Simon Sinek uses a Marine Corps story about two soldiers who fell asleep on watch to show why accountability builds trust. One admitted the mistake and was punished; the other denied it until caught and risked expulsion. In small groups of about 150 people, trust is survival, and leaders who won't own their failures break it.
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So to be clear, the military is not perfect. They've got plenty, plenty of problems. We have. They have amazing leaders, and they've got some really bad leaders. But as an unbalance, the lessons, the good lessons tend to be very exaggerated, easier to see because the stakes are higher. It's life and death for us. The stakes are just dollars and cents. Like, when we screw up, we lose a company a bunch of money. That's pretty much it. When they screw up, really bad things happen. And so you start to recognize that the lessons are easier to identify. And so that's one of the reasons I've sort of learned a lot from them. I'll give you one example. I don't think this is one I've written about.
I had the opportunity to visit a Marine Corps ocs, Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. And that's where the Marines choose their. Their officers. And I was having a meet. I was. I was expected to have a meeting with the colonel and who runs OCS. And he was just going to give me a PowerPoint about, here's what we do at Quantico. And he showed up late for the meeting. And if you've ever met a Marine, they don't show up late. If you're on time, you're late. That's how Marines are. And he showed up late. He apologized. He said, I'm terribly sorry. We've had an incident on base.
Something where I had to deal with because we might have to throw one of our Marines out of the Marine Corps. I'm thinking, what did he do, right? What law did he break? And so I said, what'd he do? And the colonel said, he fell asleep on watch. And I'm thinking, he fell asleep on watch in the woods of Virginia, like you're going to throw him out of the Marine Corps for that. I literally said that to him. He said, you don't understand, Simon. He says, when we asked him about it, he denied it. When we asked him about it again, he denied it again. And only when we gave him irrefutable proof did he say, I'd like to take responsibility for my actions. The problem we have is you don't take responsibility for your actions at the time you get caught. You take responsibility for your actions at the time you perform your actions. He says, we have another Marine that fell asleep. He completely admitted it, took full responsibility. We punished him. We have no problem with him. And then he went on to explain. He says, you have to understand, if I put this young leader in a leadership position and they're in a combat situation. And if his Marines doubt for one minute that that Marine, that their leader doesn't have their back, if they doubt for one minute that that Marine will lie to cover his ass, who will say things simply to make himself look good and won't take accountability for his mistakes, trust will break and people will die.
And you start to understand that that story makes perfect sense in a Marine context. But if you look at human beings, we're very primitive animals living in a very modern world. And if you understand sort of like the anthropology of human, of Homo sapiens, and you go back the thousands of years when we lived in reasonably small communities, no bigger than about 150, that trust is the currency that keeps you alive. And if somebody owns up to their mistakes, you will trust them and you will look out for them. If they lie to you, deceive you, or try and just pump themselves up, you will be very nervous to fall asleep at night that that person's gonna watch your back and you're not watching theirs. And that's how entire communities will die. And so we carry these mentalities to this day. We have the same fears and anxieties. We have the same evaluations of each other. And these subtle. These. These subtle cues that we're giving to each other constantly are very, very primitive, very, very caveman. And I think if you learn those lessons from the military, because the stakes are so high, you start to recognize that they are pervasive in our lives, and people react that way.
Which is why.
Isolating people or making fun of people or pushing people out of the tribe can be very dangerous. Like kids who shoot up schools, these young men who shoot up schools, they're, first of all, predominantly young men, and they've all been picked on and isolated. There's nothing more dangerous than an isolated young man. And again, go back to caveman, right? So have you ever watched a nature documentary with, like, a herd of gazelle? And.
You know, they all sort of, like, they're all grazing, and, like, one hears a rustle in the leaves, and they all go like this, right? Like, they all have this cortisol that keeps them alert to danger. And if you notice how gazelle graze, they put the old and the sick outside, and the young and the healthy are the inside. So when the lion attacks, they're going to eat an old or sick gazelle, because if they eat a young one, then the whole herd is going to die at some point because all the young ones are going to be picked up. And that's it, it's over. And so they always put the weak on the outside to get picked off by the lions. Right? It's the same for human beings. We're social animals just like gazelle. We have cortisol that helps us. You know you wake up at night and go, your spouse wakes up and goes they didn't hear anything but they saw your reaction. It's the same thing. And so when we ostracize, when we push aside people, when we make fun of them, the feeling they get is the same deathly fear as that gazelle who's been pushed to the side which is you are literally being pushed out for the lions which is why those people become actually dangerous because they're that sense of self preservation, they're left to their own devices. But again all of these things are very easy to see when the stakes are real. They're very hard to see when the stakes are abstract or financial.
