I just learned about that like boom boom applying to and then now when I get up or whatever I'm like oh shoot I'm kinda like a upgraded person now. Now that I know about this.

• 2:02:28Jocko Willink?

  That's what that's what that's great. That's a great way of thinking about it. College should upgrade you mentally so you have more firepower to use against the world.

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  And whether that yeah and. And that lack of perspective man when you're eighteen, you got parties going on, you're the, you know. You could, I think you could probably follow, fall into that too, but just less likely because after come from the military if you had, it's like. When you're eighteen, you're pressured to go to college this way. After high school, everyone's talking.

• 2:02:57Jocko Willink?

  You're saying the military guys could fall into what?

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  Like the trap of like, okay, but thinking about it, not as.

• 2:03:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, partying?

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  Of like partying.

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  Environment is just like so seductive, you know?

• 2:03:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Cause these military guys are gonna have the GI Bill. They're like. Roll, they got a nice car, everyone else is struggling students and they're pretty much set.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  Right, popular.

• 2:03:18Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden, they're like, oh yeah, well, you know, they know about the world, they've been around the world, they know how to drink and they know how to. Party really well. And so they can take a leadership role in partying with other people and they can have a great time. And that's cool. But. Make sure you don't, make sure you upgrade your, your truck.

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:39Jocko Willink?

  While you're there too.

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so you're more likely, when, especially when you make the decision kinda on your own to go back.

• 2:03:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  Like, like I said, when you're eighteen coming out of high school, everyone's talking, your parents are talking about it most likely. Kids around you are like, hey, I got into this college, huh? And if you're the guy who's starting out of college, unless you have some cool, other cool plan or whatever.

• 2:03:57Jocko Willink?

  Unless, unless you just joined the military.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  Right, but that's like another thing, you know, like they went to the military, but what are you doing? And you're like, I better go to college then, you know, unless you're gonna. So you kinda go because you're expected to go, but you don't have that clarity like. If you go back, go back later, like some people nowadays is popular to.

• 2:04:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, I do think though, a lot of military guys that once they're getting out, people say, what you gonna do now? And they go, they go, uh, well, I'm gonna go to college, I'm gonna use my GI belt and they go, okay.

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:24Jocko Willink?

  But they're going without a, without a focus and without a plan. So military guys can fall into that trap as well. And that's why I'm hoping that they're listening to this going, hey, you know what? Absolutely. Take advantage of the fact that you're with a bunch of people and you can hang out and you can party and have a good time. But have the discipline that you win.

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Jocko Willink?

  None of it matters. That partying doesn't mean anything if you don't win every day and make yourself better and come out of there with the ability now to set yourself up for a good life. Cause that's what college is supposed to do. It's supposed to give you opportunity.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:58Jocko Willink?

  That's what you want is opportunities that you can take advantage of it.

• 2:05:01Speaker 01

  Man, so true, man. It's like, I, I'm thinking back to any party hangout situation is not serving me at all right now.

• 2:05:10Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  At all. Not one. And I think that was like, that's what really got in the way. I think, and not partying like I was in this big partier, cause it wasn't the case.

• 2:05:19Jocko Willink?

  But it's just there.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  The social scene just pulled, had way more of a draw than making it to class.

• 2:05:25Jocko Willink?

  Of course, you're a human being. You like social activity. Most human beings like that.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 2:05:31Jocko Willink?

  Not all of us can sit around and be like, no, I do not negative one to speak to other people.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  If I went, if I went back to college for, for, you know, if I found myself in that situation, bro, it'd be just like how you said.

• 2:05:43Jocko Willink?

  You bring your A game.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Bring me every single day. I wouldn't, literally it'd be, you know how like when you train for a tournament?

• 2:05:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  You know, and you're just like, yeah, guys are going, that's the last thing I wanna do. I wanna eat right now, I wanna rest and I can't wait to get back to training so I can learn some new stuff, get in better shape, you know, so it's like laser focus, you know? Yeah. And even if it's not like focusing on the goal the whole time, you're focusing on winning that day.

• 2:06:04Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  And winning the next day, winning this week, you know? Man, that, that's a valuable tool, man. Valuable advice as well.

• 2:06:12Jocko Willink?

  Dig it.

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  Next question. Can you discuss peer leadership a bit? Such as during the B O L C, which is Basic Officer Leader Course.

• 2:06:26Jocko Willink?

  In the army, yeah.

• 2:06:27Speaker 01

  In the army. Ranger School or other training environments without a command structure. I know you've touched on it before and said that it's probably, probably the toughest form of leadership. But if you could discuss things that have worked well for you and any tips in these environments.

• 2:06:44Jocko Willink?

  So peer leadership and actually whether that's harder than leading up the chain of command, which takes the most amount of nuance and technique and savvy as opposed to peer leadership, which definitely takes a lot as well and there's nothing new here.

• 2:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:00Jocko Willink?

  Nothing new and you're trying to lead peers, just like when you're trying to lead up the chain of command, you're trying to lead down the chain of command, what are you gonna do? Number one, you're gonna be humble, you're gonna listen, you're gonna lead when it's time to lead, you're gonna follow when it's time to follow, take the hard jobs, work hard, put the priority on the team instead of yourself, accept the blame when things go wrong, give credit away to the team when things go right, keep your ego in check. And keeping your ego in check is very important because when it comes to peer leadership, this turns into like there's a little ego struggle going on. There's actually a big ego struggle coming on over the whole time because what peers are actually competing with each other in some form for promotion, for authority, for recognition.

• 2:07:43Jocko Willink?

  So you're gonna want that credit, you're gonna wanna be recognized and those little things inside your brain, if you really wanna be a good peer leader, you gotta let them go. You gotta let them go, you gotta stay humble.

• 2:07:58Jocko Willink?

  Now, for instance, when you come up with a plan, you can't get addicted to your plan. You can't think that your plan, you can't impose your plan on your peers. You don't wanna do that, you wanna hear other people out. And in fact, one way to build leadership credibility is when you become champions of other people's plans and you go, "Man, that's awesome, I'll run with it." And you take a leadership role with someone else's plan, how cool is that? They actually love you then. They say, "Man, Jocko doesn't have an ego, he's running with the plan I put out and he's giving me credit for it." Of course you're building leadership, leadership, uh, credit with that person. Now, so those are all, those are challenges, right?

• 2:08:42Jocko Willink?

  And a lot of that, again, boils back to ego. But the other thing is you gotta be mentally nimble when you're doing peer leadership because you're gonna be constantly shifting back and forth and back and forth and back and forth between the dichotomies of leadership.

• 2:09:01Jocko Willink?

  The things of being aggressive, but not being overbearing, being a leader and being a follower, stepping up and yet not stepping on people's toes. So you gotta, you gotta balance those and you gotta be going back and forth between those all the time. And that's what makes, that's what makes peer leadership hard. Because if you and I are peers, if I'm in charge of you, then, then we know that. And so I can kind of, I, I can be a little bit more inactive in my balancing act. Because I'm in charge. So, "Hey, Echo, this is what we're gonna do." You know, I, I can be less active in balancing. And it, if, same thing if you work for me, we know what the roles are.

• 2:09:46Jocko Willink?

  You're leader, I'm following. I- it's that. The other way around, I'm, I'm leading and you're following. We know what the roles are. With a peer, it's just constantly balancing. And if I go too strong in one direction, I'm gonna affect your, I'm gonna off, I'm gonna offend your ego. Which is gonna make you turn against me, which is where all these problems come from.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:10:10Jocko Willink?

  So, the, and the biggest thing about that, about that balance is what makes you good at balancing it, is knowing that it's there. That's what gives you the ability to balance, is that you know that you are balancing. When people don't know what, that they're balancing, that's when they're just like, "Hey, I'm, I'm leading, I'm stepping up." So they just lead and everyone goes, "Man, this guy's a jerk, he has a big ego." That's what you don't wanna do. But when you know that, "Hey, if I'm stepping up to lead right now, I need to pay attention to look around and see how people are taking it and make sure that I'm getting the support of people. And if I'm not, then I'll go, "Hey Echo, you know, you seem to have really good input on how this, why don't you take this section and lead it?"

• 2:10:54Jocko Willink?

  So people see, oh, Jocko's not trying to take control of everything. He's not a control freak. That's what you want to make happen. So that is, in a nutshell, some advice on how to lead in the peer situations.

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully. And the, you, when, when you first meet someone's a peer, especially guys, guys have this a lot where if they're even close to being you, identity wise, like, you know, within a certain age of you, within a certain build of you, or whatever, your brain goes into this, like, real focus mode, this small party brain, and it, it wants to make a decision. Is this guy my enemy or my friend? I want one of them. I don't care which one, but I just gotta figure out what it is. So automatically you feel sense of competition when you see a guy near you, in your, like, environment, you know, like, if you're, you go to the gym, or you go to jiu-jitsu, like, what happens if a new guy walks in and he's about your size?

• 2:11:55Speaker 01

  And he walks into the jiu-jitsu.

• 2:11:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a, there is an assessment.

• 2:11:59Speaker 01

  Competition, yeah, assessment. Oh, don't let him be wearing a black belt. Oh, that's even closer to you now. Now it's like, okay, who's this guy? You know, who's this guy? And then.

• 2:12:07Jocko Willink?

  We got something to settle.

• 2:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but let's say he rolls up to you and he's just so nice to you.

• 2:12:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  And then you guys roll, he's good, he gets you, whatever.

• 2:12:17Jocko Willink?

  He disarmed me.

• 2:12:18Speaker 01

  Right, but he's really nice. He likes the same football team you like.

• 2:12:22Jocko Willink?

  I'm saying he disarmed me.

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:12:24Jocko Willink?

  By saying, hey, man, what's going on? Hey, it's really good to meet you. I've heard of you. Uh, I know you train with Dean Lister. Dean Lister's like, one of the main guys I've always liked. It's great to meet you, Jocko. I appreciate you guys letting me come to the gym, man. Love to roll with you sometime, you know, if you get the chance, just, you know, I, I, I know, uh, really respect y'all's game.

• 2:12:42Speaker 01

  Right. Yes, exactly right. So boom, now that decision that you, like, on this primal level have to make.

• 2:12:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I made it.

• 2:12:48Speaker 01

  You're like, okay, I got you. You're my friend, you're my ally. But you get a guy who only mad dogs you, but

• 2:12:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  Uh, with other calculations, he's kind of the same as you, more or less.

• 2:12:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. If he's mad, so now, this is the thing, to take what you're saying, which is a hundred percent right, and folks, this isn't just about. Obviously.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:13:05Jocko Willink?

  This is about life and when you meet a person that comes into your office and they're a, they have a role at their company or within your company or at another company and you're meeting them for the first time and you know that there's somewhere equivalent of what you're there an EVP or they're an SVP or they're a VP and you know that you are too. Or they're a regional manager or whatever the case may be. You're automatically doing an assessment. So what do you want to do? Do you want to, do you want to bring them to make the friend decision or foe decision?

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13:34Jocko Willink?

  Let's be leaders.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's the key right there.

• 2:13:37Jocko Willink?

  And create relationships, not adversaries.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  Yes. Or not adversarial relationships.

• 2:13:45Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:13:47Speaker 01

  Playing words obviously, but yeah, and the key there, how you're saying is you want them to make the decision that you're their friend.

• 2:13:53Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:13:54Speaker 01

  It's not, you're not saying you make the decision that that's your friend.

• 2:13:58Jocko Willink?

  And you know what else? The, just going to ego and insecurities, the more secure you are as a person, the, the easier it is to be nice to them.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Like when someone comes into the gym and they're mad dogging me, it's not hard for me to be like, hey, man, what's going on? Hey, wh- wh- where are you from?

• 2:14:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:15Jocko Willink?

  Because I know I've been training for a long time. I know that they're not going to mop the mat up with me. That's not, it's not going to happen.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right, yes.

• 2:14:22Jocko Willink?

  Like, because I'm, I'm confident, you know, I'm secure. I, I know I've been training for a long time. If I'm in a business world and I meet someone and I know that they're might be close to my equivalent, am I insecure where I got to bow up to them and act like a tough guy? No. I'm actually confident that what I do as well, what I do is good. I know I need a good team. I know that I'm solid. I know I know my information well. I know I'm a hard worker. So why am I going to bow up to them? I got, I'm not threatened by them. It's no big deal to me. Let's do this.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Right. And yeah, and even if you feel those, you're compelled to, to kind of have those feelings or to do something to bow up or whatever, because maybe you are insecure. Not everyone's secure, whatever.

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  Just keep it on the inside, you know, don't behave like that.

• 2:15:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  Just know that, okay, I'm feeling this.

• 2:15:07Jocko Willink?

  Because, because, because when somebody bows up to you, when somebody bows up to me, I don't get the feeling that they're secure and confident and I don't even get the feeling that they're good. I get the feeling like, oh, this guy's protecting something, this guy's hiding something.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:22Jocko Willink?

  He must not be that good because he's intimidated by me, that's why he's bowing up to me.

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:25Jocko Willink?

  If he wasn't intimidated by me, he'd be treating me cool.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:29Jocko Willink?

  But he is intimidated by me. So the tougher you try and act, that's actually, eh, to a skilled kind of person that can read people, the tougher you try and act, the weaker you actually appear.

• 2:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:41Jocko Willink?

  Now, if you're running around intimidating white belts, either in the business world or on the jiu-jitsu mat, that doesn't matter, because you can win anyways.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:15:50Jocko Willink?

  So be intimidating the white belts.

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, bro.

• 2:15:56Jocko Willink?

  Alright.

• 2:15:57Speaker 01

  But yeah, make them wanna be friends with you.

• 2:15:59Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:00Speaker 01

  That's a good one. Ah, I wonder if I'm gonna... Okay, next question. Jocko, how would you have handled the leadership role in the First World War trench, trenches? In other words, seemingly helpless situation?

• 2:16:13Jocko Willink?

  This is, this is a question that I didn't even wanna answer because it's just such a brutal question.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:19Jocko Willink?

  And that's why I did answer it.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  (laughing)

• 2:16:21Jocko Willink?

  Because I, I, I wanna have some brutal questions and I would love to think that I would have stood up like a man and like a hero and done everything in my power to stop the madness.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:34Jocko Willink?

  And to come up with a new way and protest the futile tactics and raise my hand and say, "We're not doing this, sir. I will not send my men to their deaths." I would love to think that that's what I would have done. And I can tell you when, when, when I was told to do things in Iraq that I thought we shouldn't be doing, I said, "Hey, you know what? That's not a good idea. Let's find another way. Let's do something different." So I know I've done that before. We got, we got, we had operations that we looked at and said, "You know what? Uh, this is not a smart operation. There's a really high risk and there's very low reward. Let's, let's, let's not do that one. Let's find another way to do it." So I know I've done that.

• 2:17:19Jocko Willink?

  But you take me and you put me in a World War I trench. Now we have a different mind. I have a different brain. And the thing that I'm scared of, the thing that haunts me is, what if my mind was trapped?

• 2:17:36Jocko Willink?

  What if I couldn't see the futility of the situation? Because everyone's saying, "No, you know what? When we do this attack, we've done these things and we've prepared for it and we've got more bombs we're gonna drop. We've got more artillery. This is gonna be the one."

• 2:17:54Jocko Willink?

  You just need to go over the top one more time. Or what if I believed that? What if I couldn't see the solutions in front of me? And that's what scares me.

• 2:18:09Jocko Willink?

  Is,

• 2:18:12Jocko Willink?

  what if you become so brainwashed and closed-minded that you cannot see anymore? And you lose your ability to think?

• 2:18:27Jocko Willink?

  And that's why all the time you're gonna hear me say, "Free your mind." That's what I'm talking about. Free your mind. That is the situation that I am talking about. Question what is around you. Question the status quo and question the authority and the leadership and your subordinates. Question everything.

• 2:18:50Jocko Willink?

  In order to make sure that you're not following a, a well-worn path.

• 2:19:00Jocko Willink?

  A well-worn path that other people have gone by. Maybe it's a path that you've walked before, but it's a well-worn path. And it's a path that leads to suffering and pain and tragedy. And you can't get off the path because your mind is not free.

• 2:19:26Jocko Willink?

  So, how would I have handled the leadership situation in World War I? I cannot honestly answer that question. But the way I try and live and the way I try and think is one with an open mind, a free mind that can see, that can see different perspectives, that can detach from what's being told to me and I can question it and I can come up with a different solution.

• 2:20:05Jocko Willink?

  Free your mind.

• 2:20:10Speaker 01

  Sound advice.

• 2:20:12Jocko Willink?

  It's a tough question.

• 2:20:16Speaker 01

  Next question. Jocko, Echo. Tough versus smart? So wait, what is this do you think? Is this like, is it better to be tough than smart? Or just in general?

• 2:20:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, you just read the question as it was stated. It just said, "Topic for podcast, tough versus smart."

• 2:20:39Jocko Willink?

  And in my opinion, I don't think you need to be tough versus smart. I don't think it needs to be tough or smart. I think you need to be tough and smart. I don't think those two traits are mutually exclusive at all. And being tough and being smart is actually what we want. We...

• 2:21:00Jocko Willink?

  You know, so when we think of tough, I think we think of using, for instance, using blunt force to solve a problem.

• 2:21:08Jocko Willink?

  Right? And, and you might think that using blunt force to solve a problem is stupid.

• 2:21:15Jocko Willink?

  And at the same time, you might think that stepping back from a problem and taking a look or stepping back away from it might be giving up.

• 2:21:25Jocko Willink?

  So you're weak.

• 2:21:28Jocko Willink?

  Or you're not tough. But there are times when those options are the best options. There's some times when blunt force is the best option. And you've just gotta power through and you gotta be tough and you gotta get over the hurdle or over the obstacle or through the obstacle through blunt force trauma. And there's other times where the best possible thing you could do is step back and quit beating your head against the wall and trying to blunt force through something, you wanna step back and find another way. You wanna be smarter, not harder.

• 2:22:04Jocko Willink?

  And I think, again, this comes out to balance. And people pushing when it's a good time to push and a good time to be tough and at the same time knowing that you need to balance that with being smart. And the only way you're gonna be able to do that, the only way you're gonna be able to figure out if you're just being too smart or not smart enough or too tough or not tough enough is to be able to detach and step back and look and see, assess the situation. If you get too in the weeds on it, you won't be able to see that, hey, you've beat your head against the wall forty-seven times, that's enough, stop, step back and find another way.

• 2:22:47Jocko Willink?

  Just like if you're so engrossed in solving the problem and finding the perfect solution and finding the least impact way through the smartest resolution, you don't, if you don't step back from that, you might not see that if you wait any longer on your brilliant plan, you're gonna be overrun by the problem itself. So, being smart and being tough are not mutually exclusive. You need to be both and the way that you balance them is by stepping back, detaching and doing, always doing an assessment of what's happening.

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  So what if you had to choose, and I'm gonna make the question even harder, no specific scenario, what if you had to choose, you gotta be either really smart but not tough, or really smart, or really tough and not smart? What would you choose?

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, you have to go with being smarter.

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:45Jocko Willink?

  I mean, that's just the fact.

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  Why is that unfortunate?

• 2:23:47Jocko Willink?

  It's not unfortunate, but it's just the, the, the reality is being smarter is better.

• 2:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:51Jocko Willink?

  Because being smarter means you can find another solution.

• 2:23:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:23:54Jocko Willink?

  But you know, the, the wall that you might be banging your head against might literally be impassable through that, through that section.

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:24:03Jocko Willink?

  And if all you're gonna do is beat your head against it, eventually you're gonna, you're gonna not make it, you're gonna die.

• 2:24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:08Jocko Willink?

  So, being smart is always better.

• 2:24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, I guess I, I should add it, just in life, let's say, you know, the, really, the question I was wondering is, like, in life, you know, God was there and he said, "Okay, I'm gonna bestow one of these on you in, just in your life, you can either have a knack for being really smart, but, but not tough at all, or, uh, really tough and, and not be smart." Smart, because it-

• 2:24:30Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's, it's, it, um, I shouldn't even be like, making this like, this is a hard decision. Being smarter is better.

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:36Jocko Willink?

  Being, being smarter is better. That's, this, there's no doubt about it. That's, being smarter is better. But, get, by the way, being smarter, look, look at the human race, why do we rule the world over the animals? I mean, you tell me that you're tougher than a chi- than a chimpanzee?

• 2:24:51Speaker 01

  Well, me, yeah, but, I'm just saying.

• 2:24:53Jocko Willink?

  Right, the only reason, the, the thing that wins is intellect. And it'll win every single ti- well, it'll win, mm, a lot of the time. A lot of the time.

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  And if you're smart, you can figure out a way-

• 2:25:04Jocko Willink?

  To overcome the toughness, yeah.

• 2:25:06Speaker 01

  To be tough, yeah, and not even necessarily to make your body-

• 2:25:08Jocko Willink?

  It's called a firearm.

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly right, exactly right, like, when you say, "Are you to, am I tougher than a gorilla?", we'll say, "Well, in a way, yeah."

• 2:25:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:15Speaker 01

  You know?

• 2:25:16Jocko Willink?

  If I have a shotgun.

• 2:25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, or if I have a, yeah, anything, you know, anything that I think up to build or buy, you know? Because of other people like me thought it up and I use their knowledge, you know, because I was that smart to do it.

• 2:25:26Jocko Willink?

  Which goes back to the original question, or what question we answered a little while ago about college. Like, go to college and improve your smartness, get smarter.

• 2:25:33Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah, the smarter-

• 2:25:35Jocko Willink?

  That's why I always say that on the podcast, I'm not, I'm not always talking about being stronger and faster and bigger and tougher, I'm always talking about, you gotta be smarter too, no doubt about it.

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:25:44Jocko Willink?

  The, the success I've had from my life is zero of it, just about zero of it has come from anything physical or being tough. Now, there is a mental toughness that does help you when you are doing intellectual things.

• 2:25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:56Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I can force myself to do some intellectual, uh, goals or some intellectual challenges, that if I wasn't, if I didn't, uh, tough isn't the best word, but if I wasn't mentally tough, I wouldn't be able to do it.

• 2:26:08Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, but if you're smart enough, you can figure out ways to get mentally tough. Like if you're like, hey, I'm like, I know I'm not mentally tough. I'm smart enough to know I'm not mentally tough or I'm not physically tough. Let me figure out a way to get me- I'll figure out a good workout program.

• 2:26:23Jocko Willink?

  Who would you rather be, the guy that is really tough and can stay in cold water for forty-five minutes? Or the guy that invents a wetsuit like Jack O'Neil? And I can stay in the water for unlimited amount of time now?

• 2:26:35Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:26:36Jocko Willink?

  Case in point, Jack O'Neil, keeping it real.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  Boom, name dropper.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  Next question.

• 2:26:44Jocko Willink?

  I didn't say I knew Jack O'Neil.

• 2:26:46Speaker 01

  Right, but you know, you implied.

• 2:26:47Jocko Willink?

  Me and Jack, we go way back.

• 2:26:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:26:50Jocko Willink?

  You got time for one more, maybe?

• 2:26:53Speaker 01

  Maybe. Um, okay, Jocko. As far as self-improvement and getting after it goes, whose standard should one measure themselves by?

• 2:27:06Jocko Willink?

  So, who do I use as a standard to measure myself by?

• 2:27:16Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's really everyone and no one.

• 2:27:23Jocko Willink?

  Because, or there's people in the world that have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. I won't.

• 2:27:35Jocko Willink?

  I mean, some of these notions that you can be whatever you want to be is, as long as you want it bad enough.

• 2:27:43Jocko Willink?

  Those are not true. They're fairy tales. We all have limitations. And I don't have the right genes to be an Olympic weightlifting champion. I don't have the right genetics to be an Olympic champion sprinter. Or a gymnast, or whatever sport you want to name. Now, sure, if I trained my whole life, perhaps I could have achieved some high level in those sports. But I can tell you, I do not have the DNA to be the best in the world in those categories.

• 2:28:29Jocko Willink?

  So, what does that mean?

• 2:28:34Jocko Willink?

  Does that mean that I give up? Does that mean that I quit? Of course not.

• 2:28:40Jocko Willink?

  Not at all. It means that I'm gonna try to be the best that I can be. The strongest, the fastest, the smartest. The smartest human that I can become. That's what I'm gonna go for. And I will, I will compare myself to others and, and look at them and see what they're doing and I'll say that it is possible. How close can I get to that greatness? How close can I get to that glory?

• 2:29:20Jocko Willink?

  But the reality is

• 2:29:23Jocko Willink?

  that my glory?

• 2:29:26Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't happen in front of a crowd. It doesn't happen in a stadium. It doesn't happen on a stage.

• 2:29:35Jocko Willink?

  There's no medals handed out.

• 2:29:42Jocko Willink?

  My glory happens in the darkness of the early morning.

• 2:29:48Jocko Willink?

  In solitude, alone.

• 2:29:52Jocko Willink?

  Where I try. And I try, and I try again to be everything that I possibly can be. The best that I possibly can be. Better than I was yesterday.

• 2:30:13Jocko Willink?

  And better than other people thought I could be.

• 2:30:19Jocko Willink?

  Faster and stronger and smarter and with one victory that no one can ever take away from me.

• 2:30:31Jocko Willink?

  A victory that is earned every single day.

• 2:30:39Jocko Willink?

  A victory of determination and will and discipline.

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  And a victory that is achieved because I will not stop.

• 2:31:03Jocko Willink?

  And I think that's all I've got for tonight.

• 2:31:09Jocko Willink?

  So, once again, thanks to everyone for listening and downloading and supporting the podcast through the various options that we have to do so. Echo, what are those options?

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  Options. If you care about supplementation, the good kind, they'll work. Go to Onnit, Onnit Supplements. Alpha brain for your brain, make you smarter, make quicker decisions, memory, all that stuff. Proven to work, by the way. I don't know if you knew that.

• 2:31:35Jocko Willink?

  I did.

• 2:31:35Speaker 01

  You know, some supplements, they don't prove, they just say, "Hey, this is what's in it, that's it." These ones are proven, and you can even go on the website, look at all their research, it's cool. Anyway, Onnit.com/Jaco, 10% off, boom. Or, before you do your Amazon shopping, just remember to go to JacoPodcast.com or JacoStore.com, just click on the Amazon link.

• 2:31:55Jocko Willink?

  And then we get a little, a little cut to support the podcast.

• 2:31:58Speaker 01

  Like passive supporting, it's like, easy, you know?

• 2:32:01Jocko Willink?

  But it costs you nothing.

• 2:32:03Speaker 01

  Costs you nothing.

• 2:32:04Jocko Willink?

  You're actually just...

• 2:32:06Speaker 01

  Getting after it, really.

• 2:32:08Jocko Willink?

  Really. But you're, but you're supporting the podcast for free.

• 2:32:12Speaker 01

  Yep. Dig it. That is legit. Or, if, if you like shirts and mugs and stuff, you know, if you're into that, which I know I am.

• 2:32:26Speaker 01

  They're pretty cool. We do, I, I do add, like, layers to the shirts, you know, they're not just, "Ooh, a cool saying," or "Discipline equals freedom, that's it." There's like more to it, you know? It's like you're saying that you, I don't know. Anyway. Shirts are cool in my opinion, if that's your opinion as well, look at them.

• 2:32:45Jocko Willink?

  So you're saying there's a whole nother level of cool to the shirts that you make?

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  I think they're cool, but I don't wanna make that.

• 2:32:52Jocko Willink?

  I tend to agree with you, actually.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  There you go, but I don't wanna be like, hey, they're cool, and then people go there, they'll be like, you know, they have a different opinion.

• 2:32:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:58Speaker 01

  They're not cool, I don't wanna be the guy pushing not cool stuff. I think they're cool, go to JacoStore.com. If you think they're cool, go get one, or two.

• 2:33:07Jocko Willink?

  And that's also supporting the podcast, and you're getting cool shirts, so that's cool, we dig that.

• 2:33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, and I, I use the, actually, people ask me this, so it is relevant, where, what kinda shirts do I use? I use the blended one, poly, poly cotton blend.

• 2:33:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so they're high quality.

• 2:33:21Speaker 01

  There, there's a bunch of different kinds, there's a really light one, and then there's like a medium, but still soft, and, you know, that's the one I chose because the light one, it's good, and I, I like those a lot, but, um, some people might not, you know?

• 2:33:34Jocko Willink?

  Too light.

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  Too light, maybe, yeah, maybe, I don't know, but, um, I, I, I figured that out, and, but it's, they're dope. Anyway, they're the high quality ones, they're not the ballpark giveaway shirts, you know?

• 2:33:46Jocko Willink?

  Quality items.

• 2:33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're good. Anyway, there you go, JacoStore.com, um, check them out for yourself, and then, um, yeah, there you go.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Well, also, you can support the podcast by reviewing it on iTunes, or Stitcher, or Google Play, or whatever you listen to it on, and that helps promote the podcast and spread the word, so take a couple minutes and write a review, and I read them. So say something cool in there. Say something cool, and then I'll, I'll talk about it, it'll be in my brain, so I like that. They don't let you respond to them on iTunes, though, like, I can't say like, hey, man, thanks.

• 2:34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz essentially, it's, it's a review, it's not like a, a conversation.

• 2:34:29Jocko Willink?

  I know, but it should be, it should be a conversation, so I could be like, hey, man, thanks, yeah.

• 2:34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is that.

• 2:34:36Jocko Willink?

  That would be cool.

• 2:34:36Speaker 01

  Well, but then again, if, if people think that you're gonna like respond to it, they might not even accurate, you know?

• 2:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's true. Well, if you say something cool, you know what some people have done? They've, they've, uh, like, taken a screenshot of it, and then put it on Twitter, and that way I could be like, oh, that's cool, man.

• 2:34:50Speaker 01

  That's all, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:51Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome, appreciate it, or I can say, hey, good point.

• 2:34:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:34:55Jocko Willink?

  We'll, we'll, we'll think about that.

• 2:34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:58Jocko Willink?

  We'll make some adaptations, adaptations, perhaps, perhaps not.

• 2:35:02Speaker 01

  But getting a screenshot of their iTunes review, that, that's a message in and of itself that's saying, hey, I, I put a review on iTunes.

• 2:35:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:09Speaker 01

  It's not necessarily, hey, you know, your audio is too quiet, you know? It's not that. If they want to tell you that, they tell you that on Twitter.

• 2:35:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, but they're, at least, at least they're showing.

• 2:35:23Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:35:23Jocko Willink?

  That, hey, this is, this is, this is funny, because I would like to see like some reviews, like there's some people that write reviews.

• 2:35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:30Jocko Willink?

  That I, I laugh at, because they're funny. They're like, I, I am definitely getting after it tonight. You know what I go, that's awesome, man.

• 2:35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, this guy, this guy I talk to all the time, Brady, he, he'll like shop at Amazon, and he'll be like, click, screenshot.

• 2:35:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. That's awesome.

• 2:35:47Speaker 01

  You're the man.

• 2:35:49Jocko Willink?

  So, that's cool, appreciate that. And also, of course, if you want to continue this conversation like we just talked about, or you want to ask questions, or you want to give us feedback, or you want to send us a screenshot of your Amazon purchase. Uh, or you just want to kick it with us, then you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, Echo Charles is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. We are also there with Facebook and the Instagram.

• 2:36:17Jocko Willink?

  And we do appreciate what you do for us, the questions, the support, the comments, the fact that all of you are out there getting better. Putting these principles to work on the battlefield, in your business, in your personal life. I've seen a bunch of SEAL buddies that I have, and they're, they're into it, they're listening, and they're giving me feedback. And that, that is worth everything to me. To know, and I get a bunch of emails from Marines, from cops, from firefighters, that they tell me they are putting this stuff to work. I get emails from business people, that they're putting this stuff to work, and that's what we're doing this for.

• 2:36:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:36:57Jocko Willink?

  And so, that's what inspires me to do this and keep doing this, and for me to push myself, because you are pushing yourself out there. Earning that victory every single day by going out there and getting after it.

• 2:37:18Jocko Willink?

  And so, until next time, this is Echo and Jocko, out.