Jocko Underground: The Cure to Being Overwhelmed, Inadequate, and Afraid.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe What to Do When Your Boss’s Plan Will Destroy EverythingIs It Betrayal to Train Somewhere Else? How Do I Lead When I Feel Like I’m Not Good Enough? Why Can’t I See My Progress When I’m Getting Better? How Do I Escape the Grind Without Losing Everything? 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 186, sitting here with Echo Charles. We've got a bunch of very interesting questions from you all, and we will provide answers in some cases, recommended courses of action in other cases, and maybe just overall guidance.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  That's where we're at.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Helpful guidance.

• 0:19Jocko Willink?

  Yes, indeed.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  All right, first question. Good evening. I listen to your podcast a lot, and it helps me stay disciplined in many areas of my life. In my, in my mid twenties and after starting to work out consistently for the first time in seven years, I decided to increase the plank time I was doing by 10 seconds after about a week and a half. So plank is, you know, when you go on your elbows, your feet, you know, you're rigid, anyway. You time yourself, it's a thing. So for a week and a half, okay, the first time I tried this, I found myself engaging in all this negative self-talk, like, wow, congratulations sarcastically. You're now 10 seconds of planking less pathetic than you were a week ago. My question is, why can some of us struggle so hard to be happy with growth and acknowledge

• 1:03Speaker 01

  when we are acting with discipline and commitment in other ways as well beyond my planking? Sincerely, and with appreciation.

• 1:15Jocko Willink?

  I was kind of wondering how that was negative until you read it in a sarcastic voice, you know? Because in my mind, it's like, oh yeah, you actually are better there than you were a week ago.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  No, he said less pathetic. See what I'm saying?

• 1:27Jocko Willink?

  Like, yeah, yeah, I get it, but it's like, bro, wow, congratulations. You are less pathetic now. You know what I mean? Like, that's a positive thing. And, and look, do you need to use the word pathetic? Probably not. I can tell you've been called things a lot worse than the word pathetic, especially in like basic SEAL training. They're telling you, they're calling you, you know, all kinds of words that are way worse than pathetic. But here's the thing, man. I think what you should actually just focus on and to answer the question of, how can you struggle so hard? Well, it's because you're, you're focusing on the wrong thing. You need to focus on where you're going and like what you're doing good.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  You know, you can't, if you're constantly looking at all the mistakes that you've made and all the times you lack discipline and all the places where you went off the path, that that's not helpful. That's not helpful for anyone. It's not helpful for me right now. I can tell you about a freaking house that I should have bought in 1993, that if I would have bought this house in 1993, maybe it was 1994. If I would have bought that house in 1994, I would be a freaking real estate mogul right now. You see what I'm saying? I think about that probably once a year. I don't dwell on it. You know what I did do? In 1998, I bought a house. It took me another five years before I was like, okay, I gotta buy a house.

• 2:55Jocko Willink?

  I, but that five years is a big timeframe. You know, when you take away the compounding progress I would have made by buying a house five years earlier in a clutch zone.

• 3:10Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying? It could have been a game changer.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  My dad used to work, used to work on computers in the, in the early eighties, early eighties. We had a Commodore Vic 20. Have you ever heard of that before?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yes, I have. Well, not the Vic 20 part, but Commodore 64.

• 3:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, the first one they made was called a Vic 20. And my dad got a Commodore Vic 20. And I think it came with 2.4 kilobytes of memory. And then we had a cartridge that brought it up to like eight kilobytes of memory.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  And I remember I was at school. And when you turned on the computer at school, it's like came up with a screen and it said like MS-DOS.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, MS-DOS, hell yeah.

• 3:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay. That computer was a Texas instrument. And when I came home and I was on a Commodore Vic 20 and you turned it on, it said MS-DOS. And I remember asking my dad, hey dad, why do both these computers that are made by different companies? And I'm like 10 years old, 11 years old, maybe 12 years old. These computers are made by different companies. Why do they both say MS-DOS? What is MS-DOS? And he's like, oh, that's Microsoft Disk Operating System. And I said, what's that? And he said, it's the thing inside the computer that makes it all work.

• 4:39Jocko Willink?

  And I said, that seems like it's a good company.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  And if my dad would have said, yeah, you know what? You're right. Let's buy a hundred dollars worth of stock. The whole life, whole life would be different. It's different. You know what I'm saying? But we didn't buy that. Brutal. So, am I dwelling on that? No, I'm not dwelling on that. I'm, I'm thinking about what we're doing here, what we're doing now, what we're gonna do in the future. Did I learn from that? Sure. Learned from that. Did I learn from the real estate gig? Learned from it. So there's nothing wrong with learning from things in the past, but we don't wanna, we don't want to, to focus on the things that we've done in the past, focus on where we were, focus on what we could have been. Like, none of those things help you. They're freaking waste. The actions that you're doing right now, those are real. That's what's real.

• 5:29Jocko Willink?

  And when you're doing the thing that you're supposed to be doing right now, that's real.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  And no one can call you lazy when you're taking action. And no one can call you pathetic when you're taking action. No one can call you pathetic when you're improving. No one can call you pathetic when you've taken ownership of your life and you're making things happen. When that's the situation you're in, it doesn't matter. What, what am I doing right now? You call me pathetic. You call me pathetic? Cool. Look what I'm doing right now. I am, I am factually not pathetic, because I'm in the game.

• 6:03Jocko Willink?

  Now,

• 6:05Jocko Willink?

  when I talk about people can't call you that, it includes you. Because if you're taking action and you're doing the things you're supposed to be doing, you can't call yourself pathetic. You're not, what do you mean pathetic? I'm here doing planks right now. And I'm getting stronger and I'm getting fitter and I'm getting better and I'm disciplining my mind and I'm disciplining my body.

• 6:24Jocko Willink?

  You control the voice that's in your head. You get to tell it what to say. You dictate the situation. You dictate the words you wanna hear.

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  And that's where you gotta be at.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  There's no pathetic activities going on here. You cannot simultaneously be pathetic and working out at the same time. You can't do it. You can't do it. It's impossible.

• 6:50Jocko Willink?

  So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen,

• 7:00Jocko Willink?

  go to jockounderground.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

• 7:44Jocko Willink?

  strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you. It's jockounderground.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.