Jocko Underground: The Truth About Hustle Culture

Hustle Cultrue. Cutting Corners. Ideas of re-structuring deployments. Jocko's opinion. Getting dumped after helping him get a job at your own workplace. Being pressured into a promotion. Your rubbing people the wrong way is the a problem. 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 83 with Echo Charles, sitting across from me. So here's, I'm not a huge quote guy, but occasionally gotta throw them out there. Here's one. "Perseverance alone does not assure success. No amount of stalking will lead to game in a field that has none." That's a quote from the I Ching, which is the ancient Chinese text. Kind of has some mysterious origins, but believed to have been compiled by a group of sages. I like when you can use the term sage in a legitimate way.

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  Not calling some person on Instagram a sage, but to say an ancient sage.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  A real one.

• 0:47Jocko Willink?

  A group of sages who were trying to understand the nature of life and the nature of the universe and whatnot. So, you know, and perhaps on the Jocko Podcast at some point, we'll cover the entire text of the I Ching. But this, the reason that this, this, reading this, I decided, hey, this might be something worth bringing up. This quote of perseverance alone does not assure success. No amount of stalking will lead to game in a field that has none, is because, interestingly, right now, in this world of hustle culture, in this world of, did you make up the term toxic productivity?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  No, I thought it was your daughter.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay, okay, maybe my daughter made it up. But you can see how if you're a toxic productivity human, or you're all on board for the hustle culture, which let's face it, hey, hustle, I'm down, right? Hustle culture, yeah, let's go, let's get stuff done, let's make things happen. But.

• 1:54Jocko Willink?

  This is an important thing to remember. It's in line with that conversation which we've talked about. We talked about on the game podcasts. You know, which game are you playing? Are you playing soccer or playing basketball? You know, in soccer, you can only score a point, maybe two points. And in basketball, you can score thirty.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  So what game are you playing?

• 2:14Jocko Willink?

  And in this one, the, what made me think that this was even more relevant because I started thinking of being in a field. Stalking for game, right? Stalking for an animal to hunt. Well, when you're stalking, you're crawling, you're low crawling, you're sneaking. You can't see very much at all. You certainly can't see the whole field

• 2:42Jocko Willink?

  that you're stalking in, in order to tell whether there's any game in there or not. Look, you might be following a trail, but you don't know how long that trail goes for. You know how far it goes? You, you have no idea.

• 2:56Jocko Willink?

  So what happens with us is we, it's very easy for us to get caught up in the stalk. It's very easy for us to get caught up in the hunt.

• 3:07Jocko Willink?

  And

• 3:10Jocko Willink?

  it's exciting, right? It's engaging. On the trail, you're, you're stalking. It's good. Victory's around, as far as you can tell, victory might be around the next bush. That could be happening.

• 3:23Jocko Willink?

  But if you're not careful, you just might be hunting in a field that has no animals in it. There's no game in there.

• 3:35Jocko Willink?

  So you have to detach. And I, I realize that I use the term detach all the time. And it's real easy for me to throw it out there because I know what I'm talking about. So what I mean, what I mean here is actually stopping working for an hour on a Saturday or for an hour on a Sunday. Stop your hustle culture, stop your toxic productivity, actually stop that.

• 4:02Jocko Willink?

  And write down.

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  What you're doing, where you're going, and how you plan to get there.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  That's all it takes, right? Actually, write down, where am I right now? Where am I right now? Wait, where is it that I want to go?

• 4:23Jocko Willink?

  And then how do I plan to get there? That's what this is. If you write things down, it helps you detach from them. And then you can look and you can say, wait a second. I know where I want to be. And this job that I'm in isn't getting me there. This path that I'm on isn't going to get me there.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  This methodology that I'm using is not going to get me there.

• 4:45Jocko Willink?

  So once you write this down, once you detach from it, once you assess what is actually happening, then you can either get back to hunting in the field because you're in the right field, in the correct field, or you can go and move to a different field where there is some game that you can hunt.

• 5:14Jocko Willink?

  That's it. That's what I got for today. It's my underground output for today. Watch out for it.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, the hustle culture, and I'm still trying to get a grasp on it. Where, if I'm not mistaken, tell me what you think. Where you hustle, okay, you have all these sort of leaders in the community, right? Who hustle and they're all but they're successful. So it's kind of like, and they, and they really advocate for the hustle. So then you have certain followers who embrace the idea of hustle. But meanwhile, they're not getting success, but it doesn't matter. Because the culture is the hustle itself. So it's kind of like, and then of course, social media and the internet in general sort of can proliferate just the, the attitude because of the payoff, because of the additional payoff. Meaning if you can, if I can hustle, if I can, you know, power through 100 emails today, send out, you know, 100 more.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Um, made 12 cold calls. I don't know whatever the, whatever we're doing. And if I did all that, regardless of the results, regardless of the mistakes I made or didn't make, regardless of the result, if I did all that, that gets kind of commended like, hell yeah, hustle on brother, you know, they get the, the support. So they get a big payoff, a big one, you know, uh, what do you call it? Admiration or respect from your peers is one of the best payouts.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. This is your exactly, you're talking exactly why I brought, brought this up and you're bringing it to a point where people will try, will understand. I think I, I didn't do a good job. I didn't do this justice. Here's what you gotta watch out for. Look, everyone says these days, you know, you got to enjoy the process, right? You gotta enjoy the process. You like focus on the process. And there's a reason that people say that and it makes sense. Here's the thing. If you're focusing on the process, but there are no results coming, you're making a mistake. What, when people say, hey, just enjoy the process, what they say is you can't go out and try and sell your widget for one day and be like, we didn't get any sales or even a week and be like, we didn't get any sales.

• 7:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I enjoy the process. So I'm gonna go and bang on more doors tomorrow. Yeah. Good job. But at a certain point, you've got to assess and say, wait a second, I haven't sold any widgets in a month and a half. I keep getting told no. Hey, I get, I get, I might need to ask a hundred people to get two yeses, but if I asked 500 people and I've got no yeses, now you need to start to assess, not just the process, but what is the actual widget that you're selling? What is the actual game that you're in? This is where it can be problematic. Here's, you know, you're a workout guy. I'm a workout guy. If you have someone that's following a program, like, oh, I'm gonna do whatever they're gonna do. Hey, from now on, we're gonna take the, uh,

• 8:02Jocko Willink?

  We're going to do high repetition workouts. Okay. Cool. So you start doing that. You're not going to see results tomorrow. You're not going to see results in a week. But if you're doing super lightweight and very extreme high repetitions and you're trying to get bigger and stronger, you might be gaining endurance, but you might certainly might not be getting bigger and you certainly might not be getting stronger. So if you just embrace the process and you keep on the grind and you keep doing these massive, high repetition exercises, but you're not getting the results that you want, eventually you need to say, oh, my approach is wrong. I need a new strategy.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was saying, there was this guy, Sal DiStefano, he's a trainer. He, uh, he said something that I totally agree with where he's like, the man who enjoys walking will walk farther than the man trying to get to where he's walking to. Something along those lines. And I was like, yeah, that's true. And given now, given what you're saying, it's like, man, the bigger, a big picture look at it's like, it's kind of a, one might say dichotomy, right? Where it's like, a man who really loves walking and wants to get somewhere, he really has to want to get to that place as well. Because if a man just loves walking, he might as well just walk on the treadmill. And then that's the same as these, these hustle culture guys who are just hustling for the sake of hustling. They're just on a treadmill. They're not going nowhere. See what I'm saying?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  So yeah, that, that second part of it, I think is, is important, you know, especially, you know, you bring to light, make it a lot more clear. And you used to say this, and I actually still say it, where you're like, what are you doing right now?

• 9:42Jocko Willink?

  What are you doing right now?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  You're like, frig, bruh, if you can ask yourself that, ask yourself that question once a day. What are you doing right now? And bruh, it kind of helps because even just that simple question, which actually seems kind of ambiguous on the surface, bro, that is a deep question.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that'll help.

• 9:59Jocko Willink?

  You should say to those young SEAL officers, there'd be like mayhem going on. Be like, what are you doing right now? And you can see they didn't know what they were doing or whatever they were doing wasn't making any sense. And they, as soon as they asked themselves, wait. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen.

• 10:19Jocko Willink?

  Go to JacoUnderground.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 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

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you. It's JacoUnderground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email [email protected] and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.