Jocko Underground: Start Walking | Influencing Toxic People

Improving a toxic work environment. Getting daughters into Jiu Jitsu. Finding success as a new leader. The pains and grind of a 911 dispatch operator. Taking Extreme Ownership with your kids. 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. We're on number 62. This is number 62. I'm sitting here with Echo Charles.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  I was talking to a guy at camp, pretty much been to been to every camp that I think I've been to. Jiu Jitsu camp, this is by the way, Origin Emerging Camp. And good guy, we've, we've always hung out and I've kind of watched his growth and journey, for lack of a better word, over the past few years. Anyways, this time, shows up to camp. We're talking and he's going through a really hard time. Like a surprisingly, you know, when you just, you see someone on a trajectory? And you're watching their trajectory and like, oh, this is a good trajectory. You're, and then all of a sudden they're just off that trajectory. Like,

• 0:50Jocko Willink?

  it's like the space shuttle Columbia. Like you think everything's going good and it like, it just, it just goes sideways. So that's what's going on. Um, he's a former military guy. He's been out of the military for a pretty long time. But you know, he started his own business and he's doing pretty well, but you know, it was a lot of hard work, like a tough business, a lot of hard work. Kids, the whole nine yards, everything's, I mean, this is just the trajectory. Like, oh yeah, you're doing well. You've kind of pivoted a little bit, made some adjustments. You got the wife, you got a bunch of kids. And if you would have asked me, if you would have said, you know, where do you think my life is right now? I would have been like, okay, well, you probably expanded your business a little bit more. You probably, you know, this is,

• 1:29Jocko Willink?

  but it was like, no, um, wife wants divorce, uh, like just, just total

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  uh, change, right? Just a drastic change in direction in his life. So as we're talking through it, and we spent like an hour talking. As we're talking to it through it, like at one point, he's like, you know, I might have to sell the business, you know, because they built up this business and he might, in order to settle with her, he might have to sell it, just like sell the business. And which to me was weird because if you sell the business, you have no more income, you know, so it's not like, you can sell. And he goes, no, well, he goes, I'll probably have to sell the business, give her a big chunk of the payout. And then I'll have to work at Home Depot just to pay child support and I don't know what I'm gonna do.

• 2:22Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I just can't figure out, you know, he's like, I'm a smart guy. I think about it, but I just can't figure out what to do. And so I'm sitting there listening. I'm thinking about it for a while and um.

• 2:32Jocko Willink?

  Finally, I said, you know, I'm not smart. But. I know what I would do.

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  And he was like, well, what? I said, if I was in your situation, I know what I would do. And he was like, what? And I said, I would start walking. And he's like, well, you know, what do you mean? And I said, here, let me explain. This is what's going on with you right now. You. Just woke up like you just came to consciousness and you're, you don't know where you are and you're in the middle of the woods.

• 3:01Jocko Willink?

  And you're looking around and you see trees and it's like. Thick. You can't even tell where the sun is, right? But you, you know, you're in the woods. You don't know where to go. And so what I would do is I would start walking. I would just pick, pick like a direction and I would start walking and as I'm walking, I would eventually find a little terrain that's going downhill and I'd follow that terrain downhill and eventually I'd hit a stream. And the stream would actually be attributable into a, a, a river and then from the river, I'd follow the river until I'd hit a road. And when I hit a road, eventually I'd follow the road to a town somewhere and I'd figure things out, right? I figured out where I was. And I'd be back and I'd be able to get food and I'd put everything together.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  But I said, what you're doing, and this is what I could tell from this conversation. I said, what you're doing is you're just standing there looking around.

• 3:52Jocko Willink?

  And you're trying to figure out where the town is, where civilization is. And you're waiting. Trying to guess and looking around and looking for clues, but there's no freaking clues. You're in the middle of the woods. There's no clues. There's no, there's no clues, literally.

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  You have to go and find it. Civilization, the town, the thing is not going to come to you. You have to start walking. So that's what I would do. And look, there's a, obviously, there's a hint of like iterative decision making, right? You don't know where you are, you don't know what to do. Start moving in some direction and that'll give you some clues or some indication or some immediate feedback about where you are. And you can start assembling a better picture of what's happening. So I know I'm not, might not be the smartest person in the world and you're smart, but you're not going to be able to do anything without doing something. So you're going to have to start walking.

• 4:51Jocko Willink?

  And then we, I went back to this Home Depot piece and I said, listen, you know, I've, if I was in your shoe, okay, I could get a job at Home Depot. And I was like, and you know what? I got my job at Home Depot. My aisle would be the freaking squared away aisle. And after like a week and a half, it'd be the most squared away aisle in Home Depot. And I said, in a few weeks, the store manager would look at me and he'd be like, hey, can you run the, these three aisles? They'd give me three aisles and then they'd give me seven aisles and then they'd give me 12 aisles and then they'd give me the front of the store. And then eventually they'd be like, hey, can you just run this store? Cause I'd be busting my ass and I'd be making things happen. I'd be building relationships with people. And then eventually they'd be like, hey, we want you to run this district with all

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  the Home Depots in this district. And then they'd go, we want you to take this region. And eventually they'd be like, hey, we want you to be the CEO of Home Depot. And we're laughing, right? Cause I'm not that arrogant, but we were, I was making a point. But I told this guy, I was like, look, you see working at Home Depot as a punishment and I see it as an opportunity. As an opportunity. And by the way, Home Depot, there's like, you've heard of Home Depot millionaires, right? It's a real thing.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Well, no, what is it?

• 6:05Jocko Willink?

  Home Depot millionaires, like in the early days of Home Depot, you could take stock options when Home Depot wasn't that big. And a lot of people that were cashiers and, you know, cleaners in the aisles, they took stock and, you know, now they're millionaires.

• 6:21Jocko Willink?

  But that reframing, the way you're looking at things and seeing opportunities, instead of seeing punishments and instead of seeing downturns in your life, seeing opportunities.

• 6:37Jocko Willink?

  It's just gonna have such a much better impact on the way you, where you get to. Cause you know, go into like the, you know, you're Jordan Peterson talking about like aiming and you gotta take aim, right? Well, this is a version of that, right? When I get in there and I think, hey, I'm gonna make this aisle look awesome.

• 7:01Jocko Willink?

  Look, look at what I'm aiming at. I'm aiming to improve and get better and do a good job. If I go in there, this sucks. What am I aiming at? I'm aiming at this sucking. That's actually where I'm gonna, you know, the same thing we, when we used to do a offensive driving. And when you're driving a car, if you start looking at like, if you gotta go between obstacles and you start looking at one of those obstacles, you're gonna hit that obstacle. That's, you know, there's like a tendency that you're gonna hit the obstacle, you're gonna go where you're, what you're looking at. Same thing with this. If you think this job is gonna suck, well, guess what? The job is actually gonna suck now. And you're not gonna do it well.

• 7:45Jocko Willink?

  And you're not gonna get promoted and you're not gonna give, be given more responsibility. You're not gonna be given any opportunities. So just be careful of that. I think that's a good lesson for everybody. This happens to, this happened when I got to SEAL Team One. Back in the day, I got to SEAL Team One, they like clean toilets. I'm like, cool. Let me rock and roll. I'm gonna do this really well. Do you think I wanted to clean toilets? Of course not. But I was like, okay, that's what we're doing. Let's do this. At one of my friends, had a different team made like his web gear into like custodial attack mode. He put like, had like a holster with cleaner in it, another one like a toilet brush, you know? He's like running around ready to respond. You know, he's having fun with it.

• 8:31Jocko Willink?

  And if he was just poking fun at it, it would have been like, well, that might be a risky move. But he was doing it like, no, I'm ready to go. Like he, he actually was fired up about it. So embrace it. So that's what I'm saying. If you're in a spot and you don't know what to do, and you're not sure where to go, and you don't know where the right direction is, start walking. And start looking for opportunities. And they'll show up. That's my word of the day. Echo Charles.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, agree. They in some people talk about that where it's like, yeah. He's far more ahead than it's because it's not some people they look at it. Oh, my gosh, I gotta start all over, whatever. And a common that thing that I've heard is you're technically not starting all over because of all of your past experience and knowledge or whatever. So even waking up in the woods like that's perfect. Such a perfect. You ever watched the movie Memento?

• 9:23Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I I did, but my memory of it's kind of vague, oddly enough, right?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So and the way they present that movie is like in backwards clips, which is kind of part. They try to mimic his thought process and the way his brain works because he doesn't have short term memory. So. He'll just sort of come to just like in the woods or whatever, and something's either going on or he's at a certain place and he doesn't know how he got there. So he kind of refers to his tattoos as like notes. So that's kind of like in your analogy where. The tattoos is your past experience and knowledge, you know, you can look at them and whatever. You don't have any assets. You don't have like. Everything that you lost is gone. It's gone.

• 10:03Jocko Willink?

  But you have knowledge, which is more powerful.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Exactly right. Only the knowledge in your head, though, you don't have like the business. You don't have, you know, the access to all that. So that's gone. That's like. The guy's memories, you know, so those are gone. He knows only what he can do moving forward and he can use all the knowledge that he has tattooed. So it's kind of the same deal in a way. That's what that's how it struck me anyway.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  So, yeah, he's kind of starting ahead.

• 10:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, definitely starting ahead.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:27Jocko Willink?

  And starting with no baggage.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:29Jocko Willink?

  You know, which is another way to look at it, right?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Age and kids and stuff like that. Those are factors or whatever, but yeah, man, that's a good such a good way to look at it where. Don't. When you say avoiding like the driving thing where you're like, what'd you call it? Offensive?

• 10:46Jocko Willink?

  Offensive driving. Don't look at the obstacle.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's like you can't actively avoid an obstacle. Just don't look for the obstacle. Look for something else like look for how you said, opportunity or, you know.

• 10:55Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Drivable terrain. Have you heard me talk about that?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Drivable terrain.

• 10:59Jocko Willink?

  Drivable terrain. Yeah. You're driving. You're like a accident ahead of you.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:03Jocko Willink?

  And you're just looking for drivable terrain. What? Where can I take this vehicle where I'm not going to die?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:08Jocko Willink?

  And that's a real positive thing. So that's the another thing. You start walking in the woods. You're looking for drivable terrain. You're looking for a way out of there.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:16Jocko Willink?

  You don't know where it is. How can you tell? In the middle of the woods?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels like the challenge there. You have to have some mental discipline is to like, avoid thinking about all things you've lost.

• 11:28Jocko Willink?

  Yes, you definitely don't want to focus on that.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  In fact, that's like, kind of everything, right? When something like happens like that, it's like you, because literally you just had it last week, and now it's gone. It's like you're so used to having something, and then it's gone. It's like, bro, how can you avoid thinking about all this stuff you lost? You know? So I guess that would be one of the big challenges as well. But if you can maintain, it's kind of the same thing. Don't focus on those obstacles or the bad part or whatever, focus on the opportunity, how you say.

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  That's good. Definitely. Uh, when we had Jim Searlsley on the podcast, who was the Vietnam guy that was wounded really bad, lost both of his legs and lost one arm. And his, I will never forget, it wasn't on the podcast, unfortunately, we were just talking afterwards, you know, about how he had lived this incredible life. He'd done a bunch of real estate stuff, owned a roofing company. Like, how do you, you know, you come home from Vietnam, and you go to nine months of rehab, learn how to use a wheelchair, learn how to like survive without legs and only having one arm. And he gets on with that, and he just like carried on with his life.

• 12:36Jocko Willink?

  Like, literally carried on with his life as if, and when I talked to him about it, and we talked, we talked about Louis Puller Jr., and they were in rehab at the same time. And Louis Puller Jr. ended up killing himself, and Jim Searlsley ended up living, and he unfortunately died recently, but he lived a really incredible life. You know, had kids and businesses. And when I asked him what the difference was, and he was like, he said that Louis... So, that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen...

• 13:19Jocko Willink?

  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 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

• 14:04Jocko Willink?

  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.