Pod Insights Jocko Podcast "Now" Is an Important Word. And it Starts NOW. About this episode >Join Jocko UndergroundJoin The DEF Reset< https://www.thedefreset.com
Now will pass... and you can't really get it back. Where do you want to be?
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Jocko Willink? January 1st, 2025. This is the first day of Def Reset. It starts now. If you know what I'm talking about, good. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're about to find out. It starts now. And here's what I was thinking about. Now is an important word. And let me tell you, I'm going to give you a different angle on this that you may or may not have thought of before in your life. Echo Charles, how long is now? How long the duration, instantaneous? It's immeasurably short, basically, right? Now, it's already gone. So.
0:39 Jocko Willink? I'm not asking you for very much.
0:42 Jocko Willink? I'm not asking you for very much at all. I'm just asking you to be disciplined now. You ever heard that thing when somebody says you gotta do something that sucks like?
0:54 Jocko Willink? But it's gonna be a short amount of time, like when someone's in an MMA fight and the corner man's like, it's five minutes. You can stand on your head for five minutes. They put that emphasis on it. Yeah, yeah, fully. Or we'd be doing something in SEAL training. Something that was gonna, they'd be say, all right, we're gonna put you back in the water. 10 more minutes. 10 minutes out of your miserable life, meaning it's like that, not that much time. And hey, you can suck it up for 10, you can kind of do anything for 10 minutes, right?
1:23 Jocko Willink? So think about that. This time is gonna pass. Have you ever had something pass you by?
1:30 Jocko Willink? And you look at it later in your life and you know, it kind of would have changed the trajectory of your life?
1:37 Jocko Willink? Not off the top of my. It's like, maybe you should have taken that job, or maybe you should have invested in that company. You know, maybe you should have bought Bitcoin when your brother told you about it and it was $4 a coin. Right? Or maybe you should have finished that class, or maybe you should have started playing an instrument. You know, you picked up that ukulele. Did you ever buy an ukulele? Yeah, yeah, bought two of them. Okay, so good. Imagine if you did that when you were 19 or 13. You see what I'm saying? And I'm sure you were on the island. It's not like there wasn't ukuleles available to a brother. You know what I'm saying? No shortage. And right now, you know, who knows? That could have changed the trajectory of your life. Maybe, you know, I'm sure there's people that are, I wish I would have stuck with that workout program. I wish I would have stuck with jujitsu.
2:19 Jocko Willink? I wish I would have stayed on the team. What I do, you see what I'm saying? There's just things that you do that you let them pass. And, and you can't really get them back. So I think it's a very important to keep that in mind, right? Because in most cases, what made you walk away was just the short-term pleasure. Or the, or at a minimum, the short-term avoidance of pain. Yeah. One of those two. Instead of the long-term strategic win. The short-term avoidance of pain or seeking of pleasure. Those two are related, but they're not the same thing. You can see you nodding your head. You know that that's a good little
3:03 Jocko Willink? little nuance to make. Yes, sir. But the avoidance of pain or the seeking of pleasure leads to a short-term win, but a long-term loss. So
3:17 Jocko Willink? what I'm saying is don't let that happen. Do not let that happen. Do not avoid the short, short-term pain. Do not avoid the short-term pleasure to disrupt your long-term strategic goals.
3:34 Jocko Willink? That's what discipline is, by the way. Discipline is you absorb the short-term pain, you avoid the short-term pleasure. And you know that discipline in the long run is going to make you better.
3:50 Jocko Willink? You know that the unmitigated daily disciplines that we follow.
3:56 Jocko Willink? For the death reset, for sure. You know that these things in the long run, they're going to give you freedom. You're going to wake up early. You're going to get after it. You're going to prioritize next. You're going to hydrate. You're going to clean fuel. No sugar-coated lies. You're going to read, write. And you're going to remember. And also you're going to do 100 burpees or 10 minutes worth of burpees every day. That's kind of Kind of a necessary thing. And by the way, that's going to change you. That will change you mentally. I promise you that when you do your first 10 minutes or 100 burpees, it's going to suck. And what you're going to learn how to do is you're going to learn how to shut off your mind and do something that sucks for 10 minutes. And you're not going to think about it. It's just going to be, you're going to turn into a machine, little bit at a time.
4:39 Jocko Willink? I promise you that. I felt that last def reset. I felt that first freaking 100 burpees. I was like, dude, this sucks. This just sucks. And I'm thinking about how much it sucks. Yeah. It's one thing you learn, like when you're going through basic SEAL training, you learn how to just be like, yeah, I'm doing this thing, whatever this terrible thing is with no emotion, just like, that's what we're doing. You know, oh, we just jumped out of an airplane, landed in the ocean, 12 miles off the coast of San Diego. We rode a boat, a little tiny Zodiac boat for three and a half hours.
5:11 Jocko Willink? Freezing cold. You're wet when it started. By the way, it's January, it's 53 degrees. And then you get to your destination. Okay, now put on your dive rig, get in the water for four hours. It's like, it just sucks. Just the whole thing sucks. Leif was saying something the other day. It was like, hey, everything in the SEAL team is cool for like 20 minutes.
5:30 Jocko Willink? Cause you're like, oh yeah, we're on a Zodiac and 20 minutes. That's cool. And then 21 minutes, between 21 minutes and nine hours. Though that all sucks.
5:42 Jocko Willink? So you're going to learn that you're going to do burpees and over time, you're going to learn that you're going to go do things that suck and that short term pain is going to be worth it.
5:54 Jocko Willink? Those daily disciplines are going to give you the long-term strategic success. I want you to think about that every day. Long-term strategic success. That's how we think. We think long-term strategic success and then we act tactically. What does that mean? We do the thing right now. We just do it. We're not thinking about it. We're just doing it.
6:13 Jocko Willink? And when you have that little voice in your head that starts rationalizing and starts debating with your discipline and starts making excuses.
6:22 Jocko Willink? Think about where you're gonna be in a week. Think about where you're gonna be in a month. Think about where you're gonna be in a year and then get disciplined. Right now. Right now, just decide to be disciplined right now. By the way, now is already gone and just be disciplined for that second, for that moment. Be disciplined long enough to get away from the freaking donuts. That's how long you need to be disciplined for. Are you gonna walk around with like a donut dangling in front of your face? No, you don't need to do that. You just need to walk away from that thing.
6:57 Jocko Willink? The 10 minutes that the burpees are, are, are, you're being executed or they're being executed. You just need to be disciplined for those 10 minutes. That's it. Actually, just one burpee at a time. Just shut up and do one burpee and then shut up and do another burpee. And tell that voice in your head to shut up because you're gonna, you're busy doing burpees. You don't have time to listen.
7:18 Jocko Willink? Be disciplined right now.
7:22 Jocko Willink? Alarm goes off, get out of bed. How long does that take? You have to be disciplined for one second to get out of your freaking bed. Go to the gym. You have to be disciplined for one second to go to the gym. Start walking to the gym and now you're gonna be in the gym. Once you're in the gym, you're freaking in the gym. Do the stupid workout. Get the task done. You wrote down a task that you said you were gonna do yesterday? Freaking do it. Be disciplined right now.
7:47 Jocko Willink? Read. You said you're gonna read. You said you were gonna write. Do that thing. You write 10 words. Be disciplined for freaking 10 words.
7:58 Jocko Willink? That's what we're doing. We're being disciplined now. Not forever, not for two hours. You're being disciplined right now. Right now, you're gonna do the right thing.
8:11 Jocko Willink? And when you start waving, you're gonna think about where you're gonna be in a, in a month. Think about where you're gonna be in a year. You're gonna be a different person. You're gonna be a better person.
8:24 Jocko Willink? That's what we're doing. Discipline. Discipline equals freedom. Reset 2025. We start today. We start now. Join us at thedefreset.com. Get the app. Win a $10,000 home gym. That'll change your freaking life. It's all free.
8:49 Jocko Willink? And it's actually not just free. It's freedom.
8:53 Jocko Willink? This discipline will give you freedom because discipline equals freedom.
9:01 Jocko Willink? It's time to reset. 2025 starts now.
Previous Commitments Scare People. And This is a Commitment. Next 471: Better K-9s and Better Humans. With Mike Ritland Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated