Jocko Underground: How To Develop The "I Don't Quit" Mind Set.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe How to develop the "I don't quit" mind set. Great job with lots of money, but no passion. How to deal with your spouse complaining about everything and not fixing it. How to balance staying on the Path and Having a Life. Understanding suicide. 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 the Jocko Underground Podcast, number 205, sitting here with Echo Charles. We have questions from the field and we will provide, to the best of our ability, answers in some cases, recommendations in other cases, and at a minimum, some courses of action that you can take to move forward on the path.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Well said. First question. First question is, okay, good evening, Jocko and Echo Charles. I'm a high school senior, preparing to matriculate at Virginia, at a Virginia Military Institute in August. I'm an avid CrossFit athlete at my school and would like to start BJJ. I was wondering what advice you would have regarding time management in a high-stress environment and how to get into a "I won't quit" mindset.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so, you know, what you want to do is you want to get involved in some basic stress inoculation.

• 0:59Jocko Willink?

  And what that means, you have to do some stressful things. Do inoculate yourself. It sounds like you're doing some of them, right? You do some CrossFit, those are some psycho hard workouts, they're going to put some stress on you. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu definitely can put some stress on you and get you, if you compete in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you can overcome some stress there. I don't know what actual sports you did, like wrestling, or football, or basketball, or tennis, or rowing, or cross, or whatever, track, something like, so you get stressed in those situations. I watched the interview with Jewel on Joe Rogan. You familiar with Jewel?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that was a while ago.

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was a while ago. But I remembered it because she runs like an academy for kids, or like a school for kids, and one of the things that they do to prepare the kids for life is they play tennis. And Joe Rogan was kind of like, "Oh, why, why did, why do you play tennis? Did you play tennis?" And she's like, "No, no, I didn't play it." But it's super stressful, right? Because it's all on you, and if you, you have a small room for error. So, you know, whatever, like, it's, any of these sports is going to give you some level of stress, and they're also going to help you, you have to have grit, right? Because if you're wrestling, or you're playing football, or tennis, or basketball, or rowing, or, you know, Jiu-Jitsu, you are going to be put in stressful situations, it's going to be hard, and you can't quit, right? So, that's good.

• 2:26Jocko Willink?

  So you want to get stress inoculation, do stressful things. You want to get

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  into a mindset where you're not going to quit, do hard things.

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  As far as the time management piece goes, the time management under stress, you got to, first of all, you have to eliminate procrastination. You just got to do the thing. Just, just do the thing, right? That's number one. You have something to do, do it.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  Get as far ahead of the power curve as you can.

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  Right? And the way that you do that is don't do anything later that you can do now. Don't do one thing later that you can do now. Do the thing now. Don't wait.

• 3:08Jocko Willink?

  That's important. Because it's really easy. When you're, when you go, oh, you know what? I don't need to get this done tonight because I've got time in the morning. Don't do that. Do it tonight. Do it tonight. I'm very good about that. I'm almost like a nine point eight out of 10. I am not going to go to bed until I have the thing ready.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  It's the rule.

• 3:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's, it's actually borderline, borderline anxiety. Where like I can't sleep because I know I've got that thing and something happens in the morning and the, the water heater breaks and like, whatever, like, yeah, something goes wrong. You know, I've only like, like, uh,

• 3:49Jocko Willink?

  for the podcast, for this podcast, I will print out notes.

• 3:54Jocko Willink?

  The night before. Because if there's something wrong with that printer in the morning, you know, now we got to probably get, I can email you like, hey, man, printer's not working. Can you print these notes out? Cool. I think I've done that to you twice.

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  Or we've printed them out at victory. But anyways, you know what I'm saying? It's hard for me to sleep. I'm pretty good. My printers, I've got a really good printer right now at my house. So I've, I've eased up on that a little bit. So, but if you can do something now, do it now. Don't put it off. Anything that you can get done now, get it done now. Cause you don't know what's coming. So that's a, a step. Here's another thing with time management that is very important.

• 4:36Jocko Willink?

  Some things only have to be good enough.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying? So to get something good enough takes 20 minutes to get it perfect takes two hours. You know what I'm saying? Like this is very common. There's a lot of things in life. You will waste a bunch of time trying to. And by the way, military indoctrination programs. They do that to the nth degree. They will, they will give you tasks that if you do them perfect, you will not succeed. Cause you'll be doing this one particular task perfect and you'll fail everything else. So you really have to learn what tasks just need to be good enough. And what things, cause there are some things you're gonna need to be as perfect as possible.

• 5:20Jocko Willink?

  So keep that in mind. What only needs to be good enough? And you know, the different, you know, I was talking about this the other day with Andy Stumpf. To get a 90 on a test takes 45 minutes of study.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  To get a, to get a, you know, a 30 takes zero minutes. To get a 90 takes 45 minutes. To get a hundred takes four or five hours.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  By the way, both those things say A.

• 5:51Jocko Willink?

  So you gotta, you gotta figure that out. And now listen, if there's a course where your grade has dropped and you need to pull up the average. So you get an A. Cool, you might need, there's some times where you might need to spend that three, four hours studying. So you make you pull, make sure you get a hundred and pull up that grade. But generally speaking, you need to figure out what is the optimum speed? You know, the optimum speed, like they have in aircraft. Like, how can you go the longest mileage? You know, what speed is it? Cause if you've got to pedal down to the floor, you're, you're gonna go less distance. So you need to keep that in mind.

• 6:29Jocko Willink?

  And that means you need to learn to prioritize and execute, right? What is it worth doing perfect and versus what is just worth doing?

• 6:37Jocko Willink?

  As far as stress goes,

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  especially in like a Virginia Military Institute, you have to remember that it's a game. I'm not saying that in a negative way. I'm not saying that in a demeaning way. It's a game. Look, I went to Navy Boot Camp. It's a game. I went to basic underwater demolition and SEAL training. It's a game. Officer Candidate School. It's a game. SEER School. It's a game. All these things are games. So if you, you have to remember that it's a game and the more, if you care too much, it's going to create stress. I'm not saying don't care. But if you get wrapped around the axle about something that you shouldn't care about, they're, they're going to find it.

• 7:26Jocko Willink?

  They're going to figure out what that is. They're going to be looking for your weakness and they're going to try and exploit it and they're going to try and capitalize on it.

• 7:33Jocko Willink?

  For example, if you care about something too much, it can cause a problem, i.e. The classic example is like a mom joke, right? You know, oh, your, your, your mom was just over here, right? It's just a, it's a joke, right? Occasionally you see people fly off the handle with that stuff. Right? So now they've created a problem. And look, I'm not saying that you don't care about your mom. I'm not saying you shouldn't defend your mom's honor and all that stuff. What I'm saying is they're going to be saying a bunch of stuff to get in your head, a bunch of, they're going to be doing things to try and make you, to try and cause stress.

• 8:16Jocko Willink?

  They come in and start, you know, throwing your, you've, you've spent all night organizing your locker for the locker inspection. They come in and start throwing things around. And you spent a lot of time on it and you really care about it? Bro, it's going to be much, much worse than if you go, huh, that's funny.

• 8:34Jocko Willink?

  It's a game.

• 8:36Jocko Willink?

  So with highly stressful things, you know, obviously detach, obviously take a step back, obviously don't let your emotions get involved. But one of the things that causes you to fail to detach and causes you to get emotional is when you care so much about something and you, and you don't step away from that.

• 8:57Jocko Willink?

  So please, just chill, just relax a little bit. The stress is they're looking for indications of things that will make you freak out. And they're going to focus on those things that they're going to cause stress. And then they don't quit attitude.

• 9:17Jocko Willink?

  Just don't give yourself another option, you know, this is not, I don't have a great way to develop a don't quit attitude. Cause I don't, I never thought about it. I didn't have to go through some protocol to come up with a no quit attitude. I was like, oh, I'm not going to quit. I wasn't even, I didn't even think really like, I'm never going to quit. I didn't, I never even thought that. I never thought that. I never thought like, oh, I, I need to develop a no quit attitude. I never thought like, never said, I'm not going to quit. I never said that. I wasn't even thinking about it. It wasn't even a thing. It would be like if I said, hey, Echo, are you going to go, you know, uh, jump in the tar pit? When we get done with this podcast?

• 10:02Jocko Willink?

  Have you thought about that today?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  I have not thought about.

• 10:04Jocko Willink?

  That's how much I thought about quitting. As much as you thought about going to jump in a tar pit after this podcast? You didn't think about it at all. It wasn't a thing.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:12Jocko Willink?

  So that's where I was. So I would just get it completely out of your system. That's not even a thing. I don't even know what it, it's not even an option. I haven't even thought about it.

• 10:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you look like you're going to say something.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I was thinking of yesterday, we were talking to Andy Stumpf. He said something and it was, it was a more specific version of he didn't have a plan B. He said, uh,

• 10:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you don't want your plan B to be too tempting.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's at that time he said it, but the way he said it kind of made it slightly different, more specific. He said, um, he said, oh, I didn't have anything else better to do. That's what he said. So I was like, oh yeah, which kind of means like, I didn't have a plan B. I get that part of it, but it's like, when you say, I didn't have anything better to do. It's kind of like, yeah, I'm going to quit, but why would I quit? It's not like there's some relief somewhere. I don't have anywhere to be like I, suffering here is kind of the only thing I've been thinking about, you know, like. And I felt that too on little smaller levels, obviously than compared to Bud's. But I remember one time all my family was gone and I was like, I went to work out. I was like, I'm not in the mood to work out or whatever, but you know, you know, I'm out here working out and I'm like, what am I going to do? I'm not rushing to dinner or nothing.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I literally have like all day and all night. I could rack my brain for something to get done for sure, but I'm like, I don't have anything better to do. Might as well just do this workout. See what I'm saying? So it's kind of like that. It's like, there's nothing, you're not quitting for anything. So it's like quitting is not, doesn't seem like there's anything better to do. So you might as well just stick around kind of a thing.

• 11:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  That's what I was thinking about.

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So that's it, man. Stress inoculation, keep pushing yourself. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen, go to jacood underground.com and subscribe. And we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control and we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors.

• 12:31Jocko Willink?

  And we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you. It's jacood underground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email assistance@jacood underground.com and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.