374: Know Your Strengths, Know Your Weaknesses, Know Your Attributes, Know Yourself. With Rich Diviney

Rich draws upon 20+ years of experience as a Navy SEAL Officer where he completed more than 13 overseas deployments – 11 of which were to Iraq and Afghanistan. Through his career, he has achieved multiple leadership positions – to include the Commanding Officer of a Navy SEAL Command. 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 374 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  I found myself in a C-130 lumbering through the sky at 20,000 feet one late spring night. When you're inside an airplane or a helicopter, the sensation of height is muted. As far as the physical senses are concerned, you might as well be standing in a small wobbly room or sitting in an uncomfortable chair. But once we reached the right altitude, I was in the tail, standing on an open ramp, staring into a pitch black abyss and getting ready to throw myself into it. Did I mention that I hate heights? The fear response is an interesting thing. There are some basic physiological reactions common to most people.

• 0:53Jocko Willink?

  An increase in pulse and respiration, dilation of the pupils, but others are idiosyncratic. Mine? I yawn. I know it sounds weird and I used to think it was too, but what I now know is that yawning is just my body's way of trying to re-regulate my breathing, take in more oxygen and access my parasympathetic nervous system.

• 1:20Jocko Willink?

  Of course, the outward appearance of this suggests the complete opposite of fear, which is handy when you don't want people to know that you're nervous. But I was. I was nervous every time I got ready to jump. I was practicing the most difficult level of skydiving, high altitude, high opening, or HEHO.

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  You jump from around 20,000 feet, count to four, then pull the cord. The parachute opens at about 19,000 feet, which means there's a long flight to a distant landing zone. This training is done during the day and at night, with nighttime proficiency being the goal, which is why I was standing at the back of that C-130 yawning in the black sky.

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  Several things make jumping from that height more difficult.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  One is how cold it is up there. Average air temperature differentials are approximately three degrees per thousand feet. This means that if it's reasonable sixty degrees when you board the aircraft, you can expect the air to be a bone chilling sub-zero temperature when you jump out. There's also very little oxygen at that height. At sea level, the air is almost twenty-one percent oxygen. At twenty thousand feet, it plummets to less than ten percent. Where they're that thin, you're at risk of altitude sickness, which includes a myriad of symptoms ranging from dizziness, fatigue, and headache to massive confusion, shortness of breath, and complete loss of consciousness. This means you have to jump with an oxygen canister

• 2:48Jocko Willink?

  and mask, and that's on top of full combat gear, ballistic helmet, and, because it's pitch dark, night vision goggles. That's a lot of equipment to juggle, which only adds to the list of skills needed to survive a hey-ho jump.

• 3:10Jocko Willink?

  Yet I'd mastered all those skills. I'd made dozens of hey-ho jumps, yet my nerves quickened every time I stood at that open ramp. And none of those skills mattered if I couldn't force myself out of the damn door. In times of high stress and great discomfort, skills aren't enough. That is where attributes come in.

• 3:40Jocko Willink?

  That right there is an excerpt from a book called "The Attributes: Twenty-Five Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance," written by Rich Diviney. And the book focuses on uncovering attributes required for success in any endeavor, and also how to evaluate and improve those attributes. And the author, Rich Diviney, is a retired SEAL officer, served over twenty years in the Navy, deployed over a dozen times. Eleven of those deployments were to Iraq or Afghanistan.

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  He served in leadership positions at every level and also ran the assessment and selection for the maritime component of the Joint Special Operations Command, which we call JSOC. And it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to talk about his experiences and lessons learned. And of course, we'll dive in to these attributes. Rich, thanks for coming down, man.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jago. Honored to be here.

• 4:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, glad to, glad to have you. I know we ran into each other in some unfortunate circumstances, but glad we were able to link up and get the opportunity to pass on some of these lessons, some of these hard earned lessons that you have, which includes being in the most uncomfortable position with gear strapped all over your body on the back of a C-130 in the middle of the night. Good times.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Good times.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  Let's, let's just, before we jump into the book, let's jump into just how you ended up here, how you ended up there. So where were you born? You're a Connecticut kid, huh?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I'm a Connecticut kid. And it's actually surprising how many team guys that I discovered when I went to SEAL training, how many guys are from Connecticut.

• 5:28Jocko Willink?

  No kidding?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of, big populace. I don't know what it is. Maybe something in the water.

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  I always found it rare. I don't know. Whenever I met a guy from Connecticut, I was like, whoa, right on.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  All I know is that when I first joined up, within the first few years, I met at least a dozen or more dudes from Connecticut. And I was like, wow.

• 5:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever hear that thing that when they researched who could make it through BUDs, they were trying to figure out, the thing that they figured out, there was two things, they only improved the chance of making it through BUDs, like, almost, almost a immeasurable tiny amount, but it was wrestlers and people from New England. Have you ever heard that?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  I heard wrestlers. I didn't hear people from New England. I also heard rowers. And I have a theory on that one, too, but we can talk about that.

• 6:08Jocko Willink?

  What's your theory on rowers?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  So, well, it's wrestlers and rowers. And what I, I think one of the, one of the primary attributes required, if there's one most important attribute required to get through BUDs, it's compartmentalization. It's the ability to assess your environment, immediately prioritize what you need to focus on, and then focus on that until completion. And so you think about a rower, and I never rowed competitively, but I've talked to many rowers. A rower is someone who's sitting in a boat and is part of a team. And has to literally just row until they puke. And if they, if they even break their rhythm for a second, they mess up the whole team. So it's literally a selfless sacrifice in, in a, in a team effort that they just have to gut it out until they're done.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it is, is kind of one of the most intense compartmentalization moments, I think.

• 6:57Jocko Willink?

  What's the average length of one of those races in time?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Oh, I have no, I have no idea.

• 7:01Jocko Willink?

  Are they doing 2000 meters?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I'm sure it's like sprinting in terms of they have different, uh, different, uh, distances, but none of them are, are short.

• 7:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're gonna have to keep it together for a long, a longer period of time.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  And, and to, and to, and to not to even dip a little bit is going to affect the team, which is fascinating to me. Um, and of course wrestlers, I think, you know, and I would actually put any fighting discipline into this category, this idea that you are, you are in a ring with another human, so it's a highly uncertain situation. And, uh, and you have to, you have to compartmentalize and you have to basically adapt to everything you're seeing. And you are often being viewed by, by the external. So to, to give up in any capacity is going to mean injury or least of, or, or I guess least, uh, favorite, or least favorite embarrassment, injury or embarrassment. So I think, I think those, those sports I talk about, I, I typically don't talk about

• 7:56Speaker 01

  attributes in the athletic endeavors because most, most sports are fairly certain environments, uh, other than a few. And the few that I do talk about are fighting sports, climbing in some cases, uh, rowing's pretty certain, but I think compartmentalization is, is definitely affected in that one, but.

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:12Jocko Willink?

  Um, so you're born in Connecticut. What, what did your parents do?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Dad was a lawyer. Mom stayed, stayed home with kids. Um, professional, she was a semi-professional pianist, so she used to spend most of her days practicing piano.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  Which was either really cool or really annoying.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's funny. Yeah, it was, I thought it was, I thought it was annoying, but then I had friends come over and was like, man, that's really nice background. And I recognize I do love classical music. I don't, you know, I don't overindex on it, but I do have a love for it. And so, uh, so yeah, it was, it was, it was nice. But yeah, really nice childhood. Twin brother, older sister, younger brother.

• 8:44Jocko Willink?

  And was there any military in your family?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  No, none. Um, my dad was a private pilot, so he'd go flying on the weekends and, uh, so he'd take us all up. And my twin brother and I got hooked from the, from the beginning. Um, you know, he put us in the, in the. In this, in the right seat and we'd help, help him steer the aircraft. And so my favorite, my two favorite books growing up were Chuck Yeager's Autobauer for Yeager and The Right Stuff. And I read those books, I mean, a dozen times. And all I wanted to do was be a fighter pilot. And I, well, World War, World War II fighter pilot, that's all. But, but we had this bent on joining, well, first Air Force, then we found out that the Navy guys land on ships. We're like, well, that's really cool. Right? So, so then it was Navy all the way. This was pre Top Gun, then Top Gun just made it, made it even worse.

• 9:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a wild thing. One of my buddies, Dave Burke.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Good deal, Dave.

• 9:36Jocko Willink?

  Yes. They have this thing where they, they call it getting aboard. And, and basically there's some people that can't do that.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:45Jocko Willink?

  That last thing, which is land the boat, land the plane on the boat. And he had this one buddy that decided to go in the Marine Corps instead of go in the Air Force. And he made it all the way through training, was an F-18 pilot. And the last thing that he needed to do was get aboard.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:59Jocko Willink?

  Couldn't get aboard. And so if he would have been an F-15 pilot in the Air Force or an F-16 pilot, he would have been good to go. But he couldn't get aboard. It's just like that last little thing.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I remember reading an article, Navy pilot, of course, I was absorbing as much as I could back then. And a Navy pilot was quoted as saying, imagine putting a postage, postage stamp in the middle of a, of a large rug, turning out the lights and then jumping and landing on that postage stamp with your tongue. That's what it's like. I was like, that's, that's pretty good. Yeah.

• 10:27Jocko Willink?

  What sport? You, you said you didn't row. What sports did you play?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  I, I, I tried everything when I was a kid. Back then you could, you didn't have to start it.

• 10:35Jocko Willink?

  They didn't, they didn't, they didn't put like a baseball glove in your hand when you were born. And this is the only sport for you.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 10:40Jocko Willink?

  You're going to be a champ.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And I'm imagining all where you grew up nowadays, you have to start, if you don't start early, you're not going to make the high school team, right? So, anyway, I tried everything growing up. When I, when I got to high school, I decided, I loved ice hockey, but I couldn't skate well enough to make the team. So I decided to play lacrosse. I felt like it was kind of a, a land version of ice hockey. And so I, I walked on the team freshman year, never having played. Played four years and was captain by the end of the, by my senior year.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  That's legit?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:06Jocko Willink?

  Was that, was that the only sport you played?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I did track, I did track in the winter to get in shape for lacrosse, but that was, yeah, that was about it.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  And then when, are you thinking about the milit-, so this is high school, are you thinking about the military?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, Navy, we were bent on Navy. And so we were the kids, we were the kids who had pictures of, of jets, you know, in our, in our notebooks, I had it all over my room.

• 11:28Jocko Willink?

  Pictures of Tom Cruise?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Not so much Tom Cruise, but, but yeah, jets and, yeah, so it was, yeah, we were known, kind of, those who knew us in high school, they knew that the Vinnie boys wanted to go in the military, so.

• 11:41Jocko Willink?

  And then, so then your plan was to obviously be a pilot, you have to be an officer, so now you know you gotta go to college?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  And when did you end up going to college?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  So went first year to an aviation school down in Embry-Riddle.

• 11:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, in Florida?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, Embry-Riddle down in Florida. My brother went to FIT down in Florida. The plan was, let's get our, let's start learning how to fly or maybe get our pilot's license and go OCS. But after about a year there, or half a year there, I realized, well, first of all, I, I realized getting, you know, paying $20,000 a year to get your pilot's license, right, it makes sense. So I, I majored in avionics, which I wasn't good at at all. My brother did get his license, but we also realized that the doors, after the Top Gun kind of surged, the doors for slots for OCS were closing. So we were like, no, we should probably find a, an ROTC unit. And so we both applied to Purdue and then transferred up to Purdue. And I joined the ROTC unit, earned a scholarship there.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  My brother did not, but he went, well, after some years of kind of figuring out what he wanted to do, went to Marine PLC, joined the Marines and then flew Harriers for 20 years, yeah.

• 12:44Jocko Willink?

  So at what point did you realize you didn't want to be a pilot?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  It was never I didn't want to be a pilot. It was, I, it was after the first Gulf War, there was a Newsweek article I, I saw and it was, it basically had a guy's face on it, was camouflaged and said, it was like special, special operations forces, right? And so I opened up this article and it was, it was about seven pages and it talked about all the spec ops units. So Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Through those seven pages, there were probably 20, 25 pictures of guys, you know, doing different things like underwater, in the snow, skydiving, desert, jungle. And I recognized that out of that 25 pictures, like 20 of them were SEALs. They were just in different environments.

• 13:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And I was like, who are these guys, right? And so I started, I started reading about them. And, um, and then as I went to school, I still hadn't made a decision when I was in RTC, but ultimately, I said to myself, well, I know I can be a pilot, but I don't wanna, I don't wanna wonder if I could be a SEAL. And so, so I went that direction and fortunately got a billet.

• 13:41Jocko Willink?

  And then how did you, I mean, this is what, so what year is this?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  This is, well, I graduated in 96, so this might have been 90s. Yeah. Not a lot of SEAL stuff.

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  Did you, how hard was it to get a billet?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Well, it was difficult. I mean, they were only, they only, my year, they only accepted 11 ROTC guys nationwide. Um, and I think, and it was like 16 academy guys. And so, uh, I was able to link up with a guy in Connecticut who was running, he basically, he'd just started a program where he just, he was, he was a retired reserve SEAL, Captain Bissett. And, um, and he had helped a couple of guys get through the, you know, get to the, get through the pipeline. And so I linked up with him, he started, you know, helping me with the physical test, which ironically, back then I did, I think I did 11 pull-ups for my, for my test, which, which, I mean, I wouldn't even have, you know, gotten close to making it today. Um, but he also, I think what he really did was, uh, introduced me to some active SEALs.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  I drove down to DC to meet with a captain down there, got a recommendation. So I, I met with them, they gave me recommendations, and then he helped me put together a package, which I then gave to my RTC unit, cause they didn't really know how to do the SEAL thing. Uh, in fact, you know, during our summer cruises, there's, there was something called MiniBUDS. And, um, I remember, you know, being at my unit, going to my, my unit officer and saying, "Hey, can I go to MiniBUDS?" He was like, "Oh, uh, well, let me look into that." And so a couple of days later, he's like, "Oh, you know, there's no more billets for MiniBUDS." I was like, "Oh, okay, check." And so I went on a normal Navy cruise. In fact, I went on a ship out here in San Diego. And one day threw on my whites and just walked into the BUDS quarter that I could say, hey, can you show me Ron? But ironically, I get to BUDS, I realized that actually there were billets, there were extra billets for ROTC that that he didn't know about.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  So extra, extra academy guys got to, got to go that year. So I never got to many BUDS, but.

• 15:21Jocko Willink?

  So this was like 1996, you say. I remember there was a time period where they were recruiting guys, like the officers were just kind of like off the charts, uh, you know, Ivy League guys that rode crew and were captain of the football team and all this stuff. And then they kind of backed away from that because they had these guys that were basically, there's, there's several issues that they were into. I'm sure we could run into the attributes of what it was, but a lot of them were just, they were just there to do four years.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Bunch of ticket.

• 15:50Jocko Willink?

  And get the qual and then get out and move on with the rest of their life. And other guys just didn't have any common sense type thing. And so they, they kind of opened up. I think they opened up their minds as to who they were recruiting. So it sounds like, you know, you were laughing, you're saying you only did 11 pull ups.

• 16:08Jocko Willink?

  And it's one of those things where, you know, you look at a bunch of guys and this guy can do 50 and this guy can do 42 and this guy can do 38 and this guy, and this guy can do 11. Well, quite frankly, being able to do pull ups is not necessarily mean, translate to any part of being, being an actual SEAL and being a SEAL officer for sure.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:26Jocko Willink?

  And so, you know, obviously you must've had some other characteristics that they looked at and thankfully they did because, you know, I was, I was also talking to a a guy that worked at BUDS a little while ago and, and, you know, he was basically talking about the fact that sometimes guys that are like, for instance, bad runners. He was like, yeah, you know, a guy can't keep up with his boat and he just gets run out of the boat and that's it. He's done. And he says, and you and I both know, and we all know, like, being a good runner does not necessarily make someone a good SEAL.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  No, no, you know, it's fascinating. I think you can, you can agree with this because you were actually in the pre-war SEAL teams longer than I was. But when I got to the SEAL teams, you know, 97 or so. I went to the SEAL teams and I recognized that all of the best SEALs were, or those who were considered the best SEALs were all the best PTers. They were the guys who came up first on the runs and all that stuff. And PT was kind of the measure at the time because we'd have these massive team PTs every day, which was good from a morale standpoint. I think that's something we lost in the war. But what I recognized is when the war started, all those guys started to disappear. I mean, the guys who were actually good at war, good at the job, those measurements left, right? And so I think you're absolutely right. I

• 17:35Speaker 01

  think the default tends to be physical because it's immeasurable and you can see it. But we all know those dark horses, man. But this is why we have a fire in the gut award at BUDs, right? Because, you know...

• 17:47Jocko Willink?

  I don't think they have it anymore.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 17:49Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:49Jocko Willink?

  Oddly enough.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  It is odd.

• 17:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they don't have it anymore. Yeah, you know, when I got to Team, so I went to, I got to Team One, and I would say there was a little bit of a, there was a little bit of a line between like people that were good at running. And then there was people that were considered to be like good team guys. And those, sometimes the good runners were also good team guys, but sometimes team guys weren't great runners. And it really boiled down to like how good they were at doing the job of being in the field. And that's what counted. And although I think from like, maybe senior leadership would look and go, this guy's our best runner, he must be a great SEAL. And that certainly is, as

• 18:36Jocko Willink?

  we both know and laugh, like, just not true.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  As two non-runners here, yeah, we can testify, right?

• 18:42Jocko Willink?

  I've never been accused of winning running races.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  I was goon squad. When I first got to BUDs, I was goon squad. And I was literally on the weekends practicing my running on the beach on the soft sand because I really hadn't done it. And slowly I got up to the edge of the pack of the back and then into the middle. But I was goon squatting a lot.

• 19:01Jocko Willink?

  So were you, so how prepared were you? What information did you have going about?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I mean, books back then were, you know, hard to find. Brave Men, Dark Waters, you know, Orr Kelly wrote a couple. There was one called The Commandos, which was probably the most recent. It was kind of at the time, the most recent book and it kind of outlined Hell Week. So, so I had a sense of what was going on. The be something special recruiting video. That's all you need, right?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Ultimately, I think, I can say I wasn't prepared enough. But, you know, when I got there, I just, I recognized, hey, I just had to do what I needed to do. And even the O course, I mean, you know, again, on the weekends or after work, I was going to practice the O course. I was running on sand, you know, just to get going. Cause I was like, I just have to, have to do it. So, and what I knew I could do, I think one of the things I recognized at BUDs fairly quickly was that it actually wasn't about the physical. It was about just keep going, you know, and, and you almost come to the sense that, hey, there's only so many pushups that someone can make me do until I can't do anymore. And at that point, they're gonna make me get wet. It's like, okay, so I'll get wet, you know, and I'll be, and I'll cool off and I'll go do more pushups, right? So, so

• 20:13Speaker 01

  you almost come to a recognition that you're going to get to zero and just do what you can at zero. And I think that's, that's, that's what, that's what they're looking for. They're looking for that recognition and that, almost that comfort in the fact that yeah, I'll just keep going. Even if it's slow, I'll just keep moving. So.

• 20:30Jocko Willink?

  Not gonna give up. Was there anything that was especially challenging for you?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Well, running was probably the most challenging, especially beach running. Yeah, I would say, yeah, the water stuff. I always loved the water stuff. So if there was anything, so drown proving was pretty much my favorite thing to do. Because it was a time that no one was screwing with you. So, so I remember they'd have dog and ponies and, you know, you know, as a BUDs class, they'd have. They'd say, hey, we need volunteers to do these dog ponies. I'd always volunteer for drown proofing because it was the time they'd leave me alone. You know, for 30 minutes I could just bob in the, in the pool. So.

• 21:06Jocko Willink?

  And pool comp and everything, you were just good in the water. Where'd you, did you grow up swimming?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I grew up, yeah, I grew up in Connecticut, right on the Long Island Sound. So I was always a water rat. So yeah, everything water related I was comfortable doing. Um, I had, I had learned to scuba dive in college just deliberately. Um, and just recognized I just loved, I just, I loved being in the water, underwater. So pool comp, yeah, it wasn't, wasn't an issue for me. I mean, um, yeah, obviously I had the normal stress for it, but I, I was able to get, get done the first time.

• 21:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird. If, if you're lucky enough to have that comfort, I mean, some of the, some dudes are just petrified of every water evolution. And usually they don't make it. I mean, it's not a good way to roll into it. You're petrified of drown proofing, petrified of life saving, petrified of not tied.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:51Jocko Willink?

  Just having that hanging over your head all the time.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Well, especially if you fail a few times and then you have to do it, uh, you have to wait the weekend and then do it again. But, you know, but you bring up a good point because I think, you know, uh, a lot of people and you, I'm sure you've had this, uh, they've described seals as fearless and I can't stand that description because it's not, none of us are fearless. You know, because, you know, courage requires fear and all of us have little things that were like, it, we were, we don't like it, you know, there, there are team guys who love skydiving and they hate diving. There are team guys like me who love diving and I don't like skydiving, you know? Climbing is nothing, is not, I would never climb on my free time, you know? Um, or bungee gym, right? Um, but I think every single one of us, we learn how to move through it. Um, and so you hope that every guy has

• 22:37Speaker 01

  something they like, uh, about, about the job. Um, but regardless of who you're talking to, that person had to move through some fear.

• 22:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's some stuff you're gonna have to just suck up at some point.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Well, and here's another thing, cause, cause, um, I've always, you know, and I got asked by, it was a while ago, a bunch of sailors, they wanted to be seals. And so I was on a ship, I did a one ship deployment as an LNO. And they said, hey, sir, could you just give us 30 minutes and talk to us about being a seal? So I said, sure. And I got them all in a room and it was about 10 of them. And I started it by saying this. I said, listen, I want all of you to know, okay? When you're a Navy SEAL, when you're doing the job, okay, there's never any cool music playing. And there's no like girls on the side or beers. It always sucks, right? They will, the teams will take the fun out of everything. If you're diving, it's cold, it's dark, it's dirty. If you're skydiving, it's nighttime, you're waddling out of there. Nothing is ever cool. The coolest part is at the end, when you look back at what you did and you're having a beer or whatever.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  But you have to get that into your head. And I think Bud's slams that into your head day one, right? You come in with this mythology and you're like, oh, cool. And then suddenly you're like, holy crap, what the hell is this? And so I think that's

• 23:45Jocko Willink?

  Supporting that whole premise is the fact that it's in Coronado, California.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:49Jocko Willink?

  What you're driving in. If you ever get the chance to go to San Diego, you drive over to Coronado. As you drive over this beautiful bridge, you look down at Coronado, it literally looks like a movie depiction of, of a little heavenly neighborhood.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it almost is with a hotel.

• 24:05Jocko Willink?

  And it almost is. It almost is. Just this beautiful place, sunny beaches, or sun out, beautiful beach. And somehow they can take that.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Well,

• 24:14Jocko Willink?

  and make it suck.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, people think Southern California water is warm. You know, I actually went on a run this morning. I hit the beaches at my west coast ritual. I always go down to Coronado and take a run. And so I hit the beach at 5 a.m. I was like, okay, cool. 5 a.m. No one will be on the beach, right? I get there and immediately realize that it's high tide, right? So I was like, okay, it's cold because it's cold.

• 24:33Jocko Willink?

  It was 45 degrees.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Forty five. Yeah. So, so I start running within the first hundred yards, the waves crash over my feet. The sand is soft, right? I was just like, I started laughing because it was just beautifully miserable. And, and I think that's what you really start to, you start to relish that stuff. So.

• 24:49Jocko Willink?

  So Hell Week, you get done with that, you get done with pool comp, get done with land warfare. So you get done with Bud's.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Did you get rolled at all?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  I got rolled from the, so I didn't, technically I started with 209. I did their, their, their in-doc. But before 209 classed up officially, they're like, hey, there are too many officers in the class. We're rolling, we're going to roll the three slowest runners.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  So I got rolled to 210. So I never classed up with 209. But so I started with 210 and I graduated 210.

• 25:19Jocko Willink?

  And then where'd you go from there? What team did you go to?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  SDV 1 in Hawaii. But at the time, classic budgeting, you know, we graduated April 98. And there were no, there's apparently no money to PCS officers. And so like, hey, we're going to keep you here and you'll do your SDV school. Because back then it was in San Diego. So we waited, we lived, we just lived in apartments until summer that year, did SDV school. Went to jump school and then I checked in January 90, January 98 to SDV Team 1.

• 25:51Jocko Willink?

  And then you get out there, did you want to go to SDV? Because you liked the water? Did you actually put in for it?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Well, so, no. And my plan was to, but when you go to BUDs, as you will testify, everybody, especially back then, everybody was like, don't do SDV. And so I got, I got worried about SDVs. So on my dream sheet, I put to all East Coast teams, because I wanted to go to the East Coast. And I got SDV 1. So, but I wasn't upset. I was like, okay, this is cool. Because I did love diving. And I loved that, I loved that aspect of it. And to be able to have done that, I thought was pretty froggy. So.

• 26:24Jocko Willink?

  And then you get there, you get put into a platoon? Like, how's that working?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was a little bit, we were a little bit delayed. There was a platoon that was already formed up. My, one of my, you know, my best friend, he's an admiral now, he and I were, were, were kind of put in holding. Got to do an exercise, one of the platoons went out to the Middle East in an exercise and then platooned up a little bit late. But did one platoon and a deployment out to the, out to the Middle East, you know, kind of went to the Middle East quite a bit back then. We're out there and we were actually out there in Bahrain when the coal, the USS Cole got hit. So we actually did some response to that. So yeah, did one deployment as an AOIC there at SDVs.

• 27:03Jocko Willink?

  And then what was the next stop?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  SEAL Team 2. Yeah. So I was, I'd always wanted to go to the East Coast and specifically SEAL Team 2. Because all the books back then, you know, were older books. So they focused on SEAL Team 1 and SEAL Team 2.

• 27:14Jocko Willink?

  And so you say you got to, you just, you and I just missed each other in SEAL Team 2?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:18Jocko Willink?

  Because I got, I left there in 2000, the spring of. Yeah, the spring of 2000.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And I checked in January 2001.

• 27:25Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 27:27Jocko Willink?

  And is that where, did you go straight to a platoon commander?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  No, yet again, I was delayed. Um, I would did a, I, the only way I could get to SEAL Team Two, you know, interesting. So my, my buddy and I would call the detail for, detailer from Hawaii and both of us want to go east coast. So he gets on the phone first. He's like, I'd like to do an A, I like an OIC on the east coast. And the guy's like, yeah, I have one a teammate. He's like, cool, I'll take it. So he's like, my buddy's here. So I got on the phone. Yeah, I want an OIC on the east coast. That was my last one.

• 27:53Jocko Willink?

  You missed it by a phone call?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  You missed it by a phone call. Yeah. Um, but he said, uh, he said, you know, if you want, you can do an L and O. You know, back then, uh, there were, we were deploying guys on ships on both carriers and, and mark platoons. And they usually put a SEAL officer as an L and O on their ships. And so I said, I said, listen, can I go to SEAL Team Two? She said, he said, yeah, you know, you need to do an L and O. I said, I'll do an L and O, but I want to do a carrier. I don't want to do a bark. Cause I always loved aviation. I just wanted, he said, deal. So I went, checked in and then did a, did my first deployment with the John F. Kennedy battle group as an L and O on that carrier.

• 28:26Jocko Willink?

  Dude, this is crazy. So my platoon at SEAL Team Two was the strike platoon and we went on the USS John F. Kennedy.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  There you go. The last conventional carrier. Yeah. So, yeah, it was, it actually turned out to be a great deployment. We, I mean, obviously nine 11 happened.

• 28:40Jocko Willink?

  Is that while you were on deployment?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  No, in fact, we, it was before we deployed. We were actually getting underway for Comp 2X, uh, on nine 11.

• 28:47Jocko Willink?

  I haven't heard the word Comp 2X in a long time. It just says shutters.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 28:53Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, these are big like fleet exercises that you're doing. And the whole fleet's out there, all these ships. And you're going to get tasked with all these missions and it's just, it's just like a operation complication for two weeks.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. Yeah. And, and, and the battle group got underway on the morning of, of September 11th. And so all the news, all the news reports said that there was a, a, a strike battle group that got underway within hours of the attack, which is hilarious because that wouldn't, it wouldn't happen that way, right? But it happened to be within hours. And so, uh, and so we actually steamed right up to the east coast, off the east coast of Virginia there. I flew off and went to the teams to check in to see what was going on and, uh, you know, get a sense of everything. So.

• 29:34Jocko Willink?

  And then you guys did that, but then did you go on a normal deployment?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I got back from there, uh, platooned up as an OIC, um, and started that work up. And then, of course, then Iraq was kicking off and so, uh, because we were, you know, our platoon did pretty well in the, in the training. Um, our CO sent us to Iraq.

• 29:51Jocko Willink?

  And when was that? What year was that?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  That was 2004. Yeah.

• 29:56Jocko Willink?

  2004.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so I remember when you guys showed up. You guys, did you guys go up north? Did you guys?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  So we started up north and then, um, and then came down south and we took over the, the security mission. Yeah, we started it. Yeah, so.

• 30:11Jocko Willink?

  My, I had a very lucky career. Like, I got wrapped that up and went home and a few months later, you guys were doing the, uh, the security.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:21Jocko Willink?

  And then, so, so how was your workup when you were a platoon commander?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  It was great. It was, it was standard. Um, you know, uh, did the, well, obviously the, the, you know, the individual trainings. All the guys went to schools and we did our, our, uh, our platoon training, did all our, our schools. Um, and back then it was all, well, as you remember, they had just, um, implemented the, the, the NSW 2000 Force 21, I think it was called. Um, brilliant idea. We, we didn't know that it was going to be so brilliant, right? Because it just set us up to deploy in such a perfect way. Um, but they hadn't, they hadn't changed the, the training program. So we did all the regular box, you know, you know, mobility, diving, CQC, all that stuff. Uh, and, um, and then went straight to, uh, when we, when we went out there, we went straight up to Mosul and started there.

• 31:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So I remember that because we didn't see you guys. So you guys literally turned over with us. I was a team seven. And you guys arrived in, well, I went home sometime around April.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:19Jocko Willink?

  But you guys, I think you guys might've showed up. We, I might've high-fived a couple of guys that I knew from team two.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:25Jocko Willink?

  And then you guys rolled straight up to Mosul right after that. I think you guys had people that stayed down in Baghdad as well.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:33Jocko Willink?

  I think.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had some LNO guys who stayed down, which was also fortuitous based on the fact that we all, after, you know, after a few, after about a month and a half, all went down to. Baghdad to start running that PSD mission.

• 31:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys chop under the Team One CO?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:50Jocko Willink?

  Or was your Team Two CO on deployment too?

• 31:52Speaker 01

  He was on deployment with us. So, and so what happened was the Team One CO stayed out west to continue running direct action and our Team Two CO ran the PSD mission.

• 32:05Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so both COs were deployed.

• 32:07Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Okay. Yep. Now I'm remembering. And also, I remember this too, the Marsoc, like, Det One. The first Marine showed up.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  And that was cool too, because a bunch of those guys, I had done, when I was an enlisted guy, I did two back-to-back ARG platoons out here at Team One.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 32:24Jocko Willink?

  And so, we knew all these Force Recon guys, and a lot of those Force Recon guys became the Det One guys, so we high-fived with those guys as well and had the good times.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:35Jocko Willink?

  So, that deployment, you do a little bit of direct action stuff up north?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit of DA up north, only about a month and a half, and then get drawn down to PSD. And, yeah, that was a deployment. And that was the focus for the teams for, I think, a year and a half before they were able to pass that off.

• 32:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The mission was, there was a bunch of Iraqi leadership, government leadership, that everyone in the country, well, a lot of people in the country wanted to kill.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:04Jocko Willink?

  And they had to keep those individuals safe. I mean, from a strategic level, those guys had to stay alive. And so, this was an incredibly important mission. I mean, it was the highest level.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  It was the mission, yeah.

• 33:15Jocko Willink?

  It was the mission. It was the most important mission in the Iraq war at that time, and was to keep these, was there seven of them, right?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Seven, yeah. The PM, the President, a couple others, and yeah, and then, yeah, seven with seven different details.

• 33:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  It was. It's funny, I was on a call about a month ago with, well, retired now, General George Casey, and he was out there in charge of the whole effort. And I was telling him, hey, I was out there, and he's like, "Yeah, I remember you guys. All you wanted to do, all I kept hearing is get us out of this mission, get us out." Which made sense, because, you know, we can only do it for so long, and that wasn't our primary medal, so. But again, you know, it's this idea, I think... SEALs spec operations, special operations holistically are designed to do what you have to do. I mean, you could adapt, you can, you can mod, you can, you just, hey, what's the job? Okay, we'll do the job. And we might complain and bitch and moan, but we'll still do the job well. And that's what we did.

• 34:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've always talked about the fact that, you know, and we're getting better now, but when you and I were in, especially at that time, there was no doctrine on anything.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:17Jocko Willink?

  And so you would know how to do a direct action mission because some other guy had come back and taught you how to do it. The Vietnam guys taught us how to do raids. Like, it's all was word of mouth. And occasionally you'd get some photocopied thing with some weird stick figures on it about what your patrol formation could be. But it was all, it was all like word of mouth. And then you'd go out and you'd do it and you'd adapt and you'd figure it out. And so we didn't have any doctrine, which can be a negative.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:43Jocko Willink?

  If you've got some kind of a mission that you probably should have some baseline to do, and yet you can't pull out a book, whereas like, the army can pull out, what is it? FM seven tac eight infantry platoon and squad. There it is. Here's everyone's job. Here's how you execute a mission. Here's where's people's fields of fire. It's all laid out for you, which is awesome.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:02Jocko Willink?

  The, the issue is, when you have something like PSD, you know, security for a bunch of high value people, and there's no, there was no book on that.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 35:12Jocko Willink?

  There was no doctrine. No one had any doctrine on that.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Well, the only doctrine we, again, the only thing we drew upon was that our, our specialized unit had been doing it up in the, in Europe for, for a few years. And we had some guys who were from that command, who were, were like, oh, we know how to do this. We know, we've, we've done it before. And that's why we were tapped to start doing because those guys started training all of us and, and they, they were familiar. So, so yeah, you're right. I mean, the doctrine, I think, I think officers, and I think they do a little bit more of this, but it would, you know, officers who could come in with a better understanding of just field maneuver and, and, and battlefield stuff, right, is advantageous. But at the same time, this, this ability kind of come in almost with a, with an infant's mind is, is something we do pretty well.

• 35:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It takes a certain level of. Of open mindedness to go, oh, here's the biggest strategic mission that you've got in the country. Cool. Yeah, we got it. Yeah, we'll do it. And and to pull it off. I mean, think about that. All the thousands and thousands of movements of individual movements of these individuals over a year and a half into hostile territory where there's so many people trying to kill them and they all made it. Yeah, they all lived. And that's a pretty amazing, pretty amazing job for all the boys. And like you said, SEALs don't want to be on defense.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:30Jocko Willink?

  And that the the crux of that job is you're on defense.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  You're on defense. Although what people don't understand is the offensive nature of that job. I mean, there's so much preparation and planning. And I think I think one of the reasons why the guys did it so well is because we just look at environments differently. We're always hedging our, our, our situation to the best of our ability. We're comfortable with uncertainty, but we'll get it to whatever percentage we can in terms of looking ahead and certainty before we say, Okay, that's, that's the line. We got to be good here. And so I, for me, it was a real education on the, on the, on the offensive nature of that of that type of mission. Of course, when you're in the moment, you're on defense, but you've you've offensively prepared the environment so that you are hedging your bets in your in your advantage, which is pretty cool.

• 37:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the shift of the mindset from this is a defensive mission. How do we make it? How can we be offensive as we possibly can? And I remember we, we actually, when I was at Team Two,

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:27Jocko Willink?

  We did training for this. We actually did like some scenarios where, oh, we got to protect this guy. And I remember, you know, having conversations with guys that had worked with other units. And their, what they were taught, wasn't he told us this? So like, hey, what we when we worked with these other units that do this for a living, here's what they would say, oh, you collapse on the, on the person that you're trying to protect. You it's a very defensive mindset. And he's like, what we would do is, oh, there's a threat, we would attack the threat. Yeah, it's like, it's like the opposite mindset. And he said, you know what, when they would play it out, you know, with ammunition or whatever, the

• 38:09Jocko Willink?

  people that were go on offense and attack the threat would do better than the people that were just trying to surround the principal and get him out of there.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:16Jocko Willink?

  You do want to do that. But if you've got guys that are attacking the attacker. It ends up being a better move.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get into their oodle loop. I mean, you get it, you know, as soon as someone, if they're, if an enemy is in attack mode and suddenly they find that someone is getting into their space, it puts them on the defensive. And so I think that's a really cool mindset and strategy that, you know, we applied.

• 38:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you get done with that deployment and what's next?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  So then I screened for the maritime component, the specialized unit for the Joint Special Operations Command, the maritime component, screened and got accepted and went to that selection.

• 38:55Jocko Willink?

  And how was that selection for you?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  I enjoyed it. I mean, I, it's about nine months. I enjoyed, so I would, I would describe that, whereas Bud's, the primary responsibility is to not quit, the, there, there's a performance. I mean, you have to, you have to be able to perform in, in the, in what they're asking you to do. But I just like, I love the, I love the, the precision. So I grew, so growing up, you know, I said my mom classical piano, my dad John Denver, I love all of it, but I started getting into metal and, and it was probably in the, in late eighties, I heard Master Puppets for the first time. And, and I was, I was, I had been listening to like, you know, Motley Crue and things like that. And I was like, I just want something heavier.

• 39:40Jocko Willink?

  There's something, there's gotta be more.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  There's gotta be more. And I, and I heard Master Puppets and, and Justice for All, I heard those guys. And I realized, well, I guess I realized this later in kind of this mental autopsy, that I loved the, what I call precision violence, precision aggression, and the way these guys played. And I love thrash metal, but I mean, with the palm muting and the fact that you could hear every single chug on that E chord, and it was just so fast and so precise. And that's what I felt like when I was doing this kind of hostage rescue level CQC. It was just so fast and so precise. And so I just realized I love it. And musically, I love it. I mean, the, the rappers who do it, you know, who rap fast and precise, I love. If it's a country, if it's a banjo playing fast and precise,

• 40:24Speaker 01

  I love it. I mean, I just, anything fast and precise, kind of violent, you know, precision aggression, I love. And I love the challenge. It was, you know, I enjoyed it.

• 40:33Jocko Willink?

  I met Metallica just like in passing. And I, and I walked up to James Hetfield, and I told him this story, which was that when I got to SEAL Team One in 1991, there was a big stereo system in the Waitroom and it was had the old school five disc CD changer.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Nice, yeah.

• 40:55Jocko Willink?

  And it was all the Metallica albums were in there and it was lock shut. It was the only thing you could listen to.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 41:01Jocko Willink?

  It was like, yes.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 41:02Jocko Willink?

  I knew that's when I had made a good decision by joining the Navy.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, they that so so my so the training reminded me a little bit of that. Uh, just this this very precise aggression, um, which I love because I thought SEALs were always that way and and obviously underwater. It's a little bit different, but I thought we were just designed differently in a sense that, yes, we we deliver violence, but we do it every single time you move every single time your trigger finger moves. It's with a thought. It's it's thought through and I um I really enjoy that that level, so.

• 41:35Jocko Willink?

  So then you get done with that with the training.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:39Jocko Willink?

  And now it's time you're you're get put into a squadron. You start going on deployment.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:43Jocko Willink?

  And and what are those? What are the? How many of those? What's your? What's your op tempo like?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, back then it was um it was a nine month cycle, three months, uh, three months training, three months. It's called alert and then three months deployed, um, and then rinse and repeat. Um, but because the war had started, it was basically, uh, you know, it well, I guess prior to the war, it was it would be basically six months of training, three months alert, and then it became three months training, three months alert, three months deployed. And um, and so the training cycles got got crunched, uh, and it was just very fast. Uh, and and tough, tough, but cool because the op tempo when you were there was so intense, uh, but uh, but yeah, I did. I ended up doing um

• 42:31Speaker 01

  two deployments as a troop. I did a toy and I was kind of the op so for the squadron and I had two deployments as a troop commander there.

• 42:37Jocko Willink?

  Were those Iraq or Afghanistan?

• 42:39Speaker 01

  One, well, two, uh, two Iraq, one Afghanistan. Yeah.

• 42:42Jocko Willink?

  And then what what timeframe were these?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  This was, uh, oh, five through oh, eight. Yeah.

• 42:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, five. Oh, yeah. So you and I may have crossed over.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  I'm sure we did. I I'm, you know, I in trying to think through it. I mean, we may have crossed paths here because I even when I was running training, I came out here and I I we probably sat down in some of the same training conferences to talk about stuff, right? But, uh, yeah, you never know.

• 43:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 43:06Jocko Willink?

  So you're out on those deployments. How's that? How's that from a leadership perspective?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  It's, um, I mean, you're learning the whole time and I think, uh, I think you try to, when you, in any, in any SEAL platoon, um, especially as a new officer, you go in there and if you're not willing to just listen first, you're, you're going to be screwed, right? Especially when you have guys who've just been there, done that. Uh, and so, so to go in and listen first and watch and, and hear the expertise and it was almost like getting into a machine that was already moving and you just try to say, okay, how can I help this move better and faster? And so it was a tremendous lesson in leadership for me because that's when I recognized that you have to, you have to be a part of the machine. It's not necessary, I mean, the, I think, I always say, kind of, leadership is not a, a position, it's a behavior, right?

• 43:54Speaker 01

  And, and I talk about this concept, uh, called dynamics of ordination, which is really decentralized leadership and I, you know, and the story of this, kind of me thinking about this, comes after I left the teams. I was talking to a bunch of executives and, and they asked me, I had a flip chart next to me, and they said, hey, Rich, can you draw the task organization, what the task organization looks like for a, for a high performing team? And so I was stumped when they asked me that because I had the models in my head, but I was like, this, these models don't apply. I had the pyramid model, of course, and I was like, well, that doesn't apply because, you know, that's too slow and bureaucratic. The flat model, which was a mild rebellion to the pyramid, and I said, um, that doesn't apply because, you know, in a flat model, first of all, it's hard to know who's in charge, and second of all, it, because it's flat, something can happen on the right side of that line that doesn't, it's not seen or heard by the left side of the line, so it gets

• 44:38Speaker 01

  silent, information can get silent, and a high performing team, information never gets silent. So, flat model was out. And then I had the Robert Greenleaf servant leadership model, where the leader, it's the upside down pyramid, leader sits on the bottom. And I always tell people, I was like, if you're gonna, if you're gonna land on any one of those, philosophically, that's the one you can land on. It's a, it's a good one. However, it's still not how a high performing team operates because, you know, a high performing team, a burden is distributed, it's not all in one. So, so really in frustration, I basically drew a blob on the board, an amoeba, and I said to the group, I said, where do you think the leader sits in this blob? And I got answers like, you know, front, back, top, bottom, center. I said, all of you are correct. The leader is wherever the leader needs to be in the moment. And this is what I call dynamic coordination, which is literally this idea that a team

• 45:19Speaker 01

  understands that issues and challenges and problems can come from any angle at any moment. And when one does, the person who's closest to that problem and the most capable immediately steps up and takes lead and everybody follows. And then it swaps. It's also also called alpha swapping, that alpha position swaps. And so I know you and I as officers, we were pretty much in charge of every op we were on, but didn't mean we were always being supported. In fact, it was usually the opposite. We were supporting other people. And sometimes the environment would shift and they'd have to support us, right? But it was really, and this really hit me when I was actually in training and I was watching close quarter combat training because in close quarter combat, you'll see a group of four guys outside a door and they'll go, you know, number one man, number two man, number three man, number four man. They're going to that room, they're suddenly clear, everything all clear, well, the next threat might be closest to the number four man.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  So guess what? Number four man becomes number one man. And so you see this and so no CQC run is ever the same, you know? And it's just this, this just amazingly beautiful, violently beautiful dance between leadership positions. And I think that's what I recognized the most and fell into quite, quite, you know, quite well, because that's kind of how I liked leading. But, you know, funny story, first deployment as the troop commander, I'm in Afghanistan. And we get this, we get this, it's our first mission. And it seems fairly, fairly good, compound's not too far away, easy drive there, relatively easy. So we get this thing planned out and as we're planning, we're, you know, we're getting little

• 46:47Speaker 01

  things like, you know, change the crypto or this thing didn't line up. Hey, the gear we need is not there. So these little things, little tics. And, you know, just little enough, you just brush them aside, right? But they're adding up and I'm kind of keeping a count in my head. And so we start rolling out and now we're driving and the first route fouled, right? So we have to go second route. That's fouled. And now we're like, okay, wait a second, you know, okay, we could probably get this third route. We get the third route. Okay, finally park. Now we're a little bit late, timeline's a little bit skewed, walking towards the target. Finally, we're walking towards the target and we start hearing whistling. And we'd just read a couple of days before some intel on a unit that had been ambushed and they had heard whistling.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  So I stopped everybody. I called my troop chief. I'm like, hey, I'm not feeling good about this one. You know, I've got, there's too many ticks. And fortunately, he was a great guy. And he's like, I agree. And so I always joke, on my very first op at that command as troop commander, I called the CO, who was a Ranger back at the base and said, hey, we're turning around. We're quitting the mission, you know? And I actually wrote a blog on this. It's okay to quit, but just never give up, right? Because if you're seeing this situation and you're not paying attention, and I realize it was really, it was really good for me to understand that. That's my job as a leader. I mean, we've got so many guys who do so many phenomenal things. If I'm not keeping abreast of all this stuff. And of course, there were some guys who were pissed. And you have to, you have to take that hit too. But, but that's

• 48:11Speaker 01

  my job. And it really taught me, I think, in the hundreds of missions I did, I turned around on three. And everyone felt like I was quitting. And everyone was hard. And on every one, we had guys who were pissed off and upset. But, but I recognized that that's, that's the job, you know?

• 48:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I used to have the, I used to joke about it. So when I was a platoon commander, when I was a troop commander, I called it go-go criteria. Because, you know, in the SEAL teams, they have no-go criteria. If you don't have this many vehicles, it's a no-go. If you don't have this air support, it's a no-go. If you don't have comms with this people, it's a no-go. So we'd have all these no-go criteria. So my joke would always be, it's, for me, it's go-go criteria. We're fucking going, right? And, but, but the interesting thing was, there was same thing. Like, there'd be a mission where it's like, hey, we're going. Okay, cool. Hey, we, we actually just lost the air cover for this part of the insert. Okay, we're going. Hey, it looks like the Army that was going to support us with their

• 49:08Jocko Willink?

  vehicles for QRF for the first half an hour, they're not going to be on station for an additional three hours. Okay, we're going.

• 49:17Jocko Willink?

  Hey, uh, the whatever, uh, L and O for that unit that was supposed to be here for the brief. He actually didn't show up. You know what? We're not going. So, so eventually you gotta make that call of, hey, you know what? For me, it was just the, the universe trying to tell me that this was not a good op.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Well, and you and I, we've read these after action reports of these, these tragedies that happen and these tragedies never happen with one big thing. It's always a series of little things. And so Einstein's always 2020. And I think if we're not as leaders, understanding that we're looking for those number of ticks and, and no one knows how many ticks it takes. You can't say, well, it's 10 ticks, right? It's just that it's what the tick is and how does it affect the mission? And then eventually what's your, what's your no go versus go go, you know? And I think that's a, that's one of the jobs.

• 50:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The, uh, the other, as far as the leadership goes, you know, I've had this conversation with so many civilian companies. And one of the ways that I would explain it to them is, you know, we are on an assault and we go over the wall and there's a guy that's in charge of opening the door. He's a breacher. And guess what? Whatever he tells me to do as the breach team leader, I'm gonna do it. I'm the overall guy in charge out there. I'm the ground force commander. All these people out there actually work for me. And when he says, hey, step back 10 feet and go around that corner. I say, Roger that.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:35Jocko Willink?

  When the point man says, hey, we're gonna shift to a different route. I say, cool. Roger that. When my vehicle commander says, hey, I'm gonna bump up and, you know, and, and get, get up on this corner here. I say, cool. Roger that. So you're constantly, people are gonna lead what they have control over. And that's what I actually want as I want everyone on my team to be a leader and step up and make things happen.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:56Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like a school of fish or a flock of, I mean, we were literally amoeba. We're not, we're not this, this hierarchy or, or line and that the position, all the position tells you is what your, you know, your responsibility circle is, you know, for, for making shit happen, you know? So, uh, and I think that's important.

• 51:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. So you're, you're, do these deployments and then at some point here you get, uh, tasked with running the selection for this JSOC group, this Navy JSOC group.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not before I volunteered to go back out to the teams. I, uh, so one of my great mentors, you and I both know him, um, and he was, he was, he's now retired, but he was my CEO at SEAL Team Two, and then he was also a deputy there. He had been my SEAL SEAL Team 2 and he had been at that command and I just loved him so much and I saw what he get back and I didn't, I wanted to make sure I stayed in both communities kind of or both venues. I volunteered to go to SEAL Team 10 as Ops XO and you know, the other, the other component was my wife was, she-

• 51:59Jocko Willink?

  Is this when he was a group commander?

• 52:01Speaker 01

  He, well, no, when I did it, he was the deputy commander before he took group commander.

• 52:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. But we're tracking on the-

• 52:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  But my wife was also sick of, sick of the command.

• 52:12Jocko Willink?

  Someday I'll have him on here. We've got, we've got some good stories to tell.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness. Yeah, he's, yeah, what a phenomenal guy. But my wife was also sick of the command and she basically, back then, I mean, they wouldn't even let wives near the compound. I mean, she, you know, she had to drop me off at the, at the fence so I don't walk in and so she was, she was pretty pissed off. And she sat me down, she's like, "Listen, you know, I don't think, I don't think I can take you staying there." And that's a pretty big thing because, because you know, typically, especially as an officer, if you leave, chances of you're coming back are, you know, you know, you don't know, you know, it's a, it's a gamble. And so, but I, you know-

• 52:49Jocko Willink?

  How long had you been married for at this point?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  We got married in 01. So this was, uh, this was now 08.

• 52:56Jocko Willink?

  So you got married when you were, when you got to Team 2, basically?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I met her in Hawaii, though. And, um, and then I got to Team 2, she moved, she was, she's from Pennsylvania, but she moved from Hawaii back to, you know, Virginia Beach. And so, and we had two kids by then.

• 53:09Jocko Willink?

  So she's already pissed, bro. You took her out of Hawaii and brought her back to Virginia Beach?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  So, so I tell this story, it's funny. Um, it was, it was probably 07. Um, and I was, um, yeah, 07. And I came back from one of my deployments and it was very successful deployment and you know, and my wife's pretty sick and tired of hearing how awesome her Navy SEAL husband is. She's at home with our one-year-old and our three-year-old. And it's a couple of days I've been home and I'm-

• 53:31Jocko Willink?

  You're just a freaking loser.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Total loser. Total loser. And I come home, and so I'm at home, I'm doing some projects and I hear her from the back of the house. She's like, "Hey, Rich, can you grab the-" she's in the, doing something with the kids. "Can you grab the Q-tips?" Now, admittedly and embarrassingly, I didn't want to drop what I'm doing. So I'm just like, I don't know where they are. And, and then she's like, "No, they're in the bathroom." It's like, "Okay, I better drop what I'm doing." So I kind of begrudgingly drop what I'm doing. I go to the bathroom. I step in the bathroom, I'm like, "They're not here." And she's like, "They're in the closet." I open the closet door. "They're not here." She's like, "They're right there on the shelf in the closet." I'm like, "I'm telling you, they're not here." So now I hear her footsteps. I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna prove her right." Her arm comes from over my shoulder, grabs a Q-tips, puts them in front of my face and says, "They are right here." And as she's walking away, she's like, "It's no wonder you guys haven't found Bin Laden."

• 54:19Speaker 01

  She's like, "You guys are probably going in these caves and he's just sitting there." You have male eyes, you're not seeing anything. Which ironically, ironically, it was a female. I mean, it was a team, but a female who found him, right? So we just went and got him. The wives, SEAL wives are badass. They really are. And I know you could testify that.

• 54:36Jocko Willink?

  Indeed.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  But yeah, so it was 08. Volunteer to go back out to Team 10, did an ops, then XO, deployed with them. So that was about a two-year tour. And then...

• 54:46Jocko Willink?

  And how'd you like that?

• 54:47Speaker 01

  I loved it. Yeah, I loved it. Loved the CO, loved the Master Chief, loved the team. Again, you're back on, you know, six-month deployments, which are rougher. But I was, I recognized, I recognized the healthy nature of seeing both sides and staying connected. And of course, it helped, you know, it helped on the home front. But then was asked to go back to run training. And, you know, at that point, they changed the command. There was issues with the command. It started to, actually, NSW holistically had started to do a lot more for the families and the wives. Bring the families in, they said, which is a great concept, right?

• 55:30Speaker 01

  And so, so it was a better, it was a better situation. And I was happy to go back and went back in early 2010 and took over selection.

• 55:43Jocko Willink?

  So this point, when you take over selection, this is kind of the, kind of the beginning of this book that you end up writing.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:51Jocko Willink?

  And with that, it's probably a good time to just jump into some sections of this book. Well, I'll just jump into it right here. Here we go. You say this, "I learned about attributes the hard way, on the job and under pressure from the top. In 2010, I was in charge of training for one of the premier special operations units on the planet. Our command selected candidates from other spec ops teams, men who already proven themselves to be exceptionally skilled and committed. One Friday afternoon, I was sitting across a small table from one of those men, still sweaty in his fatigues from a long day of training. He was a Navy SEAL with eight years of experience behind him, a seasoned warrior who'd completed dozens of missions. His record was saturated with glowing reviews and recommendations from his superiors.

• 56:33Jocko Willink?

  He was also recognized as a mentor to younger, less experienced guys, and he'd been promoted at every available opportunity, often early." So you're sitting across the table from this stud. On paper, he was perfect. But three weeks into a nine-month training program, we already knew he wasn't going to make it. The selection and training class had just finished a week of close quarters combat exercises, or CQC. You've seen it in the movies and on TV, a SWAT team or a squad of soldiers busting into a building, staring down the barrels of weapons they're waving around. One of them shouting "clear" every few seconds. The Hollywood version is much noisier and sloppier than reality, though. In real-life CQC is a complex sequence of movements, the exact order and timing of which have to be improvised in a fluid, high-stress environment,

• 57:15Jocko Willink?

  where mistakes can be fatal. The lead man focuses only on the door and waits for the signal of squeeze or a word from the second man. Then he goes through the door and turns left or right, sweeping his sight line down the wall 90 degrees toward the center of the room. The second man goes the opposite direction, left to the lead man's right, or vice versa, and does the same visual sweep. The third and fourth men keep alternating directions, each of them scanning the room for any bad guys who need to be neutralized or good guys who don't. All of that happens in a few heartbeats. The guy sitting across from me had, in his career, cleared more rooms than he could likely remember. But each special operation team had its own habits and techniques, and we needed him to learn our particular ones. The candidate at the table had started strong, but after the first week or so, things began to get a little shaky.

• 58:00Jocko Willink?

  Little mistakes morphed into bigger ones, and his confidence was taking a hit. He knew he was falling behind, and he tried to, like hell, to catch up. He stayed late, walking through scenarios, practicing techniques, asking instructors for feedback. None of it was working. One of the most highly-trained warriors in this world, a man specifically recruited for this specialized unit, just couldn't keep up. What was I supposed to tell him? That at least he wasn't the only one, that more than half of the other candidates washed out too, that wouldn't do. No matter how gently words came out, "You're not good enough" is a hard blow to anyone's ego, let alone a guy of his caliber. And then there were my superiors. There's a high attrition rate for candidates who want to get into special operations units in the first place, and that is by design.

• 58:43Jocko Willink?

  About 85% of prospective candidates, for instance, don't complete basic SEAL training. But we were recruiting men who'd already proven themselves to be among the very best special operators. When only about 50% of those guys made it through our training, commanders farther up the chain understandably wanted to know why. On that day in 2010, I didn't have any satisfying answers. I told this highly experienced, highly decorated, and highly competent SEAL the only thing I could. "I'm sorry, you just didn't cut it." He wasn't happy either. So that's sort of you figuring out, "Why is this happening? What can I do better here?"

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, rough.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Rough and disingenuous, especially as a, I mean, the leadership was obviously needing some answers and wanting some answers, but as cadre, I mean, you just, we could do so much better. And I think the collateral effect of that was that these guys were leaving, these guys would leave and go back to their teams, and they didn't feel good. And they hated where they just came from. And so, so we were looking at a real problem in the community of hurt feelings. And I say that, I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way.

• 1:00:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, like animosity.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Animosity, yeah. Yeah, and so, so yeah, my leadership said, "Hey, Rich, take a better look at this. What's going on?" And so I really had to start deconstructing performance. Yeah.

• 1:00:15Jocko Willink?

  As you do this, um, you say, you say here in the book and obviously get the book. It's called the attributes. I'm reading little chunks of it. You say this, "To begin figuring out a better way to explain why so many seemingly well qualified candidates weren't cutting it, I decided I needed to examine our roots. So I went back to the beginning, 1943." And here you talk about World War II, you talk about Draper Kaufman, uh, you know, the, the NCDUs, you, you go through some of that history and have you read, uh, By, By Water Beneath the Walls?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  I've read, yes.

• 1:00:48Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding, outstanding. Ben, what up? Ben Mulligan. Go get Ben Mulligan's book. I try to give him a shout out every time.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, awesome.

• 1:00:55Jocko Willink?

  Uh, just an incredible job he did on that book. Um, so you start looking at that. You say, "Your Kaufman understood though, that being a strong swimmer who could sneak across the beach wasn't enough for his recruits. He needed men who could think on their feet, men who could adapt, adapt and flex as fast as the environment did, men who had the ability to be aware of multiple aspects of their surroundings, could work together as a team, and learn things quickly and do so while under unfathomable stress." Kaufman realized in other words, that he wasn't looking for recruits who knew how to do the job, but rather men who could do the job. The difference in that single word between how and could is enormous. The required skills, diving, cartography, demolition, and so on, could always be taught.

• 1:01:38Jocko Willink?

  What Kaufman needed were men with certain innate attributes, traits that are hardwires, hardwired into each person's core. So there you go.

• 1:01:52Jocko Willink?

  That's what you started looking at.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  So I thought about, at the time, you know, now it's 2010, I'd, I'd already been on hundreds of combat missions and I thought about my own BUDs experience. And you know, in BUDs, we spent hundreds of hours running around with big hook boats on our head and hundreds of hours running with 300 pound telephone poles and exercising with those and freezing the surf zone. And I thought about the hundreds of missions I'd been on, never on one of those missions, or thousands of training evolutions, never on one did I carry a big happy boat on my foot or a telephone pole, right? So what they were doing to us was not training us in the skills to be SEALs. And so that's where I started to distinguish this, this difference between skills and attributes.

• 1:02:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um, I did do one op one time.

• 1:02:30Jocko Willink?

  I did a training op in off the coast of North Carolina. We came across the intercostal waterways. We ended up, it was low tide. Everything was a disaster. We're in this mud flat. We had to carry our freaking Zodiac in the mud flat for like a long, long ass time.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Did you put it on your head?

• 1:02:47Jocko Willink?

  No, we didn't put it on our head though. We did low carry.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Low carry.

• 1:02:49Jocko Willink?

  We did a low carry.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Jocko Willink?

  So you say this, uh, skills and attributes get conflated all the time, yet they're inherently different things, right?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Jocko Willink?

  And, and again, you've got a whole section on this. Skills are learned. These are some of the high points. Skills are learned. Skills, direct behavior.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:12Jocko Willink?

  Uh, explain direct behavior.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  So, so skills tell us what to do in, in known, specific environments. So here's how and when to ride a bike or throw a ball or shoot a gun.

• 1:03:20Jocko Willink?

  There's a target. Here's the skill.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Here's what to do.

• 1:03:23Jocko Willink?

  Here's what.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Here's what to, here's, here's when to write. Here's what to do. Here's when to write, right? And, and then finally, because they're, they're visible, they're very easy to assess, measure and test. You can see how well anybody does any one of those things. And you can put scores and stats around. This is what we go into organizations and hiring. It's like, you could put them on a resume and this is why we get seduced by skills when we're hiring, right? But they don't tell us how we're going to show up in stress, challenge and uncertainty. Cause in an unknown environment, it's very difficult, if not impossible to apply a known skill. And so that's when we lean on the attributes. And the attributes are innate, right? They're, we're, all of us are born with levels of patience or situational awareness or adaptability. Now you can certainly develop those things over time and experience, but you can see levels of this stuff in very small children, which means there's a nature nurture element. And then attributes inform our behavior.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  They don't direct it. So in other words, my son's levels of perseverance and resilience inform the way he showed up when he was learning how to ride a bike and he was falling off a dozen times doing so. Uh, and then finally, because they're hard to see, they're difficult to measure and test. You can't, it's hard to test someone's levels of patience or whatever. And so they're the most visible and visceral during stress, challenge and uncertainty, which is what made our laboratory, my laboratory, where there's a specialized commander, even Bud's, the perfect laboratory for seeing this stuff. And Bud's really ultimately is an attribute selection course. That's what it is. You learn some skills certainly, but

• 1:04:38Jocko Willink?

  That's questionable.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  That's questionable. Really SQT is where you learn, you really, and then you go to your team and you start really learning, but it's an attribute selection course. And so, uh, and so these attributes, these inherent qualities are really what drive the, the distinction as to whether or not we can operate in these environments. You know, here's a funny story. I'm not sure if you heard this one, cause I heard it when I first. Got to Bud's because it obviously happened sometime before me, maybe even way before us. But the story goes, and back then, the story goes, this kid shows up and he wants to be a SEAL and they basically say, well, you need to swim, you know, 50 meters. He's like, okay. So they take this kid to the pool and it's going to be 25 meters one way and 25 meters back. And the kid jumps in the pool and sinks right to the bottom and starts walking across the bottom of the pool to one end and then walks across the bottom pool back to the other. And he comes up and he's gasping for air, nearly drowning. And instructor looks at him and says, what the hell are you doing?

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  And the kid, who's still gasping his breath, looks at the instructor and says, I'm sorry instructor, I don't know how to swim. And the instructor pauses for a second, looks at the kid and says, that's okay, we can teach you how to swim, right? And it's because the instructor knew, if this kid had the attributes, the balls, that's one, I guess that could be an attribute, right? But to show up to Navy SEAL training, not knowing how to swim, teaching him to swim, the skill was going to be the easy part, right? And so, so the idea is, and you know, we go into business, obviously, I don't, you know, some skills are necessary just for basic entry, right? But if you want teams, if you want the highest performing teams on the planet, which are teams that not only do well when things are going well, they do well when things are not going well, you have to look at attributes. And so, in the book, I talk about this dream team paradox where you, you hear it all the time, these teams are put together, best graphics designer, best marketer, best lawyer,

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  whatever, best, best, best. And then they slowly turn, you know, and they go, they go well when things are going well, right? But as soon as the environment changes, as soon as things go sideways, the team turns toxic. And if you don't, if you haven't built your team on the attributes, you're not going to have a team that survives.

• 1:06:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Jocko Willink?

  I'm questioning if I should tell this story, but I'm going to. I think I've told it before. So my, my daughter was having her birthday down at the beach and I ended up taking all of her friends and like organizing them into teams and having them compete against each other and a bunch of things. And this was at Santa La Joa State Beach, as a matter of fact, and there's a river up there. And so, I was having to do these contests, you know, drag this log, because there's all kinds of fun stuff, that you drag this log and who can do it faster, who could build the tallest, you know, sand tower in five minutes, ready, go. And the cool, one of the cool thing was that as I'm watching them, I'm like, I see like one person that steps up and starts leading. I see someone that doesn't care. I see someone that's lagging. I see someone that will do whatever they're told to do as soon

• 1:07:12Jocko Willink?

  as they're told to do it. I was like, this is the freaking little SEAL platoon of eight year old girls. This is crazy. Like the same exact humans.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Jocko Willink?

  But then the funny part is my daughter, I said, okay, you guys go across the river. Whoever can bring the biggest rock back wins. And so my, my daughter, she swims across the river, they're all swimming across the river and everyone's grabbing, you know, rocks that are the size of a baseball, maybe the size of a grapefruit. My daughter, uh, this is my middle daughter, Rana. She picks up like a legit rock that is, you know, like a small boulder and she starts back across and she clearly she's not going to be able to swim with it. And I'm watching, I'm like, well, this is gonna be interesting. And she just like, like this kid that you're talking about, she just goes and her head just disappears.

• 1:08:01Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, five seconds go by, six seconds go by, then her head pops up and she's, she barely gets her head mouth out of the grabs a breath of air, goes back down, keeps walking, comes back up and grabs another breath of air, cups walk and then finally like her head rises up on the other side as it gets more shallow. She walks up and just drops the thing at my feet. Known victory.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  And she wasn't, she didn't win that, did she? She wasn't the first, was she?

• 1:08:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, she freaking won like by a heartbeat. She was like, you got the biggest rock. It was like known victory. She dropped it like, whatever. I got this. I was like, okay, you definitely won that one.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  It's totally, it's, um, I mean, this is, this is where a lot of teams hiring, uh, they get, they get confused. They conflate these things and they think someone with the, with the best skills is the best person. And, um, and this is why I think, uh, you could, you can pick certain environments where just attributes show up more than skills. And, uh, and, you know, obviously spec ops is an environment like that. This is where I talk about like different sports and in, in many sports, skills take predominance, right? But things like fighting, you know, and I don't fight, you know, just I know people who do, and I, you know, I, I look at it with interest, but, uh, but you can't predict necessarily what the other person, it's uncertainty. So there's after there's adaptability, there's perseverance. There's all these things coming to play. Climbing would be the same thing. And so, so I think these are, this is where you start. I'm really, if I'm obsessed

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  with anything, I'm obsessed with who we are as human beings at our most raw, because that's the real us, right? And, um, we always hear it, you know, it's when, when the shit goes down, the real us shows up. And I'm like, okay, who's that? Because we had, we had the, the great gift. In our careers of understanding who that person is and understanding who that person and all the people around us. And that allowed us to be the teams we were. I mean, I know you, you would agree. I mean, I knew my guys. I mean, I could see a silhouette and I knew that guy. That's how well we knew each other because we'd seen, we'd lived each other at the most raw. And a lot of people don't get that opportunity and you don't have to go through SEAL training to do it, right? It's just understanding these, these qualities because, because these attributes, when we fall back to like our most raw,

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  it's what these attributes are what's running. So we should know what we're high on, what we're low on. So.

• 1:10:09Jocko Willink?

  As you start talking about attributes here, you say this, but the right stuff by Tom Wolf basically meant things hardwired into skills, into skilled pilots that allowed them to function at the highest level, no matter how badly circumstances went sideways. He meant in these three words, attributes. That's what the right stuff means. And then it's the things you talked about. They're elemental. They, they inform rather than direct what you're going to do. And attributes are difficult to assess, measure and test. And that is the truth. And that's why, you know, like you don't know, they don't know who's going to make it through SEAL training.

• 1:10:49Jocko Willink?

  Through basic SEAL training, they don't know who's going to make it in despite, and listen, there is a, there is a, an element of, if this guy does great on his PST, the, the physical standard test, if he does great on it, it, it does indicate that this guy had the discipline to work out. He had the wherewithal to stick to a program. So there, it does indicate some of their attributes.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:11:12Jocko Willink?

  But it's not necessarily, there's also people that are just really good athletes and they like to work out and therefore they show up in great shape. We, every single SEAL has a story of the guy in their class that was, you know, a Olympic this or a whatever college athlete that, and they just quit.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Jocko Willink?

  You know?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think if you and I went to BUDs and, and this is just a hypothesis, there's, there's no way we'll be able to prove this, but, and we could sit down with a class of, of candidates getting ready to start and we could interview each one of those candidates about what their journey was to get there in the first place, right? I think that the guys who had the longest journey, the toughest journey, we could say that guy's probably going to make it through. You know, because I think this is, these are, because it's, they were executing attributes to get there in the first place. I always say, Bud selection starts when you decide, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of attrition that goes on because people are like, oh, I wish I could do that, but then they stop there, right? And so, so there's a journey, whether you're enlisted or officer, to even get to the beaches of Bud's. And then it's, then Bud starts, right? And so, so I think

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  the, the folks, and again, you know, there are, there's always exceptions, but the, the folks who have practiced these attributes and developed the, and of course, we all have to come up, we have to, we have to enter the game with a little bit of a level, right? We all have to have a level of compartmentalization at day one of Bud's, or else we're not gonna make it. We'll hyper-develop it in Bud's, but we have to have it. But there's, we could, I think every single one of us could tell stories from our past, was like, oh yeah, that was, that was great, right? That was compartmentalization. I mean, I, when I was playing football in eighth grade, my dad didn't like, he didn't want my mom driving us around. So he's like, you have to ride your bikes everywhere. So my brother and I would have to put on our football gear and ride our bikes through town to get to football practice, and then practice and then ride our bikes home. You know, uphill, all that stuff.

• 1:12:53Jocko Willink?

  Uphill both ways.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Uphill both ways, right? But, but there's elements there that, you know, you're just powering through. And I think we could, you know, there'd be, there is, you know, we'd never get it right, but you know, I think we could, we could pick some of the guys.

• 1:13:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we'd miss some of the guys.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  We'd miss some of them too, yeah.

• 1:13:06Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, it's, it really is crazy, the, the demographics of people that make it and don't make it.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Jocko Willink?

  There's, it's like literally, oh, this rich kid from wherever, uh, from Boston that grew up, you know, with a silver spoon. Oh, he made it. Oh, and this poor kid from the ghetto that grew up, you know, without a mom, without a dad, grew up raised by his, you know, his grandma, who didn't have a job and lived off welfare. He made it. And you can also say, oh, this rich kid from Boston that went to a private school and had a silver spoon, he quit.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Jocko Willink?

  And this poor kid that grew up in the ghetto, quit.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:13:41Jocko Willink?

  Like, it doesn't make any sense.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  It's one of the things I love the most about that training, and one of the things I'm most grateful for. It's because, um, I don't think there's a process on the planet, there are very few processes on the planet that allow you such a Zeroed out start. I mean, you hit those. I remember Lily getting there and I felt relieved because it took so many people. Like I had to get interviews and recommendations just to get a billet, right? And I remember getting there. I was like, all right, it's now it's on me. And I felt relieved because it was now it was literally on me. No one there was going to force me out and, um, and we, we, we had this opportunity to zero out everything and just start moving through. And it's just cool.

• 1:14:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Admiral McGuire was telling me that, um, he would tell when he was the CO of BUDS, he would, before Hell Week, he'd say, if you guys don't make it through, it's because of you.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Jocko Willink?

  Like, like pretty much, we're not going to drop you. Look, look, people get dropped, but vast majority of people, they quit.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Very few performance drops.

• 1:14:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and those are out, those are towards the end and it's all at times in SQT, but very few.

• 1:14:50Jocko Willink?

  And those are, am I correct in saying those are attribute drops?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  I would think so because if you're talking about very basic, like, you know, I remember we had a guy who got, who got dropped because he just, he was unsafe with his weapon. Well, being safe with your weapon has nothing to do with the skill of hitting a target. It has to do with the attributes of being safe with your weapon. Right? I mean, it's a, it's a situation awareness. It's adaptability. It's, it's, um, it's all this. It's, I'm going to name off a bunch, right? That's what he didn't have. And so, uh, and it's so BUDS, just like this training I was running and we used to say, I, I remember briefing Olson when Olson was SOCOM. Um, I said, sir, this training we're on, it's nine months long. Okay. But, but it's an attribute selection course, the whole nine months where there are attributes that we're assessing that's, that are going to take nine months to see. How can I see someone's level of integrity? For example, if I can't watch them in a myriad of environments,

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  I can't get feedback from their peers who tell me how they are out in town, you know, who tell me what they do, right? Who tell me if they, they just clean their, their stuff and, and leave, right? They don't help out. I have to, so, so some of these attributes don't, do take a little bit of a long time to assess, but I think the, the beauty of BUDS and then this process is it is over a long period. And so we have all these, we have time and we have different environments inside of Wish to see these because they can be in some cases contextual. And even the ones that we're naturally high on, sometimes we're just not. Sometimes we're on an off day, right? And so, so even just one data point is not a decision point. You have to, you have to see that across, across some time.

• 1:16:17Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, you talk about the kind of grouping these things together. You say that the ones that follow are grouped into five categories. This is the attribute you're actually going to talk about in the book. Grit, mental acuity, drive, leadership, and team ability. That does not mean that any particular attribute is relevant in only one context. For instance, empathy and accountability are not reserved exclusively for those in position of leadership. And open mindedness certainly is useful regardless of whether one is especially driven. Rather, the attributes are organized on the page in a way similar to how they tend to cluster in real life. People we think of as gritty, for example, generally have healthy amounts of the four attributes in that category. But again, this is simply an organizing tool.

• 1:16:58Jocko Willink?

  It is entirely possible to have a sizable amount of courage, yet not have a notable amount of grit. And that's an interesting dynamic, isn't it?

• 1:17:08Jocko Willink?

  So now we're going to get into this, this little, you start talking about the attributes themselves.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Jocko Willink?

  I just kind of went through what the major ones are. And again, the detail that you give, you give stories around all these things, examples. You talk a lot about the neuroscience behind it. I know you're friends with Andrew Huberman. There's all kinds of great information in the book, so get the book. But did you hit some highlights? The, the first section is the grit attributes. And number one, courage, the ability to manage fear in order to confront danger, difficulty, or pain. And you have this, this chapter is actually called Beware of the Fearless Leader. That's a very good, you know, if you've ever worked for someone that it doesn't seem like they're scared of anything, you should be a little bit nervous.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  So the, so the officer we've talked about, but haven't named, he told me that. He was the guy who said, beware the fearless leader. He's going to get you because he'll likely get you killed.

• 1:17:59Jocko Willink?

  He's the one that has the go-go criteria and no, no.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no.

• 1:18:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Jocko Willink?

  Courage is not an absence of fear, but rather the ability to function despite being afraid. This is you on a C130 in the middle of the night at 20,000 feet getting ready to jump off. Fear comes 100% from the brain. This is, you're talking about Andrew Huberman.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:18:20Jocko Willink?

  Andrew Huberman quote. It's a state of mind, which is why people are afraid of different things. Heights might not bother you at all, but they make others uncomfortable. Or maybe you have a debilitating phobia of snakes or rats, both of which many people consider delightful pets. That's not to say, however, that fear stays in your head. Fear is considered by neuroscientists to be the subjective label that is put on the stress response, Andrew says. And stress is more than just a state of mind. It's a physiological response to our environment.

• 1:18:55Jocko Willink?

  But fear does start in your head. It begins with your brain detecting a threat, a process which happens in the amygdala. In very simple terms, the amygdala is a sort of tripwire for sensing danger, assessing both existence and severity of a threat. So that's talking about what fear is.

• 1:19:13Jocko Willink?

  Do you think you got used to overcoming fear?

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Yes, I think we all do.

• 1:19:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  We all do. And again, it's this idea. And so there's a couple ways. So when we start talking about the physiology of fear and the rise in our autonomic arousal system, when the things start, you know, our breathing starts getting rapid, our vision starts to focus in. We were, we all of us have, well, I think we're wired. First of all, our courage, our courage circuits are wired. So our courage attributes are wired. So we're slightly above boiling point. If I were to say boiling point is the average or our autonomic response trips, I think most seals, ours trip a little higher than boiling point. Right? Which means we don't, it takes a little bit longer for us to get that response. But even when we do get the response, we also, I think unconsciously, train ourselves

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  to manage our physiology in a way that, that keeps our frontal lobe online. So what happens as we, as we approach amygdala hijack or autonomic overload, our frontal lobe's starting to take a back, a backseat. Our limbic brain, our lizard brain is starting to come forward, which when we reach full autonomic overload, we're acting without thinking. It's a lizard brain to survive. So this is, this is advantageous for certain things, right? When we touch a hot stove, we don't want to have to think about pulling our hand away. You know, our brain takes over, pull our hand away. In most environments, however, we want to think through challenge and stress. Right? We want to think through the environment. I think that's what we do. We manage our physiology. We, we keep our frontal lobe back online and we're able to start thinking through the process. And so, and I know all of us have this.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  And it's funny, you know, again, I'm in, I've lived in Virginia Beach now for, you know, 22 years. Same house, by the way. And I have a seal who lives across the street from me. I have a seal who lives down to the right, down to the right, and a seal who lives down to the left. I remember my wife saying, you know, I'm so glad these, these guys are here. Because if something happened, I could go to them and they act like you act. And I'm like, what do you mean? And she's like, well, whenever something happens, they just calm down. And they just start working the problem. And, and this is what we practice doing. So we don't, we don't have less fear. We have just practiced the process of moving through the fear. Every time I jumped out of an airplane, I felt fear. But I just knew the, I knew and understood the process of going through that. And part of that process is we understand what to focus on in the moment. We don't overwhelm ourselves.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  And we basically, and so I'm, I'm writing the next book right now. The next book is called Masters of Uncertainty. I'm going to basically walk through this process. But, but it's, it's the idea where we say, okay, out of all of this, what do we focus on in the moment? How do we move our horizons? You know, we pick a horizon that we move to. And oftentimes, we pick the appropriate horizon so that we can actually move. And it can be anything. It can be the next 10 seconds. In surf, in surf torture, it might be 10 seconds. You know, in hell week, it might be, I'm going to make the, I'm going to do the next meal. But we pick whatever that horizon is. And so it's interesting, I was having lunch with a couple of guys who I served with in, in the squadron. Of course, we did a ton of these hey-hos together. And we're talking about hey-ho, and we're talking about like, being on the ramp and it's unknown DZ. And, and you know, for the audience, an unknown DZ is like, basically, you look at a map and you're like, oh, that looks like a good place to land.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  And you don't have any other, you know, intel on it. It's like, okay, that's where we're landing. And you're hoping it's good. So it's, there's, there's some stress involved. And I remember he was, and my buddy was like, yeah, you know, we're on the ramp. And I can remember it'd be an unknown DZ. We have this mission ahead of us, all that stuff. And, and there's only one thing I'm thinking about. Just one. I was like, what's that? He's like, nail the exit. You know, that's the horizon. Nail the exit. And then once you nail the exit, the next horizon is, okay, pull my chute. Okay, that's the next horizon. Okay, what's the next horizon? Get on heading. Right? I mean, so, and, and we, we are trained to think that way. And we do so in almost all areas and elements of stress, challenge, uncertainty. That's what we do. And that's what combat is. And we know that.

• 1:22:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, I mean, in the, the very first book that I wrote about leadership was like, uh... We call it prioritize and execute.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:58Jocko Willink?

  Like, what's the biggest priority you've got right now?

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:00Jocko Willink?

  That's what you need to focus on and get that thing done.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:02Jocko Willink?

  If you try and focus on 14 different things that are all going sideways at the same time, you're gonna be a disaster.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Jocko Willink?

  You're not gonna have the resources to get it done. You won't probably likely have the cognitive capacity to get it done. It's gonna be a problem.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and there's neurology, right? What you're doing by doing that is you're deliberately engaging your conscious mind. You're deliberately bringing your conscious mind back in, your frontal lobe back online to focus and make a decision, move, focus, make a decision, move. So I love this, so this idea of, and I know Huberman and I have talked about this, you know, ad nauseam, but this idea of we have this, we kind of have this big picture. So you talk about stepping back, which is, which is exactly what happens. We step back, we open our aperture, we start, we say, okay, what about this environment can I control in the moment? And then you pick something and you go like this and you focus in, you do that until completion, then you go back out again and you ask the question again. And one of the things I loved, again, CQC was such a great laboratory inside, which because CQC is this just extremely rapidly.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  You're going into a room with big focus and you're focusing in, you're shooting, you're going back out, then you're focusing, you're shooting, and it just goes one after the other with that feather. This is exactly what we do in all environments and anybody can do this. And this could be what I talk about and this is how we become masters of uncertainty because master of uncertainty is not, oh, I, I know all the environments. No, it's not about training into environments, it's about training the process by which you you operate in an environment. And that's how you start moving through chaos.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  So, did you go through the Navy Free Fall School?

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  No, fortunately got good, well, I don't know, fortunately or unfortunately, I went to Yuma.

• 1:24:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So I went through the old school Navy Free Fall School after my first platoon. And it used to be the better you did, the less jumps you got. And because you just didn't have to repeat jumps. So if you've screwed it up, you gotta do it again. You screwed it up again, you gotta do it again. And I did fine. I think I screwed up one jump and I had 19 jumps at Free, at Free Fall School. And so I'm totally incompetent, right? Basically completely incompetent.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  Just enough to get yourself hurt, yeah.

• 1:24:59Jocko Willink?

  And so then, then I'm, then I'm, jump back into a workup and now I'm going through workup, we go to land, we go to, so now it's been, so I've done 19 jumps, probably in whatever, two weeks. And then I, I don't jump for, I don't know how long, it's a long time, long time, don't jump, like, like a year, probably like a year, no jumping. And then, then I get on a jump and we're like, well, there was a guy there that was a very experienced jumper. And we're, we're just doing a jump at the command, a team one. We're doing a jump at the command. We happen to get a bird like, hey, you guys want to jump? Yeah, well, hell yeah. Haven't jumped in freaking a year. You know, I only have 19 jumps. Yeah, I want to jump.

• 1:25:39Jocko Willink?

  So we get on this bird and we go up and we're supposed to be jumping at whatever 12,500 feet, normal jump, you know? And there's, there's a ceiling, right? There's cloud cover. And, and, and so all we can't get up to 12,5. And so, you know, we're like, oh, we're gonna go down low. We're gonna take it to whatever, six, still not coverage. So now I'm like, okay. So now we're down to five. We get down and finally, and this guy is a great guy. He's like a, a guy from, from the Special Operations Command. Great dude. You know, he's a Master Chief. And so he's like, hey, guys, this is it. Like we're, there's, there's just, we gotta get down low. We're going out at, at whatever it was. We're going out at 2,200.

• 1:26:25Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, and I was like,

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Which just, just let me, that's usually pull out.

• 1:26:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  I mean, it's usually 4,000 is pull out. So now you're going down.

• 1:26:32Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, I was like, what? And you know, we're friends, you know, he's a Master Chief, but like we're friends. I'm like, I go, what are we going out? He's like 2,200. He goes like 2,200, just to hop and pop. And I was like, he could, and it was actually not just me. There were several of us that were all in the same platoon, all had just gone through free fall school a year before, all of a sudden experienced. So, so finally I go, like, what's, what do you mean hop and pop? And he's like, hey, go out, get stable, count to two and just pull. And you know, he's yelling in the aircraft and he's, you know, just got a smile on his face. He's trying to be cool. And I was like, Roger that. He goes, you've never done one of these before? And I was like, negative. And he, and he's like, what about you guys? They're all like negative. And he goes, hey, don't worry, guys, you'll be fine.

• 1:27:15Jocko Willink?

  Just don't ziggy the exit is what he said. Just don't ziggy the exit, which I'm thinking like, I, I mean, I can barely get out of a freaking aircraft at this point. So, and went out. I didn't ziggy the exit. I'm still here, still alive, but uh.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  And, and that's all you're thinking.

• 1:27:29Jocko Willink?

  Yup, yup.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Nail the exit and then you'll worry about the two counts.

• 1:27:31Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's what made me think of it was you said the guy's thinking just like, just, just get, just get, just don't ziggy the exit.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:27:37Jocko Willink?

  Which is pretty good, pretty good instruction, man. Just don't ziggy the exit. That's a good, uh, piece of advice.

• 1:27:44Jocko Willink?

  So, after fear, perseverance.

• 1:27:48Jocko Willink?

  Constancy in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success. You know, it's one of those things. Seems real obvious, right?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Jocko Willink?

  You say this, if courage is the ability to effectively move through fear, challenge, or discomfort, then perseverance is the ability to keep doing it over and over again. To persevere, though, does not mean simply to endure. Every challenge, every uncomfortable situation and fearful episode has its own contours. Some might require only stoicism, a quiet, a quiet suffering until the moment passes. Others might call for an active aggressive response. Those are two, you know, you get those situations where dude, you're just hanging on. You're just gonna like suck it up.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I talk about there. I, I break, that's one of the attributes I break into a couple of different things, right? And so perseverance is actually a combination of both persistence and tenacity and with a little mental fortitude thrown in the mix, right? But, but persistence is, hey, I'm going to, uh, do this thing, the same thing until it, it's accomplished. I know it's, it's the rocks, it's the stone cutter approach. I'm gonna tap on this rock a hundred times because I know on the hundred first tap it's gonna break. Uh, tenacity is I'm gonna try something. If it doesn't work, I'm gonna try something else. If that doesn't work. And so, so you don't want a tenacious stone cutter, right? You'll never get the rock cut. And you don't want a persistent car mechanic who just checks the belts and checks the belts and check. But what perseverance allows you to do is allows you to modulate in between those two. And we all know that any environment might require either. Uh, and, and the, the kind

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  of the mental fortitude piece is can I decide which? But, um, but yeah, it's this ability to just keep stepping through and modulate yourself as you go through.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, you get into this at some point in the book, um, you know, and I wrote a book called Dichotomy of Leadership with Leif. Leif and it was the idea that if you take any of these, we weren't calling them attributes, but if you take any characteristic of a human and you take it to an extreme, it's probably going to be a problem.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%.

• 1:29:37Jocko Willink?

  And you know, one of the examples that I wrote about leadership strategy and tactics is this is something that when I was running training, we'd put these guys like in a hallway, you know, and at the end of the hallway, there'd be a barricaded shooter. And the platoon commander be like, two guys go, those two guys get shot up with paintball, they're dead. Two more guys go, those two guys get shot up with paintball, they're dead. Two more guys go, those two guys get. And you'll have those guys stuck in that mindset of number one, they've been trained to never quit their whole life, like don't quit, don't quit, don't quit. And all you have to do is step back like two feet, look around and be like, oh, and you know, I sometimes have to be like, hey, man, how many more guys you're going to send to their, to their death?

• 1:30:16Jocko Willink?

  Do you think there's maybe another way to get to that room besides this hall, this one hallway there that you're in right now? And it was amazing how tunnel visioned people get and experienced guys, you know, platoon chief, like the guy's got 15 years in. Like two more, go, two more, go. You're like, hey, man, flank this dude, man, just go outside, throw a grenade in the window, do something else. So that the idea of, and I think when I wrote about it in um, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, I think that's called the chapter like, When to Quit. You know, like, hey, this is not, this is not working out, man.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  Might want to try something new.

• 1:30:53Jocko Willink?

  Stop what you're doing.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Might want to be tenacious versus persistent on that one. Yeah.

• 1:30:59Jocko Willink?

  Uh, another one, adaptability. The ability to quickly and calmly adjust to changing circumstances and situations. And you have a little ode to the frog here.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:31:10Jocko Willink?

  Chapter six is called Be Like the Frog. Adaptability as amphibians frogs are built to live a double life. If it isn't safe or suitable on land, they can hop into the water. Nothing to eat in the pond, wander out on land and grab a bite. Frogs have adapted to environments on every continent except Antarctica, from low lying deserts to the slopes of mountains at 15,000 feet. You know, in the Australian outback, the water holding frog can wait up to seven years for rain.

• 1:31:43Jocko Willink?

  Thanks to their cold blood frogs can change their body temperature to adjust the temperature to the surroundings and their legs provide a mobility that is extremely advantageous, allowing them to leap up to 20 times their body length. The evolution of frogs, of course, is classic Darwinism. Survival doesn't necessarily favor the strongest. Fat lot of good that did the T-Rex, but rather those life forms that are most adaptable. This is the same for us.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  And therein lies the secret to making through BUDs. It's not about being the strongest, right? You have to adapt yourself and to whatever's going on. So, I mean, we're all, all team guys are high on adaptability, I think, because we can, we can just, the environment changes and we just, okay, how do I adjust? You know, you know, you don't fight it, you adjust to it.

• 1:32:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I should have brought you this book. I did, I think I did four or five podcasts on this book called The Psychology of Military Incompetence. And it's written by this guy who is a World War II guy who became a psychologist and he wrote this freaking awesome book. But one of the main dynamics of the book is that when you look at the military from the outside, you know, if you're a young sort of person with an authoritarian mindset and you like things to be a certain way, you look at the military and you're like, oh, that's the place I need to be. People have to listen to me. Everyone's gonna look the same. Everyone's gonna have to wear the same stuff. Everyone's gonna have to do what I tell them to do. It's a really promising looking environment when you have an authoritarian mindset. And that authoritarian mindset in garrison works out really well.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Or on the drill team.

• 1:33:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, on the drill team it works out well. But man, when you don't have that open mind and the adaptability and you get into combat where all of a sudden, things aren't gonna go the way you want them to go, it's gonna be mayhem.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:28Jocko Willink?

  And you can't, and people that have trouble adapting to it are gonna be not good combat leaders. So I've always, there'd always be some of those folks rolling into BUDs. A lot of times, I shouldn't say a lot of times, but I've heard stories of guys that were prior Marines, prior Army, you know, had, and squared away like these guys, infantry officer, a special operations guy from the Army, whatever. But those environments, the Marine Corps and the Army, they have a, they're, they're going to favor someone that has a little bit more authoritarian mindset.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:02Jocko Willink?

  And they show up to BUDS and they're like, this is freaking mayhem.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:04Jocko Willink?

  And they don't even, they don't like it. It's too crazy for them.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07Jocko Willink?

  It's too chaotic. This is not all Army guys. It's not all Marines. I'm just saying, I've heard stories of guys like, oh, that guy was, you know, that guy was a freaking, a platoon commander in Iraq in the Army. What happened? And they'd be like, dude, he just, he just, it was too crazy.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a structure thing, right? And so I talk, you know, we'll probably get into cunning. I mean, but this is team guys. We all hate rules.

• 1:34:29Jocko Willink?

  You know, I mean, and, and so we actually like lack of structure in many cases. It, it

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  can be our downfall. It has been as leadership, as leaders in the teams, we have to actually monitor that because it can go awry quite quickly. But, but it's this looseness that we approach environments to because again, one of the things that you learn, and I always say, people ask me a lot of times, how does, how do Navy SEALs stay humble? Right? And I say, well, listen, there are some SEALs who aren't very humble, but most of us, for the most part, are humble dudes. And I said, the biggest, the most, the primary reason is because we're in environments that will kill us. Right? I don't care what kind of swimmer you are. The ocean will kill you if you, if you turn your back on it. Right? Same with jumping out of airplanes at 22,000. I used to tell my guys, you know, Somalia, a nine-year-old with an AK-47 and just pulled the trigger and just happens to aim will

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  kill a 35-year-old expert Navy SEAL in a second with a, with an unaimed shot. Right? So, so, so in, so in a world where the environment requires deep humility, and the ocean's just a perfect example. I mean, look, you, you surf, right? I mean, when you get, when you get churned up by a wave, what do you do? You relax. You just let the, you kind of, you go with it. You don't fight it. You adapt to the water. Right? And so, so I think this is a huge asset in, in, in, in any type of uncertainty. And just like you said, any of these attributes, over-indexed is a bad thing. Too much adaptability means you're limp noodle. Right? And so, and so what we, in fact, what we're trying to do right now in the work we do with organizations, we're taking each attribute and we have about 46

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  now. And we're actually defining, okay, what does too much look like? What does too little look like? Because it's a pretty cool project.

• 1:36:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's, we, at, at my company, we do the same thing. We, we do a balance assessment. And like, where are you out of balance?

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:14Jocko Willink?

  Do you? Micro-managed to a point where people have no say in what's happening, or are you too far in the other direction where now no one knows what's going on?

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:23Jocko Willink?

  And we do that with every characteristic of leadership.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, balance and not being extreme. That was the bummer about our book Extreme Ownership, is we put the term extreme in the title.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  So the assumption was like, oh, yes, we gotta be extreme.

• 1:36:35Jocko Willink?

  No, actually, we'll run another book to make up for that.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:36:39Jocko Willink?

  Next one, resilience. The ability to rapidly return to one's baseline emotional and mental state after a stressful, traumatic, or even triumphant event. And you've got a story in here, and get the book to read the story about your buddy Hank, who was wounded badly in Afghanistan, and you just talk about his resilience.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta meet Hank. Just an awesome guy.

• 1:37:06Jocko Willink?

  I was trying to, I was actually, I was reading about, I was like, who is this guy? I was trying to, because he was your troop SEA?

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you may know him. We'll talk, we'll go offline, but yeah.

• 1:37:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was figuring, I mean, he's gotta be, I mean, if he was in for the same time period, he's gotta be around my timeframe, actually.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, yeah.

• 1:37:24Jocko Willink?

  So, we'll talk offline about that. But you have a great, great story about him, obviously a very inspiring story, and it's a legit story of resiliency. But this is an interesting way of looking at it. You say this, "Imagine your life represented by a line plotted on a page. Line moves from left to right, from the past into the present, extends a little bit more with each passing day. If your life was uniformly calm and pleasant, neither aggravating nor exciting, the line will be flat and level. We'll call that your baseline. And it's where you're at. It's where you're most comfortable emotionally, mentally, and physically. But the line is rarely flat. Of course, it undulates, rising and falling in an irregular wave to mirror the highs and lows of your life. Occasionally, the line spikes, representing your greatest achievements, and sometimes it plummets.

• 1:38:09Jocko Willink?

  Maybe your spouse divorces you, or maybe you get fired. It's difficult to function in either of those deep troughs or at those dizzying peaks. What you want, what you need, is to return to the baseline, to that state of pleasant calm that's neither aggravating nor exciting. That's what it means to be resilient." And you got a story in here from one of your skippers. Who?

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Who you know, who I will say, because we mentioned him on the McCraven, Pete Van Hoosier. When I mentioned him when McCraven was on, I mean, one of the best officers. I mean, he was, and I was so fortunate, he was my CO when I was running training.

• 1:38:46Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  And yeah, he used to talk about the two-minute rule. And, you know, he said, "My grandfather taught it to me." And, you know, "Something bad happens, take two minutes and just, you know, wallow, swear, whatever you need to kick the dirt, you know, feel sorry for yourself, after two minutes, get back to work. Something good happens, celebrate, rest on your laurels, pat yourself on the back, after two minutes, get back to work," you know? And it's such, and again, people say, because I've put this on social media, I've gotten some people like, "Well, it takes a lot more than two minutes." There's a lot of things in life that take a lot more than two minutes to come back to baseline from, but, but the two-minute rule allows you practice in those small tragedies, you know, that you might have, and practice the resilience muscle. And again, resilience is not necessarily growth, or growth, to grow from something like that takes a little bit more effort, and you can kind of, you can up that baseline.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Some other stuff that Tebow and I were working on as well. But resilience, if you can get back to baseline, you know, then you, you are, you're getting yourself back into a steady state where you can not start making decisions again. And I think that's another thing that Navy SEALs do very well, is we get better, we get ourselves back to baseline. Sometimes to our detriment, because if we come back, because we might come back from a low so fast that we don't allow ourselves the appropriate healing time for that to happen. But, you know, again, sometimes we have to, if we're in a combat environment, you know, we have to get back, right? But, but resilience is also often conflated with perseverance, you know? But resilience is not perseverance. Perseverance is moving through and going through. Resilience is snapping back, it's that rubber band stretching and then going back to the original shape.

• 1:40:16Jocko Willink?

  So would it be a, how does this play out? I'm imagining what the answer is, but when you have someone that's really good with perseverance, but not really good with resilience, so they're in a bad place, but they keep going?

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, you keep going, but what happens is they slowly, they slowly fall into entropy. There, so if you imagine, so the way you look, if people imagine that line and that sine wave, and a nice sine wave that kind of goes up and down and stays with that, with that line center. Someone who does not, is not resilient, will that, but that, that curve will slowly go down, and that line will, so it will fall, so you'll fall into entropy. Whereas if you can become anti-fragile, you can actually get that line, can actually have that, that curve start moving up, and that line starts moving up, right?

• 1:40:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  So any one of these, one of the cool things that I, you know, was exploring, continue to, and the way I actually distinguish these attributes is can they exist independently of each other? So can you be perseverant without being resilient? And the answer is absolutely yes. Can you be resilient without being perseverant? Yes. So, uh, but, and there's, there's manifestations of each of those, those combinations.

• 1:41:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, that's what, kind of what I thought, that's why I said I can imagine what the answer is. And, and the reason I think this is because I think you and I both have known guys where they're going to keep going.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:27Jocko Willink?

  But you can see that they're not, they're not where they should be. They're going to keep going, they're going to keep going on deployment, they're going to keep working, they're going to keep driving forward, but everything's falling apart.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Yes. I think, I think out of all the grit attributes, resilience is where a lot of team guys fall short, and you actually see it in the, in the civilian sector with really high performers, and there's a reason. The reason is because high performers, to include team guys, love the, uh, love the feeling of getting, getting the shit done. Oh God, I got it done, right? What's the next thing? Okay, give me the next thing, give me the next thing. And resilient, one of the things resilience requires is a recovery. It requires a, an semblance of recovery to get back to baseline. If you maximize that recovery, you'll get to anti-fragility, but you at least need enough recovery to get back to baseline. A lot of top performers fall into the trap of not recovering, and we know team guys are pretty bad at that, you know?

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh, next set of attributes that you talk about is the mental acuity attributes. Mental acuity is basically a measure of how sharp the mind is. It has little to do with education or even raw intelligence. It's not a matter of how well-read or quick-witted you are. Rather, we're focusing on the ability to effectively absorb and understand information to concentrate, focus, and remember.

• 1:42:44Jocko Willink?

  You give some definitions in here. This is via Huberman.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. We talked a lot while I was putting this one together.

• 1:42:52Jocko Willink?

  I'm sure you did. You've got scripts. These are, think of these as the lines of code your brain is constantly writing to make sense of the world. You've got patterns. These are collections of similar scripts that build familiarity and certainty in our environment, such as every time I touch a hot stove, I get burned. Patterns are how we learn. Categories, the hippocampus, which is in charge of long-term memory groups, patterns into categories for easier retrieval, using a stove, climbing a tree, driving my car. And then contexts, these are broad versions of the categories, cooking, climbing, driving, and they can be applied to a variety of environments. For example, and this was, I thought this was a great example, if you jump on a tractor or slip into a go-kart or take the wheel

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  of a boat, your brain will recognize that context as driving. So, these are-

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  It gets complex. It's funny, you know, you write a book, and I recognize I wrote that book, and afterwards I was like, "God, this is pretty dense." And you have people who resonate with some of the details. My wife writes, she's like, "There's too much neuroscience in here. I don't like that part," right? Other people are like, "I love the neuroscience." I think when you talk about those definitions, it speaks to mostly that task-switching capability. Our brains are focus points, and we're hopping between context and categories all the time. Ultimately, these attributes just describe how we process the world around us. And they're my favorite, because I think even though I would say compartmentalization is the number-one thing you need at SEAL training, it's really the mental acuity attributes that start defining how you perform in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. And so, and so when you start going through those, like situation awareness,

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  compartmentalization, task-switching, how's our brain working in those environments? And how quickly and effectively are we able to do certain things? And there's pros and cons for both, so.

• 1:44:39Jocko Willink?

  The one you just mentioned, the first one of these, situational awareness, the ability to absorb and process meaningful information about our current environment.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47Jocko Willink?

  And man, this is-

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  And short vigilance, right?

• 1:44:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, you get into, and you get into this as well. The fact that, you know, here's what you say, as with any attribute, extremes can be detrimental. Like I said, you get into it yourself, you know, I wrote a book about it, this book has it as well. Extremes can be detrimental. Too little situational awareness risks obliviousness to real danger. Too much hyper or hypervigilance can wear out the nervous system and perhaps even mask an underlying paranoia.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  So this is, this is the seeds oftentimes of PTSD, for those of us coming back from the combat zone. I mean, I'm someone who literally walks around New York City and I love New York City, right? I walk around, I notice everything. I notice dark alleys, I notice hands, I notice faces, I notice cars. You know, everything. And my wife's not next to me and she doesn't notice anything, right? And now, again, let me just make sure I set the context. All of us have all of these attributes. The difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each, right? So, so adaptability, right? You and I would be a level eight. Environment changes around us, we shift, okay? Someone else might be a level three, it's difficult for them, they're still adaptable, it's just difficult. So, and if we were kind of lining all these up like a dimmer switch on a wall, we'd all have different dimmer switch settings as to where these things fall, which starts to speak to our performance, okay?

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  So there's no judgment in this, right? It's like judging your hair color, it's just who you are. So when I say I'm, we all, seals tend to be very high situational, pretty vigilant. And when you go to a combat zone, as you know, you're wired, I mean, you get, you get high, I mean, everything. You're just notice everything, you're on key. And so when you go home, if you can't turn that off, that's when you're walking around New York City, it's like, okay, there's a guy like two feet behind me, I can't, and he can't, it's like, okay, it's gonna be okay, right? So, so I've, I made, I had, I took deliberate efforts a lot of times to just freaking relax.

• 1:46:38Jocko Willink?

  What, what efforts did you take?

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  Just to, just to recognize where I was being too hypervigilant and say, don't worry about it. It's gonna be fine, right?

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  And, and in some cases, just enjoy the moment of obliviousness, you know? Put my headphones on maybe a couple of times, which is hard for me. Like, I'm like you, I don't run with headphones, usually because I like the environment. But I see people running with headphones on the street, I'm like... What the hell are you thinking? I mean, you're gonna get hit by-

• 1:47:08Jocko Willink?

  I'll put one ear in, that's it.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:10Jocko Willink?

  Two ears, I've never, I, no, that's not happening.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  That's not happening, yeah, yeah. My, my sons do one, do the one ear phone, headphone, but, but anyway, I think, uh, situation awareness, again, too much is hyper, seize a PTSD, too little, oh, I mean, you're not gonna notice stuff, and that's, it's important to you sometimes, so.

• 1:47:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um, it's weird too, I was thinking like, your wife, if you, you're in New York City, she's with you, her vigilance is way low, but I bet, you walk out of the grocery store at night to your car, which is far across the parking lot, you're not thinking that much about it. Your wife, the other hand, you know, walking out at night from the grocery store to the car, she's probably more vigilant than you are, just because there's a, she probably perceived threats higher.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, threat, I think threat definitely, definitely affects this, and, and this is where it gets, attributes get interesting, because context matters, and I think what, the, the best way to describe this in a general sense is where you default to, you know, and, and I just, I default to noticing stuff, I mean, just, it's just who we are, uh, I just noticed, actually, Hubert and I, Hubert and I were joking about this, we were traveling, this was, well, before COVID, we were traveling to do a talk, and so we happened to be traveling together, and, um, and we show up and, and I'm just like, okay, we gotta go here, here, here, I know what's in my bag, I know, I get through security, like, everything's just, I just know, I've, I've thought through everything, and, and I think I did TSA pre-check too. Meanwhile, he goes through the regular security and I walk over to see where he is,

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  and his bag is completely opened up, the security guards take it, you know, there's protein powder and all that stuff, and we were joking about that, because we're just, we're just constantly thinking that way, you know, noticing stuff, so, yeah.

• 1:48:49Jocko Willink?

  So this is the one that you've mentioned already several times, compartmentalization, the ability to effectively chunk an environment or situation into meaningful pieces, then focus on that which needs immediate attention. And again, in the book Extreme Ownership is, we call this prioritize and execute.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:49:05Jocko Willink?

  You gotta focus on what's happening.

• 1:49:10Jocko Willink?

  Compartmentalization is a three-step process. Assessment, prioritization, and then focus. So, you know, for me, it was prioritize and execute. It's interesting, one of the stories that I tell in the book is Seth Stone was the platoon commander. I was task unit commander and we're out doing vehicle immediate action drills. And when the guns, when the guns would start shooting, the targets would pop up. He would like lock up, you know, this is just in our workup.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:35Jocko Willink?

  And I'm watching him and he's not making a call. And so I took my Sharpie magic marker and I like, we got done with the run and I was like, hey, bro. Next time I want you to do this. And I wrote one, like on, on the windscreen or the windshield of his Humvee. I wrote one, relax, two, look around, three, make a call. I said, when you hear those guns start shooting again, just follow these steps.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:55Jocko Willink?

  And he's like, Roger that.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Jocko Willink?

  And so then sure enough, you know, I'm like sitting behind him in the vehicle. The targets pop up and the shooting starts and I, I'm looking at him and I see him like, you can't hear anything because the 50 cal's going. But I look at him and I see him like take a breath and exhale. I'm like, okay, cool. He's got step one, he's relaxing. And then he looks around, he opens the door, looks at the vehicles behind him. I'm like, okay, there's two. And he gets on the, on the horn and makes a call. And I was like, there you go. That was kind of the original version of prioritize and execute. And, and also taking a step back, like you gotta take a step back. You gotta relax and look around and make a call. And that's what, that's what you're talking about here.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Well, and compartmentalization doesn't work without situation awareness. I mean, and that's, so what you're talking about is that, that stepping back is you're stepping back. You're getting situation aware again, and then you're compartmentalizing and then you're getting a situation. This is that, that out in motion and they just work in tandem in the best way.

• 1:50:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's such a freaking cheat code.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:50:45Jocko Willink?

  It's such a cheat code. And again, another Seth Stone story. So he broke his neck during workup.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  I remember hearing that, yeah.

• 1:50:51Jocko Willink?

  And so now he can't do land warfare. But I'm like, hey, bro, let's, you know, come out, I'm going out to, to do FTXs with your guys. I'm going out to watch him. He, I said, come out with me. He's like, oh, of course. So we're standing there and his guys are pinned down. We got the, the laser tag system on and his guys are pinned down in this ravine. And he's like, let me help him. And I was like, no. And we're, we're literally standing like a foot away from these guys. And it's so obvious what call needs to be made. It's just completely obvious.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:20Jocko Willink?

  And no one's making the call. They're all looking down their gun and yelling and screaming and just, it's just chaos. And finally, you know, go ahead, help him. And he tells him, hey, do this IAT or whatever. And he looks at me once they're out, he goes, man, it's so easy from way up here.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:34Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, bro, look where we are. I go, you know what this was like for me when we went through a workup together? I said, everything was like this because I was never freaking staring down the barrel of my gun or the sights of my weapon like freaking out. I was just like looking around. Oh yeah, there's, there's an out over there. Cool. We could, oh, I see the bad guys. We don't want to go in that direction. Hey, let's do this maneuver. And it's just really easy. It's like a freaking superpower.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:54Jocko Willink?

  The detachment.

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:51:58Jocko Willink?

  Um, so you go into this compartmentalization and also worth noting, you say this is an endless process. Compartmentalization is not static. If you silo your thoughts into a tight box and keep them there. Or, or sorry, as if you silo your thoughts and keep them there. It's ever changing. The script is constantly updating with information. And we actually have a word for this in the military. Target fixation.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52:21Jocko Willink?

  Right? This is like, oh, you're going to prioritize and execute, but then you forget about everything else. Now you've only got one thing you're looking at.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:26Jocko Willink?

  We call that target fixation.

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  Not, not a job, not a job of a leader. Yeah. Leaders should not be doing that. Yeah.

• 1:52:32Jocko Willink?

  Um, the multitasking myth. This is chapter 10, task switching. The ability to shift focus among tasks or contexts. Most people believe they can multitask. Most people in fact, believe they're very good at it. In one famous study from the University of Utah, a statistically absurd, but remarkable confident, remarkably confident, 70% of participants thought they were above average in their ability to multiple things at once. They weren't, and you aren't either. When people try to do several things at once, almost everyone, a full 98% according to the Utah study, gets worse at each individual task. Another study at Stanford found that people who habitually multitask actually do more poorly over time.

• 1:53:18Jocko Willink?

  So this is, this again falls into compartmentalization.

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:21Jocko Willink?

  Because if you're not prioritizing and executing and you're trying to do a bunch of things at the same time, you're actually going to fail at all of them.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And a recognition that we just, we can't focus on more than one thing. I mean, we just can't. And so, and again, people, people will be listening to this podcast and say, you know, Rich and Jaco, you're full of it because I'm listening to this podcast and driving my car. Right? It doesn't count if you've relegated that task to your unconscious mind. You can do that because you don't have to think about driving your car. But if you're listening to this podcast, driving your car and someone swerves in front of you and you have to take evasive maneuvers, you'll have to rewind the last 15 seconds of the podcast because your brain will have hopped context, right? And so, and so the people, so there are some people who are really good at this, you know, who can go from the email to the conversation to this, to that, and go all around and just hop really effectively. Other people, when they, when they get hop or get hopped, it takes them a while for their brain to kind of engage into that new activity. And so, and so it's really just about understanding where you are.

• 1:54:11Jocko Willink?

  I just realized I do something, echo Charles. You're not gonna like this because I've probably done it to you before.

• 1:54:17Speaker 02

  I don't doubt it.

• 1:54:18Jocko Willink?

  So let's say we're rolling. You and me rolling jujitsu. We're struggling, right? And all of a sudden, I just like start having a conversation with someone or like I, or like I go, or you know, like we're rolling. And all of a sudden I say to someone that's else that's carrying on a conversation somewhere else and I go, I say, uh, you know, actually no, that there's no class this afternoon.

• 1:54:40Speaker 02

  Chiming in.

• 1:54:41Jocko Willink?

  And I'm doing that. I literally do that psychological warfare to let you know that whatever you're doing right now, I'm not even thinking about it. It's kind of a joke.

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I know that.

• 1:54:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I just made it sure you do that.

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  Fully aware of your intention too, so it kind of like mitigated the effects a little bit.

• 1:54:55Jocko Willink?

  It's like the ultimate cool guy thing.

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but a lot of people do that and it's kind of like, cause some jujitsu is like that.

• 1:55:02Jocko Willink?

  I feel like I just, I just kind of gave up some of my.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  I know, now you know the gap.

• 1:55:06Jocko Willink?

  He's not the only person that do it too.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I already knew he did that. He does other stuff too. It's way more mean. It's a, but jujitsu is the kind where sometimes you can do that because a lot of it is just natural, you know, muscle memory, whatever. And so you can see, you know, especially in the early rounds where you're warming up or whatever, like people do it. And that's kind of the reason he'll do it because it's kind of like, oh, I don't even have to think when I roll with you. Relegate to the subconscious, right? I see what you're doing.

• 1:55:33Jocko Willink?

  That's good. That's what made me think of it when you're like, oh, you can drive a car, you'll have to rewind the 15 seconds. So you know, you had to think about it, think about what you're doing.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  So now watch, next time he does that stuff, I'm, I'm gonna like go hard or whatever, increase his sense of urgency. Yeah, you gotta interrupt his little psychological thing.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:49Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 1:55:52Jocko Willink?

  This is the one, between that one and, so the compartmentalization thing you talked about for BUDs, for basic SEAL training, it's just like, oh, you just need to focus on whatever you're doing right in front of you right now.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  Right. You need to effectively move your horizons.

• 1:56:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And but, and the focus of this one is the task switching. So recognizing that you can't do two things at the same time, you need to focus on this one, and if you have to focus on the other thing, go ahead and focus on that other thing.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  So it gets, this is where it gets fun, a little bit complex, is that the people who do this very well, and what we've seen in our environments, can, can compartmentalize while keeping a little bit of situation awareness to the environment. Because, because as they, as we monitor the environment, and actually Huberman will testify to this in terms of the human brain can't necessarily focus on two things at once, but it can keep awareness of a second thing while you're focused on one thing. And so, and so we keep awareness because if, if in that awareness, the priorities change, then we task switch, right? And we, we say, oh, now the new priority, we're coming off of this, even though it's incomplete, and shifting, shifting to a new priority. So, so they can, they can dance, these attributes can dance with each other, and I don't know

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  what the optimal levels are for, you know, a SEAL or someone, you know, depending, I would, I would imagine fighting is the same way, because you're, you're constantly gauging the environment, and you might be focused on one move, but you're, you're gauging what's happening, you may have to shift or adapt, but these types of, these types of exercises can allow for, for a good practice of these.

• 1:57:27Jocko Willink?

  One of the, one of the things that I think it's really useful to be able to do is like, press into an issue, and this is what I used to tell the young SEAL officers that were going through my training, I'd be like, hey, you might need to get in there and solve a problem, don't stay there.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:43Jocko Willink?

  Like, get in there, look in that room, look in that building, look at that, what that squad is doing, make the adjustment, and then get back out of there. And now, I, I, well, with the OODA loop, when, when people fail with the OODA loop, it's because they get stuck in one piece of that.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:58:01Jocko Willink?

  They're looking around too much, they're not making a decision, or they're, they can't figure out what decision to make, or once they make a decision, they don't act on it. I also do this whole, uh, leadership loop of decision-making, and the final point that I make is don't get stuck in any one of these things, because then you're stuck in that one thing.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:19Jocko Willink?

  So, the ability to press in, look at a problem, solve the problem, give them, give a direction, give a solution, and then get out of there, is, is, is a key to anything that you're doing, really, is, from a leadership perspective. The minute, and this is another thing I've been saying a lot lately, the solution to the problem is not in the problem.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:58:39Jocko Willink?

  Like, you, you're, you can go in there to figure out what the problem is, and then back out and find what the solution is, because most likely, when you're in that problem, you're not gonna, you're not gonna see the solution.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  You're in the fishbowl.

• 1:58:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's like when you're up in the catwalks, you know, you're watching, when you're watching other people do CQ, see, oh, it's like so easy from up here. When you're watching somebody do an IED, you're like, oh, there's the out over there, or that's where they, that's where they should flank to. You can actually get there, while you're doing it, as long as you exercise that detachment, and taking a step back and looking around, so important.

• 1:59:10Speaker 01

  This is what, uh, again, the, the advantage, I mean, again, I think you, you would agree with it, war sucks on all levels, um, but the advantage of being able to be in combat, or, or be at these, these units where we're learning this stuff, um, if you're not doing this as a leader, you're, you're out of the game, you're gonna be outrun. I mean, you have to, you recognize that this is your job, your job is not looking down the gun, point and, and shooting. I mean, I, I, I maybe kicked a couple doors when I was out, out in Iraq and Afghanistan, because my job was task unit commander, I was running the environment, and my guys expected me to do that job, because they, they said, hey, you do that very well, right? So, so the job is to maintain that awareness, so that the guys who have to be target fixated for a little while can do so, and understand that their, their backs are covered.

• 1:59:55Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Learnability, the ability to absorb, process and apply new information to a current or future context. Among the mental acuity attributes, the most important is learnability. It's a sort of catalyst that allows those other cognitive traits to be put into effective use. If we didn't have the ability to update and adjust the scripts, our brains are constantly writing or apply and remember the appropriate patterns and templates that is to learn, then compartmentalization and task switching would only help make us make the same mistakes more efficiently. So if you're not looking at what's going on and actually adjusting to what's happening, then although it doesn't matter if you're compartmentalized, you're not learning anything.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Well, and I would say this is actually one that I admit that I'm a little lower on, because the people who are really high on learnability are the people you can tell how to do something once, or show them once and they got it, right? They just, they pick up things really fast. And I, for me, well, it was buds, but probably more the, the selection when I was going through it. And we would finish a day of training and there'd be guys that are, they're cleaning their gear and go drinking. I'd have to stay back and like, think about what I did and, and I'd make the same mistakes a couple of times. And so it's really, it's an adjustment to where you are. But if we're not, if we're not able to recognize where we fall on this particular attribute, it's going to be tough to actually metabolize these lessons.

• 2:01:16Jocko Willink?

  I think something that I learned, watching when I was a young guy, and I'd see guys that were older than me, you know, with experience that have two platoons or five platoons or whatever, and they would be, this is the way you do it. Something, whether it was a room entry, whether it was immediate action drill, whether it was, you know, how to put your weapon at high port, low port, whatever. There was a way that they had been taught. And in their minds, that was the only way to do it. It was the only way to do it. They usually couldn't articulate why their way was better. They would usually use their rank or their authority, their experience to say, no, I've always done it this way. This is the way we learn.

• 2:02:02Jocko Willink?

  And I remember, I have to try and try and remember where this kind of lesson solidified. But I remember thinking to myself, I'm not going to be like that. And there is definitely a hundred percent more than one way to skin a cat. Like you go into a room, you can do 28 different things and they can all be right. Like you can go, you could go left, you could go right. There's a bunch of different ways to do things. And to, to get stuck on one way and not ever

• 2:02:33Jocko Willink?

  make adjustments, to me, that's a lack of learnability.

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  100%. Well, so when I got to SDVs, you know, again, late 90s, we had, as you recognize when you're at SEAL Team 2, a bunch of the old Vietnam guys were still in the teams, great dudes, most of them running training. And I remember we did a, we did an island trip as SDVs because we were going to deploy out to the Middle East. And so we're doing this insane like seven day hump or whatever. And, and they're, they're contacting us and things like that. And they're contacting us in open terrain, middle of the desert, right? And they're like, okay, peel right or peel left. They're using Vietnam like channelized, you know, tactics in an open desert. And I remember thinking that doesn't, it just doesn't compute right now. I mean, are there other ways to do that? And in fact, the teams started to see that too.

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  I remember, you probably remember IMT, the whole IMT stuff, right? That, that came from, or at least when I saw it, or it would seem to be born from this idea that, hey, we need to start learning how to move in a different way because yes, some of these channelized tactics are great. They work for jungles, but you know, we need some different tactics. But this is the dinosaur mentality we always, you know, are combating.

• 2:03:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's been some, there, there definitely was some.

• 2:03:44Jocko Willink?

  Strange evolutions that happened, and I mean literal evolutions. You didn't go to OCS. I went to OCS and when I went to OCS, they had, you had to polish your, you got to issue these belt buckles, they're brass belt, they're some kind of brass, right? And they came with this coating on it that meant it didn't erode.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:02Jocko Willink?

  It just stayed beautiful and shiny.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:04Jocko Willink?

  And when you got it issued to you, they would make you polish that thing until that enamel came off and now it could erode. And I remember thinking to myself like, this lost its, this got lost somewhere.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:19Jocko Willink?

  The IADS, so as you know, at our land warfare on the west coast, the desert training facility, there's areas in there that are closed terrain.

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:28Jocko Willink?

  You can go and you can do jungle tactics in closed terrain. And what, what happened is some things over time, they lost, they got lost. And I'll give you a great example. When you're doing, for instance, like a, like a peel right, and when you do peel right, you ever, you ever seen that thing where it looks like you're doing a pirouette, they call it, which is like a dance move, you spin around?

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:55Jocko Willink?

  So you'd be, like, if you were gonna peel right, or if you're gonna peel left, and it was your turn to go, you would turn the opposite direction.

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  Turn to the right to spin.

• 2:05:04Jocko Willink?

  Spin around.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, like an about face, yeah.

• 2:05:06Jocko Willink?

  And so, if you're on a range in America, there's almost no place where you can do what you're actually supposed to do. And the Vietnam guys, no, this got, I missed this for like my first platoon. I was like, I didn't really understand. I said, hey, why are we doing this spin? And guys said, it's for safety. And I was like, okay, I didn't really understand why this was safer. Maybe you're kind of high porting or whatever. And then a Vietnam guy was, you know, I asked a Vietnam guy, I was actually, I think it was Roger Hayden. And I was like, why do you spin like this? Why don't you just get up and go? And he goes, oh, if you weren't on a range right now, if you were, if you

• 2:05:48Jocko Willink?

  had 360 degree, you would, when you got done shooting at the target, you would then turn to your right and dump more rounds on your flank. Then you would turn behind you and dump rounds behind you to make sure that you're not getting someone behind you. And then you'd tag your next guy and go. So what it looks like when you can't shoot is it looks like you're just spinning for no reason. And so I've explained that to many, many people over the years like, oh, here's what's actually supposed to be happening. You're supposed to be doing this. So what happened is when you got guys that went from like doing the closed terrain where you can move because you're behind cover and concealment.

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:34Jocko Willink?

  Well, when you're in the desert, it's a long way to travel. And so what do you do? Well, well, just kind of going through the motions. So in order to go through the motions, just get up and run. And that became a thing. And it's like, hmm, that does, why doesn't that feel right? Well, it doesn't feel right because it's not.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:50Jocko Willink?

  Now, listen, if you're at, if you're have distance and you have cover fire, sometimes it does the right thing to do. And you can, you've got guys putting down massive cover fire. Hey, get up and move. We're trying to get out of there. But yeah, there's some of those things that over time, they, the next thing you know, you're polishing the enamel off your belt buckle.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:07:09Jocko Willink?

  And, and things just get lost in translation over time. That's one of the negatives about not having doctrine, like we talked about earlier.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:16Jocko Willink?

  Knowing to say, hey, the reason that you spin like that is if you were in a, in a real contact in a closed environment, you'd be dumping rounds so that you're not getting flanked and you're not getting anyone coming up your six, which is what, you know, there's, when you're online in a gunfight, everyone's online facing in one direction.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:31Jocko Willink?

  So somebody's got to occasionally dump some rounds behind you. Make sure no one's crawling up your ass, which is going to be a bad scene.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm really appreciative because I never knew that. So I've, I've, I've learned that now after 21 years in the Navy.

• 2:07:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and again, I got lucky, like caught that. And I always had those questions, you know, like, wait a second, why are we doing this? Wait, why does that?

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:52Jocko Willink?

  What's that? Where's that come from? And yeah, usually there was a reason. And unfortunately, sometimes it would get lost in the translation over time, which is, which is terrible.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:01Jocko Willink?

  Um, and then a lot of lessons we relearned in, in, in our war. Um, right on. What do we got next here? After learnability.

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  Drive, I think.

• 2:08:15Jocko Willink?

  The drive attributes. We all have needs and the drive is how we try to fulfill them. If you're hungry and thirsty, to use the easiest examples, you are driven to find food and water. Those are admittedly much easier tasks now that we can satisfy those needs by opening the refrigerator and turning on the tap. But for many millennia, eating and drinking required expending a considerable amount of time and energy. The more driven among our ancestors were the least hungry and thirsty. There are two kinds of human needs, intrinsic and extrinsic. Explain those to me. Intrinsic and extrinsic.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's from Dan Pink's book, Drive. So the intrinsic needs are those, you can almost talk about the physiological needs. I mean, the drive to drink is from a physiological need to, because you're thirsty, you need water. Extrinsic are those, you know, I need to, I need to make money to pay my rent, right? So, so they're just coming from the external environment. But, but yeah, drive, the drive as opposed to grit. I mean, grit I would define as that, that ability to kind of set and pursue those shorter term or acute challenges and objectives. And then drive is those longer term challenges and objectives. And what are those, what makes up the driven person? What are those attributes?

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  And there's some counterintuitive ones in there, so.

• 2:09:36Jocko Willink?

  Self-efficacy. A belief in one's ability to achieve a goal, especially when the path is uncertain or unknown. And you have this chapter titled, this chapter about self-efficacy is titled, Mastering the Pivot. You say, like some other attributes, self-efficacy can be dissected into components. It's a combination of confidence, initiative, and optimism. I like these little, I like that. As soon as I read that, I was like, hmm, that's a good, a good way of explaining it. It's not as simple as I got this. That's usually bravado. Self-efficacy is thoughtful and serious. It's I know I can do this because I'm willing to take the first step.

• 2:10:17Jocko Willink?

  And even though I don't know yet all the answers or how this will unfold, I'll continue until I'm successful.

• 2:10:25Jocko Willink?

  And then you go through talking about confidence, talking about initiative and talking about optimism.

• 2:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Jocko Willink?

  And it's really interesting to try and, you know, if you're, if you're entering any kind of pursuit in life.

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:35Jocko Willink?

  And you think, all right, how confident about this? Can I take the first move? And in order to take that first move, you gotta have that optimism that you're actually gonna make it happen.

• 2:10:44Speaker 01

  You do. And, and so we, we, we, we throw those other attributes into our mix when we're doing this stuff with, with organizations. Cause all, all these attributes are meaningful, but, but they can be inert by themselves. You know, I, I talk about in the book, I mean, you know, I've always wanted to be a pilot and my dad was a pilot. My brother was pilot. Uh, I know pretty much at this point I could fly an airplane. I know everything about flying. I've been through ground school a couple of times. I mean, I know everything. Like again, I got my brother's SIM and I could fly the thing, right? I've never gotten my pilot's license. I've, I'm confident I could fly a plane. I've never gotten my pilot's license, right? So there's a lack of initiative there. Um, and so initiative on its own is frenetic energy. I mean, you just, you know, oh, I'm just gonna go, right? But if there's no, if there's no confidence, if there's no optimism, you're just, you're just expending energy.

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  And then optimism on its own, I mean, you and I could plant gardens and, and say every day that weeds are not gonna grow. Um, and sure, you know, sure enough, three weeks later weeds will grow. So, so optimism on its own can be inert. Um, and so it's really the combination that makes up the self efficacious person. And, and if you have, if you have a, an optimal level of that, you will, that, that adds to your drive quite a bit.

• 2:11:49Jocko Willink?

  There's gotta be a, I, we had a, a friend of mine, Travis Mills on this podcast and he's just a freaking, probably the best human ever. I don't know. You think Travis is the best human ever? Do you know who he is? He's a quadruple amputee from Afghanistan.

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  I've heard of him.

• 2:12:03Jocko Willink?

  He's, his attitude is bar none better than any, uh, anyone I've ever known. I mean, just absolutely freaking awesome guy. And we were talking, you know, we're going through his life and his history. And he joined the army and you know, we're talking and you know, he like was a stud in high school, freaking football athlete, just a stud. And he's a beast of a human, just a total stud. And I kinda was like, hey, man, why don't you go and like, you know, like, why don't you try for special forces? Or do you go Ranger or anything like that? He goes, man, I didn't know if I could make it. And like this guy is, I mean, I was the most average person, like I was average high school kid across the board, like average to low average in everything that I did.

• 2:12:47Jocko Willink?

  I was just like, but for some reason I had this idea like, oh, SEAL training, toughest training in the world.

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 2:12:52Jocko Willink?

  Let's go, bring it. And you have a total stud like Travis being like, I wasn't sure if I could make it. So it's like he, he might've had a little negative on the optimism.

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  Right, you know? Right, yeah, there's a balance in it. And but there's also, we can, we'll throw, throw a little cunning in there. We don't like rules, so don't tell me what to do. Uh, there's some rebel nature in there, um, that I think causes guys like you and I to, to try for SEALs. And we'll talk about this, there's a little bit of narcissism too.

• 2:13:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:22Speaker 02

  I have a question.

• 2:13:23Jocko Willink?

  You go.

• 2:13:23Speaker 02

  So, and like Travis Mills, you, you mentioned the Travis Mills thing where he was like, kind of a higher level, like a high level athlete, like in high school and stuff and got used to it. And we talked about this, about buds too, with Jason Gardner a little bit where he was talking about, you have high level athletes who are really used to being high level and winning, winning, winning. Right? So, but then they go through buds and they start losing and then there, it shatters them, right?

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:50Speaker 02

  And then you get someone like how you just said, like you were just average. So you're kind of used to taking hell.

• 2:13:55Jocko Willink?

  For a beat down.

• 2:13:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, ready for that. So do you think that it's like, if you kind of consider like, why is that? So it's kind of like the, the, the high level athlete, so to speak, is used to a certain standard of, of what winning is?

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  I wouldn't even say winning. I would say, I would say, and again, I, I think it's a, it's a level of performance. I mean, the, the high level athlete designs his or her entire day and system around being a hundred percent for the moment, right? It's, it's this idea of peak performance, a hundred percent for the moment. And, and so when they. Come into an environment where 100% doesn't exist, or they say, oh, great, you're 100%, we're gonna take you down to zero.

• 2:14:35Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:14:36Speaker 01

  They're just not used to it. And so I think, I think a lot of the, the, the, the div one athletes who go and don't make it are just not used to being at a performance level of, of, of not 100, let alone zero. I was like, you know, we, we love to be 100, but like, if someone came to us before our mission and said, you know what, my, um, my shoulder's kind of 90%, I think I'm gonna sit this one out. We're like, what?

• 2:14:57Jocko Willink?

  It's more like telling a guy that like, has a freaking broken leg, like, hey, bro, you cannot go.

• 2:15:04Speaker 01

  I'm sorry.

• 2:15:05Jocko Willink?

  No, I've gone good.

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  It's, you know what it is, the difference between rugby players and everybody else, right? Seals are more like rugby, rugby players, but yeah, I think it's that, it's that level of performance.

• 2:15:14Speaker 02

  So like the, and, and not to put too fine of a tip on it, but, so like, let's say someone who's so used to winning and so used to performing at their best, more or less, it's almost like their level of standard of what they would call success in their mind is like so high. So anything below that threshold is kind of like, oh, I might as well not even exist in this environment.

• 2:15:34Speaker 01

  I think you're, I think you're on to something. Again, we can't, we can't dig in the minds of these folks, but this is again, you know, I, I keep on saying fighting, like, fighting is a, is a sport you go into and you're literally going in and expecting to get hurt. You're gonna go, I mean, the, the whole game is you're gonna go from 100% down to whatever percent knocks you out, right? Or you're not gonna, that other guy. That is a whole different mentality than a lot of other sports, right? And so I think, I think these types of distinctions are really interesting to me. I'm sure, you know, you have to be careful, you don't put labels on things, but, um, I don't know, I like dissecting that stuff.

• 2:16:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the scary thing too, cause whatever example you bring up, there's a counter example.

• 2:16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:10Jocko Willink?

  For every example where you're like, well, this guy was a stud and he quit. And there's a good stud that made it.

• 2:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:16Jocko Willink?

  You know, and there's a stud that failed, whatever, and he was like, yeah, cool, I got it. Like, there's just a counter, there, there's a counter to every example that you can come up with.

• 2:16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I don't mean necessarily like the whole guy, I'm just saying that element of their brain.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. If we could, if, if we could figure those things out, then you'd start to be able to figure out who's gonna make it through, I think. Uh, but you have to look at the whole, you can't just look at their. Their life in athletics, you'd have to look at their whole life. I mean, because there's, because all those grit attributes, all those mental good attributes, all those drive attributes, they're all executed in other areas of life, too. I mean, I talk about, I mean, SEALs are gritty, yeah, but there are some gritty people out there who are way grittier than SEALs, right? I mean, so, so these contexts of life can be training and proving grounds for people. And athletics, that's why the, the top athlete might have had a, a whole different context inside of which he or she just, just nugged it out and was used to being at zero and then they make it.

• 2:17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would make sense with the wrestlers because they're cutting weights, day of and all this like crazy starving themselves like that. So that would make sense.

• 2:17:15Jocko Willink?

  And they still quit, by the way. Division one wrestlers go and freaking quit.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:20Jocko Willink?

  That's what happens. Actually, I heard a story from one of the instructors was telling me like they had a guy that was a total stud. Like just an awesome, fast, freaking strong, just a stud. And they had like, they do things like, uh, put you on runs where they're supposed to be four miles, but it's actually 4.6 or whatever. Or they make you do a bunch of exercise before. And, and so they fail everybody. They'll, they'll let, they'll let three guys pass or whatever. And be like, gee, those guys did it. And this guy, like, I think it was like first day, whatever, of first phase. So he's gone through all the pre-training and then he failed. They're like, you fail. And he's like, you got me. I quit. They were like, okay.

• 2:18:01Jocko Willink?

  See ya. Which is, it's actually crazy when you think about guys that sign up for the Navy, enlisted the Navy for six years of their life. Tell their girlfriend, tell their parents, tell all the friends, I'm going to be a Navy SEAL. And they show up there and the first day they freaking quit. It's crazy.

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  It is crazy. I, I think part of that's the mythos, though, because, because even, even reading about the training, you read about how we go, you don't, you just don't experience until you hit the beaches that, that first day.

• 2:18:29Jocko Willink?

  I was telling some young guy the other day, you know, like,

• 2:18:35Jocko Willink?

  You know, his dad or whatever, someone was, it was a, it was a family context, like, like a family had met me or like a father and son or something that, and the kid's like, that's like, he wants to be a SEAL. And I was like, yeah, you know, uh, it's really hard. Most people don't make it. Most people quit. And, um, and he's like, looking at me as if, bro, you know, I mean, what are you, and I go, and I go, and most people look at me like you're looking at me right now, like, clearly it's not going to be, I go, I go, everyone shows up there thinking they're going to make it.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:06Jocko Willink?

  And 80% of them ring the bell. So I wish you luck. Don't quit. That's my advice.

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was, I was in a group of, uh, again, good dudes or company we're working for, about 10 of us. And they were all, you know, talking about SEAL training and, and, um, and almost all of them were like, I'd love to be a SEAL. I, I think I could do it. If I did, I think I could do it. I think I could do it. And I looked at him and I said, listen, there's 10 people in here. Okay. About 85% quit. So the, and I, and I already got through. So the odds aren't good for you.

• 2:19:33Jocko Willink?

  It's a point, point five from one of you is gonna make it.

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  Point five from one of you is gonna make it. So.

• 2:19:39Jocko Willink?

  Um, all right. Here's a topic I'm always a fan of. Discipline.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:19:44Jocko Willink?

  The ability to remain focused and steadfast to achieve a result. But what's interesting, this is called the, the chapter title is the self-disciplined loser.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:19:55Jocko Willink?

  And what's interesting is, is Echo, when I talk about this, you know, people that have high amounts of discipline in certain areas, and they just don't apply it to other aspects of their life.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  It's that difference between what I call outer and inner discipline.

• 2:20:11Jocko Willink?

  To talk about them.

• 2:20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, and so the discipline I talk about in the book is really outer discipline. The, that's making, uh, uh, choosing or, or deciding upon a goal, uh, that the outside world has a say in whether or not you accomplish. Okay. That could be a Navy SEAL, writing a book, becoming a bestselling author, being a great chef, whatever, whatever that might be. The outside world has a say in whether or not you accomplish those. So, so the, so the discipline required to accomplish that takes a different level. It takes adaptability, it takes flexibility, it takes an understanding of, you have to shift, you have to move, right? But then there's self-discipline. Okay. Self-discipline, uh, speaks to those goals that the outside world has no say

• 2:20:51Speaker 01

  in whether or not you accomplish. So that's like me saying, I'm going to eat healthier and I'm in Vegas next week. Well, I'm at the buffet. The buffet is not going to throw pastries at me. Okay. It's all on me. All right.

• 2:21:01Speaker 01

  Again, this is where it gets interesting because I asked myself, can these exist independently? I have known people who are highly self-disciplined. They have a routine, they work out every day, they eat right, blah, blah, blah. They can't get a long-term goal accomplished to save their lives, right? I've seen people, I'm actually one of these, who's, I'm highly disciplined. Like, I can get audacious goals accomplished, you know, and I'm good at it, right? My self-discipline sucks. I have to work on it, it was really hard for me, right? I always joke, it's like, I don't even like to tell myself what to do, let alone, you'll be told.

• 2:21:31Speaker 01

  The best is a balance, right? But again, when you start separating these and seeing that they can live independently, you start really understanding your performance. And so if you have the ability to say, listen, I'm really high on self-discipline. Get really high self-discipline, people love structure, they love routine. Guess what's going to happen if you try to be a Navy SEAL? Or be a bestselling author? Or be whatever, you name the outside goal. Your routine is going to get screwed with. You're not going to be able to work out one day. You're not going to be able to eat the same thing you want to eat, right? So, so that's why they fall off. The, the, the really well-disciplined person, people who have audacious goals, we're really good at adapting. We're like, oh yeah, throw it at me now, I'm good, bro, right? But like, now I say, hey, you gotta be structured. It's like, oh, don't tell me about structure, I hate that, right? And so, so obviously, the, the, the best, the best is having a balance,

• 2:22:16Speaker 01

  or at least understanding where you may fall higher or lower on those scales, so that you can affect, you can affect each side, or affect each side independently and get yourself to where you need to go.

• 2:22:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think, you know, so I wrote a book called Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, but I'll talk about, when, when I'm talking to companies, you know, I'll talk about, hey, this is a dichotomy as well. And inside of a team, if you're overly disciplined as a team, all of a sudden, people don't, they stop thinking. You know, we can only follow the rules. You know, the DMV, in many ways, is a highly disciplined organization. They're going to follow that rule. Oh, you're in the wrong line, go get in that other line now. They don't go, hey, cool, hey, we can just move you over here, I can do it this time. No, they're highly disciplined and therefore highly ineffective.

• 2:22:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:22:57Jocko Willink?

  So you can go, just like any of these things, you can take it to an extreme and it's gonna, it's gonna cause problems.

• 2:23:04Speaker 01

  Someone, real quick, someone asked me about once, about discipline equals freedom. What do you think about Chaco and discipline equals freedom? And I said, I said, he's absolutely right. I said, the only thing that we have to add on the tagline is discipline equals freedom to be undisciplined, right? Because if you, if you discipline yourself to a degree, you allow yourself the freedom to once in a while be undisciplined, you know? And that's the dichotomy.

• 2:23:25Jocko Willink?

  And it, it happens with teams as well. And this is the example that I give all the time is, If we're out on a target and there's another building that needs to get taken down and I can just look at you and go Rich, go hit that building too. And you'd be cool, got it. You didn't need to tell me the people you're gonna take or what method of venture you're gonna use or what you're gonna do with the people that you captured. You didn't tell me that because we had discipline, standard operating procedures, which gave us all kinds of freedom. So we have the discipline, which gives us freedom to then move and maneuver quicker. And then on a personal level, this occurred for the first time I was at this kid's birthday party. Little kid's birthday party and they had cake and or ice cream cake, which I think that's one level up because cake won't. A lot of times cake, cake is generally, in my opinion, dry.

• 2:24:11Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 2:24:11Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:24:12Jocko Willink?

  The frosting is good, but a lot of times the cake itself dry, it's not, it's not enough to bring me over the edge.

• 2:24:18Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 2:24:19Jocko Willink?

  Ice cream cake, different story, right? So anyways, the ice cream cake rolls out, the ice cream cake gets caught up and I slap a slab of that thing right on my little plastic party plate and the grandma. Who, you know, this is like friends of the family, the grandma. And she's from Germany and she's like, Jaco.

• 2:24:43Jocko Willink?

  I thought we were disciplined and I said, ma'am, this is the freedom part, like you said, right? Like Rich just said, you gotta have that discipline so that occasionally when that ice cream cake shows up with the, with the ground up kind of Oreo scenario on the bottom, you know what I'm talking about? You know what I'm talking about, right? They make the crust of Oreos type thing.

• 2:25:02Speaker 02

  Yep, they did the right thing.

• 2:25:03Jocko Willink?

  They did, they made good moves crossing the border, mint chocolate chip ice cream in there. So yes, we have the discipline, it'll give us freedom ultimately to do what we want. That's what, that's what we want. What was the tagline you added on?

• 2:25:17Speaker 01

  Discipline equals the freedom to be undisciplined once in a while.

• 2:25:20Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Yeah. I guess I put, I put freedom and undisciplined in the same category, right? In a way. So there we go. Discipline.

• 2:25:31Jocko Willink?

  Next one. Open mindedness, a willingness to consider and accept new ideas, opinions, or perspectives. This is again, coming from that book, The Psychology of Military Incompetence. This is the major downfall of leaders that have authoritarian mindset is their mind is closed. They don't want to hear your idea. Not only they don't want to hear your idea, they don't want to hear the intel report that just came in. That's saying something. They don't want to take the feedback from the guys that are on the phone lines. That's how close minded they are. And this causes all kinds of problems.

• 2:26:07Speaker 01

  It does. And I, you know, in 20, I put open mindedness specifically in the book to speak to optimal performance. There's another attribute called curiosity, which I don't talk about in the book. And the difference between the two is, is really a, an activeness and a passiveness. Curiosity is, is proactive, open minded. I'm going to go, whereas open mindedness is passive. So that's you and I going to Thailand and you know, we meet our local friend, a local friend says, hey, I'm going to take you to the most authentic Thai place. And you're like, cool. We're all, we're good, that's open minded. Or we go to Thailand, we meet our local Thai friend, we say, take us to the most authentic restaurant. Right? That's being curious, right? And so very interestingly, these can exist independently, right? So you can be curious without being open minded. You can be open minded without being curious. Being open minded without being curious, that's okay. Okay. It's not too bad.

• 2:26:52Speaker 01

  You're just passively open minded. If you are curious without being open minded, it can be dangerous as a leader. This is the seeds of conspiracy theory, right? I know what I want to believe and I'm curious to find out why it's right. It's right. And, and the leaders who are curious without being open minded stand the F by. Yeah. It's bad.

• 2:27:13Jocko Willink?

  Those are, that's an interesting one.

• 2:27:16Jocko Willink?

  Open mindedness then can to some extent be a debilitate, deliberate, sorry, deliberate process. This is what I like. We just talked about this on one of our other podcasts where I was saying that having a contrarian mind. If you take it to extreme, obviously it's bad and I've worked for bosses. I'm sure you did too. They were contrarians and so it just became a drag. Everything was like, well, there's another way to do this. Even if it didn't make any sense, we're still going to do it a different way. But I like this idea of open mindedness, making it a deliberate process. And what I said was, being a contrarian, it's going to let you see the counterintuitive options that you might not see if you didn't actively try and say, okay, let me get deliberate about what's another way to make this happen.

• 2:27:59Speaker 01

  I just listened to that and I totally agree. This is like idea of the devil's advocate. And I always said, hey, I, I really wanted the occasional devil's advocate, but it had to be a productive devil's advocate, not a, not a, just a, you know.

• 2:28:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. I had, I had a boss that was very contrarian on everything. It looked great guy, but you know, eventually you're just like, yep, got it. Wow, that's crazy, boss. Wow, that's nuts. Cool. Can we move on now? Uh, next one, you've mentioned this one already, cunning, the ability to consider problems and circumstances from unusual and unorthodox perspectives in order to achieve a goal or objective. The story that you're telling here is, is a pretty cool and everyone on this podcast will appreciate it because it's about Chuck Liddell. And basically you're talking to some of your guys and who could beat Chuck Liddell in a fight?

• 2:28:49Jocko Willink?

  And everyone's like, kind of knows the deal, you know, if you train combatants at all, you know, if you go, and this is at the time period when Chuck Liddell was the light heavyweight champion of the world. And so you, if you've trained, you know that Chuck Liddell is going to beat your ass. Cause he's way better than you are. And you got one guy that's like, I'll take him. And everyone's like, oh, what do you mean? How could you take him? And he says, I'll take him as long as I get to dictate when and where we fight. What do you mean by that? Well, I want to fight him at 2:00 AM in the dark, in the ocean, down at 50 feet. And then I'll take Chuck Liddell. It's like, makes sense. That's your, uh, that's your cunning.

• 2:29:24Speaker 01

  The cunning mind approaches a problem and immediately asks three questions. The question it asks is first, are there rules and boundaries? Second is, are they real or are they perceived? And the third is, if they are real, what happens if I break them? And then goes about looking at different ways. And this exactly, it's, it's one of the primary qualities of Navy SEALs is the cunning mind is we, we, we are not constrained by rules and objectives.

• 2:29:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You have in here, cunning is a pejorative word, implies sneakiness, deception, using trickery to an unfair advantage. But I'm using it a broader sense as a neutral term. It might include deception at any given time, but not always rather. I mean, an ability to disregard the unspoken and often artificial rules when appropriate. To consider objects and circumstances from unorthodox perspectives. This is a weird one in this day and age. Okay, so you're in BUDs. Basic SEAL training. And you, I heard two things when I went through BUDs. One of them, if you're not cheating, you're not trying. And the other one, if you're cheating, you're only cheating yourself.

• 2:30:31Jocko Willink?

  And I've, you know, there's been, obviously, you know, BUDs is pretty high on the radar. Um, as far as what, what's going on there. But that's a difficult balance, but there is like, there's no right answer. You, you want to have guys that are like, wait a second. A classic example, you know, the instructor will go out and say, all right. Uh, you know, you're doing log PT, which means you all have, you're, you're on your squad with six guys or seven guys and you're carrying this log. And I think this is in this book. I don't know, I read a lot of books. Is it the one, anyways, the guys, the instructor comes out and says, okay. Take your team, run down around the berm and run back.

• 2:31:13Jocko Willink?

  Don't do anything that I, don't do, just do what I told you to do. Take your team, run around the berm and come back. And so all the teams pick up their logs and run and one, one leader says, all right, let's go guys and leaves the log. Cause they didn't get told they had to take it. So that's a person that's like thinking outside the box. Good job, right? Good job. And I think you talk about in this book is that the dragon, right? Yes. Go, go rescue the dragon who's guarded, go rescue the princess who's guarded by the dragon. And what the SEAL mindset is, well, can we just avoid the dragon completely? How can we just not even have to deal with the dragon? Go, you know, deliver a pizza to the princess and then sneak her out.

• 2:31:56Jocko Willink?

  Throw some slices of pizza at the dragon too and he's all good. As opposed to going to fight the dragon where we take athletes. Um, so what do you, what do you think, what do you make of that balance that they look for in buds of someone that's going to break the rules? Without breaking the rules.

• 2:32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so, so Hank and I talked about this, uh, we're having coffee and it was actually in the context of the, the recent controversy of, of, um, of the students that still training using, using substances. And, and in the, the common, uh, thoughts from most of us is like, that's, we feel like that's stolen valor, right? I mean, if you're not going to do it the way you're supposed to do it, then that's stolen valor. And, but there's a reason, right? Because this is different than cheating and, and what we came up with, right or wrong, but I'd like your thoughts is that if you're cheating and it's hurting the team, it's bad, right? Um, if you're cheating in a context to get the team to accomplish a mission, right? That's different, right?

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  And what, what, what we, what we were looking at in that conversation about substance abuse is you are, you're doing, you're, you're cheating the, you're cheating the process by which we will understand that you can go to combat with us and do anything we need you to do, right? Because you're, you're giving yourself physical stuff or whatever you're doing, right? Um, so, so you ain't cheating, you're trying, you're trying is about, is about looking at the problem differently. For the purpose of making the team successful and there's no selfishness involved with it, right? And I think that's the key. Um, again, there's benevolent cunning, right? That's, that's Oscar Schindler. There's, there's malevolent cunning, right? That's Bernie Madoff. I mean, so, so, so even being, um, uh, divisive or, or devious, right?

• 2:33:33Speaker 01

  Uh, you can do it in a benevolent way and these guys who, I would be curious, I mean, the, the guys who ran around the, the berm without the log, they probably got beat up because, you know, the instructors like, but they probably, you know, the instructor's probably got, actually that's a pretty good idea, right? Yeah. Cause they're seeing, they're seeing some different ways of thinking as long as it's in service to the team. Selfish cheating is where we draw the line.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  I was at Team Two. We were doing CQC at whatever Blackwater is now called.

• 2:34:02Speaker 01

  Hey, I can't remember if it's changed.

• 2:34:04Jocko Willink?

  And they had this, one of the, one of the mount towns, they had like a facade. One, one side of the street was just a facade. So there was only this, there was a street, a fake street. And then there was like a Hollywood for you Echo Charles, like the front of buildings. But they had windows and doors and all this stuff. And we had some target that we were supposed to hit. Where we had to like go right in front of that street and the few runs that we'd done already. The guys were hiding in those facades and just shooting the shit out of us. So, you know, we're just doing quick iteration runs. And I'm like, all right, here's what we're gonna do. And we moved a few guys, like the bulk of the platoon just ran right down the field to the mount town and started doing the clearance towards the target.

• 2:34:48Jocko Willink?

  But we sent like four guys, ran all the way around the berm, all the way around to the back of the facades. And as we initiated the target, they just shot all the op four in the back. You know, just killed them all like immediately. And it was one of those things where the, where they were like, hey, good job, guys. Like, hey, you, you, we, we weren't watching our six and you, you kicked our ass. They were stoked about it. So I, the, the, what I wrote down was like that theory of, uh, kind of like the spirit of the rule. Like if you break, I think there's something where you have to judge, like, wait a second, are we actually doing something that's breaking the spirit of the evolution? Like in Bud's, you know, hey, are we doing something that actually is,

• 2:35:33Jocko Willink?

  is just not the right thing to do?

• 2:35:35Speaker 01

  At the detriment of the team or at the detriment of, of true training, right? I mean, you know, there's, yeah.

• 2:35:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What I thought you were actually gonna say when you were talking about you and Hank talking about, uh, doing steroids or whatever in Bud's. What I thought you were gonna say, and I, I agree with what you said, but also. If we're in a boat crew and I'm on steroids and you're not, I can go a little bit faster. And now you're having to keep up with me and you're, you don't have the benefit of being juiced to the gills. As they say, which is a problem. Now, I, I mean, from what I understand, the, the, the steroids as a whole are not going to help you get through.

• 2:36:16Speaker 01

  But no.

• 2:36:17Jocko Willink?

  And it's a going to be a detriment.

• 2:36:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:36:19Jocko Willink?

  So hopefully, uh, guys are hearing that message.

• 2:36:23Speaker 01

  And what, what baffles my mind is the guys who are doing it, they, they haven't gotten it because it's not about looking good. It's not about winning it. If you can win things, great. It's a, even if, I mean, there's no score. I mean, the, the guy who wins nothing, but still makes it through, still becomes a Navy SEAL.

• 2:36:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, what I was thinking about was you said earlier is like, hey, you can do, let's say you and I get dropped down. I'm juiced to the gills and you're not. Cool. You did a hundred and seventeen pushups before you went face first. You hit the surf. I did a hundred and thirty, right? I did an extra thirteen pushups. No one knows. No one cares. We both end up wet.

• 2:36:59Speaker 01

  I cooled off faster. Faster. I saw my buddy who's, who's running, who's in first phase told me a story. He said it was hell week and they were doing this evolution hell week. I can't remember what it's called. It's called, I think it's called a double up where they run, they have the class run two miles. And then when they, they have a certain time to do it and whoever fails that time has to do it right, uh, uh, uh, do, do it again or immediately do another two miles. And he said, um, this class, it was, this class, they were basically, apparently they, they got in word and all that stuff. They're, they're super prepared, right? They go to this two mile run. They, every single person passes. It was like, holy crap. Every single, except one dude. And this dude is like way far behind and he's like struggling. And so the whole class passes and they're sitting there and the dude finishes and they're like, okay.

• 2:37:40Speaker 01

  You know, um, it, tell this dude who's, who's, um, who, who didn't pass. Okay. Um, you know, go, go over there, get some water. You're going to do it again. So he walks over to the, the class, the class kind of circle him, huddle around him. About a minute later, the kid comes back to the instructor says, hey, uh, I'm, I'm quitting. I'm going to DOR, right? So he quits. And so my buddy goes to the, the class leader and says, hey, uh, you know, what, what went on there? I was like, well, you know, we, I don't know. We, he just, we, we were all prepared to win that. And you know, he, um, you know, he didn't, he didn't live up and we kind of, we felt like it was probably his time. He's like, uh, my buddy's like, um, You guys are idiots. I was like, what? He's like, you guys could have been sitting around doing nothing while he ran another two miles. You know, did you ever think about that one?

• 2:38:23Speaker 01

  Now you're gonna get beat. So this is, this is thinking outside the box, right? In a different way, right? So it's, it's this idea of, are we breaking the paradigms of our thinking? Because this is what Spec Ops was designed with first base and this is how we, we, we, we conducted the war. I mean, I remember we were changing tactics all the time to try to stay ahead. Uh, because, you know, we had to, you know, and so I think the cunning mind used benevolently and used in service to others is a huge asset.

• 2:38:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, definitely what, what, what the SEAL teams and like you said, well, that's what special operations is for.

• 2:39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:01Jocko Willink?

  You know, to look at a problem and say, hold on a second. What were those three questions you had? Those are three good questions.

• 2:39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. First question is, are there rules and boundaries? Uh, second question, are they real or are they perceived? Third question is, what happens if I break them? If they are real, what happens if I break them?

• 2:39:15Jocko Willink?

  That's cool. Those are good. Uh, Echo and I just did four podcasts about the game.

• 2:39:21Speaker 01

  Game.

• 2:39:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We're just about the game, about the, all the different games that you're playing and life is a game and job is a game and jujitsu is a game and relationships is a game, all these things. But those are three really good questions. And, and we actually ended up talking about the infinite game versus the finite game. And I know you mentioned that in here as well. But yeah, always checking things out and saying, wait a second, you know, why are we even doing this? That's kind of the contrarian mind that I have. It's like, why are we even doing this? What, what, what if we don't do this?

• 2:39:51Speaker 01

  It's healthy skepticism. And I think that really is, is a valuable asset, healthy skepticism.

• 2:39:56Jocko Willink?

  Powerful. Um, now we get into the, this one.

• 2:39:59Speaker 01

  The fun one.

• 2:40:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You mentioned this one. Uh, it's all about me. By the way, closing line of the book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics is, it's on you, but not about you. Um, narcissism, the desire to stand out, to be noticed, to be recognized. When I was lying on a California beach in the dark, the cold Pacific surf crashing over me at the miserable height of hell week, I was not driven by selfless service to my country. I did not lean on my deep patriotism and I was not inspired by a sense of sacrifice or duty. To be honest, none of those high-minded ideals were even the primary reason I wanted to be a Navy SEAL in the first place. All those are part of me, but of course, all those are part of me, of course, but they aren't why I signed up for Bud's training.

• 2:40:42Jocko Willink?

  So why did I? For the same reason every SEAL does, to see if I could be a badass special operator, to prove that I was good enough, tough enough, strong enough, to be recognized as a member of an elite fraternity. In a word, I was motivated by narcissism. That's another one of those words that typically is considered pejorative. An excessive amount of narcissism, in fact, is clinically recognized personality disorder. But in the layman's version of the term, narcissism is one of the elemental engines of human behavior, the innate attribute that urges us to strive, to succeed, to be noticed. In healthy doses, it's important for optimal performance.

• 2:41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. I got a, I got a copy of the DSM-5, which is the psychological bible. I want to make sure I was looking at this correctly. In the DSM-5, they have a couple pages on narcissism and the disorder and they have nine criteria in there that you read, like sentences. And the idea is if the, if the doctor reads these nine and five and the patient, you can say yes to five or more, then the patient is, is considered disordered, right? And so I started reading through these nine. And as I read through them, I did not have five or more, but I was not innocent of all that I was reading. And so I said, okay. I asked myself the question, why did I become a SEAL in the first place? And it was because, you know, all those things exist, but I wanted to see if I could do something very few people could do. And the idea, and the other thing is, when you look at the

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  neurology, the neuroscience of this, an infant that's getting recognized and adored by its parents is getting bursts of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, all very powerful feel-good chemicals, right? It feels good to be recognized and noticed. Doesn't change when we're adult. So, so the, the thesis is, it's the impetus to some very audacious goals that we set for ourselves. It has to be metabolized in a healthy way. And the way we metabolize it in a healthy way is we surround ourselves with people who tell us the truth. You can always tell the disordered. Narcissists because they surround themselves with yes men. People who tell them what they want to hear. People who put them on a pedestal and it's interesting because those groups are very transient. So someone who can't bend the knee for very long will leave eventually.

• 2:42:50Speaker 01

  Well, that person who just left immediately becomes enemy number one to that narcissist. That's just the way it works and so. So we can set, you know, a lot of people would wouldn't argue the fact and you we could debate this, but that Hollywood is generally considered a narcissistic town. But you look at some of the the most kind of the the healthiest, most stable Hollywood actors and actresses. They are people who've surrounded themselves with people who they're just normal around, right? And so and so we just surround ourselves with people who don't put us on a pedestal, who tell us the truth, who keep us humble. That's our teammates, by the way. That's our wives, if we marry the right person. And we can really use narcissism to great advantage because why else would I want to be a Navy SEAL? Why else would I want to write a bestselling book?

• 2:43:34Speaker 01

  Why else would I want to be the best surgeon, the best athlete, the best teacher, whatever that is? So the idea is understand our humanness, recognize our humanness, don't don't ignore it. Don't pretend it's not there. Just recognize it and body it and try to metabolize it.

• 2:43:51Jocko Willink?

  You say this. People who fall too high on the narcissism scale, however, can be dangerous. In a simple sense, those more narcissistic types favor the quick hits of serotonin and dopamine over the longer lax lasting oxy.

• 2:44:07Speaker 01

  What is it oxytocin?

• 2:44:08Jocko Willink?

  Oxytocin. They need those constant reinforcements because their self esteem is either very fragile or very low despite presenting as arrogant. They're generally feel unsafe and insecure. They're extremely sensitive to perceived injuries from criticism or defeat. And they very easily feel humiliated or degraded. To prevent that, highly narcissistic people try to put themselves at the center of small, tight, sycophantic tribes. They are rarely loyal. Loyalty requires trust and a sense of safety, so their tribes are inherently unstable. Healthy members tend not to stay long and new ones that are let in only when they show their requisite deference.

• 2:44:51Jocko Willink?

  Those who do leave usually suffer a disproportionate amount of wrath from the person to whom they once deferred, because defectors are considered enemies. So beware the highly narcissistic people in your sphere. Their energy and effort will, more often than not, be to prop up their fragile egos rather than to achieve shared objectives or serve a common purpose. They are by definition not team players. Yet if they sense you are distancing yourself, if you are not obviously on their team, they'll likely lash out, diminishing you in an effort to inflate themselves. Worst of all, narcissism doesn't show up clearly in the mirror. The more narcissistic a person is, the less likely it is that they'll recognize that behavior.

• 2:45:38Jocko Willink?

  This is one of the biggest things that we try and teach, you know, as one of the key components, the most important characteristic for a leader to have is humility. And the reason that we, the reason that I found that we have to lean into that is because when you're working with people that are in leadership positions, lieutenant, they got there because they have confidence, right? They got there, not only did they have confidence, they did well and were rewarded. And when they got rewarded, they did even better. And then they get promoted and then when they get promoted, they're confident, so they do well again. And so they get this, so we have a tendency when we're working with, and it was in the SEALs,

• 2:46:20Jocko Willink?

  like occasionally, we would have a young officer that was over-indexing humility, like just lacking confidence, right? Occasionally, that was. Way more often than not, it was someone that was, you know, hey, I already know how to do this. Hey, I don't, we did this my way. Like that was the norm, and it's the same thing in the business world. Like you don't become the CEO of a big company. Because you are overly humble. You got there because you were confident and then the more good decisions you make and the more success you have, the more that ego gets out of control. And that's when we run into problems. So, uh, that's a good one.

• 2:46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and honestly, like confidence, I, I almost tend to sometimes separate confidence because I, I consider arrogance, the opposite of humility. Um, and confidence and arrogance, the way I talk about those, when I, when I talk about organizations is, um, is arrogance is, or confidence is I know I can do this. Arrogance is I'm better than you. Um, confidence is, is internally focused and arrogance is externally expressed. Um, and so obviously confidence is quiet, arrogance is loud. Arrogance almost always comes from a place of insecurity. And so, and so you can have a very, very humble, you can have a very, very confident person who's very humble. Right? I mean, most of the masters out there that we, we've, we've encountered are very confident, but also humble. And humility in my, in my mind

• 2:47:37Speaker 01

  is really just a, it's not a, it's not a deference. It's really just an understanding that I always have something to learn. I always, I have, I, I, there's always someone who can teach me something and I'm open minded to it.

• 2:47:46Jocko Willink?

  I'm not necessarily right.

• 2:47:48Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so, uh, and so, so people, so, so a lot of these, a lot of these folks, again, if you, if you look at the studies, a lot of the top like entrepreneurs, like the very successful, they're a little bit higher on the narcissistic scale, but it's because those endeavors required a little bit of that to get it going, kind of, kind of to spark that. But if you want to keep on going, you just have to manage it.

• 2:48:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that can bite them in the ass too. You know, we see these people, you know, self-destruct because yeah, it takes a level of confidence leaning towards arrogance to get to like, hey, I'm going to take this money from you and I'm going to kick ass and we're going to create this thing that's never been done before. I tell you, you gotta be, you gotta have some level of arrogance pushing in that direction. But then they grow to a point or they get to a point where all of a sudden, I'm not listening to you. I'm not taking, like I said before, I'm so confident in what I'm saying. I'm now into arrogance. Now I'm not listening to my advisors. I'm not listening to the market. Hey, people just don't know what they want. You know what I mean? They just don't know what they want. I'm going to educate them. And that's when you have people just self-destruct, which is, uh, always

• 2:48:53Jocko Willink?

  crazy to see and unfortunate. All right. Time to roll into.

• 2:48:59Jocko Willink?

  The leadership attributes. Leadership is not a position, it's a behavior and you don't get to decide if you're doing it well. I really like that. You don't get to decide if you're a good leader or not. Leaders are identified and defined by those whom they lead. You can't declare yourself to be a leader. That's like announcing that you're funny. You might think you, you might think so, but if you can't make anyone laugh, you're not funny. Whether you're actually a leader, not just a person in charge, is entirely up to other people. Great leaders were told again and again are trustworthy. They listen and they care. They're selfless, authentic and accountable. Some of those answers describe skills. Listening for one is greatly unappreciated skill, but most of them are attributes. There are five

• 2:49:42Jocko Willink?

  that are key to leadership. Empathy, selflessness, authenticity, decisiveness and accountability. Certain skills like time management, delegation and listening will enhance those leadership attributes, but they are not critical. In fact, mastery of any particular skill is not required. So here we get into these leadership attributes. The first one, empathy. The ability, whether deliberate or not, to join the emotional state of another person to feel what someone else's, what someone else feels. Definitely important.

• 2:50:15Speaker 01

  I think it is and overlooked quite a bit. I mean, you know, I always define team guys, especially team, team guy leaders, but I think team guy holistically, holistically as, as the best guys having kind of an empathy dimmer switch. So we know when to dial it up and when to dial it down. And this just stems from this idea that we were out, out there doing combat and in one second you're, you're killing a terrorist and the next second you're caring for, you know, mother and kids, right? And so it's a, it's a dial, but, but if we don't as leaders, take, take the time to feel what other people feel, then they will not feel cared for. And if someone doesn't feel cared for, they don't look at you as a leader. What's interesting about these attributes is that, you know, when I got out of the Navy,

• 2:50:59Speaker 01

  I, so a good friend of mine, Simon Sinek, author, he linked me up with a great leadership organization called the Chapman, the Chapman Leadership Institute. So I went around teaching leadership and kind of their style and things like that. We'd go around the country, around the globe and we'd get in front of these audiences and we'd say, just ask a question, what do great leaders do? And we'd have a flip chart next to us and we'd just have people yell out things and we'd just make a list of about 25, 30 things. No matter where we went, the list was always the same stuff. Always, it doesn't matter what country, what state, what generation, it was always the same stuff. And always, within the top 10, were those five, were those five things. Selflessness, accountability, empathy. Empathy, a lot of times, was number one, you know, or number two.

• 2:51:40Speaker 01

  So, um, so it matters to, to take that time. And it does take time, it does take effort, but when you expend time and effort, that's also a display of caring, you know? A good friend of mine used to say, "Time is the currency of leadership." Because everybody has the same, and, and when it's spent, you can't, you can't get it back. Uh, and so when you, when you spend time to help another, uh, they will feel cared for, so.

• 2:52:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and then even the pragmatic perspective of understanding what other people's perspectives are, and is so important. Like, if we're gonna plan a mission, and you work for me, and I see some kind of resistance, like you don't want to do it, or you've got some, some qualms about doing it. Like, for me to actually say, "Wait a second, what does he see that I don't see? What does he know that I don't know?" Even from a pragmatic perspective, that's like tactical, you know, empathy about what are you actually seeing, is, is so important. And, and I always tell people, you know, I've got a, I talk about not making emotional decisions, you know? Don't make emotional decisions, obviously, and I always ask groups of people, you know, "Who here, who in here has made an emotional decision?" Everyone raises their hand.

• 2:52:49Jocko Willink?

  "Who here's made a good emotional decision?" Everyone's hands goes down. So, we don't want to make emotional decisions. At the same time, you have to put emotions into the calculus of the decision that you're making.

• 2:52:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:52:59Jocko Willink?

  So, if my team is mad, I need to think about what we're doing. If my team is upset about something, if they're overly aggressive mindset, I've gotta take those emotions into account when I'm making a decision about what we're gonna do. So, it's not totally void of emotions, but you've gotta understand what other people's emotions are, understand what their perspective is, and that's what, uh, that's what empathy is all about.

• 2:53:23Speaker 01

  Well, and one more quick note, and this is really important. Empathy does not require agreement, um, and, and we have to understand this. And our country could, could do, do right by understanding this. So, here's an example. We were in Iraq. And we saw an unfortunate event that that happens unfortunately too often. It was like a 12 or 13 year old kid attempted to fire a rocket propelled grenade at a convoy and and, you know, unfortunately got got killed doing so because they can't have that happen. And I remember a bunch of us team guys at the end of the day were around a fire like we always do out overseas. We were on the fire just chatting and this thing came up and we kind of said, well, let's let's walk this thing back for a second, you know, this kid 12, 13 years old,

• 2:54:05Speaker 01

  he probably has no father. His father's probably gone or dead. He's probably him just taking care of his mom and his sisters. No school, no loud music, no sports, no parties, no girls, nothing to get his testosterone out on. One day, the bad guys come and say, we will give you 100 DNR to go fire this rocket propelled grenade at this US convoy. Every single one of us Navy SEALs said, we would be that kid. If we had been in that environment, we would be that kid. Right? That is empathy, right? And that's empathy without agreement. We don't agree with what the kid's doing or what the kid did, but we can totally put ourselves in that person's shoes. And so, so the act of empathy does not require agreement. It really just requires effort.

• 2:54:47Jocko Willink?

  Well, that also reminds me of, you know, when I was in the leadership position in a SEAL platoon or a SEAL task unit, I would look at these guys, these young SEALs that are 20, 21, 22, 23 years old, and they would do some knucklehead stuff.

• 2:55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:55:04Jocko Willink?

  And I would always remember, yep, that was me. I was that kid. Talking about being that kid.

• 2:55:10Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:55:11Jocko Willink?

  I was that kid. So that just remembering where you came from and remembering where other peoples are, people are, and understanding where they're at. That's what that's what this, why this is so important. Such an important attribute for leaders to have, for sure.

• 2:55:27Jocko Willink?

  Selflessness, placing the needs and well being of others above one's own despite real or perceived risk. You know, I had this, I was a

• 2:55:40Jocko Willink?

  Podcast with Jordan Peterson and, and what I ended up saying was, I forget what led to the conversation, but I was trying to explain what made a good seal. And, you know, I explained the fact that, look, you can be a great shot, you can be a fast runner, you can be a great diver, you can have all the parachute skills. But if you are the type of person that doesn't put the team first, no one wants you in the platoon.

• 2:56:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:56:05Jocko Willink?

  Period. And that's exactly what you're talking about here.

• 2:56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's a difference, because another attribute is generosity. And we have that in our, in our kind of a full attribute list. But there's a difference between generosity and selflessness. And the, the difference is that risk factor, right? Generosity is, can be done without risk. And that's fine. It's great to be generous. Selflessness is at risk. There's, you're putting yourself at risk in some way. And when people see you doing that, they, they tend to say, this is someone I want to follow.

• 2:56:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's a whole theme that I've been talking about for the past couple of years, when it comes to building relationships with people. What does a relationship consist of? Well, if trust, you know, if I trust you, you trust me, we have a relationship. If I respect you and you respect me, we have a relationship. Contrarily, if you don't trust me, or I don't trust you, we don't have a relationship. If I don't respect you, you don't respect me, we don't have a relationship. If I, if you don't influence me at all, and, and, and you're not influenced by me at all, we don't have a relationship. I mean, if we have a relationship, we should influence each other. And the last one was listening, if I don't listen to you and you don't listen to me, we don't have a relationship. But the, the final one, which I just added the other day, and it's one of those ones that was so

• 2:57:15Jocko Willink?

  sitting in front of my face that it, I didn't say it. And that's, of course, care, which, you know, we've mentioned, which is, but the interesting thing, and this kind of reflects on what we're talking about, for every one of these, if I want you, you to listen to me, how do I make that happen? I listen to you.

• 2:57:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:57:34Jocko Willink?

  I want you to treat me with respect, I treat you with respect. I want to be, I want you to be influenced by me, I better allow myself to have an open mind and be influenced by you. And the caring, of course, if I take care of you. In most cases, you're going to take care of me. Look, if you're a narcissistic bastard or whatever, there's always going to be people that, you know, I trust you and you screw me over. I listen to you and you, there's a small amount of people out there in the world that are just, oh, their egos and they're, they're just dented, dented souls, right? They're, they're terrible people, unfortunately. But for the most part, you take care of other people that take care of you. You, you show that selflessness and sacrifice and they'll be willing to do the same thing for you.

• 2:58:18Speaker 01

  And this, by the way, is the only time you can use leadership as the noun. Leaders go first. They go first in behavior, right? You model the behavior you want to see more of, and then you reward the behavior you want to see more of. If you want more empathy in the, in the people you are, that are in your span of care, you model empathy and then you reward empathy. And that's the problem. If you don't understand that, you're not going to, because people will automatically, you know, they'll, they'll do what you, where the rewards, you know, flow and they'll, they'll do what the boss does, right? If they, if they, if they feel good about it. So that's the only time you go first as a leader.

• 2:58:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh, next one here, decisiveness, the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively. You say decisiveness is the ability to make clear, well-informed and timely decisions. The last criterion, timeliness, is what separates the person with a high level decisiveness from a person who merely makes solid decisions. In any dynamic environment, taking too long to make even a good decision is ineffective because the environment changes so quickly.

• 2:59:21Jocko Willink?

  So, this is one that I've, I wrote about this one in Leadership Strategy and Tactics. And I, I talk about the fact that I was decisive in the SEAL teams, but I always cheated. And the way that I cheated was I would make very small decisions very quickly. I wouldn't try and figure out everything that was going on that in the next four hours of a, of a scenario, I would figure out, okay, what's going on right now that I can see and I can get, we can make a move and I'm going to do that pretty quickly. And then I'm gonna pay attention to the feedback, run that ooda loop, pay attention to the feedback, and make another very quick decision. And that's a very, I call it the iterative decision-making process.

• 3:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Lots of little decisions quickly.

• 3:00:04Speaker 01

  That's your compartmentalization loop going on, too. I mean, it's really effective. And one thing I do want to highlight here, and I didn't say this earlier, a great way to determine whether something's a skill or an attribute is to ask a simple question. And that question is, can I teach it, or can it be taught? If the answer is yes, it's probably a skill. If the answer is no, it's probably an attribute. So, so if someone could come up to us and say, hey, I want to learn how to shoot a pistol and hit a bullseye, well, we could take out someone up to the range and teach them how to do that in two hours, right? Someone else could say, I want to learn how to be more patient. We can't teach you how to be more patient. And so to develop an attribute you're low on requires a, it requires three things, a knowledge that you need to develop it, a motivation to develop it, and then a deliberate, a deliberate effort to step into environments that test and tease

• 3:00:48Speaker 01

  and develop that attribute. So if you want to develop your patience, for example, go find environments that test and tease your patience, whatever that looks like for you. It could be, I'm gonna deliberately go drive in traffic, I'm gonna pick the longest line of the grocery store stand-in. I always say have kids, that'll develop your patience, right? But the reason why I bring that up is because I want to separate making decisions with decisiveness. Making decisions is a skill. You can actually teach someone to make better decisions and how they gather information. It's a skill that can be taught. Decisiveness adds a speed and efficiency factor to it. And some people are just higher on the decisive attribute than others. But, but no, it's rare. I don't like to be definitive, but it's rare that leaders are looked at as leaders if they are indecisive. There are some people I've

• 3:01:32Speaker 01

  served with and served under who were really great decision-makers, but it was a long process. To get them there was a painful process. You're like, oh, my gosh. I mean, and, and again, it's just didn't feel like leadership.

• 3:01:44Jocko Willink?

  You know what was wild, that you and I both got to experience being pre-war and then living in the war, the 96-hour planning cycle? And that was, you know, what we

• 3:01:57Jocko Willink?

  I wouldn't say it kinda entered into the scene in the mid 90s. It became a thing where like this is and we probably eventually caught that, you know, it got passed down through the army and eventually made it into the SEAL teams and eventually got into a freaking lowly SEAL platoon where I was and it was like, yep, it's a 96 hour planning cycle. And man, I remember my boss when I was at SEAL Team 7, he's like, how much time do you guys need to launch on a mission? And you know, he's like expecting, I was like 15 minutes. He was like, what are you talking about? I was like, yeah, 15 minutes. And I had a great relationship with my boss at SEAL Team 7. I was like, yeah, 15 minutes, we'll roll. He's like, how, how can that be? I was like, tell me where the target is, tell me the friendly, uh, unit that's in the

• 3:02:41Jocko Willink?

  area and what frequency they're on and we roll. And we, we can make this happen. Um, big difference for the 96 hour.

• 3:02:48Speaker 01

  I tell you, when I, when I got to Iraq the first time we started doing ops, I was so happy that that, cause remember how many briefs? It was like, you had to do like seven different briefs and it was all like painstaking. And we get to Iraq and it's like, hey, con op, go, con op, go. And even the con ops, in fact, in fact, that was actually a, um, a real challenge in combating complacency. The, the speed with which we could move really showed me and it made me really think about, okay, we've got to make sure that we're actually thinking through things versus just snapping on what we usually do. Um, but all that said, you know, I just, I didn't like the 96 hour planning cycle.

• 3:03:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, for, for that, we know the, the way to combat that, a good little protocol to, to combat the, hey, we got into a groove and getting complacent is just, uh, as often as I could, I would have my subordinates come up with a plan. Like, oh, you guys, hey, here's the mission, come up with a plan. And that way I'm detached, I'm looking at it from a distance. If they start throwing it up there too quick or you're just gonna see the holes in it. That's powerful. The other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about teaching skills versus learning or developing attributes. An interesting, uh, metaphor that I use in jujitsu or when I'm teaching a move in jujitsu.

• 3:04:03Jocko Willink?

  Let's say there's 10 things that you have to do right to make a move actually work in jujitsu. There's 10 things that you have to do.

• 3:04:13Jocko Willink?

  I can only teach you like five of them. Maybe Dean Lister can teach you six. Maybe Echo can teach you four. Doesn't have quite have it. But there's gonna be things that you have got to put yourself in that situation and you've got to experience yourself in order to get better at them. So I think that when you were talking about putting yourself into these situations. Cause look, I know for a fact and I know you do too. I would see guys over time improve in all these attributes. Sometimes they would, I should say, not always. But sometimes you get someone that is, you know, they're, they're, they're just not very decisive. They're just not. But then you'd see, you put them in that position, you talk to them about it, you can tell them a couple of things like, hey, you need to, hey,

• 3:04:56Jocko Willink?

  figure out what three things you could do and pick one to one's the best one. Like even that little help, it's a move that you can teach them. That they can kind of start, that can become part of their personalities. And, and so you can teach some of it, but ultimately you've got to develop it over time. Is that, is that line up with what you're saying?

• 3:05:14Speaker 01

  Totally lines up and, and it actually brings up a good point. And that is when we, I kind of often relate or relate us as, as like automobiles, humans are like automobiles. We're all different types, right? Some of us are Jeeps, some of us are SUVs, some of us Ferraris. And there's no judgment there because the Jeep can do things that Ferrari can't do and the Ferrari can do things that Jeep can't do. But it behooves us to lift our hood and figure out what kind of engine we're running with. And there's no, again, there's no judgment on that. It also means that we don't necessarily have to be high on every attribute. In other words, I, I use stand up comedy, right? The stand up comic who's too high on empathy, not gonna be a very good stand up comic, right? So, so being too high may be detrimental to what you want to do in your specific niche. But bottom line is when you start looking at developing these things, if you find that you just can't develop something, that means you adapt and you adjust.

• 3:05:59Speaker 01

  I mean, and they can start playing off of each other. So I think I remember, in fact, I think I remember hearing one of your examples on one of, one of the podcasts about talking about a guy who was not, uh, I think he wasn't very loud.

• 3:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Wasn't loud, yep.

• 3:06:10Speaker 01

  Wasn't loud, right? Um, and so, and, and you said, hey, you encourage this guy, you gotta be louder. And he just, just wasn't getting it. So basically he pulls the loudest guy over and says, hey, tell the guys to do this, right? That's adaptability. He's using his adaptability to buttress his low. Whatever loudness attribute, you know, whatever. And so you can, some of these, so, so for example, low adaptability can be buttressed by high open mindedness, right? And you can actually, that they can even out your performance that way. That's why understanding these levels in yourself and your team is really important.

• 3:06:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:06:46Jocko Willink?

  That guy was, that guy was a freaking smart guy and did a good job. I was like, yep, he just solved that problem. And that's why building complimentary teams, when you know what your attributes are, and you're like, look, I'm not the guy you want doing paperwork, right? I always find the guy in my platoons or my jobs that are good at paperwork. I'm finding that guy.

• 3:07:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:05Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna take care of him. He's gonna be my best friend, because I'm not doing paperwork.

• 3:07:08Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Next one, accountability, taking responsibility for and ownership of your decisions, actions, and the consequences thereof.

• 3:07:20Speaker 01

  Extreme ownership.

• 3:07:22Jocko Willink?

  I agree with this very much.

• 3:07:24Speaker 01

  And, and by the way, a buttress to decisiveness, right? You can't be effectively decisive if you haven't buttressed it with accountability, because you have to look at those decisions and say, okay, was that the right decision? What are we doing? Did we, we need to make a different decision? So incredibly important.

• 3:07:39Jocko Willink?

  You say in here in complex environments, taking, taking action is paramount, even if the action is making a decision to do nothing. It's important to understand what you're doing and why. Just as important is recognizing that any consequence of that action, any consequences of that action are your responsibility. You have to fully own those decisions. Being accountable and owning our decisions and actions serves several purposes. One, it requires that we understand why we're doing whatever action we've chosen, which in turn helps us to be fully committed to it.

• 3:08:15Jocko Willink?

  Which I, which. Lately, I've been talking about this thing. What am I calling it? Uh, the explanation effort meter, the E E M, the explanation effort meter. Which is, if it is, if it is so hard for me to explain to you why this makes sense, I should probably really consider if it actually makes sense or not.

• 3:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:08:36Jocko Willink?

  It shouldn't be that hard. Look, I'm fairly articulate. I've got a good grip on what I'm trying to explain, and if I can't get through to you, there's probably something wrong with my idea. Now, look, there's a chance that you just have a big ego and you're, you're, you know, everyone loves their own idea the best. But if it's really that hard, if my idea is that much superior to yours, I should be able to explain that and articulate it, and you should probably end up nodding your head and going, yeah, you know what? You're right. And if I'm expending all this effort trying to explain something, and it still isn't getting landing with you, and you're still not nodding your head, well, then why?

• 3:09:14Jocko Willink?

  How much effort is it worth?

• 3:09:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:09:16Jocko Willink?

  Because let's face it, you know, I, I've, I've explained this to many people, you and me arguing about how to hit a target, when neither one of us actually knows where the enemy's going to be, you know, what they're, how they're going to be set up, what we don't, we, we've got ideas. But they're going to get a vote. And so you and I disagreeing and being combative and finally I said, you know what? Shut up. I'm in charge. You do it my way. And then we go on a target where there's a, we have no idea what's actually going to happen. And you see this in, in the business world too.

• 3:09:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:09:44Jocko Willink?

  People want to make an investment in this thing over here. This other person doesn't want to make that investment. Well, the reality is no one really knows what's going to happen. And if I can't convince you, you know, if that explanation effort meter is just redlined, just all I'm saying is, just consider, just consider maybe it might not be worth the squeeze.

• 3:10:04Speaker 01

  Well, and, and the, the hack to that, the hack to that is if you encourage or you allow someone to make a decision to do something, it, it automatically makes them accountable, right? They, they own that in a way, you know, the other thing I tell leaders all the time, because this is something that sometimes they don't quite get is that leaders, leaders can always delegate responsibility, but never accountability. And that's really important because I've had leaders who delegate both. And it's not good. I mean, it's not good. They, they, something goes wrong and, and they, they back away, they push away. It's like, no, no, that's. We're always accountable. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, because some people are like, well, no, the people you're giving responsibility, they're accountable too. It's like, yeah, sure. Yeah. But you are still accountable. And by you owning it, it just, it's the behavior you're modeling

• 3:10:48Speaker 01

  that they need to see more of. They will also own it in their own way. But, but we can delegate responsibility. We cannot delegate accountability.

• 3:10:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Another, another problem people run into and they want, you know, if I want Rich to take ownership, so what do I do? I say, okay, Rich, here's the mission. Here's the vehicles I want you to take. Here's the people I want you to take with you. Here's the weapons I want you to use. Here's the route I want you to take to the target. They go through the whole thing and say, now, now that's the plan. Take ownership of that plan and go execute. It's like, this is not happening.

• 3:11:15Speaker 01

  One of my favorite Metallica songs. So one of my favorite albums is "Endjustice for All." One of my favorite songs is "Eye of the Beholder." And the line in that is, "You can do it your own way if you do it how I say."

• 3:11:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly. And that's like, yeah, take ownership of this.

• 3:11:28Speaker 01

  It's a song about oppression, by the way. It's awesome.

• 3:11:32Jocko Willink?

  And it's so easy to say, hey, man, hey, Rich, here's the mission. How do you want to do it? It's so much easier to say that. I don't have to get you to buy anything into anything. And yes, is there a chance that you present to me a plan that's completely insane and makes no sense? Sure. But if we've been working together and I've been showing you how we do this, and I've been letting you run little parts of the operations prior to this, you're gonna know what to do.

• 3:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11:54Jocko Willink?

  And you're gonna give me a decent plan that we're gonna be able to run with. So, give ownership. You go on to say here, "Purpose provides clarity. It's nearly impossible to truly own an action if you aren't clear why you're taking it." If you fully own your decisions, you will better be able to explain the reasons behind them. Being accountable allows us to look objectively and critically at the results of a decision, which helps us assess the results more accurately and make the next decision more effectively. The mission, if the mission plan ends up not working as well as possible, the accountable officer and men will studiously figure out what could have been done better, rather than dismissing any flaws as the boss made us do it that way. Better decisions will be made next time and everyone will improve a far better outcome

• 3:12:39Jocko Willink?

  than repeating a cycle of grudgingly doing what the powers that be demand. Finally, taking responsibility for a decision and its results immediately engages the learnability attribute. Remember, we human beings are wired to make sense of our environment. While much of that happens automatically and unconsciously, part of that process is very deliberate.

• 3:13:04Jocko Willink?

  So, and this is where the humility comes into mind too. Cause if you're not humble enough to be like, yeah, this was my decision and I made it and it didn't work. And here's what we gotta do to fix it.

• 3:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the last thing I'll say on accountability, cause I don't think I mentioned it in the, in the book is that, especially for leaders, accountability allows control. It allows you to take, when you, when you say, I own this, and, and sometimes I've done this quite deliberately, even though I know I had nothing to do it, I just take, I say, I own this, this is my fault, right? I take the steering wheel and as soon as you place blame, you're, you're giving the steering wheel to someone else. And so, uh, so accountability allows for taking control of an environment and starting to steer it the way you want to steer it.

• 3:13:44Jocko Willink?

  Beautiful life rule.

• 3:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:46Jocko Willink?

  A little, little extreme ownership goes a long way. Uh, team ability attributes, is team ability a real word?

• 3:13:52Speaker 01

  Team ability is a, a word I, I took from NSW.

• 3:13:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Although I think we missed authenticity, didn't we?

• 3:13:58Jocko Willink?

  Did we miss something?

• 3:13:59Speaker 01

  I think we missed authenticity.

• 3:14:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Let's talk authenticity.

• 3:14:01Speaker 01

  The only reason why I need to say it, I need to mention is because, uh, the guy I talk about in that chapter, Brian McCabe, he's a deeply authentic guy and he loves and has been to several of your musters.

• 3:14:14Jocko Willink?

  I'm trying to think of how I missed this.

• 3:14:16Speaker 01

  I told him I'd, I'd, uh, I'd give him a shout out.

• 3:14:18Jocko Willink?

  This is the one that, um, you, uh, there it is. There it is. Sorry. I missed it. Um, authenticity, the degree to which a person's actions are consistent with his beliefs, values, desires, despite external pressures. Is this who you gave the coin to?

• 3:14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:14:31Jocko Willink?

  And he held on to it for like, yeah, that's a great story. Um, again, get the book, read the story, very cool story about the history of giving coins and, uh, what they mean and all that. And this particular case is a pretty cool story.

• 3:14:48Jocko Willink?

  Among all the leadership attributes, authenticity is the most important for building trust. Authenticity by definition can't be faked. It can't be copied. There's no template, no checklist of external behaviors or attitudes that are the model of authenticity. Being firm and taciturn doesn't make one any more or less of a leader than being easygoing and funny. What matters more is that, is that person is authentically firm or authentically easygoing.

• 3:15:15Jocko Willink?

  The simplest measure of authenticity is consistency. Very, you know, so, so important, right? And it's really hard to fake this stuff. When guys aren't authentic, it's like really easy to see.

• 3:15:30Speaker 01

  And how, I mean, you've seen these, some of these folks, you know, and I will, I'll just say as an example, because I've seen officers who are, you know, sticky sweet to the, the senior leader who comes and visits. They're just like, like apple pie and then turn around, they're tyrants to the people underneath them. It doesn't build trust.

• 3:15:49Jocko Willink?

  Freaking horrible.

• 3:15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:15:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, um, there's a, you know, that level of vulnerability there, you know, like, hey, you're not going to know everything, that's okay. And yeah, I always, I always, um, to your point, like, this one thing that's interesting about the podcast is like, dude, you're on here for long enough, I don't know how many hours we have of doing this, but it's a long time. You, you get the character, play the character, after a while, man, it's just.

• 3:16:18Speaker 01

  The real you's gonna come out.

• 3:16:20Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 3:16:20Speaker 01

  So here's a, interesting, so I was putting, when I was doing this attributes work, I was talking to a buddy of mine, he worked for one of the agencies and one of his primary jobs was to help people develop alternate personalities, undercover personalities. And I told him about the work I was doing, he's like, Rich, this is really interesting because when we help someone develop an alternate personality, we always make it consistent with who they really are. Because what we found is that even the best actors on the planet can't pretend to be someone else for more than 30 days. You know, most of us can't pretend for more than a few days, right? We will always revert back. And what I tell people in, in, in business is that anybody can pretend to be anyone you want for an interview process. Right? Um, but the, the idea is these attributes are who we really are, right? And if we lean on these, then our authentic self comes out.

• 3:17:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I love telling people, intent has a smell. And so when you're, when you've got some weird alternative agenda in the back, everyone can smell it. And you don't think they can smell it. It's a weird thing. You can throw a little deodorant on it. You try and keep a little distance, but everyone goes, you ever heard of the person you're like, something just, they actually say it. You say something doesn't smell right.

• 3:17:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:17:23Jocko Willink?

  Right? Something doesn't smell right. That's when you sense that lack of authenticity. And man, the boys can see through that shit.

• 3:17:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:17:32Jocko Willink?

  They look at it like, oh, no, no, we're not buying into this. So, yeah, sorry, I missed that one. Glad you were on it. And so what's the guy that came to the muster?

• 3:17:43Speaker 01

  Brian McCabe.

• 3:17:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, a couple of times.

• 3:17:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, right on.

• 3:17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 3:17:47Jocko Willink?

  We'll have to get him to another one.

• 3:17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I'll, I'll tell him to let me know and I'll let you know if he's coming, so.

• 3:17:54Jocko Willink?

  Those are powerful events. Did he have a good time?

• 3:17:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. He loved it. He's been, I think he's been to two or three.

• 3:17:59Jocko Willink?

  Right on. We'll get him to another one. We can make that happen. We have the power.

• 3:18:04Jocko Willink?

  So now we get into team ability.

• 3:18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, I think I took that from the teams. I remember that being one of the attributes for, for SEAL candidates.

• 3:18:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:13Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:18:15Jocko Willink?

  Man, that's important.

• 3:18:16Speaker 01

  It is.

• 3:18:17Jocko Willink?

  And it's weird that some people don't get that.

• 3:18:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:18:20Jocko Willink?

  Like you're literally joining the SEAL teams.

• 3:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:23Jocko Willink?

  You may think it might be an important thing to be a good teammate, be a good team player. And this kind of falls back on what you said about, yeah, you can't say, I'm a good leader.

• 3:18:33Speaker 01

  100%.

• 3:18:34Jocko Willink?

  The same thing here. You can't say, hey, I'm a good teammate. Team ability is about how well people work and play together, how deeply they connect and how effectively they collaborate. Much like being a leader, you don't get to decide whether you're a good teammate. Others will instinctively make that assessment for you and they will do so based upon how well you perform and interact with them.

• 3:19:00Jocko Willink?

  Number one of these integrity, the ability to act in accordance with relevant moral values and social and cultural norms. You put it, you get a good, um, you throw a good test at people on this one. This is the one about the person that cheated on the test. Is this that one?

• 3:19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:19:17Jocko Willink?

  Tell us about that little dilemma.

• 3:19:19Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, the, I will misquote the dilemma, but I, what I will say is we have to remember integrity is subjective. Um, in other words, in accordance with their group, um, doing the right thing for a Cub Scout troop is going to look different than doing the right thing for an ISIS troop. And I would submit, and this makes people uncomfortable when I say it, so I will say it, right? If you have a Cub Scout who steals five dollars from his fellow scout, and you have an ISIS person who runs into a building with a suicide vest, who's being, who's behaving with more integrity in that situation? The ISIS person in accordance with their group. And so, so the reason why this is important is because if leaders have not defined what do the right thing looks like, the, the group's going to sort it out. And we found this in the teams. I mean, the teams, sometimes those, those less well-run groups,

• 3:20:04Speaker 01

  um, uh, loyalty will supplant integrity. And that's not right either. And so, and so, uh, leaders need to be diligent about defining what do the right thing looks like for a group, for an organization behaving those ways, right? Cause if you're not going to behave it, you're, you're, you're sunk as well. Uh, and then that, that, that will define the integrity for the group.

• 3:20:23Jocko Willink?

  The example that you put in here is like a kid is cheating on a test, basically. And you see him cheating in a test. And, and then you ask like, hey, are you the person that's going to tell on them?

• 3:20:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:20:34Jocko Willink?

  Or not tell on them?

• 3:20:35Speaker 01

  I think I said you've studied your, your ass off of this thing, and you see this kid cheating. Yeah. And on his cellphone. Yeah.

• 3:20:41Jocko Willink?

  And so then eventually you give the context of like, hey, so, so the kid cheated, you studied hard, he's going to get an A. You're, you know, he's going to pass, but you had to work for it. And then the teacher asks you like, hey, I think that kid was cheating. Was he? And you put, you asked the question, but then when you put context around it, it's like, oh, his mom is sick with cancer. He's got a, this is the one test he's got to pass. He's already been offered a job. As long as he passes this test, he's going to be able to get his mom on health insurance. And he hasn't had time to study because he's been taken care of. It's like, all of a sudden they're like, oh, okay.

• 3:21:10Speaker 01

  That was an asshole for telling.

• 3:21:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:12Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 3:21:13Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, I always try and break it down, just like, do what you say, say what you do. You know, like if I tell you I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it.

• 3:21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:21:22Jocko Willink?

  You know, um. Integrity. Next one conscientiousness, the ability and inner drive to work hard, be diligent, and be reliable. You give a story about here about, you know, a guy you again, get the book because you've got cool stories in here.

• 3:21:38Speaker 01

  Lots of stories. It's a dense book, so.

• 3:21:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Conscientiousness matters in the context of a team because it fosters trust. This isn't an esoteric concept, no trickery of brain chemistry. It's common sense and you understand it intuitively. Think of the people in your life, personal or professional, whom you trust. Odds are, most of them are dependable, reliable, and hardworking in one way or another.

• 3:22:04Speaker 01

  It's fairly straightforward then.

• 3:22:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's fairly straightforward. Like, and the interesting thing is, if you're one of those people, you get more work.

• 3:22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 3:22:13Jocko Willink?

  You always get more work.

• 3:22:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, totally. What was it? What was the, the, what's the saying in the teams here?

• 3:22:18Jocko Willink?

  Uh, no, no, no good deed goes unpunished because you're going to get more good deeds. If you're a reliable team guy, you're going to get more shit to do.

• 3:22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. But these team ability ones are fairly straightforward. I mean, they really are. They're, they're not rocket science. And the reason is because we all know what makes great teammates.

• 3:22:33Jocko Willink?

  I was about to say, yeah, we all have to interact with people that are cool and people that suck.

• 3:22:37Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. Yeah.

• 3:22:39Jocko Willink?

  Humility, the ability to be self-aware and transparent about one's strengths and weaknesses. Humility is often stigmatized, especially in a high-performance arenas. It can be seen as a weakness or a lack of confidence, a modest or low view of one's own importance. As one dictionary puts it, as an attribute, though, humility means being transparent about your weaknesses. That's not the same as false modesty or the occasional humble brag, but rather an honest assessment of one's abilities. That also means being vulnerable, admitting weakness. By definition, requires vulnerability, but it's critical in the context of team ability. One of the strengths of any high-performing team lies in understanding its weakness. Being open about your own weaknesses allows others to understand where they can help. Boom.

• 3:23:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:23:24Jocko Willink?

  Working with people that are arrogant gets old.

• 3:23:28Speaker 01

  Arrogance kills teams. It really does. And arrogance, much like narcissism, is like a vampire staring in the mirror. You can't see it in yourself. And so, so I always tell people, be aware of it in yourself because we, we're victim of it sometimes. And then if you are a leader and you see it in your, so actually. Arrogance was always a trigger for me. I mean, I just hated, I mean, every time I saw it, it'd just trigger. And I was, I was actually with a buddy of mine, his name is Josh Waitzkin. Do you know Josh Waitzkin? Yeah. Yeah. So Josh and I would have lunch in New York a ton of times when he was still living there. And, and we were talking about one time, we were talking about triggers, things that trigger us. And I said, I said, oh, it's arrogance for me. And he's like, that's interesting. He's like, when I see arrogance, I immediately think insecurity. And as soon as he said that, it clicked for me. And I was like, that's exactly it. And I

• 3:24:12Speaker 01

  recognize that I have to approach arrogance with empathy. You know, there's something about that person that's causing them to want to express the way they're expressing. And it changed my whole view of arrogance.

• 3:24:24Jocko Willink?

  That is so accurate. I just had a conversation with a client this morning, and they were talking about that. And I was like, well, this, you know, this is ego. And he's like, well, I think it's insecurity. I was like, yep, well, you're right. It's insecurity which then flares up as ego.

• 3:24:39Jocko Willink?

  Just like the dichotomy that I talk about here, you say, there's a sweet spot on the humility scale, and it's quite wide, but there is danger at either extreme, in either too much or too little. A lack of humility often resembles arrogance. While that's almost always a byproduct of fear and insecurity, arrogance on any team is detrimental. It breeds resentment, stifles communication, and as a result, is brutal in terms of results. Too much humility, though, risks teetering into meekness, which in turn can lead to inaction. Deference in the support of empowering others is necessary for optimal performance, but there are times when you need to step up and be the alpha. You will be the expert in the room, the one who's been empowered

• 3:25:23Jocko Willink?

  by the deference of others, at which point you will need to take charge and perform with confidence. Great leaders understand this balance. They will defer until they've squeezed every ounce of potential out of their team, but they will not hesitate to assume control when required. Moreover, an overabundance of humility can also mask an underlying lack of confidence. A lack of confidence, real or perceived, inevitably will begin to erode trust, which in turn will undermine any team. Your own level of humility is difficult to assess. Humility is a strange thing, Sir Edward Holt, a 19th century British politician, once said. The minute you think you've got it, you've lost it.

• 3:26:02Speaker 01

  I love that quote.

• 3:26:03Jocko Willink?

  That's a, that's a very good quote. I've got a section in Leadership Strategy and Tactics where I talk about leadership vacuum. And when do you step into the leadership vacuum? And, and I talk about giving it a little bit more time. And the reason you get, and this could be like, like literally two seconds. But if you jump in, when there's a leadership vacuum, as soon as it shows up, other people haven't seen it yet. And they're ready to resist it, or they already think they know what's going on. So I would always like, there's a little bit of confusion. Hear like some shouting, some yelling, like no one's really sure what to do. Give it a second. And then all of a sudden you hear the quiet. That means that people are recognizing it. And then if you say, give it that a second, say, everyone, you know,

• 3:26:45Jocko Willink?

  get to the ground floor right now. We're going to move out. Everyone's ready to be led at that moment. So that waiting, that's why I like that, that, uh, when you said defer until you've squeezed every out of potential, like you want them to try. And they can't make it happen. It's like, all right, here's what we're doing. That leadership vacuum, let it, let everyone feel the vacuum, step in and make a call. That's what you gotta do.

• 3:27:08Speaker 01

  Well, I used to tell my J O's, I used to call it the irony of leadership, right? And I used to tell my J O's, you're, if you're doing your job correctly, you're working yourself out of a job. You're creating a unit that can operate without you. And that takes humility. And, and a quick story about Hank and I, we were out in Iraq and we were talking about some of this stuff. And we said to ourselves, you know, if we're talking about growing all our leaders and if we don't, um, if we don't do anything about it, we're not walking the talk. And so we said, you know what we should do? We should have them, we should send them on an op without us. And so sure enough, we, we find an op and it looks pretty, pretty good, pretty easy, right? We're like, hey, tell the troop, hey, you guys are taking this one here. Hank and I are going to sit back at the, the jock. And, um, and sure enough, they go and one of the, one of the troop chiefs, uh, take, or one of the troop,

• 3:27:50Speaker 01

  one of the team leaders takes the GFC position, another takes the troop chief position, they go out. Of course it turns kinetic. And it's like, it's stuff's going down. And Hank and I are sitting in the jock and we're looking at this and we look at each other, it's like, man, if this goes bad, we're done. Like we are done, you know, but it's about, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's being humble enough to then have the courage to grow your leaders. I mean, if you don't, if you're not allowing them to do what they need to do and, and make decisions and, and, and, and have confidence in doing it without you. You're not creating a team, you know, and the collateral effect of that was that they got back and the team leader that had my job, the ground force commander, he takes his headphones off and throws them at me. He's like, I never effing want to do that again.

• 3:28:34Speaker 01

  Right. Because of course, GFC, you're like, you have like 5,000 things going on. So they have an appreciation for what you bring to the team as well. Right. So, but, but it takes humility, takes courage and humility.

• 3:28:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was something I learned from my, when I was in my second platoon, we had the best platoon commander ever. Best guy ever. And like, he took over, we had a platoon commander got fired and he took over and like the first training mission we did, he was like, I was, I was an E4 actually. And he was like, Jocko, you're running this mission. I was an E4. He's like, hey, you're the PL for this. And I was like, and he, me and another guy.

• 3:29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:29:10Jocko Willink?

  Another E4. He's like, you guys are running this. We were like, totally stoked, but man, we learned. And that's what I did from then on. So by the time I was on deployment, everyone had run missions. Our E4, our new guys had run ops as ground force commanders in training.

• 3:29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:29:24Jocko Willink?

  So when you get overseas, like the, the young lieutenants were definitely ready. That's what you gotta do, man.

• 3:29:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:29:30Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, well, there's two things that are going on, like, man, you just want to go out there anyways.

• 3:29:37Speaker 01

  It's true. It's true.

• 3:29:40Jocko Willink?

  Next one, humor, the ability to find the funny, even laugh when times are tough. Humor is a powerful attribute. The ability to laugh, find a sliver of funny amid the tragic and the trying can be calming, comforting, empowering and encouraging. We've all heard the joke that broke the tension, a one liner that smoothed the edge of fear, the wise crack that distracted us from nagging pain. I just had a vision in my mind. Imagine if they put like, imagine if they just were able to grab a compilation. You know, they have YouTube things that are like, best one liner for whatever. Imagine if they had like real team guy shit. When things were going sideways and people are cracking the best.

• 3:30:18Speaker 01

  It's what I miss the most. It's what I miss the most. I mean, the, the, the stuff that guys would say. So, so a friend of mine, you probably know him, but anyway, he's. He was telling me, I was talking about this. He's like, you know, we were on our way back from an op one time and we were in the helicopter and the helicopter started going down, started like having a malfunction and crashing. We're sitting in this helicopter and one of the dudes looks at us and says, well, I guess we're not gonna have to clean our weapons tonight. And everybody bursts out laughing. It's like, that's what I miss. You know, it's that dark humor.

• 3:30:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, freaking classic.

• 3:30:51Jocko Willink?

  Next section is about dynamic subordination, which we already talked about. Just of the fact that, as you put it here, leadership shifts wherever and to whomever the leader needs to be at any given moment. Those teams understand that information challenges and obstacles can come from any angle at any time. And they're effective, meaning the teams are effective because the teammate closest to the problem can step up and lead. While the rest of the group defers to that temporary leader. This is freaking decentralized command. Everyone on the team's gotta be a leader. That's, that's how we absolutely want things to go down.

• 3:31:28Jocko Willink?

  Got a little section here called the others. Everyone has all of the attributes. If any of the 22 I've described seem unfamiliar, that you can't imagine that they're wired into you. Trust me, they are. Remember, attributes aren't exotic quirks bestowed only upon elite performers. They're a basic part of being a human being and their element. But you might have some that are like just as you use a dimmer switch, you might have some that are pretty dim.

• 3:31:52Speaker 01

  Pretty, pretty low.

• 3:31:53Jocko Willink?

  Might need to light a fire on some of these things.

• 3:31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:31:57Jocko Willink?

  Uh, there's three more attributes that you will say you want to discuss. And you say, these three are important, but they're also outliers. None of them fits into the dimmer switch model because each of them has an opposite that can't be ignored. Most of the attributes can be measured on a straight line that begins at zero. If you have low accountability or empathy or discipline, whatever, the dimmer switch will be at the bottom. Your level of accountability can't go lower than that. Negative accountability isn't a thing. But what if you have zero patience? What if you have less than zero patience, then you're impatient. So you get into these, some of these patience and impatience.

• 3:32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idea, the idea was that these polarities can both imply success. So in other words, the, there are highly successful people who were patient. There are highly successful people who are impatient and, and same with the other ones. And, and the idea is on a team, this is when, this is when polarities matter, right? The best teams have representation on either side, right? And I, my wife and I are a great example. I am typically a patient person. My wife is typically impatient, right? That's worked beautifully in our 23 years of marriage, right? Cause when patience has been required, I step up. When impatience is required, she steps up. And so, so whether it's patience or impatience, whether it's competitiveness or non competitiveness, which really was interesting because I've never been a competitive person, you know?

• 3:33:15Speaker 01

  Even when I was captain of the lacrosse team, whether we won or lost, didn't bother me very much. In fact, I used to fake being upset because I was like, uh, it would probably look bad if I'm not, if I'm not like swearing or something. Uh, I thought that would be a detriment to me when I went to SEAL training. Cause like, oh shoot, I'm not competitive. But what I recognized is that the competitive mind tends to think in a finite game, right? It tends to place rules and boundaries in an, in an environment because you can't win or lose unless you have rules that define win or losing. The non competitive mind, there are no rules, right? We both know that combat, military operations, in fact, any type of teaming requires both polarities. Sometimes it requires running up the line and winning, right? Sometimes it requires thinking outside the box. And so those are two. And then the final two, which I thought were interesting, I was really, to be quite honest,

• 3:33:59Speaker 01

  trying to figure out what it was about SEALs that distinguished us. And I was kind of landing on this vanity piece. I was like, is it vanity, right? And I was almost going to use vanity, but the problem with vanity is vanity typically centers around appearance, you know? And while we know there are some guys who really focus on their appearance, it wasn't, it wasn't the thing. And so that's when I kind of thought about this fear of rejection thing. And what I recognized is this is it here. This is it because every single one of us who made it through BUDs, we have somewhat of an elevated sense of fear of rejection. We don't want to look bad for our teammates. We just don't. And it pushes us to do things. It pushes me to jump out of an airplane 22,000 feet, which I never otherwise would have done, right? So that can actually power you in certain good ways. Obviously, too much is bad, too little is

• 3:34:42Speaker 01

  bad. But then the opposite, right? The assoucius, I don't care what anybody thinks. We've seen those people, right? These are iconoclasts. They start their own movements. They're the people who's like, I don't care what anybody thinks, I'm doing this. And typically, people start to swarm around them. So my wife and I are like this. Like, I have an elevated sense of fear of rejection. She doesn't care what people think. And we blend together beautifully, right? So, so these polarities should be looked at as, hey, if you can have each represented, high on either one is not a bad thing. Have each represented, and you'll have a really balanced team.

• 3:35:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'm just paying attention to where you're at. You know, a lot of, a lot of, what's the, when someone's an alcoholic, and the first thing is like saying, I'm an alcoholic. So, so the first thing here is saying like, oh, I have a high fear of rejection. I need to pay attention to that. I'm overind... You can overindex on that. You can overindex on patients. You can overindex on inpatients. So, having that, um, balance.

• 3:35:34Speaker 01

  Balance.

• 3:35:35Jocko Willink?

  I guess we'd say. Now, you go into, you know, kind of getting close to the end here of the book. You've got decoding your palate. And what you say is you've got a, you've got a online thing at theattributes.com, and you've got an assessment tool.

• 3:35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:35:49Jocko Willink?

  I actually haven't taken it yet. But talk us through a little bit through this tool, and then how it works. Go and fill this thing out.

• 3:35:59Speaker 01

  So, the tool, the tool is for the first three categories, grit, mental beauty drive. And the reason why it's the first three is because those can be self-assessed. We have just finished a leadership and team ability attributes tool. That is going to be a three, that is the 360. Because again, you can't, you can't just assess yourself on how humble you are, right? Or how, how selfless you are. So that's a 360.

• 3:36:19Jocko Willink?

  I'm the most humblest.

• 3:36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm the most humblest. The one on the website now is, is free for those three, and you can get a score. And, and the score really should be looked at as a, as a starting point, okay? Because whatever that score is, then the idea is to interrogate your own performance and say, okay, if I'm coming up low on adaptability, let me think about some environments where my adaptability was tested. The environment was changing around me. How did I do? Right? Okay, it was difficult. It was challenging. Okay, that makes sense to me. And so the assessment tools can allow you some, some sense on where you might stand, and where your dimmer switches might lie. And then it really takes some self-reflection to, to really get that dialed in.

• 3:36:57Jocko Willink?

  And then you've got this acronym to start to make adjustments to these things. You've got this acronym START, which is slow down, think, act, recognize results, and try new environments. These, that's the, am I correct in saying that's the methodology to actually start to evolve and improve your attributes?

• 3:37:16Speaker 01

  Yes, because, well, I guess the, the, the part that comes before that acronym is place yourself in the environment where the attribute is being tested. And then you're going to feel stress and challenge come on. So as you feel that stress and challenge, then you, then you slow down, you think, you know, you, you, you, you assess your performance, you can use that acronym to kind of cycle. Okay, you think, again, this is what we just talked about, you know, engage your conscious mind, engage your frontal lobe to start examining your performance in the moment, and you'll start to understand and, and, and develop it.

• 3:37:44Jocko Willink?

  Lots of good tools. And I'm just gonna fast forward, just kind of close out the book. You, you say this, and again, this isn't the closing of the book, I'll leave that for the people that get the book, but for me to close it out, it says, "We are a species that in only 10,000 years evolved from cave dwellers to space explorers. Humans have the unique and brilliant gift of being able to imagine something and bring it into existence. We are only able to do this because of our grit, our mental acuity, our drive, and leadership, and teamwork. Understanding your attributes is one of the keys to unlocking your potential."

• 3:38:25Jocko Willink?

  So, that's, again, that's my rap to the book. It's not, it's not rap of the book, but you know, even there, you gotta go back, that's like going back 2,500 years to Sun Tzu, in saying that we have to know ourselves. And what you're saying in there is like, we have to know ourselves, and in this case, know ourselves through our attributes.

• 3:38:50Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 3:38:53Jocko Willink?

  So, um, that's the book. So you're working on another book right now?

• 3:38:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the next one's called Masters of Uncertainty, which is really what I always define SEALs as. An individual and teams that could drop into complex environments and figure it out. And, um, and I'm going to, I'll lay it out in about six steps. Step one is understand your attributes. Step two involves your identities, the identities we, we, we define ourselves. Step three is our beliefs and that's kind of understanding yourself because we all, all of us who do this habitually know those three things about us. And then the, uh, the other three steps are in fact, the tools, actually a lot of the stuff that Huberman and I have worked on, the tools that allow someone to actually engage their own physiology to start stepping through that. And again, it's about, um, it's about a process, right? We can't predict, uncertainty by definition cannot be predicted. And that's not what we do, right?

• 3:39:42Speaker 01

  They say, oh, you SEALs, you're, you're experts there. No, no, we're experts at the process, right? We understand when, when things go into chaos, we slow down. We start working through the process and start figuring it out. And it's not always pretty, right? Sometimes it's decidedly ugly, um, but it's the process. So I'm going to see if I can get that kicked out here by the end of the year.

• 3:40:01Jocko Willink?

  How deep are you? How much have you written so far?

• 3:40:03Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm about a third in, but it's going to be a shorter. I'm going to, I'm going to take a, uh, this is a, this attributes is a very dense book. I'm very proud of it, but it is dense. Um, I'm going to do a much shorter version, so do a little bit quicker, so.

• 3:40:15Jocko Willink?

  So you're a third done.

• 3:40:18Jocko Willink?

  What is it? Tim Ferriss? Tim Ferriss, this is such a great quote from Tim Ferriss that you've written a book, so you know this is true. Uh, when you're done with your book, you're 50% there.

• 3:40:26Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 3:40:26Jocko Willink?

  Freaking nightmare.

• 3:40:28Speaker 01

  I know.

• 3:40:29Jocko Willink?

  Now, I'd say I'm getting pretty good at this point. Like when I'm, when I'm done, I'm feeling like I'm, when I'm done, when I'm done writing it, I'm like, I'm, I'm.

• 3:40:36Speaker 01

  Almost there.

• 3:40:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So people can find you, like you do consulting.

• 3:40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:40:43Jocko Willink?

  Um, you, you do speaking.

• 3:40:47Jocko Willink?

  All that's through the attributes.com.

• 3:40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a one stop shop.

• 3:40:50Jocko Willink?

  One stop shop.

• 3:40:51Speaker 01

  Check out all that stuff.

• 3:40:52Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and there you also have social media?

• 3:40:55Speaker 01

  Yep, Instagram.

• 3:40:57Jocko Willink?

  Got Instagram, you're rich underscore Devini.

• 3:40:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:41:00Jocko Willink?

  You're on Twitter?

• 3:41:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:41:02Jocko Willink?

  Do you engage on Twitter much?

• 3:41:03Speaker 01

  Not much. I, I, I need to do more, but as you know, we're, I mean, we, it's, it's somewhat antithetical to our normal behavior. But, uh, but yeah, Instagram, Instagram, mostly LinkedIn, um, and then Twitter occasionally too.

• 3:41:16Jocko Willink?

  And you have Facebook as well?

• 3:41:17Speaker 01

  Facebook as well, yeah. It's all on there and it could be all found on the website.

• 3:41:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So it's all there at the attributes.com and that's how people can find you, reach you, talk to you. Um, and that's, I don't know, that, does that get us up to speed?

• 3:41:31Speaker 01

  Totally, man. This is a, this is good.

• 3:41:34Jocko Willink?

  Good place to stop. Echo Charles.

• 3:41:35Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:41:37Jocko Willink?

  What do you got, man? Questions from Echo Charles?

• 3:41:40Speaker 02

  Uh, you have a, your twin brother identical to?

• 3:41:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. Echo has a twin brother as well. So you guys, you guys want me to leave?

• 3:41:47Speaker 01

  Talk about the identical twin.

• 3:41:49Speaker 02

  I kinda want you to leave then. Uh, is he involved in any of this, the, the stuff that you're doing?

• 3:41:55Speaker 01

  He's not. He's a, he flew for 20 years and now he flies for FedEx. Uh, so, uh, but you know, he's, he's still a best friend.

• 3:42:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, so you mentioned you yawn before, like a competition or nervous, is that a common thing? I, I used to do that too. That's why. And I, and I thought I was like the only one. I was like, something's wrong with me.

• 3:42:15Jocko Willink?

  You were just tired.

• 3:42:17Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, uh, it's, it's literally, it's, it's accessing your, uh, uh, trigeminal nerve, which is linked to your vagus nerve. And it's, it's, it's engaging your parasympathetic, parasympathetic system. So yawning is, I've heard, now that I've written it's funny. You read a book and then people start saying, oh, I yawn too. Right? So I've heard of, there's a bunch of people who've gotten back and said, you know, I, I yawn as well. So.

• 3:42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause it's kinda like you, you wouldn't think that, right? Like you're nervous. You think you're gonna be all, but yeah, you're yawning. So I'm like, shit.

• 3:42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I thought it was weird. So I didn't say anything. Then I talked to Huberman and Huberman was like, hey, that's why that happened. I'm like, oh, thanks buddy.

• 3:42:49Speaker 02

  There you go. Boom. The world makes sense.

• 3:42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:42:52Jocko Willink?

  Who's born, who's older, you or your brother?

• 3:42:54Speaker 01

  I am two minutes.

• 3:42:55Jocko Willink?

  Two minutes older. Did you, who's bigger?

• 3:42:58Speaker 01

  Well, after Buds I was, yeah. We were fairly, we were fairly even. He didn't play lacrosse. He played like a year, but, um, but we were fairly identical. And then I went to Buds and yeah, just, I got really thick.

• 3:43:10Speaker 02

  Was anyone born bigger or were you the same?

• 3:43:13Speaker 01

  We were basically the same. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 3:43:18Jocko Willink?

  This, the-

• 3:43:19Speaker 01

  He has two daughters, I have two sons, so.

• 3:43:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really? You beat the curse?

• 3:43:23Speaker 01

  Yes, I did.

• 3:43:24Jocko Willink?

  Congratulations. The curse is if you're in the SEAL teams, and they actually say it about pilots too, right? Well, the curse in the SEAL teams is you're gonna have girls, for kids. That's the curse. And it's, and it's pretty freaking, it's pretty heavy. It's a pretty thick curse. It's a pretty effective curse. Is that it, Deco Charles?

• 3:43:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it.

• 3:43:41Jocko Willink?

  No more questions, no twin questions? Do you know some secret code you gotta like throw out there?

• 3:43:46Speaker 02

  No, Jaco, thank you.

• 3:43:47Jocko Willink?

  Psychological questions?

• 3:43:49Speaker 01

  People probably ask you commonly, hey, what's it like to be a twin? And I always say, what's it like not to be a twin?

• 3:43:53Speaker 02

  Same, similar. Yeah, you don't know any, any different.

• 3:43:58Jocko Willink?

  Some interesting dynamics can happen with twins, right?

• 3:44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say so. More or less explainable, I think, but yeah.

• 3:44:06Jocko Willink?

  I saw something that if you are a twin and you marry twins, like you each marry twins, then your children are DNA-wise brothers and sisters between the whole crew.

• 3:44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in a way, yeah, because they can't differentiate DNA, right? So the, yeah, yeah, so that would make sense, that math, I guess. I didn't think, I never thought about that part of it. But yeah, I guess the likelihood of you having twins goes up too, or something like that.

• 3:44:34Speaker 01

  It usually, it typically skips a generation, or it skips, yeah, it usually, it usually skips a couple, so, so like,

• 3:44:41Speaker 01

  my sons might have twins, right? It skips down, so, who knows?

• 3:44:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know, we don't have any other twins in our family, I don't think, that I know of. But, who knows?

• 3:44:52Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Rich, any, any closing thoughts?

• 3:44:55Speaker 01

  Hey, listen, I just, first of all, what you all are doing, and, and, and since you began, since, since the day one, I think the leadership stuff has always been sound. Like I told you, I think it's, it's very simply put and digestible, and I think I, I'm, I'm always excited when I can hear guys take- Military experience and translate it into ways that people can actually understand it. And it's not just, I want to sit and tell a bunch of stories. Because the combat part is, you know, it's, it's tough. It sucks, right? So, but we can extract some goodness out of it. So, so thanks for doing that and, and thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So, I'm glad, and I'm glad you're there. I was thinking about, you know, I knew you were running training on the west coast and, and some of the ways you ran training that I heard was like, well, it's, I mean, he's testing out.

• 3:45:36Speaker 01

  I mean, if, if, if a guy's can't get a run done before getting contact or something's getting thrown into the mix, that is attribute training. Right? You know, and I think that's, so it's, it's, it's exciting that you, you read it and it resonates. Good.

• 3:45:49Speaker 02

  Actually, I have one more question.

• 3:45:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:45:50Speaker 02

  Do you, you know who Sam Harris is, right?

• 3:45:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I'm a big fan.

• 3:45:53Speaker 02

  Okay. Has anyone ever told you, you sound like Sam Harris?

• 3:45:56Speaker 01

  No, but I, I consider that a compliment.

• 3:45:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Like the, I don't know what you'd call the tonality or whatever, but yeah, every once in a while.

• 3:46:03Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 3:46:04Jocko Willink?

  I didn't think that.

• 3:46:05Speaker 02

  There you go. I found that to be the case, even with like videos I've seen of you.

• 3:46:08Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 3:46:09Speaker 02

  But even more so in person.

• 3:46:10Jocko Willink?

  Do you know what ASMR is? Do you know what it is?

• 3:46:13Speaker 01

  ASMR, I've heard of it.

• 3:46:14Jocko Willink?

  It's like, yeah, it's, well, it's like you could, but it's also just talking like this, like someone, and it's, it's like a weird thing on the interwebs.

• 3:46:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:46:23Jocko Willink?

  It's like sensory and so sometimes they'll like brush hair or they'll record it and you can get it. I forget what it stands for.

• 3:46:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:46:32Jocko Willink?

  But anyways, I was on Twitter when Sam Harris used to be on Twitter, which he's not on Twitter anymore. But, uh, and I said something to him, you know, like, oh, you know, we were making fun of each other, which we would normally do. And we, uh, if you were on Twitter, we, Sam Harris and I had a long running, um, war on Twitter of me challenging him to intellectual debates and him challenging me to fights.

• 3:46:58Speaker 01

  Oh, that's hilarious.

• 3:46:59Jocko Willink?

  And so that was kind of our, and then what's funny is every time I'd say like, you know, you're, you're too scared to debate me. And then there'd be a bunch of people like, aha. And then there'd be someone's like, this guy, Chaco, you're an idiot. This guy's a freak.

• 3:47:11Speaker 01

  Like take it seriously.

• 3:47:13Jocko Willink?

  And then he'd chime back like, you, you, you know, you'd love to debate, so you didn't have to face me on the mats. And somebody like, what is wrong with you, Sam Harris? You're an idiot. So anyways, long story short, you know, he's got a very calm soothing voice and I made some comment about him making ASMR, but then it turned out that everyone says that about him. It wasn't even, it wasn't even new.

• 3:47:34Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 3:47:35Speaker 01

  Because he does have a very calm.

• 3:47:37Jocko Willink?

  Calm.

• 3:47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's why his meditation app is so great. I mean, it's a, it's very soothing.

• 3:47:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:47:42Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 3:47:42Speaker 01

  I sent him a book, so I don't know if he's ready.

• 3:47:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so Echo puts you in that category.

• 3:47:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:47:48Jocko Willink?

  Vocally.

• 3:47:49Speaker 02

  Or ASMR-ish.

• 3:47:51Speaker 01

  Okay, maybe if the, maybe if the attributes doesn't work, I'll try that.

• 3:47:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go. No one has ever told me I had an ASMR voice.

• 3:47:57Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:47:58Jocko Willink?

  It's not happening over here.

• 3:47:59Speaker 02

  That makes sense to me.

• 3:48:00Jocko Willink?

  Anyways, man, thanks for joining us. Appreciate, appreciate you coming out here. Uh, you know, more important, thanks for your service to the nation, to the teams. Um, you were in leadership your whole career, most of which was war. So, uh, thanks for going out there and holding the line, man.

• 3:48:18Speaker 01

  Ditto, brother. Thank you.

• 3:48:21Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Rich Devini has left the building. Echo pondering your personal attributes. You over there?

• 3:48:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48:31Jocko Willink?

  What'd you come up with?

• 3:48:32Speaker 02

  Well, actually, to be honest, I did more than ponder just my personal attributes. I pondered like my, kind of my life coming up. You know how you kind of reflect on like, hey, wait, what, why am I, first you, first you start to think, oh, what attributes do I have and do I lack? And then you're like, why is that? Then you think of your childhood and like all this stuff. Where was I successful and why? And where was I unsuccessful and why? Kind of a thing. So it's one of those. It's good reminder because the skill part, which, which dawned on me some time ago, kind of like a video game where you can just, especially nowadays, right? You can just think of a skill and be like, I want that skill and you can get it.

• 3:49:08Jocko Willink?

  Go on YouTube.

• 3:49:09Speaker 02

  You just, yeah, you, you exercise a little commitment, a little discipline. You can have that skill.

• 3:49:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:13Speaker 02

  And boom, just like that, you have another skill. I mean, not just like that, but like you can have it. In fact, I'll even go one more and you can, you can have one of these real, like the real deals, life-changing skill in like three, three or four years.

• 3:49:26Jocko Willink?

  Example.

• 3:49:27Speaker 02

  Like, let's say I want to be a, I don't want to say lawyer, but let's say I want to be a.

• 3:49:34Speaker 02

  Marketer, maybe a web developer or a coder, like I wanna code, I wanna do coding now. You know, that's a hot like, or I wanna make apps.

• 3:49:43Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:49:43Speaker 02

  Or something like this, right?

• 3:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Do it.

• 3:49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you three years, you wouldn't even need three years, I don't think.

• 3:49:48Jocko Willink?

  Video editing.

• 3:49:49Speaker 02

  Video editing.

• 3:49:50Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of what, that's factually what you've done.

• 3:49:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:49:53Jocko Willink?

  Didn't go to college.

• 3:49:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:49:55Jocko Willink?

  You haven't even done a course. Have you ever paid money?

• 3:49:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I paid money for courses for sure, like Skillshare, but it's like a membership to like Skillshare, for example, that's like a membership thing. So you can.

• 3:50:05Jocko Willink?

  How much is it?

• 3:50:06Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 3:50:08Jocko Willink?

  Did you do it a lot?

• 3:50:09Speaker 02

  No, like I took.

• 3:50:10Jocko Willink?

  What percentage of your knowledge came from that?

• 3:50:12Speaker 02

  Oh, point one percent.

• 3:50:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so.

• 3:50:14Speaker 02

  And it's.

• 3:50:14Jocko Willink?

  I'm glad you corrected.

• 3:50:18Speaker 02

  I'm trying to be truthful.

• 3:50:19Jocko Willink?

  You get the attribute of being a dipshit right now.

• 3:50:23Speaker 02

  No, the attribute of being very specific and precise. Yep. Anyway, and it was for, and actually, you know what? You're even more right than I kinda indicated because it, it wasn't for video editing. It was for VFX.

• 3:50:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:50:38Speaker 02

  Which is part of the video. Anyway. True, true. Hundred percent was self-taught, right? You don't need, so anyway, anyway, the, the point is we think of skills as like something that, you know, you can get, which is true. It's even more true now, but the attributes is the thing that what inform the skill as it were, which we don't, I mean, of course, I think we do think about that, but we don't think of it as something to pay attention to. You know, where it's like, yeah, you can work on your weaknesses and, and, and that kind of thing, but it's like, not in that specific way. It was a good reminder, I thought.

• 3:51:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and this ties into what, what we talk about at Echelon Front when it comes to, and you've, I've talked about it much on the podcast, like what is your tendency?

• 3:51:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:51:19Jocko Willink?

  As a person, is your tendency to micromanage, then you have to know that about yourself. If, is your tendency to be too aggressive, you have to know that about yourself. Is your tendency to let your ego get in the way? You have to know that about yourself. And if you can pay attention to those tendencies, you're gonna have a better chance of correcting the issue. And it's the same thing as with these attributes. If you know, oh, you know, I'm not really good at this particular deal. So I can A, pay attention to it, hopefully improve upon it, but also get people on my team that. compliment my areas of weakness.

• 3:51:52Speaker 02

  And the part I thought is and something I always like keep in mind too about like people who keep you keep around. Right? Like you, you say it don't have like yes men or whatever it like this kind of in a small way illustrated like how important it is like not to have a yes man. So which one he was talking about some ten or some attributes that are like vampires. You can't see them in yourself.

• 3:52:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, ego was.

• 3:52:15Speaker 02

  So, yeah. And I think a lot of them are like that to different degrees.

• 3:52:19Jocko Willink?

  Narcissism.

• 3:52:20Speaker 02

  Narcissism, there's the ego, there's like even like being um.

• 3:52:24Jocko Willink?

  The quote about humility, the minute you've got it, you, the minute you think you've got a humility, you lost it.

• 3:52:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm the most humble person in the world. Like no one's more humble than me, you know?

• 3:52:32Jocko Willink?

  You know, Coach Adam?

• 3:52:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, hell yeah.

• 3:52:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he makes a T-shirt that says the most humblest. Kind of funny.

• 3:52:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's like the plan work. But if you keep people around, whether you family, friends, or whatever that are that that will. And if you indicate to their hey, I'm working on this part of it or whatever, maybe, you know, keep your eye open for this kind of thing. And they can kind of help you with that stuff. See what I'm saying? So it's like a workaround for the for the vampire attributes.

• 3:52:57Jocko Willink?

  Check. All right. Well, while we're working on our attributes, which we will, let's also work on our physical and mental capacity to do more.

• 3:53:06Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:53:07Jocko Willink?

  In order to get there, gonna have to work out mentally, physically. When you do that, guess what?

• 3:53:15Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna need to fuel that system. And I recommend you go to jog fuel.com, get yourself some fuel.

• 3:53:21Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:53:21Jocko Willink?

  The cleanest fuel. You know, you can get different levels of fuel.

• 3:53:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:53:24Jocko Willink?

  At the gas station.

• 3:53:25Speaker 02

  Sure. Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:53:27Jocko Willink?

  Like one's premium, one's okay, one's like, hey, bro, fill up that Corolla. You know what I'm saying?

• 3:53:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they call that the regular.

• 3:53:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you want to get the premium for your, for your body. You want to get the premium.

• 3:53:39Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 3:53:39Jocko Willink?

  And there's actually a big difference. Like, let's face it, you can put the, you can put the crappy fuel in your, in your Mercedes if you want to. You know, they're gonna recommend against it, of course. And you can put the good gas in your Corolla. Might be a waste of money. I'm saying you can get away with it. Both cases with your body, though, with what you put in your body. You want to go with the clean, the good.

• 3:54:02Speaker 02

  I think so too.

• 3:54:03Jocko Willink?

  The clean stuff. jog fuel.com. Get yourself some protein. Look, if you gotta drink an energy drink. Don't just drink one of those energy drinks. Don't drink one of the other. Would you, would you, in your little video you made? What'd you put? Extra legit.

• 3:54:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, made by most drinks, by the way.

• 3:54:19Jocko Willink?

  Made by most drinks.

• 3:54:20Speaker 02

  Energy.

• 3:54:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so don't drink that. It's got a bunch of crap in it that's gonna kill you. Oh, Jaco's being all great. No. You drink that much chemicals, that much sugar, that much caffeine, it's gonna kill you. So, don't do that. Get yourself some Jaco. Discipline. Go. Get yourself some ready to drink protein. The ultimate go to fuel.

• 3:54:48Speaker 02

  So I got some elk meat, by the way.

• 3:54:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, nice.

• 3:54:50Speaker 02

  And so I'm like, okay, yeah, this is some like the good stuff. You know, I make up my little, I got some recipes. Don't worry, I'll tell them about, tell you about them later. But yes, perfect, right? I have, okay, I got the 50 grams of protein from the elk meat, right? Then I got the 30 grams with the drink.

• 3:55:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:55:09Speaker 02

  They're ready to go. Oh, man, 80, 80 grams, just like that.

• 3:55:12Jocko Willink?

  Boom.

• 3:55:12Speaker 02

  All good, no bad.

• 3:55:13Jocko Willink?

  No catabolic going on there.

• 3:55:15Speaker 02

  No, sure.

• 3:55:16Jocko Willink?

  Staying out of that zone. Uh, joint warfare, training jujitsu. We talked a lot about fighting today. A little decent amount about fighting. You're doing physical stuff, man. Joint Warfare, JacoFuel.com, you can get it there. You can also get a vitamin shot. You can get it at the military commissaries, Hanford, Dash Stores, uh, Wakefern, ShopRite, HEB. Meyer, up in the Midwest. Something else coming online? GNC, heard of it?

• 3:55:43Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:55:44Jocko Willink?

  Rolling in the GNC, bro. Rolling in the GNC old school.

• 3:55:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:55:48Jocko Willink?

  Iconic.

• 3:55:49Speaker 02

  Do you know specifically what's going in there?

• 3:55:52Jocko Willink?

  I will have to give you the actual product list.

• 3:55:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:55:54Jocko Willink?

  But, uh, yeah, I don't have it right now on me.

• 3:55:57Speaker 02

  Cause I figure, and I'm just, the only reason I ask is I, when I used to frequent GNC from time to time, I'd go in there for specific stuff. So it would be what? Protein, pre-workout, and any kind of vitamins.

• 3:56:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, that's what GNC's for, technically, everything you just said, bro.

• 3:56:16Speaker 02

  General nutrition. But, no, the energy drinks, not so much, right? I mean, I would grab, I would grab one if it was there. But energy drinks is one of those on the go things, not a, like, oh, I'm shopping for more supplements. Yeah, yeah. But I guess it's a, it's something.

• 3:56:30Jocko Willink?

  Let me ask you, would you get fired up to go to GNC?

• 3:56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:56:33Jocko Willink?

  Like a little bit of a?

• 3:56:35Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 3:56:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, back in the day.

• 3:56:38Speaker 02

  And I was like back in before online shopping was like super hardcore like it is now. It was, yeah, it was good. It was like a whole experience and there's a few stores that are like that where it's like you don't just go there just to buy it like a freaking CVS or something like this. You go and it's kind of like the experience.

• 3:56:55Jocko Willink?

  So GNC, go check that out. Um, or actually I think around the 20th, when this is coming out. I think February 20th, 2023 in that GNC. Go in there and just buy, just go and get some. Let's be like, get some, get in the, you know, the old thing you had when you were a kid and you get a new pair of shoes and made you a little bit faster? You know what I mean?

• 3:57:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:57:18Jocko Willink?

  New pair of running shoes, new pair of Keds. Did you ever have Keds?

• 3:57:22Speaker 02

  No, I never had Keds.

• 3:57:23Jocko Willink?

  So you had Keds or you've got the Converse one star. You got a pair of Chuck Taylors and then the Nike with the waffle. I had like the OG Nike with the waffle tread, uh, blue and yellow.

• 3:57:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:57:36Jocko Willink?

  Roll back in the day. There's only when Nike made one shoe. Imagine that.

• 3:57:40Speaker 02

  Oh damn.

• 3:57:41Jocko Willink?

  Nike made one shoe. It was this blue shoe. It had a waffle tread on it. This, that was the name of this tread.

• 3:57:49Speaker 02

  I remember the waffle tread. I don't remember the blue shoes.

• 3:57:51Jocko Willink?

  So blue with a gold stripe back in the day. When you got those, you kind of like felt like you were a little bit faster. I remember that same thing going to GNC back in the day. Like you're going to get a little bit more jacked. So roll into GNC, get yourself some Jocka Fuel. There we go. Also, uh, originusa.com. You're gonna need some American made. Look, you're not, you're not looking to buy these other companies, aforementioned companies that are, they're using slave labor to make their stuff, right? We're not doing that. We're not doing that. We're not supporting countries that have tyrannical governments. We're not doing that. We're supporting America, freedom.

• 3:58:31Jocko Willink?

  We're supporting the workers in America. We're bringing manufacturing back to America. All of that, right there you can do. Originusa.com jeans, boots, gees, rash guards, t-shirts, hoodies, wallets, belts, boots.

• 3:58:46Jocko Willink?

  Origin USA. Freedom that you can put on your body.

• 3:58:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:58:51Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 3:58:52Speaker 02

  We're in the Delta 68's current.

• 3:58:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, that's right. When's the last time you wore pants to record the podcast?

• 3:58:58Speaker 02

  Oh, I've been wearing pants, but I usually wear the Kelly camouflage.

• 3:59:01Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if I've ever worn pants to record a podcast. I mean, I wear shorts, bro.

• 3:59:04Speaker 02

  Bro, I was noticing your, the uniform, your uniform. And it's funny because you like take off your slippers too.

• 3:59:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:59:11Speaker 02

  You're like barefoot. Full on Hawaiian style.

• 3:59:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:59:13Speaker 02

  Good, man. That's good.

• 3:59:16Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yes. Speaking of Hawaiian style.

• 3:59:18Speaker 02

  Speaking of Hawaiian style, um, okay. So Jaco's Store, we're representing on the path. I know I am. Discipline equals freedom, good. There's a, there's a, a good version shirt on the shirt locker coming up.

• 3:59:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 3:59:32Speaker 02

  It's just a hint.

• 3:59:33Jocko Willink?

  Been a while.

• 3:59:34Speaker 02

  Little hint, so it's a good one. It's a little bit more, more like subtle.

• 3:59:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:59:38Speaker 02

  Either way.

• 3:59:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:59:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, you want to represent jacostore.com. Also, I mentioned this shirt locker, which is a new shirt every month. Some cool like new designs every month. People seem to like that one, but yeah, look at that. Check that, that one out. We, I put on a, um, we call like a, we call it a sneak peek. It's like a little close up of part of the design. So you can kind of get a hint of what the next design is too. If you want to check it out before you sign up or whatever, but nonetheless. Just go to jacostore.com.

• 4:00:05Jocko Willink?

  I like it. Subscribe to this podcast, subscribe to Jaco Underground. We do, we do about a podcast a week on Jaco Underground, the UG as it's called. And that way we can talk about whatever we want. And, uh, we have a escape platform in case we get shut down for whatever reason. You know, we'll be there $8.18 a month. If you can't afford that, it's cool. We still got your freedom.

• 4:00:29Jocko Willink?

  Email assistance at jacostore.com. Don't forget the YouTube channels. Don't forget Psychological Warfare. Don't forget Flipside Canvas. Don't forget all the books, Attributes by Rich Devini. Don't forget about that one. And then all the books, uh, Only Cry For The Living, Final Spin, all the leadership books, The Way, The Warrior Kid books.

• 4:00:48Jocko Willink?

  What an opportunity to make a kid's life better, make their whole life better, by the way. Mike and the Dragons, About Face by Hackworth. I wrote the foreword on the new one. There you go. Bunch of those books, Echelon Front. We solve problems through leadership. Echelonfront.com. Don't forget about our online training platform, ExtremeOwnership.com. This is how you get better at life. You don't get better at life by you read a book one time, now you're good, or you went to a seminar one time, or you listened to one podcast. No, you gotta interact. So go to ExtremeOwnership.com, take classes, ask questions, live interactions with me, with Leif, with the team. So we're doing. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee.

• 4:01:34Jocko Willink?

  She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 4:01:41Jocko Willink?

  And also don't forget about Micah Fink, who currently, at this time, we just got reports from the field. He just killed a mountain lion with a K-bar knife. He is skinning it and making a loin cloth, which he will wear on a 72-day retreat across the wilderness. Micah Fink getting after it. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, don't forget Rich Davini. To get in touch with him, or what the services he offers, go to The attributes.com. And on social media, Rich is on Instagram, Rich underscore Davini, Twitter, at Rich Davini, Facebook, at Rich Davini. Of course, Echo and I are there as well. Echo is, uh, Echo Charles.

• 4:02:25Jocko Willink?

  I am at Jocko Willink. Be advised, the algorithm's there. It's waiting to grab you. So just, you know, look out. Thanks to all the military personnel out there on the front lines, maintaining freedom around the world. We appreciate what you're doing right now. And also, thanks to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all first responders. You maintain our safety for us here at home. We are grateful for that. And everyone else out there.

• 4:02:57Jocko Willink?

  Know your strengths. Know your weaknesses. Know your attributes. Know yourself.

• 4:03:07Jocko Willink?

  Then see where you can get better and be better by going out there every day.

• 4:03:15Jocko Willink?

  And getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco out.