Jocko Podcast 5: Corrective Measures, Workouts, Diet, Marcinko and Rollins

This is Jocko, podcast number five, with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo Charles.

Good evening.

Welcome to podcast number five. Here we are. Here we are, number five. Thank you, everyone, for joining us.

So tonight.

I got asked on Twitter.

Hey, could you talk about coaching some people? And that kind of prompted me to think about something that I have pulled out in the past when I'm teaching some leadership classes. And what this is is two counseling notes.

That I wrote for sessions when I was trying to help a couple of SEAL leaders.

Improve themselves and get better. And the first one was for a SEAL that was a buddy of mine and who was a little bit junior to me, just a little bit junior in me in rank. But, you know, because I was a prior enlisted seal, I had actually been in the SEAL teams for a much longer time. And this guy was a real great, great leader. Great guy, and very passionate about doing a. A solid job and very passionate about the SEAL teams, which is an awesome thing to see. And with that passion, and I've said this before, sometimes your strength can be your weakness. And sometimes he would get a little bit too passionate about stuff and a little bit emotional and be. Be a little bit easy to read.

And.

So I was in a meeting with him, and I kind of saw how he was acting, and I saw how other people were reacting to him. And so when I saw that, I kind of sat down and just put some words on paper to let him know that he had a little area of improvement. And what's good about this is, you know, I was the detached person, so I was able to sit outside the situation and just watch and see, oh, that's. That he's not coming across the way he thinks he's coming across.

And so I'm gonna start off with that one. This is pretty positive Echo question. When you.

When you say put words on paper, is that like an official thing? You know, like when you get written up at work or something, it's like.

Here'S your official warning, right? This one was not. This was just a bro saying, hey, man, here's some. Here's some tips.

Almost like a DL note. Almost.

Yeah, a DL note. Yeah, this is a DL note. So what's interesting is there's. There's. In the SEAL teams, there's not a lot of writing up on. In this. In this capacity. So if somebody has a safety violation where they do something unsafe, that gets written up immediately. But this type of thing is a little bit, you know, because normally you're just trying to Bring someone along and help them out and improve their leadership. You know, it's just mentoring. So a lot of times that you don't need to document when you're trying to help out your buddies. The, the reason. That's why I'm kind of lucky here. I forget what it was, but I, you know, I went to a meeting, he was in it, and I kind of forget the situation, but for whatever reason, I wrote this down and I think I sent it to him and said, hey, let's talk about this later. But just. Just wanted to give you this stuff, you know, now. And so I'm kind of lucky that I wrote it down is kind of.

Like in the spirit of organization.

Yeah. And just, I think it was more of just I couldn't talk to him immediately for whatever reason. And so I just sent him an email and said, hey, bro, just, just. Or I, like, left it on his desk. I forget if it was digital. It's probably email. But so here we go.

And there's. There's some interesting comments in here. And that's why I think I saved it. And that's why I think it's. It's good conversation. So here we go. Here's my note to seal leader.

That is a buddy trying to. Trying to move along his leadership paradigm. And here we go. 1. Leadership is getting people to do things. This is a form of manipulation.

So right there, I use this word that everybody hates, manipulation. And people often replace that word with influence. And I do it too. You know, I say, oh, you want to use your influence, but what you're really saying is you want to manipulate people, but it's very negative. And the way I break that down, the way I separate that from something negative and something positive, is if I'm trying to manipulate you in a negative way, that means I want you to do something that's going to benefit me and it's going to hurt you. To me, that's manipulation and that's negative. But if you're trying to influence someone, you're trying to lead them, you're still manipulating them, but you're trying to get something that's going to be positive for them and positive for the team. So as far as I'm concerned, when you're influencing someone, you're really manipulating for a positive outcome. So, but that being said, I think people need to recognize that, and that's why I use that word, because everyone knows what manipulation is. You're trying to get someone to do something, and that's what leadership is. If you think about it, you're trying to get someone to do something, but I use that word so it's very clear what you're trying to do. Leadership is nothing more than. Than getting people to do what you want, both up and down the chain of command. So not just the people below you want the people above you to do what you want them to do. More importantly, getting them to. To want to do what you want them to do is the best form of leadership and the highest form of manipulation. So this is a situation where you don't even want you. You want the person just to want to do what, what you're getting them to do, right?

So now I go on, every time we open our mouths to speak to another person, our goal is to get them to do what we want them to do. Otherwise, why the hell are we talking? So everything you say, the tone of your voice, the. The words you choose, the inflection on those words, and body language and facial expression are all tools to be used to make progress in getting your way or tools that you misuse and isolate yourself and move away from your goals.

So again, I wanted to make sure that this guy knew that every little facial expression, everything that he said and how he said it, all those things have an impact. Because people forget that you don't realize how important your words are and how important your facial expressions are and how important your tone is and how that impacts people.

You are always in negotiation. Everything you say and do and the manner in which you say and do it has an impact on future outcomes. Pretty simple. Now this is.

When I say this to people, they go, oh, so here it is. The best way to win is when the other person doesn't know you won. And if possible, might not even know there was a fight.

If your ego requires the constant food of victory, you can never win in this manner. So just to restate that, the best way to win in a. In a competition of getting some. Getting something to happen, or getting some. Someone to do something, the best way to win is when they don't even know that you won. And even better than that is that they don't even know that there was a game. They don't even know that they're doing this for a reason other than by their own free will. That's what they think. That's what you want them to think. And again, this is manipulation. And I'm sorry about that. The thing is, is that you're manipulating for positive outcomes. You're not manipulating for your own benefit. You're not manipulating for to. To make bad something bad happen to that person. You're influencing them so that they do a better job, so that the team does better so that the mission gets accomplished.

Now I go on. Creating adversarial or antagonistic relationships never helps you reach end goals. This is slightly related to the old keep your friends close and enemies closer. People that outright oppose me will never help me and will usually maneuver to hurt my cause. This is never good. At least a neutral relationship seldom results in someone actively sabotaging my efforts.

So it's really easy to get an adversarial relationships. And that was one of my little go to words that I used to use when talking to my subordinate leadership. What adversary adversarial relationships. You know, I'd say, hey, you're starting to get into an adversarial relationship with a person, right? Then where is that going to go? And I would say it's never going to be good. They're never going to, they're never going to go out of their way to help you. In fact, when you're an adversary of somebody, they go out of their way to sabotage you and hurt you. And that's, that's just never going to be helpful.

So now go on to say your history reveals that you are good at getting into adversarial situations.

You should work to control that impulse. It will never help you attain your goals. And that's, you know, you're laughing because that's a very blunt statement, right? That's a very blunt statement. Your history reveals that you are good at getting into adversarial situations.

You're good at it though. Like that's a skill almost.

Yeah, yeah, you're real good at it.

And you can see this is, this is a pretty blunt.

Pretty blunt writing here. And the reason is because I had a relationship with this guy, you know, he was open to hear what I had to say. And so it wasn't like I was just being a jerk and I was going to put him on the defensive.

And he knew that and he knew that I was always, you know, looking out for his best interest and I knew he would look out for mine as well. So we had a very good relationship.

Going on. Don't burn bridges, period. Nothing is ever gained by this. The future is never known. And I always do what I can to keep lines of communication open, bridges intact and reinforced if possible. So why burn bridges? So seldom in life should you.

Burn a bridge? And a lot of times people think because I'm a seal And I'm aggressive that I'm like this kind of burn bridges type of person. Right. And it's.

It'S just not true because it's not an effective way to go through life. Now I go on to make a note about that. I don't like to say never, but when dealing with human relationships which are inherently complex and unpredictable, I believe that you should never follow courses of action that cannot be undone, reversed or manipulated in the future. Of course, now I'm talking about, you know, people on the same team. I'm not talking about, you know, going to war. And there you obviously do things in war that are completely unreversible because you're destroying and killing people and they're never coming back. So this is different. This is, this is in a team situation where you're trying to work together and you're in a leadership role.

Going on. Believe in what you're saying, but accept that you might be wrong. I believe in what I'm saying and if I don't believe it, I study and question it until it makes sense or I change what I am saying until I do believe it. That's a little hard to understand, that last piece. So, so what I'm saying is you've got to believe in what you're saying. You have to believe in what you're saying. And if you don't believe it, then you've got to either question whatever it is that you're being told to believe or that you should believe or that you're supposed to believe. You got to question that until you understand it. And then once you understand it, then you have belief in it.

And you know, I'm, I'm not going to go into crazy detail on that because in, in our book, the, that Leif and I wrote, you know, there's a chapter and it's called Believe and it explains exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to making sure that you believe in what you're saying. But I think the point that I was focused on here was more that sometimes you're wrong and you have to be able to admit when you're wrong. And I go on to kind of go into some detail here. If I'm wrong, I look forward to admitting it because it gives the opportunity to advertise being humble and open minded.

That's interesting. And people miss that opportunity all the time. When they're wrong, they either put their foot down and deny it or they don't take advantage of the fact that they go that, that when they're wrong. They say, oh, you know what, Echo? Ah, man, I'm definitely wrong here. I think you had a much better idea. Let's. I'm stepping back, and you run with it. That's a great sign. It makes people respect you and go, yeah, that's cool. This guy. This guy's humble enough to admit when he's wrong. They like that. So that's actually a form of manipulation in its own right. Because I want you to think that I'm humble, and I am humble, but I want to make sure that you see that. Right.

I go on to tell this individual, you are not good at being wrong or taking criticism. This is a weakness of yours. So recognize fool. And again, you can see here, that's where the kind of the relationship that I had with them comes out.

All right, you really put that.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's real. That's real. And this is written, I would say.

Maybe eight years ago, something like that. It's pretty old.

Thank God for computers because we have, you know.

Records of things.

Right, right. You saved it.

Right?

Control S. Yeah, for sure.

Now I go on. Think strategic. You will win and lose daily battles all the time. If you flaunt your victories, which you do, they hurt you strategically. If you sulk in your defeats, which you also do, it hurts you strategically. This is wrong. Winning in daily battles gives you the opportunity to deflect credit, show your humbleness and victory, and show your ability to lead, which all help you in the long term, fight to achieve your goals. Losing a battle gives you the opportunity to generously, generously cede your position, to admit you're wrong, which both display humbleness and display your ability to follow.

So.

People in every business, in every job in life, in your house, you win and lose little battles all the time, and deciding which ones are worth fighting for, number one. And then when you do win them, how do you act? And then when you lose them, how do you act? And all of these, the winning and the losing, is not as important as how you act upon winning or losing and how you. You continue to influence the situation even though you might have lost. You do it in such a way that you show humility and you open up. You show your open mind, and it makes the person, you build your relationship with them. So winning or losing is not important. What's important is how you react to winning and losing.

Yeah. Like when you. Like when you say you're sorry. Right. You know, like if two people are in a relationship or even friends and get into an Argument, fight, whatever about whatever. And in one person, they don't want to say they're sorry, you know, because it'll show that I was wrong or it'll show that I lost the argument or show that my points were invalid or whatever. They think, yeah, but when you say sorry and for real say sorry, don't be like, well, I'm sorry if you were offended. Don't say that kind of stuff. Don't be like, okay, I'm sorry. Don't say like that, like really mean it. And when you can do that, you know, consistently, it'll be any future argument. It'll start to break down that barrier of defense, you know, so they, the person, the people, both of them won't go into it thinking, okay, I gotta, I gotta mount this defense against this person. Now it can be a little bit more of a fair problem solving situation more so than this argument. Me against you because they trust they're not gonna, you know, get attacked if, if they show weakness or whatever. If they're like, oh, you know what? I know I, I, I made a mistake. They get, they, you demonstrate by saying sorry, you demonstrated that you're not gonna go and turn up the heat when they start showing that weakness. It's like, okay, you can, you can solve problems a lot more easy.

That's, that's thinking strategic.

Right, Right.

Speaking to people. Going on here, speaking to people. Oh, wait, going back. I say you have a bad tendency to get caught up in tactical battles. You expend effort and ammunition, receive wounds, and tear yourself up when you should be thinking strategically. That kind of goes to what you were just saying. People will get all angry and they'll hurt the relationship. Why? Why? Because they want to win this meaningless battle. Right, Meaningless battle. So detach yourself when you start feeling that anger, that aggression, that frustration, detach yourself and ask yourself, what am I really arguing about? What is happening right here? Why am I getting worked up? You probably shouldn't be.

Now I go on to speaking to people. Well, literally speaking to people, treat everyone with respect from E1 to O10. Ewa, E1 in the military is the lowest ranking person. O10. An officer, 10 is the highest. That would be an admiral or a general. The E1 is the, is the seaman recruit, the lowest ranking person. So I'm saying treat everyone with respect, speak with humility. This disarms people and is one of the best forms of manipulation.

And again, if everyone is, is put off by that term, manipulation, which I know it is a very derogatory term. And, but you have to get over that because you have to understand what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to make sure that people understand that when you're in a leadership position, there's nicer ways of saying it, but what you're trying to do is get people to do what you want them to do. That's what leadership is. And that's also what manipulation is.

Disarmed people are open to suggestion, overconfidence, and condescending tone, which is common for you, causes defenses to go up and people to get defensive.

So the minute you come in and you start being overconfident or talking to people in a condescending manner, they get defensive and all of a sudden they're not really listening.

That being said, subtle confidence and believing in what you are saying, as noted above, allow people to also believe in what you are saying and that they trust in your judgment and leadership. However, do not speak as if you know things your opponent does not. That offends everyone, especially SEALs. So you never, never, like, talk to people as if you know something that they don't, you know, because it offends people, it offends me, it offends everybody. It's impossible not to be offended by that. It makes you feel stupid. You get defensive, so you got to say things in a manner that you don't sound like, I know it and you don't.

Right?

Your rank means nothing in an argument. Pulling rank in any way, defeat.

So the minute I have to say, echo, I outrank you, therefore I'm right, means I, means I couldn't, means my argument didn't make sense. It should be able to stand on its own two feet. And similar to that, and this is something we, we saw a lot in the SEAL teams, and you see it a lot in the business world as well. It's similar to rank. It's the experience. It's pulling the experience card. Pulling the experience card is weak. Arguments should be able to stand on their own without needing to be backed up by the way we did it in Baghdad, the way we did it in Ramadi, the way we did it in Afghanistan, or whatever the case may be. You shouldn't need to say that. Now, you can cite an example, but that shouldn't be the basis of your argument. And we see that in the business world where someone will say, well, we've been through this before, right? And, well, why did you go through it before? Then why are we going through it again? If you went through it before, maybe you did something Wrong. But that's a tendency that people have. And in the business world, you end up with people that have been in a specific industry for 20, 30, 40 years. And so it's very easy for them just to fall back on the, well, this is the way we've done it before. I've seen this a million times. I've always done it. I've done this before. I've been through this before. You've heard all these examples. It's what people do also.

Like, if people, they're in some kind of debate or argument about, I don't know, whatever solar system, they'll be like, oh, I have a college degree. Almost like my argument is better than yours, regardless of what it is, because I have that college degree.

Yeah, I have an example of that where a young SEAL was feeling as if he was being disrespected about what?

That he didn't know very much. He's a pretty new seal. And he fell back on the argument of exactly what you just said. This was like, you know, I have an. I have a degree in problem solving or something along the other. I've been to classes on problem solving. That was his reason why people should listen to him.

Right.

Which is not a good card to pull out in any situation, and definitely not in the SEAL teams. Hey, I've been a client. I've been to a class on problem solving. You, you need to listen to me. Wait a second. Why don't you just present your solution, right? And then let it stand on its own two feet? Because if you're so good at problem solving, then we. Surely you must have a wonderful solution.

Yeah, you took that class for sure, man.

But yes, it's the same thing. So to close this thing out, I said, anyway, those are some thoughts. I thought about this today after we had that conversation. I left thinking about my principles of Management Leadership off the battlefield in administrative situations. These are the same principles I used in combat building relationships and leading. And I also use them in administrative leadership situations. And as you know, I've been successful in that environment as well. You're a great leader. Just make some adjustments to your game and you'll be even better. And that's it. That's how I closed it out to this guy who was, you know, got this note from me and hit me back and said, hey, man, thanks. That's good stuff. And. And I'll take action. And definitely improved his game with it. Now that's a pretty.

Nice counseling session or nice attempt to help somebody. Now, this next Example that I'm going to go through is somebody that was on his last legs. He was in a leadership position and he was having some significant problems. Now.

He was an inexperienced guy and for some unknown reason, he was cocky, he was arrogant, he was failing as a leader. And he'd been through multiple verbal counselings like I talked about. You asked me, do we write people up? I mean the SEAL teams for writing somebody up for a leadership problem, they've been counseled numerous times verbally because you don't expect. I mean, it's not that hard, you know, it's not that hard to say, hey, make this adjustment. The guy goes, oh, yeah, okay, I didn't see that I was doing that. The only time you end up with someone that you have to actually write it down is when someone gets, starts getting to a point where you say, okay, this person's job is now in jeopardy. And this is.

Again thanks to technology. I, I saved this. Thanks to technology.

Yeah.

So here we go. Seldom do I have to do this. Most guys listen and adjust and get better and move on. My cadre, meaning the, the training crew that I had, my cadre and your leadership ask that I talk to you. And it is my job and my duty and my responsibility to try and make squared away Tactical SEAL leaders.

Know this. I have personally worked with and seen all kinds of platoon commanders with all kinds of personalities. If you count my previous experience in platoons and training cell and as an enlisted man, the number is pretty big. I've done seven deployments serving in every spot from the youngest E3 new guy to the oldest and the task unit commander. That being said, I'm not that good at anything, but I am a hard worker. I don't like to waste my time with people that don't appear to have the desire to be better seals. And you don't appear to have a desire to improve yourself despite your history, which includes the following. Getting bad fit reps. So fit reps is short for fitness reports. And that's basically an evaluation. And this guy had really bad evaluations.

Just like general evaluation, not like fitness stuff.

Well, it's fitness. Fitness is like one block. But there'll be a block on leadership, there'll be a block on tactical knowledge. There'll be. So there's all these blocks in his. And he had bad fitness reports, bad evaluations, getting sent to a staff billet as a junior officer. So they took him and instead of making him and putting him in a SEAL platoon, they had him in some administrative job which is a big signal. Sometimes they'll do that in between tours or after you do an assistant platoon commander tour, they'll give you a tour like that to expand your knowledge. But he just got put straight into that, so that wasn't good. And finally having a horrible reputation in the teams, which this individual certainly did have. Now I go on and say I didn't take this into account when looking at you as a SEAL officer and as a man. I don't care what people say. I judge people on what I see with my own eyes. At first I thought you were just another alpha male SEAL that rubs people the wrong way. No big deal. There are plenty of seals like that. I usually like them. Most of my true friends fall into that category. And that was one of the things about this guy, you know, he was like a big guy and he was pretty aggressive. And.

I thought to myself, just what I said, I thought, okay, you know what, maybe he's rubbing the people the wrong way. And, and people are a little intimidated by that.

As time passed, I began to see something different. This is what I see.

You are insecure about something. I don't know what, but it forces you to act arrogant and come across as selfish. Your performance as a tactical leader varies between below average and average with some visible spikes of increased potential. You are almost incapable of communicating with other people respectfully.

So those top three right there, for whatever reason, and I never figured out what made this individual so insecure. I don't know if he. I have no idea. I don't know what happened to him. But it's okay. We have insecurities. We get intimidated. We feel like we have to over prove ourselves. It's okay. These things happen. You just make adjustments. That's all you got to do. You got to make some adjustments. You got to realize that you're not communicating with people respectfully. And when somebody tells you that you're not, you got to question, what do I sound like? Maybe you pull out of a recorder and listen to yourself.

You have some good ideas. You have some good ideas from time to time, but you act as if you know everything all the time.

Your ability to elevate your presence to that of a respected leader of men on the battlefield and in Garrison is almost non existent. And I don't know if at this time I was really using the term like detach that much, but that's what I was trying to get across to him is that he wasn't able to elevate his presence. He wasn't able to Come across like a leader. He was right there in mentally with the rest of the platoon.

Going on. You cannot mask your emotions and you don't understand the ramifications of that shortfall. So these are the little things. The little eye roll, the heavy sigh.

Yeah.

The crossed arms. I mean, just all these little things that it was like, it was like an open book. When you'd see this guy, you knew exactly what he was thinking and he had no idea that it was so obvious to everybody else. Myself, all the rest of my instructor staff, his leadership, everyone was thinking the same thing. And in his mind, he was good to go. He was, you know, he was a stone face poker player.

Yeah. It kind of gets worse when you can't mask your emotions, but your emotions are reflective of your insecurity, which you mentioned is one of the first things. So it's like this double whammy. It's one thing if you can't mask your emotions, but you're pretty humble in general and you're a nice guy guy or whatever. You're a go with kind of guy.

Yeah. And. And the, the emotions that you're not masking are something positive.

Right. Some positive or, or a lot of positive, maybe some negative. But hey, look, no one's perfect kind of thing. But yeah, if it's just like insecurity oozing out of. Yeah, yeah.

And the insecurity was really, the. What oozed out of him was. I know everything you don't know. Look, Jocko, I know you've been in the teams for 18 years and you've done multiple deployments overseas. And even though I have done zero deployments overseas, I know more than you.

Yeah.

Here we go on. And, and so now I start trying to make sure I cover all the bases with this guy.

Sure.

You do not have the understanding of human nature, team building, leadership, influence, manipulation, compromise, and the broad concepts of tactical operation, operational and strategic leadership and management. Perhaps you don't have the intellect to understand these things because if you did, why are we sitting here right now talking about this? And by the way, the reason this is written down, I wrote it down and then brought him into my office, put it in front of him and then read it to him. Because I wanted to be crystal clear.

Right.

And so that's why this is written in that perspective. I'm saying, why are we sitting here talking about it right now? Why am I not thinking this might not be the most polished guy in the world, but he's a good guy and he'll get things done, because you end up with plenty of seals that are just. They're just not that polished or they're a little rough around the edges or they can't brief well or whatever. I mean, it's cool. There's. There's all kinds of different guys in the SEAL teams, and you just got to take what you get, and you. You strengthen your weaknesses a little bit. But this guy was just not getting there.

For some reason, you believe that you are a victim, that people don't like you, or have it out for you. And this was so weird. This guy had this attitude that everyone wanted to fire him, that everyone was against him, and he was this. He was in this, you know, struggle on his own against the world, and it was just completely not true, especially in the beginning. I mean, obviously it escalated to that. That.

Right.

But that he brought it upon himself. But. But honestly, that's something I kind of. I kind of pride myself in. In as a leader, in taking a.

A blank slate when I meet somebody and saying, okay, cool. You know, hey, look, this guy has a bad reputation. Whatever. I'm gonna. I'm gonna see what I can do with him. I want to make him better. I kind of take pride in that and. And want to make. Make people better. And so for him to think that I was out to get him or this training cadre was out to get him, just not true. Just completely not true. This is not true. But it isolates you, hurts your ability to interact with people and keeps you in a paranoid, guarded, and confrontational state.

It's rough.

Rough.

Next, you don't understand the broad skills required to be a good SEAL leader, such as tact, team building, communications, and trust building.

So it's interesting. None of this is about fire maneuver. None of this is about taking down a building. None of this is about, you know, how to. How to plan and execute an assault. None of this is about that because that stuff is relatively easy to do. And what we would, 99.9% of the time when we fire a leader had nothing to do with their tactical prowess. It had to do with them as a leader. Now them as a leader. Affect would affect the tactical outcome of operations for sure. But that wouldn't be the. The key component of their failings. The key component of their failings would be their arrogance.

Going on. You do not understand the burden of command. You do not understand the influence you have on your men. This is a big one. This is one of those ones that.

I. I find this with CEOs I find this with mid level managers, I find this with everyone where they don't understand.

Their influence on their people. They understand when they say something off the cuff.

That everybody listens and they think they mean it and it has real impact on people. They don't understand when they show up late. Now being late is okay. When they go home early, going home early is okay. Those are the little things, examples of little things that people don't understand the influence they have on their troops.

Going on. You do not understand the gift you have been honored with to lead men in combat against our nation's sworn enemies.

My concern is how you will act overseas when lives are at stake. I cannot allow you to go forward with these shortfalls.

And that is something that.

In the SEAL teams, so in the SEAL teams, people think if someone's no good, you just fire them. That's it. And it's actually not true. You know, you have to have good reason and document what issues they're having. And the other thing is that that's really harsh about firing someone in the SEAL teams is when you fire someone in the SEAL teams, you're ruining their life. It's their dream to be a SEAL now. They're not going to be a SEAL anymore. Their paycheck, their retirement, I mean, they've got plans, they, they're counting on this. So when you fire someone on the SEAL teams, it, it can be devastating career blow and it can really ruin someone's life. Now there are times where we go, hey, you know what? This guy's gonna be okay. We need to push him back a little while, we need to recycle him. He'll be able to come back and he'll get better and he just needs to learn more. That happens as well. But in this type of situation, this guy was already with a bad reputation. This was going to be, if he got fired from this job, this was going to be a death sentence for his career.

So when you fire someone from the SEAL teams, they're not out of the military.

They're or it depends on the situation. Yeah, sometimes they, they'll get, A lot of times the officers will be removed from the military. The enlisted guys might go to the regular Navy, which is, which is a harsh punishment for a guy that's been in the SEAL teams that, you know, in the SEAL teams you have quite a bit of freedom. You get more money, you doing some job that you really like, and then all of a sudden you're not doing a job that you really like. And that can Be a severe form of punishment as well.

Is it, Is it like going to the minors from the major league?

It's just, it's just a totally different job. It's like going from baseball to something completely different. I mean, it's going from baseball to doing accounting, you know, or from baseball to going to construction, you know, because the regular Navy has regular jobs that are like that. There's accounting jobs, there's building jobs, there's, you know, technic technical jobs. So it's like going from a job that's like a sport, which is the SEAL teams, going into a job that's more of a job.

But it's not like a dishonorable discharge situation.

No, not unless the guys. And, you know, it's interesting, I, I remember I was on a, I was on a ship one time and.

The waves were big and it was cold, and we were launching off this ship in the middle of the night and there was this regular navy guy, a first class bosun's mate, which means, you know, he ran the, the deck operations of the ships and putting boats in the water and, and it was all stormy and dark, and we're on these little boats out in the middle of the ocean. We're about to go launch, and the guy says to me, man, I would never want your job. And that's, you know, that's what he was thinking. And I looked back at him and I said, well, that's good because I would never want yours either, because I would never want to be, you know, stuck on a ship and doing that kind of work. But it's. We both had jobs that we liked, you know, and everyone's got jobs they like. But so when a person's in the SEAL teams, though, and they're getting put to a job, it's normally a job that they don't really like.

And what my point in all that is that it is difficult to ruin someone's career. And it is a heavy burden when you have to do this to somebody. That being said.

You'Re gonna send these people, especially a person in a leadership position. They're going to be overseas and responsible for people's lives. You have got to do the right thing.

Yeah.

And I say that to business leaders now. You know, you've got to do everything you can to mentor someone. And that's, that's, that's actually how I know you've done everything you can to mentor and get someone along, because when you fire them, you shouldn't feel guilty about it. And when, when a Leader says, oh, really? I feel bad about firing this person. Okay, then that means you haven't done everything you can to mentor them, because if you have and they still fail, then they're incapable of doing the job. And. And they need to go find a different job or they need to get put in a different position. That's just the facts.

Right?

But if you've done everything you can and they can't do it, then, yeah, they need to move on. But when you go, oh, I feel bad about getting rid of this person, it's because you. It's because you haven't had this conversation that I'm having with this guy right here. The laying it out and saying, here's what you're doing wrong. Here's how you need to fix it. This is what the expectations are, and if you don't meet them, you're not going to be here. You need to clearly understand that.

Yeah, it really puts it into perspective. Right on that. On that last item there. One, when you said, my concern is how you would act overseas when lives are at stake, like, that really puts it into perspective. I mean, really.

Looking at it in a lighthearted kind of way. You can kind of compare this to, let's say, you know, when you're in kindergarten, you get a report card or whatever. And then at the end, if you're a kid like this guy, yeah. You get a little note at the end says, does all it says does not play well with others.

Right.

You're like, all right, you know, it doesn't. Whatever this, especially when this is the adult version of that, but times it by like 10. And it sums it up right here with that last one, like when lives are at stake.

And that's exactly what was going on. So here I tried to give this guy corrective measures, is what I called it, corrective measures.

Number one, be humble.

And we get asked all the time, what's the most important characteristic of a leader? And Leif and I will say all the time, humility.

And.

If you're not humble, then how can you look at yourself and say, I need to do stuff better. How can you look at your team and say, we need to get better? How can you look at your enemy and say, I better respect them. If you don't have that humility, you're going to fail there. So my first corrective action to this guy, be humble. Number two.

Truly and deeply accept the fact that you have some serious personality defects that you need to immediately put in check. And over the long term, completely fix.

So I was very concerned that this guy was going to sit there and nod his head. Yep, okay. Yep. Sorry, but not truly and deeply accept the fact that he had these issues. Because there's a big difference between nodding your head and saying, I got you, sir. Okay, sir. Yep. Yes, sir. I'm going to. I'm going to do better. There's a big difference between that and going home, looking in the mirror and saying going, I've got some serious problems that I need to fix.

Going on. Understand that the criticism you are hearing from me is not mine alone, but also my staff's and your leadership's as well. I've also heard this from other people outside your command. Your reputation is horrible.

Again, I. I wanted to make sure that he didn't think this was just Jocko being hostile. I wanted him to realize it was my entire staff and his leadership that was being hostile. Going on corrective measure Embrace and contemplate the solemn responsibility of being a SEAL officer about to lead men into battle and possibly to their deaths.

Embrace the burden of command.

This is one that for me.

Was very disturbing to see because I had led men into battle and I had.

Had my guys get killed. So to have him with this attitude where I could see that didn't occur in his brain, he didn't understand that these guys that he's supposed to be in charge of, he's going to be asking them to do things that can get him killed. And I don't think he understood that.

The burden of command. That's the burden of command. That's that heavy responsibility.

And yes, in combat it means guys getting wounded or getting killed. And that is a heavy burden. But I will tell you, in the business world, when you've got people's jobs at stake, when you've got the profitability or the survival of a company at stake, and.

Dozens or hundreds or thousands of people may or may not have a job. If you don't do your job correctly as a leader, that is a heavy burden to as well.

Going on.

Be the best at everything you do.

In doing that.

One. Put everyone else before yourself. Push away compliments, shift them to your peers and your men. Accept right responsibility of failure and shortfalls only for in them.

Is the improvement and growth.

So this is actually a conversation we had on one of our earlier podcasts. Any compliments success, you shift that to your peers and your men. You accept the responsibility for the failures and the shortfalls. And again, if you don't accept the responsibility for those failures and shortfall or false. How are they ever going to get fixed? The answer is they're not. I'm never going to change everything, anything if it's all Echo's fault. I did everything right. It's all Echo's fault.

Yeah.

Truly listen and try to understand what people tell you by first understanding that your personal compass is wrong. Truly and completely wrong for what is right and wrong for what a good seal and a bad one is. For what makes an exceptional leader and a horrible one. You must correct this compass so that it may guide you in the right direction.

And my point with this was that I think in his mind, his vision of what a quote unquote good seal was, I think he thought he was being it.

And I had to explain to him that he was wrong. He did not understand what a good SEAL was. He did not understand what an exceptional leader was. He just did not understand it.

You must correct this compass so that it may guide you in the right direction.

The final.

Corrective measure, lose your ego.

This guy, despite.

Having.

A treacherous record and a horrible reputation, despite that, for some unknown reason that I cannot fathom, he had a big ego. He thought he was a great seal. He thought because he was a big dude and could shoot well, he was. He was a talented athlete as well. But he thought that that made him a good seal. And it didn't. It just gave him a big ego.

So.

Now I tell him, these are tall tasks, but you control them all.

And that's true if you look at every one of those things. Be humble. Yes, he controls that. Accept the fact that he needs some serious work. Yes, he controls that. Understand that the criticism is coming from a bunch of people, not just me. Yes, that's under his control. Embrace and contemplate the solemn responsibility of being a SEAL officer about to lead men into battle and possibly to their deaths. Yes, he controls that ability.

Be the best at everything you do. Yes, that's under his control. So all these things, lose your ego. These are all things that he had control over.

We need good, aggressive leaders in the SEAL teams. We don't need the person that I outlined above. And the reason I pointed that out is because I think in this guy's mind, he was an aggressive guy and he was a good leader in his mind. But I wanted him to know that, yes, we do need aggressive leaders in the SEAL team, but we don't need this guy. We don't need the guy that I'm just talking about. It's in your hands. Good luck. Then I asked him, do you have any questions or comments for me, which he did not.

I asked him, are you sure? He was sure. I asked him if he understood, and he nodded his head. And again, the reason I'm reading these is because these are my actual notes.

And then I said, do you believe I am right, or do you just think I don't? Or do you think I just don't get it and that you actually know what's up?

And he, of course, said, no, I understand. And even as he was saying those words.

I was not convinced.

And this gentleman did not make it in his leadership role, and he ended up getting fired.

When he said he. That he understands, was it like. Was he all salty? Like, yeah, I understand, man.

No, I mean, he was. He was not. Dis. Not. He was not openly disrespectful. And maybe somewhere in his brain, he was trying.

To understand and trying to listen and trying to believe.

But.

It wasn't there.

So in going through this, and I think one of the reasons why I wanted to do this on the podcast was.

A lot of times, leadership is about awareness.

And.

I use this example all the time. In the movie Terminator, it says, you know, in the year 2016, the machines became aware. And I used to get to see that with SEAL leaders. Like, they. They become aware of being in a leadership position. And so that's. That's one form of awareness. And I think a lot of times.

You don't recognize. If you're not aware of something, you can't recognize what the problem is. And so going through this, all these issues that this guy had, I. People that are listening to this podcast, you don't have all these issues. It's impossible. You wouldn't even like to listen to this podcast because this is a podcast where we're all kind of sitting here picking ourselves apart and seeing what we can do better and trying to learn. And. And people with. With this type of attitude that this guy had, they. They don't even enjoy this because they think they know everything.

Yeah. You're not even talking to them.

I'm not even talking. But everybody, myself included, I still go through this, and I go. I'm doing that a little bit right there. I'm falling into that trap. I'm getting a little bit arrogant on this thing.

Mm.

Doing this wrong. I'm not. I'm not. I'm letting my emotions out too much. And again, I'm not telling people to be robots.

But you can't be an emotional disaster or emotional show for your people. So.

That awareness and thinking about it. And the other thing, this is the other reason why I wanted to use this particular note is because I think it's as direct of a note. I. I could write someone, maybe I could do it better now. I don't know. But at the time, to go face to face with someone and kind of call them out, this is about as stern as I could do it. And this is the standard that we need to hold ourselves to, that sternness that, what am I doing wrong? And how do I be honest with myself and be my own worst critic? Which is a big cliche, but, yeah, be your own worst critic. Look at yourself. And you can't be your own worst critic if you don't detach from the situation. If you're inside your own head, you can't even critique yourself. So you got to get out of that brain. And that's going to be a common theme for. Not just for this show, not just for this podcast, but forever. Because it's one of those things that's really helped me and I think has helped the people that I've worked with when they've. When they overcome that. So there's some counseling.

For everybody, myself included. So now we. We're getting to the Internet questions. So, again, if you're listening to this podcast and you're wondering where these questions come from, they come from a couple different places on the Internet. Facebook.

I actually get most of them from Twitter.

You.

If you want to see what's happening on Twitter with me, it's at Jocko Willink. If you want to see what's happening on Twitter with Echo, it's at Echo Charles.

And if you want to see what's happening on there, and also if you want to submit questions, then for me, Twitter's the place to do it, because I can jump on there.

You.

That means you have to be disciplined and keep your question short. And I just drag those questions out of there and. And put them into the well of questions. And.

With that.

And some of them, I answer, you know, right there on the spot. And some of them, I go, ooh, that's a good topic. So with that in mind, and. And I'll tell you, this is still from the well of questions, where most of these I don't have the name of the person because I'm still on the well of questions of the first time I asked, and I got hundreds of questions. So I'm still going through those.

And here we go.

What drove you to become an English major in college?

This is something I surprisingly get asked a lot. And I guess it shouldn't be that surprising because if you don't know my story with college, I was actually already in the SEAL teams. I had spent 10 years in the SEAL teams. When I finally got sent to college, I had to get a college degree in order to continue my career as a SEAL officer. And when I went to college, it was. Was not even a question that I was going to be an English major. So why is that? Well, luckily I had spent enough time in the SEAL teams to realize that the most important skill from an officer perspective, that could differentiate and make you do a better job of something, you could. I mean, we talk about leadership all the time and, and the different points and humility and discipline, all those things that make you a good leader, that's great, but those aren't things that you learn in college. So which skill could I learn in college that will actually make me do a better job as a SEAL leader? And I knew before I even showed up there exactly what that was going to be. And that was English. Why? Well, English to me was the study of the English language. The English language is the methodology that we American humans use to communicate with each other. And as a leader, it is critical that you have a good control and a good grip on this medium that you're going to use to communicate what your vision is, what your ideas are, what your strategies are, what the orders are. You have to be able to do that in clear and concise language. And I knew that English would provide me with that. You also have to be able to understand what you are being told to do or what the orders are or what the mission is, or things like Rules of engagement. So Rules of Engagement is a legal document written by lawyers, and you have to read it and understand it. And I found that this was very, very useful. This was probably. And again, looking back, because you know what? I guess I could have gotten a degree in history and I could have really drilled down on the military. That would have been helpful as well. But the practical application of English in that job was very important. And I will tell you that in anyone that's going to end up in leadership position, the command of the English language is a very important, important thing. And when I.

Started to get into Shakespeare.

And Shakespeare, I know there's at least.

Half the audience just went, oh, God, what is he talking about? Shakespeare? The thing about Shakespeare is. And this is what I had to learn in college, when you first see Shakespeare, you think, oh, I don't understand this this is a bunch of gobbledygook. This doesn't sound like English. I don't understand it. You're not supposed to understand it. And people don't pick up a Shakespeare play and just understand it. You have to study what the words mean. The guy made up words. He just made them up. So how could you know what it means? You're lying if you say you know what it means. He made it up. He used archaic words. That, or words back then that weren't archaic, but they're archaic now, and people do not use them anymore. So how could you know what they mean? You don't. You have to. To look them up and figure out what they mean. And that was very good for me to take a bunch of Shakespeare and have to look at these, look at this writing and figure out what it all means. Because I realized that when three years later, four years later, when I got a Rules of Engagement that was written by a lawyer and there was words in there I didn't understand, I didn't just go, oh, God, I don't understand this, and throw it away. No, I said, okay, okay, there's a word I understand. I just need to look it up, figure out what it means, make sense of it. And that's what.

That's what studying Shakespeare specifically did for me. And, you know, at some point, we're going to get into some Shakespeare right here, and there's some very, very powerful.

Things that Shakespeare wrote which are unmatched in language, in my opinion. So that's down the road, probably not too far. But that is why I studied English in college.

How do you deal with delayed onset muscle soreness or stiffness from weight training? And how does it affect your Jiu Jitsu?

The Jiu Jitsu questions. Awesome. So.

Obviously, I work out. I work out pretty much every day. I. I work out. That means I lift weights, I do calisthenics, I do sprints, I do.

Some kind of physical conditioning every single day. And that means that, yes, I am always at least somewhat sore and tired when I show up to train the Jiu Jitsu, which I usually do in the evenings. So for me, Jiu Jitsu always makes me feel better. You know, you're. You're basically getting a very gnarly full body massage when you train Jiu Jitsu, you're getting a very aggressive and involuntary full body massage, and you're getting stretched in different directions. So whenever, you know, if I did some exercise that made me sore, if I did deadlifts and I'm feeling sore, tight in my back, and I go do jiu jitsu. By the time it's done, I don't feel that soreness anymore. So just like a massage or a stretch, I think it, it.

Loosens you up and, and it's pretty normal for me. I also like to train sore and tired because it just makes training a little bit harder and makes you more ready. And all that being said, when I do heavy squats or high repetition squats or any squats where I kind of push the envelope, yeah, my legs are really sore and it sucks to get on the mat and I do it anyways.

And also training while your muscles are sore, when you're tired, it helps your technique. Right. So you're not, especially as a bigger guy.

Yeah.

You know, having strength and weight at the same time as an advantage can be used as a weapon, but can get in the way of your technique.

It can get in the way of technique and it can get in the way of your progression.

Progression, yes, for sure. You might be speaking from a standpoint of someone who's in good condition, by the way, because I would say that for most people, I would argue.

For most people, it's not a full body massage. It doesn't loosen you up, it makes you more sore.

Yes. And you know what, that's a good point. And beyond the fact this is, you actually are right on more points than you know, because beyond the fact that, yes, I am in fairly good condition because I do work out every day. Also, jiu jitsu, for me, because I am experienced, is generally not a 100 physical war like you have when you're not quite as experienced.

Right.

And if you watch, you know, when I'm rolling with guys, all my training partners, they're all good guys too. So we're, we're training for, you know, an hour and we can do it. It's not because we're in that much better condition, it's just that we're very, that, that much more relaxed and we're relying more on technique. So. So that's a good point. And I could see where in the early days. Now, that being said, I trained this way the whole time that I've trained. So I, even when I was a spaz, crazy, you know, white belt warrior, I still worked out every day. And when I was a blue belt training super hard, I still worked out every day. So you're. I was going down the path that you were. Right. But now I'm going to renege on that and say that you're wrong. And you just need to work out, get on the mat, loosen it up and keep training.

Well, yeah, I think in the grand scheme of things, you'd be more loose. Yeah, but.

We'Re talking about delayed onset muscle soreness. I think, I think, I would argue that most people after training Jiu Jitsu, unless it is like just a light, like rope, but if you're, you know, if you're doing just, I don't know, your normal Jiu Jitsu guy.

Let'S say he does four rounds, six minutes, one minute in between.

He'S gonna get more delayed onset muscle soreness the next day from the Jiu Jitsu.

I don't think so.

I, I, I think so.

I, I don't think so. This is a issue that will not be solved on the Jocko podcast. I would say try it, try it.

That's what I'm saying. I think so, cuz I've been trying it for years and years. So we're going to go ahead.

Another thing is every time you show up to do Jiu Jitsu, it's not a competition day, you know, and, and not that you don't have roles and good roles and you go hard, but there is a difference between, like, oh, I'm going to let this guy pass my guard, or I'm going to, I'm going to hang on with every little piece of might. And what is this look you're giving me right now?

I, I agree with you, but it still doesn't change my argument that even if you're rolling that way. Yeah, I, I think that you have to roll pretty light to not get any delayed onset muscle.

Okay, here's one more story. And this is where, this is where you might be, right? This is a funny story. So like I just talked about when I went to college. So when I went to college at the University of San Diego, it was, I was still in the military, but I was, my job was to go to college, which meant that for somebody that was used to working 18 hours a day as a SEAL, all of a sudden I didn't have 18 hours a day to work. So I trained a lot. And one of the things I noticed one day, for whatever reason I had, I think I had, one of my kids was born and I had final exams or just some, some perfect storm of events and I missed. And I didn't train Jiu jitsu for three days. And on the fourth day I got up out of bed and I felt all like, young and I wasn't sore And I just, I, I was, dang, I feel great. What is this? And what it was was that I hadn't trained. And at that time, at that time, we, this is when Dean Lister and I were training like Mad Men and he was constantly competing. I was competing and, and he was. And we would train for two to four hours a day of just psycho rolling and. But again, even we were doing psycho rolling like that, it wasn't competition day and, but we, but it definitely made me sore.

Yeah.

And so you, you do get some soreness. You're, you're correct.

You're correct.

I think I'm just used to being in a continued state of soreness.

Yeah, that's what it is. So when you're like, oh, yeah, I didn't roll for, for three days on that, for, you know that, that fourth day you woke up and you're like, dang, I feel young. What is this? That's called rest. You rested and you recover and it happens.

I mean, I travel now and there'll be days, obviously days when I don't get to train, but.

Okay, so this question is it. I don't know if it's an addition to the other question, but it's phrased like this. Also, I'd like to hear more about, more about your writing process. This. Tough times, what worked well, creative breakthroughs, etc.

I don't think these were related. I think this is just pulled out, so.

Oh, right, right. Okay.

Creative breakthroughs.

Yeah. So first of all, if to, to go specifically on how I wrote this book, and you could probably apply this to any kind of task that you're looking at doing. But the first thing we did, and Leif and I wrote this book together, the first thing we did was we outlined the book and what the chapters were about and what the stories inside the chapters. So we both knew what the chapter was. And then we said and, and if you haven't read the book, I wrote half the chapters and he wrote half the chapters. So we didn't, we didn't write it together and try and mind meld the whole thing. Now the intro we wrote together in the outro or whatever it's called, we wrote together. And that was cool. You know, we just edited it because it was both of us talking. But we didn't have to try and mind meld or, or come to agreement on the rest of it. We just wrote separate chapters. And so what I did was once we, once we knew what the chapters were, once we knew what they were going to be about, then I wrote a thousand words a day, no matter what. That was my. I was very busy at the time. I was doing some big contracts. I was super busy. And I knew that I had to do it in chunks. And I also know that my attention span is. I can force it, but it's not fun. So a thousand words took me about an hour, like 50 minutes to an hour. So every day, no matter what, I sat down and I. I ended up writing about 60,000 words. So it took me. No, I think it was 55,000 words. Took me 55 days, 55 days straight, and my draft was done. And that's. That's. There's a couple good advantages to it. Number one, when you write every day, if you write. If you skip two days and then you go back, guess what? You've got to go back and reread what you wrote because you don't remember it.

Right, Right.

Whereas if you just go back into it, I could just pick up where I left off. Boom. I could start writing again an hour later, I'm done. Don't have to waste any time. Have to go back and reread. I know what my train of thought was. That's the important thing. So. So that was important. And sometimes I didn't feel like writing, of course, but I just wrote anyways. And sometimes it would come out not that great, but it doesn't matter. You got a thousand words that you can hone and you can adjust and you can turn it into something good. And. And also, it just takes away. Every excuse is gone. There's no excuse. There's zero excuse. There's only. You do what you're supposed to do. That's the only thing not. I'm don't know what to think. I lost my train of thought. I have writer's blocker. What? Whatever. I'm too tired. No, it's like one answer for all these problems. And that is. Right. So you got writer's block. Good. Right. You got. I'm too tired. I had a long day. Good. Right. Oh, I'm stuck. And I don't know where to take this story. Good. Right. That's the only. It's just one answer. Solved every problems. And that's kind of the same thing with. With everything, you know, with going to the gym. You know what? I'm tired. Good. Go work out. I'm sore. Good. Go work out. I'm super busy right now. Good. Go work out. And you could do this. You could apply this to any sort of. You know, with training, Jiu Jitsu. I don't know if I'm. I'm. I'm not feeling like my A game tonight. Good. Go train when you're weak.

Right?

Good. Go train when you're mentally not. Not there, because it doesn't matter. What is it? Is it the world championships today? And even if it is the world championships, you gotta go fight anyways, because it's the world championships. So get on the mat and train.

Yeah. And you could. You could look at these. When you say that, that applies to everything. Like, you don't feel like it or whatever. A lot of times create, like, creative block. And I'm just realizing right when you said that is this is the first time I'm kind of understanding this and realizing that, okay, when you have a creative block, that's almost like, in my experience, it's a good reason to not do creative stuff, because I can't. Because creativity comes from a real. Like, you have to feel it. You have to want to do it. It's like a creative thing. Right?

Inspirado.

Yeah.

And you cannot manufacture Inspirado.

Yeah.

Quote Tenacious D. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. You can't, you know, manufacture whatever. So, you know, it's different than going to the gym.

So are you saying, though, if you get creative block, and for those of you that know, Echo does. He writes and produces and films and directs videos of all kinds. So you're saying when you can't think of what to write, you just stop?

Yes.

We have a quitter in our meds, you know, in a way is. And that. That's okay. I mean, we all have different techniques. My. My technique is not better than your technique. Your technique may work sometimes. It may be work 100% for you. I'm talking about my technique. And my technique was like, okay, I've got writer's block. I don't know where to go with this. I'm gonna write anyways.

Right.

And what you're saying is when that happens to you, you say, you know what? I'm just gonna walk away from it right now and come back to it later. And that's okay.

I say, until right now, though. I just realized it when you said, okay, if you don't feel like writing or good, do it anyway. Because I guess I never really thought past that. Because when you say, yeah, you'll just have more stuff to hone into. Okay. If later on, when you do hit inspiration, which now you have more material to draw inspiration from, it's going to come clear, like, okay, that thing that I wrote or, you know, put in when I wasn't inspired. Okay, that's got to go. But you can learn so much from what you put down there. Why doesn't that work? Or. Dang, that was pretty good. When I was feeling bored or when I was feeling whatever. That's pretty good. I'm going to use that, you know, so you're going to get way more results, results potentially than you would if you simply don't do anything anyway. And what if the inspiration doesn't come back, which it doesn't a lot of the time, then it's too late. So, yeah, good lesson learned right there. Thanks.

That is a good one.

So next question from Jennifer.

From Jennifer. This one that has a name.

Nice. Jennifer. Jennifer says, I'm really struggling with focus lately. I'd love for you to cover it on the podcast Focus. Cover that.

This is. Do we get asked this a lot about focus? I don't know if we've gotten asked specifically.

Yeah, specifically about focus.

But this is one of those things. And this is, this is. I, I'm starting to realize a underlying theme with a lot of, With a lot of what people are asking me. And.

That is I think people have a vision or a thought that I'm. I've got some answer that is like, oh, you lack focus. Follow steps 1, 2, and 3. And I've talked about this with leadership and that I've got some.

Easy button solution for these situations. And this got me thinking about my kids and one of my daughters who, when she was, I don't know what, how old you are when you're supposed to learn the times tables. But she was that age and she got really disappointed because she didn't know our times tables. And she would actually, you're young. When, again, I don't, I forget the grade. But it's, you know, it's like maybe second grade, second, third grade. Yeah, second, third grade. So she's supposed to know her times tables. She doesn't know them. And she starts getting this, this negative attitude of, I, I'm stupid, you know, I'm dumb. Other kids know them. I don't know them. And I just said, oh, well, have you studied them? And she hadn't. She hadn't studied them. She'd sat in class when they would go over them, and she'd picked up 50 or 60 or maybe even 70% of them. But, you know, there's some hard ones in there, right?

12 times 12.

12 times 12 is a tough one. You know, there's some tricky Ones in there that she didn't know. And so I said, oh, well, you need to study them and then you'll know them. So, you know, we made the flashcards and she studied them and all of a sudden she knew them. And then she realized that you have to practice these things and you have to put effort into them. It's the same thing with sports. You know, you'll get the kid that says, I'm not any good at baseball. Well, you don't spend any time practicing it.

Right.

And so it's the same thing with focus. You, it takes effort. You just don't. I don't wake up in the morning, flip a switch and then become focused. When I was writing, when I was just talking about writing this, this book that we wrote, I didn't go, okay, flip the switch for focus. I'm going to do a thousand words right now. No, no, I, I just sit down and go, okay, listen, idiot, this is your job. Job. You need to do it. Get it done. You know, another, another.

Funny story is in the SEAL teams, we have these helmets where we, we had them, we've modified them since, but we had these helmets. And underneath the helmets you would wear this, this headset that your radio headphones would go into. So when you're in the SEAL teams, you're out on the battlefield, you got to talk to different people and you've got to have a radio and you've got nice, almost, I guess it would be to describe it. It's like a Bose noise canceling headset for all practical purposes, but it's durable and you wear that underneath your helmet. And if you're in a leadership position, sometimes you have one group of people talking into one ear and the other one might be the air frequency so you can hear the aircraft talking. So you got all this stuff going on inside your head. And that's tricky and kind of a pain. But what was really painful was the way they made these headsets. They didn't fit right.

So they were very painful and they, they actually squeezed your head. So when you put your, you put your headset on and then you put your helmet on over it and it actually squeezed your head and it was very, very uncomfortable. Give you a headache. It was just, it just wasn't fun at all. It sucked.

So we were out on this training mission and this is when I was a task unit commander and it was a long one. It was, you know, 14 hours we were out there on this target and we were securing it and we were holding it and we were searching it and doing all this stuff. It took a long time.

In about eight hours into it, one of the junior officers came up to me and he says.

Have you kept your helmet on this whole time? And I said, yes. He said, doesn't it hurt a lot? And I said, yes.

And that was it. You know, there was just pain to be experienced, and I just sucked it up. And eventually we figured out how to. How to cure it. But the point is, is that. Does it take some pain to focus? Yes. It is not easy. There's. It takes will and it takes mental effort to make it happen. You know, it's there. We get into kind of the things. I think I talked about this last week, but, you know, shut off the music, set a goal for what you're trying to get done, and then put a time limit on it. You know that I used to race myself when I was writing those words. You know, I'd race and see how fast I could get them done and then go. And that's. That's. That. That's your focus. Your focus is something that you control and you can make happen. So get focused.

And practice focusing.

Practice focusing?

Yeah, because you kind of.

At first glance or the first thought isn't that you practice focusing, you. You focus on practicing or you focus on writing, or you focus on, you know, and if you can't focus, like, dang, that sucks. But if you practice focusing, then you can focus on your writing and you can focus on.

And also, everybody knows that the deadlines make you more focused when something's due. I mean, so put a deadline on yourself and make it real somehow.

Right? Like, kind of like if someone texts you, say, hey, I'll be over in 10 minutes. You can clean your house pretty quick in that 10 minutes. You know what I mean? But give yourself three hours to clean.

It's gonna take three hours.

It'll probably take three hours.

Leif and I say when. When people would. To plan for an operation. How long does it take to plan for an operation? We always say a half an hour longer than you have. That's how long it takes. So just get on it, start planning it, and. And go forward.

So, diet. What do you eat? And any thoughts on using superfood amaranth to increase fuel nutrition?

Amaranth. Do you know what amaranth is? No, I didn't know what it was either.

I looked it up.

I looked it up. I'm no stranger to looking things up.

It's some kind of a grain, some kind of a Grain. So what do I eat? In short, I, I guess you would classify me as a Paleo type person. I eat steak, I eat chicken, I eat pork. I actually, for whatever reason don't like the taste of fish and seafood that much or eggs, which is really unfortunate.

Really?

Yeah, I know, it's really bizarre. I ate a lot of hamburgers growing up and I kind of didn't eat a lot of seafood growing up. So I just am not a, not a big fan. So. But I eat a lot of steak, chicken, pork. I eat some kind of salad, you know, just about every day. A Caesar. I love Caesar salad. So I do a lot of that spinach salad. I put a lot of olive oil on it, kind of bathe it. This is I, Peter Attia, who's a really smart doctor and the.

I guess the president and CEO of something called Nusi, which is this nutrition science, which is this large, the biggest organization to study nutrition. And he, he gave me a good thought or the way he explained these salads. You know, he, he looked at salads as a vegan vehicle to eat fat by just putting a ton of, you know, olive oil, basically. So I, I've gotten into that lately and just really making these big salads with massive amounts of olive oil so I can get plenty of fat. So I'm definitely a, a fan of eating as much fat as possible. You know, if you want to, if you want to talk about why I do that, if you, you know, there's a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, which is a, a fantastic book and gives a lot of background on it. The, like I said, Peter Attia, who's just a brilliant guy who I've had a lot of great long conversations with because we've done some stuff together. And he's actually the person that introduced me to Tim Ferriss. I mentioned that on the first podcast, but it's funny. We'll go out for dinner and he wants to know about seal stuff, but I just want about nutrition stuff and his take on nutrition stuff so that we have good conversations and good trade offs. But he will, you know, he explains a lot of stuff really well. And then, and then another good thing there's on the Tim Ferriss podcast, he did an interview with Dom d', Agostino, who's got a really good perspective. Another, another doctor that's, you know, a workout guy and, and understands nutrition very well. So that's where I have gotten to in my life. And I've got a long story. You know about nutrition and maybe someday we can go into it. It's just, just the discovery and it's just with everyone else, I mean, just the fact that I guess 20 something, 25 years ago, everyone thought, well, not everyone, but most people thought fat was bad and carbs were good. That's not true, actually. Carbs are bad and fat is good. So it's been a, it's been a re. And I was lucky to have been around people that knew that early and, and taught the information to me. So that's, that's the, in a nutshell. And if you want to get with the experts, then people like Gary Taubes, people like Peter Attia, people like Dom d', Agostino, they're the ones that can give you the science behind what I'm talking about or, or what I've experienced as well.

Nutrition.

Nutrition is also one of those subjects that, you know, people vehemently disagree with each other on. There was a while where I was banned by my wife from talking about nutrition with her friends in the early days of me being completely pro fat and pro, pro protein and really anti carbohydrates, when no one really thought that, you know, 10 years ago, and I would be giving all of her friends a hard time about what they were eating and what they were feeding their kids. And my wife eventually banned me because I was problematic in that situation.

I could see that.

Yeah.

I mean, even just saying, you know, carbs are bad, I mean, there's a lot to that, you know, but to say carbs are bad, that's a controversial thing to say.

Exactly. Yeah. And, and that's another thing. And I, I, I keep saying this, but I'm not, I'm not here to convince anybody. And if you want to tell me that carbs are great, good for you. You know, I hope you enjoy type 2 diabetes. Get after it.

But, but it's not like carbs get, See, see what you're doing right now? You're going to start a little argument right now.

No, I'm not going to. Okay, but. Because the bottom line is I, I don't. This is stuff that I.

Have figured out. I've learned from people, I've used it myself, and I know what works for me. And, and if you don't want to believe that, I'm okay with that, I'm not here to save your life. I'm not here to change your mind. You know, and it's the same thing. You know, you've heard me say this about jiu jitsu. Where I used to be really, you know, no, Jiu Jitsu is better than this, and Jiu Jitsu's better than that. Now I'm like, no, actually, there's other. And first of all, there's other perspectives, but also that are correct. And Jiu Jitsu. And I actually believe that Jiu Jitsu, I actually believe need me well rounded and all this other stuff. But the bottom line is I'm not a. I'm not a here to convert people. But somebody asked what I ate, and I told them, right? And that's. That's technically.

That is 100% true.

That's what I did. And if you want to argue those points, don't argue with me. Argue with Peter Atia. Argue with Gary Tos. Argue with Dom d', Agostino. Because those guys are. I mean, Peter and Dom are scientists and doctors. So they know. And they will give you the facts, which I could give you, but I won't be do nearly as convincingly.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, next question. A couple of guys I'd like to hear your thoughts on.

Richard Mark Cinco.

Marcinko.

Marcinko. And Henry Rollins.

Marcinko and Rollins. So let's start off with.

Dick Marcinko. Demo Dick Marcinko, who. If you don't know who that is, he was a SEAL in Vietnam, a SEAL officer in Vietnam. He was the founder of Seal Team 6. He created Seal Team 6. He.

Ended up getting in trouble with the Navy, and they kind of did a witch hunt on him. And he was eventually. I don't actually. He did. He did a little bit of jail time. They found that he had falsified some travel records and maybe some money, but they found stuff on him, but it was kind of trivial stuff that was trumped up.

But. And they forced him out of the military. And he wrote a book in the 90s, in the early 90s, because it showed up in the SEAL teams right around when I got actually through buds and into the SEAL team. So it was sometime around 1990 or 1991. He wrote a book called Rogue Warrior, and it did amazingly well, sold a lot of copies. And it was. Definitely broke the mold of this idea of the quiet professional, which was how I was most certainly raised in the SEAL teams. And it's something that I've. I've obviously contradicted now because wrote a book with Leif, have this podcast. I've been on tv, so I've. I've definitely broke the paradigm of the quiet professional.

I absolutely try to respect the spirit of the quiet professional. And I, I'm not. You know, even if the book that Leif and I wrote isn't a book about our triumphs and everything we did great, it's a book about what we learned at usually from bad situations and humbling experience, that's what the book is about. And it's an effort to pass on leadership lessons learned that we learned in a humbling way. So.

So there's that.

But Richard Marcinko, from my perspective on the SEAL teams, and again, this was right when I came in, he was kind of the guy that broke this mold. And of course there's been, you know, dozens and dozens of quote unquote SEAL books now, but he wrote the first one very well received and definitely got some flack from the SEAL community.

And that is what it is now. Now, I worked for guys that worked for him that literally were, you know, they. That he was their commanding officer. And I remember one of them, I said to this one senior guy that was. Had been ton of experience, and I said, you know, you worked for Marcinko. How was he? And he looked at me without no hesitation, said, best commanding officer I ever had. And that's. I heard that everybody I ever asked.

Just about told me that the only people that you'd hear anything different from would be senior senior officers, that he was, you know, he'd be over the top. He wasn't. He didn't quite play the game. And, but there's no doubt about it, he was a tough guy. He was a hardcore guy. And the guys that worked for him respected him and liked him. The thing that I learned from him was seeing how that transition took place and how he, the thing that got him.

To where he was to. To get that responsibility of Creating Seal Team 6, which was this elite counterterrorist part of the Navy. You know, obviously he was trusted and he was liked and he was respected. And so I saw that he had gotten himself to that level, which is very cool.

But I also saw and I.

Again, this is a topic that comes up a lot. Our strengths are often our biggest, weak weaknesses. And so this kind of cowboy mentality, this aggressive mentality that he had.

It got him there. But once he got there, it doesn't seem like he was able to reign that back in. And that is something that I became cognizant of because no doubt, when I was a younger guy, when I was a young SEAL and then a young SEAL officer, I was definitely fairly cowboyish. And as I moved up the ranks, I recognized that I had to mature and I had to grow up and I had to do things differently. I couldn't do the same things that I did when I was a young platoon guy as I could. I had to tighten it up when I became a young officer and then I became a platoon commander, then I became a task unit commander and I, I had to grow up, you know, for lack of a better word. And, and looking back, I should have grown up even more, you know, but you don't see that at the time. So that's something that I learned from Marcinko, even though I never worked for him, and I met him a handful of times, you know, but never spent any actual time with him. But I have also seen this exact same thing with business leaders, with CEOs, especially with CEOs that come into a company that is not doing well and there's only one kind of person that can turn that company around. Somebody with a dynamic personality, someone with a vision, someone that's going to kick down doors, somebody that's going to make things happen. And you see those guys go in there and they get that done and they turn those companies around. And then the real test comes is can they transition from being that cowboy to, to be in that company person to be in that straight shooter, straight and narrow that takes the, takes the company then from survival to thrive. And some of them make it and some of them don't. And I look at Dick Marcinko as a cautionary tale to everybody that comes up through the ranks and gets to that point where you need to take it to the next level. And how you have to change what got you there.

Is not going to be what keeps you there. You have to change and you have to adapt and grow. And so I think that's important to recognize and it's important to constantly be looking around for examples and saying, okay, I see, I saw what happened there. And try and push yourself forward. So that's, that's my.

I don't want to say my opinion because it's not really my opinion. That's. Those are my thoughts on demo. Dick Mareno, the Rogue Warrior. The other one.

Is Henry Rollins. And if you don't know who Henry Rollins is, he was a young kid from the D.C. area who grew up in the punk rock scene in dc, went to a military academy, and eventually, even though he was kind of just a kid, at, at some point, a band called Black Flag, who was a incredible band, led by a guitarist named Greg Ginn, they asked Rollins, who was just a fan who had jumped on the stage at some point and sang one of their songs. They said, hey, they, they, they had a falling out or I forget what happened with their first singer. But the first singer wasn't singing anymore. They needed a new singer. They asked Rollins to try out. Rollins jumped on the opportunity and took that gig and ended up being the lead singer of the band Black Flag, who is a really pivotal band in American rock and roll.

And I think he took, you know, Black Flag to a whole new level. And I've talked about, talked about this on Tim Ferriss and I, I'll talk about it again, but there was an album called Black Flag My War, which is an incredible album and it's especially an incredible album. And if for those of you that listen, for those of you youngins out there, the records used to come on a piece of vinyl. There was two sides to it. And so the, this Black Flag album called My War had two sides to it. And the first side sounded fairly similar to what most of Black Flag sounded like prior to that, which is just sort of punk rock, fastbeat, whatever side two was, this slowed down, heavy.

Dredging.

Powerful music. And the whole side is like that. And that, that side of that album was on my record player when I was, I don't know, 13 or 14 years old for like a year. That's all I listened to. And I really related to it because it just was something that, this heavy, this introspective, this, this.

Aggression and anger was something that I, when, when I heard it for the first time, I was like, oh, that's, that's what I think. That's, that's what my mind is filled with.

And this was sort of my. The next thing that came after Black Sabbath for me, because Black Sabbath was the first thing I said, okay, that's what I. That's heavy and that's dark. And I understand, I relate to that. The happy music that I was hearing, I didn't understand that. I didn't relate to it. That heavy stuff. When I heard that, this dark stuff, I related to it and I understood it and it fueled me. And so Rollins, Black Flag, My War side two definitely had a big impact on me. And then from there, eventually he was out of Black Flag and.

He formed his own band. And. And they made an epic record, which is called Lifetime. Just, again, this, this hit me at an age where.

What was I, 16? And here comes this album called Lifetime that was very powerful.

Very raw, very hard, and it just. I can't imagine a better sound Coming into my ears when I was 15 or 16 years old then this album, Lifetime. So myself and my buddies at the time, we were listening to Rollins. And again, this was. These were songs about power. These were songs about. As a matter of fact, the COVID of the Lifetime album was Two Hands Gripping the Earth. And it was, you know, this kind of. This message of. At least that's how I interpreted it. That's the thing. You gotta remember, I was a kid and. And I'm hearing this stuff and I'm overlaying what my thoughts of the world are on top of it. It sounded aggressive to me. It sounded tough to me. And that's what my mind was like at the time. And so I put what I wanted it to. I made it what I wanted it to be. And to me, two hands holding the earth was a powerful symbol of. I'm going to. I'm going to take over the world. I'm going to control the world. I'm going to make things happen.

So we actually. When I was a kid, we actually followed Rollins around. We. We would, you know, he played. This was in. I want to say this was like 88 or 89. But myself and my buddies who were. We were all into Rollins, and we went. And I probably saw him play 10 or 15 times on the Eastern Seaboard. Maybe it wasn't 10. Maybe. Maybe it was 10 times. And we, you know, this is. Back in the day. This is. This is. You know, he's playing in clubs that are the size of your living room. You know, you're. And we'd help them onload their instruments, and we'd help them offload, and we'd hang out with them afterwards, and it was. It was great. It was cool. And that was my experience. And I was definitely. I think that had a big impact on me. Another thing I had to mention this about Light, that album, lifetime in between the songs. You know, if you look at vinyl records and there's a space in between the songs.

And there's, you know, there's like a standard. I don't know what. You know, there's a standard of 2 millimeters, let's say. And when I first got that Lifetime record, the space in between the songs, you could see it was. It was tiny. And that's because the. The one song would end and boom, The. The other song, after a moment of silence, boom, the next song would kick in. And that's what the album was like. This intense, just driving, getting after it. So we would go to those shows and we would Just go completely nuts in and get our insane mosh pit destruction on. So out of that, you know, spawned this. And the other thing was cool is, you know, Rollins was, you know, we were not into drinking, we were not on drugs and neither was Rollins. So he was this kind of. And you know, we'd see Rollins doing push ups before the shows. We'd say, oh yeah, this, this guy's like us, you know, this, I relate to this guy because I want to be strong and I don't want to do drugs and I'm staying clean and he's staying clean. And so we had this good thing going. But again, this is my 15 year old brain. And so what happens? So I took all that to mean that's the way life is. For instance, Rollins has a big tattoo on his back that says search and destroy. Okay, I took that literally. You know, okay, this, I need to search and destroy. How do you do that? Okay, what is the most hardcore thing? What is the most physical thing? What is. How do you get control? How do you do, how do you be aggressive in the nth degree? You know how you do it? You be a commando. And so some, so those, again, those weird twisted interpretations of my mind said to me, okay, that means you need to be a commando. And that's what I did. That's how I end. That's one of the, one of the, I would say one of those factors that led me on the path that I'm, that I'm here today. So went through SEAL training and actually, interestingly, the first Lallapalooza tour, we'd have to google this and see when this was, but it was the first Lalapalooza and Rollins was playing and they played down in somewhere in San Diego. Lollapalooza came and I went.

And I didn't want to pay for it for whatever reason, so I went backstage and I waited until I saw Rollins and I saw Rollins and I said, hey Rollins. He said, hey. And, and you can see he kind of recognized me. I mean we. He recognized me, went over, said hi and I said, hey, can you get me into the show? And I got a couple buddies with me. And he said it'd be easier to get you into Fort Knox. It was kind of weird because back in the day we would sit there and hang out with him and help him load his van and get. Walk right in. And it was just really cool to have that much interaction with somebody that you were into. I mean, you can't do that normally. And all of a Sudden, there it was. Now he's in Lollapalooza, and even though he's on tour and he doesn't know anybody there, there's a guy there, me, and I can't get in. So it was. You know, it was cool, but it was. It was definitely a sign to me that. That things were a little different now, and he had kind of made it right. I guess he made it now, and he ended up having some pretty bigger. He had some bigger records that did better than. Than Lifetime. But.

The way it kind of continues, the way this story continues, is that Rollins was a guy, when I was a kid, that talked about Vietnam vets. And if you read any of his, you know, he used to write books, and I'd read his books, and you would talk about Vietnam vets and how this guy taught him so much about discipline, and. And then he talk. You know, he had this tattoo, this Search and Destroy. And in his books or in his shows, he would talk about the violence and the fights and all these things, and. And he even talked about, like, missions.

Remain calm. Prepare to destroy. That's from a song. That's from a Henry Rollins song. Remain calm. Prepare to destroy. So he. He kind of.

Had this thing that I thought was cool when I was 14.

And then I actually went in and I did this stuff. You know, I actually went and did the stuff that he had talked about and that he spent his career talking about.

And so all of a sudden, this connection, this sort of.

Yeah, this connection that I had with him, all of a sudden it kind of faded because I. I looked at it from a different light, as it was no longer me looking at someone thinking, this guy's done this cool stuff. It was actually starting to look at him thinking, he didn't do this cool stuff.

And. And now I think when I see him now, and it's weird, I think he's about 10 years older than me, maybe 12 years older than me. So he. I can kind of see.

It's a little bit of a glimpse into the future, you know, because you see a guy that's a certain years older than you, and you know what he looked like when he was 25, and you know what he looked like when he was 35 and 45, and now he's probably 55, and I can see what he looks like and what he did look like. So I kind of. I. I see him now, and he seems to be a result of that life that he ended up with, which is Hollywood and kind of famous and kind of being in movies and being a rock star.

And.

It'S, I don't have the same.

Like I said, connection that I, that I did, but like I said, when I was a kid, When I was 13 years old, when I was 14 years old, when I was 15 years old, I was, I was definitely.

I, I definitely.

Took some things from him and applied them to my life and I'd love, I'd love to meet up with him. I know he lives up in la and if at some point, Hank, if you're listening, let me know. Let's, let's link up, we'll talk about the old times.

But you know, I think that might, might even be something to close with is when.

When you're dealing with people.

People are not who you want them to be.

Your idols, the people that you look up to, the people that you think are cool, they're not, they're not that person.

Kill your idols. Now, there's things that we can learn from people, but they aren't going to be what you think they are. They aren't going to be even what they should be.

Those people, when you take them and you put them on a pedestal, they're not deserving of that pedestal. They're going to be faulted, they're going to be weak, they're going to be egomaniacal, they can be condescending, they're going to be all those negative things, being lazy, they're going to be entitled, they're going to be short sighted, they're not going to be perfect.

Far from it. And that's fine. That's okay. You learn from their weaknesses and you learn from their strengths, of course, and you mimic them and you emulate them.

But equally as important, you learn from their faults and you see what not to do.

Because the bottom line is you can't control other people. I know we spent time tonight talking about manipulation and influence, but the bottom line is you can't control them. You can't make people be what you want them to be.

The only person that you can control.

Is you.

You.

And that's what you've got to focus on. Focus on you. Focus on, focus. Focus on making yourself who you want to be. Faster, smarter, stronger, more humble, less ego. Discipline your body.

So you can free your mind, get up early and go get after it.

And be that person that you want to be.

And that's not easy. And not everyone can do it. And I'm not here to tell everybody that everybody can do it.

But it can happen and it does happen.

Through one small decision at a time.

And every one of those decisions important in building.

You.

And that's all I've got for today.

So to every everyone out there.

Thanks for listening. Appreciate it. Thanks for subscribing. That's kind of how we know that people are listening. Thanks for reviewing. When you get the chance, let us know what you think and let the world know what you think. Spread the word. We want to keep doing these podcasts.

So thanks. And most of all, to everyone out there, thank you for getting after it. This is Jocko, until next time out.