Standard Directive 018: False Motivation Is Better Than No Motivation

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  When I was going through basic SEAL training, we were getting absolutely crushed by our instructors at 2 o'clock in the morning. And I forget what we did wrong, but we messed something up, or we failed to do something, and we were paying for it. We were doing sprints up and over the sand berm, and we were doing buddy carries, and we were doing bear crawls, and we were wet and sandy, and it was a gut check. And this was after a standard day of SEAL training, getting crushed all day anyways. And some of the guys were feeling it.

• 0:42Jocko Willink?

  And the class kinda grew silent as we went from exercise to exercise, and punishment to punishment. And then one of the instructors yelled at us. And he said, "False motivation is better than no motivation." And I remember thinking to myself momentarily that I didn't agree with that. That seemed actually kinda weak. If you aren't really, truly motivated, it seems weak to fake it.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  Because my whole life, I always had an aversion to fake people. Fake people with their fake way of talking, and their fake way of acting, and their fake voice, and their fake attitude. I never liked people like this. And now, I had this SEAL instructor telling us that if we weren't truly motivated, then just to fake it. But you know what? He was right. He was right. You see, I was already fired up. And some of the other guys were fired up as well, but not everybody was. And that had us as a class dragging.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  But then, the guys that weren't truly motivated, they started to fake it. They started to yell, "Hoo-ya!", and they started to pretend like they were fired up. And all of a sudden, the mood of the class changed. It went from dreary, and dragging, and negative, and people started to get fired up. And they started to yell louder. And the next thing you know, we were having a good time.

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  And the instructor was right.

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  If you're not motivated to do something, pretend that you are. Fake it.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  Because false motivation is better than no motivation.