Jocko Underground: Contrarian Thinking As a Framework to Discover Things that are Counterintuitive.

Contrarian Thinking. Tracking fitness. Dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Becoming a SEAL at 39 years old. Dealing with daughters growing up. Untrained Large Male VS Trained small female. 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 79, sitting here with Echo Charles. EC, Echo Charles.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:06Jocko Willink?

  And me, Jocko. Contrarian thinking is a, is a tool, I believe. And the reason I believe it's a tool is because I think it allows us to discover things that are counterintuitive, which is positive, which you need help to get, to get to. You need help finding counterintuitive ideas and finding counterintuitive solutions.

• 0:37Jocko Willink?

  You need help finding them because they're by nature counterintuitive. So your intuition is probably wrong and you're thinking it's this, but it's not that. And so you need help finding counterintuitive ideas and solutions. So the reason is counterintuitive thinking goes against conventional wisdom. Sometimes it even goes against common sense, right? There's times where you're looking at a counterintuitive idea and it doesn't make sense. This happens, this is a bro-science problem, by the way.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:11Jocko Willink?

  Because bro, you ever heard of bro-science explanation that makes 100% sense?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, most of it.

• 1:16Jocko Willink?

  And then someone just presents actual facts to you?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21Jocko Willink?

  And you think, hmm, I'm completely wrong, right? So sometimes intuitive thinking is wrong, completely wrong. So even though it makes total common sense, but it doesn't work. So I, the reason I bring this up is because I talk about counterintuitive solutions a lot. The reason I probably end up spending a lot of time talking about them and explaining them to people and teaching them is because they're counterintuitive. People don't get them easily.

• 1:55Jocko Willink?

  You want the team to buy into the plan? How do you get them to do that? The intuitive response is, oh, you, first of all, you need to explain the why. There's a bunch of reasons that actually makes sense. But the counterintuitive one is you let them come up with a plan. And as soon as people hear that, they go, oh, yeah, that's right. Or here's another one that I've been telling a lot of people lately. You want someone to listen to you? You want your team to listen to you? How do you get your team to listen to you? Yell louder? No. Explain more explicitly? No. You want someone to listen to you? Listen to them. Counterintuitive, but it works. So

• 2:33Jocko Willink?

  that's what counterintuitive is. Now, contrarian or contrarian thinking is intentionally going against the grain. It's intentionally going against popular opinion. And sometimes the thing with contrarian thinking is it often or actually, the, the goal of contrarian thinking is to be against traditional wisdom. That's the goal of it. The goal isn't to be smarter. The goal isn't to be, have a better plan. The goal isn't to have a better idea. The goal isn't to have a better solution. The goal is just to be contrarian. It's just to be against traditional wisdom.

• 3:11Jocko Willink?

  Whereas counterintuitive thinking is to actually figure out what the best idea, idea is, even if it happens to be against the norm.

• 3:20Jocko Willink?

  So I worked for a guy one time that was very contrarian. Contrarian guy and, and it was good because he would get like new ideas, you know, he'd throw something out there to be a new idea and you'd think it's cool. But then I realized after a little while that everything that he said was the contrarian view. And he didn't care if it was going to take more time. He didn't care if it wasn't the best idea. It was just that it was different.

• 3:47Jocko Willink?

  So my recommendation is to think like a contrarian. So think as contrarian as you can. So that you are able to see counterintuitive ideas. But at the same time, don't be contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian. And don't get stuck in the in the zone. Or in the lane, don't get stuck in the lane of being contrarian. Reid Hoffman, he's a guy, he's a billionaire venture capitalist. Guy from Greylock Partners, he founded, he founded LinkedIn. So if you've heard of him, that's probably where you've heard of him. He's attributed of using this phrase.

• 4:30Jocko Willink?

  Encouraging people to have strong beliefs loosely held. Right, so you have very strong belief, but you don't hold on to it. And I think this is a good way to look at being a contrarian. Is like, you're gonna think the opposite, but you're not gonna just think that way. Try hard to think of new ideas, but don't get married to them. To be able to look at a problem, be like, hey, maybe we could do this a totally different way. You know what's a great way to start off with contrarian thinking? When you're trying to solve a problem? Is to just say, why do we even need to solve this problem? Like, why do we even need to do this? You ever heard someone, actually was, who was I with?

• 5:15Jocko Willink?

  I was with Dr. Luke. And we were talking about passing the knee shield, you know, guard jujitsu. If you're not a jujitsu player. And he was saying, he was talking to Jeff Glover. And Jeff Glover was like, how do I, you know, he's like, Jeff, how do I get past this? And he puts him in the knee shield and then Jeff just steps back. All of a sudden, there's no more knee shield, it's gone.

• 5:37Jocko Willink?

  Why would you, why do you, he's, that's the answer that Jeff is giving. Why, why do you even need to get by that thing? Go a different way. So if you're looking at a problem, if you're looking at something that needs planning, if you're looking at something that needs a solution, and you wait a second, why are we even trying to solve this right now? You ever have that, you know, you, you got the guy who's trying to, uh, figure out how to pick the lock to the door? And then someone else just like slides open the window because it's open. You know, it's like that kind of thing. Why are you trying to solve this?

• 6:08Jocko Willink?

  The way that you see this is by being detached, by taking a contrarian look at something.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, here's another good little contrarian statement to ask yourself. What if this was already done? Would we be worried about it? Would we be thinking about it? Right? What, what would we be, if this wasn't, if we weren't focused on this right now, if this just disappeared, what would we be focused on? All of a sudden you say, wait a second, we're focused on something very small that's right in front of us, but it's not going to really have a big impact over a long, long period of time. So those are some questions to ask yourself to try and break yourself out of normalized thinking, to try and get yourself in a contrarian mindset. You know, do we even need to do this? Is there a totally different way to do this? What if this was already done? Those are some questions you can ask yourself.

• 6:56Jocko Willink?

  And if you, so that you can think like a contrarian and you'll see new perspectives.

• 7:03Jocko Willink?

  But like I said, don't get stuck there. Don't be a person that is just going against the grain, just so they can go against the grain. That's annoying.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:12Jocko Willink?

  It's annoying.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  I kind of like the idea of, like I said, counterintuitive. Those are, those are hard to find. When you find them, they're more efficient, they're better.

• 7:26Jocko Willink?

  And sometimes you can find those solutions by thinking in a contrarian manner. So there you go. My topic for the day.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Ronald. Counterintuitive, like there's a recently kind of went down a little rabbit hole with like decision making. And one that that was counterintuitive is that more choices is better.

• 7:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  So you know, like, and you know, like most counterintuitive things, when someone can effectively explain it, you're like, okay, that makes sense. Not intuitive, but it makes sense with the explanation. But yeah, the choices thing is a big one. If you have like three choices or two choices, that's an easy decision.

• 8:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Or it tends to be an easier decision. But then, so there was this experiment where I think this is what it was. It was people from the Ukraine, I think. They grabbed them. They said, what's the differences here? And they had all these different brands of soda. And they're like, it's like, how many choices do you have here? They said, one choice.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  They're like, why is it one choice? Because you have a choice of soda. It does like the differences between all this soda or whatever is like, there's no choice there. That's just soda. And then they said, okay, they have a bunch of sodas. They have an orange juice and they have a milk. How many choices? Three choices. So they kind of went down like, why is this one choice or different brands? They taste different or whatever. But in their mind, I guess, like it has a lot to do with where you're from, your environment, all this stuff where that they didn't, didn't present as a bunch of choices. Cause that's not the routine in regards to soda. So it's like, interesting.

• 8:54Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's, there's all kinds of, when it comes to having multiple choices, it is certainly much easier to make a quick decision between two choices. Is a lot, and there's a, there's a law for this. There's like one of those theoretical laws and I can't remember what it is. But like, if you have two choices, the amount of time it takes you to select between A and B compared to A, B and C.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:20Jocko Willink?

  Is a big exponential factor.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:23Jocko Willink?

  So you want to minimize the number of choices that you have in a stressful situation. Because it's going to make, make it a lot easier for you to make a very quick decision. As opposed to if you have four, three choices or four choices.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:37Jocko Willink?

  Even on the battlefield, we have like a set number of immediate action drills that we're going to follow. We'd have thirty eight plays.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, we got like twelve.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:47Jocko Willink?

  And they're all pretty simple.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:50Jocko Willink?

  So, yes, minimize the number of choices. 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 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.

• 10:31Jocko Willink?

  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 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.