Jocko Underground: How to Never Get Frustrated... Ever. How to Find a Leadership Void and Stef Up Like A Champ. Money VS Passion.

Frustration Military and it's bureaucratic bullsh*t. How to fill a leadership void without jamming it up. Dealing with lack of confidence as a blue belt. Money vs passion. Bragging and showboating culture in a group. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jocko Underground Podcast number 23. Sitting here with, again, with Echo Charles, Echo Charles, as they say. Sure.

• 0:12Jocko Willink?

  I wanted to talk, speaking of laughing and just chuckling about stuff, I want to talk about a different kind of emotion that we sometimes feel frustration, anger, or annoyance. Frustration, the definition of frustration is anger or annoyance by your own inability to either achieve something or change something. That's what frustration is. Again, I've, I've started to pay attention to when I'm talking to clients, when I'm dealing with people, I'm starting to pay attention to what's happening to them.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  You know, the last one, we talked about balance and I see when I deal with people and I talk to people and I coach people through certain situations, I see them getting out of balance is a, it, it trips people up or jams people up as, you know, as you like to say. This is another one, people get frustrated. What's, what's interesting about the frustration is, look, you can get frustrated with people for sure, but you can also get frustrated with inanimate objects. I know the, the running joke in my family is that I get frustrated with printers, number one, printers, number one, or whatever, but it's, it's, it's all kind of in jest.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  So, but when I see, when I see it impacting people, and I just wanted to talk a little bit about it so we can look at, what do we do with it, right? It's a thing, it's a real thing.

• 1:48Jocko Willink?

  We have to utilize it, actually. One thing that we realize when we get frustrated, you're not going to do any better by allowing the frustration to, to impact the way you're behaving, doesn't help. The anger that you're feeling, the frustration that you're feeling is not going to help you get any smoother, it's not going to help you get any better, it's not going to help you overcome that problem, it's not going to help you interact with that person so you can change their mind. All those things are bad. All those things are bad. So we can't allow this to impact us. We have to, we have to contend with what we've got, we had to work with it. So.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  I would say one of the

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  I started getting frustrated the other day. Sure dang sorry. Yeah, started getting frustrated the other day. What happened was, and the reason I can, I want to talk about this is because I started getting frustrated and then I this is how I over, I'm gonna talk about how I overcame the frustration. I was was, was, had a late night. I was up too late. I had actually decided like, okay, you know what? It's 1:30 in the morning right now. I'm not gonna get up at 4:30. I'm gonna, you know, sleep until whatever, probably six. So I did that. So got up at six. And, which is pretty rare for me, but

• 3:13Jocko Willink?

  look, if you're gonna get three hours of sleep, that's a negative. That's, it's not, that's not a good move, right? You may have to at some point, but it wasn't a good, wouldn't have been a good move in this situation. Sleep until six, cool. So I sleep until six, six fifteen, something like this. Get up, get out of bed, put my workout gear on. Well, what's interesting is now at six o'clock in the morning, I'm not alone in the house, right? My wife's downstairs. So now when I go downstairs, I'm ready to work out, but you know, my wife's gonna be saying hi, you know, going through the, the morning procedures of hello. And as, as you and I talked about on the last underground, um, you know, we have to remember that relationships are part of the path. So hey, my wife's kind of stoked that I'm

• 3:56Jocko Willink?

  talking to her. It's early in the morning. She's up, I'm up, you know? So what do I do? I spend 15 minutes talking about whatever things, you know, we're hanging out for a little bit. Cool. So now, it's probably more than 20 minutes. So now it's like pushing 6:45, 7 o'clock, right? But now I get up to the garage gym.

• 4:19Jocko Willink?

  And I Chalk up, it's pull up day, so I'm gonna be doing pull ups, I'm gonna be doing muscle ups. So I start my, my warm up routine, stretching, a little warm up routine, I'm doing a couple. I hang on the bar for a little bit, then I do like a one pull up, two pull ups. I'm, I'm, it's like my first warm up set. So it's been 10 minutes, no, maybe not 10 minutes, it's been five minutes. Enrolls my son to the gym. So normally I'm done, that's kind of our little unwritten rule. I've got until seven, you know, right?

• 4:58Jocko Willink?

  You know, so I'm up at 4:30, I'm in the gym by five, you know, I'm working out, doing whatever, stretching, get done by seven. You know, all things normal, I'm done, he's in there and he's not alone because he's got his, his little crew that he lifts with and trains with. Well, they come rolling in, they're already, they've already been working out. So they went for a run or something, they went up to the track and did sprints, so now they're back, now they're there to finish off leg day, by the way. So, ah, you know, he's like, are you almost done? But he's kind of looking at me with a tilted head because he sees that I'm not dripping with sweat. So he's like, are you, are you almost done? And I go, no, I, you know, I just started.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  And he goes, well.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  He's like, can, can, can we work out first? Can we work out right now? And I'm like, what do you have? Because I figured if they're doing something, maybe they're doing kettlebells, we could kind of get it done, I could use the pull bar. He's like, squats.

• 5:59Jocko Willink?

  And I go, now, meanwhile, I knew I had some editing to do. Like just, I'm just gonna do a quick edit on something for Echelon Front, I was like, cool.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  And I got, had a text from Leif and he's like, hey, can you take a look at this? I'm like, yep, absolutely. So I go, you know what, I'm gonna go, you know, I said, hey, go ahead, you, I go, how long you need? He's like, an hour, this is my son, an hour. I said, cool. So he's, he goes and starts, um, he's working out. So I figure, you know what, I'm gonna go take a look at this document that Leif sent me. So I go, start going through that and all of a sudden, well, as I'm doing that, I get another, I get, Jamie sends me, so hey, can you take a look at this? So I'm like, okay. So now I'm editing, now I was just gonna edit it short, now I'm looking at a longer document. Now there's a couple of sections that are highlighted for me to look at, but as I change one of them, now I gotta go. Now all of a sudden I'm rewriting stuff instead of just editing.

• 6:51Jocko Willink?

  But I at the mo- this is where the frustration came in. So now I'm kind of pissed that I haven't worked out yet. And, oh yeah, and like also I had a phone call. Not a scheduled phone call, but like an unscheduled phone call that was not an emergency, but a scenario that needed to be dealt with. So now I'm talking through this for 38 minutes or whatever. So, cause I was thinking, look, I'll still be able to get just jumped down in the gym, but whatever. So, so now I realize I got more work to do. And as I realized that as I look at this document, that I'm gonna have to rewrite some stuff and it's not just an edit, but it's a rewrite. I have a moment of like, damn it. Like, damn it, like.

• 7:33Jocko Willink?

  I, I didn't sign up for this today, right? I had plans, right? And there's a frustration left. There's a frustration. Right? I get you. This, this is one, it was not what I was, this was not on the agenda, right? So I have this little bit of frustration creeped up and look, I don't get frustrated very easily, but I had just a little bit, cause now I'm missing a workout. I was up, was still, even though I, even though I woke up a little bit later, I still was only operating on like four and a half, five hours worth of sleep. So I'm, I'm mad. I'm frustrated about that. I'm frustrated about my son being in the gym when I should be in there. I mean, I had chalk on my hands. Like there's a certain protocol in the world that shouldn't be violated and it was. And now this document that I was gonna, you know, you think, oh, can you take a look at this document?

• 8:17Jocko Willink?

  Cool. You're thinking four, seven, maybe 10 minutes. Now I'm starting to, now I'm looking, I gotta rewrite stuff. So the frustration level starts to escalate. And as soon as I felt that, I was like, cool. You know what? Boom. Get to work. That's, that's literally what I said. I said, you know what? Get to work. I just let that frustration, just let it go, man. And I got to work. That's my point. Is that frustration can really end up being more of a distraction than anything else. Where you start getting frustrated about something and it's making you mad. And it's turns more, it turns whatever you're doing worse. Makes whatever you're doing worse. You wanna hear a funny story? Yeah.

• 9:02Jocko Willink?

  So Leif Babbin and I, we are at the muster in New York City. And again, this was our second muster. It's our first muster out in New York City. There's.

• 9:19Jocko Willink?

  Things happened. We failed to plan certain things. We didn't do things in the smoothest, passable way. We underestimated the time it would take for things. There's a bunch of mistakes that we made that we were, had to deal with. And by the way, there's, the muster starts at 4:45 in the morning for the, for the attendees and it ends at, you know, six o'clock at night, day one, and it's the same thing on day two. That's what the attendees are gonna see, right? When you're at, when someone attends the muster, that's what they're gonna see. They don't see what happens in the hours in between those things, but, but at this particular muster, the New York was the worst muster from a logistics standpoint for a whole bunch of different,

• 10:03Jocko Willink?

  a whole bunch of reasons, all of which are on me because, you know, we're running the muster at Echelon Front, and so when things aren't right, there's only one person to blame. But that's where we're at. So, one of the things we have to do is sign certificates of graduation, right? Like, hey, everyone's going, so we're, so for whatever multitude of reasons, it's, it's like one o'clock in the morning, two, I think it's actually, I think it's actually two o'clock in the morning. We are gonna go PT at 3:30 in the morning. And Leif and I have got a stack of 850, there's 850, I think, attendees at the muster, and we've got to sign 850 of

• 10:45Jocko Willink?

  these certificates. Everyone else is asleep, so it's, sometimes it makes, I know it might sound diva-ish, but if you have to sign a bunch of stuff and someone's helping you, it makes it a lot easier, right? There's someone putting it in front of you, there's someone taking it away, and passing it to Leif, and so we can get it done in one-third of the time. If you have someone helping you, because think about it, you gotta, the things are sticking together, there's all these issues. So, so we start signing these things. So I'm just signing, I'm, I'm, I'm just signing them, boom, boom, boom. And, and Leif, he starts going, "Some of these are..." So, that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen,

• 11:29Jocko Willink?

  Go to JacoUnderground.com and subscribe and we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control and we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors and we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen

• 12:14Jocko Willink?

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