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I don t worry about the things that I can t control, and if I go out and get blown up, then that s what happened.
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I mitigate as much as I can, and then I m not gonna worry about it.
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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Hey everybody, Jordan Harbinger here from the Art of Charm.
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Today we re talking with Jocko Willink, SEAL Commander of Task Unit Bruiser in Iraq, Baghdad, and Ramadi to be specific.
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This guy s the real deal.
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He s a good buddy.
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If anyone s heard of him anywhere else, he s known for his intensity.
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This is a good guy.
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This is a good person to know, a good person to listen to, and a good person to learn from.
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His book, Extreme Ownership, taking extreme levels of responsibility in your organization and in your life.
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We re gonna talk about how to own absolutely everything in our world.
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And this has changed the way that I live, it s changed the way that I do business, and I love it.
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I love the concepts, I love the book, and Jaco s not so bad himself.
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We also discuss discipline, intensity, leadership, and a little bit of violence on this episode of The Art of Charm.
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AOC brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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If you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at AOC.
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In the US, just text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, and everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the right answers, but we definitely have all the right questions.
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All right, here s Jocko.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence, or what you used to do, maybe.
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Well, what I used to do is I was in the military for 20 years.
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And when I got done being in the military, retired, then I went and tried to take the lessons that I had learned in the military and teach them to people that were not in the military.
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That s what I do.
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During your time in the military, commander for SEAL Task Unit Bruiser, what s a task unit?
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What does that mean?
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Task unit in the SEAL teams is basically two platoons worth of SEALs, so maybe 35 or 40 plus or minus SEALs, and then a bunch of support people that take care of your radios, provide intelligence.
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fix your weapons, fix your Humvees, keep the camp running.
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Well, with Task Unit Bruiser, we probably had 60 or 70 of those support people, and then 35 or 40 SEALs.
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So there s more support people than actual SEALs.
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That makes sense.
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You got a lot of gear, a lot of stuff going on.
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The amount of uncertainty that you guys deal with when you re out there seems like it would drive most people insane.
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There s definitely uncertainty out there, but I think the world is filled with uncertainty regardless of whether you re in combat or whether you re in the business world or whether you re trying to raise kids.
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Or whatever you re doing, there s gonna be uncertainty.
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I think the difference, though, might be that here in civilian life, we think we can control the uncertainty, but you re acutely aware that you cannot.
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And also, it s maybe more lethal.
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The lethal uncertainty we have here are things like, oh, you might get in a car accident later.
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And that s probably the most common sort of uncertain occurrence that we can t control that we think we have control of, because we re controlling the vehicle.
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But when you re out there, you re kind of like, all right, people are actively trying to kill us.
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We don t know where it s gonna come from.
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Everything is suspicious.
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Everyone who we don t know could be suspicious.
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And every little trash can that s too close to the street is suspicious.
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How do you manage the base level of anxiety that you would have with that?
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Or do you train it out of everyone somehow?
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Well, for me, you know, I can only speak from my own experience.
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But there s things, as you said, there s things that you can control, and there s things that you cannot control.
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So for instance, an IED, which for those of you that don t know, you mentioned it, trash on the street, which the reason you said that you obviously have some experience or knowledge is that the enemy in Iraq would camouflage IEDs,
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booby traps, homemade bombs on the side of the road and they would camouflage them with a piece of trash.
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It wasn t just a piece of trash because eventually they made it look like a curb and they made it look like a mailbox.
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They made it look like a wall or they put it in a dead animal.
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So that s everything.
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You become suspicious of everything.
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So what you do on things that you can and cannot control, if you can t control them, then I m not going to worry about them.
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There s literally things I can do.
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I can mitigate as much risk as possible.
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I can pay attention.
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We can look at briefs and understand what the camouflage of an IED is going to look like.
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And I can learn as much as I can.
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And we can plan a route that is as safe as possible.
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And then beyond those things that we can do to mitigate the risk,
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there s nothing we can do.
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So I don t worry about the things that I can t control, and if I go out and get blown up, then that s what happened.
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I mitigate as much as I can, and then I m not gonna worry about it.
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Yes.
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How would you teach a civilian to do that?
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People around here, Silicon Valley, even probably in this very building, there s people worrying nonstop about things that they absolutely cannot control and can never control.
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Well, so many things that when I do teach people, I m less teaching them than I am just making them aware of the fact.
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Because once you become aware of the fact that there s things that you can t control, and if you worry about them, you re actually expending effort worrying about something that you can t control anyways.
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So it s doing you no good to worry.
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So why not take that effort and focus on things that you can control and things that will improve your chances and make your chances of survival better?
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Why not just shift and focus on that?
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Once people become aware of that, then it s not that hard to do.
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because you re expending your energy in one direction.
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Instead of trying to bottle it in, I think the way that a lot of people try to control worry is they bottle it up, right?
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They go, okay, I m not gonna worry about that, and they freak out, and there s that energy that s gonna leak out somewhere, and usually that shows up as anxiety.
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If we re focusing on only what we can control, then we go, all right, well, I m just gonna double down on making sure my gear is working, the car is full of gas, or whatever, my body s in good shape, I gotta change underwear in the trunk, whatever it is, rather than what if I don t get the job later, and they re butt-chewing their nails off about that.
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Exactly.
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Are you going to be nervous and you re going to be afraid and you re going to have fear?
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That s okay.
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But as you said, what you want to do is you want to take that nervous energy and that fear and utilize it to do something positive that s going to improve your situation as opposed to just expending that fear and nervousness, worrying and getting paranoid and working yourself to where you can t sleep.
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So now you re not well rested when you go out on an operation, which is going to affect you in a negative way.
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So just take those things, shift them towards something positive, and you re going to be much better off.
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Now in the book, the book Extreme Ownership, which we ll link to in the show notes, that left a powerful imprint, and I started using some of what you wrote right away, and it made an immediate difference in both my business and personal life, because the concept behind the book seems really deceptively simple.
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own all the mistakes, own all of your personal issues, own all of the outcomes that you end up with from your team or from your business.
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In practice, it can be really hard to do.
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I was talking with Jen earlier about somebody we know who works for a big company, multinational company, and some project went south somehow.
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That person wrote an email that said, well, we know Tim didn t get the deliverable done in time, and I had just read the book and I thought,
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Oh, that s literally the opposite of what you need to do.
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I don t know this is fact, but I assume this person now has an enemy in the company that cannot wait for her to go down.
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You embarrass somebody, you also showed everybody else who s looking that you re gonna do that to them if they screw up, so they re gonna avoid working with you in case they make a mistake.
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And furthermore, if you re the boss,
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And you re looking at this person that had the project fail, and the first thing they do is say, well, Tim didn t get the deliverable done, that s why it s their fault.
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If I m your boss, and you tell me that Jen didn t do what she s supposed to do, and that s why you re part of the project failure, I m not mad at Jen.
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No.
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I m actually disgusted in you.
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First of all, because you didn t lead Jen correctly.
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You didn t give her the equipment she needed, or the gear she needed, or the training that she needed.
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When all that happened and went wrong, you just blamed her, didn t take any responsibility for it yourself.
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So I m now lost trust in you as well, and we ve got an issue that s gonna cause problems in the future.
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I d love to talk more about that in a little bit as well.
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I think the person who recommended the book to me originally was like, oh, you probably don t even need to read that.
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Just get the summary where it tells you basically just accept responsibility for everything.
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but that s not really the point of the book, and we can get into some of the nuanced stuff later, but it s funny and interesting how deep the rabbit hole goes with the concept of extreme ownership, because you end up becoming so much more respected, even when you re taking ownership of someone else s mistakes, it s completely counterintuitive in a lot of ways, which I thought was fascinating, because it s hard to take that first step and say, all right, I m gonna own the mistake that this other person on my team made.
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Because what that person was thinking, what Jen and I s mutual friend was of course thinking was, I don t want to get in trouble for this.
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I m not getting fired over this.
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And ironically, she s much more likely to get in trouble over someone else s mistake now that she s been the one who called attention to it.
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There s a lot of benefit that comes from it that s hidden as well, not just psychologically in your own head, but even organizationally, the ripple effect is incredible.
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We can deep dive into that in a bit.
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I have to say, though, reading the book, one thing that was funny is you guys use about a thousand times more PowerPoint than I ever envisioned Special Forces guys using.
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I never imagined these elite badasses using PowerPoint and having to clicker and the paperclip guy pops up and is like, do you need help?
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Not unless you know where Osama bin Laden is.
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We don t need any help.
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How do we get rid of this thing?
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Yeah, we actually went overboard with it.
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That s one of the chapters in the book of where we had guys that were, instead of thinking, they were putting slides together.
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And that s not a place you wanna be.
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You wanna use your brain, not your mouse pad.
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It seems like it would be really easy to get caught up in the details of something like that, rather than focus on the problem.
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You have this built-in distraction where, well, I don t know,
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how we re gonna extract everyone if something goes south over here, but you know what, let s get a higher resolution photo of this area.
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Let s color this in and make the background white so people can see it.
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And then you re looking at it and going, wait, I didn t solve the problem at all.
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But it seems like you re doing work, goes back to kind of the anxiety, worrying about things you can t control, you get this anxiety, you ve gotta have the outlet somewhere, but if you don t direct the energy, it s a waste.
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Yeah, so what do you look to control?
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You look to control the fonts on your slides, which as you pointed out, do not matter.
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What matters is do we have a good plan that everybody on the team understands fully that we can go out and execute in an efficient manner?
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That s what s important.
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I often see you tweet things like, discipline equals freedom, which sounds a little bit like an oxymoron.
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Can you explain that a little bit?
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Because it sounds to a lot of people, especially, I m talking to younger Jordan right now in my own head, and I m thinking, discipline is the opposite of freedom.
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How does that click together?
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And don t you wish younger Jordan could have seen the light?
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Because I know I wish younger Jocko would have seen the light.
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Definitely.
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Because we all want freedom.
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And we want to have financial freedom, we want to have more free time, that s what everybody wants.
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And when you want that freedom, the way to get there is through discipline.
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The two examples that I use all the time are the ones I just said, which is financial freedom.
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If you want to have financial freedom, how do you get more financial freedom?
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You have to have financial discipline.
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If you want more free time, how do you get more free time?
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You have a more disciplined time management schedule.
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That is the pathway to freedom is discipline.
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And that s why I always say discipline equals freedom.
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And it s not just for individuals.
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I mean, those two examples are individuals, but as a business or as a team, the more disciplined you are, the more freedom you re going to have.
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So with my task unit, with my seal platoons that I was in, we were highly disciplined and had all kinds of standard operating procedures about how we did everything.
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Everything had a standard operating procedure.
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how we got into vehicles, how we got out of vehicles, how we lined up on buildings, how we left buildings, how we talked on the radio, everything we did had a procedure.
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And you might think that that constrained us on the battlefield, but it actually gives you more freedom on the battlefield.
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Because if I needed you to go take down a building, I could say, Jordan, go hit that building over there.
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and you could just immediately go and do it.
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You didn t have to tell me how you were going to do it.
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You didn t have to tell me how many people you were going to take.
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You didn t have to tell me what you re going to do with any unknown people that you found in there.
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You didn t have to tell me what you re going to do with any wounded.
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We already knew all that.
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So you could just go do it.
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Not only did I know what you were going to do, but all your team, your subordinates, all knew those things as well.
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They knew the basic plan.
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They knew the standard operating procedures.
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So you could just do it.
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So that gave me all kinds of freedom
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on the battlefield, because I could say, Jordan, go hit that building over there, and I could say, Jen, you need to go hit that building, and you could take your team and do it as well.
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So that s why discipline equals freedom, not just as an individual, but as a team as well.
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Do you have kids?
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Yes, I do.
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How do you teach them things like this without just yelling at them and being like a regular dad all the time?
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It s the same way you try and teach any other human being that you re working with in the world.
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And that is you try and show them, you beat them to death with PowerPoint.
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No, what you do is you try and make them understand why you re doing what you re doing.
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And that s the same when you re leading any team, whether it s your kids or whether it s something at work or whether it s something in the military, you want your team to understand why you re doing what you re doing, what the benefit is going to be.
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where it s going to put you in the long run, what the benefits are going to be, how it ties back from the team benefits back to the individual benefits.
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If we re working on a project for our team, I want you to see how it s going to benefit the team.
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But then I want you to also see how once it benefits the team, it s going to benefit you in the long run, because we succeed with this project.
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Now we ve got more product to sell.
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And now you as a salesperson is going to be able to sell more product because you re going to have more options to offer to people.
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You want to tie that thread all the way back through.
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What about your kids in terms of the military?
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Do they think about going in?
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Do you want them to go in?
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You don t have any expectations there?
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I don t have any expectations.
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I don t want to place any pressure on them to make any decisions in life.
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I want them to understand the world the best they can and make decisions based on what they think they should do.
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I know that I have one son and three daughters.
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I would say my son is fairly interested in going in the military.
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And I think my daughters are actually weighing
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whether it might be a good option for them as well.
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So I m completely open if they want to go in the military or if they want to go and be street artists, whatever they re going to go choose to do.
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I will wish them the best of luck and provide them with whatever support I can until they re 18 years old, in which case they are then on their own.
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You mentioned weakness and being mentally weak for the moment, creeping into discipline and being the thing that ruins it.
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You kind of analogize this to if you have the discipline to getting out of bed, you win.
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You pass the test.
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How do you stop the small weaknesses transitioning, I should say, into affecting more significant decisions?
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How do you stop the small weaknesses?
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Yeah, do you plug that as soon as you spot it or do you try to prevent it somehow?
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You stop the small weaknesses.
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It s a circular thing.
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This is not some epic, biblical, crazy theory to put out.
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If you have weaknesses, then you stop them.
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That s it.
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Basically, you cultivate discipline by getting rid of the weaknesses.
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You get rid of the weaknesses by exercising the discipline that you ve cultivated.
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And I talk about getting out of bed in the morning because to just about everybody, being in bed in the morning feels good.
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It s warm, you re tired.
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Hitting the snooze button is a very real temptation that everybody can relate to.
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That s why I talk about it all the time.
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So instead of hitting the snooze button, just get up and get out of bed.
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That s it.
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And that discipline decision, next thing you know, you re in the gym.
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You re working out.
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And that discipline decision, next thing you know, when it comes to breakfast, instead of eating donuts,
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maple bar, maple bar, eclair.
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Those things.
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Instead of eating those things, you re eating a piece of beef jerky or you re having a cup of tea or you re just drinking a glass of water and doing an intermittent fast.
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And then when you get done with that, now you sit down to work and you re feeling like you re on the right path.
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And so you say, you know what, I m gonna knock this stuff out.
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So then you start working and you work harder.
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You know, I ve heard some of this talk about the fact that you re willed
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it dissipates through the day and it weakens through the day and I actually disagree with that.
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I think that your discipline and your will grows stronger as you exercise them, even through the day.
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Even throughout the day.
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So starting off right maybe starts you off with a bigger tank or just keeps things propelled upwards instead of just wearing you down.
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I think it gets you on the right track and it feels bad to step off the track.
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Yeah, that s for sure.
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There s psychological pressure to not top off a day where you worked out, ran, got up early, ate healthy with an extra large pizza.
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You know how crappy that s gonna feel and it outweighs the feeling that you re gonna get by eating it.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, I can definitely identify with that.
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I was surprised to find, I ve talked to a lot of SEALs and special forces, special operators, especially through the AOC programs and the live programs and things that we run, and there s always this air of humility that originally before I started spending a lot of time with guys like that, guys like you, I thought it was a little bit fake, like maybe this is something they re taught and they gotta do it because otherwise they seem really,
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almost aggressively capable, and I think a lot of people wouldn t like that maybe in a structure like the military, but I don t think it s fake anymore.
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I think it s real, and there s a lot of fake motivation, there s a lot of fake humility in the world in general, but you can t really fake a lot of the things that you guys have to deal with, like bravery.
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You can t fake bravery because courage in the face of
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Danger is essentially what bravery really actually is.
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And so I think that that permeates the whole mindset of the Special Forces, or at least the ones that I ve met and dealt with.
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It seems unusual to me that there would be entire units in all branches that seem to grab hold of this mindset and never let it go.
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And maybe I just met the right SEALs and the right Special Forces guys.
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Can you sort of point to a time in your life where, obviously you probably were young and feeling your oats at one point,
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You went through the military, and then at some point, things turned and you went, I don t have to front like this anymore.
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I don t have to do this crap anymore, or act tougher than I am, or act holier than thou, or put on airs anymore.
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Do you remember that process at all?
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For one thing, combat is extremely humbling.
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And anybody that s been in legit combat for a sustained period of time is not going to walk out of it feeling like Superman.
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Because if you are in enough combat, there s going to be situations where you were not in control, where things got out of control, where the enemy did something you didn t expect, where your man got wounded or killed.
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When you go through that, you re going to be humble.
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So I don t think there s any faking it.
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I think it s just real.
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Yeah, well, one, I ve never been in combat, and two, to have somebody with so much capability be so down to earth, especially when I lived in L.A., I didn t meet a whole lot of people who have a lot of capability and qualification and are also extremely humble, so it came out of nowhere for me, and I was very surprised by that.
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For you, what was the draw to the teams and to Special Operations in the first place?
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Ever since I was a little kid, the only
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thing I remember wanting to do was be a commando of some kind.
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And so at some point I figured out the SEAL teams was one of the hardest ones.
2
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And that s the one I decided to go.
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Also, I like the water.
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I grew up in the water.
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And so the SEALs was maritime oriented special operations.
2
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So it was an easy pick for me.
2
SPEAKER_03
Even extreme athletes and things like that that go for seals, it s the water that you hear about the most that gasses people out or intimidates them or scares them or just makes them ring the bell during buds because there s just an element to trudging through the water.
2
SPEAKER_03
Maybe it s the salt, maybe it s just the water itself or the cold.
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SPEAKER_03
Probably a combination of all those now that I m thinking about it that just makes it so uncomfortable.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the water is an absolute differentiator, because it is.
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SPEAKER_00
It s cold.
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SPEAKER_00
It s uncomfortable.
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It destroys things.
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So radios, weapons, intelligence gear, maps, it just destroys everything that you have.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you re going to operate in the water, you have to be able to do it a little bit smarter, a little bit better.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that s what the SEAL teams get you used to.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so when we ve been fighting these wars in the desert and we get to drive in on a truck or come on a helicopter and you re completely dry when you get off and start your mission, it makes it a lot easier than what you re used to in the SEAL teams growing up, getting out of a boat, getting into a smaller boat, getting out of the smaller boat and swimming across the beach, coming across the beach with your gear covered in sand and all messed up from that and learning how to waterproof that, fix it if it does leak.
2
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It s just all kinds of problem.
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SPEAKER_00
The water is a real challenge.
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in combat and in any situation, the water is a good test.
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I think there is such a thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Matter of fact, I know there is such a thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I ve seen dozens and dozens of SEAL platoons go through training and some of the people inside those platoons, whether they re in a leadership position or not, they step up and become leaders.
2
SPEAKER_00
I see that in businesses, that some businesses, they have in their organization teams and inside those teams, again, regardless of rank or structure, someone will step up and be a leader.
2
SPEAKER_00
So there s absolutely people that have
2
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more natural leadership ability than others.
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SPEAKER_00
I hear people say that leaders are born and not made and some people say leaders are made and not born.
2
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And I think it s a little bit of a combination of both because there s some people that are great leaders and when they start learning about leadership and they start focusing on it, they become even better.
2
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There s some people that are okay leaders that become really good leaders.
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There s some people that are bad leaders
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that become okay leaders, and there s some people that are bad leaders that never can lead.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s just the reality of it.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think that you have to have some natural ability, which I think most people do have some level of natural ability, and then there s some people that don t have it at all.
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SPEAKER_00
That s a pretty small percentage, but they definitely exist.
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SPEAKER_03
The untrainable, the uncoachable leader, the person who can never make it, it s rare.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s pretty rare.
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It s one reason why people are like that.
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SPEAKER_00
There s one person that s untrainable as a leader, and that s the person that lacks humility, the topic that you already talked about.
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Because if I come to you and I want to be a leader, but I m not humble, how can I learn anything?
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How can I accept your viewpoint on anything?
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How can I improve in any way?
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Because I already think I know everything.
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When we would fire guys from the SEAGLE teams from leadership positions,
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99.9% of the time, it wasn t because they didn t know how to shoot their gun.
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SPEAKER_00
It wasn t because they weren t in good physical shape.
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It wasn t because they weren t a good tactician.
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It was because they weren t humble, which meant they couldn t listen to anybody, which meant they couldn t take any suggestions, which meant they didn t respect the enemy.
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Because if I m not humble, guess what?
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I don t need to worry about the enemy.
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Wrong answer.
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You do need to worry about the enemy.
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You need to respect the enemy and be thinking about them improving and be thinking about what they re going to do to you to get the edge on you.
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SPEAKER_00
So when a person lacks humility, that s the biggest issue that I would run into with the CEO leadership that we d end up firing.
2
SPEAKER_03
That makes sense.
2
SPEAKER_03
Obviously, we have extreme ownership in the concepts that we re gonna get into, but is mostly what you re looking for charisma?
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SPEAKER_03
I mean, what have you observed about good leaders that lets you know early on, maybe, like, okay, this guy, we re gonna look at this guy, he s probably gonna end up being the leader?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, again, I mean, obviously, it s the question I just answered, or the statement I just made, when you get someone that s a humble person, that s ready to listen, that s ready to listen to their subordinates, that s ready to listen to superiors, that s ready to listen to their training cadre, someone that has that kind of attitude, they re going to do a decent job, they re going to do a decent job.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, are there some specific traits that will help?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, there are.
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SPEAKER_00
For instance, and this is a very particular skill set, can you be loud on the battlefield?
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Can you be heard over the sound of gunfire?
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If you have a loud voice, that s beneficial.
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If you don t have a loud voice, again, I m singling out this one thing, but if you don t have a loud voice, I ve seen plenty of leaders that weren t that loud, but guess what?
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They learned how to work with their team to make sure that they got their word to a couple of key people that were loud and then they would spread the word.
2
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And so there s ways to overcome these things, as long as they have the humility to say, you know what, I m not that loud, I m gonna need some help on this.
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If they said, you know what, I m not that loud.
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So people aren t going to hear me.
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But what I m going to do is just lead a different way that no one s ever seen before, because I m smarter than everybody else.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, it s not going to work.
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There s traits.
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And again, I think these are all things that people can get better at, people can develop more.
2
SPEAKER_00
The idea of detaching from the chaos and the mayhem, that s a skill set that you can develop.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re not born with that.
2
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You might be born with a certain level of it or a lack of it, but you can definitely improve that.
2
SPEAKER_00
If I took you and put you into presser situations for the next five days, you know, had people shooting paintball at you and I put you in charge of a squad and I put you into dark rooms where I said, okay, when the lights come on, you got to figure this out.
2
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And I did that to you over and over again.
2
SPEAKER_00
In a week, your perspective would change, and you d develop the ability to detach and say, okay, I m stepping back.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, there s people shooting paintball from over there.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not gonna worry about that right this second.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna assess where my team is.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you would learn the ability to do that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s one that almost every human can do that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Almost every human can learn that ability to detach.
2
SPEAKER_00
Occasionally people can t.
2
SPEAKER_00
Occasionally people just don t have the mental capacity.
2
SPEAKER_00
They just get too caught up in stuff and too emotional, and that s a person that s gonna have a problem.
2
SPEAKER_00
But most people can learn.
2
SPEAKER_03
I d be covered in paintballs.
2
SPEAKER_03
When I heard you guys train with paintballs, I was just thinking, yeah, I gotta ring the bell already, because I played that a couple times, and I ll tell you, those things, they make you bleed, and I m thinking, if this is what paintballs feel like, there s a reason guys like you do that job, and I talk to people and listen for a living, let me put it that way.
2
SPEAKER_03
The toughness element of the guys that you see on the teams is incredible, and even the training that we just read about, which I m sure is 100 deviations away from what it feels like to be in there, is incredible.
2
SPEAKER_03
I m very curious, we talked about humility and good leaders,
2
SPEAKER_03
What other traits do bad leaders have in common?
2
SPEAKER_03
Is it just arrogance?
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Is it just ego that you see most of the time tripping people up?
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SPEAKER_00
It s all gonna stem from arrogance and ego.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s all gonna stem from that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because again, once you re arrogant and your ego s too big, now you can t take coaching.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can t even do a good, honest self-assessment.
2
SPEAKER_00
Never mind an external coach.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can t even assess yourself and say, you know what, that training mission we just went on, I didn t do a good job.
2
SPEAKER_00
If these are the mistakes I think I made, where I can improve.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you re arrogant, you have a big ego, you never say that.
2
SPEAKER_00
So now you re never making any improvements as a leader and you re not going to be a good leader.
2
SPEAKER_02
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It comes down in large part to flexibility, your ability to be flexible in situations, namely your own ego and your own issues being the chief impediment to that flexibility and that ability to learn from the sound of it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yes, the ability to be flexible and really that s the ability to adapt and improve and grow.
3
SPEAKER_02
and that s what you need to do in a leadership position.
3
SPEAKER_02
Adapt, improve, and grow.
3
SPEAKER_02
Obviously, you need to do that personally, but then, as a leader, you re leading your whole team to do that.
3
SPEAKER_02
And again, when you see an arrogant leader, sometimes they re so blinded by their own arrogance that they think that their team can do no wrong.
3
SPEAKER_02
And now we re not making any improvements, not only as an individual, we re not making any improvements as a team.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s a nightmare.
3
SPEAKER_01
In your situation, where the stakes are so high, that s literally a life and death mistake.
3
SPEAKER_02
It is very, very bad.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that s why when we get those leaders coming through, we d get rid of them.
3
SPEAKER_02
Can you tell us the boat crew story?
3
SPEAKER_02
The book was written by myself and my buddy Leif Babin, who was one of the platoon commanders that worked for me in Ramadi.
3
SPEAKER_02
And this was a chapter that he wrote when he came back from Iraq.
3
SPEAKER_02
He was one of the instructors at SEAL training.
3
SPEAKER_02
To make a long story short,
3
SPEAKER_02
In one week of training, it s called Hell Week, you stay awake for five or six days, and you do a bunch of physical evolutions.
3
SPEAKER_02
And while you re doing that, you re divided up into boat crews of seven, six, seven, eight guys, depending on how many people have quit.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the boat crews race against each other.
3
SPEAKER_02
And of course, in the SEAL teams, it pays to be a winner.
3
SPEAKER_02
So you want to win the races, because if you win the race, you get to rest.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you lose the race, you get punished.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the punish is going to be more physical activities.
3
SPEAKER_02
So during this particular hell week that Leif was one of the instructors for, there was a boat crew that was winning.
3
SPEAKER_02
It was boat crew number two.
3
SPEAKER_02
They were winning all the races, which is pretty common to see one boat crew start to dominate.
3
SPEAKER_02
And there was another boat crew, boat crew six, that was getting crushed in every race.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so one of the senior instructors came to Leif and said, hey, let s try something out.
3
SPEAKER_02
Let s switch the leaders because each boat crew has a boat crew leader.
3
SPEAKER_02
He said, let s switch these leaders out and see what happens.
3
SPEAKER_02
So they switch the boat crew leader from the winning boat crew leader went to the losing boat crew.
3
SPEAKER_02
The losing boat crew leader went to the winning boat.
3
SPEAKER_02
They all head out to do their races and lo and behold, the boat crew that had been losing every race that now had a good leader won the next race and then continued to win.
3
SPEAKER_02
The saying that the chapter is called is no bad teams, only bad leaders.
3
SPEAKER_02
Because if you put a good leader in a bad situation, they re going to turn that team around and step them up and get them to win.
3
SPEAKER_01
I almost thought you might have made this up when I read it originally because it s such a perfect parable for this concept that I thought, what are the odds that they actually witnessed this happening?
3
SPEAKER_01
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized you probably witnessed this a bunch of different times.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just not in as clear cut a way as it was in this book.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, while Leif was doing that training, which is the basic training, I was actually running the more advanced training of SEAL platoons getting ready to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so I would actually see this all the time.
3
SPEAKER_02
You would get a platoon that had a bad leader, and they would be falling apart and failing training missions, and the guy would get fired, they d bring a new leader in and put him in, and almost instantly you would see them succeed.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s an outstanding example, and it almost does seem unbelievable.
3
SPEAKER_02
And even Leif says, he says he couldn t believe it.
3
SPEAKER_02
But it is the reality.
3
SPEAKER_02
Again, I ve seen it so many times, I can t even tell you.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the other thing is, I would see SEAL platoons, a SEAL platoon is a SEAL platoon.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s a bell curve of guys, there s awesome guys in there, there s a bunch of guys that are really good, there s a couple stragglers that are pretty lame, and then you put a leader over them.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that s pretty much what a SEAL platoon is.
3
SPEAKER_02
And when I d go through this training, you know, some platoons would fail training operations over and over again, and some platoons would crush them.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it was always based on how well the leader did.
3
SPEAKER_01
What really surprised me about this was how quickly the losing boat went to the winning boat.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can t even think, oh, well, the winning boat, they had better athletic talent, they were less gassed out, these are endurance athletes, the other one was the guys who shouldn t have been there.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the fact that they won, they didn t even need like a ramp up, warm up period, oh, we re starting to get the hang of this leadership thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, it was like the next race, they came in and won.
3
SPEAKER_01
I can t even imagine what you would have to do or say or the feeling that you would have to convey to get all these tired guys who ve been beaten up more than the other guys because they keep losing.
3
SPEAKER_01
So they re getting punished.
3
SPEAKER_01
They ve had no rest.
3
SPEAKER_01
The other teams won a bunch, had a bunch of rest, maybe drank more water or whatever they re doing, chilling, laying on the beach at that time.
3
SPEAKER_01
And these guys turn around and beat the winners.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was even easy to think, well, the winners were maybe lollygagging because they were like, nobody can touch us.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re so far ahead.
3
SPEAKER_01
But they did beat everyone else, too.
3
SPEAKER_01
They wanted to win, too.
3
SPEAKER_01
So everybody wanted to win just as bad.
3
SPEAKER_01
And these guys who were they weren t just dead last.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were the guys where you re like, are they OK?
3
SPEAKER_01
They re so far back there.
3
SPEAKER_01
We don t even know what s happening to these guys.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they came back and crushed it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And a couple of dynamics that might make this a little bit clearer, if you look at a boat crew, when you re saying, hey, these guys are working harder than everybody because they were getting beat, they were coming in last, they were probably working less.
3
SPEAKER_02
The effort that they were making was to fight with each other, to say, hey, you need to paddle harder.
3
SPEAKER_02
Hey, what are you doing back over there?
3
SPEAKER_02
It was them fighting amongst themselves.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so you put six guys, seven guys in a boat,
3
SPEAKER_02
and you take those guys and you say, everyone paddle in a different direction, where s the boat going to go?
3
SPEAKER_02
The boat s not going to go anywhere.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you take those same seven guys and you say, hey guys, we re all going to paddle.
3
SPEAKER_02
We re all going to paddle in this direction.
3
SPEAKER_02
We re all going to paddle as hard as we can and we re going to do it until we win.
3
SPEAKER_02
All of a sudden you ve got a unified team and that s the difference between winning and losing.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that s all comes down to leadership.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is serious intensity.
3
SPEAKER_02
Did you bring that to the seals or did that develop while you were there?
3
SPEAKER_02
I would say I always had a fairly intense personality, especially when I was passionate about something.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so
3
SPEAKER_02
I d say it s part of my personality, and I think that the SEAL teams was a place where that type of personality, for me, it tended to water and fertilize my personality quite well.
3
SPEAKER_01
You could have been a gym teacher, a Navy SEAL, but probably wouldn t have been great at French.
3
SPEAKER_02
they would have been some good gym classes.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, definitely.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there would have been a lot of boat races.
3
SPEAKER_01
When you go into the special forces, obviously there s an intense training, there s an intense vetting process.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everyone who makes it through those seems to kind of start at the beginning of a new hierarchy.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what sets people apart in the new hierarchy as opposed to the old one?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because a lot of those guys were probably running circles around everybody at basic and all the other training that they had.
3
SPEAKER_01
then they go to BUDS or whatever, Special Forces Training Camps for whatever branch, and then everyone s at a level playing field again, probably for the most part anyway.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, when you get through SEAL training, and I checked into SEAL Team 1, no one cares that you went through SEAL training.
3
SPEAKER_02
They don t care.
3
SPEAKER_02
Everyone s been through it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Literally the Master Chief of the Command said, you made it through SEAL training.
3
SPEAKER_02
No one cares.
3
SPEAKER_02
We all made it through SEAL training.
3
SPEAKER_02
It means nothing here.
3
SPEAKER_02
So that s what you start with.
3
SPEAKER_01
What sets these guys apart?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s gotta be a bunch of people who are all-star athletes.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s still gonna be people that are more fit than the next guy.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s gonna be somebody who s bulkier and can t run as far as fast or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
But what is it that sets somebody apart where you go, this guy, this guy is next level.
3
SPEAKER_01
He seems to be really together.
3
SPEAKER_01
He seems to be really bulletproof when it comes to
3
SPEAKER_01
not having these weird mood swings or depression or whatever it is that affects these guys or is it just, is that an illusion that it affects everybody all the time and some people are better at hiding it?
3
SPEAKER_02
No, I think when you get to any special operations unit or really any team, what is it that makes somebody shine in any team?
3
SPEAKER_02
They do a good job with their work.
3
SPEAKER_02
They work hard.
3
SPEAKER_02
For me, I can tell you, I wasn t the smartest guy in the world, I wasn t the best athlete in the world, I was like marginal performer when it comes to the runs, the swims.
3
SPEAKER_02
I passed what I needed to pass, but I wasn t winning.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t think I won.
3
SPEAKER_02
Matter of fact, I know.
3
SPEAKER_02
I didn t win a single run during Buds.
3
SPEAKER_02
I didn t win a single swim during Buds.
3
SPEAKER_02
I didn t win a single obstacle course.
3
SPEAKER_02
I didn t win any of that stuff.
3
SPEAKER_02
As far as intelligence, I m probably slightly smarter than your pad of paper.
3
SPEAKER_01
You pointed to the iPad first and then went, nah, nah.
3
SPEAKER_02
That thing s got me.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what are you going to do?
3
SPEAKER_02
For me, what did I do?
3
SPEAKER_02
I just worked hard.
3
SPEAKER_02
I just got to work before most people.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the guys that I was friends with that really rose to the top, they worked hard.
3
SPEAKER_02
They got to work before everybody else.
3
SPEAKER_02
They focused on the gear.
3
SPEAKER_02
They helped with the team.
3
SPEAKER_02
They always put the team before themselves.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s what makes a good team player.
3
SPEAKER_02
And that s what makes people excel in any organization, including the SEAL teams.
3
SPEAKER_01
when did you first experience or see violence firsthand after becoming a SEAL then?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because it seems like you go through all of these simulations in your training and you re going crazy with all that, and you must at some point think, let me at them, I m ready for this.
3
SPEAKER_01
I would imagine there s some shift, there s some break between the reality of it and the imagination that you have during training.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, the thing that s hard for a lot of people to understand, especially folks that are younger, we were in a period of peace
3
SPEAKER_02
through the 90s, from the end of the Gulf War until September 11th, 2001.
3
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That was my first 10 years in the SEAL teams.
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I didn t shoot my weapon at the enemy for 13 years.
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my first 13 years in the military.
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And there was people that were in the SEAL teams from, you know, they missed the Vietnam War, and they did a 30-year career and never shot their weapon at the enemy.
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That s hard for some people to understand, but that s the reality.
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Yeah, that makes sense now.
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I wondered about the timing.
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And so yeah, it was 13 years for me before I shot my weapon at the enemy for the first time.
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Did you ever think, this is never gonna happen, we re gonna go through this whole thing and never have to use our training, quote unquote?
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I trained, and the guys that I was friends with, we trained like we were going into combat tomorrow.
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We always had that attitude.
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That s not how everybody thought, but me and my friends, that s how we thought.
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We thought, we are going into combat tomorrow.
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We re gonna be ready.
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That way, when September 11th did happen, and when I did get my first firefight, I did feel ready.
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I was kind of stoked and also prepared.
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And so it wasn t this huge,
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crazy thing that happened.
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It was just sort of, okay, this is what I trained for, and let s do it.
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SPEAKER_00
I d wondered about the training intensity, and you said not everybody did this, but it seems like, obviously, some people do.
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SPEAKER_00
You have to be able to bring the intensity to your training.
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SPEAKER_00
Otherwise, it seems like you just wouldn t make it.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, at some point, you gotta be swimming along in the sea doing your 10,000th sit-up on the edge of one of those zodiacs and going, what the hell am I doing here?
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Why am I doing this?
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I m never gonna need this.
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You re right, if you had an attitude of just, I m never gonna do this, then you re not gonna be a good SEAL.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I won t even pretend like I belong there, but I feel like a lot of people probably feel that way.
4
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No, I m not saying you personally, I m saying someone that thinks, I m never gonna need to know how to do this, is not gonna be a good SEAL, because they re not gonna have the right mentality when they re training.
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And to be honest, when I was running training, I was borderline psychotic.
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crazy about training because I had just got back from overseas.
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I knew where these guys were deploying to.
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I knew that blood had been spilled.
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I know my friends had been killed.
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My guys had been killed.
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And I knew that the training that I was giving them, the training that I was in charge of, was what was going to keep them alive on the battlefield.
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So for me, the training was everything.
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And I did everything I could to make that training as realistic, as demanding, as I wanted the training to be harder than combat.
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I wanted them to get into combat.
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And I actually had guys that came back and said to me, yeah, you know, we got in our first big firefight and I was waiting to turn a corner and see you standing there saying, hey, we re going to bring the heat now.
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because they were well prepared for these situations.
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And the reason they were well prepared was because we worked on the fundamental skills of combat, the fundamental skills of combat leadership, and then we drove them really hard.
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And the thing is, what we tried to do and what I tried to do was to teach people to think.
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I needed people to think and that s what a lot of people don t understand about the military.
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Combat is an exercise in creativity.
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It really is.
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You need to be creative and you need to have a mind that is very thoughtful when you re in combat because the enemy is going to do things you don t expect.
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The terrain is going to be something you don t expect.
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The people that work for you are going to do things that you don t expect.
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The equipment you have is going to do things that you don t expect.
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nothing is going to go the way you planned it to go.
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So therefore, you have to have a very open mind, a very agile mind, and a mind that is ready to adapt and creatively find solutions to the problems that you confront.
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So when I was putting guys through training, we were giving them scenarios that the only way to get out of the scenario
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was to have a standard operating procedure, to know that standard operating procedure, to have the discipline to execute the standard operating procedure, and then on the fly decide that standard operating procedure is not gonna work, we have to modify it this way, I have to think this way, and I gotta get my guys to come from a different direction, and now we re gonna execute it and solve the problem.
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That s what I try to train people to do.
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I try to train them to think.
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And you have to do that while things are exploding, people are shooting at you, or worse.
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SPEAKER_00
It s funny that you said some of your guys came back and expected combat to be harder.
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I can imagine running through a city where people are shooting, there s explosions in the distance, your support s too far away, and they re thinking, wow, this run is not nearly as taxing as it was last week when Jocko made us run 15 miles with our packs on or whatever.
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Yeah, well, just to be clear here, when I talk about the training that I ran,
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It wasn t physical training.
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In other words, it wasn t hey, run 15 miles with a pack.
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We had simulated combat scenarios happening that were very, very realistic.
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I would hire actors to come down and special effects people to come down.
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We had them come down and make our cities look like they were in Iraq.
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And when you put down your night vision goggles, you could easily be in Iraq.
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Easily.
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That s how outstanding the people did recreating scenes from Iraq.
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But then we d bring down actors that were, you know, from whatever locale people were deploying to.
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So they d hear the language.
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They d have women.
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Oh, SEALs are easy with handling some guy.
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All I got to do is smash him down to the ground.
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What about when it s a
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62 year old woman that doesn t understand your language, how are you going to handle her?
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You know how you re gonna handle you d have to think.
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So we would throw these scenarios and we would have special effects.
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So when you went into a room, a bomb would go off now and you get hit in the face with a bunch of cork and foam and there s smoke all around.
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And when the smoke clears,
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You hear screaming and on the floor is a guy with no legs and there s blood spraying all over the place and he s screaming.
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And that guy is an actor from Hollywood, an amputee actor.
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So now you say, okay, let s get the medic, medic, get over here, start working on this guy.
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And right when the leader calls the medic in, all of a sudden we start shooting him with paint balls from different directions.
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These are the kind of training.
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I m not talking about runs or swims.
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I m talking about training to make people think.
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Yeah, because of course, when I think of things like Buds, I think of what I see in movies or television where you re running on the beach, you gotta finswim, you re doing the sit-ups on the edge of the Zodiac.
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I mean, I m already out of exercises.
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Yeah, and that s sort of the image of what SEALs are, and it s actually a fraction.
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of your SEAL career is any of that stuff.
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And what you learn in that is a lot less applicable.
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That s why I think why our book is done well is because we re not saying, hey, do sit-ups, you ll be a better leader.
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In fact, doing sit-ups has almost nothing to do with being a better leader.
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What it has to do with being a better leader is learning the principles of leadership, and that s why I think we ve done really well with the book.
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You mentioned some of the people that work with you are going to do different things when they re under pressure, when they re under fire.
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We re sitting home in America watching Fox News or listening to the radio and we hear, oh, the Iraqi troops that we just trained, they just turned and ran.
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SPEAKER_00
You just want to cry because you know how much trouble that we went through, that you guys went through to train these guys and how much money it costs and how big of a problem that is for their country and how that just does not bode well for the future of Iraq and Afghanistan.
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SPEAKER_00
What s going on when those people just say, screw this, even though they outnumber ISIS three to one, four to one?
4
SPEAKER_00
What are they doing?
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Why are they cutting bait?
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SPEAKER_00
Lack of leadership.
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It s as simple as that.
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It s a lack of leadership.
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Since they ve ran, they ve gone back in and took back the city of Ramadi.
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They went back in.
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Right now they re fighting for the city of Fallujah.
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What they ve benefited from now is they ve got American leadership there, even though the Americans aren t on the front lines fighting with them.
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They ve got that leadership and support to say, look, this is what needs to happen.
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This is the effect it s going to have.
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Here s why this is an important mission.
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When no one s telling you that, and you re a 19-year-old Iraqi kid that s from Baghdad that s now out in the Al-Ambar province, and you re seeing ISIS coming, and you re thinking, OK, why is this important?
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SPEAKER_01
What is this all about?
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SPEAKER_01
You know what you re going to do?
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SPEAKER_01
You re going to run.
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SPEAKER_01
You re going to run, yeah.
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But when you have good leadership,
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SPEAKER_00
Everything changes.
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didn t know how to count to five.
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SPEAKER_00
Other guys, when they were running, instead of just running, they were shooting their guns back over their head behind them, while you guys and whoever else was up front, now you re getting shot at by your own guys, inadvertently, and by the enemy, and all of your reinforcements are cutting and running.
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SPEAKER_00
When that happens, what s going on in your head when that happens?
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Is it just kind of a robotic calculation because of the amount of training that you ve got where you go, alright, those guys are gone, our numbers are now this, this is what has to happen?
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SPEAKER_01
That s what it is.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, you want to give yourself a quarter of a second to say, I wish this wasn t happening.
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I wish those guys would do their job.
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And then you go, okay, now what are we going to do to deal with it?
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One particular situation I remember is, you know, seeing these guys run and they re shooting back over their heads.
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You know, I m just trying to get them to cease fire because I m literally looking at my guys downrange.
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You know, what do I have to do?
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SPEAKER_01
I need to mechanically say, Hey, cease fire.
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SPEAKER_01
You stop shooting, lift your weapon and get them to start
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acting responsibly with their weapons is the first thing I need to make happen.
4
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So yeah, you just go into a mode of, okay, there s the problem, and here s what we gotta do to fix it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you find that mindset has translated really well to civilian life as well?
4
SPEAKER_00
It seems like the situations are definitely still there, slightly less lethal, hopefully.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it absolutely is.
5
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does.
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And when you work with any team or any company and they come into a bad situation, what are they going to do?
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Are they going to panic?
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Are they going to get mad at each other and see an Iraqi shooting in the wrong direction and now just go into a temper tantrum and start yelling at him and start yelling at his leader and start going berserk?
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there may be a time when we get back to base where I may have to show anger so I make sure that they get the message because if I ve tried talking to them, I ve tried counseling and I ve tried pointing it out to them, I ve tried eight times to get this message across in a nice, calm, constructive way and it hasn t worked, maybe it s time that I have to show some anger.
5
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I have to calculate that, show some anger so that they go, wow, I don t want that to happen again.
5
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That really bothered this guy.
5
SPEAKER_02
This whole shooting in the wrong direction is a bad thing and I won t let it happen again.
5
SPEAKER_02
So, yeah, but to do that in the heat of the battle, what good is that gonna do me?
5
SPEAKER_00
Right, it s more distraction than anything.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so it s the same thing in the civilian sector.
5
SPEAKER_02
You ve got something happening in your market, you ve got something happening to your competitor, you ve got something happening with people that are leaving your company, they ve been recruited to somewhere else.
5
SPEAKER_02
Whatever situation you wanna put up, okay, what are you gonna do?
5
SPEAKER_02
Are you gonna panic?
5
SPEAKER_02
Are you gonna freak out?
5
SPEAKER_02
Are you gonna get emotional?
5
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Or are you gonna do something to actively resolve the issue?
5
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I vote that you do something to actively resolve the issue.
5
SPEAKER_00
Growing up with my dad, for example, he was an emotional guy.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now he s really chill.
5
SPEAKER_00
He handles stress a lot better now.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know, must have had a more stressful job than I imagined.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now that he s retired, he s great.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I get a lot of that from him, and reading your book, for example, reading Extreme Ownership, and learning from people who do things at a high-performing level all the time, especially military, I find really are great at controlling some of that emotional response.
5
SPEAKER_00
Ironically, where you might normally have the most emotional response because the stakes are so high, you tend to be the best at controlling it.
5
SPEAKER_00
You find somebody who, their gig is starting 10 minutes late and they re losing it, even though the stakes are relatively low.
5
SPEAKER_00
I find that to be something that I m still wrapping my head around because it seems like that s really hard to train and retain.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and your gig is starting in 10 minutes.
5
SPEAKER_02
So what you re going to do is go berserk and get crazy and work yourself and start sweating before you even walk out to your gig.
5
SPEAKER_02
When reality is, if you said, OK, looks like we re starting 10 minutes late.
5
SPEAKER_02
You know what?
5
SPEAKER_02
I m going to think of a good opening line right now.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m gonna think of a way to soften this when I get out there and people go, wow, we ve been waiting for this guy for a while and he s 10 minutes late.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m gonna have an opener that s gonna get him right back where I want him.
5
SPEAKER_02
So is that the better plan or is it a better plan to go yell at the microphone guy because his batteries were dead and now he doesn t have any backups?
5
SPEAKER_02
What benefit does that get you?
5
SPEAKER_02
And it goes back to what I talked about earlier.
5
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I talk about this on my podcast all the time.
5
SPEAKER_02
You gotta detach from those situations.
5
SPEAKER_02
You gotta detach from that emotion.
5
SPEAKER_02
You gotta detach from that chaos.
5
SPEAKER_02
and you just gotta say, okay, how can I actually improve the situation I m in?
5
SPEAKER_00
It s funny that you use anger as a tool later on in order to convey an emotion, because by that point, it may have dissipated to the point where you re like, well, we re still alive, that was bad, oh wait, hold on, I gotta make sure you remember that that was bad.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let me think back to how I felt the second I saw you shooting over the shoulder with that rifle at one of my guys.
5
SPEAKER_00
All right, now I m in the moment.
5
SPEAKER_00
Get over here and bring your commander with you.
5
SPEAKER_02
People don t follow robots.
5
SPEAKER_02
and robots don t have emotions.
5
SPEAKER_02
So the difference between you and a robot is the fact that you have emotions.
5
SPEAKER_02
So if you never show those emotions in any way, shape or form, you re a robot and people aren t going to follow you.
5
SPEAKER_02
Again, it s very important.
5
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you have to be in control of your emotions.
5
SPEAKER_02
And honestly, when I am getting angry, it s going to be a calculated decision to say, okay, I need to show this person some anger right now.
5
SPEAKER_02
unless I m dealing with some sort of technology like a printer or a copy machine, that might be real anger.
5
SPEAKER_02
No, I can t take ownership of printers.
5
SPEAKER_02
They hate me and I hate them.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s something going on there.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, if I lost my temper with you, if you re my employee and I lost my temper with you and went all crazy, is that going to make you increase your respect for me?
5
SPEAKER_00
Not a chance.
5
SPEAKER_02
Is it going to make you think, wow, I really want to work for this person?
5
SPEAKER_02
Is it going to even make you think I m going to try and do my best job possible to keep this guy happy?
5
SPEAKER_02
No.
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SPEAKER_02
Best case scenario I get is that you re in fear of me.
5
SPEAKER_02
and you re doing something to avoid getting yelled at, but is that going to help you get over an obstacle?
5
SPEAKER_02
It s just a bad situation.
5
SPEAKER_02
The temper thing, the emotional thing, is generally something that needs to be controlled.
5
SPEAKER_02
It doesn t need to be eliminated, but it needs to be controlled.
5
SPEAKER_00
When you transitioned back into civilian life, was it hard for you to relate to civilians?
5
SPEAKER_00
Was there something that you had experienced that, granted, most of us have never experienced this, did you find it hard to transition back into the civilian life from the military, especially being in Ramadi and the intense combat you saw there?
5
SPEAKER_02
I mean, coming back, I wasn t a civilian when I got back from Ramadi.
5
SPEAKER_02
I still had three years left.
5
SPEAKER_02
And coming back from Ramadi, I was definitely, I was very focused on training.
5
SPEAKER_02
So I guess you could say that it took a little bit of time to readjust to saying, okay, this person isn t actually going to die if they re standing in the street getting hit with a paintball.
5
SPEAKER_02
It took me a little while to get away from that.
5
SPEAKER_02
But overall,
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, the interesting thing about the civilian world and combat is civilians deal with all kinds of crazy things, too.
5
SPEAKER_02
They deal with loss.
5
SPEAKER_02
They deal with disease.
5
SPEAKER_02
They deal with getting fired from their job.
5
SPEAKER_02
They deal with people committing suicide.
5
SPEAKER_02
They deal with all kinds of problems and issues that are just as heavy as what you might experience in combat.
5
SPEAKER_02
Now, the difference is that
5
SPEAKER_02
combat, you get a lot of that in a very short period of time.
5
SPEAKER_02
So you get like a lifetime s worth of suffering in one deployment, if you have a rough deployment.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so you get some experience that you can hopefully learn from.
5
SPEAKER_02
And really, hopefully, you can pass that information on to people that you know, and say, Hey, you know what, here s how I got through situations like that.
5
SPEAKER_02
Here s what my team did to get through a situation like that.
5
SPEAKER_02
I think what I try to do with it is
5
SPEAKER_02
I think combat makes you better.
5
SPEAKER_02
It makes you understand people more, it makes you understand human nature better, because it s a lifetime of experience compressed into six months or a year.
5
SPEAKER_02
And so you should come out of that with some wisdom.
5
SPEAKER_00
So essentially it s real life with possibly higher stakes tuned up to 11 in terms of intensity, and then you come back from it thinking, all right, if I haven t learned anything from that, I m in trouble.
5
SPEAKER_00
Most people come back having learned plenty, I would imagine.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I think, you know, that s one of the things that happens as well.
5
SPEAKER_02
And obviously it s been in the news a lot is, you know, we have guys going into significant depression and even committing suicide, which is obviously horrible.
5
SPEAKER_02
I think some of that comes from the fact that they dwell in those experiences and they stay there in their mind.
5
SPEAKER_02
instead of saying, you know what, that was an experience I m lucky to have experienced a lifetime of situations and grief and sadness and happiness and joy, all those things in a year or in six months, that s heavy.
5
SPEAKER_02
But if people stay there and they dwell there and they don t move past it, that s where I think it becomes problematic.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you ever miss Iraq or combat?
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you ever miss it at all?
5
SPEAKER_01
Every day.
5
SPEAKER_00
Really?
5
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_01
What do you miss about it?
5
SPEAKER_01
The crystal clear, absolute focus of my whole existence into that situation.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s almost like mindfulness in a way, but you re completely immersed in that.
5
SPEAKER_02
Completely and 100%, everything about me is focused on this thing, and it s very difficult to get that focused on anything else in the world.
5
SPEAKER_00
I would imagine.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you think that s a primal instinct that just kicks in that we don t use much anymore, or is that something you develop?
5
SPEAKER_02
Well, I think that combat is a very primal instinct, and I think that s why people are drawn to it.
5
SPEAKER_02
I think that s why people join the military, because they think, I want to fight other people.
5
SPEAKER_02
I own an MMA gym.
5
SPEAKER_02
That MMA gym is filled with people.
5
SPEAKER_02
What do those people want to do?
5
SPEAKER_02
They want to fight other people.
5
SPEAKER_02
So I think, yeah, I think it s primal, and I think it s part of being a human.
5
SPEAKER_00
You hear about war journalists, my friend who s been on the show before, Dan Harris, who hosts Nightline, he was a war journalist for a while, and he went to, I think, Iraq and Afghanistan, and he came back and he realized, I m addicted to the rush from being in this situation, the focus of being in the middle of conflict, and he wasn t even in the conflict, he was around the conflict, and he felt like,
5
SPEAKER_00
he needed to replace it and he ended up with a drug problem actually as a result because he was looking for the spikes and the focus that you get from being in those situations.
5
SPEAKER_00
Most of us will never experience or hopefully never experience anything like that unless that s what you re going for.
5
SPEAKER_00
But it does seem to be something that you find yourself thrust in there and something in your lizard brain just turns on and it seems like it would be hard to forget about that.
5
SPEAKER_02
It is hard to forget about it.
5
SPEAKER_02
Again, in my mind I think
5
SPEAKER_02
What a person needs to do that s struggling with that is look at it in a positive light.
5
SPEAKER_02
Look at those experiences in a positive light and be happy that you are lucky enough to live through that and experience those things and experience a lifetime of struggle and strife and happiness and joy and sorrow.
6
SPEAKER_01
a lifetime of that in a six-month deployment, or a one-year deployment, or a 14-month deployment, or however long that lasted for.
6
SPEAKER_01
But then once it s over, instead of staying in that cycle and looking back towards that, look forward.
6
SPEAKER_01
Don t dwell in the past, but look forward to the future.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, if I were in your shoes, I m not sure I could switch from fighting bad guys in Ramadi to hanging out at my MMA gym in San Diego without maybe having some things in the back of my head.
6
SPEAKER_00
Do you think about this at night as well?
6
SPEAKER_00
Is this something that, do you wake up at night thinking, what s the enemy doing?
6
SPEAKER_00
Or do you have any kind of thought processes that you can t turn off that you developed while you were there?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this all comes with some level of paranoia and some level of continually thinking about things that could happen.
6
SPEAKER_01
So yes, yes.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I like it.
6
SPEAKER_01
I like it.
6
SPEAKER_01
I want to have that.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m happy that I have that.
6
SPEAKER_01
It makes me, me.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I m good with it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Is it even a darkness or is this something that s like, no, this is a thought process that I have, it s part of me now.
6
SPEAKER_00
It seems like for you, it s become more a part of you and less of a demon that you have to continually keep at bay in the back of your head.
6
SPEAKER_01
War is darkness.
6
SPEAKER_01
War is evil.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there s evil people doing horrible things in war.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think probably the difference between a lot of veterans and active duty people is they recognize that there s darkness in the world.
6
SPEAKER_01
They recognize that the evil is real.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s, you know, with my podcast, so often I hear from veterans, they just say, thanks, man.
6
SPEAKER_01
I know what you re talking about.
6
SPEAKER_01
And even people that are relatives of veterans,
6
SPEAKER_01
that write me and say, Hey, you know what, I understand what my brother is thinking.
6
SPEAKER_01
I understand what my son is thinking.
6
SPEAKER_01
I understand where he s been.
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SPEAKER_01
I understand it now.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I think that yeah, there s darkness in the world.
6
SPEAKER_01
And if you ignore it, or you act like it s not there,
6
SPEAKER_01
That s just a little fantasy bubble that you live in and you re not facing reality.
6
SPEAKER_01
And when the darkness does enter your world, which it s going to enter your world at some point, I don t care who you are, things are going to happen.
6
SPEAKER_01
Life is going to happen.
6
SPEAKER_01
Death is going to happen.
6
SPEAKER_01
And if you ignore those things throughout your life, you won t be prepared when they come.
6
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned extreme ownership as a mindset, an attitude.
6
SPEAKER_00
Tell us, first of all, what that means to you, what the phrase extreme ownership means.
6
SPEAKER_01
To me, the phrase extreme ownership.
6
SPEAKER_00
Self-explanatory?
6
SPEAKER_01
Means extreme ownership.
6
SPEAKER_01
The thing that s interesting about it is it s so easy, and as you said earlier, it s so simple to understand what it means, but it is definitely challenging to execute.
6
SPEAKER_01
Simple to understand, not easy to execute.
6
SPEAKER_01
Now once you get in the mindset of it, once you develop the attitude of extreme ownership, then it s very easy to do.
6
SPEAKER_01
And even you, after you read the book, you saw someone that wasn t implementing extreme ownership, and they were blaming other people for something that went wrong, and it stands out like a sore thumb.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so, what it is,
6
SPEAKER_01
is not making excuses, not passing blame onto anybody else, taking ownership of everything that affects you and your mission, and making it right.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s what extreme ownership is.
6
SPEAKER_00
Why is it important?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because I m thinking, look, we kind of alluded to this earlier in the interview as well.
6
SPEAKER_00
Somebody else makes a mistake at work.
6
SPEAKER_00
Why am I gonna sit here and take the blame for it?
6
SPEAKER_00
What if I get in trouble?
6
SPEAKER_00
Won t this reflect poorly on me?
6
SPEAKER_01
Actually, no.
6
SPEAKER_01
If your subordinate makes a mistake and you blame them, that will actually reflect horribly on you.
6
SPEAKER_01
And anybody in a leadership position that has people working for them that are blaming their team when things go wrong is not going to be a respected leader.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re going to be seen as a detriment.
6
SPEAKER_01
Whereas, if something goes wrong with my team, they miss a deadline, they don t finish what they re supposed to do, and I step up and say, hey, we didn t get this done, we didn t accomplish our objective, this is my fault because I am the leader and these are the changes I m going to make to fix it next time around.
6
SPEAKER_01
Now all of a sudden you say, okay, I respect that.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I have faith that you re actually going to implement those changes.
6
SPEAKER_01
Whereas if all you re doing is blaming other people, we re not getting anywhere.
6
SPEAKER_01
Nothing s going to change.
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you implement this then?
6
SPEAKER_00
Is this a top-down type of thing?
6
SPEAKER_00
When you go in and you teach this to CEOs and businesses, you start with them, I assume?
6
SPEAKER_01
We sometimes do, but sometimes we get brought in at various levels of companies.
6
SPEAKER_01
The simplest way to explain how to implement this is to start doing it.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it can start at any level of chain of command.
6
SPEAKER_01
For instance, if I work for you, and you come back and you say, hey, we failed this project, it s your fault, Jocko.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I go, you know what, boss?
6
SPEAKER_01
This is my fault.
6
SPEAKER_01
This is my fault, here s what I did wrong, here s the mistakes I made with my team, here s what I m gonna do to fix it.
6
SPEAKER_01
Now, what are you gonna say?
6
SPEAKER_01
Are you gonna say, you re damn right, that was your fault?
6
SPEAKER_01
No, you re gonna look at me and say, wow, this guy s stepping up.
6
SPEAKER_01
And you re gonna start to take ownership of what you did wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know what, Jocko, I could have done better giving you more time to get this done.
6
SPEAKER_01
I set the deadline too early, that s my fault.
6
SPEAKER_01
All of a sudden we got problems and we re both taking ownership of the problems and we re both solving the problems.
6
SPEAKER_01
And when you have a team where everybody is solving the problems, that s when you end up with a really, truly, highly performing team.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s something that, in the SEAL teams, it s just the way I was.
6
SPEAKER_01
And in the SEAL teams, I would identify the difference between people that took ownership and people that didn t, leaders that took ownership and what those teams would look like, what those platoons would look like, what those task units would look like, and leaders that didn t take ownership and what those teams would look like and what those platoons would look like.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the difference was stark.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so when we moved in the civilian world, I saw the same thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
When people took ownership of things, then it became the whole team took ownership.
6
SPEAKER_01
And when people didn t take ownership, no one on the team took ownership.
6
SPEAKER_01
It was an idea that then formulated, the more I saw it,
6
SPEAKER_01
Eventually, I said, oh, this is it.
6
SPEAKER_01
These people take ownership.
6
SPEAKER_01
These people don t.
6
SPEAKER_01
The actual term stemmed from an email that I wrote to a leader.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I was saying, listen, I see everyone pointing fingers at each other.
6
SPEAKER_01
When I was in a SEAL task unit, when I was a task unit commander of Task Unit Bruiser, the commander would go around the room and say, what do you need?
6
SPEAKER_01
to the different task unit commanders.
6
SPEAKER_01
What do you need?
6
SPEAKER_01
And a guy would say, well, we need this gear and we need this and I need more training on that.
6
SPEAKER_01
And he d go to the next guy and the next guy would say, we need internet out at the training facility and we need this and this other thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the commander would get to me and he d say, Jocko, what do you need?
6
SPEAKER_01
And I d say, I don t need anything.
6
SPEAKER_01
We re good to go.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because if there was a problem, I m not going to tell my boss, I m going to solve that problem.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m going to get that gear.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m going to figure it out.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I said in the email, I said, I took ownership, extreme ownership of everything in my world.
6
SPEAKER_01
I wasn t out there saying, I need this and I need that.
6
SPEAKER_01
I just took ownership of it.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that phrase is what kind of caught on with some folks that we worked with and said, we need to take extreme ownership.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I said, yes, you do.
6
SPEAKER_01
You do need to take extreme ownership.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it kind of built from there.
6
SPEAKER_00
Are there any times when it doesn t make sense to say, okay, this is my fault?
6
SPEAKER_00
Are there exceptions to this somewhere?
6
SPEAKER_00
For the most of the time, I mean a vast majority of the time.
6
SPEAKER_00
Probably in hypothetical land, there is one, but.
6
SPEAKER_01
We ve worked with scores of different companies, small companies, big companies, Fortune 500 companies, little startups.
6
SPEAKER_01
We ve worked with every kind of company.
6
SPEAKER_01
And not once have I said, you know what?
6
SPEAKER_01
This is going to go a lot better if you don t take ownership of what s happening.
6
SPEAKER_01
I haven t said, hey, you should blame your team.
6
SPEAKER_01
Or you know what?
6
SPEAKER_01
Your boss isn t giving you the support you need.
6
SPEAKER_01
You should blame your boss.
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SPEAKER_01
You should fail the mission and blame your boss.
6
SPEAKER_01
I haven t said that one time yet.
6
SPEAKER_00
If we re working in an organization, can I suddenly read this book, which will be linked up in the show notes, of course, can I read this book and go, I m doing this, and then have it affect the other people around me?
6
SPEAKER_00
What if I m low on the totem pole?
6
SPEAKER_00
Is it still gonna work?
6
SPEAKER_00
It absolutely will.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was the youngest and most junior guy in my first two SEAL platoons.
6
SPEAKER_01
I had this attitude back then, and that spreads.
6
SPEAKER_01
All of my buddies acted like this.
6
SPEAKER_01
We all acted like this.
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SPEAKER_01
We weren t going to blame if something went wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
If the boat motor didn t run, we didn t blame each other.
6
SPEAKER_01
We said, okay, this is our problem.
6
SPEAKER_01
How do we get this thing fixed?
6
SPEAKER_01
How do we make sure we need to run the motors more?
6
SPEAKER_01
We need to make sure the fuel doesn t get contaminated by the saltwater.
6
SPEAKER_01
Cause this is what happens.
6
SPEAKER_01
And now we ended up with a situation.
6
SPEAKER_01
How can we overcome that problem?
6
SPEAKER_01
We didn t say, Hey, that guy s responsible for the fuel.
6
SPEAKER_01
The fuel is contaminated.
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SPEAKER_01
It s his fault.
6
SPEAKER_01
He better fix it next time.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, we work together as a team to solve these problems.
6
SPEAKER_00
To clarify, this isn t just, oh well, you know, I didn t do something so everybody get mad at me.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s something being done here with the blame where you re just absorbing it so you can move beyond it, correct?
6
SPEAKER_01
Just to kind of spell it out, and this is kind of an anecdote that I talk about, if we take a SEAL troop and they re going out on a training operation and they re horrible, everything goes bad, they come back from this training operation,
6
SPEAKER_01
And you know, I go, okay, the boss, I say, hey boss, that didn t go too well.
6
SPEAKER_01
What happened out there?
6
SPEAKER_01
And if the boss says, well, I ll tell you what went wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
Number one, Jordan, he was charged the assault team.
6
SPEAKER_01
He didn t have enough guys, which means he couldn t take down the target quick enough, which means we were out there for too long.
6
SPEAKER_01
That was ridiculous.
6
SPEAKER_01
Jordan needs to fix what he s doing.
6
SPEAKER_01
He might even get fired.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then Jen, who was in charge of the Humvees, guess what?
6
SPEAKER_01
She didn t show up where she was supposed to show up with the Humvees to pick us up.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s her fault.
6
SPEAKER_01
She s ridiculous.
6
SPEAKER_01
I can t believe that you did that, Jen.
6
SPEAKER_01
So now...
7
SPEAKER_00
What s your reaction when I do that?
7
SPEAKER_00
What s your reaction when I blame you?
7
SPEAKER_00
What s anybody s reaction when I blame you?
7
SPEAKER_00
You re going to get defensive.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you are going to blame someone else.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re going to blame members of your team.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re going to blame me.
7
SPEAKER_00
You might not say it, but you might blame me for not giving you what you needed.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so now you ve got a problem.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re not solving it.
7
SPEAKER_00
Jen s feeling the same way.
7
SPEAKER_00
She s not solving her problem.
7
SPEAKER_00
We got a disaster on our hands.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s horrible.
7
SPEAKER_00
So now let s take the same scenario.
7
SPEAKER_00
We go out on a training operation.
7
SPEAKER_00
We send a troop out on a training operation.
7
SPEAKER_00
They do a horrible job.
7
SPEAKER_00
They come back and we ll go to the debriefing room.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I say, Hey boss, that didn t go too well.
7
SPEAKER_00
What happened?
7
SPEAKER_00
And he says, well, you know what?
7
SPEAKER_00
First of all, Jordan went to hit the target.
7
SPEAKER_00
and I didn t give him enough guys to take down the target.
7
SPEAKER_00
I thought it was a smaller target building.
7
SPEAKER_00
I thought he could get it done.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s my fault, Jordan.
7
SPEAKER_00
I didn t give you the resources you needed.
7
SPEAKER_00
I apologize.
7
SPEAKER_00
It won t happen again.
7
SPEAKER_00
Next time we ll definitely have a face-to-face.
7
SPEAKER_00
And Jen, you missed us at the extract point with the vehicles.
7
SPEAKER_00
I can t believe that I let you walk out of the brief without confirming that you knew where you needed to be and when you needed to be there.
7
SPEAKER_00
And not just you, but your whole team should have known that.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so that s my fault, too.
7
SPEAKER_00
I let you walk out of the brief without the information you needed, so that s my fault, and from now on, I m gonna get that confirmed.
7
SPEAKER_00
Now what s your attitude gonna be?
7
SPEAKER_00
Now what s your attitude?
7
SPEAKER_00
Jordan s gonna say, you know what, boss?
7
SPEAKER_00
I looked at the target longer than you.
7
SPEAKER_00
You had other stuff going on.
7
SPEAKER_00
I knew I might need more guys.
7
SPEAKER_00
I thought I could pull it off, but I went underhanded.
7
SPEAKER_00
I won t let that happen again.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s my fault.
7
SPEAKER_00
We ll get it solved.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then Jen s gonna look at me and say, hey, you know what, boss?
7
SPEAKER_00
I walked out of the brief.
7
SPEAKER_00
I thought I knew.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I thought to myself, maybe I should confirm, but I didn t say anything.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the fact that my whole team was out there and didn t know where to go and when to go there.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I didn t confirm that.
7
SPEAKER_00
What happens if I got shot?
7
SPEAKER_00
Now we re lost.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so Jen would have taken ownership of that problem.
7
SPEAKER_00
So what we end up again, what we end up with is a whole team with a whole team is grabbing hold of those problems, taking ownerships to those problems, and then solving the problems.
7
SPEAKER_00
and that s the huge difference.
7
SPEAKER_01
Right, you end up, instead of looking for how to defend yourself or blame other people or point fingers, you think, okay, what did I do that contributed to this that we can then fix for next time so we don t end up in the same situation again?
7
SPEAKER_00
Like if I say, hey, it was my fault, you know, I didn t explain it to you or I didn t study the target well enough and I didn t get, you don t look at me and say, that s right, boss, it was your fault, that was pathetic.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, you feel bad because we got a unified vision.
7
SPEAKER_00
We re trying to make something happen.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you let me down.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m not going to say that.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m going to say I let you down.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m going to mean it.
7
SPEAKER_00
This isn t about just lip service of, hey, this is all my fault, gents.
7
SPEAKER_00
Sorry.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, this is about I truly believe that if I sent you on this target without enough people, that is my fault and I need to fix it.
7
SPEAKER_01
The only thing I can see getting in the way of this would be an ego problem.
7
SPEAKER_01
We alluded to this earlier.
7
SPEAKER_01
We mentioned this earlier.
7
SPEAKER_01
How do you strip the ego out of somebody who might otherwise be a good leader but is hung up on maybe accolades or validation or avoiding any kind of dirty hands for any shit that goes down that s not up to snuff?
7
SPEAKER_01
How do we strip the ego out of somebody like that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Or do you have to filter for people like that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are those people salvageable at all?
7
SPEAKER_00
It can happen.
7
SPEAKER_00
It can happen.
7
SPEAKER_00
But if you want to remove someone s ego, it s gonna come from the pain and suffering of failure.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so, you know, in the SEAL teams, by the time you get into a leadership position, generally, you ve been through enough pain and suffering and failure to realize you re gonna make mistakes.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it s okay.
7
SPEAKER_00
We already talked about this, but if I take blame for something as a leader, you don t lose respect for me.
7
SPEAKER_00
You go, ow.
7
SPEAKER_00
He s stepping up and taking the blame for all this stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
I respect that guy.
7
SPEAKER_00
But people that haven t been in these situations before, they are insecure in their own leadership.
7
SPEAKER_00
They think if I admit that I m wrong or I take blame for something, everyone s gonna look at me like I m a worse leader than I am and I can t handle that.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, because I m the best person in the world.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re 100% right.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s why there s a chapter in the book called Check the Ego, because the ego is a massive problem if you let it get out of control.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the way that ego gets checked over time is by life.
7
SPEAKER_00
is by failure, is by reality.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s what humbles you over time.
7
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned that as a leader, it s not what you preach, it s what you tolerate.
7
SPEAKER_01
Can you tell us about that?
7
SPEAKER_01
I feel like in every organization that I ve ever been a part of, what people tolerate, what we as an organization tolerate, it starts to expand over time, and eventually it poisons everything.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and that s actually a line that Leif wrote, and it s true.
7
SPEAKER_00
He told a story the other day.
7
SPEAKER_00
This was when I was a troop commander, he was one of the platoon commanders, and we were going through this block of training, really hard training, really stressful training, really physical training out in the desert in the summertime.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the block of training is about three weeks long of preparation and learning tactics and gunfighting, and then they put you into a field training exercises where you re gonna do these
7
SPEAKER_00
big exercises, these big training operations.
7
SPEAKER_00
And in between those two little sections, there s a break where they give you a day or two days where you can go and they ll let you go into town.
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe guys have some beers and let off some steam and whatever.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, he was telling the story that that s what SEAL task units do when they re at this training site.
7
SPEAKER_00
And when we went through training and that day came,
7
SPEAKER_00
They didn t even come to me and say, hey, can we go out tonight?
7
SPEAKER_00
Hey, can we go and have a few beers?
7
SPEAKER_00
They knew what I would say.
7
SPEAKER_00
They knew that what I would say was, listen, we are out here to train.
7
SPEAKER_00
We ve got training operations coming up.
7
SPEAKER_00
We need to be ready on those.
7
SPEAKER_00
When we get back to San Diego, we ll go drinking some beers.
7
SPEAKER_00
But right now, what we need to focus on is what is the job at hand.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s not going to be any slack out here.
7
SPEAKER_00
Let s not do that.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s because those guys knew me.
7
SPEAKER_00
They knew what I was going to tolerate.
7
SPEAKER_00
And they knew also that I didn t even have to preach that stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, those guys were just on board.
7
SPEAKER_00
Everyone in that task unit wanted to be the best.
7
SPEAKER_00
Everyone in that task unit was ready to do what they had to do to get the best reputation we could have.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s why we performed really well.
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you get to select the people in your task unit or is this something that you have to build the people in your task unit?
7
SPEAKER_01
You get assigned to people.
7
SPEAKER_01
So everybody that was there was a good performer in large part because if they weren t quite up to it when they got assigned to you, they fell in line because of the training.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and they got help.
7
SPEAKER_00
We helped each other out.
7
SPEAKER_00
We took guys that needed extra training.
7
SPEAKER_00
We d give them extra training.
7
SPEAKER_00
Anybody that didn t understand something, we d make sure they understood it.
7
SPEAKER_00
And our goal was that everybody in the task unit was good to go.
7
SPEAKER_01
It must be almost weird being separated from people like that after going through things like combat and where you re watching each other s back and you re always together 24-7.
7
SPEAKER_01
It almost seems like separation anxiety.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, you get, we call that teen guy separation anxiety.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh really?
7
SPEAKER_00
You re used to being with SEALs and now you re not with them anymore.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so you go through this phase of what is the world really about when I m not around all these guys?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because you work with them, you eat with them, you drink with them, you work out with them, and you actually live with them.
7
SPEAKER_00
So while I was in the SEAL teams, no doubt, my family saw a lot less of me than my platoon did.
7
SPEAKER_00
They re not even close, not even in the same ballpark.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s probably 75% with the troop, with the platoon, and 25% with the family.
7
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned that when you were in combat, when you were in Ramadi or Iraq in general, you didn t have a lot of photos of your family up on the wall.
7
SPEAKER_01
Why was that?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is that a focus thing for you?
7
SPEAKER_01
Why?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because I had guys that were putting their lives on the line on a daily basis.
7
SPEAKER_00
I needed to be focused on making sure that I did everything I could to make them as safe as possible, to give them the best chances of going out, executing their mission, and coming back.
7
SPEAKER_00
Every time the guys rolled out the gate, there was a significant chance they were going to get in a firefight.
7
SPEAKER_00
That was a given.
7
SPEAKER_00
There was a significant chance that they were going to die.
7
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So what could I do?
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What could I be thinking about?
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What could I be adjusting?
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What could I be looking at?
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What intelligence could I be pouring over that increases their capability of accomplishing the mission and staying alive?
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So these two things can t be weighed against each other.
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My family s in San Diego.
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They re going to school, getting their school lunches.
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They re going to the beach on the weekends.
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They re gonna be fine.
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I can t think about them right now.
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It sounds like how we started the show with you can only focus on the things that you can control.
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There s no point in worrying about other things.
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Yes, and I was not worried about my family.
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Of course, do I care about my family?
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Absolutely.
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I ve been married for a long time.
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I got four awesome kids.
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That s great, but I can t be thinking about them when I got lives at stake.
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Last but definitely not least, there s a concept in the book that leaders should never be satisfied.
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Can you speak to that?
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Of course we re always striving to improve, but how do we create that and build that mindset into the team?
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Is it simply just leading by example?
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Because I feel like there s always gonna be some people that won t fall in line.
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You should absolutely be leading by example.
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You should absolutely be living that example.
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Not just at work, but with your life and how you re doing mentally, physically.
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What are you doing to get smarter?
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What are you doing to get better?
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What are you doing to become a better leader?
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What are you doing to become a better follower?
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All those things and you apply those things from your personal life to your team because you want your team to be saying the same things and thinking the same things.
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What can we do to be a stronger team?
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What can we do to be a smarter team, be a better team?
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That s what you want as a leader.
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As a matter of fact, you can t impose this on them.
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You can t be, as a leader, you can t be in everyone s head or standing over their shoulders all the time.
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What you have to do is you have to foster this culture where everybody wants to win, everybody wants to do the best, everybody wants to improve.
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That s what you re looking for.
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And when you end up doing that with your team and you convey that culture of excellence, of not being satisfied,
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as a person or as a team, when you convey that and you instill that culture, you will end up with excellence across the board.
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Jaco, thank you very much.
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Thanks for having me on, appreciate it.
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Intense interview, very cool, done on the spot.
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Flew down to see him in San Diego, which I normally don t go to the location to do it.
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I like to do stuff over Skype.
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Jocko was kind of insistent about doing it in person, and I m thankful that he was because it was great to meet and hang out and do it face to face.
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There s just a little something special about that.
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And look, extreme ownership, it s a powerful principle.
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People think they take responsibility, but when you really take extreme ownership,
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You see the changes right away.
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I ve seen this in my own life.
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I ve seen this in my business.
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I highly recommend people read it and do it and implement it right away because it s harder than it sounds, but you will see results.
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There will be a yield from this for you.
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And if you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Jocko on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well as the other resources mentioned on the show.
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Of course, the book Extreme Ownership will be linked there as well.
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You can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the cheat sheet for this episode, and we link to the show notes directly right on your phone, right in your face there.
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I m also on Twitter, at theartofcharm.com.
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You can interface with me and Jaco both there.
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I m posting articles and insights, and I d be happy to hear from you and what you thought of this interview.
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I also want to encourage you to join us in our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or in the USA only text charmed to 33444.
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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It s about improving your network.
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networking and connection skills, and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show, and I m also doing videos every week to help you move forward with drills and exercises and very practical things that you can use to develop your soft skills.
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It will make you a better networker, it ll make you a better connector, and a better thinker, most importantly.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or text charmed in the US to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.