Jocko Underground: The Name You Have Can Impact Your Success | Physical Prep | Rules?

What's in a name? Physical Preparation. You want credit. Get over it. I don't have to follow rules. Finishing Americanas in Jiu Jitsu. Living day to day in a chaotic environment. 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 Underground Podcast, number 60, with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. We are sitting here, getting ready to record this thing, and I'm saying, Echo Charles, I'm saying Jocko Willink, what's in a name? I was thinking about this the other day, it turns out, there's a lot, there can be a lot in a name. There's a theory, as I researched this, there's a theory, or should I say, there's a hypothesis, that people tend to gravitate toward things in life, that kind of fit their names, which is an interesting thing to think about.

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  The hypothesis is called the nominative determinism, which means name-driven outcome. So, whatever your name is, there's a decent chance that that might influence the way you think and where you end up in life. Maybe decent chance is a strong word, and we'll get some of the research here. There's an October issue of The Psychologist, and it says that authors, authors gravitate towards areas of research that fit their surname. This is, this is, this is research. The example in the article they use, there's an article on incontinence from the British Journal of Urology, and it's written by Dr.

• 1:29Jocko Willink?

  A.J. Splat and Dr. D. Weedon. You see what I'm saying? It's kind of strange, right?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  It seems strange, yeah.

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  There is another magazine, a British magazine, had some good examples, there's a guy named Andrew Drinkwater, who works at the Water Research Center, there's a guy named Dr. Will Welfare, who's, works at the Public Health Department in England, there's a guy named Alan Too Good, who's a Samaritan volunteer, a woman named Dr. Pam Graves, Pam Graves, and she's an archaeologist.

• 2:06Jocko Willink?

  There's a guy named Tom Kitchen. Guess what he is? He's a chef. Yes, you see what I'm going? A woman named Sarah Blizzard. BBC, weather, weather reporter. A guy named Aaron Farr, he's a distance runner. Uh, when you speak of running,

• 2:24Jocko Willink?

  Usain Bolt.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying?

• 2:29Jocko Willink?

  So there is a little bit of research behind this and look, it looked like even the numbers that they threw up were, it's pretty minimal. It's not like this direct correlation.

• 2:41Jocko Willink?

  But at the same time, from, I started thinking about this pragmatically, like how, how does this apply to us? As people in what we do and how we interact and how we interact in groups and how we lead groups if we're leading groups.

• 2:56Jocko Willink?

  Think about when you give a team a name? Or when you give a nickname to someone, right? So if you nickname your kid Dummy,

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  you see what I'm saying? How's that gonna work out? If you nickname your kid Champ, hey Champ, come here. How's that gonna work out? Look, is this a hundred percent correlation? No. But let's face it, if you're, nickname your kid Dummy, or you nickname your kid Champ. Now, look, you could nickname your kid Champ and then think they should win everything and now they are a brat, right? Could that happen? Sure. But if you nickname your kid Knucklehead,

• 3:44Jocko Willink?

  or you nickname your kid Ace. You see what I'm saying? These, these can have, and they, they did some legitimate in reading some of these things. They had some legitimate things, the way this turns out. Uh, and the real obvious examples is like naming a team or naming a military unit Hackworth. In the Korean War, he took over Fox Company and changed it immediately to Fighter Company. Think about what that does to the mentality. And when he got to Vietnam, he, he took over the Hopeless Battalion?

• 4:22Jocko Willink?

  And he changed it to the.

• 4:25Jocko Willink?

  Hardcore Battalion, I think we might have the Hard Luck. Hard Luck Battalion? Confused. But he changed the name to Hardcore. Why? Because the other one doesn't even matter anymore because we're the Hardcore.

• 4:36Jocko Willink?

  I did the same thing. It's SEAL Team Three, changed tasking to Bravo, tasking to Bruiser. So.

• 4:43Jocko Willink?

  This is an important thing to think about. It's an important thing. Here's another thing, like you're at work. You got a guy on your team. What nickname do you give them? Now, in the SEAL Teams, it's awful. You're gonna get a nickname that is making fun of you.

• 4:59Jocko Willink?

  That's the way it is. I mean, Dave Burke, you know Dave Burke's call sign?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, now it's a good deal, Dave. But the call sign, yeah, Chip.

• 5:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Chip, which was making fun of him because he chipped his teeth on something, you know, some pilot thing.

• 5:14Jocko Willink?

  So, name people and name things and nickname people. Positive things. And you are going to. At least have a chance that you have a positive impact on the scenario. And you know, even you can nickname, you can name processes, like you have a process for something. And if you name it, you know, the drag. No one's gonna like it. But if you call it lightning. People are gonna, and you can see the government, the government tries to do this stuff too, right? They give things names. They frame it a certain way. What do you think about your name? Echo?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I just, I, I don't know, like, what depends on what you mean.

• 6:00Jocko Willink?

  Do you think it had an impact on your life?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:03Jocko Willink?

  Compared to, you have a twin brother, right? Your twin brother, his name is also kind of new, unique, right? Jade.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:12Jocko Willink?

  Did it have some kind of impact on you?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:14Jocko Willink?

  What, what kind of impact? What if your name was Bill?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it fell in line with the idea that I was just different a little bit. So I always felt different. And I don't know in what way, to be honest, and I don't even know what even that even means. But, you know, like, I guess most, that's kind of the irony, right? Where we all feel different. We all feel like we're different, right? A little bit. I mean, I don't know. Maybe we do, maybe don't. I know I did. Put it that way. So even-

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  You felt different?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:39Jocko Willink?

  Because your name?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  My name was one of the things that made me feel even more-

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  Even more different?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  I don't know. Like, I guess when you think about it, what that I had a twin brother that made me different.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember when you realized that you were a person?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:52Jocko Willink?

  What was it?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Two years old.

• 6:54Jocko Willink?

  What do you remember?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Doing this. When, when people would ask me, how old are you? You know, it's a common question. And I'd do this. And I remember seeing this, like, between my fingers.

• 7:03Jocko Willink?

  Seeing your own fingers.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So between my two fingers, making a two. And then it like spiral. You ever did this where maybe when you're a kid, when you look at your hand and you're like,

• 7:14Jocko Willink?

  This is me?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Holy cow, yeah, this is me. This is me, like I'm a, and you just spiral into almost like insanity a little bit. You know, you ever get that? Oh, I remember. Yeah, that started at two years old. I remember.

• 7:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I, I gonna have to dig back into my memory because I remember thinking about this like, like two years ago, I was thinking about, I sort of remembered when I remembered being like, oh, I'm a person.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:39Jocko Willink?

  And I have autonomy in the world and I can do what I want to do. And there's going to be forces fighting against me, but I can get strong to where I can defeat those forces.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's-

• 7:48Jocko Willink?

  Remember those thoughts?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  No, I've never had that. No, I never had that thought.

• 7:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, here's what I, here's what I think. Uh, so my, my nickname, Jocko is a nickname, right? But it's a nickname I've had ever since I was born. So even before I was born, that was my nickname.

• 8:05Jocko Willink?

  What that, what I think that did influence is that when I would meet, this is back in the seventies, man. There was no weird names. Everyone has a weird name now, right? Like legitimately, every kid is named like, it's a weird name.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Very common.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  My, my kids all have weird names. Like it's just a, your kids have weird names, right?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  They're mediocre weird, I guess. It's not John, Bill and Mike. It's not Ben, Jan.

• 8:28Jocko Willink?

  So back in the day, when I was going into, you know, first grade, second grade, kindergarten, you go out on the schoolyard, whatever, you're meeting Bill, you're meeting Frank, you're meeting David. And then there's this freaking kid whose name is Jocko, which is a total, which is totally different type of name. They don't know what it is. So I'm immediately like, you're going to get made fun of, kind of, you're going to be noticed a little bit. And what you have to do is you have to be able to, at a very young age. I had to be able to negotiate a little bit of awkwardness and maybe a little bit of teasing or maybe a little bit. I had to learn to negotiate that at a young age.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:05Jocko Willink?

  And I think that made me comfortable interacting with people at a young age and thinking, oh, you know, my name's Jocko. What kind of name is that? It's a dumb one, you know, but that's what my parents get, whatever, like the little things. So I think that that like the same as having the name Echo, kind of you have to, you have to learn how to negotiate having a strange name that you actually have to explain.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  Every time. I probably had to explain my name to every person I met for the first 10 years of my life.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Did they? That makes sense. Same here.

• 9:41Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Still even now.

• 9:42Jocko Willink?

  What kind of name is Jocko? And again, I think nowadays, you know, you meet people named whatever their names. They got, everyone's got a weird name. You go to the kids jujitsu class. It's a bunch of weird named kids. You know, everyone's more unique now, I guess.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 9:56Jocko Willink?

  But legit, back in the day, you know, my, my wife's name is Helen. Her brother's name is John. My sister's name is Jenny. My other sister's name is Julie. You know, like, my dad's name is John. It's just, that's the way it is. Everyone just had normal names and all of a sudden, boom, here's this weird kid named Jocko.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:15Jocko Willink?

  You gotta, I gotta explain that. I gotta be able to contend with it. People are gonna make fun of it.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did they, did they ever make fun of you like, cause Jocko's not a name, just like my name's not a name that they're gonna be mean about it.

• 10:26Jocko Willink?

  What name would they be mean about?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Um, if your last name was, I don't know, there's this like hamburger or something.

• 10:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you could get some bad last names.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially last names. Yeah, there's certain Filipino last names. If you're not Filipino, they'll sound funny. Like there's one, um, Macadang dang. That was one that I remember.

• 10:46Jocko Willink?

  Pretty common in Hawaii.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Well, no, in the Philippines, in Filipino, yes. And there's a lot of Filipinos in Hawaii, for sure.

• 10:52Jocko Willink?

  So you had, you had a number of friends whose last name was Maka dang dang?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Just, well, this was elementary school, so this was, and yeah, you're right. Later on in high school, there's like, yeah, there were a bunch, a bunch of people named Maka dang dang. But the first girl that came in, she came from the Philippines too. So she had a thick Filipino accent and her last name was Maka dang dang. When you're kindergarten, first grade, second grade, that sounds funny. So they're gonna be teasing it like it, it's an actual funny last name. Echo is like, oh, is there an Echo in here? Oh, what's your name? Echo, what is it? Echo, what is it? Echo, you know, like that kind of stuff, but that's not mean. That's just like, oh, they're trying to be funny or whatever. So yeah, you contend with that. Jocko doesn't seem like one they'd be, that would be mean, because it kind of sounds cool.

• 11:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, then generally speaking, yeah, it was more of like curiosity or maybe they'd make, make a little joke. You know, I used to say to people, who could a name is that? I'd be, I'd, I'd look at them with a straight face when I was, you know, eight years old. I'd go, oh, it's, it's short for Jocko.

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

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

• 12:28Jocko Willink?

  more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you, it's jacood underground.com. It costs eight dollars and 18 cents a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email assistance at jacood underground.com and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.