Commitments Scare People. And This is a Commitment.

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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?

  Def reset 2025. This is a commitment. So. A commitment. Commitments scare people. They make people scared. But this is a commitment that's gonna make you better. Now. I was thinking about the commitments. I've made in my life. One of them, when I was pretty young.

• 0:23Jocko Willink?

  I wanted to join the Navy. I wanted to be a SEAL.

• 0:27Jocko Willink?

  And you go and talk, I went and talked to the recruiter.

• 0:31Jocko Willink?

  And you get presented, okay, here's what it's gonna take. You wanna be a SEAL? Cool. Yeah, no problem. And the recruiter, of course, they're saying, oh, you're gonna make a great SEAL. They have no idea. They, they don't think you're gonna make it, but they're not gonna say that. Hey, you're gonna make a great SEAL. Here's all it's gonna take.

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  Sign this piece of paper.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  Six year commitment of your life.

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  Six year commitment. By the way, I'm 18. So this is a third of my life. Six years is a long time when you're 18. By the way, 80% attrition rate. By the way, people get injured. And don't make it, or you go to war, you get wounded, you get killed. You're going on deployments. You, you don't have any idea what's gonna happen.

• 1:15Jocko Willink?

  But. I knew.

• 1:18Jocko Willink?

  That that's what I had to do. To get where I wanted to be. I had to make that commitment. Now, what's nice is when you're in the military and you sign that line. Guess what? You raise your hand, you make the commitment, you literally swear an oath.

• 1:34Jocko Willink?

  That is a commitment. So.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  It can be nerve wracking when people get asked to make a commitment. There are a lot of things like this, right? Where, look, you ever known someone's getting married? Yes. You ever seen someone get nervous about it? Yes, I have. Yeah. So that happens. Why? Cause it's a huge commitment. Some people back away from the whole thing. Leave people at the altar. Hey, I'm out. It just wasn't gonna happen. So. That's because there's a commitment there.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  And people are scared of commitment, even with something like the death reset, which is a commitment for the month of January. It's a commitment. And sometimes people get scared of that, even a 30 day commitment. Look, not a six year commitment, like joining the Navy, not a lifetime commitment, like getting married, but a 30 day commitment, people are scared of that. I'm kind of glad that they're a little bit scared of it because if they were just throwing the commitment out there and not being worried about breaking the commitment, then they don't care about it. It doesn't really matter.

• 2:40Jocko Willink?

  But people also put little qualifiers in there around trying to get better. Like, maybe I'll go to the gym tomorrow. You know what I'm saying? Maybe that maybe can be pretty big or I might go to jujitsu in the morning. Have you ever had someone say that to you?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 3:00Jocko Willink?

  I might be there, bro. Don't tell me you might be somewhere. You either show up or don't show up.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06Jocko Willink?

  Hey, look, if you got a flight that you're landing at nine 30 in the morning and open mat is at 11 and any delay is going to cause you to get jammed up and you say, hey, look, I got a flight. I might make it. Okay, I'll give you an exception. But if you're just going home on a Friday and I'm asking you, are you going to open mat on Saturday? And you say, I might be there. I got a problem with you.

• 3:29Jocko Willink?

  I'll try to make that practice. What is this? Right? So people build in these little excuses.

• 3:36Jocko Willink?

  And with the death reset, we don't want to let that happen. This is something that's going to improve every aspect of your life. It's going to make you stronger. It's going to make you healthier. It's going to make you smarter. It's just going to make you better. It's going to make you better. But in order to get there, you have to commit to it. You have to sign the line.

• 3:56Jocko Willink?

  You have to tell your friends, hey, you don't bring freaking Doritos to my house because I'm not eating them.

• 4:04Jocko Willink?

  You have to get the app, download the app, get it. Put it on the front page of your phone.

• 4:11Jocko Willink?

  You got to get rid of the junk food in your house. Do that tonight, by the way. Get rid of it.

• 4:17Jocko Willink?

  Hey, it's kind of a waste of money. Shut up. Get it out of there.

• 4:23Jocko Willink?

  If you don't have an alarm clock, get one. Get one. Now, you got 14 alarm clocks on your phone, by the way. Yeah. But get a, get a manual one. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. Get make, I'm gonna get up. When this thing goes off, I'm gonna get up.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  Get a set of dumbbells.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  I told you I got those 25 pound dumbbells. You did the right thing. They're just in my, they're just in my office. Yep. Bro, I can just knock out some curls, some tricep extensions. Yeah. Some thrusters. Yeah. I'm, I got a whole new thing I'm contemplating. I haven't fully designed it yet. But. NSW. No sweat workout. No sweat. No sweat workout, which is, seems very contrary because you know I sweat. I sweat quite a bit. And there's also a thing from Colonel David Hackworth. Don't try and find the sweatless solution. But. Let me tell you something. The no sweat, the NSW. No sweat workout. What does that mean? Well, let's face it.

• 5:25Jocko Willink?

  If you can do some work and not break into a sweat because you got a meeting or you got a, you won't have time to take a shower or any of that. So you're gonna do 15 thrusters. Just boom. And then you're gonna wait half an hour. You're gonna do another Zoom call. You're gonna do 20 thrusters. You didn't even break a sweat. You got working. You will feel those. Now, throughout the day, you did 100. Yeah. Think about that. Yeah. That's the way, I had somebody ask me on Twitter, you know, wouldn't it be better if people were just like out swinging an axe or plowing the field or digging trenches? Wouldn't that be better than working out? Yes. It would be. I would love to do that. Most people would love to be doing that. But you don't get to do that.

• 6:07Jocko Willink?

  You gotta sit around. You gotta sit in an office. Hey, if you're out working construction, you need to do less lifting than someone that's working in an office, for sure. Cause you're, if you're, you work at a moving company, when you're working at a moving company, tell me about it. As far as, did you, did you de-escalate some of your workouts because you were tired?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, a little bit, but also, yeah, it, it does take the place of working out, physical activity. Yes, face it, and that's really what a workout is. It's like a manufactured physical activity.

• 6:37Jocko Willink?

  Have you, have you ever done the things where you count your steps?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do that now.

• 6:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you do that now? So, that's a real thing, right?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, people used to just walk around all day.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  Now they don't do that. Now they take an elevator.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:52Jocko Willink?

  Just the elevator. Cause like if you didn't take the elevator and you had to go up eight stories to go to your job, and you walk down eight stories to go to lunch, and you walk back up after lunch, you walk back down. It's just all day, you're doing eight stories. That's a lot of little lunches.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully. And the, the, the counting steps thing is exactly what you're saying where now our life, if you think of like a normal life, I don't mean in a real generic way, you're kind of made to be doing stuff. Not crazy stuff necessarily.

• 7:23Jocko Willink?

  Not necessarily.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  But just doing stuff.

• 7:24Jocko Willink?

  Might have that capacity.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yes, every once in a while, yeah, yeah. And really, when you formulate like a full protocol, it's gonna have kind of everything, but the, really the baseline is gonna be like, like this kind of stuff. How many steps are you taking? You know, it's like, even like, you know, you talked to a lot of experts. Again, this is general, really general, because with every workout, there's like a goal that people have, and everyone's goal is different, right? So, I know that, but it's like, what are, what are you doing just daily? What's your daily activity?

• 7:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  So it's like steps. Yeah, usually, a normal person be walking around, working, doing stuff, going here, going there, going up the stairs, coming back down, like just kind of sort of all day. But nowadays, you know, especially, you know, you sit in an office job, work at home, right? You're not going nowhere. You're taking 10 steps and that's kind of it, you know? And it, and it creates this like, Really unhealthy scenario, you know? So yeah, if you can replicate that essentially, yeah, I get it. Manufacture it. That's what lifting weights is. It's manufacturing like doing like strenuous. So, um, so, yeah, and it, it helps a lot.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to be doing in the app. Like challenges, basically not challenges, but tasks.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:32Jocko Willink?

  Right? Tasks like, hey, do this right now. Do this within the next hour. And it, most of those, my plan is going to do no sweat workouts. Right? Where you're not going to break a sweat, but you're going to get a little something, something.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:45Jocko Willink?

  Right? Some of them I'm thinking is even, you know, like stretching.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  So these are the kind of things we're trying to get movement into our lives and get thought into our lives. Some of those tasks can be thought experiments or relationship building maneuvers. Right? All kinds of good stuff.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Bro, that's like, I mean, to say that's deeper than you probably know, maybe, maybe not. But to put, to reintroduce thought like into your, because really that's really what it is. The reason you let your body slip because freaking you stopped thinking about it as much. Or the reason like the relationship is you stopped being conscious of certain parts of that relationship. Like the thought, the element of thought has gone a little bit. So yes.

• 9:26Jocko Willink?

  And it is also very important to remember. So I had this concept of squeezing your brain. You, you remember talking about that, right? So you gotta squeeze your brain sometimes. You gotta squeeze your brain because if you, if you don't squeeze your brain, nothing's going to come out of it. You gotta sometimes sit down and think about something. I did this the other day, I was working on a story. Well, I had a story like, like the, the most, the most, like the seed of a story, nothing else. And I had it for a few months and I went, I, so on the day after Thanksgiving. What's everyone doing on the day after Thanksgiving? Look, we lifted, we rolled, all good, we're happy. But we also, there's no calls, there's no clients. So I didn't have work. So guess what I did?

• 10:11Jocko Willink?

  Squeeze the brain, took that little seed of a story, turned it into a whole, a whole story. Right? And then a couple of days later presented it. And the funny, the guys I presented to, when did you do this? And I said, Thanksgiving after, or day after Thanksgiving afternoon.

• 10:25Jocko Willink?

  And they're like, you did all this then? I'm like, yeah, cuz I sat down for the first time in six months and had the opportunity to think, to force myself to think. So we're gonna do some of that too in Def Reset. There's little ideas, there's little seeds that you have, you gotta water those things. You gotta plow the field, you gotta give them nutrients. So you're gonna have to think during Def Reset, get a notebook for that. Get a notebook so you can write down your daily tasks, get a notebook so you can write down your schedules, you can put aside some time to think about the things you're supposed to be thinking about. Not just about the thoughts that get put into your head,

• 11:02Jocko Willink?

  but the thoughts you create.

• 11:05Jocko Willink?

  So get that.

• 11:08Jocko Willink?

  Get a pull-up bar, by the way. If you can get one thing, get a pull-up bar. And by the way, a pull-up bar is $12 at Home Depot, cuz all it is is a freaking piece of pipe. An inch and a half or a two-inch piece of pipe and some string, some 550 cord hanging up on the beams in your garage, hanging up between two trees in your yard, hanging up on the fence post that's a little bit tall. There's a, hanging up in the parking garage in the condo that you, the apartment that you live at. You could find a little place to mount a pull-up bar and you can get every workout that you need.

• 11:40Jocko Willink?

  And you're gonna do all these things, but all these things, you're gonna commit to doing them. You're gonna commit to the daily disciplines, waking up early, commit to getting after it in the morning, commit to it. Commit to it. I know you're scared of it, commit to it. I was scared, 18 years old, signing a piece of paper for six years of my freaking life. Let's go, let's go. Commit to it. Commit to prioritize and execute, commit to hydration, commit to clean fuel, commit to no sugar-coated lies, commit to the reading and writing back to the book and commit to remembering.

• 12:19Jocko Willink?

  And also commit to 100 burpees or 10 minutes worth of burpees.

• 12:26Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're doing. And here's the thing, everyone, everyone, everyone knows with 100% certainty, 100% certainty that this will make you better in every aspect of your life, every aspect of your life.

• 12:41Jocko Willink?

  But it takes discipline, it takes will, and it takes commitment. Everyone is scared of commitment.

• 12:51Jocko Willink?

  Overcome that fear. Put the stake in the ground. Join me and the rest of these troopers on the path. That's what we're doing. So go to thedefreset.com. This is free. This is free. This is, this is free. This is just freedom is what it is. Free guided workouts from Jason Kalipa at Train Hard. Free leadership lessons from Echelon Front. Free nutrition guidance from Ashley at Jocko Fuel. The app is free. The tracker is free. By the way, you can win a $10,000 freaking home gym, which will change your whole life. That's free. It's all free. In fact, it's not, it's not just free. But it will give you more freedom than you ever thought possible.

• 13:38Jocko Willink?

  I guess there is a price. The price is discipline and the price is commitment.

• 13:46Jocko Willink?

  So let's take control and let's commit for 2025. Thedefreset.com. We'll see you there.