How To Make Zero Progress | Jocko Willink Reads Ego Is The Enemy

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  How to Make Zero Progress. For nearly two years, Brent Underwood had made no progress on restoring the buildings at Cerro Gordo, this abandoned mining town in California. "I had been telling myself," he writes in "Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley," a wonderful book, I've been reading it to my son, actually. He said that, "I just felt we needed to raise money, hire contractors and preservations, and then it all get done in one big frenzied crush of can-do spirit. Not a very good plan," he said, "because after two years, I made precisely zero progress." The one thing all fools have in common, Seneca said, was that they were always getting ready to start. It's not that these fools aren't busy, they are. They're running around

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  like crazy. They've got a million ideas, a million things they're doing. The problem is that none of them concretely moved the ball forward in any way. It was only when Brent threw all these plans aside and got serious, got small, that any progress was made. He stopped thinking big, and he started working on the front porch of one old building. As he writes in the book, which again is awesome, he says, "It was a small feat in the grand scheme of things, but it was a start, a good start. The sense of pride I derived from seeing a space go from unusable to usable, the sense of autonomy that accomplishing this small task left me with felt like life, like rebirth, like my own personal Renaissance. I felt competent and effective, that something, anything, had finally happened here, and

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  that I was the one responsible for it. It gave me the first taste of satisfaction that comes from working with your hands, from working meaningfully, diligently, patiently, incrementally towards a big goal. My dreams had an integrity now that they lacked before. They weren't pie in the sky, they were boots on the ground, hands in the dirt." We all have some version of what Brett told himself. When I have more time, I'll write my book. When I have more resources, I'll start my company. When the circumstances are just right, I'll make a career change. When I get this other stuff done first, then I'll be set. Marcus really has talked about how we can't wait for perfection. Because if you do, that's all you'll do. You'll wait. Instead, he said, be satisfied with even the smallest progress. Action by action, step by step.

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  He said, that's how we assemble a life. Zeno, well before Marcus said that these small steps amount to no small thing. And the little things add up. Why? Because they're real. Brett was actually at the Painted Porch on Tuesday. We did a nice little event and we talked Stoicism and our history. If you didn't know, Brett actually started as my intern. He became my partner in Brass Check, my marketing company. He helped get Daily Stoic off the ground and he's someone I collaborate with and talk with on a regular basis. I love his videos. They're awesome. I'm one of the investors in the town of Cerro Gordo. It's become a place, my family's gone a bunch of times. We absolutely love it there. And I think if you're not following him on social or on YouTube, you're missing it out. You're missing out on a lot.

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  You can check out Ghost Town Living on all those platforms. But his new book is great. It's called Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley. And I think it's a desert solitaire-esque book or wild by Cheryl Strayed. It's just a great book. I think you can check it out. And we've got some signed numbered first editions that we are selling at the Painted Porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes. I hope you check it out and enjoy.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower returned from his inaugural parade and entered the White House for the first time as president late in the evening. As he walked into the executive mansion, his chief usher handed Eisenhower two letters marked confidential and secret that had been sent to him earlier in the day. Eisenhower's reaction was swift. Never bring me a sealed envelope, he said firmly. That's what I have staff for. How snobbish, right? Had the office really gone to his head already? Not at all. Eisenhower recognized the seemingly insignificant event for what it was, a symptom of disorganized, dysfunctional organization. Not everything needed to run through him. Who is to say that the envelope was even important? Why hadn't anyone screened it?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  As president, his first priority in office was organizing the executive branch into a smooth, functioning, and order-driven unit, just like his military units had been, not because he didn't want to work himself, but because everyone had a job and he trusted and empowered them to do it. As his chief of staff later put it, "The president does the most important things. I do the next most important things." The public image of Eisenhower is of a man playing golf. In reality, he was not someone who ever slacked off, but the leisure time he did have was available because he ran a tight ship. He knew that urgent and important were not symptoms. His job was to set the priorities, to think big picture, and then trust the people beneath him to do the jobs they were hired for.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Most of us are not the president, or even president of a company, but moving up the ladder in life, the system and work habits that got us where we are, won't necessarily keep us there. When we're aspiring or small time, we can be idiosyncratic, we can compensate for disorganization with hard work and a little luck, that's not going to cut it in the majors. In fact, it'll sink you if you can't grow up and organize. We can contrast Eisenhower's system in the White House with the infamous car company created by John Delorean. When he walked away from GM to produce his brand of futuristic cars, a few decades removed from the company's spectacular implosion, we can be forgiven for thinking the man was just ahead of his time.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  In fact, his rise and fall is as timeless a story as there is. Power-hungry narcissist undermines his own vision and loses millions of dollars of other people's money in the process. Delorean was convinced that the culture of order and discipline at GM had held brilliant creatives like himself down. When he set out to found his company... He deliberately did everything differently, flouting conventional wisdom and business practices. The result was not the freewheeling creative sanctuary that DeLorean naively envisioned. It was instead, an overbearingly political, dysfunctional, and even corrupt organization that collapsed under its own weight, eventually resorting to criminality and fraud, and losses of some 250 million.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  The DeLorean failed both as a car and as a company, because it was mismanaged from top to bottom, with an emphasis on the mismanagement at the top by the top. That is, DeLorean himself was the problem. Compared to Eisenhower, he worked constantly, with very different results. As one executive put it, "DeLorean had the ability to recognize a good opportunity, but he didn't know how to make it happen." Another executive described his management style as "chasing colored balloons." He was constantly distracted and abandoning one project for another. He was a genius. Sadly, that's rarely enough. Though probably not on purpose, DeLorean created a culture in which ego ran free, convinced that continued success was simply his by right.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  He seemed to bristle at concepts like discipline, organization, or strategic planning. Employees were not given enough direction, and then at other times overwhelmed with trivial instructions. DeLorean couldn't delegate, except to lackeys whose blind loyalty was prized over competence or skill. On top of all this, he was often late or preoccupied. Executives were allowed to work on extracurricular activities on the company dime, encouraged specifically to chase side projects that benefited their boss at the expense of the company. As CEO, DeLorean often bent the truth to investors, fellow officers, and suppliers, and this habit was contagious throughout the company. Like many people, driven by a demon,

• 8:22Speaker 01

  DeLorean's decisions were motivated by everything but what would have been efficient, manageable, or responsible. Instead of improving or fixing GM's system, it's as if he threw out order altogether. What ensued was chaos, in which no one followed the rules, no one was accountable, and very little got done. The only reason it didn't collapse immediately was that DeLorean was a master of public relations, a skill that held the whole story together until the first faulty cars came off the assembly line. Not surprisingly, the cars were terrible, they didn't work, cost per unit was massively over budget, they hadn't secured enough dealers, they couldn't deliver cars to the ones they had. The launch was a disaster, DeLorean Motor Company never recovered. It turns out that becoming a great leader is difficult. Who knew?