DEF 06: You Can't Control Other People. You Can Only Control You.

When we fail to do what we are supposed to do, it hurts us to admit it's our fault. 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?

  Discipline equals freedom. Episode six, sitting here with Echo Charles.

• 0:07Jocko Willink?

  A blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Words, words, words, excuses, excuses, excuses. Why do we do that? Why do we do that? I can tell you a big reason, a very prominent reason, why we're making excuses, why we're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's because of our ego. When something goes wrong, when we don't do what we're supposed to do, when we fail

• 0:32Jocko Willink?

  in terms of our discipline on a daily basis, when we fail, when we drop the ball, when we don't get it done,

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  it hurts our ego to admit that it was us. So we use a bunch of words and a bunch of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And sometimes we blame inanimate objects, which is kind of comical and kind of ridiculous, right? People blame inanimate objects for their own shortfalls in life. Okay? The donut somehow snuck into my mouth.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:05Jocko Willink?

  It's the donut's fault that I'm freaking just, I got powdered sugar all over my face right now. It's the donut's fault. Or the alarm clock decided it wasn't going to wake me up today. That's the, the alarm clock didn't go off. An inanimate object. But it's the, it's the, it's the alarm clock's fault, not mine. You've heard that before, right?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:26Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the bed covers wrestled me to keep me in bed. I could, you ever heard someone say, I couldn't get out of bed today?

• 1:34Speaker 01

  It was too comfortable, or it was too cold, or it was too warm, you know, something like this.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  They at least, I at least have heard someone many times say, I couldn't get out of bed today. I couldn't get out of bed today. Look, was it the pillow? Was it the warmth? Was it the whatever? I don't know what it was, but I know that they're telling me that their bed caused them not to get up. They're blaming their shortfall and their failure in life on an inanimate object. So this is totally freaking ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. And everyone kind of knows that's a little bit ridiculous. So what do we do? We tend more often than not to blame other people. Other people. Because those are, those are people. They can make, they can make things happen. They can make adjustments. Right? It, it sounds a lot worse to get beat by a donut than to get beat by a person. Right?

• 2:24Jocko Willink?

  So more often than not, we blame other people. We blame our spouse. We blame our boss. We blame our subordinates. We blame our coworkers. We blame our peers. We blame our friends. We blame our enemies. We blame our kids. We blame our neighbor. We blame everybody about what our shortfalls are. It's everybody else's fault. Because they didn't show up. I, they didn't pick me up. They made me late. They were late. They needed me. The boss called me. They didn't tell me what was going on. They didn't tell me I had to be here. They, they, they, they, they. That's what we're doing. Just excuses. Excuses, excuses, excuses. Here's the thing about other people.

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  And here's the thing about blaming other people. It's a lie. It's a lie. You're lying to yourself. Here, here's the deal. You can't control other people and you shouldn't for one second think that you can.

• 3:17Jocko Willink?

  You shouldn't. You shouldn't put any reliance on your success on some other person's behavior. Because you can't control them. You don't know what they're gonna do. People are freaking crazy. Think of the shortfalls you've got. And you don't think other people are gonna let you down? You don't think somebody's gonna show up late? You don't think someone's gonna call you with an emergency?

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  Some panic situation? You don't think that's gonna happen? It's gonna happen. You can't control them. The only person you can control is you. Or at least the person that you better control is you. I'm going to the book right now. I'm going to the Discipline Equals Freedom field manual. Let me tell you about, a little bit about this. You can't control other people. You can't make them what you want them to be. You can't make them who you want them to be. The only person you can control is you. So focus on making yourself who you want to be. Faster, stronger, smarter, more humble, less ego.

• 4:22Jocko Willink?

  Discipline your body, free your mind.

• 4:28Jocko Willink?

  I used to say that a lot in the early podcast, free your mind.

• 4:34Jocko Willink?

  It's, I think when I said it, when I would say free your mind, I don't think it landed with a lot of people at the time. I think I've gotten, gotten better at articulating what that means. Free your mind, open your mind. I think I use open your mind now more often than free your mind. The same, I mean the same thing. I think it's, I think it's easier for people to understand because people understand closed mind. They understand that if I have a closed mind, I don't want, there's no new ideas getting in there. Open mind, they go, oh, okay, I understand what that means. That's the opposite of a closed mind. But free your mind, they don't understand what it means. It's hard to comprehend what it means to have your mind not be free.

• 5:21Jocko Willink?

  It's a little harder to comprehend that. When I say your mind is not free, it's a little bit easier. But to say like, oh, free mind versus what slave mind? Yeah, trapped. Yeah, trapped mind, something like that. It's, it's hard to, it's hard to truly comprehend what that means, even at a surface level. So I've started saying, open your mind more, but it's the same thing. When I wrote this book, free your mind. That's what I meant. Open your mind up, be able to comprehend, be able to see, be able to understand more. That's what our goal is.

• 5:55Jocko Willink?

  Discipline your body, body, free your mind, get up early and go. Get after it and you'll become the person you want to be.

• 6:04Jocko Willink?

  And you become that person through one small decision at a time.

• 6:12Jocko Willink?

  Isn't that kind of strange to think about? One small decision at a time. One little decision at a time. And who makes those decisions? Who makes those decisions? I do. You make those decisions. I make those decisions. We have control. And listen, can you get yourself in a situation where it might take some time to get out of? Yep, we can, we can be there. I've told this story many times. My first deployment to Iraq, we move into these old broken down buildings on a, on a former Iraqi military base. And what do we do when we move in there? The day we move in there, we start squaring them away. We start fixing things. We start building them out.

• 6:54Jocko Willink?

  I built myself a desk and a bed and partitions between other rooms for where other guys were sleeping. That's what we're doing. We're immediately squaring that stuff away. We're immediately making a habitat that we want to live in. The moment from moving in there to start to improve the situation was zero seconds. As soon as I walked into this place where I gotta live, I'm trying to fix it, stuff and square it away and move it forward.

• 7:21Jocko Willink?

  A couple, only a month into that deployment, we went and did a, a hit on a building. And I get in there and there's the, the kitchen. What you'd call the kitchen, which is basically one big room, the kitchen, the living room, the dining room were all kind of one big room. And in that room, about four feet from the counter where the sink was where you would prepare food, was the trough where you would go to the bathroom.

• 7:51Jocko Willink?

  And there was multiple generations living there.

• 7:55Jocko Willink?

  And I remember thinking to myself, if I moved into this place today, in one second, I would be fixing this to where I wouldn't have to prepare my food and go to the bathroom within range of each other. Within, within three feet of each other. That's just not cool. I would have started fixing them.

• 8:12Jocko Willink?

  That's an attitude. Could I have fixed it all immediately that day? No, you're gonna have, it's gonna take time to build that stuff up. But I would have fixed that small problem. I would have fixed that small problem immediately. So when we are in a situation, there is a way to get out. Can you do it overnight? And sometimes it seems overwhelming. You might find yourself right now in a situation where you don't like your job. You don't like where you're living. You don't like what's going on in your life. And it might seem like, oh, how am I ever going to get out of here?

• 8:44Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna take time.

• 8:47Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever see the movie The Great Escape? Classic war movie. And they're try- there's a bunch of American soldiers and some Brits and whatnot and they're trapped in a Nazi war camp, prisoner of war camp. And they come up with plans and they're trying to break out of there. For you, I guess the Shawshank Redemption, right? These guys don't like the situation that they're living in. What do they do? They start to come up with a plan to get out of there. By the way, that's not only a plan to get out of there, it's also how they're gonna stay sane. It's also how they're gonna look at the world and, and, and, and dig up some kind of control over their life.

• 9:27Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you can do in your life. The minute that you say the guards are never gonna let me out of here and the judicial system was bad and I got screwed over by my wife framed me and that's why I'm locked up in this prison. Cause that's what they're all saying.

• 9:45Jocko Willink?

  But you can do something about it and you take a little tiny step. You take a little tiny step, you take out the little, uh, what'd they use, the mineral hammer?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Oh, on Shawshank?

• 9:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, on Shawshank.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a rock hammer?

• 9:57Jocko Willink?

  Little rock hammer, little tiny rock hammer, so he could look at minerals. And carve a hole in the wall over months and years, years.

• 10:08Jocko Willink?

  Years. That's what we're all doing.

• 10:12Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're all doing, making little decisions, not just making little decisions, then taking action that backs up those decisions. And you gotta keep that strategic vision in mind.

• 10:26Jocko Willink?

  You gotta keep the long-term vision in mind, cause you think about it, what do you wanna do at night? You're in prison, you're at night. Do you really wanna sneak around and have to pick away at this thing quietly for three hours to carve out one quarter of an inch? You don't feel like doing that, but it'd be easier just to lay down. But, but he had strategic vision of how he's gonna get out of there. That's the way our lives are.

• 10:50Jocko Willink?

  We gotta take these small actions over time. And if you blame other people and you blame other things, you're not gonna take any action.

• 11:00Jocko Willink?

  So get control of yourself.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  Get control of yourself, come up with a plan and take action. Daily.

• 11:14Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're doing. And that's the discipline.

• 11:20Jocko Willink?

  For more of it, go to thedefreset.com, go to jockofuel.com, originusa.com, echelonfront.com, jocko store.com. You know the deal.

• 11:32Jocko Willink?

  It all starts with discipline.